Monday, February 28, 2011

Where's the love?

Three years in a row now I've participated in the Ragnar del Sol running relay. By now I know the drill well, including Sunday, the day after the event, being a wash for getting anything done but some fast catching up on much needed sleep. This is my way of saying that I spent even less time than usual thinking about what to blog today.

Occasionally I wonder if I should have squeezed in a second minor during my four years in college. In case you're wondering, I majored in computer science and minored in math, which together made for a pragmatic though somewhat humdrum education from which to pursue a career in software development.

I enjoyed taking fewer credits and registering for fun electives with nothing more than fancy as my guide during my last year in college, but maybe I would have been better off going for depth in one field, something unrelated to my then upcoming career. But, if I had had to pick a second minor at the time, I probably would have picked philosophy, and in this I'm glad I didn't chase after that second minor. I've become less impressed with professional philosophy the older I get.

* * *

So this is what passes for professional philosophy these days? This is nothing more than high-brow, jargon-laced rationalizing of your desired conclusions. Are you that blind to your biases?

Yes, I hear your layman criticisms all the time, often bordering on being little more than ad hominem attacks. Why don't you actually take the time to read some real philosophy before bothering to respond with your tired and predictable responses? Maybe you'd learn something.

Why? Because I reject the idea that an education in philosophy makes a person any more qualified to love wisdom.

Really? How about I visit you at your job and offer my criticisms of the software you write? Surely you don't believe that an education in computer science makes you more qualified to develop software than others!

Don't give me that “we should all stick to what we know” garbage. I don't tell a plumber how to do his job. The plumber doesn't tell a bean farmer how to do his job. A bean farmer doesn't tell an accountant how to do his job. And accountants don't tell me how to do my job. That's because these jobs are all regular jobs that produce a good or service. Your job, as far as I can tell, is to come up with “universal principles” that tell you how to tell everyone else how to live their lives. Then you lay down diplomas and reading lists as credentials and gripe when other people dismiss you for admonishing them. If you don't want your ideas dismissed, stopped using words like “universal” and “principle”.

I'm sorry you have such a problem with truth.

Add “truth” to the list of words to avoid. I'd give you guys some credit if your field showed any semblance of convergence. In my field, quick sort is undeniably more efficient than bubble sort. It's pretty well regarded that the indiscriminate use of goto makes for bad code. Whereas, philosophers have been arguing about basic premises for thousands of years and show no sign of coming to agreement. As far as I can tell, if I actually did go read some real philosophy like you suggest, I'd still disagree with you just as I do now, only I'd do so obtusely and every bit as ineffectually. Stop pretending that the only thing holding back the whole world with agreeing with you is that they haven't read enough of the same books as you have.

What a waste of time. Tired and predictable indeed. You completely lack awareness of the subtleties and nuances that have been worked out by greater minds than yours hundreds of years in the past. This conversation is over.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Descent, pt. 4

This is the fourth entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1, Descent, pt. 2, and Descent, pt. 3.

Catabolic Collapse

In one sense, The Long Descent is nothing but 250 pages of Greer's commentary on his own 14-page paper written in 2005, How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. In that paper, somewhat obscured in awkward academic prose, Greer presents what I think is the most plausible single explanation for why civilizations cycle through rises and falls. From the paper's abstract:

The collapse of complex human societies remains poorly understood and current theories fail to model important features of historical examples of collapse. Relationships among resources, capital, waste, and production form the basis for an ecological model of collapse in which production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital. Societies facing such crises after having depleted essential resources risk catabolic collapse, a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction converting most capital to waste. This model allows key features of historical examples of collapse to be accounted for, and suggests parallels between successional processes in nonhuman ecosystems and collapse phenomena in human societies.

In a nutshell, the theory of catabolic collapse states that civilizations rise when their consumption of resources nets them a positive return on investment and thus allows for greater systemic complexity, and they fall when that consumption nets them a negative return and requires a return to lesser systemic complexity. The Long Descent applies the theory of catabolic collapse to modern industrial civilization.

The Four Horsemen

My previous post briefly describes Greer's idea of “the stories we tell ourselves”. Through most of the remainder of The Long Descent, Greer explains with a tad more specificity what he thinks we should expect in the decades to come owing to our own catabolic collapse, and he advises what we should be doing about it.

As for what Greer expects, he outlines what he calls the “four horsemen” of catabolic collapse: (1) declining energy availability, (2) economic contraction, (3) collapsing public health, and (4) political turmoil. Anyone who has been following the news since 2008 with even the slightest attention towards long-term trends should recognize an eerie familiarness here.

Basically, Greer starts with the first horseman of declining energy availability following directly from peak oil and the apparent lack of adequate energy substitutes. Declining energy availability leads to breakdowns in system complexity and the second horseman, economic contraction. Economic contraction happens while we find ourselves most needing to spend to rebuild and replace existing infrastructures to accommodate the new and old technologies that supersede our current fossil-fuel-based ones, and this leads to a difficult allocation of resources, likely leading to the third horseman, collapsing public health, where even “absolutes” like sewage treatment become as intermittent and non-existent as they are in the Third World today. Amidst all this breakdown, Greer expects the political system to be less functional and less capable of solving real problems than it is today. This fourth and final horseman, political turmoil, will feed into the other three, as they all feed into each other, in a vicious circle until our consumption level is brought back into balance with what our resource base can sustain.

What to do? What to do?

Is it time to panic? The Long Descent is titularly a user's guide, and Greer has a few suggestions for what we as individuals should be doing about this. On the whole, his advice is rather modest. We face a predicament, not a problem, and there are no silver bullets. We shouldn't expect the political system or any other top-down power structure to solve the problem. On the other hand, we shouldn't “[hole] up with guns and food in a fortified enclave”. Rather, we should be enacting practical changes in our own personal lives that make our lives more sustainable in a world increasingly pressured by those four aforementioned horsemen. Mainly, this reduces to simplifying our lives and equipping ourselves with skills and knowledge that will be useful during the long descent ahead.

None of the four horsemen … are new to human experience. Our great-grandparents knew them well, and today they are familiar to the vast majority of our fellow human beings. Only the inhabitants of the world's industrialized societies have had the opportunity to forget about them, and then only during the second half of the 20th century. Before then, most people knew how to deal with them, and most of the strategies that were developed and used in the past will still be viable far into the future. The one hitch is that we have to be ready to put them into practice. Since governments have by and large dropped the ball completely, it's up to individuals, families, groups, and local communities to get ready for the future ahead of us. Each of the four horsemen requires a different response, and so different preparations will be needed for each.

Plan to cut your energy use “by half, to start with, and be ready to cut it further as needed.” Choose a viable profession whereby you produce a necessary good or service. “Take charge of your own health”. Become an active participant within your community. Basically, Greer offers as mitigation for each horseman suggestions and strategies that are straightforward and logical extensions of his core argument. These suggestions and strategies are all things we can enact in our own lives now, without waiting for some organized power or institution to give us the okay and show us the way. But though simple and practical, these suggestions and strategies also happen to be things most of us would rather not do, given the choice.

There's more to The Long Descent than I can explain in a few blog posts, but that wraps up my summarization on the book. Next week, I'll editorialize and give my thoughts on it, its predictions and its advice.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Memory

At work I sat staring at the screen in front of me. It displayed a cryptic-looking map file, telling me in its arcane way why not all of my program was loading into RAM like I expected it to. But before figuring out my problem, I became lost in a recollection of a faraway memory.

I'm about seven years old. I'm stopped, straddling my bike atop the levee that serves as the perimeter for the subdivision I live in. I'm looking out, away from the neighborhood, over a barbwire fence upon a cow pasture that borders the prison farm less than a mile farther away. I'm looking at a dilapidated shack in the pasture, maybe a little more than a hundred meters from the levee. I'm alone.

I'm stopped because I came upon a parked ATV and a couple of dirt bikes lying on their sides, kickstands unused. At the shack in the pasture is a small group of boys, playing. They're a few years older than me. They're doing what boys typically do when playing, which this day amounts to trying to destroy the shack piece by piece. I'm watching the boys.

Within minutes, one boy within the group sees me. He calls an alert, which grabs the others' attention. One of them shouts something discernible enough only to communicate its aggression, and they all begin running towards me. Immediate panic grips me. I'm outnumbered, and there are no adults anywhere around. I know only enough to flee. I take off on my bicycle in a spasm, legs pumping furiously, every fiber of me iced in fear. Home lies a ways down the levee and then through a short maze of turns on suburban streets—in total, about a mile away. I look behind me only to see the boys continuing to run towards their bikes and ATV on the levee. The rusted, tangly fence in their way will slow them down only so much. Machine power and age difference make this an unfair pursuit. As I quickly speed down the steep slope of the levee and into the vacant lot to cut back to the streets, I hear the ATV start up. I jump the curb out onto the street and ride as fast as I can over the smooth cement of the road. As I ride, the sound of the ATV becomes louder as my head start in this terrifying race begins to vanish. I'm not far enough to lose them blindly around a turn. I doubt that I will make it home fast enough, but I don't dare stop trying.

It is only with the insight as an adult looking back at this episode that I realize that those boys were probably as afraid of catching me as I was of being caught. Probably it is that fact that best explains how I was able to arrive safely home and avoid being overtaken. I rode up the driveway, discarding my bike in the garage, and fled inside through the back door. This was when our house was new, so new that my dad had not yet put up the privacy wooden fence in the backyard.

I remember this little fact about the fence because another day, maybe a week later, maybe a month, I was still able to look with an unobstructed view from our backyard into the vacant lots behind. At this time, my parents were in the backyard with me, busy transforming their bit of earth closer to their American dream one shovelful at a time. I don't remember what I was doing, but I remember the same fear welling up inside me as I heard the rumble of an ATV approach on the streets on the other side as those vacant lots. It was the same group of boys.

The one riding atop the ATV jumped the curb into the vacant lots and began riding back and forth, avoiding the overgrown weeds and brush. He looked menacingly toward me. They all did. I ran to my parents nearby. I can only imagine how I sounded to them as I, not the clearest of communicators at that age, blubbered with frantic fear and tugged at their arms with desperation. I must not have gotten across to them my point that the boys who happened to be riding around in the lots were clearly out to get me in a bad way. Not getting that delicate point across, my parents may have wondered why I was suddenly so upset. But they did nothing except try to get me to calm down. Eventually the older boys left. I never saw them again, though I worried about them for many months afterward.

By now, my silent, internal narrative of this one childhood memory has autonomously subsided back into the enigmatic recesses of the mind whence it came, and my eyes pull back into focus upon the hex digits of code and data addresses in the map file open on my laptop screen.

Where do these flashbacks come from? The mind is remarkable.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Descent, pt. 3

This is the third entry of a multi-part post. The previous parts are Descent, pt. 1 and Descent, pt. 2.

The honest thing to do

It's my view of long-term intimate relationships that they start as a chemical-induced trance of obsessed attraction that lasts just long enough, in the successful case, for both people to develop enough of a feeling of sunk loss so as to perceive it as being worthwhile staying with and investing in the other person for the long-haul, no matter how unglamorous or unexciting that long-haul proves to be. My sunk loss view of relationships is too unflattering, too unromantic, and far too cynical for many people to embrace, though I think it underscores a positive point: that even an unglamorous and unexciting life spent with another is likely better than a glamorous and exciting life spent alone.

How much did Laura like The Long Descent because of me and her perception of my expectations? I don't know. But I've seen this book work its magic a few times, with each reader coming away with his or her own positive takeaway messages. Years 2006-2008 of Greer's blog, from which The Long Descent is mostly derived, has been a large influence in my own attempt to understand how contemporary, day-to-day events fit within the greater trends and the greater chaos of history—the ebbs and flows that are bigger than any single lifetime. Thus it is that I wish to review the book, both because it's possible that someone reading my review may feel a spark to explore for themselves the possibilities of comparative history and alternative narrative frameworks and also because reviewing my own influences seems like the intellectually honest thing to do.

The Long Descent

The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age begins with the premise that global oil production is currently at (or very near) its all-time maximum, as predicted by the Hubbert curve, and that we face a long, inexorable decline for the next century or so until the precious hydrocarbon is nothing more than an expensive curiosity. Greer doesn't expend many words arguing what new technologies will replace oil. As he sees it, oil is the pinnacle of cheap, abundant, concentrated energy, and no set of new technologies will replace it fully; every potential alternative will be an incomplete, poorer substitute. The decline in worldwide oil production will inevitably lead to a decrease in overall worldwide wealth severe enough to cause an uneven series of breakdowns in existing social, economic, and political systems, just as resource-depletion issues in past civilizations led to similar such breakdowns. We do not have an energy problem, Greer says; we have an energy predicament. Problems have solutions. Rather, the future we should expect will be a centuries-long, punctuated descent into a post-industrial dark age akin to the dark ages that followed all other great, past civilizations. Large, centralized power bases will retract, sometimes violently so, and on the whole people will muddle through, getting by with fewer available resources and simpler technologies.

From this dreary prophesy of deindustrialization arises a surprisingly positive and encouraging book. The Long Descent is not so much about peak oil as it's about how we think about peak oil—or, more often, how we we avoid thinking about peak oil.

A story about stories

At the core of The Long Descent is Greer's idea of “the stories we tell ourselves”.

Stories are probably the oldest and most important of all human tools. Human beings think with stories, fitting what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of all the universe around us into narrative patterns that make the world make sense. We use stories to tell us who we are, what the world is like, and what we can and can't do with our lives. Every culture has its stories, and if you pay careful attention to the stories a culture tells, you can grasp things about the culture that nothing else will teach you.

The more stories we know and tell ourselves, the better equipped we are for understanding what's going on around us. “If you have a wealth of different stories to think with, odds are that whatever the world throws at you, you'll be able to find a narrative pattern that makes sense of it.” However, according to Greer, most industrialized people don't have this wealth. Instead, we're often locked in to one of two stories, with each one seeking to explain everything in the world. The first is the myth of progress, the story that humanity is on a trajectory of vast and glorious improvement, starting all the way back with our baser past as primitive hunters and gatherers and continuing through today and tomorrow with relentless scientific innovation and economic growth. The myth of progress tells us that there is no problem too difficult for us to solve.

The alternative story is the negation of progress. The myth of the apocalypse is the story that humanity is on a trajectory towards inescapable tragedy owing to our increasingly immoral, unbalanced, and unnatural civilization. As a result, civilization will certainly crash, and it will do so suddenly and violently. Most people will not survive the transition, though those who do will find the world returned to a better, truer state free from modern evils.

Greer's argues that neither of these stories deal well with the awkward evidences of peak oil. The myth of progress tells us that oil is just one energy source on the ladder climbing up to ever better energy sources, despite some critical arguments concerning energy return on invested energy (EROIE) of every non-FF energy source today, including nuclear. Never mind that, science will pull through. Future humans will have it even better than us.

The myth of the apocalypse, on the other hand, embraces our decline but accelerates the process to a speed never actually observed. This is where Greer's historical perspective works to advantage, by detailing example after example how though a civilization's fall may comprise a single page in a history textbook and thus seem swift and linear to us nowadays, its reality was something far, far longer, messier, and more complicated, usually with no one person alive both at the beginning and end. Greer asserts we have insufficient evidence to suppose that industrialization will end any differently than past civilizations.

According to Greer, better stories are ones that lie in between the two extremes of progress and apocalypse and align themselves with the patterns and evidences of history. Greer himself spins such a story for the remainder of The Long Descent, a story I've come to think of as the myth of meandering change. In it, Greer outlines a little more specifically some broad, likely trends in the next few decades and proposes some practical advice for what we ought to be doing. And if you'll bear with me and my description of Greer's ideas, I'll finally get to writing about what I think about all this.

Monday, February 14, 2011

How much does a bed cost?

Oscar Wilde wrote that a cynic “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I'm not so sure. It seems that few people manage even to know prices.

Consider the question: how much does a bed cost? Stop reading; take a minute; and think about the question. Come up with a dollar amount for an answer. Have you arrived at an amount? No? Alternatively, you can cheat (as I did) and ask our God of Answers, Google. Google referred me to that lesser deity, Yahoo! Answers, who claims that the best answer is $789. This seems high. I would have guessed lower, say, a few hundred dollars, but I have simple needs when it comes to beds and never purchased a bed myself.

But, as you may guess, the question is a trick. Even the cheapest of beds cost more than the high figure of $789; they cost thousands more, even tens of thousands more. Why? Because you probably won't own a bed without also owning a bedroom to go with it, and bedrooms are dear, price-wise, even here in Phoenix where they've dropped in price by about one-third over the last few years.

The example of the bed exemplifies a great flaw in typical reasoning about prices; the overemphasis on the cost of obtaining and the over-discount of the cost of maintaining. What does a bed cost? For me, the difference in rent between an apartment that comfortably fits a bed (i.e., a one-bedroom) and an apartment that doesn't (i.e., a studio) is about $100/month. So a bed costs me a few hundred dollars upfront plus $100/month for the life of the bed, plus or minus rent price fluctuations in the future.

For people who are inclined to argue with the details of my analysis and say that you can fit a bed in a studio (which is true), look at this way. Rent costs me about $1/sq-ft-month, and a full-size bed takes up about 30 square feet. This means that in our thriftiest of scenarios, where there's no accounting for space around the bed and rolling out of bed in the morning results in a solid thud of knee knocking into wall, a bed still costs $30/month. Even a low-ball figure like this means that a $360 bed is “repurchased” once each year.

Is a bed worth $30/month? I suppose most people answer in the affirmative. I won't argue against the subjectivity of the question. If beds are worth a lot to you and dollars aren't, then buy a bed and keep paying for it. In any case, the important thing is that we're honest with ourselves about prices. Many things cost a lot just to keep around if for no other reason than the square footage they occupy. Anyone who has bought a lot of square footage in Phoenix in the last few years is feeling this point acutely these days.

In my own case, I don't own a bed. I discovered, largely through chance experimentation with different sleeping arrangements, that camping equipment functions well indoors, packs small, and costs less than conventional furniture. That I don't own a bed makes me feel better about overspending on that carbon fiber bike I bought back in 2009. There's no such thing as a bike-room. (Not yet!)

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Descent, pt. 2

This is the second entry of a multi-part post. The first part is Descent, pt. 1.

Life(style) insurance

Introducing others to peak oil and other resource depletion issues is tricky business. Likely reactions range from flat denial to talking only about what other people should be doing about the problem. It's like trying to start a conversation with your spouse about how much insurance you should buy for your house and your spouse insists either that (1) your house is invulnerable to any type of destruction or (2) that the Powers That Be should get busy about eliminating fires, theft, storms, and floods altogether. Understandably, it's a bit of a drag to make insurance payments when you never file a claim; on the other hand, it's an enormous problem not to have any coverage and to suffer a loss so big you can't afford to cover it yourself. Though we all hope never to suffer such losses, planning ahead for their possibility seems like the prudent, wise thing to do. But somehow this logic gets lost for many people when faced with society-scoped issues like peak oil and resource depletion.

It was with this in mind that I wondered how to broach to Laura the topic of a prudently planned future. The urban, white-collar middle class of which we are a part is now three generations deep into operating under the assumption that the future will be a continuation of the past, only more so. Adolescence to college to job to car to spouse to house to kids to retirement to old age. Throw into the mix divorce and remarriage, too. How many more generations will thrive operating under this assumption? That's not clear to me, but the prudent and wise course is to have that conversation about deciding how much metaphorical insurance coverage to buy against this lifestyle. But how do I start that conversation when the conversation is so often vetoed?

My sneaky plan

The sneaky plan I ultimately settled on was to have someone else start that conversation for me. I purchased online a used copy of John Michael Greer's 2008 book, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, and used Laura's and my standing arrangement of it being okay to “make” the other person read a book from time to time. Despite this arrangement, however, I felt trepidation in undertaking this plan. Was I being too sneaky? Too manipulative? Did what I was doing constitute a breach in our trust for the other? I hadn't even read the book myself and couldn't vouch for it with certainty. Would Laura end up flinging the book against the wall in disgust without even finishing the first chapter (as the author himself wryly suggests some people are likely to do)? How would she react to a world view bounded with hard limits? How would she react to an author who heads his own fringe, polytheistic religion? In short: what was I expecting?

On the other hand, what I knew is that Greer is simultaneously erudite and entertaining and has a masterful command of language, and these skills make it easier for readers to swallow otherwise unpleasing messages. I knew of Greer's skills because I had been reading his peak-oil-related blog, The Archdruid Report, for a while and, based on that, trusted that The Long Descent would not be as hocus pocus as I would have otherwise expected from an author who frequently writes about the occult. I also knew that the book wouldn't stoop to arguing the peak oil thesis point by point, fact by fact, which often results in either the reader's eyes glazing over or else the reader digging in her heels and becoming obstinate and irrational. Rather, I knew The Long Descent would be comparative history. It would present a cyclical view of the past centering around the rises and falls of former great civilizations and how individuals nowadays do or don't incorporate that view into their day-to-day lives when thinking about our own civilization. Solid stuff. Practical stuff. Stuff you can hang your hat on.

What I didn't expect is just how immensely successful and rewarding my sneaky plan would prove to be. Laura enjoyed the book, enough that she since bought it for her parents to read. That's a strong recommendation. While reading it, Laura did a share of initiating conversations about the future. That rarely happened previously. And though we're far from agreement or certainty about what we should be doing, the dialog is now started. Mission accomplished.

Might there be a good way to introduce others to peak oil and resource depletion after all?

Monday, February 7, 2011

Disc wheels

Triathlons cost money. There is the obvious cost of entry, which ranges from about $50 for short, local races to the $600 or so for an official Ironman. A triathlete who competes in four medium-distance races over the course of a year can expect to pay about $500 for the privilege.

Even more significant are the equipment and training costs. Swimming incurs either the one-time expense of buying a wetsuit or else the ongoing expense of renting them and a continual fee for year-round access to a pool for training. Bicycling costs a bike and its array of related equipment: helmet, shoes, spare tubes, spare tires, and so on. Even running has its costs by way of regular replacement of worn-out shoes and of keeping ibuprofen well stocked in the medicine cabinet. I haven't seen any exact figures, but I suspect that many triathletes average spending more per year on their sport than I ever did on my car. I'm probably one of them. I'm too afraid to run the numbers.

Awhile back, I decided never again to splurge for a mid-end bicycle (and never once to know the feel of a high-end one). Entry-level bikes deliver great bang for the buck nowadays, and even a high-end bike will degrade into a squeaky, barely ridable mess without proper, ongoing maintenance effort and know-how. My plan is to ride low-end bikes and to be expert at keeping them in great condition and thus ride well for cheapish. Hence, when it came time to buy a triathlon bike last year, I bought a low-end one whose price, after taxes and shipping, was less than $1300. That's modest. It's about half of what a “serious” (mid-end) tri-bike costs, and, frankly, I look forward to riding past many of them in my races coming up this spring.

Bang for buck is key for me. For bicycling in triathlons, there are basically four categories in which a person may buy himself a faster time, listed here in decreasing order of bang-for-buck.

  • Tri-bike (versus upright road bike)

  • Aero helmet

  • Aero tri-suit

  • Disc or aero wheels

The conventional wisdom goes something like: bicycles cost a lot, but you must buy a bicycle anyway, so choose a tri-bike. Then continue to spend on the additional items until you can fit your rapidly thinning wallet into your tight Lycra shorts.

My limit stops after the aero helmet. That's because I feel a twinge of pain just about anytime I spend money on anything, and the amount of pain roughly corresponds to the amount being spent. (I think of this spending-pain as the blessing of being thrifty.) What this means is that I say “no” to the tri-suit and the disc wheels. I can take or leave the suit, but the wheels I wish I had. This is my dark, not-so-secret secret.

It's only through the discipline of rationality that I can convince myself that I'm better off not buying disc wheels. Spending upwards of $2000 to shave off mere seconds in a race, maybe a few minutes in an hours-long ride, is not smart spending. I know this, and from it I feel the sadness of knowing that I will never sit atop a machine equipped with disc wheels. Thriftiness has its costs.

My obsession with disc wheels is complete nonsense. I would want disc wheels even if they weren't faster. Disc wheels are just that cool to me. I like how they look, and I like even more how they sound. I remember the first time I seeing disc wheels on television during the Olympics and Dad explaining to me how the discs made the bike faster. That made no sense to me, and even as an adult I don't fully understand the dynamics of why they're faster. But a bike wheel without spokes? So cool. And that they make a distinct, whoosh-whooshing sound with each pedal stroke? So cool! There's no sneaking up on fellow racers when using disc wheels; it's like shouting from behind, “Awesome machine, on your left.” Or that's how I imagine it. And imagining it is the most I'll ever do.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Descent, pt. 1

Car-free

Two-and-a-half years ago, right around the time I started Just Enough Craig, I rid myself of my car. This also happened to be almost to the day the point at which U.S. gas prices hit their all-time high, just over $4 per gallon on average.

There are different ways at looking at this decision. On one hand, I shrewdly unloaded my car at the peak of the short-lived panic-buying of smaller cars and received more for my banged-up, modest four-cylinder than it was worth. On the other hand, there's the view that I myself panicked and jumped onto the car-free bandwagon right before lower gas prices were on the way. Of course, I look at my switch as a lifestyle decision, one in which I improved the quality of my life by excluding myself the possibility of using an automobile for short trips, an exclusion I later undid by dating Laura, who owns a car and doesn't share my love of the bicycle, though I'll credit her with making the honest effort.

In any case, I still don't know what to make of the gas-price bubble of the summer of 2008 and how much to attribute its cause to speculation versus supply-and-demand versus some other, third reason. However, the gas-price bubble was the catalyst that led me to asking, “What's going on with oil? What's going on with the economy?”, and simultaneously uncovering both revelation and confusion in my attempt to answer those questions.

Clear skies with a chance of water shortage

Laura likes it hot, preferably somewhere in the triple digits, which, converted to Fahrenheit, is really, really hot indeed.

I like it hot, too. Though as I age, a year doesn't seem nearly as long a duration as it once did, and I more and more think of the annual cycle through winter weather as an opportunity. I'm not even really sure what I mean by that, only that today while I write this blog post it's bitterly cold by Phoenix standards but that in the long run, the cold makes no dent in my overall happiness. Longer, warmer days are on their way, as they always are this time of year, and I'll enjoy each season as they pass. All two of them.

Given the opportunity, I think I could be happy spending the rest of my life in much the same way I spend each day now: spending quality time with Laura, riding my bicycles and training for triathlons, hiking, camping, writing software, reading books, learning, eating oatmeal, and always not quite allocating enough time for writing. Living in Phoenix gives a person the feeling that one can spend the rest of one's life with each day being just like the previous one. I think that feeling stems in part from the weather and how most days ostensibly look the same here, with their wide blue skies and windless calm. With each day looking like the previous one, it begins to feel like the whole world doesn't change all that much.

But, of course, that isn't true. The history books provide me my first hint how slow change multiplied by the persistence of time leads to big change, often with no reverse gear once that change arrives. In addition to the history books, there are other, worrying signs. For example, Phoenix has no long-term plan for dealing with a water shortage. One might think this would be a critical issue for a metropolis of four million people in the midst of the desert, and it is. The city has invested a lot of resources into doing what it can and has done on the whole an amazingly good job. But water issues in the desert appear to be fundamentally hard problems to solve.

While much of the rest of the state is depleting aquifers to make up for inadequate surface water and are thus surely on their way to harder times, Phoenix is more sustainable in that it relies upon perennial snow melt flowing down to us from the mountains to the north. But Phoenix faces the show-stopper of drought. Snow melt varies from year to year, and Phoenix's reservoirs, from what I understand, can handle no more than one or two years of severe drought before—before what, exactly? There's no plan to deal with that.

An appetite for worry

There's also the general eeriness of living in a sprawling metropolis in the middle of desert. Most food must be trucked in (or shipped and trucked in) over hundreds or thousands of miles. Phoenix is not and cannot be self-sufficient in food production, not at anywhere near its current population level, not with the aforementioned water shortage issue serving as our Sword of Damocles. There's no fallback plan for people in this city should commerce itself go through a few lean years, like if rising energy prices (or energy's flat-out unavailability) make the shipping of food over long distances cost-prohibitive.

Undoubtedly, what I've written will impress upon most people no certainty other than that I worry too much. And maybe they're right. It's just that before I decide to settle down and grow some deep roots into the community around me, I'd like to know that the likely problems the region will face can be weathered with something other than exodus. Perhaps I've got Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath too much on my mind these days. I finished reading it only a few days ago. It's an amazing, gripping story, especially considering that it's set in our very own nation just three or four generations ago. Slow changes multiplied by the persistence of time can produce big changes, indeed. Perhaps the slow change that's been creeping up on us since World War 2 is our increasing belief in our own infallibility.