Jack Burns Lives!

Now, would you rather see her on your daily commute or this?

This post is about oil. Yes, another one. I simply can’t stop myself.

And, I hate to say I told you so, but I will. Can’t resist that either. As Abbey said, “some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I’ve always found the second approach the more pleasing.”

So here we sit at gas at over $4.00 per gallon and rising. Yet, numbnuts all over the country are this very day getting in their gas guzzlers and taking the 25 mile (or longer) daily commute. NASCAR is running full steam ahead. Real estate agents are driving all over creation trying to sell massive houses NO ONE NEEDS. Rich folks driving to their weekend getaways in Nantucket or Pickwick, TN.

The beat goes on.

Widely scattered here and there, from Maine to Santa Cruz, a small cadre of people, likely less than 1% of the total population, are making plans. They’re working from home, riding bikes, growing food and trying to conserve while everyone else blithely goes along as if nothing is happening. One can only conclude the larger group is either selfish and apathetic or just plain stupid. Perhaps both.

There is hope, people. We can carry on in a more sensible manner. No reason for panic. Just make some modest changes.

From today’s Alternet:

“Though largely unnoticed by the world media, a decisive moment in the peak oil debate came last September, when James Schlesinger declared that the “peakists” were right. You don’t get closer to the American establishment and energy business than Schlesinger, who has served as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, head of the CIA, Defense Secretary, Energy Secretary and adviser to countless oil companies. In a speech to a conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, Schlesinger said, “It’s no longer the case that we have a few voices crying in the wilderness. The battle is over. The peakists have won.” Schlesinger added that many oil company CEOs privately agree that peak oil is imminent but don’t say so publicly.

One who does is Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell. Without using the term “peak oil,” van der Veer warned in January, ‘After 2015, easily accessible supplies of oil and gas probably will no longer keep up with demand.’”

photo: time.com

Yesterday was one of those picture perfect days blessed with sunny skies, cool morning temps, blossoming trees and flowers, little critters busy gathering food their nests, fresh fruit for breakfast and even a decent morning commute.

I loaded the panniers on my trusty steed and sailed off into the world of pavement, cars and trucks navigated by driven individuals. Driven by profit and fueled by caffeine, Xanax and talk radio. I sail along effortlessly until my first right turn, when I’m greeted by a truckload full of rednecks honking and screaming “fucker” and “faggot.”

Charming young troglodytes, all. I return the courtesy and acknowledge them with half of a peace sign and peddle onward.

As I’m late, I choose a different route, much busier and more dangerous than my normal route, but almost two and one half miles shorter and with fewer hills. The choice pays off, and I reach the office by nine.

Riding back it’s a bit hotter. Nearly 80 degrees. Same route, but more tiring as I near the twenty mile mark on the odometer. As my legs pump up the last hill, I can definitely feel the hygroscopic organic acid in my quads made worse by a brisk five mile run the day before. At 45, I feel it a lot more than I did at 35, but I’m determined to keep running, cycling and hiking my entire life. Especially the hiking. Can’t imagine a life without hiking.

It may not make much difference in the big scheme of things, but I feel pretty good about riding my bike to work. I rarely see others, and while that’s discouraging, it doesn’t deter me. I got a good workout and didn’t spend a dime on gas.

As I biked, I sort of slipped away into an imaginary world. I imagined a community of hundreds of commuters on bikes. Talking to one another at stop signs, along the path. Discussing their rigs, passing on tips. Bike traffic jams, parking lots full of bikes.

All I need now is gas to hit ten dollars a gallon….

Michael Pollan had an interesting essay published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine titled “Why Bother?” It expressed many of the same sentiments I often feel, mainly, why bother doing these things when millions and millions, the vast majority, aren’t going to do shit? He states that “sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.”

One person doing something can turn into two, then into four, even into a dozen. A dozen can turn into a hundred, and having one hundred people in your community gardening, cycling, recycling, composting, reusing shopping bags and living more simply will make your community more pleasant and more livable. Hell, if anything, it will cut down on the fucking noise.

Communities tend to mimic one another. Once a community gets labeled at the cool place to live, it will be copied.

But of course, it all starts with you. With us.

ONWARD

The above photo was sent to me by my good friend and fellow enviro-meddler Hayduke from the Left Coast Bureau in Northern California. I don’t know who took it, but it clearly shows the the present (soon to become the past) and the future.

The present is the price of petrol, now over $4.00 per gallon in his bioregion and rising everywhere. It’s not going down, at least not significantly, ever again. We had a nice ride, but it’s over. By summer, $4.01 will be long past.

The NY Times reported this week that record-high fuel prices and the airline industry’s fragile finances have led to a new round of bankruptcies among smaller carriers. Over the coming months and years, watch for other failures, and not just in the airline industry. All industry is dependent upon the same thing: cheap fossil fuel.

But the photo is also significant because it gives a glimpse into the future and an alternative. Not just alternative transportation, which is important, but where we live and how we live. Cycling and walking are much easier if you live nearby your work. Technology makes it possible for many of us to work at home, and we can even commingle and collaborate with affordable video technologies.

Not only is it no longer feasible to just jump in the car and on a plane, it’s not necessary. It was never necessary. Some folks just thought it was.

My question is this: What’s it gonna take for people to get this through their thick heads? Something tells me we’re like mindless lab rats hooked on cocaine, always scurrying back for the fix, despite the fact that someone has generously left the cage door open and therefore a way out. (Apologies to rodents which are actually marvels of evolution and quite adaptable.)

Oh well. Not much else I can do. I’ve been harping on this for years and very few of my friends and family have listened. It goes in one ear and out the other. Just another one of Jack’s rants about Peak Oil, community and bioregional living.

As Hayduke likes to say, “Twas ever thus.”

But one last time, let me give some advice. Find an affordable, sufficient home that’s reasonably close to work. Find meaningful work, not just a “job.” Get a bike. Get some panniers for the bike. Ride it to the store, to work, everywhere you can. Watch your weight and blood pressure go down and your savings account go up. Learn how to grow food. Get involved in your community and live in place.

Think about your present lifestyle when gas is $6.00 per gallon or higher. Can you afford to keep it going? And even if you could, why would you? Why give these assholes at big oil companies that sort of money?

Think about how this will affect the cost of everything, including prescription drugs and food, and no, folks, there’s no replacement for fossil fuel. Biofuels, ethanol and the like don’t cut the mustard. It takes more energy to produce it than the energy derived, so don’t count on technology saving our asses.

Best way to save your ass? Get a bike, plop it down on the seat and ride.

“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”-John Lennon

Here, in the middle of a busting at the seams metropolitan area of one million humans, scurrying around from their homes to their offices and back to their homes like wealth motivated little rodents, you often find other life forms. But you have to look. You have to pay close attention to your surroundings. You have to get off your cellphone, take off your headphones and be aware of your surroundings.

You have to have a sense of place. Of where you live and of what lives around you. Otherwise, you’re not living, you’re just existing in a technological trance. The hypnotized walking dead with minds full of nothing but mush.

Right outside my office window, about 40 yards from Interstate I-240, sits a Mourning dove on her nest. In a short, bizarrely pruned holly tree. The tree is cut and pruned like a like poodle, all the vegetation trimmed from its lower trunks and branches, forming an ’70′s era afro-like top. This work is carefully carried out by the landscaping crew, mostly underpaid Mexican labor hired by the landlord.

But as luck would have it, this particular dove found the place suitable, so I have the pleasure of watching it during its nesting season and not just the thousands of cars racing past, literally racing past, my window.

Interesting how these animals adapt and survive in our urban landscapes….

My hometown, by the way, is full of prolific pruners. Southerners have to prune everything. I suppose the behavior was brought over here from England or France, and Southerners apparently have mastered it. Everything is pruned, but the favorite thing to prune is apparently the Crape Myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica). Native to Asia, they’re everywhere in the South and in the spring, they’re all pruned down to the nub and shaped into little Edward Scissorhands sculptures, supposedly to force new growth and keep the plants from going dormant.

Well, let me tell you. I have one in my driveway that’s never been pruned, and it’s a blooming fool. I’ve allowed it to stay, because I don’t believe it’s considered an invasive species, and there’s so damn many of them around my community, getting rid of one ain’t gonna make a damn bit of difference. It’s twenty feet high and blooms from spring to fall. Sunday, Allison noticed a flock of Cedar Waxwing’s in the Crape Myrtle, about twelve altogether, just pecking away at the blooms and enjoying the safe height of the branches. It’s doubtful we would have enjoyed that visit had we been pruners.

But we’re not pruners. We’re more interested in creating comfortable habitat for the critters, growing some food and allowing some small trees to grow wild in the backyard. No, it doesn’t look like Augusta National, but nothing is supposed to look like that. I make concessions to the neighbors and maintain the front lawn (just weeds cut down to size), but prefer to let the back go wild. Make ‘em think we’re normal, at least till they get to the backyard and see all the wildness, including Tibetan prayer flags, a sure clue that we’re not like the other neighbors.

One thing I can say for sure about the inhabitants of Casa Burns. If the herd is going one way, we’re probably going the other way.

“Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am– a reluctant enthusiast…a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So go out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, and bag the peaks…. and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over your enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box… I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.”-Edward Abbey

This is madness.

The Madness of King George continues, as this week his administration announced plans to use waivers to continue with the Mexican border fence project. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, ignoring more reasonable options, decides to lie to the American people and claims he has no option but to build the fence. His logic? When confronted with the supposedly conflicting priorities of protecting habitats or stopping criminals and illegal immigrants from crossing the border, the latter trumps the former.

There are other options, of course.

This project completely ignores the impact on wildlife in these regions and is simply throwing money down the drain. There are a host of issues, including the disruption of fragile desert ecosystems, including the disruption of migration routes of numerous species, from snakes to jaguars.

Even some Republicans are screaming about water rights issues for ranchers, although the fence conveniently bypasses border property owned by individuals with close White House ties.

Bring the damn troops home, arm them with rubber bullets and bullhorns and put them along the border. We’ve got to do something to stop the flood of immigrants, but we can’t destroy biological diversity in the process. Get rid of NAFTA. Invest just a fraction of what’s being spent in Iraq in southern Mexico and see what happens, but this is insane.

And if you want to know what it will ultimately look like, check this out. The story is about Israel’s wall.

Guess it’s time to get Whiskey out of barn, saddle up, load the old Winchester and mend the fences.

Cactus Jack

————————

April 1, 2008, 3:15PM
Administration will use waivers to build border fence, feds say

By EILEEN SULLIVAN Associated Press Writer
© 2008 The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration will use its authority to bypass more than 30 laws and regulations to finish building 670 miles of fence along the southwest U.S. border by the end of 2008, federal officials said Tuesday.

Invoking the two legal waivers, which Congress authorized, will cut through bureaucratic red tape and sidestep environmental laws that currently impede the Homeland Security Department from building 267 miles of fencing in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, according to officials familiar with the plan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly about it.

The move is the biggest use of legal waivers since the administration started building the fence, and it will cover a total of 470 miles along the Southwest border, the department said. Previously, the department has used its waiver authority for two portions of fence in Arizona and one portion in San Diego.

“Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a statement. “These waivers will enable important security projects to keep moving forward.”

As of March 17, there were 309 miles of fencing in place, leaving 361 to be completed by the end of the year to meet the department’s goal. Of those, 267 miles are being held up by federal, state and local laws and regulations, the officials said.

One waiver will address the construction of a 22-mile levee barrier in Hidalgo County, Texas. The other waiver will cover 30 miles of fencing and technology deployment on environmentally sensitive ground in San Diego, southern Arizona and the Rio Grande; and 215 miles in California, Arizona and Texas that face other legal impediments due to administrative processes. For instance, building in some areas requires assessments and studies that — if conducted — could not be completed in time to finish the fence by the end of the year.

Full story here or here:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5665840.html

Sounds like my kind of place, and also a dream of mine for a long, long time. Wouldn’t it be nice to see small, locally owned bookstores really make a comeback all across the country? You see ‘em a lot on the West coast. Fayetteville, Arkansas has a good one. Moab has one of the best, Back of Beyond.

Well, here’s another with an Abbey theme.

Tiny bookstore fulfills big dream For 16 years, Peter Ogura has been living his dream of running a neighborhood bookstore

By Randi Bjornstad

The Register-Guard

Peter Ogura lives the dream of book lovers everywhere, surrounded every day by thousands of volumes in his very own bookstore. Of course, unlike the dream, he doesn’t get to spend every day with his nose in a book, looking up just long enough to wave a customer toward the right shelf or ring up a purchase before turning back to his pages.

No, like the owner of any small business — and at 900 square feet, Black Sun Books doesn’t take up much space — Ogura attends to nearly all the details of running the shop himself, as he has for the past 16 years and as he will indefinitely because it’s what he always wanted to do….

…The name of his store — Black Sun — comes from the title of a lesser-known work of Edward Abbey, a natural history and conservation writer whom Ogura admires and whose portrait looks down from the wall above the door inside the store.

“I thought about naming the store after one of his best-known works, but ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’ just didn’t seem like a good name for a bookstore,” he quipped….

The full story is here.