Stores Wars

Hi Ali..

Thanks for your comment. The Transition Town idea is a great one. I hope it catches on more widely. What matters in this initiative is to gradually de-consumerise people and re-engage them with their own creative imagination. Once the mass of ordinary punters see the point, they will become wonderfully empowered, and will do great things.
But at the moment people are pressured, ignorant, confused and depressed. You will need to be cheerfully persistent for quite a while, I would think!

It seems to me that people are very slowly beginning to catch onto the social and
international implications of global warming and the degenerative weather we all seem likely to get.
We're already seeing a start of something that is likely to burgeon in coming years. I'm referring to the increased rates of starvation in Africa, caused by the rising cost of aid-wheat, caused partly by poor crops (caused by poor weather), but caused mainly by the mad scramble for the quick money to be made by converting land from food-cropping to biofuel-cropping.
As sure as night follows day, the increased starvation rate will lead to more thousands of desperate Africans risking all to get into Europe somehow, with all that that implies.

I do hope this craze for biofuel is short-lived, as it is plainly a ridiculous option, dreamed up by people who have never grown a plant in their life. It's a question of scale, mainly.
I've never come across any projected statistics, (perhaps an informed reader might supply some?) but as a grower of plants myself, I have a good idea of how many grapes, for example, you need to squeeze out a litre of juice. It's more than you'd think, and that's for getting plain juice from a juicy fruit. To get an oil from a plant, you need far far more biomass. Again, I don't have any figures (can anyone help?) but to grow enough biofuel plants to run an economical family car for a year (never mind a Chelsea Tractor or a Hummer) would require many acres of land. And it's not a question of just squeezing juice out, as it is for grapes. The mass would need mechanical cutting, loading, transporting, shredding, and then would need multiple chemical treatments in enormous factories to turn it into fuel, leaving a mountain of waste to deal with afterwards. Every one of these steps requires energy to carry out. A tonne of crude oil produces far more fuel, and needs far less processing and brute shovelling than a tonne of biomass.
Making alcohol-fuel is a better bet, but would again require shifting around huge masses.

But here's the real point: for almost every acre hurriedly planted with biomass, we lose an acre of food.
Already food prices in the west are rising because of this (which in moderation might be no bad thing as it leaves less surplus cash to waste on consumer Straight-To-Landfill tat). However, it is likely that, left to 'market forces' (ie 'greed') there will soon arise a double crisis of not enough fuel, and not enough food. Government may need to intervene to ensure basic food supplies and, heaven forfend, may need to consider rationing. You can smell the black market already.

Biofuel is a madness. Just think it through... yes, of course, we should re-use 'waste' oil from chip shops but we can't all do that. There aren't enough chip shops. And we can't all have 'cheap' biofuel because there simply isn't enough land to grow it on. Maybe the government response will be to build more chip shops? (Why aren't I laughing?)
And monocropping biomass would give wildlife and biodiversity yet another severe
kicking en route.

The answer to the fuel crisis must be sought elsewhere. All the boring but commonsense things like lift sharing, bus use, walking(!), scooters, bikes, blah blah. Proper insulation required by law for all new (and existing) houses; deposits on bottles; wearing a thicker jumper; micro-generation; heat-pumps.... there are thousands of brilliant and simple ideas out there to reduce the 'need' for energy, and every one of them is a better idea than biofuel. Transition Towns can get stuff like this moving.

On the broader front, Ali... yes, I'm afraid I do see civil unrest as a possibility. The first rumbling signs are with us already. Since WW2 the advertising industry, and its allies the magazine and television industry, have consumerised us all, and made us dependent upon their throwaway fashion-items, from phones and clothing to sofas and entire kitchens, not just for survival, but for a sense of PURPOSE in our lives. Religion no longer supplies us with purpose. Science tells us there IS no purpose.. and so the admen and the rest of the 'B Ark' move in to fill the vacuum, yelling at a miserable and bewildered populus that happiness may only be found via shopping, and finally 'achieving' a £2,000 handbag.
Cut the fuel and you cut the shopping. People will be bereft, with their only hope of 'happiness' gone. Already people expect cheap flights three times a year as a RIGHT. And huge plasmas; and the right to drive anywhere anytime; and dirt-cheap clothes; and, of course, dirt cheap food. Cut this dependence on 'stuff', while not replacing it with something of genuine value, and you will have a population in crisis.
What comes from this is anybody's guess, but having noted the general low level of
personal responsibility that people exhibit, in the fields of, say, obesity, speed limits, drunkenness, drug abuse, and collossal waste of all commodities (including, apparently one third of all the food we buy)...
...I'm not very optimistic in the short term. I can see a scenario of riots looming, with race riots close behind, because it's always easier to blame 'Wogs', 'Them', etc for your own problems; under these conditions, we might very well see a sudden growth of the BNP and other neo-Nazi 'easy answer' parties; things unspeakable will emerge from the woodwork, from Mad Mullahs to Little Hitlers, with all that that will call forth in terms of 'policing'.


On the broader front, yes I can see a possible scenario for eg Water Wars. Wales has
water and England needs it. Wales still feels aggrieved by the English flooding Welsh villages to supply water for Liverpool etc. If Wales becomes further aggrieved by some clumsy oaf in Westminster putting Wales last (as usually happens) when resources start to get tight, then hotheads will demand retribution by cutting off the water. In go the troops.
Tensions rise. Protests are made and clumsily 'policed'. Massacres, real, manipulated, and imagined will follow, and you have another Balkans waiting to happen.
Ridicuous? I hope so. Exaggerated? I certainly do hope so, living in Wales myself! But water wars will almost certainly take place elsewhere in the world.

Other areas and social groups will have similar responses, egged on by our trashy 'news' media, who will feign horror but who will really take self-important delight in showing more and more videophone pictures of protests, riots, and looting, thus legitimising-chaos-by-exposure to hundreds of other distressed and opportunistic lost-and-lonelies looking for a bit of.. wait for it.. PURPOSE in their vapid and packaged lives. Now, at last, they will have a purpose! And a fight, into the bargain! A justified struggle against THEM! In fact, a sort of holy war! Yippee!

Extreme stuff, all this... and, with any luck, people will prefer the habit of civilistation over the excitement of insurrection and chaos, but Peak Oil really IS going to mean The End of The World 'as we know it'. There will definitely be ructions and storms of some sort before we work out how to live without our current obscene levels of waste and pollution.

It strikes me, for what it's worth, that Humanity, at least in 'the west', is in the middle of its teenage phase: it thinks it knows it all (to a large degree thanks to the arrogant and intolerant doctrines of Scientific Materialism) and doesn't have the imagination to think it may possibly be in error in any way. It also thinks that as life has no purpose, there can be no point to anything, so why bother? Let's all smoke skunk for breakfast, get blasted on industrial vodka every night and to hell with the consequences.
As always, there are a few people pointing out the error of this 'philosophy', but as ever, the majority don't want to think things through. For a start, they don't know HOW to think because nobody has ever taught them, and anyway, getting wasted is much more fun because famous slebs do it, and they can't be wrong, can they, coz they have their pix in Hello and everyfink doanay?

Thus, we move closer and closer to the precipice, stoned out of our responsibilites on cheap oil, stupidity, and selfishness.

Doomed? Shurely, Captain Mainwaring... we're all DOOMED???
No.. not at all!
I'm optimistic, actually, especially in the long run. But there may well be tough times ahead in the short run, I think, before Man really does realise that Humanity must hang together or we will all hang separately.

'What should we do about it?' you ask. I can think of no better response than the
Buddhist one of 'live your life mindfully', meaning that we should weigh up the value and cost of every single action we take (and encourage others by our own example). It only takes a moment to realise that 'mindful' equates powerfully with 'green' in these urgent times.
We each need to look beyond our own personal or selfish 'wants'; government needs to
start extending its sense of responsibility beyond the next election; and business must look much further beyond 'the bottom line' than it does at the moment.
In short... we all need to think ahead more, to think of others more, and to grow up... fast.


Have a great day, Ali! Your contribution to sanity via your Transition Town work is a shining example for us all.... mindfulness in action! Wonderful!

***

Did anyone else see 'Horizon' the other night? 'A Scientist' set out to tell us the truth about various things ranging from superfoods, through anti-bacterial cleaners, to probiotic yoghurts.
One of the things she found against was 'organic food'. She began by admitting that she didn't know what 'organic' meant. This from a middle-aged professor, who clearly had a respectful opinion of her own theories and opinions.... but after twenty years of increasing market share, and after many scientific papers published showing that organic food is more nutritious, and that kids stop being anti-social little rats when fed organic food.. she still didn't know what the word meant. How had she mananged to avoid it for so long,one wonders? And was she thus a suitable person to judge the merits or otherwise of organic food, even?

If I or you were called upon to make pronouncements on eg 'cloning', and did not
previously know what 'cloning' meant, despite the subject having been examined in
hundreds of newspaper articles and tv programmes over the past decade, we would make
quite sure we were well-prepared for the task, by mugging up before-hand, would we not?
But the professor apparently did not feel the need for such preparations. One can only wonder why.

It came as no surprise to find that she decided organic food was a waste of time and
money. Why? Because chemically-speaking, it was no different from chemically grown
food. Chemically-speaking, a dead acorn is identical to a live one: but one will grow into a huge tree and the other won't. There IS a difference. Chemistry is NOT the be-all and end-all. But chemistry was enough for the learned professor who was much too content to need to challenge her Materialist paradigm.

And by the end of the programme, despite interviewing various organic growers, she
seems not to have grasped that the essence of organic growing is 'sustainability': the capacity to continue growing quality food when the oil that enables the chemical
fertilisers and cheap haulage, processing and packaging, finally runs out.
She had learned nothing. Pity.
More to the point... what will viewers have 'learned' from her? And why did the BBC, and the once highly thought of 'Horizon' strand, allow such a tacky and one-sided 'analysis' to be screened?