A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences Chapter 1 …

                A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences 

Chapter 1

April 2008 ­ Go Light
 "Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something
rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for." ­ Seamus
Heaney, Irish playwright

Last June, while visiting with Wes Jackson and his wife at the Land Institute, in
Salina, Kansas, Wes said something, almost casually, over a lunch of salad and
ham sandwiches that has been on mind ever since. He said: "We live at the most
important moment in human history."

I assumed that Wes meant we live at a decisive moment of action. That the
various challenges confronting humanity ­ climate change, species extinction,
energy depletion, soil erosion, ecosystem service decline, global poverty,
population pressure, water and food shortages, plus many more ­ now require,
like a long line of airplanes waiting to land at an over-busy airport, attention ­
immediate attention. Time is short. Hurry up.

I wasn't surprised, therefore, when Wes told us that after a commencement
address he had given the previous month at Washington College, in Maryland, in
which he told the students they were "the children of depletion" and warned them
of the inevitable contraction of American society upcoming, the president of the
college came rushing up to him after his speech sputtering: "You can't say those
things!"

Indeed. That's the trouble with calls to action these days ­ they can't avoid the
umbra of doom-and-gloom. I've been there myself. In fact, I've heard the mantra
of `Trouble Coming' so often now that I've begun to suffer from the early signs of
what I call "Future Fatigue." A dispiriting affliction that often results in
listlessness and apathy, if not caught quickly, usually by sticking one's fingers in
one's ears, it can spread quickly, sometimes disabling whole families and
communities.

But when I read Wes' commencement address two months later, reprinted as an
article titled "The Next 49 Years" in the Institute's quarterly Land Report, I
understood his comment to be less a call to arms than a meditation on our
moment in time.

"In painting you this bleak picture, I hope you understand that I am honoring you
as adults," he told the students. "You were born on the up slope of energy and
economic growth, but much of your life is likely to be on the down slope in the
use of nonrenewable energy."

That's because we're depleting the "five pools of carbon" ­ soil, wood, coal, oil,
and natural gas ­ at an unsustainable rate, Wes writes. We've burned up, for
instance, half the

April 2008 ­ Go Light                                                        Page 1 
                A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences 

 planet's known reserves of oil ­ 1 trillion barrels ­ in less than a century.
Technology is not likely to ride to the rescue either. Energy, after all, cannot be
created or destroyed ­ according to the First Law of Thermodynamics ­ just
transformed. So, when sources of energy-rich carbon go into decline, as they will,
we either we find a suitable replacement ­ and we haven't yet ­ or society goes
into decline too. On this point, Wes is not sanguine.

"Down-powering won't be easy. It will require sacrifice," he goes on to say.
"Realize that [us old farts] won't be around to experience the consequences of
reduced energy and climate change. Most will be dead, you won't. You will be
going through the greatest and most important transition in human history."

In January, 2008, I had a chance to query Wes once more on this topic, this time
publicly as part The Quivira Coalition's Annual Conference. "What," I asked him,
"did living at the most important moment in human history actually mean?"

"It means we have to practice restraint," he replied.

"That's not something humans do very well, of course. But it's something we've
got to learn or things will get much worse."

Restraint.

Good luck. Two generations ago, during an era of privation and global conflict,
restraint was not only possible but often well-practiced. Gas rationing. Victory
Gardens. Meat twice a week. Prudence and frugality ruled. But everything
changed after World War II, as we know. The arrow of Progress tipped upward
dramatically. We were encouraged at all levels to be unrestrained in all that we
did, whether it has how far we traveled, how much we ate, what we built, or
where we sprawled. "Just Do It" was the unofficial motto of my generation,
courtesy of an ad agency.

Progress, we were instructed, had no limits and no consequences. Enjoy the party
­ there won't be a Hangover. As a result, excess was hard-wired into our culture,
which is why I'm not hugely optimistic about the chances of restraining ourselves
now, at this crucial moment in history. Hopeful, yes ­ because we've got to
restrain our appetites sooner or later ­ but optimistic, no.

Instead, I've had another "r-word" on my mind: resilience. For a while, I wasn't
sure what the word meant exactly. All I knew for certain was that the word
`sustainability' had worn me out. It is used so frequently and in so many different
ways, for so many different purposes, that I had no clue any longer to its
meaning. Worse, I developed a growing suspicion that `sustainability' has come to
mean `sustain' our excessive way-of-life. Were exchanging light bulbs or driving a
hybrid car really acts of sustainability? And don't even get me started on the word
`green.'


April 2008 ­ Go Light                                                       Page 2 
                A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences 

Frankly, these words describe little more than the tweaking of the margins of our
lifestyles ­ followed by a prayer that we earn a different future as a result. But as
Einstein famously quipped, doing the same thing over and over while hoping for
a different outcome is a definition of insanity.

So I went looking for another word.

I found it among the language of land health. I love the words range professionals
use to describe the elements of ecosystem function: integrity, diversity,
resistance, thresholds, transitions, recovery, and so forth. That's where I found
resilience. It describes the ability of a community to recover from change or
misfortune ­ how it handles surprise, in other words.

And Nature is full of surprises. How a community of plants or animals `bounces
back' from an unexpected flood, drought, disease outbreak, fire, hurricane or
other perturbation depends largely on its health ­ its ability to resist degradation
while the event is occurring and its capacity to recover once the surprise has
ended.

Resilience applies to humans too, of course, and not just our physical well-being.
It applies to social, cultural, and economic lives too ­ think about bankruptcy, or
a crippling snow storm. In fact, the idea of resilience came to me in the aftermath
of Katrina's devastating blow to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Would those
communities be able to recover their former vibrancy? Were they resilient? Were
we resilient where we live? Could we bounce back from a similar shock?

The reasons for wondering should be obvious by now ­ climate change, Peak Oil,
water and food shortages, etc. ­ I won't go into them here. Let me just say I
believe we're entering The Age of Consequences, in which we are already
grappling with consequences levied by our 20th century profligacy. I have little
doubt that The Age of Consequences holds many surprises in store for us, most of
them unpleasant I suspect. Therefore, as we move farther into the 21st century I
think this question of resilience will become increasingly important.

Restraint. Resilience.

There's one more "r-word" that's been on my mind: recovery. I like the word
because much of what I've been doing over the past decade with The Quivira
Coalition is to help people recover important parts of our lives that have been lost
to industrialism: grassfed food, herding, healthy riparian areas, collaborative
relationships, a place in nature and so on. This fits with the dictionary definitions
of recovery, which include: regain, reuse, restore, to find again, save from loss.

It doesn't mean `return' or `go back' to something preexisting. Rather, it's a form
of rediscovery, as well as an updating. Grassfed food is a good example ­ humans
ate grassfed meat for most of our history, until the corn industry convinced us
that a steak tasted better if the animal spent time in a feedlot. But research

April 2008 ­ Go Light                                                         Page 3 
                A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences 

indicates that grassfed food is better for you, for a variety of reasons. So,
`recovering' grassfed food means regaining an important part of ourselves.

It means, I believe, recovering what is "normal" about being human ­ what
worked for millennia and therefore is hard-wired into our essence. What we're
experiencing right now is not "normal" in many respects, as I think we're
beginning to discover, thanks principally to the amazing infusion of fossil fuel
energy into our lives over the last century. Our notions of "normal" ­ including
the idea of Progress ­ have been turned on its ear in very short order. That's why
some folks, such as organic farmers, have been "opting out" of the system for
years, to use Joel Salatin's term, preferring to `recover' what worked before, only
different.

I like to think of it as a new agrarianism, but with laptops and cell phones.

James Kunstler, author of `The Long Emergency' describes this issue in starker
terms, when he warns us that when the contraction of society hits we'll be rooting
around in the dustbin of history in an attempt to recover things we need ­ such
as railroads and a sustainable agriculture. And he thinks we need to move quickly
­ he declared 2007 to be officially the start of the Long Emergency.

Restraint. Resilience. Recovery.

I think these Three R's will dominate our lives in the 21st century. I could be
wrong, however. Perhaps nanotechnology will save our hides, but I'm not betting
on it. Nobody knows what's coming precisely. That's why I've decided to start a
Chronicle: to track this important moment in human history ­ and to leave a
record behind for my children, and their children, about what happened. I've
decided to kick off this Chronicle by posting an essay that I wrote recently ­ an
essay that, hopefully, can serve as a baseline for measuring what happens next.

In the meantime, I'll borrow the poem that Wes Jackson used to close his "The
Next 49 Years" essay. It captures this moment in time perfectly ­ as Wes would
no doubt had in mind:

For the Children, by Gary Synder (from his collection Turtle Island):

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,

April 2008 ­ Go Light                                                           Page 4 
                A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences 

they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light




April 2008 ­ Go Light                                     Page 5