psybelle

I want to go back to school.

It's a combination of this article on depleting aquifers (which doesn't just apply to California) and the current batch of speculative fiction on JM Greer's blog, and finishing off The Peripheral (and contemplating The Jackpot)…

I want a degree in "Resiliency" but I don't think such a thing exists.

Parts of it do, under different names - systems theory is the skeleton on which everything else is built, risk-modeling (at both insurance industry and .gov levels, though I could do without the latter's "elite panic" biases) is a piece of it, George Foy's nodes versus megorgs is a chunk, ecology and doughnut economics are the foundation of it, some form of sustainability is the end goal…

( a few strands in the web )

I think I'm mostly caught up on the usual suspects. And, as usual, both Peter Watts and John Michael Greer are spot-on (and David Brin is starting to look like a complete ass, but that simply scores another point for "do NOT read the comments").

And as I contemplate Greer's ruminations on the fall of civilizations and the similarity of various "dark ages" … and I remember the Motie museum, and think about the Long Now's Rosetta Stone project and Clock … I wonder if it's possible to salvage more knowledge this time?

What would it take to avoid a global Dark Age? What might it take to "reboot" a somewhat technical civilization (something we might recognize/feel comfortable in) in the absence of fossil fuels?

I am an introvert, and feel like I'm lacking some crucial insights into basic human power-structures and dynamics; have never been a keen student of history. So, I have absolutely no idea how something like the preservation of knowledge over centuries of strife and dissolution might be accomplished. I really don't even know where to start. But it's going to be occupying a good bit of my thought processes for a while…

(And, in my usual practical/cynical fashion, I am not at all surprised that the silverbacks are getting agitated, given where we are on the general downslope of "civilization" - buckle your seatbelts and get your kill-switches ready, decide ahead of time where you look back and where you decide not to be seen in the first place.)

Nine Meals from Anarchy: Yes, it's about Britain. But the causes are global in nature, the lessons apply here as well as "over there"...

Oil is expensive, getting moreso, and it's never going to be cheap again. (Don't talk to me about frakking or tar-sands or the like - the reason those are being exploited *now* is because the easy stuff is mostly gone. All of the current sources of petroleum products are more expensive to extract in terms of money and energy - we've hit the point of diminishing returns and that also is only going to get more expensive.)

All the things that depend on oil are going to get hideously expensive. Food, clothing, the current plastic whatevers (healthcare! "use once and discard" is the standard, for obvious reasons of infection control)...

This is the iceberg. And there simply are not lifeboats for 9 billion people... There aren't even sufficient lifeboats for Westerners. (The Republicans have been dismantling lifeboats as fast as they can, as if that will do *them* some good. I think it's more "Only we get nice things" than Stross's Fallacy, but there does seem to be a whiff of desperation to the latest round of idiocy...)

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3253

Marine Bio is Watts' chosen field (long before the career in writing sf); if he thinks the coral reefs are d.e.d dead, I tend to believe him even though I really don't want to.... The obvious (to me) question is what dies next? What is utterly dependent on the reefs (biologically, physically, chemically) and is going to fail next?

I've done my share of cell-culture, have left the occasional flask to overgrow and die horribly in acid media, awash in its own effluent. And, for as big as the whole world is, it's no different - it's still a closed ecosystem, just like that solitary flask (just like Watts' punchbowl). This is going to be a very different world in a decade or two, unrecognizable in a century or two; I suspect that The Windup Girl is wildly optimistic as such things go.

From another list I'm on, a "grim and articulate 17 minutes":

In this age of the "global village", global climate change, true global interdependence, we all live downstream.

Some of this is personal stuff, some of it isn't - lots of people seem to be "itching" lately...

On the personal level... I think the last few years of study and work have reorganized some deep stuff. Can't put my finger on anything in particular, but I have a sense of new structures starting to show - sort of like speeded-up geological change. "Oh, there's bedrock here now. And a ridge that didn't used to be over there - guess I'll have to change my route!"

And there's more to come... I'm looking at what I need to be doing, what my Work is, how I can be of service. (Yeah, yeah; I'm a Virgo. Deal.) I'm doing some of it now, but I could be doing more of the truly necessary stuff if I had a clearer feel for the upcoming "weather" and what might be necessary... and the "weather" is weird.

Weird. Not all-caps weird, yet; but I'm not the only one who's itchy....

Back around '97 or so I made a prediction of sorts that there were a lot of folks who were going to be disappointed when Y2K rolled through and nothing changed except that 1, and a few souls who would take it upon themselves to be the change they hadn't seen yet after a few years. (And the general weirdness-quotient has gone up, though not in the Aum Shinri Kyo/Timothy McVeigh directions I'd kind of expected...) And the next Y2K is coming up in the shape of the ancient (sacred!) Mayan (native!) calendar roll-over in 2012.

I don't/can't believe it'll be the end of the world. And, yet - I itch. And I'm not alone in that. I would like to believe that this is not the end of the world (everybody clap!), but a changing of the guard, mebbe the beginning of the end of the old New World Order. I'd be happy with a coincidence of fudged numbers and a calendar artifact and a critical mass of people deciding there is no "them" that's going to fix all the problems of the world, just us...

And at the same time? On the flight back from the midwest, I sat next to a woman who was gung-ho pro-military, more than casually racist, almost-devoutly green, and all set to repeat last year's donations of her garden's (not insignificant) excesses to the local food bank. I don't know how to make her part of my "us" - am adamantly opposed to some of her "fixes" while I admire and want to emulate other parts of her behaviors...

I am reminded of biological models and how system homeostasis is a continual dance of push and pull and prod and squash, robbing the piggy-bank to pay the cookie-jar and balancing the mortgage against the retirement fund, if and maybe and but. And I think of "smart mobs" and emergent behavior, and wonder if the collective we can actually manage this dance? If enough people are going to pay attention to feedback signals from all over and keep Tink alive? (Not that I want to see the Western-lifestyle-as-it-is continue - this just is NOT sustainable...)

gah. Need sleep...

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herding sphinxes on the astral veldt

sigh, part 158621445669952

playing catch-up:

sobering article

well, damn.

(no subject)

the back of my head itches...

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August 2024

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