Retirement in the Time of Cholera

I reached my sabbath decade a couple of years ago. Even before that, my long work history in federal service allowed me to take retirement. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, so I work away at things that I believe will be helpful, trying to emulate our Father in Heaven who rests and enjoys the fruits of his labor, while keeping everything on an even keel.

During the final decade of my life-cycle, maintaining an even keel looks like it will require battening down the hatches. Financial collapse looms. Best to turn liquid assets into something more permanent. The Social Security Administration tells me that if I live another 3 years, I have a better than average chance of making it to 83 years. That fails to include the life-threatening risks that accompany hard times and ecological collapse, not to mention the prospects of Social Security insolvency. I think I'll take that bird in my hand.

Financial planning should include short-, medium-, and long-term goals. Those time frames compress in the sunset years. Right now, I see them as 1, 5, and 10 years. These days, financial assets for the medium- and long-term time frames should be kept in gems or precious metals. These should be put to use as the occasion arises to purchase durable goods and property that will have near-term, as well as lasting, value in production or trade.

Working for pay should be low priority. Managing and reducing assets already acquired, i.e. having one's affairs in order, should be emphasized.

Aside from survival, the sabbath decade should be one of enjoyment. Rewards should come from diligent saving. Vacations and hobbies should be undertaken more earnestly, pets and spouses given more time and attention. Luxuries have no place in my budget, but there are some things that money can buy that could make life a bit more enjoyable. Following Ralph Nader's advice, I subscribe to Consumer Reports to know what could be worth buying, though living with less is my m.o.

I've come to put the pleasure of good cooking nearly on par with life itself.  Everything around me can go to Hell, but tasty, wholesome food is my bottom line. When that basic pleasure is gone, I don't think I will last much longer. Could that be why people who lose their sense of smell die within 5 years? Smell and taste are mutual senses.

Nap time is also hugely rewarding. Sleep comes so much easier in the middle of the day, especially when I've been doing physical labor. Many days, a 10- or 15-minute nap brings wonderful relief from the tiredness that comes with age.

Naps and night sleep fill the mind with dreams, which for me have little waking value, but are valuable in and of themselves. Perhaps if food fails, I can find a way to alter my mental state to allow me to endure by consuming raw foods and pharmaceuticals, living out my remaining days with nightdreams and daydreams as a refuge from the waking nightmare of civilization's collapse.

The Coming Scramble for Survival

Necessity is the midwife of devolution. Invention's mother is running out of resources, so she is reverting to the tried and tested. Her next brood will be a passel of low-tech survival tools. System design and implementation takes about a decade and that is about all the time we have before nature puts her foot down (if the rate of Arctic sea ice melt is a reliable leading indicator). The rate of ocean warming will increase promptly after the ice is gone. Coastal cities will experience a markedly more rapid increase in flooding events. It will finally become clear to the man on the street that we haven't done what it takes to turn the tide and cannot spend another decade working on it. The new systems that we could have had ready to withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere will not be available in sufficient quantities to prevent a great die-off. Suffering will move people to act individually and locally and one of the only negative CO2 tools available to the average Joe will be the biochar that they can make on their own. Enduring the diminished resource future will, however, carry the built-in solution of doing less of what has long been damaging the climate. 

Below, a list from Drawdown.org shows 71 solutions before it gets to biochar, about one-third of which are scalable to the human individual level. Collective activity won't entirely cease and the ultra-wealthy will still be able to command some sizeable projects, but beyond what takes place in the next few years, there won't be much civic initiative to avoid the continuation of today's burgeoning apocalyptic chain-of-events. Debt levels keep rising and all it will take is a crisis for everything to collapse in a way that will take a century or more to heal. Some places "get it" more than others, though, so living in a state governed by the cognoscenti may allow some of today's heroes to continue a more efficacious collective fight against global warming into the next saeculum. If so, a few people may survive to perpetuate the human species.

1 Refrigerant Management 2 Wind Turbines (Onshore) 3 Reduced Food Waste 4 Plant-Rich Diet 5 Tropical Forests 6 Educating Girls 7 Family Planning 8 Solar Farms 9 Silvopasture 10 Rooftop Solar 11 Regenerative Agriculture 12 Temperate Forests 13 Peatlands 14 Tropical Staple Trees 15 Afforestation 16 Conservation Agriculture 17 Tree Intercropping 18 Geothermal 19 Managed Grazing 20 Nuclear 21 Clean Cookstoves 22 Wind Turbines (Offshore) 23 Farmland Restoration 24 Improved Rice Cultivation 25 Concentrated Solar 26 Electric Vehicles 27 District Heating 28 Multistrata Agroforestry 29 Wave and Tidal 30 Methane Digesters (Large) 31 Insulation 32 Ships 33 LED Lighting (Household) 34 Biomass 35 Bamboo 36 Alternative Cement 37 Mass Transit 38 Forest Protection 39 Indigenous Peoples’ Land Management 40 Trucks 41 Solar Water 42 Heat Pumps 43 Airplanes 44 LED Lighting (Commercial) 45 Building Automation 46 Water Saving - Home 47 Bioplastic 48 In-Stream Hydro 49 Cars 50 Cogeneration 51 Perennial Biomass 52 Coastal Wetlands 53 System of Rice Intensification 54 Walkable Cities 55 Household Recycling 56 Industrial Recycling 57 Smart Thermostats 58 Landfill Methane 59 Bike Infrastructure 60 Composting 61 Smart Glass 62 Women Smallholders 63 Telepresence 64 Methane Digesters (Small) 65 Nutrient Management 66 High-speed Rail 67 Farmland Irrigation 68 Waste-to-Energy 69 Electric Bikes 70 Recycled Paper 71 Water Distribution 72 Biochar 73 Green Roofs 74 Trains 75 Ridesharing 76 Micro Wind 77 Energy Storage (Distributed) 77 Energy Storage (Utilities) 77 Grid Flexibility 78 Microgrids 79 Net Zero Buildings 80 Retrofitting

The Greatest

Environmental protection and restoration are the highest calling a person can have. Ministers administer and kings reign, but environmentalists serve the embodiment of God in all of his earthly creation. Those who would be greatest must be the servants of all creatures; they must be environmentalists.

Caring for the environment benefits both non-humans and humans. When, in the course of restoring nature, dilemmas arise over sacrifices for nature's sake, it could be that society has departed from the way. Remedial actions that seem harsh to humanity may be part of a necessary retreat from something that is even harsher to non-humans. Ultimately, a return to Eden would benefit humans more than any other outcome.

The world is being so overrun by enough clueless, heedless, and competitive people that little Edens will not be enough to save most of us from a mounting onslaught of disasters, insults, and injuries from Gaia's reactions. Universal repentance over diet , transportation, and work (in sum, modern life with all its negative consequences ) would have to occur for the world to avoid such tribulation. If we manage to repent over our unsettledness and downshift to a pastoral lifestyle, then perhaps we could still include a bit of meat in our diets with climate-smart agriculture.

Whatever measures we wind up taking to survive the anthropocene, it seems that cities should become virtual prisons and that only environmentalists and their subjects should be allowed to roam freely and keep property outside those confines. Environmentalists should be as angels keeping watch over the realms outside the domain of heavy human settlement. Suburbia should be returned to nature or sold to farmers. Farmers should all be lovers of the Earth, unlike the deriden rednecks who see the earth as a thing to be conquered.

The numbers of people in cities vs. the countryside are not as important as the personal qualities that suit an individual to be in one or the other domain. Current policy in the U.S. is to drive down the number of small farms through an incentive system that favors industrial (read "redneck") farmers who exploit the impoverished land. Disincentivizing industrial agriculture would be the first step toward reducing farm sizes and populating the countryside with environmentalists. May it be that the new Farm Bill leans that direction (though I see no indication that it will).

It should come as no surprise that environmental restoration is not an especially lucrative occupation, yet one may be deeply enriched by it. Depending on how close one is to the natural world, this connection can offer resources aplenty. With such knowledge, self-reliance is attainable (even self-actualization).

I would be sadly myopic were I to claim the title of Environmentalist. I can barely call myself a Master Gardener and a Master Watershed Steward, but, among those whose efforts directly deal with eco-systems, Environmentalist rightly belongs to the likes of those who restore landscapes and rivers to wild conditions. I merely have experience in making healthy soil, growing plants and fungi, and keeping runoff in check. It's a start, but with my few remaining years, my contribution may fall far short of that of the greatest among men.

Welcome to Disasterland

I was talking to Colin, my next-door neighbor, yesterday about the impact of Hurricane Irma on the Everglades. As a U.S. Park Service biologist, Colin has spent many hours in the Everglades. He  unequivocally stated that the wildlife in the Everglades was seriously harmed by Irma. Yet, the Everglades took the hit for much of the human habitation on Florida's west coast. In a few decades, that won't be the situation since the Everglades will be swamped by rising seas.

Irma was a big hurricane that could have caused a lot more damage, especially if it had tracked up the eastern side of the state. As it turns out, the cost is estimated at $60 billion, yet we haven't figured in the cost of ecosystem damage that, due to threshold effects like loss of the entire Everglades, will precipitate from this and subsequent storms and temperature rise.

Ecosystem services aside, the cost of natural disasters is increasing. Driven in large part by overpopulation and also by global warming, the cost trend has been swooping upward over the past several decades. The relevant graph in the preceding link is the one above the caption: "Overall losses and insured losses 1980-2016 (in USD bn)." It shows trend lines for uninsured and insured losses superimposed over the loss figures for each year. 2017 looks like it will be consistent with that trend.

A dramatic graphic that shows how 2017 is shaping up in the U.S. came out after Hurricane Harvey. Since then, we've had Irma, Maria, and wildfires in California. Note that the yellow semi-circles on this reticulated timeline, denoting wildfires, are the second biggest in terms of average cost per occurrence. My guess is that one yellow semi-circle this year will exceed any on this chart.

Figures that put Harvey and Irma together at $150 billion are enough to nearly exceed the global total of losses for 2016. Maria, the Mexico earthquake, California's fires, and who knows what else will send 2017 way over that mark. Markets may falter as the effects compound. My prediction made three years ago of a major financial seizure in 2017 could well turn out to be accurate.

Richard Heinberg sees, in Puerto Rico, a teachable moment about how the limits to growth will eventually treat all places in much the same way as Maria did P.R., forcing us all to adjust our thinking about what is achievable and sustainable. We may not all be made homeless by wildfires, hurricanes, or earthquakes, but we will still suffer from collapse of financial and infrastructural systems we have come to rely upon. Take heed and prepare for a simpler way of living.

Photoshopped photo by Elliot Margolies

Republican Civil War, Let's Get it On

As we shoe-gaze over the embarrassment of the pretender to the Presidency's twitterpations, America is teetering on the brink of calamity spawned by an ineffectual majority party. Congress has until December to pass a tax reform bill that will give Wall Street enough of a lift to overcome the downdraft of Fed tightening. A promise of relief in next year's tax provisions could provide the positive sentiment to keep us airborne long enough to provide a not-so-hard landing. The GOP, however, shows itself to be so aggrieved over its supposed leader that passing major legislation is unlikely, if only for their perverse pleasure in turning popular opinion further against the cheat executive. leading to his eventual impeachment.

Trumpeting a call to arms by his basest base, the disappointed dictator could then incite uprisings by Trumpists across the country, making articles of impeachment too parlous at this point (Rep. Al Green's (D - Tex.) righteous bid notwithstanding). Yet, as Old Blowhard's popularity shrivels with each legislative loss, continued Republican fecklessness could lower the potential of such civil war until they decide to lower the boom on the tyrant. To risk a recession by failing to pass a tax bill favoring the middle class, however, also raises the risk of civil war - a class war, rather than the race war that would come about by a premature move to Dump Trump.

War actually looks likely on several fronts (Korea, Iran, America) and Fourth Turning adherents are already expecting it. It is tempting to say that, based on the secular cycles of American history, war is inevitable in the next 5 years. To be ready, true Americans should try to identify public enemy #1 and be prepared to fight them (should it come to that) rather than expend too much blood and treasure on campaigns against #2 or #3. IMHO, our major problem isn't with fascists on the other side of the world, it is with fascism at home. We are too strong militarily to worry about nuclear attacks from anyone. The biggest near-term threat we face is fascist Trumpists who would make us more of an aggressor reich.

To avoid that calamity, the best scenario could be a bloodless civil war fought among members of the Republican party, which appears to be starting already. When the next national elections are held, a fractured Republican party could provide an opening for an upstart party like the Greens to turn this country on its head. All the better if a bloodless coup occurs in the meantime.

by Chris Goodwin

Czar Gazing

Democracy, as a way to govern nation-states, is on the decline. With the help of Russia, politically four centuries behind the West, the U.S. could be headed for czarist rule. The Russian word czar comes from "caesar" and was the title first assumed by Ivan the Awesome (or the more popular pejorative, "the Terrible").

If our political regression stays in step with our fall back through the growth of civilization to agrarianism, we could see an autocrat in power in a decade or so. Czar Barron has a certain ring to it.
Czar Donald sounds cartoonish, but since we don't execute traitors anymore, Junior may be first in line to inherit the throne after the patriarch croaks. He might want to change that to "The Don" to give it more of a fear factor and to divert attention from the history of his ascent at the behest of Russian propagandists. Oh, wait... the Don is a Russian river.

Aww. Who cares what people think? Junior might be found guilty of conspiring with a foreign government to influence our elections, but Old Blowhard will surely pardon him as soon as Congress shows no capacity to invoke impeachment in spite of the so-called President's failure to faithfully execute the laws, receipt of emoluments, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. Continuity is so key to establishment politicians that they would sell the country into totalitarianism. Continuity may then come in the form of dynastic periods.

On the other hand, if Congress decides that 400 years of progress in democracy is worth preserving, they may cast off their inhibitions and send Blowhard to prison, or at very least replace him. That's a lot to ask of Congress. The disruption of continuity may cost them their jobs, because when the people who are supposed to run this country - the voters - are given their next chance, they could use the opportunity to bring in new leadership to start the transition to a more federated form of democratic government suited to the limitations of our situation.