Crash Course

This week I'll be reviewing the book "Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil" by Zachary Nowak. The book has a concise introduction to the concept of Peak Oil, followed by what I see as the strength of the book: an interesting discussion on scenario planning, rounded out by an extensive guide to the skills and knowledge that will be necessary to make the best of a less-than-ideal future.

Scenario planning is something that I think is vitally important for everyone to perform on an ongoing basis. I wrote about the concept last week, but in reality it's something that we should all be doing continuously for all manner of life decisions. In "Crash Course," Nowak outlines four separate future scenarios for planning purposes (setting aside "Status Quo" and "Total Armageddon" as either too remote or pointless to plan for): The New Green Revolution (most optimistic), Powerdown USA, the Great Energy Depression, and The Crash (most pessimistic).

He then discusses the merits of planning for the future via a "refuge" or through fostering "community." He discusses the merits of these various approaches, and suggests that alternatives such as the rhizome model for communities that I've suggested may offer a viable compromise between the two. I increasingly think that the our future plans must be seen as a continuum--resilient community is the goal but cannot be just set up like a lego set; personal refuges are immediately implementable for many because they are under individual control but are not desirable long term solutions; the answer seems to lie in planting seeds of personal refuges that, from the outset, are intended to anchor the networks of sustainable community, knowledge sharing, and local solution development that will one day grow into resilient local communities. While certainly an imperfect historical parallel, I think that the monasteries of Dark Age Europe serve as a valuable example of how "refuges" can survive tough times, carry knowledge forward from past civilizations, develop newly appropriate skills and techniques, and later serve as the physical and intellectual framework for the construction of a new society. Nowak points out exactly this--that refuge and community are not mutually exclusive paths--but I would like to see this point developed in more depth. That might be asking too much, however--it's something I'd like to do, as well, but have not been able to put together satisfactory principles and rules for how it can be best accomplished. Perhaps this is because the transition plan between refuge and community is necessarily one customized to a cultural set, to a geographic area, and to an unknown future.

Nowak then discusses "the house." He goes through a variety of alternative techniques and discusses several books on the topic. Some, such as "Shelter" by Lloyd Khan are outstanding, and I second the recommendation. Others, such as Earthships, are not among my favorites (I think the Earthship design places too much emphasis on aesthetic homogeneity, and does a poor job balancing insulation and thermal mass for all but a few climactic zones--a proper mix of insulation (e.g straw bale) and thermal mass inside the insulating barrier (e.g. adobe, cob, etc.) seems like a better rule of thumb). Nowak also covers rainwater harvesting and greywater (I like his recommendations) and discusses passive annual heat storage concepts that I think are critical (though I prefer Don Steven's take to the recommendation Nowak provides, and I'm currently working to adapt these same principles to create a passive annual solar COOLING system...). I've also heard of the rocket stoves that Nowak discusses for home heating, but his recommendation made me finally purchase Ianto Evans' book on the topic. I also appreciate that Nowak points out that the "back to the land" movement of the '60s and '70s did not fail, per se, but rather helped to perpetuate knowledge of old sustainability techniques and develop new ones so they will be available when the current generation actually NEEDS them (I'd say one cause for the failure of the prior movement was it wasn't immediately necessary, in the minds of many, and lost out to the allure of moving back to the suburbs and living during the last decades of the economic "good life" in America).

Next, Nowak discusses food production and storage. Nowak points out--rightly I think--that 1) it isn't that easy to garden, and 2) that even if you're a great gardener and have a large garden, it's not always possible to count on only your own garden to meet all your food requirements due to drought, pestilence, etc. One solution to this is to diversify beyond mere raised bed gardening into perennials vegetables and forest gardens (I heartily concur with his recommendation to read Eric Toensmeir's "Perennial Vegetables" as well as David Jacke and Toensmeier's "Edible Forest Gardens."). I've discussed this very topic in "Creating Resiliency in Horticulture." I like that Nowak discusses the need to augment the yields of a garden with wild harvest from surrounding fields, woods, etc. I think this is a critical component of any resilient scheme--both skills and the access to suitable environments to ensure that when garden yields fail, natural yields pick up the slack. This is an integral part of my own planning--the need to acquire land not only sufficient to grow an intensive garden and less intensive forest garden, but sufficient to create a natural buffer (lightly "guided" with planing, rainwater harvesting earthworks, etc.) that will serve as a back up. In fact, my choice of location is largely driven by the ready availability of forageable foods--especially those that are consistent in times of drought and not readily recognized as food by most people (for me, mesquite trees). Nowak also deals with the essential skill of preserving foods--no matter how well planned and successful one's garden harvest, it's unlikely that the right food will always be available for the picking!

If I could point to one weakness in Nowak's book, it is that the book consists largely of a series of book reviews. That is also one of its greatest strengths. Any book that proclaims to provide all the knowledge that you'll need to deal effectively with Peak Oil should be dismissed as bunk at the outset. Instead, what most people (myself included) really need is a pathway to gain the knowledge necessary to succeed in a variety of future scenarios--both topical knowledge AND the analytical framework for future scenario planning to apply that knowledge. In that respect, "Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil" excels. "Crash Course" is like a knowledge map, outlining a concise path through the myriad of useless, incorrect, or irrelevant books, and taking you directly to those books that really should be on your shelf. I highly recommend the book for those interested in learning how to better prepare self and family for whatever future scenario you envision.

Center for a New American Security: More Palliatives from Policy Wonks

A friend at the Pentagon recently sent me a copy of this article from Jim Thomas of the Center for a New American Security entitled "Sustainable Security: Developing a Security Strategy for the Long Haul." CNAS seems to be something of a democratic alternative to PNAC (Project for the New American Century--the incubator for "NeoCon" thinkers in the Bush administration). Its approach, while somewhat different from PNAC (well, radically different if you only consider the highly constrained spectrum of "conventional" options), is equally, disappointingly misguided. Thomas's policy proposals in "Sustainable Security" are particularly misguided. He essentially suggests that we pour more concrete on the Maginot line, and his "solutions" are equally "sustainable." Saddly, CNAS is likely to play a role in any upcoming democratic administration similar to that of PNAC from 2000-2008 (here's Hillary Clinton speaking along these same lines while giving a keynote address at a PNAS event).

First, Thomas fails completely to understand the constitutional basis of our Nation-State system, and why it is breaking down: increasing discontinuity between a State and its constituent Nation, and the simultaneously increasing failure of the Nation to justify the Nation-State order by actually ensuring the ongoing welfare of its component Nation. The Author clearly hasn't read (or absorbed) Phillip Bobbitt, who's "Shield of Achilles" is the seminal work in this area. Then, the author proposes to solve a problem the genesis of which he fails to comprehend. That's a tall order...

2. After assuming that A) the viability of the Nation-State system is a prerequisite to our security, and B) we can prevent its decline without addressing the increasing discontinuity between State and Nation (both inaccurate assumptions, in my opinion), the author proceeds to offer a number of palliatives about how we can shore up that system and create effective partners for cooperative action through simple (to articulate, not necessarily to implement) policy means. And they'll greet us with flowers on the streets of Baghdad--this has failure written all over it.

The mess in Iraq is a classic example of how the post-Colonial Nation-State fiction rests on a fundamentally rocky (and worsening) foundation (there, when the French and British draw nice lines in the sand pursuant to the Sykes-Picot accord and then assume that this haphazard jumble of disparate national groups can form the "Nation" to underly a "Nation-State"). One maxim: a suggested solution that clearly demonstrates a lack of comprehension of the cause of the problem is highly unlikely to be successful.

Of course, it wouldn't do for me to simply critique another's solution without offering one of my own. Here's a link to my paper, "The New Map: Terrorism and the Decline of the Nation-State in a Post-Cartesian World" (also now available in German). I presented it at the 2006 Yale Journal of International Law symposium, and developed it further with feedback from Ved Nanda (of the Nanda Center for International Law). It discusses the genesis of the declining Nation-State system, the forces that are currently exacerbating that trend, how the Nation-State system is not our end goal per se but rather an outdated means to achieve our end goals, and how, in light of the inevitability of its decline, our policy position should be to support the development of an alternative paradigm to the Nation-State system (among the many alternatives currently in competition) the supports our end goals. Specifically, develop networked nodes of localized self-reliance. Radical solution, I know, but interestingly another theorist out of USAFA, John Robb, has recently shifted to saying much of these same things in his new "resilient community" set of briefs and is grabbing the ear of many Pentagon insiders. I think that the institutional inertia is, frankly, too great to adapt such a radical (but I think fundamentally necessary) change, and that current leadership would rather take the safe route of pedaling just another set of palliatives as if it were substantive policy change, but maybe I'm wrong...

...either way, you heard it here first: Judging by the buzz inside the Pentagon and the list of email addresses that are enthusiastically forwarding this article to friends (note: my source was not among the enthusiasts), CNAS is an acronym that we will hear much more of, especially when it is time to for the party out of power to start apportioning blame for our next round of failed energy/security policy.