AlienWorld Imposed

Ten Things to Consider

Here are some points currently floating around in my head. At the bottom of the list are the resources influencing my thoughts, decisions and actions at the moment. Your comments and or suggestions are, as always, most welcome.

1. Avoid new debt and pay off any old debt as quickly as you're able to -As multiple and integrated crises culminate in the coming decades such as overpopulation, peak oil, continued collapse of financial markets and globalisation, liquidity will offer the advantage of increased options once the squeeze truly falls upon us. Nobody can predict the future so the ultimate materialisation of scenarios may be unpredictable. Rapid response under stress in seemingly impossible situations may become the norm for a while. If you're not liquid, your choices are drastically limited to forces completely out of your hands. Liquidity itself does not truly change this but it's always better to have more options open.
2. Make a connection to country living -This does not imply buying a farm. Not everyone can do this. If you can, consider it. If you can't, then get close to someone that already has a farm or lives in the country. Whatever your circumstance, make some sort of connection. In the coming decades, the power-base will shift back to food production. That means farming will become absolutely integral. If you have kids, teach them the importance of this as they will live in a time far detached from our current reality. On a farm, one can eat, earn income and trade with other regional producers. In 30 - 50 years, your kids and grand kids will thank you for giving them life and having the heart to think beyond tomorrow.
3. Start thinking about Independence from your car  -The push for the electric plug-in car is just one chunk of evidence pointing to the fact we are running out of oil. The problem is, the manufacturing of electric cars still uses huge amounts of crude oil. The building of recharging stations also requires massive amounts of crude oil. The electric car experiment may not work in the long term. We still need to get around, though. If one is limited to walking or riding a bike or horse, options become limited. So think about where you live, if you are in the city or the suburbs. Think about your position in relation to a train station and then the position of your vital destinations in relation to other stations etc. Ride your bike to the station, take your bike on the train and then ride from the station to your destinations. You may not need to do this right now but keep it fresh in your thoughts because Australia relies heavily on imported crude and supplies are constantly depleting. It's common sense to conclude that living and working close to public transport is a good idea for the short to medium term.
4. Form strong alliances with friends, family and associates - The further we travel down the slope of fossil fuel depletion, the more we will be unable to live such individualistic and sheltered lives. Daily things we take completely for granted now, will in the future become much more involved and difficult. You simply won't be able to go it alone. For the vast majority of our species history, the tribal unit was the norm. Well, we will soon come full circle and as energy supply dwindles and collapses, so will big government. We will have to fend for ourselves much more than we do now. This means a much more communal outlook and mindset. The tribe will provide support, safety, social nourishment and enough numbers to make a sustainable way of life possible. Being unique is highly valued in our world but in the near future, being part of the group will be highly valued. Being on your own will spell death when there's no food around, no social security, police or jobs etc. 
5. Think regional - As I and many others have touched on so many times, the world is going to shrink as globalisation collapses due to fuel and energy paucity. That means your local community will become your world in the future. Where you get your food, where you work, obtain your clothes etc will all be much closer to your home than they are now. Start considering what this means for you and your family, not so much today but ten years from now, twenty years from now and beyond.
6. Become more of a producer and less of a consumer - If you own, start a food garden in your backyard. If you rent, start a box garden and grow food. Think of all the old skills we consider redundant like carpentry, making clothes, preserving food, camping, hunting etc. I know this sounds extreme but just think about it and take an interest in your spare time. While you're at it, include your partner, kids, friends etc. This is a great way to form tribal alliances and long lasting bonds with those you may come to depend on in future. Basically, try to be as independent and self-sustaining as possible.
7. Start an emergency savings box - Every time you get change from a purchase, throw it in the box. When you get home from the pub and find a crumpled $20 note in your pocket, throw it in the box. Never use this money, just let it build and make it a life-long practice. It may just save your life one day.
8. Begin stockpiling food, water and basic survival equipment - Aim for long-life food like cans and freeze dried foods enough for three months for everyone in your house. If this food can be carried, even better. I say that because you may have to leave the house for a while in a crisis. If you have equipment that allows you to carry supplies and shelter like a tent, along with basics like fire starters and rudimentary pots etc then you will have the option to leave the house for a while and come back when things settle down if this sort of emergency should ever eventuate. Stockpiling is not a long-term strategy. It's a bridging tactic, like staying liquid. It gives you options to keep going. This is better than curling up in a corner and dying.
9. Avoid the temptation of laughing at me and other peak oilers and dismissing all this as rubbish - The world relies heavily on crude oil and it's running out. Those who deny this are only thinking very short term. Peak oil is not a theory. The economy needs energy and crude oil is the most dense form we have ever known. Alternatives, all put together are still nowhere near what we get from crude. As fields continue to deplete and demand begins to increase once again, there will be supply shocks. This IS going to happen. Nothing you will do in your life from here on in, will be more important to you than preparing for whats to come. Take it on the chin when you are laughed at. In the end, you can hardly blame the mainstream for laughing. That's the very essence of why we are in so much shit to begin with.
10. Read, study, talk, educate yourself and others - Read books, watch DVD's, visit websites etc on peak oil. Open your mind and thus your options. If you decide to take the plunge and actually begin the journey of preparation, you'll soon find yourself spending quality time with your family and strengthening your relationships as well as forging new one's.

Here are some good sites to visit if you put two and two together and can see the writing on the wall.

www.peakoil.net
www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
www.cluborlov.blogspot.com
www.globalguerrillas.typepad.com
www.neotribe.tribe.net
www.richardheinberg.com
www.wolf.readinglitho.co.uk
www.kunstler.com

Hope this helps and thanks to those who have been sending messages of encouragement lately!

Be Well...

Michael

Making the Move

 Last Wednesday we finally made the move to the new house in the Hunter region of NSW.

As I detest moving house, I’m feeling elated that the heavy lifting part is over and done with. To celebrate, I took my son out for the morning and together we bought some more fishing gear, updating my humble kit for bream, flathead, tailor, whiting, luderick, snapper and tarwhine. All of which are found in Lake Macquarie, a two-minute walk from the front door.

 

 

The motivation for the move as most of you know, is peak oil. In the coming decades, regardless of when and how peak oil unfolds in our practical day-to-day lives, one thing is certain. The abundant, cheap energy paradigm we currently enjoy will change. That means less energy for more people, which translates to relocalisation.

As energy decline due to fossil fuel paucity begins to become apparent, the globalisation experiment will crumble. Many believe this process has already begun. When this occurs, we will witness a long, drawn out ‘shrinking’ of society. The huge international shopping centres will be replaced by local producers so if the mass produced electric car concept fails, those who live far from such producers will find themselves in a less than ideal situation.

The way we work and earn our living will change as well. It’s my belief those who work from home or live close enough to public transport should hold an advantage in the initiate stages of transition. Those who live far away from train stations, for example will have a major problem in the future. If you can’t get to work then you have no income. It’s simple to understand the consequences.

I want to keep this post uncomplicated and practical, concentrating on the key issues. Here’s my current situation, now that I’ve moved. Home is just under two kilometres from the train station. I can walk to the lake and catch fish if the trucks temporarily or permanently stop supplying the supermarkets. Within five kilometres of home, we have a choice of fresh organic fruit and veg produce grown locally on site at a number of farmlets.

In the very near future, we will experience another fuel spike. It’s my guess the price will break through any past resistance and reach levels we would probably think impossible at the moment. Unfortunately, this scenario is imminent due to the complete lack of attention we, as a society have applied to the peak oil problem.

When prices reach $200 or $300 a barrel or even more, the effects will be nothing short of catastrophic. The main area affected by such high fuel prices is transport. In this alone, our ability to get to work as well as obtain our food could be limited severely, thus these crucial areas should be the first one’s to be dealt with in any transition preparation:

*Make sure you’re resilient in earning your income by ensuring you can still get to work.

*Make sure you’re resilient in providing your family with food by ensuring you stockpile at least three months supply and further more, live close to local producers.

If you can manoeuvre your transition preparation in a direction that fulfils the above two points then you’re well on your way to practical resilience in the event of an energy crisis. It’s by no means the complete answer, if that indeed exists in this arena but it’s simple and practical, which translates in the real world to increased adaptivity. You know the old adage about survival of the fittest. Adaptation to the changing environment is key.

Given that something is better than nothing, the above is a great start in beginning your journey of transition. At this point I’d like to add that I’m just a common, ordinary Aussie bloke with a young family. I work a normal job, earn an average wage and am by no means some kind of survivalist Rambo or farmer Joe. To be honest, I have limited camping experience, have been fishing all of about ten times, lived in the suburbs all my life and have only just started learning about permaculture principles.

I’m no Colin Campbell, Richard Heinberg or Rob Hopkins. What I am, though is a person who understands the implications of fossil fuel depletion and is committed to making transition and resilience a way of life for myself and my family.

I often get asked, “What if it doesn’t happen? Isn’t it all just a waste of time?” To which I answer, “What if it does happen? You’ll wish you had wasted your time.” It’s better to be prepared for a probable situation than risk such horrendous consequences if such a probability materialises. Besides, even if it doesn’t materialise, my family will have learnt excellent new skills and in the process enjoyed quality time together camping, growing food, fishing, forming long lasting relationships in our community and developing an overall sustainable outlook on life, getting closer to nature.

 

Staying on the topic of transport, you can checkout ASPO-Australia and ASPO Sydney’s submissions to the Senate Inquiry into Public Transport at www.aspo-australia.org.au. It’s well worth reading both submissions for a more profound insight into the issue.

On my next post, I’ll share with you the supplies and equipment my family has stockpiled thus far. I’ll include some pics so you can see for yourself what a three month supply looks like.

The AlienWorld website is coming along well and should be ready sometime in June for launch. I will be adding the 10TQ page to the site (10 year Transition Quest), where you will be able to download a quarterly ebook style newsletter complete with pics and videos on our transition preparation for that specific quarter. It will be specific to my family so you can get first hand valuable information and tips on transition and resilience in an entertaining format.

Thanks for stopping by!

Michael

Transition Towns Interview with Rob Hopkins

Rob has a positive and optimistic outlook on Transition and Peak Oil. He published the Transition Handbook. Well worth a read.

He's certainly cemented a leadership role in the global Peak Oil movement.

Enjoy the video!

Michael

Rational Speculation & Justification of Peak

Peak Oil and its interrelated siblings such as modern agriculture, transport, overpopulation, globalisation, consumerism and all the associated consequences, rank on top of my list of challenges humanity faces within the next fifty years. Fortunately, I’m not the only one who holds such a belief. In fact, there’s an army of professional and highly qualified people spanning the globe who also share this view.

 

They include geologists, engineers, petroleum executives, energy bankers, analysts, journalists, scientists and economists. Yet, for every one of these peak oil advocates, there are a hundred, who believe there’s nothing to worry about. This multitude of respectable, intelligent and just as qualified people chant the mighty song of ‘we shall overcome.’ The stand out verses in the song are, ‘technology will save the day’, ‘human ingenuity will not fail us’ and ‘alternative fuels will replace crude oil and life will go on unchanged.’

 

Speaking for myself here, I certainly hope their song of embellished optimism and playing down the problem turns out to be correct. I have no wish whatsoever to live in a world with an exponentially mounting population, ‘developing’ a taste for copious amounts of cheap energy to fuel their improved standard of living at a time of declining energy resources. Yet those are the facts and that is the world I’m living in.

 

Let’s face it, the world is addicted to growth and without it, under the current method, the system begins to feed on itself. It implodes when appropriate amounts of new debt are not dished out. New debt means growth in some form, which requires more energy, of which crude oil is fundamental. It’s all conceptually quite simple.

 

It becomes vastly more complex when one attempts to play seer with supply and demand issues in the short term because of the myriad issues capable of affecting such fundamentals. Ask any economist to explain what happened to crude oil in 2008 and the spectrum of answers is as wide as the gap between Tori Spelling’s breasts. Who knows these things?

 

My own underlying proverb in all this is straightforward. If the world cannot replace crude oil without our standard of living plummeting and it’s supply is depleting, why the hell wouldn’t I start taking serious precautions? I mean, just in case.

 

We’re all well aware of the fact that the modern world runs on crude. Demand may be down for a while but it will turn up again inevitably. Add depletion to the mix and well, you know the story. This is serious, folks!

 

If peak oil turns out to be incorrect, then the world will continue. Whatever precautions you’ve taken will not harm you in the least. You would of lived close to a train station, had extra food and water stocked up, gained vital camping skills, used your push bike a little more and your car a lot less, reduced your debt load and kept yourself liquid with some cash savings and a little in gold bullion.

 

On your camping trips you would of taught yourself and your children the importance of knowing how to survive in nature for prolonged periods of time. Such skills are important irrespective of peak oil as every family should have basic knowledge of what to do in a crisis or disaster situation.

 

In the process of all the above, you would of continued living your life and probably learnt much about yourself and grown closer to your friends, family and nature in general.

 

Now, if peak oil turns out to be correct and the slow, long decline begins within the next decade, what will you do? Not when it happens because that will already be too late for you – I mean now?

 

Without going to childish and asinine extremes, the consequences of peak are many and profound. In all likelihood, they will change the world forever and not for the better. We won’t be in a position to prepare for everything. That’s not the focus of preparation. The focus is to build certain habits that will allow you and your family to operate and function when the lights go out permanently and the food stops growing on the supermarket shelves.

 

Nobody really knows what peak oil will bring and how it will bring it. It’s difficult to prepare for the unknown but in this case, the consequences of inaction are simply too great. Upon reasoned analysis, I’m sure most of you will agree it’s better to prepare than to do nothing.

 

For those of you who fall into this category, make a humble start and stick with it. Continue visiting the AlienWorld website and if need be, send me an email. That’s what I’m here for.

 

Michael