Life & success (that’s all)

First there is life. That is all, life. Life in the very broadest sense. Life and being, much the same. Rocks have life, as does plastic.

Then there is animate life. With all the attendant drama of moving, stopping, living, dying, reproduction, transformation.

We, with our fine minds, our powers of invention, like to make up stories about how things are supposed to be, but after all there is only life. It is the most important thing to remember. If we could keep that in our mind we would not chase dreams so much. Those dreams that have led us to spin stuff out of oil and metal like crazy fools.

What is it that we wanted with all of this stuff that we have made? A warm place, enough to eat, to be clean and healthy and happy in our families, however constituted. Everything else is just the means to those ends, or a detour. Everything.

Isn't it absurd that we cannot understand even our own needs? Do we define success by fulfilling our needs? No, success for us is about being better than everyone else, or trying to be. Much good that does. In fact, it does much evil. We hardly recognize the world we have made anymore, it is so over-built.

Our heroes of late have been engineers and physicists. We have all manner of machines. Now we live in order to keep the machines running. We work in order to pay for rent, food, water, for electricity, for the car and gas that goes into it, for the cell phone, cable-TV, internet connection, for the airplane, the airport, the shipping vessels, the delivery trucks, the factories, the tractors, the hospitals, the oil-rigs, the shopping centers, the cities! We have to keep all those machines running, each of us, otherwise we will be going backwards!

We can't imagine that, going backwards. We are terribly afraid of going backwards. Because going backwards means having less power, means being vulnerable, means, perhaps, failure. Failure to be better than everyone else. To do away with what is not really necessary, with what no longer works, is not failure.

Perhaps if we understood that seeing ourselves and our needs very clearly is a way forward. If we can see what we truly want and need, we will not expend energy, increasingly precious energy, on anything that does not get us there directly. What gets as much of the world as possible there, to what we truly need.

So one must challenge the idea of that false, invidious success, in the name of life, a good life, a good world. It is not so difficult, to get to the world we need.

 

Death in the Afternoon

Chicken-fighting is one of the past-times of winter and early spring while the roosters have their tail-feathers. Some people think that cock-fighting is cruel and perhaps they are right, but if you have ever seen what roosters will do to hens, it makes you a lot less sympathetic. Chickens are some of the most vicious creatures on this earth. We can all just thank the Creator God that chickens are not 10-feet high, because us humans would have been extinct a long, long time ago. So there is quite a bit of practicality to fighting roosters. You only need so many.

I've only been to one cock-fight in my life and that was with my Filipino grandparents. My grandfather had an island-wide reputation as a breeder of fighting chickens and when he was in his prime his yard was filled with huts and cages for his chickens, with roosters tied out by a string around one leg, gazing down their beaks with imperious fierceness. The chicken-fight that I went to took place in the old Filipino camp in Pahala, under the shade of the giant, ancient mango trees. This was in the 80's when the sugar plantation and mill were still in full operation, but the Filipino camp was quite broken-down already. I don't remember much about the chicken-fight. There were crowds of people and my grandmother took me around to show me off to her friends. For some reason I ended up getting a hair cut there in someone's living room.

I watched one chicken-fight: first the round of betting with much yelling and money held high in the air, then the chickens were let go. Being a "let-go man" is a special skill -and dangerous, as the roosters have knives tied onto the spurs of their legs, and they waste no time going after each other. There is also a "knife-man" who specializes in tying on the knives. Then there is the owner, anxious. He has bred or bought the rooster, fed it a special diet, groomed and massaged it to build up its muscles, trained it with sparring matches. The two roosters circle each other with ruffs open like angry lizards, then fly at each other clashing in mid-air. They peck and bite at each other, and slash with their bladed legs. It's over in minutes. One combatant is dead or nearly, the other is triumphant and deadly. Each chicken is collected by its owner. Money is redistributed. Another pair of roosters are matched.

More often than not a fight erupts between the humans as well, or some kind of drama. Everyone is jacked up on money and surrogate battle. Someone is caught stealing or cheating or not behaving the way they are supposed to be. There are threats, yelling, posturing. Perhaps it comes to blows. Usually not. Just blowing off adrenaline. It is a Sunday afternoon. A past-time that takes place in clearings in the forest or fields - it is illegal - but that doesn't stop anybody: some things are older than laws.

Community Concerns About the Biofuel Project

People I know stop me to talk about the biofuel project quite a lot these days. Some of the comments that they have voiced to me:

The honeybees in Ka'u are just starting to recover. Will the feedstock be grown using pesticides? If so this could have an effect on my honeybees and my livelihood producing honey. What assurances do we have that this will be taken seriously?

Do the project planners understand that they cannot just strip the fertility out of the soil again? It has taken this long to build anything back up after sugarcane. What are their plans for maintaining fertility in the soil?

If, as stated at the County Council meeting, this project will provide 200 permanent jobs and it takes 20 people to run the plant, what exactly are the other 180 jobs going to consist of?

I want to support biofuels but I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this project.

Balanced Cycle

I'm a member of the current Agricultural Leadership Program of Hawaii (ALPH) class - which is an experience I highly recommend. We visited Kauai in January for four days of farm tours and intense discussion (always) between the class-members and the farmers we visit. One of the most intense was a talk by my fellow Board of Agriculture member Jerry Ornellas. Jerry talked about virtuous and vicious cycles and challenged us with the question: "what does a balanced cycle look like?" No one had an answer then, but I've been thinking about it ever since.

What seems pretty clear is that we need to balance extraction with regeneration. Unfortunately our present system provides very little incentive for regeneration of any kind. At least formally. We all know we have to regenerate our own private support systems, and that our" professional life" often conflicts with that need to regenerate our personal resources of energy, health, family.

Furthermore, the economics of almost any pursuit encourages, even demands, full-tilt resource stripping. If an enterprise understands the necessity of regeneration, it does so as an adjunct to the main task of transforming resources into wealth/power/survival as efficiently as possible. There is no margin for regeneration.

How do we balance efficiency and regeneration? How do we value an enterprises' return to its own ground, its regenerative power? How do we discourage irresponsible extraction? How do we articulate regenerative power as a source of pride and social prestige? How do we, at the very least, make some room for the regenerative cycles that Nature has developed over its billions of years of existence?

A lot of it comes down to social ethos - the way we think about ourselves, our way of making a living and consuming, thinking about the complexity of natural systems and our place in them, understanding the basics which we were all educated to forget. A lot of this will become much more clear as the Great Unwinding unwinds.

http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/254427-an-interview-with-michael-shuman-if

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Kane talking about lying down in front of bulldozers.

Cliff-hanging off pali to find endangered plants.

Hippies living in remote valley of Kalalau

Green flanks, black teeth

Trail beside cliff that falls into ocean - Old Hawaiian man on horseback – seeing the hair in the water under the empty backpack

Story of Ko`olau & Pi`ilani – refuge- hanging valley – waterfall

Red dirt mud

Cycle of methane fuel production – anaerobic digester – methane –generator adapted to burn methane – electricity – heat byproduct –absorption chiller

Mud ditch and red dirt ribbon around the island

Ornellas – vicious/virtuous cycles – what is a balanced cycle?

Definition of agriculture enlarged to include all human activity? (Renewed) understanding of agriculture will only come through explaining connections, engagement, participation, holding stake. There is agriculture in astrophysics, agriculture in everything, can we remember in time? It's possible to be human without agriculture, but it's not possible to have a civilization without it, even just a village.

Mikinalo (carnivorous plant) and ohia makanoe

Smilax (hoe kuahiwi)

Can we remember in time?

 

Biofuels in Ka’u

Yesterday I went to a public presentation of a biofuels project in Pahala. A company called Aina Koa Pono wants to come into Ka'u and harvest biomass from 13,000 acres for a biofuel processing plant that will involve microwaves. The presentation was held at the Pahala Clubhouse, a graceful meeting space built during the plantation era. There were approximately 100 people there and two video cameras. It was a warm afternoon, and there were plenty of mosquitoes taking advantage of the crowd. The chief engineer Sandy (Alexander) Causey stood in front of the group and gave a fairly detailed explanation of the process by which the organic matter would be vaporized, filtered, re-vaporized and distilled into synthetic crude (aka biodiesel)l, kerosene (aka jet fuel) and gasoline. The byproduct of this process – char- would be put into a boiler to create electricity to run the plant. Everyone was very polite, but the questioning that ensued was decidedly skeptical in tone. Sandy Causey is not PR guy, which is a good thing for the people of Ka'u because they get to see what the real deal is on this project. To be blunt, there are big gaping holes in their business model as far as their agricultural/harvesting expertise. They really don't know what they are doing, especially in respect to the actual physical costs of growing and re-growing biomass. It's not something I hold against them very much. Ignorance of biological reality is rampant. On the other hand, ignorance does not inspire confidence. Is it okay for them to blunder into our neighborhood armed with a HECO contract, federal funding, and an amorphous plan? I really don't know. On the one hand, no one knows what they are doing when it comes to facing the transition from away fossil fuels on the ground level. We absolutely need to have alternative energy processes being developed, even if it not particularly efficient or knowledgeable production, just so that we can learn to be efficient. On the other hand, there is a good chance that the project will fail because of the project designers ignorance of some very basic realities of Ka'u, the kind of experience that regular people have, the ranchers, the farmers, the loggers, the bulldozer operators. Unfortunately that kind of experience does not seem to be getting into the spreadsheets for this project.

Reading: A World Made by Hand

Kunstler's novel is dystopian sci-fi of a different sort. Our more probable future, as is now apparent, will be one of devolution, rather than hyper-technology. If we come up with something along the lines of nuclear fusion, then we're on for R2D2 and the Death Star, but if not we're looking at a transition to the kind of neo-rural scenarios that Kunstler imagines. It's unclear whether he longs for or dreads it more. Me too.

Kunstler's novel is the story of the events of a few weeks in the town of Union Grove, in the vicinity of Albany, after the oil has run out, influenza epidemics have decimated the population, and bombs have destroyed Washington D.C and L.A. The electrical grid has gone down and central government has faded away. The town is on its own – for its food, fuel, shelter. Life reverts to the patterns of a 100 years ago, with the difference that people of the town are demoralized by the memory of how easy things were before.

At this point the odds are looking better for decentralization than world cities. We may lose some ground in the efficiency of production with decentralization but it is the lesser of two evils.