The odds and ends of our world and my community

"We're an intentional community; what are your intentions?" This is a quote from Phil the other day...we we're wondering how to approach people who expressed an interest in moving to our community. To further that thought I should put into words what I forsee as the result of 'forming a community'.

First, I grew up mostly on suburban Long Island (near New York City) and realized early on that I didn't want to live there for the bulk of my life..too crowded, busy, too many mindless activities (lawn mowing, competitive consumption, etc.) and I get a 'trapped feeling' when I'm there. I wanted enough land to support myself and family no matter what life brought along. Woodhenge's 52 acres is much more than enough to do this. Sharing the land with others helps me to realize my ever evolving philosophy of living. The more participating people, the smoother the pace of developments here.

I'm also paranoid, I don't think our planet can support 6 billion people. I can imagine a number of scenarios that would lead to the demise of half or more of the beings alive right now. The primary of these potential disasters may have already begun. It's called "Peak Oil". We're not running out of fossil fuels! We're running out of cheap fossil fuels. There's a big difference. What we have left in the ground will serve mankind for generations, but at an ever increasing monetary cost. The oil that's left is the thicker stuff that has settled into the bottom of the wells (that's a vast oversimplification), it has to be pumped from deeper and deeper regions and in a lot of cases we don't have the technology to do this. The coal deposits are vast, but what remains is dirtier (containing more impurities, including sulfur) and will provide less energy per ton and more pollution. Natural gas is simply running out. The tar sands and oil shale deposits are enormous, but it takes two barrels of conventional oil energy to derive three barrels of new oil; plus thousands of gallons of water for processing each barrel...lots more pollution.

That said; the real crisis will be economic. The populations and economies of India and China dwarf that of what we've come to call 'western culture'. We've surrendered the bulk of our manufacturing and a lot of our technological service industries to those countries. China alone owns over a trillion dollars in United States securities (Treasury bonds, etc.). In a bidding war for energy products both of these countries and those that are economically linked to them would be the hands down winners. If this crisis were for some reason to occur, it would make the "Great Depression" of the 1920's-30's look like a party.

The biggest single factor stopping this economic crisis that is the fact that world oil is traded in petrodollars....any nation thinking about switching to "petroeuros" has had some problems. Let's see, these nations would include Iraq, North Korea and Iran,....hmmm makes you think.

Western nations represent around 17% of the world's population and consume over 45% of it's non renewable resources. That's a fact. I don't make judgments, I just try to set an example. The interdependance of the world economy will lead to it's downfall more assuredly than any number of bombs. Speaking of bombs, the style and face of war have changed. It isn't giant armies massing on a battle field with huge ships and convoys of trucks to support them. It's small carefully planned surgical style strikes by small bands of people. The small attacks on our shores (no, I'm not trying to belittle the twin towers/pentagon/etc. incidents) were just that, small. Think what would have happened if four or five of our major economic centers and shipping ports had been bombed, worse yet, with nukes or dirty bombs...our economic and living conditions would rapidly move down to that of Cuba.

The pace of technology and the changes it brings to society has surpassed our psychological ability to handle the change. Most have lost sight of what we've been given a life for. We're no longer 'stewarts of our land'. Consume and let others figure out how to fix the problems associated with that consumption.

What we're trying to do here at Woodhenge is to set up a place that will exemplify how to not mindlessly waste our resources. We're doing it as a place where people can come to look and learn how to take a little step aside and view what they are doing in the small and big scale of things.

My first thoughts were to build a survival enclave (imagine barbed wire, poured concrete, guard dogs and stacks of freeze dried foods). I rapidly reached the conclusion that this was a bad idea, because it was limited in both scope and time...barbed wire rusts, dogs die, food is consumed...to do something on a longer scale takes knowlege and thinking. That is the stage we're at now. We're beginning to understand the skills and constraints we're under to create something that will endure. Material goods do not last, knowlege and skills, when learned well and passed on carefully last virtually forever.

The old quote; if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day, if you teach him to fish he'll feed himself for a lifetime" isn't quite enough. It should be more like "if you give a man a fish he'll feel he's entitled to get one from you every day, if you teach a man to fish he'll be hungry until he gets good at catching fish".

I don't want to tell people how to survive a crisis. That's too short of a timespan. I want to show them that sometimes the simple stuff works the best, but just like advanced technologies have their pitfalls, so do simple technologies. The problems of modern technologies are pollution, resource depletion and depersonalization of peoples. The problems of simple technologies are having to learn them and practice them until you become proficient at them. No instant gratification here! You actually have to ask and talk to people to learn how to do stuff efficiently. Yes, you can learn from a book or how to DVD, and I do this a lot of the time, but I find my efficiency level goes up at least an order of magnitude when I learn directly from 'them that's doin'.

O.K., enough babble. -Jim-