Can a large scale organization of humans even become sustainable?

Let's wrestle this down to a historical perspective.

Humans on this planet have never achieved long term sustainability.  Gulp. That's right, we have formed big groups... like ancient Egypt, the Inca Empire, the Edo Period and Nabatean civilizations but guess what?  They all collapsed and for different reasons.. So let's contemplate the assist we are enjoying by copious abundant feedstocks of energy and how those who came before us still managed to reach an apex without that gift and still collapsed.  What about our enormous energy overhang and billions of people with no real survivability skills? Worlds biggest correction will happen - maybe in a generation, maybe sooner if knuckle headed decisions are made.

Historians cite, environmental exploitation, overshoot, complexity and the lack of long term planning to adapt to the plethora of threats out there.  

So when we speak of sustainable anything are we really projecting wishful thinking - just in ignorant proclamation in defiance of our history or maybe a carefully chosen marketing trope. It sounds great to investors even if it isn't possible.  PT Barnum would be proud.

Sustainable isn't the same as survivable, or adaptable and many small, independent and geographically lucky in history tend to evolve.  But a planetary sustainable culture?  Never has happened so perhaps the strategy should be reductionist, independent and organic in concept and execution. Small, resourceful and peaceful wouldn't hurt either.  Circular economies, purpose driven innovation and the ending of wasteful diversions of talent and energy seem like great ideas to explore.  Seems like financialization has to go away too - but that's just my view of things.

Just something to think about when the rubber finally hits the road. Sustainability is simply - a canard. It's a little bit of Edward Bernays scammery mixed in with that irresistible financialization addiction the West loves. Adaptability and survivability actually mean something.  That's where we need to focus our thoughts, and we should change (correct) the language as best as we can.

How sustaining are energy dependent institutional policies?

 Like many things that are obvious that we learn in our life's walk, lack of any given resource forces us to adapt, do without or simply discard an old way.  The same is true for digitally based methods we now accept or foresee as having an indispensable role in our world view or how we envision life to be.

So things like digital currency will most certainly become a reality, but how sustainable is that? Full surveillance money or programmable “social credit” wallets probably will have a short life in human history. Policy surrounding these advances is increasingly shaped by data modeling, risk management and so called experts with their biased algorithms intended to drive profits for somebody, which after all are programmed by people with that agenda.  All of these massively energy dependent initiatives are underpinned by carefully selected bureaucratic incompetence which makes life easy for the lobbyist.  Looks like a bumpy road to go down with an eventual end that is unsustainable do to energy allocation or depletion over time.  

So get ready for more economic strain, institutional decay as governments continue to run on emergency bylaws, opaque technological creep, political polarization and general instability that comes from no clearly enunciated direction. What the Chinese call "Interesting Times." 

If you assume, governments lie most of the time,  multinational corporations act in self-interest and media always filters reality to their handlers approval... you’re being realistic and maybe just a bit better aware than the average person. So don't expect to become informed that way. After all, the "news" is a for profit entertainment show staffed with actors reading story lines they really have no idea of any depth. Checkers not chess, commercials and lots of smiles.

So what can YOU do? Be vigilante and try to protect what gets measured because that's what becomes what matters - at least in public discourse and through your democratic processes.  The unpleasant stuff that isn’t measured gets ignored.  Maybe it needs to be.  

Watch for politicians and influencers of any stripe that all come from similar schools, share assumptions, circulate through the same institutions and most importantly, review and validate each other. It is easy to spot this kind of short sightedness or group incompetence or dare I say it "corruption"... be looking for stuff like dissent being labeled “uninformed” rather than a valid democratic mechanism. Watch out for credentials replacing accountability and policy that  shields the expert class from accountability for propagating a false narrative.  In this miasma status insulation is enough to start the downward civic rotation.

Once a system gets built around a comfy clan, careers depend on it staying that way, getting funding depends on allegiance to it, and institutions grow to depend on it. So - hard to correct large corrupt systems because they have a self preservation protective posture.  When reality diverges from the narrative, data can always be reinterpreted, assumptions can be quietly adjusted, and as always, critics are framed as lunatics.  LOL, so corruption is epistemic, not just financial. 

(Epistemic corruption is the breakdown of a knowledge systems integrity where it becomes unreliable for its intended purpose due to manipulation from external interests. 

This occurs when systems for producing or disseminating knowledge are co-opted by motives like financial gain, political power, or career advancement, which are at odds with their core goals.) 

Popular examples include how the pharmaceutical industry can corrupt medical science through funding and product-defense science can skew climate research. 

We are, I am afraid reaching a point where we experience highly complicated (complexity) regulation, mostly compiled by financial industry lobbyists, this new energy hungry world requires expertise to navigate and favors the insider EVERY time. This will, again I am observing, allow for corporations to influence public policy rules whilst public influence weakens if you don't participate in making your voice heard.  This can look like a neutral system when in fact it can become the mythical wolf in sheep's clothing. Surrogate endpoints instead of real-world outcomes seem to be the only reported news. The public can feel unheard and without a mechanism to instigate democratic change. But don't give up on your democratic processes.  

This can be an abrogation by policy optimization of what’s easiest to measure as defined by somebody else's metrics rather than the voting public. So keep informed, vote and write a letter or two.  Those people who create complexity make a ton of money on adventures that don't have to make any sense at all.  Why should they care as long as the money comes in. There is a shocking reality by the way, but I digress.

Expert class insulation seems to be growing as buying the right credentialed expert is offered as dismissal to the public forum.  So these days, opinion can become science (not the scientific method) and questioning can become mis-information. So we now have status insulation NOT scientific discourse.  Know the difference.

Lastly, the inequality and resulting harms we now see have largely been reframed as “acceptable tradeoffs”, abetted by careers, grants of money, and built reputations that depend on systems which if questioned or abandoned would lead to professional $uicide for the influencer.  So don't look for a lot of internal reform anywhere a paycheck is based on keeping a head down!    

We didn't need a grand conspiracy, or evil actors or even secret meetings to get here - but all of that does/did help.  Transparency is a strong antidote to corruption and we need more of it. What we do have are systems that incentivize blindly following a narrative, we have baked in career monetary pressure to advancement, risk aversion of reprisal on an individual level and the centralization of expertise from the approved "chosen" pool of "smart people" which makes change even harder as first the incumbent rhetoric has to dismantled. All of this while the media is largely co-opted.  The systems we have created self select for conformity, keep a cloak of secrecy over motives and tend to filter out the unabashed truth-tellers, even when everyone believes they’re acting ethically.  These absurdities grew from an energy rich world, and allowed the squandering of talent and resources. In a lean mean, no room for BS world they would not have blossomed to this magnus opus.  

So energy and the policies that surround its distribution are as complicated as anything else.  Keep informed, share your thoughts, work for a better tomorrow.  Failure to grasp the significance or even create university degrees in adaptive anthropology or survivability technology dont exist, perhaps they should. Wouldn't it be amazing to see a debate on energy policy based on research in these areas?  

The game of musical chairs is progressing...

Let's do a thought exercise.  If you had a friend who was temporarily out of work you wouldn't think twice about lending a hand.  It's the right thing to do unless you are a sociopath and take delight at others misfortunes - don't laugh, there are many out there.  Now let's complicate the story. Let's say your friend lost their job because the factory they worked at went bankrupt and  the unemployment in that friends little town went through the roof.   (When the full impact of automating service jobs with expert systems - some call it AI - millions will be jobless and very soon).  That person still needs a hand, so you probably would help out. But as the days turned to months and the months to years how long would you help out before you might expect that friend to maybe relocate to where there were jobs and life could go on.  Or would you say to yourself "I'm gonna support my old friend until I can't anymore?"  Perhaps you would vote for a universal standard income and just accept the taxation that reduces your standard of living?

Let us now look at the retracting energy resources around the world.  Abundant and cheap energy flowed into country after country.  That energy allowed manufacturing to take off, buoyed trade and brought the standard of living up for billions. Prosperity - thy name is oil.

But wait a sec, if you read my posts you'll already know it's a lot more serious.  Critical minerals, metals and soil quality are all in diminishing supply.  So my friends, we have a multitude of shortages all underpinned by depletion of affordable energy, greed, waste and a belief in fairytales that something will make it all better.  The reality is a non-linear jenga tower that will collapse effecting commerce and a concomitant re-alignment of new best friends and a few old ones that won't get their calls returned.

Energy depletion will drive contraction - the opposite of growth - and all those financializations that depend on growth will go negative and the whole system will lock up.  We need a new system, see some of my earlier posts..

See where I'm going here?  Now let's accept the fact that energy is a finite resource.  Yes, you can quibble that solar panels, wind power, nukes and geothermal energy are going to save the day.  I will respectfully say, sorry, not so.  Everyone of those alternates is completely dependent on fossil fuels from mining the materials, creating more waste, manufacturing the widget, and replacing it when it is worn out with a further draw down of finite energy resources.  They are energy additives that eventually wear out and are not sustainable. Ev's don't make any of this better, or greener, neither do more nuke plants and re-shoring manufacturing to places that don't have energy resources is just stupid talk.  So is building energy sucking data centers that will eventually compete with societal base needs in exchange for clever data aggregation and the saving of payroll spend by firing the millions that are soon to be in the unemployment line.  Those millions will not be too chipper if they can't eat.  So this proposition is actually harmful in at least two ways.  The economic mayhem is actually a simple shift from the private sector expense to a public funding liability needed to support those millions and secondly a profound dumbing down of society that will stunt real creative invention.  But what do I know, I'm just an old engineer with an opinion clacking away at a keyboard trying to share a warning to my fellow citizens of the world.  Not gonna work, don't go there!

So as we go forward, less energy feedstocks are available and at an increasing cost. So the first disruption events are noticed in the energy hungry global neighborhoods.  The geopolitical partners are at this moment considering what to do about their distressed neighbors.  Traditional and mutual strategic policies are being forced into confronting long term survival not short term alliances because this isn't a dip or a transient phenomena - this is the new normal.  NO energy - talk to the hand, not a "core" interest lol..

These geopolitical forces are the greatest to arise in a century. The independent advocates and the old alliances are on the table, which will reshuffle as the world tries to find a new necessary orientation to adjust to the new realities.  The old security provider has lost its role and has to make decisions, just like the person with the distressed friend who lost a job.  To make maters even more confusing this is a clash between traditional power brokers who traditionally get their way by wielding money and the thinkers who are trying to explain to the old school elites that you cannot eat a bar of silver.  This re-thinking of the way the world works is in fact a long overdue reality check. It was always this way, but cheap and easy energy allowed the economists to play recklessly and ignore this fundamental limit to growth which invalidates their economic models. Sorry, physics always wins, cue up a new game.  

In this new environment colonialism may be a first impulse for many old governments, but it does not solve the energy deficit in the long term. Strategic doctrine is morphing into an energy focused information game and evolving into using that intel to sell defensive postures based on what exactly can this ally provide to anybody else. That isn't to say that those who have always resorted to pillaging as a survival and GROWTH method from doing what their ancient instincts tell them they need to do.  But it simply won't work in the long run.  This time it's different.   Wonder what AI program you would ask as to what alliance your country should be pondering?

 

Winter has made a dramatic entrance!

 

This past week parts of Northern Wisconsin have seen nearly three feet (1 meter) of snow!  Snow is piled up higher than most cars along the roadsides, equipment is breaking down and kids are having a blast.

Congrats you win!

I'll be updating my prognostications soon.

A nice look back at the past and some fond memories...

 It's easy to recall the joy of places past and the occasions that inspired that trip to a special place.  Recently I had the pleasure of attending a Celebration of Life for my Father In Law and Mother In Law - my wife's parents.  They were kind and rather exceptional people.  Coming from farm families and lived most of their lives in Wisconsin.  

Funerals are usually pretty sad affairs. The loss of a loved one is so recent in our minds that the emotions of grief tend to be foremost.  A Celebration of Life - at least this one - was a year beyond those sad goodbyes and the balance and tempo of life going on diminished grief to humble memories, many happy ones were then allowed to come forward.  

Family shared stories of adventures, picture albums recounted a life well lived and the community they were part of.  It was truly a wonderful experience to share with all of my wife's family including the many grandchildren who have become young adults with careers and lives of adventure. 

The event took place at an old log cabin lodge known as Garmisch.  Garmisch is a Bavarian style log cabin over 100 years old and sits on the shore of Lake Namakagon.  Rustic in construction it is a time capsule to be enjoyed by the lucky few who know about it.  

This was a perfect venue for the event as they also had a cabin on this lake and would sometimes take their boat over to this lodge for dinner.  Lots of fond memories of gatherings at their cabin including our reception banquet.  

The view from the dining hall is beautiful

Summer is now past us once again.  Once again, I piloted our boat off the lake - the last boat off of our lake again!  This morning I woke to see a thin layer of ice covering about half the lake.  So the snow is soon to follow.  This summer was busy for me. New product launches, technical problems to solve and darn it, a 90% complete outdoor pizza oven.  We ran out of warm weather to finish the final 2 or 3 firebrick courses to finish the dome.  

The loons were amazing this summer, and we got the opportunity to watch eagles, geese, deer, bear, muskrats, fox, porcupines and the random crane wade through the shore looking for minnows to eat.  

This was the best year yet for our garden, we've canned dozens of vegetables and enjoyed fresh produce since about July.  The berry production was incredible!  

Life is good.  I'll try to get back to making more posts.  I do have thoughts to share and judging by my visits - a few hundred thousand from almost 100 countries - people must find my writing of some interest.  

That's all for now.  Time for that second cup of coffee.  LJO

Sustainable Living - a very old idea

 That was crushed in favor of "development" and financial motives that supported the generation of wealth rather than the quality of life for a community. Before the oil boom and exploitation of coal to feed the furnaces of the burgeoning industrial age, there was sustainable living.  So ponder this... most of human existence has been under a low energy (water wheels and oxen pulled plow) regime and today's overconsumption with all of its complexity is really a very small blip in time. We are headed back there.  

An idea known as Broadacre City was one of many such ideas espoused by victorians albeit ahead of its time.  

Although Frank Lloyd Wright tried to claim ownership of such planning, a contemporary by the name of Wijdeveld was probably a bigger contributor to the inspiration. 

The historical record is often inaccurate, edited or just plain falsified to support some new agenda.  That is nothing new, so be wary when you read about "history" - it's best taken with a dose of many alternate views of the event as are most things in life (be very wary of those who don't seek out "the other point of view" - sadly, they can be manipulated so easily and make the best useful idiots). The idea of sustainable living has been promoted so many times in our past, with all of its quality of life attributes.  The "rub" is that it doesn't naturally have a mechanism for exploitation of anything unless you contrive a currency for exchange of "things".  Hence no way for the person(s) with the cash or intimidation to force an acquisition of power on the rest of the community without that concept. Think of where we could be right now if these evolutionary ideas had been supported by governance and not bull dozed into oblivion to always chase a buck and create a fiefdom.  We are all guilty of chasing a better value for something.  Cheap energy naturally became the easy button and it was sure to be exploited in numerous ways.   Enjoying personal wealth creation by manipulating the currency of trade and not really doing anything else is another blip in history that will die a hard death. Think for a moment - did American Indians have a banking class? Ancient cultures traded in real value not with fiat markers that can be manipulated with a mouse click or an author less "algorithm".  Their system of exchange was primitive but robust unlike the leaky and corrupt systems we have managed to employ today. Sorry Bretton Woods thinking and infinite growth models were flawed from the start, and time will bring us back around. Painfully. 

In the short FLW book cited below, and to put it in prospective; FLW's Broadacre City, represented the view of a man born in the pre-federal reserve late 1800's when there actually was a tendril to reality in the gold standard.  A person who had no idea cheap oil and energy were to enable cities to grow into unsustainable monstrosities, pollution to spiral, wars to be funded out of thin air and fought with abundant resources and all the other unintended consequences that would shape our modern lives - but alas are unsustainable.  A person from this era had one foot clearly planted in a time where sustainable living was the only option.  FLW sees the growth of modernism and the concrete jungle as an assault on intellectual honesty.  The dependency on machines, and the generation of wealth based upon plunder of the land was simply unsustainable and therefore obviously obscene to FLW.  So put on your turn of the last century contextual thinking cap and enjoy the read below! I think this short video is oddly prescient. 

Here is a fun read on the "City".     

Nothing new under the sun and much to be learned from the sensibilities of the pre or early industrial age thinkers as pertaining to the evolution of the community etal.  As this early observation made before peak oil points out... Large cities are not sustainable.  Maintaining millions of miles of roads, building energy sucking data centers, inefficient use of resources like the current battery mania  and mixing millions of tons of concrete to keep on building stuff is not sustainable either.  Retraction and eventual collapse and reconstruction of a new low density energy world will take decades to unfold - but it will unfold. All of the propaganda, digital magic and financialization ain't gonna stop this train. Wooo wooooooo. 

Also appropriate but allegorical... you can figure it out.

Always learning...

 We had a chance to get away for a few days and we decided to visit Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  I've known about FLW for many years but never took the time to understand who he was, how he came to be and what was so special about this architect from another time.

This building has a story to tell.  Burned  twice, the scene of tragic murders, and the birth place of the FLW School of Architecture.  An amazing and sometimes bazaar history of a gifted artist and a tangled life.

A lot of glass... with no curtains!

FLW experimented with low ceilings calling it compression, a space to move through but not dwell in.

The bird walk was an unusually long walkway that takes you out over the side of the hill.  I wonder how it was managed during winter with large accumulations of snow and ice...

The Blue Room, surprisingly there are still a few of his apprentices who are living at Taliesin. After he died he allowed his apprentices space to live and go on creating as long as they lived.  The oldest of those survivors who still live here is 101 years old.

The name Taliesin is a Welsh term for a shiny forehead.  The idea being the structure sits upon a hillside and is a beautiful beacon of light and style. This was accomplished in 1911 when the first version was built in my opinion. 

This is Midway barn. Later as the architecture school grew it was converted to a dormitory. The weather vane has a story to tell, but I'll leave that for another day.

The only attribution on a FLW building claiming credit to FLW

One of a kind, to not be seen anywhere else.

Apprentices walked these hallways on their way to the studio

Imagine 70 students sitting with FLW working away at designs for structures. Over a thousand plans, only half were ever built.

The auditoriums theater. FLW and his wife Olgivanna taught art, performed ballet, sketched plays.  All to round out an apprentices world view, and to open their minds to culture and the expression of art in its many forms.

 I never realized Frank Lloyd Wright was so influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Once you know what to look for the influences are all over what became known as Prairie Architecture. He was commissioned to do the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. I stayed there once and although not the original structure, I was impressed at what I thought were Prairie influences, now I know they were simply carry over of a Japanese FLW fusion. Always learning!

Wright was known for his rejection of mechanistic modernism, instead he espoused natural influences and harmony with the environment.  The union with Olgivanna really fueled his late life accomplishments.  The two were made for each other. 

A complex genius with an entire spectrum of both positive and negative interactions with the world.