Before & After - Some Of What We've Accomplished In The Past 9 Days...

Peggy and I have really been enjoying the past nine days of labor intensive outdoor work cleaning up mom's overgrown acreage under these big beautiful Utah skies.

The four photos below are before and after pictures of the orchard and a large fenced area at the back of her property which could be divided up between vegetable gardens and the raising of farm animals such as chickens & goats.

Much of this area was 4 to 6 feet deep in a thick nasty tangle of weeds, brush, & cockleburs, and quite a challenge to deal with, but we're getting there!

I must say here that, if this were my place, I'd have a herd of goats to manage the weed problems, to help fertilize the gardens, and to provide milk for drinking and the making of goat yogurt and cheese, and, that being said, we'll move on to the reality of the present circumstances.

Click on all photos to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Weed Management With Infernal Combustion Machines!
Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Yes, we accomplished a lot in a very short period of time mainly because my mother has this little John Deere tractor mower that rose way beyond the task it was designed for, which is basically to mow big lawns, which is why mom bought it.
We were in dire straits here with too many chores to do and not nearly enough time to address them all in some sort of sustainable way before winter sets in.
So, I'm certainly not proud of the fact that we converted about 7 more gallons of fossil fuel (on top of what we blew through the U-Haul truck) into the C02 which is every day rendering our planet less habitable for humans.
But we came here to help my mother, and, at this point in time, I have to do that partly within the context which she lives, and, as I said above, if this was our place things would be done in a different way.

Weeds Ready For the Chipper/Shredder

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy and I brought our electric chipper/shredder with us because we knew there was going to be a mountain of stuff we could use for mulch and compost and we're just getting started with that.

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

This little pile is just the first trailer full of chipped and shredded weeds headed for the compost heap. The horse manure in the corral will be another essential ingredient.

Note the empty bottle of Negra Modelo in the John Deere's beer holder, sometimes it's so obvious that I'm just a redneck farmer at heart.

The above photos show only a part of the many problems we've had to address in these 9 days, from a huge overgrown lawn to runaway shrubbery and weeds in the flower beds around the house, to broken door latches, lost keys for important locks, automatic sprinkler malfunctions, a broken fitting in the plumbing for the well, and so many other things I've already forgotten.

But the three of us are having a lot of fun together and that's what's important.

'MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS!' I'm Trapped In A Psychotic/Psychopathic Civilization Of Serial Killers...

Click on photo to enlarge - photo credit unknown, image courtesy of Erv Nichols

Warning!

Rant Ahead!

~

"Take the rag away from your face, now is the time for your tears"

from 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' © 1964 Bob Dylan

~

It's way past time we took the rags away from our eyes and looked directly into the horrific reality of our petroleum addiction.

Ours is an insidious addiction, mostly hidden from us beneath layers of lifelong denial, which enables us to mindlessly murder our mother, the living earth, with the sick vengeance of a deranged serial killer.

We talk a good line though, like so many addicts in denial do, claiming to care most deeply about our families and the environment, about freedom, democracy and the quality of life. But our actions speak much louder than our words, and those actions prove us to be hopelessly dependent upon the destructive extraction and consumption of the world's ever more scarce resources, a cultural co-dependency created over a dozen or so decades by mixing great quantities of oil with our short-sighted desire for comfort, convenience, self-gratification and security.

Our habitual dependency upon this ever more frenzied oil-driven civilization of reckless consumption has undermined democracy and freedom at home and around the world. It's destroying our environment and ruining the future, not only for our children, but for every species on earth. So we lie to ourselves when we say we care about these things above all, because it's obvious that what we really care about is stuff.

We want a continual fix of stuff; more, bigger, cheaper, labor-saving, convenient, stylish, sexy stuff!

Americans are fond of the term, "Put your money where your mouth is", and we do exactly that. Just look at the billions of dollars you and I have squandered on the destruction of Iraq in our country's futile attempt to monopolize their oil.

Our former president said, "the American way of life is not up for negotiation", and we've forcefully demonstrated that anyone who gets in our way is totally screwed.

As we display increasingly antisocial behavior in our relationships with the other people and species we share the planet with, we reveal that, in fact, we have become a psychotic/psychopathic civilization, a species of sociopathic ecocidal maniacs to put it bluntly.

Yes, I mean all of us! The symptoms of psychosis are clearly defined; a loss of contact with reality, grandiose delusional beliefs, paranoia, defensive aggression, thought disorders, hallucinations and antisocial behavior.

Our disease is systemic throughout society, a classic substance-induced psychosis resulting from our 150 year addiction to petroleum and its associated derivatives.

We can no longer imagine living without our daily fix of oil even though every shot we take further destroys the world which made our lives possible in the first place.

Through our addiction to this cheap abundant (although quite temporary) energy packed substance, we've fooled ourselves into believing we're super-beings, exempt from the laws of nature and the limits to growth. In other words we have lost contact with reality.

Under the influence of the happy-juice we call oil we've experienced a euphoric rush that has kept us obliviously stoned for a century and a half, which by comparison, leaves the high from any other addictive substance paling to utter insignificance.

The manic hyperactivity induced by that rush of oil into the arteries of our society allowed us, in very short order, to transform our primal insecurities, and our creative wet dreams, into a monstrous civilization whose monolithic edifices will stand for centuries as eroding monuments to the ostentatious arrogance of a narcissistic species gone mad with self-absorption, over-consumption, and obsessive compulsive disorders.

We have deluded ourselves into the grandiose belief that this pile-of-crap civilization we've plastered across the planet is a modern miracle, evidence of our manifest destiny as masters of the universe.

We Americans make up only about 4.5% of the world population yet we consume 25% of the world's resources. We are the world's number one trash producers, generating 40% of humanity's trash, and we're number two in climate altering CO2 emissions (just recently displaced from #1 by China), responsible for over 20% of global atmospheric accumulations.

We are---and have been for over a century---the development model for a civilization that has spawned the 6th greatest extinction episode in the 4.5 billion year history of earth and it is estimated that we are now losing around 200 species a day, or 70,000 species a year, through habitat loss and the pollution of ecosystems.

You and I are the ones responsible for this latest round of extinctions; for the climate change happening now; for the melting of the polar caps and glaciers; for the coming rise in sea levels, and the subsequent displacement and homelessness of billions of human beings.

We may also be primarily responsible for the very existence of those unsustainable billions of people because of increases in the world food supply created by our development of an international industrial/agribusiness model.

A model completely dependent upon the petrochemicals used for fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, a model which also requires the production & maintenance of gargantuan fleets of farm equipment and transportation networks to produce those agricultural products and get them to markets around the globe.

All of this has unleashed global-wide opportunities of unprecedented magnitude for greedy profiteering by a select few at the expense of everyone and everything else. So, as a matter of course, the world economy is now managed by a gang of legalized thugs & racketeers, rivaled in greed and ruthlessness only by illegal drug cartels, fundamentalist religious fanatics, and an emerging flotilla of Somalian pirates.

~

"Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"

from Sweetheart Like You - © 1983 Bob Dylan

~

Capitalism is a Ponzi/Pyramid Scheme which robs the larger populace of the commons to benefit a handful of elites, where obscene profits perpetuate unlimited growth on a finite planet. One of the results has been the contemporary hallucination that our destruction of the planet somehow makes us wealthy.

The wealth of America is now nothing but an imaginary bubble kept aloft by the printing of money, which becomes ever more worthless by the moment. Before long that debt bubble is going to burst into flames like the Hindenburg Blimp, as we might gather from the precedents unfolding in Iceland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (not to mention California---the 5th largest economy in the world---which is essentially bankrupt).

The perpetual wars we're now waging have deepened not only our national debt, but our national paranoia as well, resulting in over 6,700 military installations--- bases, warehouses, or support facilities in nearly 150 countries (under the guise of defending freedom & democracy)---all to enforce our world dominance and gain control of dwindling resources in the interest of "national security", or what I call our assumed national supremacy.

Meanwhile, here in the "land of the free, the home of the brave", we have the highest per-capita imprisonment rate in the world, 25% of the incarcerated human beings on planet earth are behind bars right here in the good ol' USA.

Is this the definition of Democracy and Freedom?

Is this what the Statue of Liberty stands for?

We all know better...

True freedom lies in the unspoiled bounty of nature where all species are created equal, where those who can't, or won't, adapt to the limits of their environment eventually perish.

We're so deep in denial of our collective addiction that we've kept shooting petroleum into the bloodstream of our lives without facing those limits until we have, quite suddenly, found ourselves up against a wall, with the limits of our ecosystems staring us in the face, point blank.

Perhaps this will wake us up, most addicts need to bottom out before they can face reality and attempt some sort of recovery, but sometimes it's too late for that, when the damage is beyond repair.

So, go ahead my fellow addicts...

Drill Baby Drill!

Buy Baby Buy!

Drive Baby Drive!

Kill Baby Kill!

...but beware, our chickens are coming home to roost.

~

My name is Jim, I'm in recovery from the Petroleum Age*

*Thank you, Chellis Glendinning, for the societal recovery concept.

Celebrating 13 Years Without A Car

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2005/2010 jim otterstrom

Today is the 13th Anniversary of our decision to live without a car.

Peggy and I truly love knowing that we can live quite comfortably without a gas-guzzling, CO2 belching, atmosphere destroying, infernal combustion death-trap parked in our (no longer existent) driveway.

We are proud that our decision means we haven't spewed approximately 163,000 pounds (or 81.5 tons) of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere during those 13 years.

It makes our hearts feel good that we actually enjoy life without an automobile as much or more than we did when we owned one.

It was another step toward freedom from servitude to the corporate state.

We don't buy their cars, we don't buy their gasoline, we don't buy their oil & tires, we don't buy their auto insurance, and we don't borrow their money for car loans.

But, for me, the most important aspect of all this, is that, in a couple of decades when our kids are facing the ever worsening consequences of this culture's destructive behavior, they will know that mom & pop gave enough of a damn about their future to at least make dramatic and constructive changes in our own lifestyles now.

We are leaving our descendents an unimaginable mess and future generations will not look back on us favorably.

The graph below, borrowed from Wikipedia, shows the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the past 50 years. I have slightly modified the chart by circling the maximum 300 to 350 ppm target we need to achieve if we are going to avert irreversible climate catastrophe (read a related up-to-date article here), and by placing a black X at the point where Peggy and I stopped owning cars.

As you can see we got rid of our climate killing vehicle a full decade after that 350 ppm target was exceeded, so---fully realizing by that point in time that we could no longer live at peace with ourselves if we didn't take personal responsibility for our own emissions---we took action.

We're trying to do our part and I'm renewing my pledge right now, to all the species of planet earth, that I will not own another fossil fuel powered vehicle during this lifetime.

On that note, Peggy and I will toast each other tonight with glasses of Pinot Noir over a spaghetti dinner by candlelight.

Click on graph to enlarge

The photo at the top of this post, of a 1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe 4 Door Sport Sedan, was made on April 18, 2005, at Goffs, a historic railroad town on old Route 66 near Needles, California.

The town is being restored by the Mojave Desert Heritage And Cultural Association, of which Peggy's stepbrother, Phil, is Vice-President.

Peggy, her sister Penny, and I, were out there for the weekend as part a of a volunteer crew to do some weed abatement and other work.

A One-Minute Reminder From The Lorax!

Click on arrow to play the 'one-minute times millions' video © 2009 jim otterstrom

Time is running out for the Petroleum Age...

...and none too soon if you ask me!

Every day I walk past dozens of trucks, big, bigger, and biggerer, as they just sit there idling, blowing what's left of the worlds oil from their exhaust pipes into my face, my lungs, and the biosphere of our planet.

As you read these words, millions of huge trucks, this very minute, are idling away precious fuel in every corner of the world (Fuel from oil that people are killing each other over). And it goes on 24 hours a day, while billions of other stench-spewing vehicles speed past in an exponentially spiraling pattern of blind destruction.

A stunning thing to witness as the world reaches peak everything, and descends into cataclysmic resource wars, in the waning days of the short-lived Age Of Petroleum.

In a not too distant future the rusted hulks of shiny behemoths like the one above will be weathering away among the ruins of our civilization much like the statues of Easter Island, and, for any survivors, will be a stark reminder of our supreme foolishness.

Mark My Words...

Was Our November A Canary In A Coal Mine? How Hot Might It Get In The Next Few Decades? You Tell Me...

Click on chart to enlarge - courtesy of Yahoo!/The Weather Channel

Warning!!

This IS a RANT!

...and not a very nice or funny one.

I knew we had an abnormally warm November here, I lived it, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I saw these Yahoo!/Weather Channel temperature charts!

If these numbers are accurate, and I'm assuming they are, we've just had one extremely freakish November.

In Big Bear City we surpassed our previous record high November temperature by 15° F.

FIFTEEN DEGREES!!!

And, not only that! We surpassed the previous November record of 74° on 22 of those 30 days, with seven days of 80°+ temps. And not one day of the month did we dip down to even the average low temp of 25°.

It was 89° on November 7th (88° on the 8th), fifty-five degrees above average, and just 5° shy of our all-time summer high of 94°.

All over town I hear people cheerfully saying, "Isn't this weather wonderful?", as they go to and from their X-Mas shopping destinations in their SUVs.
Yes folks, it's just lovely, and pretty soon you may not even have to battle the traffic that comes with living in a ski resort either.

Of course you won't have anywhere to work because Big Bear's economy is dependent upon the ski industry. So you'll have to sell your house and move someplace where there is work, but then your house won't sell because there'll be a glut of sellers and no buyers.

And, we may not need to worry about forest fires much longer either, because, with temps like these, the bark-beetles can just chew their way through the forest all year long. Who needs a forest anyway? Then we can just haul all that dead wood home to burn in the fireplace instead of letting the wildfires have it. But we may not need fireplaces to keep warm, we may need air-conditioning instead.

Ahhhhh.... Endless Summer!

So hop in those Escalades, Excursions, Navigators and Hummers folks! You know, the ones with the Jesus fish, the American flags, and the 'family values' oriented bumper stickers plastered all over ém.

Make all the trips you want to McDonalds, Starbucks, Carl's Jr., Taco Bell and Burger King . They all have drive-throughs and you don't even have to climb down out of the car to notice the weather.

Just sit there in your air-conditioning listening to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or NASCAR results while you wolf down those mega-calories.

Even the Pharmacy has a drive through so you can refill your Prozac, Valium and Viagra prescriptions right from the driver's seat. And if you forget to have your hair cut, or your nails done, you can always make another trip. No worries! Because, thanks to oil subsidies, corporate welfare, and very creative economic policies, gasoline is back below $3 a gallon.

But the hidden costs are becoming more obvious aren't they?

Global Warming may be the most insidious, but what about that $350 billion of our hard earned money spent on the War in Iraq? Or the tens of thousands of human lives sacrificed, just so we can continue driving behemoth gas hogs around in circles all day.

Ooops! Sorry!
Do I sound a bit testy?

Perhaps I'm sick of hearing people say Global Warming is no big deal?
Or maybe I'm a little under the weather from breathing all those exhaust fumes on my walk to the grocery store yesterday morning, especially the diesel fumes?

Oh Look! I just noticed the first syllable of diesel is 'die', as in Die-Off!

I wonder what it feels like to be broiled?
Or what it's like to watch your children or grandchildren being cooked in a solar oven.

Stick around, the fun's just beginning...
...but the party's coming to an end.
Whether we believe it or not.

Pissed-Off?
Me?

Hey, it's my blog, and I can vent today if I want to!

Because our collective ignorance is infuriatingly pathetic and Peak Oil can't come soon enough for me...

...so you can consider this my exhaust, I certainly have to breathe enough of everyone else's!

Love, Peace, & Mercy Earthlings...

It’s looking to me like we're gonna need plenty of each!

The chart below shows the daily high and low temperatures for Big Bear this past November.

Enlarge it and compare them to the record highs, lows, and average from the chart above.

Click on chart to enlarge - courtesy of Yahoo!/The Weather Channel

Most of the folks who visit this blog are well-informed about Global Warming and are making big personal changes toward sustainable living. This post isn't meant for you.

It's for the masses who are either ill-informed or just don't seem to give a damn!

The people who say, "Isn't this weather wonderful?, Have a nice day, and a Merry Christmas"

They sound to me like Stepford Children.

All programmed to speak polite, meaningless, rose-colored gibberish.

Maybe I should apologize for another of my impassioned outbursts, but I'm not going to.

This is a real world we're living in, and I have a full spectrum of feelings about it, so there's little relevence in my simply posting pretty pictures every day.

Now I'd like to refer you back to some charts I posted last January which show the correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature. Click here to review the charts, especially the fourth one down which uses data from the past 160,000 years. Compare where the CO2 levels are right now with the historically corresponding temperature line.

Then you tell me. How hot do you think it might get?

Floating Gardens Of Stanfield Marsh

Click on photo to enlarge

This tire, mounted to a rim, is still holding air after floating around the perimeter of the marsh since spring, and the garden, complete with several species of plants and some driftwood garden art, appears to be thriving.

I wonder at the circumstances of how this life raft came to be.

A perfectly good tire & wheel, fully inflated with excellent tread, somehow becomes separated from its vehicle, fills with soil and driftwood, and ends up in the marsh where it sits high enough in the water so that whatever seeds were present didn't drown but flourished instead, upon the floating junk of industrial civilization, to create an oddly beautiful statement on life, renewal, and nature's adaptability.