May and June 2006 Blog Archive
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Review: Endgame by Derrick Jensen
Endgame is a two volume set consisting of Volume 1: The Problem
of Civilization and Volume 2: Resistance.
Price: US$19.99 per volume.
Length: Vol 1: 512 p., Vol 2: 432 p.
Publisher: Seven
Stories Press
Website: EndgameTheBook.org
Rating: Essential reading
I first read Endgame three years ago, as a partial draft
under a different title. Tomorrow is the official launch of the
full published version of Endgame and I now have the
finished version in book form in front of me. It's been worth
the wait. This book is a masterpiece.
Derrick's previous books have brilliantly dissected what the
dominant culture is and what is wrong with it. Here, he takes
it a big step further. Endgame is a book about what civilization
is and how it functions, but more crucially why it needs to be
taken down and what taking it down might mean.
Read the rest of this review...
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Prisoners in Guantanamo have literally
scraped together a garden with the soil they can find and
seeds they've saved from their meals:
With their bare hands and the most basic of
tools, prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have fashioned a secret garden
where they have grown plants from seeds recovered from their meals.
For some of the detainees - held without charge for more than
four years and who the US say are now cleared for release - the
garden apparently offers a diversion from the monotony and injustice
of their imprisonment.
Using water to soften soil baked hard by the
Caribbean sun and then scratching away with plastic spoons, a
handful of prisoners have reportedly produced sufficient earth
to grow watermelon, peppers, garlic, cantaloupe and even a tiny
lemon plant, no more than two inches high.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
I'll be doing a workshop on peak oil and community sufficiency
at the famous Hillside Community
Festival near Guelph, Ontario. The festival isn't until the
end of July, but tickets have almost sold out already. You can
also get in by volunteering, but you have to sign up well in advance
to do that.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
There has been some kind of server problem this week, and the
files for the blog have been corrupted somehow, as some of you
have written in to point out (thank you).
I'm uploading an older uncorrupted copy, but some recent posts
have been lost. I'll try to recover those over the next few days.
Apologies for any inconvenience.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Someone recently shot a strange-looking bear which turned
out to be a genetic hybrid of a grizzly and a polar bear.
They're calling it a grolar bear, or a pizzly. Experts are arguing
about exactly how this could have happened, since it is historically
unprecendented.
I find it really interesting that, at this point in history,
polar bear genes are finding a way to move to a place where they
may be safe from extinction. (It's estimated that polar bears
will be extinct
within 25 years because of shrinking ice caps.) How many other
species is this hybridization happening with? It opens up the
possibility that in a thousand years, when damaged biomes have
recovered, species thought to be extinct could re-emerge from
the descendents of genetic hybrids -- hybrids who themselves may
be able to survive and persist.
It makes sense that the genes of species under threat have special
potential to move into other species, or into genetic hybrids.
In a population which is very small, a member of an almost-extinct
species may have fewer options for mates, and choose to mate with
a member of a closely related species thus passing on its genes.
It's also well known that viruses have potential to transfer genes
from one species to another, and if a species is under great stress
it may be more likely to contract and spread viruses.
It's a slim hope, but this spreading of genes may mean that extinct
species could come back again one day, at least in some similar
form.
According to a recent study, simply handling
a gun increased testosterone levels in men. There were no
women in the study to compare.
This ties in with Ran Prieur's
recent noting of George Monbiot's fascinating article on the link
between junk food and violence. Imagine you go to a movie
at the theatre and and see made-up people using guns, you imagine
yourself in their position while you eat a snickers bar or a bag
of popcorn and drink a coke. How do these simple acts affect your
biochemical likelihood to participate in violence? And how will
getting rid of those acts them affect the level of violence in
a collapsed society?
I like what Ran wrote about that article:
Did I just read that? Eating badly is more
predictive of violent behavior than psychopathy! People
with bad diets are more dangerous than psychopaths! The
good news is, when the American government breaks down, and can
no longer subsidize white sugar and high fructose corn syrup and
hydrogenated oils and factory farmed meat, when less processed
foods are cheaper than more processed foods, as they should be,
the people who eat those foods will get less violent, and Americans
everywhere will look back and say, "Wow, why was I such an
asshole?"
Erin writes in to point us to this
article about activists in German who dress up as superheroes,
plunder expensive meats and cheeses along with hundred-year-old
champagne, and redistribute it to poor people.
She also points us to this
interview about them from CBC Radio. (You will have to advance
about 16 minutes in to the first audio file.)
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Chris writes in to point us to a series of great articles by
Tom Brown called At
Home in the Wilderness. Chris also points us to this very
detailed and illustrated Tom Brown article about how
to make a hunting bow.
Monday, May 8, 2006
I was struck by this story
about a library in Chicago that canned plans for fingerprint
scanning all patrons -- not because of concerns about privacy
or surveillance, but because they couldn't get the software to
work properly.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry about it, but every day
it seems more and more that the biggest enemy of fascism isn't
democracy or activists. Instead, fascism's greatest impediment
may be a combination of incompetence and excessive complexity.
We've heard plenty about flying killer robots like the Predator
drones being used by big government and the CIA. But according
to this source, simple unmanned aerial drones are currently
at a point where they can be repurposed and used by insurgents,
freedom fighters, and malcontents of all stripes.
Friday, May 5, 2006
Following up on the blog post about some beneficial effects of
parasites, here are two excerpts from a recently written but not-yet-published
book by Derrick Jensen,
tentatively titled Songs of the Dead or Possession.
You can read the full version of it and other not-yet-published
books and works-in-progress before they are published by joining
Derrick's excellent Reading
Club.
This is a good time to mention that Derrick and I are currently
writing a book together about shit and decomposition. We're looking
at things like how shit has turned from a gift of fertility to
the land into a poison that has to be disposed of; how decomposition
works in nature and how civilization has broken those rules to
invent garbage and pollution; and how long poisons and remnants
of civilization will actually take to break down after collapse.
You can read it as we progress by joining the Reading Club.
--Aric McBay
Click here to read
the excerpts.
Friday, May 5, 2006
Here is fascinating story about a person with severe asthma who
deliberately infected himself with hookworm to cure his asthma.
And it worked! Asthma, along with allergies and Crohn's disease,
has been linked to a lack of parasitism and an excessively sterile
environment (see various links in the article).
The author notes that healthy adults with hookworm don't usually
even know that they have it, because it often provokes no symptoms.
Also, the way that hookworm spreads is totally fascinating. The
larvae crawl up through the bare soles of their host's feet, and
then swim through their bloodstream to the lungs. They then crawl
into the lungs and provoke a brief but severe cough which is how
they move into the mouth. From the mouth they are swallowed into
the gastrointestinal tract where they attach to the intestinal
wall and become adults.
I found this especially interesting in light of the recent post
about "vintage" diseases returning. What might happen
with collapse is that some diseases will get worse in crowded
conditions, some (like cancer) will get worse at first with a
higher mortality rate from reduced medical technology and then
incidence rates will decline. And some diseases, like allergies
or asthma, could decline even more quickly when people's immune
systems are stimulated beneficially by certain parasites.
This also leads into a discussion of how "parasites"
that become closely adapted to their host and landbase are often
beneficial or symbiotic rather harmful. There's some really interesting
stuff about this in a recent (but not yet published) book by Derrick
Jensen, and I'll see if I can post some excerpts tomorrow.
Here's an interesting article about how the recent US decline
in teen pregnancy rates may have less to do with government programs
and more to do with rapidly
falling sperm counts:
In a well-respected study published in Environmental
Health Perspectives, Swan, now at the University of Rochester
Medical Center, found that sperm counts are dropping by about
1.5 percent a year in the United States and 3 percent in Europe
and Australia, though they do not appear to be falling in the
less-developed world. This may not sound like a lot, but cumulatively—like
compound interest—a drop of 1 percent has a big effect.
Swan showed, further, that in the United States there appears
to be a regional variation in sperm counts: They tend to be lower
in rural sectors and higher in cities, suggesting the possible
impact of chemicals (such as pesticides) particular to one locality.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
I've previously written
here about the indigenous resistance at Caledonia. For more
about that you can listen to a powerful interview with two men
from the Six Nations indigenous community. Check it out at the
wonderful Resistance is
Fertile.ca.
Because of the intensive and ecologically horrific use of tar
sands as a petroleum source, the Canadian province of Alberta
may run
out of water before it runs out of oil. The group that wrote
the report on this suggested that a solution would be to have
oil companies pay for the water they use. Meaning that the water
would still run out, but at least the government would make some
tax dollars from the process.
This is something we've talked about before. See Tar
sands and disappearing Canadian rivers.
Monday, May 1, 2006
I've moved now, but I'm still not done unpacking or settling
in, and my internet access will be patchy for a little while.
This along with the fact that I'm having a lot of problems with
my email server being offline. None-the-less, there will still
be plenty of updates.
Now that I'm back on the land I'm going to learn to identify
and know the basics of a new edible or medicinal plant each day.
I was going to just memorize the info, but if there is sufficient
interest here I can share that as I go.
Plenty of diseases that were thought to be wiped out are
now making a comeback, including tuberculosis, mumps, whooping
cough, and some vitamin deficiencies. This is because of the spread
of immuno-supressive diseases like HIV/AIDS, the emergence of
antibiotic resistance varieties of infections like tuberculosis,
a decrease in public vaccination for some diseases, and growing
dense or crowded conditions in many areas.
I thought that these diseases, which are fundamentally diseases
of civilization, wouldn't really make a comeback until during
collapse. But it looks like they've already started.
Chris writes in to tell us that some
people are questioning the study about certain SUVs being more
efficient than hybrids, because the study has not been peer
reviewed, the full data is not currently available to the public,
and the study was done by a marketing company.
It doesn't really matter to me whether this particular study
is right or wrong on any particular point, because that still
won't alter our fundamental situation. It isn't going to change
the fact that techno-fixes won't avert collapse, that higher-tech
solutions are almost always more energy expensive, or that tuning
up an old machine is cheaper than manufacturing a new one. Not
to mention that cars
in general are a bad idea, and that driving them will be too
expensive for most people in the not-so-distant future, regardless
of how efficient or inefficient they are.
Previously: SUVs more energy
efficient than Hybrids?
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