Oh my.

Not surprisingly, the ad and the related propaganda from its sponsoring organizations like the American Immigration Control Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform continues the trend of dehumanizing people trying to immigrate to the U.S. from Mexico. With language that minimizes the social context and pumps up the fear factor (“we don’t have the capacity to assimilate the newcomers”… “adds a large burden”… “excessive legal quotas”… “lawlessness”… “threatens the American way of life”…), it encourages us to forget about why someone might be immigrating, or what happens to them once they get here, and instead focus entirely on what an inconvenience it might be to our daily lives. “I don’t want to sit in traffic any more than I need too, not with gas prices the way they are! Darn Mexicans!”

But more disturbing and a bit more surprising to me is the attempt to tie something like traffic congestion to a single factor like the number of people entering the country illegally over the Mexico border, and to brazenly suggest that we can hold off traffic congestion just by addressing that issue. They even go on to suggest that economic prosperity in many southern cities is threatened by traffic congestion because it makes it harder to attract new business. Oh, and it’s an significant environmental issue too…the immigrants are basically choking the spotted owl with their own bare hands.

This is too much. I understand that for many political players, they know they can’t win an argument about an issue unless they force us to look at it at such a macro level that removes all notion of humanity and relationship from the picture. But to plant the insidious seed that uses the difficulties that come with higher oil and gas prices and the ridiculousness that is the U.S. transportation system and car culture against the people who wish to cross our borders is a kind of twisted tactic at a whole new level.

Of course, since so many people in this country do externalize the responsibility to make our daily commutes faster, cheaper, easier, this tactic just might work. We want the government and other entities to “do something” about gas prices, about traffic congestion, about economic vitality of our cities. If the magnifying glass focuses in on a single factor that can be addressed with such apparent ease and moral clarity (“just shut down the border…it’s our country!”), we might just latch on to that and run with it.

But we’d be forgetting that even with high gas prices, we continue to produce more and more vehicles to the point where we almost have 1 car for every 1 person in the United States, the most in the world. We’d be forgetting that we continue to shun the construction or revitalization of mass transit options so that we can instead preserve the individual freedoms and seeming divine right to drive any where at any time. We’d be forgetting that we don’t zone or plan our cities and communities to be walkable, bike-friendly, or even generally easy to get around in a car, further necessitating longer trips in the car just to get to basic services. We’d be forgetting that we’ve ignored or downplayed the implications of increasing carbon emissions and energy consumption long before the immigration issue was such a focus point in U.S. politics.

I think we should talk about the increasing population in the U.S. and the troubles it creates when unchecked. I think we should talk about traffic congestion and transportation issues here. And I think we should talk about U.S. immigration policy. But these are complex issues with many influences at work, and it’s disingenuous at best to shift the singular blame for any of them onto people who are immigrating to this country; they likely have the least amount of responsibility and power to solve the problems that we created for ourselves long before they thought about coming here.

Of course, the question after a talk like that will always be “what happens now?” – what conversations will be started, what doors did I open (or close), what actual impact will be made? Whatever happens, it continues to feel like a privilege to be able to connect and share with decision-makers and community-builders in the place I call home.

Remember, if you’re interested in having me give this talk to your group or organization, just let me know.

It turned into one of my most intense speaking experiences to date.

I’ve given presentations and led discussions about a lot of different stuff, but they usually trend toward technology topics with which I’m very comfortable and have lots of experience talking about. They also tend to be specific enough that I don’t have to demonstrate a greater understanding of the universe or tie a whole bunch of big themes together. But in “Going Local,” it was about taking a hard look at how we (humans) got into the mess we’re in (energy crisis, climate change, economic collapse, widespread war and injustice) and making some very specific recommendations about what to do about it on the local level. Personal suggestions. Things that might offend, or at least cause discomfort. Things I’ve had a hard time saying out loud before.

It was also a kind of culminating presentation for me. The place where community-building, good communication and discussion, concerns about the energy and climate crises, and creating a vision for the future of Richmond meet is a nexus where I’ve been spending more and more of my own personal energy lately. There’s minimal personal risk in talking about optimizing a website for Google’s search engine, but when you’re talking about the sustainability of our lives in the place we call home, it somehow feels more edgy, vulnerable, scary.

Despite my anxiety, I think it turned out quite well. What’s more, I think it started some good conversations, some of which are still going on. I was grateful that the talk was not only attended by the somewhat academic population at whom it was originally targetted, but also local economic development officials, business owners, sustainability educators, friends, and at least one member of the media. Thanks to everyone who came and who shared your feedback.

For those who were there, I’ve posted the “menu” of suggested action items for futher comment and expansion, over at ProgressiveWayneCounty.org. And if you weren’t there, the suggested items may make more sense when you hear the rest of the spiel – I’m available to give the talk to your group or organization if you want. I’m ready to face the discomfort again, knowing how important having these conversations might be, trusting that I still have much to learn, and hoping that it will get easier each time.

1. Question to the local Mayoral race candidates about energy policy – I submitted a question to Mayor Hutton and Rick Thalls via the Pal-Item’s forum, asking “if elected/re-elected, what specific steps will you take to uphold the commitment the City has made to improve the environmental health of our communities, reduce emissions, discourage sprawl, increase fuel efficiency, and reduce energy consumption? What steps have you taken in your own life to reduce your energy consumption?” I wonder if they’ll respond on their blog?
2. The Cuddle Mattress – if you’re looking for a get rich quick scheme, just patent this idea today! (And think of all the heat loss prevented by more efficient cuddling.)
3. A Quick Video Introduction to Peak Oil – a primer on the concept of peak oil and resources available to learn more. Created by Aaron Wissner, who I met this past weekend (and geeked out with a bit over his Canon HD DV video camera).
4. Business Alliance for Local Living Economies – How can my business use less energy and produce less waste? How can I help my customers understand that locally owned businesses are important to the strength of our community? What new business opportunities exist for our region in the emerging green economy? BALLE has some good answers.
5. smallisbeautiful.org – programs that demonstrate that both social and environmental sustainability can be achieved by applying the values of human-scale communities and respect for the natural environment to economic issues.

For now I won’t try to record the conference proceedings here (they’ll be on DVD soon), but I have a number of blog entries in the works. If you’re interested in hearing about some of what I learned, I’ll also be covering it in a talk on Thursday, November 15th at 12 PM in a session called “Going Local: Building a Self-Reliant Richmond, Indiana.” Join us if you can.

I, having met Richard Heinberg and read his book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, of course presumed it was something related to addressing the impact of the end of abundant, cheap oil. The cover has a very similar image that complements the book’s exploration of our relationship to oil. But when I visited the website that the postcard mysteriously directed me to, I found that it was an ad for…a credit card company. Their solution to the energy crisis? Gas credits when you make lots of charges on your card. You know we’ve reached a new level (high or low, I can’t say) of public attention to the state of affairs when credit card companies think they can make a few dollars off of people who are worried about our dependence on oil.

If you’re interested in a more effective approach than “going into debt for Mother Earth,” you could join me at the upcoming Fourth Annual Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Heinberg will be speaking. It’s always a smashing good time, grounded in an accessible exploration of real community-based solutions.

I’m so glad that the Chamber is focusing on the relationship between agribusiness and the energy crisis that we face as a nation and as a planet. I’m also glad that the solutions we’re talking about are keeping in mind a systems approach – how the inputs and outputs from a particular industrial or energy-generating process can be used as efficiently as possible.

But I hope that whatever solutions we pursue take into account that there is a tremendous amount of energy that goes into making our agricultural system work, and so any energy solutions derived from it must take that cost into account. The USDA recently noted that ethanol generates little more energy than it takes to produce. Some scientists have shown that ethanol production consumes 6 units of energy for every 1 it produces.

Richard Manning, in his Harper’s 2004 essay The Oil We Eat, says:

“Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.”

In other words, it might be unwise to treat an agricultural system that depends so heavily on oil as a promising option for replacing oil. (As Tom Philpott also summarized in his blog entry on the matter.)

I hope the Chamber continues to pursue these important issues, and I’m glad these conversations are happening in our community and ABOUT our community. We just need to make sure that we’re addressing the real issues that underly the energy crisis at hand.

Our very approach to solving the “problem” of unsustainability is grounded in a mindset that prevents sustainability from emerging. Always anchored to the past, the future is envisioned as being bigger or better. But such an approach will always keep us rooted in the past. To escape from the past, one must think in an entirely different way.

The current ideal of sustainability, as sustainable development, is not a vision for the future. It is merely a modification of the current process of economic development that its proponents claim, in theory, need not cause the terribly destructive consequences of the past. Sustainable development is fundamentally instrumental. It suggests new means, but still old ends. Sustainable appears as an adjective; the noun is still development.

As I look at sustainability efforts in my own life and at sustainability as a local progressive value, it’s important to me that someone out there has the right words to say what so many people are afraid to say: there are ways in which the survival of life on Earth is in conflict with traditional economic development, a.k.a. the continued growth of our civilization. Many sustainability efforts are purely or primarily anthropocentric, and therefore fail by definition.

This essay doesn’t have all the answers, but it’s got a good grip on that particular problem.

That’s the question, indeed.

How will we survive and get around when the price of gas is too high to afford? Or, perhaps more pressing, how will we survive when there is no more gas to buy? It is always surprising to me that people are so expectant of intervention by a third party (or higher power) for any sort of resolution about this issue. Yes, the government and gas companies have obligations and interests related to the availability of resources that literally fuel their existence and our culture, but they are not the only variable in the matter. And even if they were, simple math tells us that the demand for oil will (or already has) exceed the supply in ways that essentially mean the compulsory end of our oil-using existence.

Right now you pay USD$3 for the ability to transport your vehicle about 20 miles. When you have to push that hulk of metal up and down those hills and around those corners, I bet that’ll seem like a pretty good deal.

Whether we can create a new kind of existence in the place of the current one is up to us. “Us” in the long term means “the human species,” but “us” in the shorter term means the people in our community. There will be no sustainable government intervention to help the people of Richmond, Indiana buy gas at a lower price. There will be no goodwill gesture by the gas companies to help us pay our bills and buy as much gas as we always have at the same time. There is no charity auction or community fundraising campaign that can help bring gasoline to our local pumps more cheaply so we can stop worrying about it. It won’t happen.

And yet we largely continue to insist on external resolutions instead of internal ingenuity and innovation. One might say that it’s a symptom of an egregious kind of privilege and sense of entitlement that has us asking to have our cake and burn it for transport too. Or one might say that it’s a cultural conditioning, we’ve expected from childhood for gas to flow like water when we need it, at the price that seems reasonable to us; breaks from that norm that has been in place for generations are jarring and distressing. Or one might say that we’ve just forgotten how to take matters into our own hands, how to apply a sense of entrepreneurship to the challenges that face our community. Or one might say that perhaps in this day in age, we know what we need to do, we’re just scared.

It’s scary to think about changing how I live (I can hardly stand it when the parking space on my street isn’t available), but it’s more scary to think about a world in which gas is $200/barrel, and all of the implications that would have for our way of life. I’m glad that some are willing to change their habits and way of life now; isn’t gradual change always so much more tolerable than sudden drops in quality of life? But I also fear that even the changes being made aren’t enough. We talk about managing money better to pay for gas, but we should also be talking about using less gas, or no gas. We talk about the fun of buying new hybrid cars, when we should also talk about incorporating better public transportation, carpooling, bike paths and other significant fuel efficiency measures into our strategic planning. We talk about bringing more jobs to our community that are a part of the global economy when we should also be talking about how we as a community can better survive when the global economy stops caring about Richmond, Indiana. We talk about recycling aluminum cans, but we should also be talking about completely different ways of producing and distributing the food and drinks we consume. These are all challenges we can take head on at the local and regional levels; Uncle Sam can join us if he wants, but we don’t need him.

Not so long ago, we created the fragile fuel economy we live in through a series of incredible and admirable innovations and “advancements” in the way we thought out our world and what we could do with its resources. It seems to me that it will only be similar kinds of shifts in our perspective that take us to a place where humans can live sustainably on the Earth. Short of that, rearranging our errand routes and waiting for the government to step in is only prolonging the problem, and making the particulars of the eventual solution (voluntary or involuntary) that much more uncomfortable. As author Daniel Quinn wrote, old minds think: “How do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think: “How do we make things the way we want them to be?” We need new minds right here in Wayne County to ask and answer that question every day – it’s not about fear, it’s about creating something better for ourselves. Otherwise, we’ll just be old minds complaining…driving around, and then eventually running, in circles.