Last Call at the Oasis is a documentary about water usage that has its roots here at UCI. See UCI’s article about it here: Troubled Waters.

[Jay Famiglietti, a] professor of Earth system science and civil & environmental engineering who heads the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling, … has collected global and regional data for years via a NASA satellite mission called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). He provides much of the research underpinning one of the film’s main messages – that humans are using up water faster than it can be replenished.

but there is also a third thing, that makes it water

and nobody knows what it is.

The atom locks up two energies

but it is a third thing present which makes it an atom.

— ‘The Third Thing’, David Herbert Lawrence, The Works of D.H. Lawrence (1994), 428.

The city of Irvine, Orange County Great Park and UCCU Master Gardeners and Food Preservers will host ‘Gardening for Adults: Growing Edibles,’ a six-part monthly series that will cover the basics of how to grow edibles in your garden, patio or balcony.

from “Irvine to host free edible-garden classes”

This is the animation done by Globaïa for the short film 'Welcome to the Anthropocene' commissionned for the Planet Under Pressure conference.

Watch the narrated version here: http://vimeo.com/anthropocene/shortfilm
More on the project here: http://anthropocene.info

Site: www.globaia.org
Contact us: info@globaia.org

1) The environment in which we live.

2) The environment that we own.

Which of these definitions is meant makes a big difference.  If it is “the environment in which we live”, it situates people as organisms that inhabit certain habitats.  If it is “the environment that we own”, it situates humans as masters of those habitats.

(Note: people often use the term “the environment”, too, which skirts the issue by assuming that we all know which environment we’re talking about.)

If I remember my high school courses correctly, Latin would use the genitive case for both of these meanings.  However, I feel that the disambiguation of the two is potentially important.

So the question for the audience is: does anyone know of a language that makes a distinction between these two meanings?  Or, alternately, is there a good way in English to convey the distinction concisely?

But perhaps there’s more to the “health” of an economy than how many McWidgets it can churn out, more bigger faster cheaper nastier. Perhaps the health of “an economy” is better represented by the mental, physical, emotional, and social health of people’s very real human lives. Perhaps what matters more than (yawn) the stuff we can buy is the stuff we can’t. And, if you want to take the argument to the limit — as I’ll argue in future posts — perhaps the very idea of “an economy” is itself an idea built in and for the industrial age.

From the Harvard Business Review Blog Network

The suggestion that the very word “economy” might be the problem is provocative. I need to read more by Umair Haque. Thanks for the pointer Graham.

“Last year for the first time ever, more corn was used to make ethanol than livestock feed.” From: “After Backlash, Ethanol Industry Is Thriving” @ npr

<rant> Ok. Both of those options are suicide. </rant>

Cross-reference the 2011 Global Hunger Index and go buy a bike and some lentils.

Plastic is more than just water bottles and Tupperware. If you’re indoors, look around. There’s a good bet that much of what’s in your field of view is made of plastic. Paint. Carpeting. Upholstery. The finish on a wood floor. Veneer on furniture. And that’s before you go into your kitchen, or bathroom, and never mind a subway car or a hospital (disposable, sterile medical supplies, anyone?). Plastic is so ubiquitous that it’s almost invisible…

Water Sales Trend for SoCal MWD water (click for citation)

The O.C. Register reports that water prices are going up 5% in the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in this article.

This is interesting from a collapse perspective because almost all my water is imported. I don’t know for sure from where, although the Colorado River and local ground water are likely candidates. A new water purification plant is going up in Huntington Beach as we reported on here, maybe that will help.

But as an indicator of how “wicked” this problem is, as Californians conserve water, revenue drops for the MWD. This is because the delivery costs are basically fixed, but revenue is generated by usage. So by using less water the pressure to raise prices goes up. We talk about this in some of our academic papers as “maladaptation” to collapse: A situation where solving your problem in the wrong way actually makes the problem worse. A toy example of this is turning on your air conditioner. In the short term it makes you cooler, but if it makes the external temperatures rise through global warming, it’s a bad strategy. This water example is a pressing example. We certainly need to conserve water in SoCal, but if that’s going to counter-intuitively cost *more* money it’s going to be hard to get people on board for that.

From MIT’s Technology Review comes this interesting article about Iceland’s renewable energy. It relates to Peak IT which is an idea that Bill has brought up here before. Peak IT refers to the idea that information technology depends on fossil fuels for the electricity that it consumes. When fossil fuels, a finite resource, peak in production, information technology costs will bottom out and begin to rise. Peak oil is also Peak IT, in the sense that it is the moment at which you can get the most fossil fuel electricity for your dollar. Presuming everything else stays the same, e.g., the efficiency of computers and the sources of electricity, the cost of IT then starts to rise.

Iceland has a wealth of renewable resources. Their clever idea is to start building data centers which run off of renewable resources only. This way the data centers will be somewhat shielded from any price shocks due to Peak Oil. Since data can be shifted much more easily than electricity, they are effectively converting energy to data storage and then selling that. It is a collapse resistant strategy.

“Iceland produces more electricity per capita than any other country in the world. Nearly all its power is renewable, coming from either glacier-fed rivers or steaming geothermal vents. And it’s cheap, too. At 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, electrons on the island cost around half the average retail rate in the United States.” … “That has Iceland’s government looking to attract new power-intensive industries. Data centers use up to 2 percent of electricity produced in the United States and are the fastest-growing source of electricity consumption globally. By 2020, according to some estimates, the data centers that store e-mails, Web files, and all manner of documents could be drawing 1,300 terawatt-hours of electricity yearly, or four times 2007 levels.”

Zombie Survival Map

“Map of the Dead” is a Google Map application that purports to show you where your survival resources are located in the event of a zombie apocalypse. It is overlaid with a threat assessment that is displayed as a heat map.

I know this is a joke of sorts, but it suggests two things to me. First, a great interface for dealing with the actual problem of risk assessment for collapse and for tracking resources. Second, it points out a gnawing subconscious fear of impending unstoppable doom that gets realized as zombie stories. Zombies are a slow unrelenting force of death. They are not acutely dangerous, but like a rising tide they will overwhelm you rather than overpower you. When we find ourselves, culturally, creating zombie narratives, are we reflecting some kind of actual perceived threat that we can’t quite put our finger on?

“Canning venison, shooting firearms, living off the grid and creating manure from human waste just aren’t traditional interests many people look for when browsing mainstream dating sites like eHarmony or Match.com.

That’s why a site called Survivalist Singles has entered the online dating scene, catering specifically to this niche community of “preppers,” “survivalists” and “doomsdayers.”"

Just to reiterate, we here at Collapse-O-Matic don’t consider ourselves doomsday preppers. We are concerned about collapse. The key difference is that you can’t outlast collapse. It’s a potential transformation in society. Not a phase to wait-out. But hey, we like companionship too!

IPCC Cover

Our colleague Eli Blevis wrote us to let us know that the IPCC has released its report titled “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”. The IPCC press release indicates that this report provides the scientific evidence for a series of policy suggestions they issued in November 2011. “It enables policy-makers to delve into the detailed information behind the
findings to examine the material on which the IPCC based its assessments. ” The press release can be found here. And the full 594 page document can be found here. Suffice to say it’s going to take some time to digest this.

From the press release:

“Geneva, 28 March 2012 – Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate
extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in
the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today.

Who is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?:

“The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess scientific information related to climate change,
to evaluate its environmental and socio-economic consequences and to formulate realistic response
strategies

The IPCC assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced
worldwide relevant to understanding climate change and its effects. It does not conduct any research
itself or monitor climate-related data. The work of the IPCC is carried out by thousands of scientists
on a voluntary basis.

In 2007 the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize …”

http://www.baycitizen.org/health/story/guerrilla-grafters-turn-ornamental-trees/

Worse Than the Great Depression: What the Experts Are Missing About American Manufacturing Decline

“In the 2000s, U.S. manufacturing suffered its worst performance in American history in terms of jobs. Not only did America lose 5.7 million manufacturing jobs, but the decline as a share of total manufacturing jobs (33 percent) exceeded the rate of loss in the Great Depression.1 Despite this unprecedented negative performance, most economists, pundits and elected officials remain remarkably blasé about what has transpired.”

“Transition Network‘s role is to inspire, encourage, connect, support and train communities as they self-organise around the transition model, creating initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions.”

I think a key need of Collapse Informatics is a system to connect people directly who have stuff and people who don’t have stuff but would like to trade, sell, rent, borrow. All kinds of niche systems are popping up to support those goods which aren’t easily sent through the mail. The latest is “ParkAtMyHouse”

It provides a platform for renting your driveway out to people who would like to park there instead of in a nearby expensive parking lot.

I gather there aren’t currently enough participants for them to turn on support in Irvine, but I bet that could change quickly.

The discovery of this came out of a mobile application design class that I taught this quarter in which much frustration was vented about parking permits and the perceived extortion therewith. So while it wasn’t motivated by collapse it could be used in collapse. Frustration as seen in this sketch

The New York Times reviewed a couple survivalist television shows yesterday.

Food prices and model simulations - The FAO Food Price Index (blue solid line), the ethanol supply and demand model (blue dashed line), where dominant supply shocks are due to the conversion of corn to ethanol so that price changes are proportional to ethanol production and the results of the speculator and ethanol model (green and red dotted lines), that adds speculator trend following and switching among investment markets, including commodities, equities and bonds. The green curve is the fit extended to the present with the original parameter values, the red curve is the fit with new optimized parameters. The vertical blue bar marks the end of the original fit in March 2011.

Spotted on necsi.org is this predictive model of food market speculation. They assert that the Arab Spring was at least partially sparked by large increases in food costs. If that’s true than the story was certainly buried in the popular press. NECSI’s underlying prediction about food costs apart from speculation is troubling.

“In 2008 and 2011 increases in global food prices triggered hunger, food riots and social unrest in North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, at a cost to global stability which policy makers can no longer ignore. Over the past decade, world unrest has sharply increased at time of peak food prices; now the long-term price trend is getting close to what used to be episodic peaks.

According to the new study, the next food price peak will take place in about a year. The results will be dramatically higher prices than we have encountered thus far. The study warns that should ethanol production continue to grow according to multiyear trends, even the underlying trend will reach social-crisis levels in just one year.”

The press release is here (webpage, pdf).
The non peer-reviewed white paper is here.

“Parked at my neighbors house. It’s packed with canned good, Gatorade, and what looks like ammo dry boxes. Ready for Surf trip or Mayan en of days, I can’t tell?” -Matt A.

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