mandarine

I have good friends who are miles away from understanding that our way of life is unsustainable. The minute they learnt they would have a second child, they changed their brand-new car for the same model in station-wagon format. Now they have three kids and will have a fourth one soon, and they have upgraded their car to a mini-van to accommodate the newcomer (in addition to buying a second car for the missus).

When I try to suggest that they should try to invent other ways, all they can say is that they could not manage otherwise. Could not go to work on their bicycles; could not go on holidays by train; could not rent the big car on week-ends; could not take kids somewhere without a full army campsite in the trunk of the car.

Each time someone says (including me) that something pertaining to energy expenses, transportation, or comfort can’t be done otherwise, I feel sad for the next generation, who will have to do otherwise in any case. And if those who have four kids can’t think for the next generation, I don’t know who will.

Energy savings.

A lot of governments worldwide are promoting a gradual switch to renewables. It has long been lip service, but now it will have to be a reality, as even the big petroleum companies are revising their peak-oil estimates - latest is Shell, with 2015. In fact, some are even claiming that we have been on an oil plateau since 2006.

After a peak comes a downhill. After a plateau comes a cliff. Whatever way, the changes that we will have to make to adapt to scarcer oil will be enormous. Even with a 20% yearly growth, renewables will not be able to make a real dent in the total until it is much too late. Even nuclear energy is very very far from allowing such fast ramp-ups.

Let us just take the catastrophic example of bioethanol. Just to reach the 10% bioethanol ratio in US gas tanks, an enormous proportion of corn production has been diverted to be burnt instead of eaten. By an interesting cascade effect, this has sent the price of food skyrocketing worldwide.

A 10% saving in fuel burn can be achieved by simply driving 120 kph instead of 130 kph, therefore losing five minutes for every hour of the trip. Have you never started your trip five minutes late or lingered five minutes along the way sipping a coffee? Why are you in such a hurry anyway? I’d rather take five more minutes for every trip I make than see famin riots all around the world because my pathetic 10% bioethanol has tripled the price of wheat…

Agrofuels are not the way. Nuclear power is not the way. Coal-to-liquids is not the way. Even wind power is not the way.

What then?

As I have said: power savings. Like it is much easier to save a dollar than ask it from one’s boss, likewise is it much much simpler to save energy than to make more. Even a 10% reduction can have great relieving consequences (see above). But I prefer the big cuts. The ones that save 50% or 75%. Let us list some of the things people can do:

• quit flying. One round-trip across the Atlantic costs you your yearly Kyoto quota. Unless you are prepared to quit driving or live in an unheated house to compensate for the trip, you’d better find nice places and people to visit nearer to you (I am sure they exist — keep looking).
• quit driving. As I have written before, driving is not faster than riding anyway. At least, carpool. Drive shorter trips. The longest trip I now drive is the one to the train station (10 km). And most times, I ride there anyway.
• drastically cut on home heating. Stack up your warm quilts and allow the temperature to drop to 15°C/59F in your bedroom. Reef you heated real estate in winter: have the kids sleep in the same bedroom, work in the living room, and stop heating two or three rooms. Consider setting aside one dollar for insulation improvements for every five dollars spent on the heating bill.
• telecommute. Office buildings and factories are very bad in terms of energy efficiency. And you’ll be able to sell your car.
• eat better, eat local, eat less meat, eat less. The ‘less meat’ factor along with the ‘eat local’ factor allow to considerably reduce the energy bill and the environmental footprint in general. Better food may mean ‘more expensive’ (although that is not always the case when you can eat local if you can avoid the distribution network), but because you will eat less meat and less food in general, the overall budget will be reduced.

Look at the list above: none of the items require any money. Power savings are the cheapest renewable energy source. And believe me, the psychological comfort cost is much lower than people anticipate. At least if you can do these things for moral reasons before being forced into doing them by financial reasons. And if anyone tells you that these things can’t be done, just know that they will be done in the near future, that much is absolutely certain.

Now I must go to my boss with these arguments and ask him when on earth he intends to arrange things for me to telecommute.

The bulk of technical works is not-for-profit. How many scholars or experts make a fortune writing a book on the specifics of Madagascar nematodes, on extended Kalman filtering for interplanetary navigation, on time and narrative in George Bernanos’ novels? It is already a miracle that they should find a publisher for such works, and another miracle that the book should find its way to a finite number of academic libraries and specialized bookshops. The motivation for writing these books is about sharing the best nuggets of human knowledge with the rest of mankind (at least that part of mankind which can understand it). Sometimes it is also about (peer) recognition. Never about money.

Trapped in paper and copyright

When paper was the only way to get the word out, then authors of technical books and articles had to find publishers. Publishers imposed copyright rules, in the unlikely event the book would sell. Then the knowledge was trapped: trapped in paper, therefore available only from the lucky academic libraries or specialized bookshops who managed to host a copy; and trapped in time, as the probability of a reprint for specialized non-fiction works is close to zero — how many books are gathering dust or lost forever in the limbo of underground shelves and copyright restrictions is beyond imagination. For all practical purposes, these books are largely unavailable to the world, except inside academia (and when you have time to wait for an interlibrary loan). As if academia was the only place where people want to learn things.

What is not searchable does not exist

But now there is the internet. Knowledge does not need paper anymore. Therefore it does not need publishers, it does not need copyright, it does not need libraries. My understanding is that authors will soon discover this, and they will also discover the one key reason why their works should be freed from paper and copyright protection: what cannot be found by an internet search engine does not exist.

When a book’s card was missing from the library catalog, the book was as good as burnt. Now when a text is not accessible to Google, ditto. Authors whose main intention is to get their message out will therefore make absolutely sure their book can be found via a full-text search on the internet. The Amazon ‘search inside‘ feature is not good enough. First pages of scientific articles at IEEE or Springerlink are not good enough. The result of an internet search is like an anteroom with 50 doors. I will visit the doors that are wide open. The locked ones, or the ones which say ’sign in to enter’, I will not visit because I already have enough with the open ones.

Therefore, if content is to be read, it has to be fully accessible. And authors want content to be read. I imagine that the wish for recognition would not readily accept a complete absence of copyright. I believe that a creative-commons licence with attribution and share-alike clauses would be the general choice for authors, although I would choose public domain straight away myself. After all, Plato, Augustine and Newton have chosen the public domain: is there no pride in just sharing what I know with the world and the world can do whatever they want with it?

What if I do not like to read on-screen?

This does not preclude paper, under the exact same model as xerox copy in academia: when I want just a short paragraph from a great book, I print the relevant page on my printer. If I want the full book, then I order it. For books which do not have enough orders to justify a conventional printing process, maybe we will see printing services specialized in on-demand printing for public-domain works: they will be sending you the book printed for you with the paper, the font-size and font-family you chose, for a price not higher than you woud have paid for a conventional book which would have had to go through the whole editor/publisher/distributor process.

What about editors?

But there remains a big question in my suggestion: how about editorial quality? Having to go through a publisher has the immense advantage of imposing an editor and a quality target. I know that whatever I write, if I can get someone to proof-read and comment, the result after correction will be greatly improved. What could replace the conventional editing process? The readership is probably generally too narrow to trigger a wikipedia-like self-improvement of the works. Will it just be volunteer-peer-based, with authors trying to find other authors to edit them? Will it be simply survival of the fittest (but then there will be a huge waste of sub-par books who could have made the cut if there had been an editor)? In fact, I am not really worried: I believe a smart solution will appear almost by itself.

And boy will I be happy in a world where all the best knowledge is at my fingertips!

The factory has admittedly greatly increased the creature comfort of mankind. Innumerable articles now in general use were luxuries enjoyed only by the gentry and quite above the aspirations of common folk before the factory system was established. The factory has enabled the masses to live under conditions, and to consume “goods, wares and utensils,” which otherwise they could not have afforded. Rich and poor both have been enabled to purchase more goods and more kinds of goods and to consume and destroy them more freely than was previously possible.

It is, of course, difficult to determine how much of the credit for all this is really due to the factory itself and how much to the fact that scientists and inventors directed their efforts to the development of factory machinery and factory methods to the neglect of improvements in domestic production. We have always to bear in mind that the well-being we credit to the factory is based upon comparison between the low prices and high consumption made possible by the factory after it has had the advantage of all the inventions and the increases in scientific knowledge of the past century and a half, and the high prices and low consumption which prevailed under a relatively primitive system of individual production.

in This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi, 1930

And he’s been proven right in at least one respect: personal computers completely wiped out mainframe computing. I am ready to wager that there are tons of other examples where we believe a centralized model is more efficient when in fact it is not.

I learnt photography with a high-school pal, and as we had to develop the film ourselves in his cellar, we only shot with B&W film. Now that I have access to millions of pixels and millions of colors, I miss the touch of our ISO 50 Ilford film coils in the dark, wet with toxic chemicals, and generally messed up beyond restauration.

PS: do not imagine that St Paul de Vence is a quiet place where one can find peace near a soothing fountain. I had to wait for nearly fifteen minutes until I had a clean shot with no hordes of tourists in my field of view. But you can still hear them around my back.

I hate tragedies. I reject fatalism. I am fortunate that I had read a short synopsis with spoilers before the time I reached book 2 of the House of Mirth, because otherwise, I would have been extremely angry at Edith Wharton near the end of the penultimate chapter. I love stories which suddenly take an unexpected course, at least when the new course appears natural and needs no Deus Ex Machina. I hate stories which follow a single bearing from beginning to end. I do understand that the formal purity of classic tragedy as a skeleton for a narrative might be appealing to any writer, but I reject it absolutely.

Tragedy requires that the various characters follow a steady collision course to catastrophe, without ever the slightest (successful) attempt at veering away from it. Maintaining a straight course over three acts is already quite difficult, but over Miss Bart’s life of twenty-nine years plus twenty-nine chapters requires such superhuman quantities of stubbornness, pride, blindness to other people, candid indecisiveness, repeated failure to learn, disregard of inner feelings, and ill-luck that it takes the constant sadistic malevolence of an author/puppeteer to force all of those into the poor characters fallen victims to an unjust plot.

It is lucky that I was listening to the book instead of reading it, because otherwise I would have laid down the book as soon as I had understood that there was no altering the course the author had chosen for Lily Bart, whatever her feeble attempts at emancipation from the inescapable. Yet, because the language of the book (and the LibriVox reader) had such a strong hypnotizing influence, I kept listening to the bitter end.

But please do not force another tragedy under my eyes or between my ears before a long while, because it will revive the two impressions I always have with tragedy: of being forced by a nose-ring to watch the sufferings of a poor puppet slowly thrown at a brick wall by the artificial hand of the narrator; and of helplessly listening along to the unheeded collision-avoidance system calling ‘terrain, pull up!, terrain, pull up!, pull up! pull up! pull up!’.

I could have named it the ‘gnôthi seautòn’ meme, or the Socrates meme, let’s just call it the ‘why’ meme. The rule is the following: pick any number of big life choices you have made or are about to make, and recursively ask ‘why’ until it makes no more sense. I believe that we should do this for almost every choice in life, so that we make sure we are aware of our true motivations.

- I want out of the treadmill of wage-slavery and leave the insane train of industrial production and gdp growth to reinvent a homesteader’s peaceful life.

why?

- Because I think the world is going nuts and that the insane race for quantity instead of quality is already banging against the limits of our small planet.

why?

- Because I think that science and technology can now give us comfort with very little work, but the human mind cannot easily adapt to the new paradigm of plenty. But instead of all rethinking how we want our lives to be, we are prevented from enjoying this by a work ethics which equates ‘more’ with ‘better’, and we have invented the economic structures that concentrate plenty into the hands of few, so that plenty is artificially out of reach from the majority, therefore giving more credit to the work ethics of penury. Always running for more leads to exponential growth. Continued exponential growth in a finite world is not possible, so this race will stop sooner or later anyway. However, I think I should step aside and leave the race before it crashes.

why?

- The obvious answer is that I hope I can make a Noah’s ark for my family and me, but this is at best improbable. If it crashes, we’ll all be in the same boat. But if it does not, I still believe that the ‘race’ is making everybody miserable, even the ones who are not denied a share of the plenty. By stepping out, I can pause and think and invent a life of quality instead of quantity. Ever since I started to work part-time, I have seen how much more quality I could put into my life while relinquishing only a tenth and now a fifth of my income. In fact, I think the best life is the one where the amount of one’s monetary work is not set by conventions but by exactly how much monetary income I strictly need, and also how much good it does the world if I work one extra hour.

why?

- We have all been trained as mercenaries, and now hardly anyone questions the validity of one’s job, whatever the job. But as I have said, it is quite certain that the world does not need more stuff, so I have to be really careful about what good it does the world if I work more at what I do. For instance, if I work for the armament industry, the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, the aircraft industry, the automobile industry, the bioengineering industry, there are serious doubts as to whether more of my work actually makes the world a better place, given the circumstances. Now if I can find a job which is useful to the world, how much of it should be paid and how much of it should be volunteer? If it is paid, it participates in the ‘race’ of money flow, GDP growth, wealth concentration, etc. If it is volunteer work, it profits the world, period. I want to live the best life without having to walk over other people’s bodies, so I have to make the volunteer/commercial work ratio as high as I can afford.

why?

- Because I feel my life has already profited too much from walking over other people’s bodies (especially people in the so-called ‘South’), although I am convinced that the new ‘paradigm of plenty’ (even in the absence of cheap oil) makes slavery of others an optional contributor to one’s comfort. I am not sure that I can ever repay the debt I have, especially if we count in terms of inheritance of the colonial times, but I can at least relieve the pressure our economies put on the world at large and on the poor in particular. Therefore, if I am to earn the least money, I should make my own stuff, grow my own food, and try to rely more on the local economy than on the globalized economy. Hence the homestead. In addition, I wish that my experience can serve as an example to other people and show that other life patterns are possible outside the commercial race.

why?

- Because I think that as soon as one is locked as a nameless mercenary in the economic treadmill, having to beg every penny of one’s needs from the globalized economy, freedom discreetly leaves the scenery. How free am I when all my livelihood relies on the economic welfare of my boss’s shareholders? How free am I when less work means less food for my family? Imagine if all the people in the world were homesteaders who could make their own food, clothing and shelter, would they not represent the kind of ideal free citizenship which was the foundation of the US of A? In addition, if people return to the land, they’ll tie new bonds with the Earth, and instead of being abusers of Nature, they’d all be stewards of the Earth. I owe that much to my son.

why?

- Because messing up the Earth unknowingly is one thing, but carrying on when we know we are is another thing altogether. How is my son to understand if I did not try my best to make his world livable. And by being around nurturing the land he lives on, I believe I give his life the best quality.

why ?

- Because I am certain that he cares more for a mouthful of homegrown strawberries, a walk in the forest, a game of ball in the garden, or wrestling on the lawn than he cares for a large bedroom, a brand-new TV set and a comprehensive collection of Disney DVDs. When kids can count on their parents being around (though not always on their back), they develop the kind of security that makes balanced grown-ups. When people are not afraid they might be abandoned, or loved less, they do not see the world as a battlefield against their neighbours, but as an adventureland with their friends.

why?

- Because I am certain that human aspirations, once the means of survival are provided for, are often the unconscious ripples of unsoothed childhood wants. Nobody is ever rich enough to compensate for an archaic fear of poverty; nobody is ever powerful enough to exorcise a history of humiliation; nobody is ever famous enough to erase a childhood of apparent lovelessness. When one seeks power, wealth, or fame, the goal is always just over the horizon. When one seeks love, happiness, health, one can take them by the hand from birth to death, and walk the walk of the good life. I picture the good life as a hike in the wild, with each step requiring a slight effort but rewarded with new sights, sounds and smells, each step bringing me a little further along whatever path I choose. A walk which is so beautiful in itself that I would have no regrets if I had to stop anywhere.

why?

- Because we have but one life, and we never know when it will end. I am not going to sacrifice now for tomorrow because there could be no tomorrow. But I will not sacrifice tomorrow for now either, because there might be a hell of a lot tomorrows ahead.

why ?

- Because I might live long for one thing, and also because although I fully embrace a purely materialistic viewpoint, I cannot completely discard the possibility that something in people is immortal, whatever it is

why?

- Because I find believing gives a special light to the world.

why?

- Because it sort of answers the final why.

why?

- Why not?

The list of books I could not finish is growing ever higher. I had started reading the Black Dahlia by James Ellroy some time ago and was put off by the slang and the mob lingo, failing to understand most of what was happening, what with the ellipses and the black humor. I decided I’d give Ellroy another go, with American Tabloid. At first, it went OK, as I found out that the difficulty with language was in fact not really greater than that I would have with the same class of jargon in French: like the lush marine lexicon in sea novels, the exuberant slang expressions in roman noir are the stuff the atmosphere is made of and are supposed to be guessed rather than understood.

But then I began to feel something building up in my throat, slowly as I turned the pages. The cynicism of two of the main characters (Pete Bondurant, archvillain, and Kemper Boyd, anti-hero) was clearly not counterbalanced by the naked and tortured honesty of Ward Littell, and as the body count kept growing steadily, the uneasiness turned into disgust.

I once thought I could detach myself from movie violence. In fact, I think I can only detach from fake movie violence, of the James Bond or possibly the Kill Bill kind. But not the realistic violence. At least not after two events which have altered the way representations of violence are processed in my head.

One Sunday morning, as I was idly cycling the remote control through all the cable channels to find something worth wasting my time on (thank God I do not have a TV anymore!), I came across a very short footage by a war reporter in Africa, in which a handful of paramilitary militia men with at least one kid among them were molesting and stripping another man, then let him run, and without a warning shot him in the back. Obviously I had seen tons of actors shot in the back, but this guy had not been acting. Maybe he was a torturer, maybe he was a landlord, maybe he was a father of two, I don’t care. All I know is that I had nightmares for some time afterwards, and that each time I watched movie violence that was intended to be realistic, these images kept surfacing in my mind.

The second event was shortly after I had become a father, when my mother told me how humans were the animal species which took the most love to make, raise, and grow. She told me how she felt that each time someone died in a war, it was like erasing all the hours of love that had gone into the making of this being, and what a waste it was. This was so powerful I could not forget it in a lifetime.

Now, whenever a scenario kills off insignificant John Does, I find myself unconsciously adding up the breastfeeding, the feverish wakes, the hikes in the woods, the bedtime stories, the lullabies, and dumping all of that down a bottomless mental pit in a splash of gory bits. Mr Ellroy was dumping love by the truckload. It was too much for me. Maybe I cannot read noir anymore. I laid down my book and opted for some P.G. Wodehouse instead.

Next: Something New, and Love Among the Chickens

Or is it catoraphobia?

Through the very excellent soil and health library website, I have discovered a fascinating author, tackling the contradictions of our industrial model 80 years ago, and forty years before Ivan Illich.

This author is Ralph Borsodi, and his social and economic insight is very sharp ; extremely sharp when you think that he had come to his conclusions in the 1920s.

I will be telling more about the author as I carry on reading his works, and there will be several quotes finding their way into my blog, for there are views I could not express better.

[…] the idea that mankind’s comfort is dependent upon an unending increase in production is a fallacy.

It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life. Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind’s most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve–the two things which he should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort. When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them.

in This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi, 1930