Thoughts and Speculations

Making Terra Preta Soil: Ramona’s Recipe for Home-Made Dirt

Michael Byron — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:39:15 GMT

Making Terra Preta Soil: Ramona’s Recipe for Home-Made Dirt

by Ramona Byron

I once heard a joke that went like this:

An arrogant agnostic once challenged God that he could do anything that God could do. God said “very well” and accepted the challenge. God rolled up some dirt and fashioned a human out of it, who then became alive and ran away rejoicing and praising God’s name. The agnostic sniffed, and reached down for a handful of dirt so he could make his own “improved” version of a human, who would of course immediately begin praising the agnostic’s name even louder. But God held up his hand to stop him before he could even get started.

“Hold on there, young man,” said God sternly. “You go make your own dirt.”

So I felt a little like an arrogant God-wannabe when I set out to make my own soil. Terra preta soil, to be precise. Unlike God, though, I had more than Chaos to work with initially. I had all of the ingredients made for me ahead of time, thanks to billions of years of star evolution to create the atoms of which the Earth, the soil, and we ourselves are all made; and millions of years of earth evolution to create the microorganisms that dwell in that soil and make it fertile for the plants that feed us.

RAMONA’S RECIPE FOR HOME-MADE DIRT (TERRA PRETA SOIL):

A partner with a lot of stamina (helps but is not absolutely necessary)
Two sledge hammers
A sharp, short hoe
An earth-tamping tool
A large umbrella with stand, for shade to work in
Safety glasses
Sun hats
Some very understanding, forgiving, or just hard-of-hearing neighbors
Several bags of charcoal – as many as you have the stamina or attention span for; it helps a lot to open the bags and leave them out under the sprinklers for a few days or weeks to get it good and wet, to make it easier to break up. I do not recommend mesquite, and it is devilishly hard and difficult to break. Use Cowboy brand or some other brand that does not have chemicals added.
A large shallow bin for breaking the charcoal into
Some concrete pavers to put under the shallow bin, to provide a firm surface for breaking the charcoal
Some buckets, or plant pots to pour the broken charcoal into (or you can just dump it from the shallow bin directly onto the ground, for that matter)
Some nitrogen (there is no science to tell you how much to use – just follow your instincts; my advice is to apply somewhat less nitrogen than charcoal)
Some soil life (beneficial fungi, bacteria, nematodes, and earthworms)
Compost
Perlite
Water
Some organic fertilizer, if you want to jump-start things
One citrus-flavored soft drink (for the terra preta and maybe one for you too)
One cheap stale beer (for the terra preta)
Some good cold fresh beer (for you)
A strong back, or else a chiropractor who’s on call
A whole lot of glucosamine and analgesics for your back, whether or not you have a chiropractor
A lot of shampoo, soap, a good scrubber, and hot, hot water because you’re going to **seriously** need a shower when this is all done

Now you have probably discerned from this list, that making terra preta soil is not for the feeble of body or faint of heart. I will get into the details of what to do with all of the above later; but I want to digress a bit first.

First of all, my own high-stamina partner-ingredient for this recipe is Michael P. Byron, author of “Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization” and “The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad.” You can find links for these wonderful books on Mike’s webpage at: http://www.michaelpbyron.com/.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

I most highly recommend Mike’s books, and it’s not just because I’m Mike’s wife. It’s because I care whether you yourself survive the coming crises of peak oil and the famine that is almost certain to result from it.

Think about it – in the United States, over 90% of our food production and distribution is directly dependent upon petroleum; so when the oil goes, our agri-business supplied food also goes. Ignorance of this subject is not bliss – it is dangerously irresponsible and suicidally stupid. If you read Mike’s books, you will be informed of what is going to happen, why, and what you can do to take care of yourself and your loved ones. Knowledge is power.

THE GOOD EARTH

Mike talks about terra preta soil in his second book, in the section titled “The Good Earth.” Here’s a short quote:

Recently, in the deep Amazon basin region of north-central Brazil, archaeologists from the Central Amazon Project discovered evidence of an ancient indigenous soil technology that may hold enormous potential for post-petroleum civilization’s fate. The area was first discovered by Europeans in 1542 when Francisco de Orellana entered it in search of the mythical golden city of El Dorado. He was not successful in his quest for gold; however, five centuries later, it appears that he may have unknowingly stumbled upon something even more valuable than gold: rich, self-fertilizing, and self maintaining soil.

Terra preta soil is formed by incorporating biochar—locally produced charcoal—into ordinary soil. This activates the soil and enables it to permanently hold far greater quantities of minerals and nutrients than would otherwise be possible. This then sets into motion a complex and still not fully understood chain of events that include microorganism growths throughout the soil, which results in the soil becoming terra preta soil within several years.

One Amazonian farmer has cultivated crops on terra preta soils for 40 years without ever adding any fertilizer. “That’s incredible,” an environmental researchers said. “We don’t get that in Iowa.”

So. Well, then. Take that and stuff it, Miracle-Gro!

FOOD NOT LAWNS

Mike and I recently bought a home in Oceanside, California. We looked for a place with enough land to grow our own fruits and vegetables, adequate space for Mike’s enormous tortoises, and still enough space left over for us to relax and unwind. We love this place.

I had attended a fascinating event in the summer of 2007 that was sponsored by San Diego Food Not Lawns. I attended one workshop where the presenter showed pictures of his front yard, which was landscaped with food plants. The presenter made the point that you don’t have to do everything at once – that you can take out the grass in small patches and just landscape in small, manageable sections. You can even leave paths of grass between the sections. You can use the tall plants like fruit trees to support other plants like pole beans, with the lettuces underneath because they like a bit of shade, so that the plants work together. His pictures were beautiful!

So Mike and I committed ourselves to using only organic farming methods for our fruits and vegetables, and even for the grass. That’s because the more that we have learned about the dangerousness of the chemicals that are slathered on people’s food and yards, the less we want anything to do with it. This decision required us to do some extremely hard manual labor as we dug out waist-high weeds, one by one, then tilled and planted grass and vegetables. But we were determined to walk the talk.

And the wisdom of our decision was made truly, wonderfully and visually worthwhile for us when one day we watched a tiny bird using our wet grass as a bird bath, and then drinking the water from the grass blades. That was when we were really glad that we had not used chemicals to kill the weeds, because we knew that our tiny guest was safe playing in our yard and drinking the water off of our grass. And by the way, I like to wiggle my own toes in the wet grass sometimes, and it is very good to know that it is chemical-free.

And speaking of birds, we have a bird feeder right by the patio, and the finches come right up even when we’re sitting out there. There are lots of mockingbirds back there, too. I’ve been trying to teach them the first few notes of the Marseillaise, but they don’t seem very impressed with my whistling. Or maybe they just don’t like the French. No accounting for taste, oui?

In the front yard, we have so far planted a stand of banana trees, an apple tree, a mandarin orange, two papayas, and two blueberry bushes. There will be a small orchard there eventually. In the turtle and people parts of the backyard, we’ve planted a macadamia nut tree, three zinfandel grapevines, a coffee tree, an allspice tree, three cherry trees (one Catalina cherry and two Surinam cherries), a fig tree, and a lemon tree – so far. There will be more stuff coming in soon, no doubt. I’m nowhere near done with this yet.

A WEED BY ANY OTHER NAME IS A PLANT

We actually left the weeds on the turtles’ side of the yard, but they’ve eaten almost all of them by now. We tilled the bare areas and planted clover and grass, carefully steering the roto-tiller around to avoid the weeds in order to leave them growing there for the turtles to feed on. And would you believe, we also planted MORE weeds in there! Actually, dandelion greens are about three times more expensive than other types of greens at the vegetable sections of the grocery stores, and they’re way more nutritious – both for turtles and for people. So we transplanted dandelions into the turtle yard, and when one goes to flower, we thump the seeds back into it again!

I’ve always said that the only difference between a weed and a plant is whether you want it where it is. If you want it, then it isn’t a weed, no matter what it is or what the neighbors think of it (by the way, we made sure to buy in an area with no covenants like that).

TERRA PRETA “FIRST DAY OF CREATION”

We set out early one Sunday morning to make terra preta soil in the vegetable garden side of the back yard. We were out rather early because it was going to get hot later in the day, and we wanted to do the greatest part of the work while it was relatively cool.

Banging on charcoal early in the morning on Sunday is the reason that my recipe for terra preta calls for either very understanding or else hard-of-hearing neighbors. Think drums, but without the rhythm or resonance that give drums their redeeming social value. Fortunately for us, no one called the noise police. I can tell you, we would never have gotten away with that in Germany, where I lived for two years (very **quiet** years – well, mostly), and where folks deeply resent it when people raise an unholy ruckus on Sundays.

So there we were, crushing about eight bags of charcoal by hammering the pieces with heavy mallets, the earth-tamping tool, and the short hoe. This was HARD WORK, to say the least!

We tilled the ground with a roto-tiller, spread the charcoal on the ground, added nitrogen, some fertilizer that contained beneficial fungi, some compost, some Perlite, and our secret ingredient -- some turtle poop. Mixed that all into the ground with the garden tiller, and planted three eggplant seeds, and a bunch of rows of mustard and lettuce, and some onions. The eggplants and onions are for us, but the mustard and lettuce are mostly for the turtles – for now at least. When we get really serious about using that garden for feeding ourselves, then the turtles will get busted back to eating weeds and clover from just their own side of the yard.

This was about 300 square feet of terra preta garden. Of course, we will be doing this again and again, to gradually turn the entire vegetable garden into terra preta.

You can use as much charcoal as you wish because the science doesn’t say that there is any upper limit to how much to use; but eight bags for about 300 square feet of area should be the minimum, in my opinion. So you can do the math for the amount of charcoal that you will need to crush for the area you’re trying to cover, and the amount of richness that you want to give to it.

We looked like coal miners by the time all that charcoal-pounding and ground-tilling was all over. By the time I got done with my long shower, I was so tired that I could barely stand up. Mike made me go sit down and have a cold beer, and I got better after a couple of hours – or was it, a couple of beers? Probably both, and using them to wash down several glucosamines, of course. Surprisingly, I was able to get out of bed the following day, which I attribute to the glucosamine. SO DON’T FORGET THE GLUCOSAMINE! 'Nuff said.

TERRA PRETA "SECOND DAY OF CREATION"

Later, after several days of rest (after all, God himself took several of his kind of days to finish making his own dirt), I poured a mix of water, beer and citrus-flavored soft drink over the area. You pour one beer and one citrus-flavored drink into five gallons of water, and then sprinkle it over the ground. It is important that both of these be the regular and not the low-calorie or sugarless kind of beer and soft drink. Low-cal beer is made of rice and lacks the amount of yeast that regular beer has. The yeast in the beer feeds on the sugar in the soft drink, which then gives a jump-start to the beneficial bacteria in the ground.

You can use cheap beer for this particular job – plants and bacteria don’t have much of a palate, after all.

TERRA PRETA "THIRD DAY OF CREATION"

About a week later, I added the beneficial nematodes. I didn’t add them on the same day as the beer because I suspect that nematodes can’t handle their alcohol and I didn’t want them to get soused in there. So while you’re waiting for the beer to sink in (to the ground, I mean), you can store your nematodes in the refrigerator for a few days or even a few weeks. Appetizing – NOT.

BE PATIENT

Be aware that the charcoal has to absorb the nitrogen and nutrients before it can give any back to the plants. For this reason, it could be awhile before the terra preta becomes truly fertile for plants, so you have to be patient with it. That was the reason that I listed organic fertilizer as a jump-starter for the terra preta garden, to both feed the plants in the interim and to help load up the charcoal with nutrients.

And that’s how we made our own terra preta soil. There is not a lot of hard science on this, so there is plenty of room for improvisation in developing your own recipe.

So good luck and happy gardening!

Citizens for Democracy presentation in Temecula on August 20th, 2008. Please feel free to post comments here.

Michael Byron — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:45:46 GMT

Post comments about the Aug. 20th presentation or generally about the problems we face and what to do here. I'll have to clear them but be assured I'll post whatever you have to say.

2008: Year of Emergence

Michael Byron — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:53:53 GMT

We are presently facing the immanent onset of a series of inter-related crises of such magnitude as to potentially bring about the rapid collapse of our planetary civilization. These include accelerating global climate change, energy resource depletion (“peak oil”), growing water shortages, food production shortfalls and more. Doing nothing is not an option. Do nothing and worldwide chaos and collapse ensue. I have made the case in my Infinity’s Rainbow book series that such crisis-driven collapse is imminent.

Because the US is currently central to the global political economy, its choices as to how to address these crises will likely determine how effectively the world deals with them. Therefore, the 2008 US Presidential election represents a choice between historical trajectories for humanity and the planet.

The sum of our global civilization’s web of interactions represents a fitness landscape for humanity. Think of it as a landscape with flat plains, rugged mountains, hills, valleys and so on. Think of the valleys as attractors towards which a system is drawn once it rolls over an edge. Depending upon the steepness of the decline, it can be difficult or impossible to climb out of such a depression once one has fallen into it.

The combination of energy, climate, and food crises represents such a peril for our civilization. And we created it ourselves.

We based the energy foundations of civilization on hydrocarbons, and assumed that these would be available indefinitely in limitless supply. We used our environment, our biosphere, as both a limitless source of raw materials and an infinite sink for our waste products (pollution), which has made the problems of global climate change inevitable once hydrocarbon powered industrial civilization became planetary.

Growing human populations, fed by industrial agriculture dependent upon petroleum and upon mining fossil water in underground aquifers, inevitably meant food and water shortages are going to happen. Industrial agriculture requires about 10 calories of hydrocarbons for each calorie of food produced, meaning that famine is inevitable after oil production has peaked.

Industrial agriculture inevitably depletes fertile topsoil far faster than it can replenish itself. Climate change fundamentally alters rainfall patterns, which intensifies the stress on food production and the provisioning of water. Conversion of food to biofuels to deal with oil scarcity just makes the whole thing worse.

Given increasing population growth (to seven billion in the next few years), increasing urbanization (very recently, for the first time ever, the majority of humanity became urban/suburban dwellers), and increasing industrialization (China and India most especially), oil consumption is increasing, while water depletion, soil depletion, and of course the resulting CO2 increase in the planetary atmosphere drives global climate into a very different configuration than the one in which human civilization developed.

Further, the people do not control their governments any longer. Global multi-national corporations, whose sole goal is profit maximization in the least possible time, effectively rule everywhere in one or another symbiotic arrangement with government. These entities could not exist without the existing political economy which is the cause of all of the other crises I’ve just described.

I could go on and on and on. However, this is sufficient to sketch out the crises, their magnitude, and their inter-dependent nature.

The onset of these crises represents a precipitous drop, a cliff plunging down into a gaping chasm on our fitness landscape. Simply stated, our existing global political economy is unsustainable. It CANNOT endure.
With such a bleak analysis, it may seem that the choice of Obama or McCain is irrelevant. This is reinforced by the stark reality that neither has espoused a desire for fundamental systemic change—Obama’s vague rhetoric about change notwithstanding. Both are beholden to portions of the existing ruling corporatocracy and so to the maintenance of the overall status quo—which is doomed.

All of this said why would I then propose that the choice of historical trajectories offered by Obama versus McCain is significant?!

My answer to this is based upon close inspection of our looming chasm in the fitness landscape. It initially slopes downwards gradually, perhaps with the appearance of small shortages of oil supply with respect to demand; but lowered demand can accommodate these shortages, and so few will see any need to respond with drastic action. But increasing climatic instability—droughts in some areas, floods in others—will begin to decrease agricultural yields. And so on, with one crisis after another. These issues will stress the existing political economy but do not lead to its collapse—yet. And this is the area of the fitness landscape we have recently entered.

Our civilizational trajectory possesses immense inertia, or resistance to change in its present trajectory. Our civilization is based on hydrocarbon energy, corporate production of wealth, etc., and we can’t just wave a magic wand and fundamentally change these realities overnight. The planet’s billion or so internal combustion engine vehicles can’t be changed into pollution free machines overnight even if such technology were available—which it isn’t. So we must approach our crises-attractor. It’s simply too late to fundamentally alter our trajectory away from it.

That said, we need to keep several things in mind:

1) We are at the initial down slope of a rapidly declining chasm or valley. From such a position, even though we can’t go back, many divergent trajectories are still possible. Think of arrows radiating out from a point across say, 120 degrees. All of these trajectories represent moving into the basin of attraction for the crisis attractor, however, they lead to totally different outcomes. If trajectories between 1 and 120 degrees are allowed at this point, then setting off in the direction represented by 2 degrees leads very quickly to a totally different historical trajectory than the one represented by 115 degrees. Very quickly, given the increasing down slope, such choices become locked in—you can’t go back and re-choose. The historical trajectory or world line of the civilization that chose the 2 degree trajectory becomes ever more different from that of the one that chose the 115 degree trajectory. This means that right now is the last opportunity we shall have to—within the constraints imposed upon us by the crises—to choose a more desirable future over less desirable ones.

2) A fitness landscape is not preexisting and unchanging. Rather, as it represents the sum total of all human choices and interactions, as they interact with the natural world within which civilization is nested, it is ever changing and malleable. If we change say, how we produce food and energy, if we change the degree of cooperation towards a common goal which exists across the whole world, then we significantly alter the lay of the land, the terrain of our civilization’s fitness landscape. Not only can we choose a more desirable trajectory, but we can also consciously alter the very contours of the landscape over which we travel. Some limits apply—resource constraints, the capacity of the biosphere to absorb our externalities are the most critical ones.

3) Human civilization represents a system. As such it is characterized by three fundamental properties:

a) Interconnectedness

b) Emergence

c) Boundedness

All systems consist of some number of elements. These elements interact together with one another such that collective, group properties emerge. These collective properties are properties of the whole system; they cannot be reduced to the properties of the elements comprising the system. For a very simple example, water possesses the property of…call it wetness. Wetness is a collective property of an H2O molecule. It cannot be reduced to the properties of hydrogen or oxygen atoms. Thus it “emerges” from the interaction of its constituent parts—two hydrogen atoms along with an oxygen atom. All systems possess a boundary between the system and its surrounding environment. “Inside” this boundary is the system. “Outside” of it is the environment.

Emergence is a very real, scientific miracle of nature. It is also, potentially a powerful force which we can harness to change the world as I shall describe soon.

The Earth’s biosphere, human civilization, and our global economy, are each examples of complex systems. As is typical of complex systems, each of the three systems I’ve named just above is nested within the preceding one. Simple systems can be, in at least some cases, modeled using equations. Complex systems cannot be. Computer simulation is required to research this class of system. Complex systems are also referred to as complex adaptive systems.

The emergent properties of a civilization are very different depending upon how that civilization is put together. The ability of a globally integrated, environmentally rational civilization would be both different from and greater than those of our present one. We can increase our ability to respond to crisis by fundamentally reconfiguring our political economy in a very brief period of time.

Now, let’s put 1-3 above together:

We still have a range of choices about our future available (1).
We have some ability to consciously alter our fitness landscape and so shape our future (2).
Because of emergence, we potentially can become much more capable in almost no time, by fundamental systemic reconfiguration (3).

Absent life and death universal crisis affecting all humanity fundamental change with respect to items 2 and 3 above are improbable, though item 1 is still in play even absent crisis.

Now consider the power configurations forming around McCain and Obama:

Obama is studiously vague about policy. However he has made the need for change into a mantra. His speeches invariably involve the need for “coming together”—both within the US and across the planet—why: To deal with some never quite articulated existential threat that affects us all and required all of us to deal with effectively. Obama’s speech in Berlin is a perfect example of this.

I believe that Obama himself has no clear idea of what he is actually talking about. It just feels right to say and is somehow effective politically. But how to explain the huge crowds who are drawn, enthralled to hear him speak? Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans know that we are fundamentally off course as a society and as a planet. They don’t quite know how or why or what to do, but they know something’s wrong. As the crowd of hundreds of thousands of Germans in Berlin clearly showed, so too do people around the world. What they all sense is the rapid approach of the crisis-attractor.

Obama channels this angst. He appears to tap into our collective unconscious for his inspiration. Put another way, since we are all part of a single world system, the particular pattern of that system at a given moment has something like resonances built into its structure. Touch those and you touch everyone. This ability to go deep is the source of Obama’s power.

To get elected, he makes the usual alliances, kisses the usual power players’ asses, and so on. Yet, because these gatekeepers are not the source of Obama’s power, their control over him is limited. If fundamental crises of existence were to manifest during an Obama’s presidency he would have the potential for acting decisively while brushing aside all of the gatekeepers. He represents the point of emergence for the deep wants, needs and fears of people everywhere.

It’s like a volcano. Subterranean magma under pressure has to come up somewhere. Because it comes up at on particular point does not mean that these is something intrinsically special about that point. Pressure must be released somewhere. This is true for magma and also for pent up pressure for the emergence of a new systemic configuration. Because now is the very last moment at which such an option is possible, we can expect an eruption to occur.

As to McCain, he embodies the inertia of our world system. If Obama is change, McCain is “more of the same.” For McCain, only fear can serve to make people quiescent and obedient to the continued rule of our corporatocracy. Unsurprisingly, people and groups such as Lieberman, Hagee, Christian Dominionists of all stripes, Neocons, oil companies, are all tightly clustered around McCain. War and rumors of war must be their agenda simply because nothing else can keep them in power. Sensing impending crisis, they will lash out with force to attempt to preserve their self-serving status quo.

Like Obama, McCain probably does not know what his role is. He just wants to be President and he has sold his soul to the gatekeepers for the opportunity. However, the configuration of systemic forces arranged to preserve the status quo is intensifying in response to the growing desire of humanity for deep change.

Ultimately both McCain and Obama represent points of emergence—metaphorically like the volcanoes I mentioned above—for opposed deep systemic trends. It is not really about McCain or Obama as persons at all.
If McCain wins the election, we will have selected a trajectory which leads to the most rapid descent into the basin of the crisis-attractor possible, for the United States and for Western civilization. War, famine, and the flaming wreck of human civilization, in conjunction with the destruction of much of the biosphere, are the very probable outcome of making this trajectory choice.

With Obama we have a chance at a much better future. We can build on this choice by choosing an incrementally better trajectory by opting for Gore’s climate change proposals in conjunction with rapid research and development of renewable energy sources. Tax credits to homeowners to install solar and wind power and heating could have nearly instant results. Geosynchronous orbiting microwave reflectors (see both of my Infinity’s Rainbow books for details) could easily facilitate the creation of a global power grid based upon the sharing of renewable energy resources. This eliminates the need for inefficient energy storage by allowing for energy sharing, and greatly facilitates and planetary cooperation in the face of impending existential threat.

This political economy is irrevocably doomed. And in 2012 it will be too late to meaningfully alter our systemic trajectory. Once the crises hit—and they will—in the next few years, Obama will be in position to become a unifying leader for the planet leading to deep systemic reconfiguration, and the emergence of new capabilities to respond to the crises. Emergence and its increase in adaptiveness is the miracle which offers hope for a future.

This is why I believe that it is critically important to elect Obama despite his clear shortcomings.

Does the Outcome of the 2008 US Presidential Race Really Matter?

Michael Byron — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:34:56 GMT

Does the Outcome of the 2008 US Presidential Race Really Matter?

By Mike Byron

Will contributing time and money to the Obama campaign, or just voting for Obama make any meaningful difference as to how the future unfolds? Conversely, does time and energy spent working for an Obama victory simply detract from applying these assets towards working for real societal transformation? I believe that evaluating these questions from a systems theory perspective provides insight on their resolution.
Global society constitutes a complex adaptive system. All systems possess three fundamental attributes:

1) Interconnectedness. A set of units or elements are interconnected so that changes in any element or elements produce changes in all. A change in any part of such a system causes rippling changes throughout every part of a system.

2) Emergence. The system as a whole possesses collective properties which are qualitatively different from, and not reducible to, the properties of its constituent elements. The wetness of a water molecule is not reducible to the properties of its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Similarly, consciousness is not reducible to the properties of individual neurons.

3) Boundedness. All systems possess a definite boundary between system and not system. This boundary may be closed or open. For complex systems, it is open.

Complex systems have unpredictable outputs. They process information and transform themselves in accordance with the results of their information processing. This is particularly true for complex systems composed of conscious elements such as human beings.

Because global human society is a complex adaptive system, its configuration is determined by the results of its information processing. All such systems may be said to evolve along a fitness landscape. As such they possess trajectories through this landscape or, as I usually call it, through learning space.

Above, I’ve included examples for a fitness landscape and its associated trajectory for human civilization from a paper I presented in 1997 at a conference on sociocybernetics at the University of Amsterdam. Once a complex system such as human civilization is reduced to a computer simulation, its fitness landscape and trajectory become readily apparent. The full text of the paper is available at: http://www.michaelpbyron.com/SystemicaArt.htm for anyone interested in following this topic up in more depth. [Note: If these images do not appear above, they can be found at: http://www.michaelpbyron.com/image022.gif and at: http://www.michaelpbyron.com/image023.gif .]

Because people learn and have goals, society as a whole has goals and attempts to “learn” its way towards the attainment of these goals. Security, comfort of life, and health are fundamental goals for all humans. Attempts at ordering society through law, fairly and impartially enforced by a government, which is responsive to the citizenry, represent one such goal. Another goal has been the provisioning of public goods. Basically, we have sought both to develop ever greater organizational “software” for governance, in conjunction with ever more powerful “hardware” for the provision of material goods.

In a system everything that happens causes rippling changes throughout the system. Consider our present day world: We have had limited success with developing the “software” needed to create what we would intuitively recognize as a just and humane society. We have recently been somewhat more successful at the provisioning of material goods, thanks primarily to cheap hydrocarbon energy. This material success has led us to the point where nearly seven billion humans are artificially sustained by the rapid release of chemical energy stored in oil and other hydrocarbons. However, availability of these resources must begin to decline ever more precipitously, and beginning soon.

Further, this decline of availability of cheap fuel is triggering ever more rapid use of the “dirtiest” of these energy sources because it exists in the greatest abundance: coal. This is triggering increasingly rapid climate change. Record setting droughts in some areas, record floods in others. As I write, a hundred blocks of Cedar City Iowa are under water due to historically unprecedented flooding.

The net effect of these climatic changes is to decrease agricultural production; and this is occurring at a time when world food reserves are already at an all time low for modern times. However, expensive oil, due to nearly flat production in the context of rising global demand, leads to increasing conversion of food crops to ethanol production, further lowering food reserves.

Global industrialized agriculture is almost completely dependent upon petroleum. Fertilizers are derived from natural gas. Pesticides are derived from petroleum. The entire agricultural production, processing and distribution system depends upon petroleum. The industrialization of agriculture across the planet had led to the majority of humanity becoming, for the first time, city dwellers. More than ever before in history, people are dependent upon the system of industrialized agriculture for their food.

As far as our governmental “software” is concerned, political power is fragmented into numerous nation states of varying power and affluence. Wealth and opportunity are inequitably distributed in all of them. Two thirds of the planet’s remaining petroleum reserves, along with forty percent of its natural gas, are located in the Persian Gulf. The United States is the only nation on the planet with the capability to project large amounts of military power globally. It is bogged down in the Persian Gulf nation of Iraq, in the sixth year of a war to control these resources.
As the energy situation becomes ever more desperate, what will the US and other major powers do, knowing that most of the remaining oil and gas are located in this small portion of the planet?

Consider that this region is roughly contiguous with the “Holy Land.” Also consider that the Middle East is the confluence of geostrategic interests with religious beliefs of the monotheistic religions, particularly the apocalyptic-oriented fundamentalist version of Christianity that is so prominent in the USA at present. Consider the near stranglehold of multinational corporations over the government, information dissemination system (the mass media), and economy, of the USA, the West, indeed, most of the planet.

Now ask yourself: Can it make any meaningful difference who becomes president of the USA at this point?
From a systems theory perspective we have acquired a trajectory through learning space, or alternately, have moved to a position on our fitness landscape from which we are now inevitably locked into movement towards what is called a “strange attractor.” The effect is like what happens when a marble rolls over the lip of a depression—it is inevitably forced to roll down hill into the depression. We are at such a point now.

I want to stress that we are, so to speak, already rolling “downhill” to whatever fate awaits us. Moving “uphill” away from the peak oil-climate change-corporatized government attractor is no longer possible. We are locked in for massive climate change now. Because we failed to transition away from hydrocarbon energy when there was sufficient time to do so—back in the 1970’s—it is now too late. Peak oil is upon us. Anyway governments—ours in the USA in particular—are largely subject to the will of multinational corporations. The interests of these soulless corporate entities—which possess the legal right of “persons”—center on short term profits. Planning for the long term is not good for short-term profit making.

So the bottom line is, we’re heading towards our crisis attractor no matter what we do now, and neither Obama nor McCain can change that reality.

Still, we do have some control over our trajectory as we move towards this self-inflicted crisis-attractor. We could “crash” head on into it—an outcome corresponding to the total collapse of civilization worldwide and the deaths of billions. Or we could rapidly reconfigure ourselves so that our trajectory moves past the attractor with its “momentum” carrying it through and out of the basin of attraction towards, a new zone of stability—corresponding to level ground in our fitness landscape. This “level ground” represents a new stability corresponding to a reconfigured human system which is sustainable with respect to energy and environment.
So does the choice of Obama versus McCain represent any meaningful difference with respect to our finessing our systemic trajectory towards the level ground and away from the smash-up outcome?

Possibly it does. Consider that Obama has made it clear that he will not authorize the national government to prosecute medical marijuana users in states which have passed medical marijuana statutes. [See: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/05/12/18498714.php] This is indicative of a greater emphasis on federalism, on decentralization of power away from the national government on the part of an Obama administration. As the crises come upon us this decentralization is exactly what is needed.

Similarly, Obama would not be likely to nominate a fifth vote on the Supreme Court for a unitary presidency. On the other hand the only probable vacancies all come from the Court’s elderly “liberal” wing” so the status quo would be unchanged—the continues existence of Constitutional government in the USA hangs on the whims of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

A McCain administration would represent continued corporatist consolidation over our political system. It would herald the consolidation of the imperial presidency, ratified by a solid five, or even six, vote majority on the US Supreme Court. This because elderly “liberal” justices would be replaced by Federalist Society vetted hard right Scalia clones. Such an administration would inaugurate corporatist designed programs to address energy and climate change. These would worse than doing nothing, as these programs would waste resources while preventing effective local and regional efforts from even occurring. The overall effect of a McCain presidency would be to accelerate the crash while “steering” us at the crisis attractor dead-on. This as I’ve noted, could end global civilization and kill most of humanity.

Still, the net difference between the possible effects on our overall trajectory caused by the election of one or the other candidate at this late date would likely be quite small. Also McCain’s agenda would likely lead more rapidly to the collapse of national government, thereby perhaps freeing up local areas and regions to act in a somewhat timely manner.

We also have to consider the possibility that rhetoric aside, Obama might not fundamentally alter existing policies. This is because, here in the USA at least, we the people do not rule. Rather we are ruled by multi-national corporations. In this scenario, supporting Obama would definitively represent a waste of time and energy.
So what to do?

All in all, it is an individual decision each of us needs to make. Is a possible slight gain in political decentralization and the corresponding possibility of adjusting our systemic trajectory very slightly worth the cost of investing time and effort into an Obama campaign, or is this time and energy better spent organizing at the state, local, and interpersonal level? Would the latter strategy facilitate a more effective trajectory adjustment? It is hard to say.
As for me, I think that my time and energy as far as campaign ’08 is concerned, will go into local campaigns, particularly City Council campaigns, in conjunction with writing, permacultural experimentation, and working towards the consolidation of a movement for change that is not beholden to any particular political party, or to the corporatocracy.

That said, I will vote for Obama.

Ruminations on Ruin and Renewal

Michael Byron — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:17:18 GMT

History is the story of past civilizations that flourished by successfully organizing to meet the challenges of their time. History is also the story of the complete collapse of maladaptive societies.

But our powerful and world-spanning civilization would surely be immune from these laws and lessons of history—right?

In fact, today is a time of profound existential crisis for our global civilization. Indeed, so pervasive is this crisis that it may be fairly considered to be a crisis of the very idea and viability of civilization itself.

All civilizations, all complex societies and systems, and indeed all ecologies, depend directly upon their available energy resources. Sunlight, soil and climate determine the possible vegetation and animal ecosystems for geographic regions and, at the highest level, for our entire planet. Nothing can exist for long outside of its energy budget. Plants can support just so many herbivores, which in turn can support a limited number of carnivores. Human settlements—villages, towns, cities, nations—also exist within natural ecosystems and are dependent upon them for survival.

Even so, Earth’s natural energy budget from our sun sets an absolute upper limit of perhaps five hundred million to two billion people that can be indefinitely supported. Within this limit, human organizational efficiency in conjunction with improved technology has allowed for increases in either material quality of life or population.
Technology opened up previously unexploited lands and/or allowed for less technologically adept human populations to be displaced and their lands appropriated. This is how Europeans in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries were able to displace and replace the population of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Pacific and Caribbean islands, and to dominate and exploit the more populous though less technologically adept lands of the world. Expansion in population and wealth for European descendents was achieved at the expense of indigenous peoples and the reallocation of biological resources within their former territories to agriculture. Still, the ultimate natural limit of the planet’s energy budget, as supplemented by technology, had not yet been exceeded.

Beginning in the eighteenth century however, we learned to tap concentrated sources of energy stored within the Earth—coal, oil and natural gas. This had the effect of artificially expanding humanity’s energy budget many times over beyond its naturally-supplied energy budget. But over the next two centuries, the human population has increased rapidly towards the limits of its artificial energy budget. In fact our population is still expanding, towards a projected nine billion by mid-century.

Today we live in a world in which the renewable resources of the natural world along with the stored energy resources of hydrocarbons, sustain nearly seven billions of us. Industrialization, its hydrocarbon energy dependence, and the core values of its pioneers the Europeans, have become global reality.

The core values of this planetary-scale civilization are those of the European Age of Discovery: That we humans exist outside of and above nature; that Nature is a cornucopia of limitless bounty waiting to be exploited and transformed into wealth for humans; that Nature is also a limitless sink into which we can dump our waste products without incurring any significant adverse effects upon ourselves; and that we only need better technology to keep the wealth flowing in ever increasing abundance.

And yet, the energy foundation of our technological civilization, based as it is almost exclusively upon hydrocarbon energy, is fatally insecure. That is because production of conventional oil peaked in the Spring of 2005 and has declined slightly in the three years since that time.

Production of “all liquids,” a catchall term for all hydrocarbon liquids including ethanol and coal derived oil, has recently shown a slight increase. However this is misleading for several reasons. As Mark Twain once observed, there are “lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.”

The energy content of liquids such as ethanol is less than two-thirds that of gasoline. So including it in a one-to-one equivalent resource with oil-derived liquids is comparing apples with oranges. Also, the energy required to produce ethanol, from corn at least, is actually greater than the energy obtained by combusting it.
Unconventional oil sources such as tar sands require vast amounts of energy from natural gas or other sources, and divert water from vitally-needed agriculture to produce the oil.

Also, demand for energy is now increasing within oil-exporting nations. So each year, less of what is produced in those nations is being exported for the use of other nations. The net amount of energy available from exported hydrocarbon liquids has also peaked.

At the same time that we are reaching the peak of net energy from hydrocarbon liquid production, coal production is approaching its limits as well. Within the next ten to twenty years, coal production too will peak and then decline. In the meantime, its profligate usage is rapidly accelerating the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and is driving an accelerating rate of climate change. Increasing winter temperatures are decreasing the snowpack in many populated areas, which is in turn is causing the long term decrease in water supplies for agriculture to feed the planet’s teeming billions—along with diminishing the available water supply for direct human use.

Our economy has been based for five centuries upon the assumption that material wealth would always increase. From appropriating new lands to developing new energy supplies, this assumption has been fulfilled throughout this half-millennium period. Now however, with hydrocarbon energy about to enter an ever-accelerating decline, and with the environmental consequences of burning hydrocarbons becoming more acute, the assumption of limitless growth must inevitably break down and our economy must collapse.

This collapse is inevitable because capitalist economies are based upon debt. Money lent today for some income-generating activity can be paid back by new wealth created in the future. Investments are based upon the expectation that new wealth will be generated to repay the loans. However, with declining energy supplies, production will decrease and less material wealth will exist in the future than exists today. Once this fundamental change in our reality is widely understood, our whole global economy will collapse.

However, human societies are capable of learning. Societal learning occurs in a manner analogous to how our immune systems “learn.” Such learning is directly encoded in the structure of the system itself. For an immune system, the physical shape of harmful intruders such as viruses or bacteria is imprinted into specialized cells which “recognize” and destroy these pathogens whenever they reappear. For human societies, institutions perform this function. National level institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, founded in 1934, seek to incorporate the lessons learned by past disasters—the Great Depression for example—into the behavioral repertoire of government so that whenever conditions such as those that caused the past disaster recur, they will be identified and neutralized before they can cause harm. International level institutions such as the United Nations, founded in 1944, similarly seek to incorporate the lessons learned by past global disasters—World War II, in this instance—so that similar disasters can be prevented.

Unfortunately, as a direct consequence of the core values of our civilization which prioritize endless material acquisition above all else, one form of human organization—the global corporation—has with rapidly increasing effectiveness, subverted all forms of institutional memory along with all methodologies of popular control—democracy for example—over the agendas of governments across the planet. This has occurred not through the action of some nefarious conspiracy but rather through what amounts to faulty programming. Corporations exist solely to make profits—as much profit as possible, in as short a time as possible. This profit obligation is encoded into law which effectively “programs” corporate behavior. Responsible behavior, such as control of their pollution, occurs at the expense of increased profit. For corporations, the institutions which seek to constrain their activities for the “greater good” are impediments to profit maximization, and impediments that must be removed. These “impediments” which obstruct profit maximization unfortunately are also our societal “memory” and the institution of popular democracy itself. Public good and private gain, are generally different things. Thus, the maximization of corporate private gain requires the subversion of the public good.

Once corporations achieved the legal status of “persons” by means of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, these artificial entities were able to out-compete all other flesh and blood persons such as ourselves. A contest between natural persons and these world-spanning artificial persons is no contest at all. In single minded pursuit of profit maximization, all human institutions along with human control over government itself have been progressively swept aside.

Yet ultimately these cancerous monstrosities are not alien impositions upon our planetary civilization, they are, in fact, nothing but the embodiment of our own individual desires for ever more material wealth. The corporations are our self-centered, materialistic values made tangible, and then subsequently run amok to trample us as they follow their pre-programmed agenda of profit maximization above all else.

Thus, at the supreme moment of crisis for our global civilization, at the time when the greatest possible civilizational adaptability and the most rapid possible civilizational learning and capacity for restructuring are required—at this supreme moment of existential crisis for all of humanity—our capability for navigating these crises is declining precipitously towards zero.

Consequently, it is too late to use our existing political system to avert our rapid rendezvous with disaster. It is also too late economically and technologically. We simply cannot quickly replace most of the energy which we are about to lose due to declining supplies of hydrocarbon energy. Indeed, given the reality of corporate dominance of our political processes, attempts to develop technologies to avert the crises will likely turn out to be scams by which wealth is taken from people via taxation and given to corporations—or more specifically—to the wealthy elites who control them.

So if we cannot look to government for our salvation, where can we turn?
We can look to ourselves and to others who see the reality of the present age as we do. We can begin now to improve ourselves—our ability to think clearly and logically, our skills, our basic health. We can network with others locally, regionally and globally. We can each become a nucleus for a self-organizing movement operating at each of these levels of organization. We can become the instigators of a new and sustainable system of human organized complexity which coexists with our biosphere.

We need not revolt directly and forcefully against the present order because this order is inherently doomed. Past revolutions have required force to remove the oppressive presence of a tyrannical old order; but today’s revolution is a struggle for the survival and future of humanity and for the biosphere. However, since our opponent is busily engaged in its very own destruction, we do not have to struggle against it to bring it down. It will fall of its own weight.

We can therefore concentrate upon our new order’s process of self-assembly. The more that we do this, the more we entice others to join us and to defect from the old order. And the more that this occurs, the more the old order is undermined by this process of quiet secession from it.

I do not believe that future human societies will entail reversion to a pre-technological, pre-scientific order. Nor is such an order inherently benevolent; for example, there were few to no cities under feudalism, but the few still dominated and oppressed the many to their material enrichment. Needless suffering occurred, where the application of reason could have alleviated such senseless pain.

What is necessary is a fundamental change within us—a change in our values and our understanding of our relationship with our environment. We must understand that we are integral parts of a greater whole, which encompasses all other humans and indeed all other life. We must use available renewable sources of energy with this understanding firmly in mind, and in ways which do not conflict with or undermine this understanding, or harm other life forms upon which our web of life depends.

We must institutionalize the lessons learned from the collapse of our present order in such a manner as to prevent its mistakes from being repeated in future ages. One planetary disaster is more than enough!

I personally believe that we can do these things and still in the fullness of time rise to challenges which we of this present age can only dream. In a very real sense we can look at crises engendered from our present crises of civilization as a learning experience—but only if we actually learn from them.

We are the creators of this future, and we must start with ourselves—right here and right now.

The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow is published!

Michael Byron — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:33:52 GMT

This is just a quick announcement:

My new book The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow has been published.

Complete details, as well as how to order it, can be found on my website at: http://www.MichaelPByron.com.

Mike Byron

Proof Certain

Michael Byron — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:16:24 GMT

Going into the Tuesday, January 8, 2008 New Hampshire Primary, all polls showed a commanding lead in favor of Democratic Presidential candidate Barak Obama over his rival candidate Hillary Clinton. Even the exit polls showed that Obama had won the state. (See http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5535).

Exit polling has been refined into something approaching an exact science. It had been almost infallibly accurate to within a half percentage point. At least this was true until the current decade when easily hackable electronic voting machines operating on source code that is known only to the commercial vendor providing the machines, and which is forbidden by law from being divulged to any governmental or private entity, began tallying our votes. Then coincidentally exit polling ceased to be accurate and reliable.

We know with absolute certainty that this is indeed a coincidence because all election analyses, on all mainstream media (MSM) outlets (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, PBS etc.) of all seemingly questionable election results have, without exception, completely omitted discussion of this possibility. Since we have a free and open press, it is, therefore, not possible that using unsecure electronic voting machines can cause any effect whatsoever on the accuracy of the vote tally. Anyone who thinks otherwise is obviously a crackpot conspiracy theorist! If you suffer from such delusions, please stop reading this study NOW and immediately seek professional therapy from your friends at the Department of Homeland Security.

MSM reports have attributed the apparent vote discrepancy to a sudden shift in female voter’s preferences away from Obama and towards Clinton at the last moment. This shift according to infallible MSM pundits (all of you who do not believe that the MSM is infallible should be on your way to Homeland Security by now) was caused by Clinton’s display of emotion the afternoon before the vote. MSM pundits determined that this caused female voters to identify with Clinton and thus shift their votes from Obama to her.

This explanation is so clearly airtight as to not need further consideration. However, incredibly, I ran across some doubters on the internet. Why these pinko, liberal, jihaddis’ aren’t in Gitmo undergoing therapeutic waterboarding, electroshock “therapy”, sexual degradation, etc. is unclear—I suppose Congressional Democrats failed to appropriate sufficient funds to provide shock therapy for all who need it in a timely manner. Another reason to vote Republican!

Anyway, after seeing such delusional thinking I was compelled to remove any and all doubts as to the veracity of MSM explanations as to what occurred. A simple analysis proves MSM accuracy.

I began by using standard research format and methodology: ∆ IV à ∆ DV. A change in the value of the independent variable (IV) causes a corresponding change in the value of a dependent variable (DV).

The study assumes that: Ballots are either counted by hand, or are counted electronically.Voters know in advance which counting methodology will be used to count their ballots.

The study hypothesizes that: Female voters voting preferences change according to the voting methodology selected. Specifically, if votes are counted by hand, then female voters vote their actual candidate preferences. However, if votes are counted electronically, female voters do not vote their actual candidate preferences.

Conversely, male voters (except for gay males) voting preferences are insensitive to which voting methodology is employed. This means that males and females are different in certain ways, for example, males lack the sensitivity (male explanation) or sensibility (female explanation) which females (and gay males) innately exhibit when faced with different voting methodologies. The study assumes that whatever this difference is, it is intuitively obvious to all, and thus need not be explained further.

Thus we arrive at our study’s Research Question:

How does foreknowledge that one’s ballot will be counted electronically (independent variable) cause female voters to suddenly vote for Clinton/against Obama (dependent variable).

Standard research methodology advises using an N (number) of cases which is greater than zero. Therefore I chose to employ an N of cases for my study of 1. One female voter would be utilized. This increased the validity and reliability of my study over using an N of cases equal to zero, ah, by an infinite amount. Can’t get better than that! We’re talking science here!

Where to find a female? I happened to be married to one and she was nearby. Therefore, I asked my wife Ramona, if she had any insights into this matter of accounting for the apparent voting discrepancy?

She replied by stating that: “When women realize that an impersonal, infallible, machine will count their ballot, as opposed to a real flesh and blood human, being it causes them to rebel against impersonality and thus vote for whichever candidate had shown the most emotion most recently.” She added: “If, subsequently, an exit pollster asks them how they voted, they will state their initial preference, which is how they would have voted if their vote would have been hand counted. Thus this behavior cannot be detected by exit polling”

To irrefutably prove this hypothesis all that is required is to demonstrate that votes were skewed towards Clinton and away from Obama in machine counted voting precincts. Actual data support this hypothesis:

Tabulation of machine counted vs. hand counted votes:

Clinton: + 5.419 %

Obama: - 3.029 %

Net spread in favor of Clinton: 8.448 %

(Source: http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS)

This explains the MSM accounts for this phenomenon exactly. Case closed.

NOTE: This is SATIRE!

2012

Michael Byron — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:22:55 GMT

2012

2012 is significant in the popular imagination mainly because of the Mayan prediction that the world as we’ve known it will come to an end on December 21st of that year. Beyond this it appears from the perspective of the present as being a year in which “things which can’t go on forever” such as ever increasing consumerism, agricultural expansion, ever increasing consumption of energy resources, and so on, abruptly stop going on forever. It appears to be about the right time for the effects of global warming and planetary climate change to become universally undeniable. Alas by this year it will also be too late to stop the accelerating positive feedback loops which will intensify the changes to our biosphere. Put succinctly, 2012 appears to be a pretty good candidate for being the year that the shit hits the fan, the year that everything changed and so on.

My friend, author and political activist Marie D. Jones recently asked me to contribute a short essay for her forthcoming book (June 2008) entitled 2013:The End of Days or a New Beginning: Envisioning the World After the Events of 2012.

Marie wrote: “.…I would like to ask for your contribution to this book in the form of a brief essay describing what you, personally, think the year 2012 will bring, and what the world may look like in terms of changes you believe may be coming. This essay can be anywhere from one to five paragraphs in length….”

My contribution to her book appears just below:

2012 as I see it

By Michael P Byron

2012 will be a year of fundamental transformation due to the convergence of several factors, all being human-caused. As Shakespeare had Cassius say to Brutus in his play Julius Caesar: “The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves...”

The following trends will culminate in the epochal year 2012: Worldwide production of oil will certainly have peaked. Since our planetary civilization runs on oil, desperate measures will be taken by powerful nations to ensure that the wheels keep turning. Wars and rumors of wars will fill the news headlines. Crash programs to produce energy using coal and nuclear power will be hastily implemented without environmental safeguards.

Global climate change will have become both undeniable and irreversible in this fateful year. Due to the peaking of oil production, coal will be increasingly ripped from the ground and burned, thus releasing more carbon dioxide more rapidly into our planet’s increasingly unstable atmosphere. Flood, fire, drought, rising seas, crop failure, disease, and insect pestilence will be the result. Due to all of the above factors, the global economy will contract dramatically. Recession and then depression will ensue. Governments will fall as currencies plummet in value.

As chaotic and disastrous as all of this will be, it will also be a unique opportunity to reform ourselves, our values, and our civilization. With profound crisis comes great opportunity. As our present civilizational structures disintegrate, we can transform and reintegrate ourselves from desire for short-term gain at the expense of others and the planetary biosphere, to a just, humane and environmentally rational civilization which can endure for ages to come. 2012 will be the year that we act decisively to bring about this fundamental renewal of civilization.

All of this raises a deeper question. How did Mayan Indians living many centuries ago manage to identify this epochal year? Or did they?

As far as the astronomical significance of the prophecy is concerned, December 21, 2012 is the date on which our solar system crosses the plane of the galactic equator. The Maya were world-class astronomers. It is perhaps not surprising that such a rare event as this should be interpreted as being an indicator of momentous events. A celestial event of such rarity and significance ought to correspond with an analogous terrestrial event—such as the end of the world as we’ve known it. So there is nothing surprising about the Maya choosing this date for such a prophecy.

Yet the Maya also predicted that in what we know of as the year 1519, Quetzalcoatl, a light-skinned, bearded person, would return, and that his return would mark the end of Maya civilization. Amazingly, in 1519, on his way to invading México, Hernan Cortés a light-skinned, bearded man, did indeed land in the Maya heartland in the Yucatan peninsula of modern day México, exactly when and where Quetzalcoatl was expected to arrive. And the arrival of Cortés did indeed bring about the subsequent destruction of what remained of the Maya civilization.
If this is a coincidence, it is certainly an amazing one! The probability of two such random coincidences panning out in reality would appear to be astronomical.

So what are we to make of the 2012 Maya prophecy? Will it prove, in hindsight, to have been as prescient as the one about the return of Quetzalcoatl? If so, how can such a thing as foretelling the future exist?

While I do not really know the answers to these questions, I was intrigued to note a possible answer. In his latest book, The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner makes the case that our universe is designed to facilitate the emergence of intelligence. This intelligence in turn is needed to ensure the existence of the universe. How to reconcile the chicken and egg dilemma posed by this scenario? Gardner posits that the universe is an example of what physicists and mathematicians call a “Closed Timelike Curve”.

Gardner states:

"In 1997 Princeton astrophysicists J. Richard Gott III and Li-Xin Li posed this intriguing question: Could our universe conceivably have spawned itself? Beginning with the recognition that ‘a remarkable property of [Einstein’s theory of] general relativity is that it allows solutions that have closed timelike curves (CTC’s)—hypothetical configurations of space and time where gravity is sufficiently strong to bend the space-time continuum into a looping configuration that allows events to influence the past—Gott and Li pointed out that, absent some rule like the chronology protection conjecture proposed by Stephen Hawking (which states that the rules of physics conspire to forbid the actual manifestation of CTC’s, at least at the macroscopic scale) the ‘Universe can be its own mother.’ Under the CTC cosmological scenario ‘the Universe neither tunneled from nothing, nor arose from a singularity; it created itself."’i

This is pretty deep stuff! However, if we recall that our minds evolved to allow for us to survive and function in a world in which contemplation of the distant future and of the ultimate topology of the cosmos had little survival value, we should not be too surprised if the ultimate nature and configuration of our universe seems strange to us!

If we live in a universe which comprises a Closed Timelike Curve, the cosmological geometry would allow for information to move from past to future, and also, under some circumstances, from future to past. Time is not linear stretching from Big Bang, onwards, but is rather circular, stretching perhaps from Big Bang to Big Bang.

So one possibility is that the Universe is configured as a Closed Timelike Curve; and the Mayan prophecies of Cortés’s and/ or Quetzalcoatl’s arrival/return, and their prophesy of the world shaking events of 2012 are indeed valid.

Another possibility is as I’ve explained above: astronomically significant events (the Quetzalcoatl prophecy is apparently related to a transit of the planet Venus) such as Earth’s passing through the plane of the galactic equator are simply inferred to represent the occurrence of terrestrially significant events: “As above, so below,” in other words.

In both cases, we are given a warning concerning future events which threaten to seriously affect our existence. In both cases we are offered an opportunity to take action to prepare ourselves for the coming changes as well as to shape those changes in a beneficial manner.

It should be clear to anyone who has bothered to pay the slightest attention to contemporary events that the Earth’s nations, our global economy, our civilization, and our planetary biosphere are accelerating towards catastrophe. It should be equally obvious that we are the cause of these impending catastrophes. Ultimately our deepest beliefs and wants are proving to be maladaptive. We must change or face catastrophic consequences.

Perhaps the Mayan prophecy of 2102 represents a final warning from this onrushing future. Or maybe its seemingly prescient timing is a coincidence.

Either way, it serves as a compelling warning to change our world’s fate by changing ourselves, or face the consequences of our failure to change. Certainly we have no one other than ourselves to blame for what may happen in the near future.

That said, I hope that we actually have a future that extends until 2012. Events currently seem to be moving faster than that. So we’ll see.

(Michael Byron is author of The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad, and Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization)

---------------
i) Gardner, James, The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos, New Page Books, NJ, USA, 2007, p 218.

End of the Year 2007 Update.

Michael Byron — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 12:38:47 GMT

Greetings,

As usual I've been extremely busy lately.

I finished my academic work days before Christmas. In the past several days my wife Ramona and I have intensively scrutinized the galley proofs for my new book "The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad". We have now returned these to the publisher with several corrections.

I estimate that the book will go to the printer in early January 2008. it should be available about the beginning of February. I will provide more specific information as it becomes available.

I'll post a new blog later today.

Happy holidays to all,

Mike Byron

Constructing Common Sense

Michael Byron — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:25:13 GMT

By Ramona Byron

      About the Southern California fires that are going on right now, my question is: “What the devil were the developers and city councils thinking?”

      As I write this, people are fleeing, their homes are going up in smoke, many of their helpless animals were abandoned to their fates, and acrid smoke and ashes fill the air.

      I will admit that I’m no expert on fire fighting or prevention, although I did have occasion to study it in the Navy Officer Candidate School. There, we learned that there are three elements to a fire: fuel, oxygen, and heat. If you take away only one of those three elements, the fire goes out.

      Now, obviously, you cannot remove oxygen and heat from Southern California. But we could do a lot about the element of fuel for wildfires that is now being provided by the houses.

      As I watch the news footage of home burning in Southern California, I see over and over that these houses have little or no fire resistance, even though they are built in obvious wildfire zones. I even see cedar shake roofs on some of these houses, and I watch the footage of fire quickly consuming the flammable shakes and the roofs caving in. These houses seem to be pyres that are just sitting there and waiting for a spark to set them off.
      Just to make things even crazier, they build houses in canyons, and then install wooden decks (also known as “fuel”) sticking out over the canyon as if to ensure that any fire down there will be led straight up to the house. Then to top it all off, they have gas grills out there on the decks, ready to explode if a fire inevitably blows up from the canyon.

      Often these houses have those fashionable but useless wooden arbors over the front doors as a lame effort to create some shade at the entrances. Those things are at best a complete waste of building materials because they do not provide shade, and at worst they are a nearly-criminal thing to do to a house. So if anyone had to run out of their burning house with their cedar-shake roofs, they would be caught in the fire that is right at the door from these idiotic wooden arbors.

      Does any city or county planning commission around here ever consider fire prevention when they are approving house construction permits or developing building codes? Have any of them, even once, considered what it means to firefighters to have to protect these flimsy houses that are being continually and increasingly built in known wildfire zones? Is there one shred of common sense anywhere around here at all?

   It just wouldn’t be that difficult to plan a community in order to reduce the risks of fire rather than to increase those risks. Since I’m no expert, I think my advice at least passes the common-sense test, which is something that seems to be in critically short supply in Southern California when it comes to building codes for fire zones. So here are my initial suggestions for future building codes in Southern California:

1. Houses built in known wildfire zones should be fire-resistant. The interior walls should be of stone or masonry rather than wood construction. They should have tile, slate, or metal roofs; thick masonry exterior walls; and fire-resistant windows.

2. No house in a wildfire zone should ever be allowed to have a wood fireplace.

3. No house on a canyon should ever be allowed to have a wooden deck sticking out over the canyon.

4. All houses in wildfire zones should have a set of sprinklers along the ridge of the roofs and at the corners of the roofs facing outward. These could create a mist that would surround the house to protect it from fire. After all, we put sprinklers inside houses and apartments, and we put sprinklers on the lawns, so why not put them on the roofs to protect the house?

5. Housing developments in wildfire zones should be planned so that the houses are grouped fairly closely together on cul-de-sacs that face into the center; and the generous-sized, fire-retardant backyards should have a stand of banana trees at the perimeter. Banana trees are full of water, and would make a natural firebreak. Plus, they’re cute and they provide bananas.

6. There should be agricultural land surrounding the community or housing development, which would provide for another firebreak. It could also serve as the community’s own food garden.

7. No one anywhere in Southern California should ever be allowed to plant highly flammable trees or other highly flammable plants of any kind. Period.

8. There should be a serious program to eradicate highly flammable trees such as the ever-present eucalyptus around here.

9. Since we know for a fact that a lot of houses are inevitably going to burn up every year in Southern California, the building codes should require construction materials that are not toxic to us when we have to breathe their fumes and ashes as they are burning.

   Please note that most of these suggestions are inexpensive, and some of them can be done by homeowners without waiting for inefficient city and county administrations to intervene. Install some sprinklers on your roof (especially if you can’t replace your cedar shake roof anytime soon); plant some banana trees; pull out flammable plants; and get rid of those infernally stupid wooden arbors at your front doors. Your life could depend on that last piece of advice.

   If city councils won’t listen to reason about intelligent planning, then the home loan and insurance companies may have some leverage on this. After all, they should have an interest in building houses that will endure for a few years longer. They could start by refusing to underwrite highly flammable houses in wildfire zones.
   We don’t have to keep being victims of fires or of shoddy construction. It’s time that the people had a say in this. So call your city or county administration and demand some decent building codes.

   The house and life you save could be your own.

The Burning Time

Michael Byron — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:49:29 GMT

The Burning Time

As I write the sky outside is an eerie brown-gray. Although it’s around noontime, the sun is barely visible through the shroud of smoke hanging above. A light rain of ash falls steadily. Southern California in general and San Diego County in particular are at the center of a firestorm. Here in San Diego County between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people have been evacuated from their homes.

I’ve lived in Southern California since arriving here at age 12. That was thirty-eight years ago, back in 1969. So I know that autumn in Southern California is often a time of firestorms driven by Santa Ana winds. That is not unusual. However the intensity of these firestorms and in particular the number of separate fires burning at once has increased. So has the destructiveness of these fires, measured in terms of property damage.

How to account for this? I believe that three related factors are combining to produce this dire result:

1) Suburban sprawl is out of control across Southern California. San Diego County is no exception.i Further, these houses are not fire-resistant.

2) An overall, long-term effect of global warming upon Southern California’s climate is to produce longer, hotter, and drier summers. ii

3) Human-caused global warming is increasing the heat content of the oceans. Temperatures have risen by over a half degree Fahrenheit on average across the world’s oceans already. iii This temperature rise is increasing the frequency of the Pacific Ocean phenomenon called El Niño.iv v According to climate researchers, El Niño acts as a safety valve for excess heat buildup in the tropics that normal oceanic currents and weather cannot dissipate.vi viiThe effect of this is to shift winter rainfall across the Pacific to the West Coast of the United States.viii California, and especially Southern California, experiences wetter than normal winters when El Niño occurs.

Combining these three variables explains what is happening in Southern California as I type these words:

El Niño conditions in 2004-5 in Southern California produced record winter rainfall.ix

This led to an exuberant growth of foliage across the region. This excess of vegetation subsequently died off and was desiccated by two long, hot summers in 2006 and 2007. These summers were separated by a record low rain season in 2006-7.x

The vegetation was converted to explosively dry kindling which awaited the arrival of seasonal Santa Ana winds to begin to blow fast, hot and dry from east to west across Southern California.

Once these winds arrived on 21 October, 2007, a firestorm which would engulf the ever-sprawling suburbs of Southern California including San Diego County was inevitable. And now the conflagrations rage.

Everything was wholly predictable. Yet nothing was done to avert it. This is because taking effective action would require that we fundamentally change the way that our political economy is organized.

To abate the frequency of future El Niños along with the trend towards ever longer, drier, and hotter summers, we must reduce the profligate burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Developing non-polluting alternative sources of energy, using less energy, and just generally wanting less stuff are all urgently needed. As to suburban sprawl, planning, smart growth and “New Urbanism” (a return to well designed walkable cities in which people actually live and work) are alternatives.

Although this urban planning could be very profitable, our housing industry will of course oppose this because it may reduce their short-term profits and because it requires them to give some actual thought to their housing development designs. Such things are inherently “bad for business” according to the rulers of our economic and political system.

And so, here in Southern California on this gloomy afternoon, the ashes of thousands of burning homes fall upon us. Will we ever learn?

i http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_researchb341_sup
ii http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/06/020604073114.htm
iii http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/change.shtml
iv http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/el-nino-global-warming/
v http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/faq.html
vi http://www.pbs.org/wnet/savageseas/weather-side-elnino.html
vii http://www.ucar.edu/communications/quarterly/winter97/connection.html
viii http://ggweather.com/enso/calenso.htm
ix http://www.usatoday.com/weather/stormcenter/2005-02-22-Calif-storms_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA
x http://www.ksby.com/Global/story.asp?S=6861146

Denial, Deception, and Delusion: American Politics versus Reality

Michael Byron — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 11:17:14 GMT

Listening to the empty blather of the American presidential candidates, one would assume that the long golden era of post-WWII prosperity stretches ahead of us as far as eye could see. But nothing could be further from the truth. Our nation, its people, and most critically its leaders, are living in a state of denial.

As America’s presidential election campaign shifts into high gear, politicians seem to be deliberately ignoring the fact that America and the world are faced with rapidly approaching resource and environmental crises of sufficient magnitude to end civilization in the coming decades. It’s reminiscent of the line from Act V, Scene V, of Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

“…it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Why do I say this? After all I was the Democratic Party's candidate for US Congress in California's 49th Congressional District in 2004. I was also a delegate at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, as well as serving on the San Diego County and State of California Democratic Party Central Committees between 2003 and 2006.

I say this because I must. Consider that America is a national political economy that is nested within a global political economy. This global political economy is in turn nested within the Earth’s geological and biological web of life and matter. Human civilization in general and American society in particular, is wholly dependent upon these non-human inputs for their very existence. Yet these are either taken for granted entirely (the Republicans), or are accorded lip service but otherwise ignored (the Democrats).

Industrial civilization runs on oil. Yet production of oil and other hydrocarbon liquids has peaked, or nearly reached its peak. See the graphs compiled from the United Nations International Energy Information Agency (IEA) and the US government’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) at: http://www.peakoil.nl/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/oilwatch_monthly_september2007.pdf.

A good and brief primer on “peak oil” for those who are not familiar with this concept can be found at: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2693#more.

At the same time demand for oil has increased from an annual growth rate of about two percent to about three percent in recent years as nations such as China, and now India, rapidly industrialize. Discovery of new oilfields peaked in the mid-1960’s and has declined precipitously ever since. Right now for every three to four barrels of oil the world consumes one barrel of replacement oil is discovered. (See http://www.aspo-ireland.org/contentFiles/newsletterPDFs/newsletter82_200710.pdf.)

Human civilization in general and American society in particular—we Americans use more energy per capita than anyone else on the planet—are living off of rapidly depleting oilfields discovered forty years ago. Supply is decreasing while demand is increasing. This is a recipe for disaster. The 2005 Hirsch Report (See http://www.acus.org/docs/051007-Hirsch_World_Oil_Production.pdf.) found that transitioning from one source of energy (oil) to another requires a massive and sustained effort over several decades. If you wait until the problem becomes acute then it’s simply too late to deal effectively with it.

In my recent book Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization, I explain in detail that no combination of alternative energy sources can allow us to maintain our present levels of energy consumption.

Additionally, a byproduct of industrial civilization is accelerating climate change. Burning fossil hydrocarbon fuels has placed large and growing quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2) into our atmosphere. Most people are aware of this problem. However, most are not aware that this process is activating multiple positive (i.e., amplifying) feedback loops which are in turn accelerating the human caused process of climate change. These include methane being released from thawing arctic permafrost. (See http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0410.html and also http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869000,00.html.)

Methane is a greenhouse gas which is about thirty times more powerful in its heat-trapping effects than is CO2. In fact, vast deposits of methane stored on the continental shelves of the Earth—far greater than those found on land—are released as part of the overall warming that result from CO2 emissions in conjunction with arctic methane releases: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0000C2C7-68A2-14F3-A56883414B7F0000&chanID=sa003.

I could go on listing the positive, amplifying feedback lops we have set into motion; however, the methane releases themselves are more than sufficient to end human civilization abruptly. Many scientists believe that just such an oceanic methane release (triggered by volcanic action) is what caused the Permian extinction two hundred and fifty one million years ago. That extinction killed off at least ninety percent of all life on Earth. (See: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/08/030828071722.htm and also http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/dayearthdied.shtml.)

We are in the process of setting the same forces into motion. (See: http://www.alternet.org/environment/64735/?page=entire and also http://survivalacres.com/wordpress/?p=977.)

So consider that we are facing the collapse of not just the “American Way of Life” (i.e. conspicuous and unconstrained consumption of global energy and resources—a level of gluttony which would shame an imperial Roman!) but of planetary industrial civilization due to peak oil and the increasingly desperate wars to control this resource. Only an all-out national effort of the intensity and scale of WWII —in coordination with similar scale efforts across the planet—has any hope of allowing for industrial civilization to be maintained into the coming decades.

Consider the effects of our substituting lesser quality hydrocarbon such as coal for oil: the more we are able to prolong our wasteful and ecologically irrational civilization, the epitome of which is our much vaunted “American Way of Life,” the greater the probability that we unleash climactic forces which will be both beyond our control and beyond our civilization’s capacity to endure. Consider that if oil supplies decline too soon we are doomed to civilizational collapse, because the decades of transition required will not be there.

Consider that if we manage to wring a few more decades of supply out of lower grade hydrocarbon stocks—mainly coal —we will simply ensure that a climactic storm sweeps our civilization away. Finally, consider that our one slender hope to avoid these disasters is to immediately implement a crash program to fundamentally restructure not only our energy infrastructure but our entire political economy. As far as the US is concerned this means fundamentally redefining the American Way of Life away from consumerism and consumption. It means the end of the car culture and other fundamental transformations.

But are any of our presidential candidates even remotely talking about their plans to deal with our crises of existence? Clearly, they are not.

There is no doubt that issues such as health care, preserving or reclaiming our constitutional rights and freedoms, taxation, education, and so on are important. However, when we are faced with existential crises which if not dealt with will inevitably collapse civilization itself, addressing these issues can ONLY be done in the wider context of dealing with the life or death challenges facing us. Anything else amounts to arguing over the placement of deck chairs on the Titanic AFTER it has struck the iceberg.

Therefore, the entire 2008 campaign, along with all energy and effort wasted upon it is a diversion from productive activities focused upon the transformation and survival of ourselves and those we care about, as well as our civilization.

Paying any attention to campaign rhetoric is counterproductive because it detracts from using our time and intellectual abilities to face reality and redesign our civilization. I note that simply including the environment, global warming and energy policy as additional issues is equally, perhaps more counterproductive. This is because such an inclusion implies that these world-ending crises are just more issues to be dealt with by our political system. Worse it implies that these crises which are actually caused by our corporate controlled political system can realistically be solved by that same system. This is civilization ending nonsense!

American politics is dysfunctional and delusional. America’s leaders and her people are in denial. We want to pretend that the oil fueled boom of the post WWII era can continue unabated indefinitely. However, reality will soon puncture our delusional bubble.

The existing global system of politics and economics, centered in the USA, is the cause of our crises. It must be fundamentally refashioned. However, it cannot and will not allow this to occur. The fortunes and power of the few rest entirely upon this system. And they are not about to give up wealth and privilege. Given this sobering reality, what are we to do? Throughout history accomplishing this sort of goal has always required a movement arising from below—from the people themselves.

We need to take action in our own lives to change ourselves and to change how we live. We need to break free of the mesmerizing attraction of corporate consumerism. We need to break free of the endless corporatist propaganda spewing out of the corporate mass media and think for ourselves. Thus empowered, we need to create a broad based social movement, which is independent of any political party, to compel needed change despite our non-responsive political system. We need to take collective actions both within and without the existing political economy.

If civilization is to endure almost everything must change. These changes must take place soon, and not in some far-off “tomorrow.”

I address these issues in detail in my forthcoming book, The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad.