30 Minutes a Day.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article about resilience, and how the most important skill to learn to prepare for any coming challenges was not specific skills, but the skill of learning. More to the point, I suggested that people who know how they learn, will be uniquely suited to the unpredictability of the long descent. Michelle Martin then posted a reply on Raise the Hammer which I thought was right on the money, but thought I might spin out these ideas a little further.

I have been thinking since then of providing a list of suggested skills that it might be usefull to try out, in your quest to learn how to learn. In the end though, I kept coming back to my favorite scene from the movie City Slickers. In many ways, the key to success in life, and indeed in the economic world many of us expect is 'one thing', but that one thing is something you need to figure out yourself. Besides, any skills I were to suggest now, may end up being totally useless in the face of whatever unpredictable future we find ourselves in. John Micheal Greer wrote on this at length recently, and it's worth a read.

By way of suggestion, here's a starting point: Spend 30 minutes a day doing manual labour.

Notice I didn't say physical activity, the two are not neccessarily related.

For the first 3,000 years or so of Human civilization, if you had walked up to an average person on the street and told them you had created a place they could go every week to just exercise, and work up a really good sweat by performing repetitive physical activities that had no practical purpose other than exercise itself, they would have done one of three things: Laughed at you, had you committed, or press-ganged you.

For our not too distant ancestors, the thought of needing to create spaces - and even machines - that would enable people to do exercise just for excercise's sake would have been hilarious. Greek Olympiads aside (which were mainly the projects of the idle rich) they were too busy doing manual labour for a purpose. They were plowing fields, or tending orchards, or canning and preserving food, or mending clothes or tack, or any of a million and one other jobs that needed doing to keep a household running.

Nowadays, most of us work in jobs that are so totally divorced from the mind-body connection that we evolved into that we need to do an hour on the stairmaster just to 'clear our heads'.

Humans are an intensely physical species. There is so much evidence that exercise clears our thinking and keeps us mentally sharp that it almost goes without saying now. Our minds and our bodies are inexorably linked, despite what 300 years of enlightenment thinking has tried to tell us.

That's why Gandhi insisted that every person should spend 1/2 an hour a day doing manual labour. His work at the spinning wheel was as much about clearing his thoughts as it was about protest. In the end though, he didn't just end up with clarity of thought, he ended up with a whole lot of Khadi that he could put to a very practical use.

So with the Mahatma's words ringing in our ears, allow me to propose the following.
Let it be resolved that your new year's resolution be to spend 1/2 an hour a day doing manual labour that does not involve basic housework or cooking (i.e. the things you would have to do every day anyway.)

If you doubt how much you can get done in 1/2 an hour a day, I'll point you to my freezer downstairs which is full of frozen veggies. These were the excess from our garden and CSA that were blanched most evenings in August in only a little more time than that. Or to the rows of canned peaches and jam in our pantry. Or to the homemade leather slippers I'm halfway through or the gallon jugs of homebrewed apple cider. If you have never consistently devoted 1/2 an hour a day to 'doing things with a tangible outcome' you will be pleasantly surprised by your output.

I would also be the first to admit that I have never been able to do this consistently, but in the fits and starts of trying to fit in a half an hour a day of 'labour', it has produced substantial results, and perhaps more importantly, clarity.

The main thing you might accomplish, should make this choice, will be starting down the road to a D.I.Y. lifestyle. To becoming comfortable with just 'giving it a go.' To becoming ok with making mistakes, with screwing things up and not beating yourself up over it. To figuring out the way(s) you are best able to learn.

I have a host of hobbies that I am either just learning, or keen to explore, as I'm sure do you. The only question is, what's holding you back? Time? Energy? Money? Or fear of screwing it up, and not being 'successful' at it on your first try?

Just the act of beginning can be very liberating - the only 'rule' is that it has to be something you don't already do, and it has to result in a tangible outcome.

By the time you've been doing this for a couple of months, you'll be well on the way to figuring out that most important skill for the long descent: The ability to figure out how to do the million and one other jobs that need doing to keep a household running when the option of just buying a cheap foreign made replacement is no longer tenable.

Good luck.

Extremism and the Long Emergency

My wife was in the Post Office the other day, and was talking to her friend behind the counter who mentioned that her three children, who had all either just finished high school or university, had been unable to find work. "What do you think the unemployment rate is for young people?" my wife asked when she got home.

Well, on Friday, Stats Can came up with the answer, and frankly, it's not pretty.

It seems that 13.6% of people aged 15-24 are currently 'reporting' being unemployed. That rate dropped by 1.4 points from the previous month because of how many young people gave up looking for work.

This is made worse by the fact that this is only the reported rate. The 'reported' unemployment rate in the U.S. is 9% or so - depending on the month, but the actual rate, including discouraged workers is widely agreed to be closer to 17. So if the reported rate of youth unemployment in Canada is 13% give or take - what's the actual rate? 23%? 25%? It's a situation some observers are calling a 'powderkeg.'

Powderkeg may sound extreme, but there are three things young people have traditionally done when they found themselves without any short or medium-term hope for employment: They get angry, they get active, and they look for quick solutions.

Unfortunately, extremism offers (or claims to) all three.

Those of us who are aware of the impending downward stepping of the industrial economy due to either the lack of affordable fossil fuels, damaging temperature increases, or some kind of sovereign debt default causing havoc on the bond market should be very, very nervous about this.

In the 1980's, rampant economic decline and some of Thatcher's most misguided policies gave rise to a violent and angry skinhead culture in the UK. Most recently described in the brilliant movie (and soon to be TV show) This Is England, it is a tale of young people cut out from the labour force, cut out from having anything useful and productive to do with their lives, and turning to the simplistic solutions of skinhead fascism.

This is a tale we ignore at our peril.

Evidence of the shift towards extremism is already underway in economies that have been hit particularly hard by the great recession. From the Oath Keepers in the U.S., to the Issuikai in Japan, people are turning to over-simplified answers that fuel their latent rage - answers usually involving racism and exclusion.

The recent riots in France, and the near shutdown of the country due to the proposed raising of the retirement rate by two years were also inflamed mainly by youth and University students? Why should they care? You may ask. They're 40 years away from retiring? The problem is not how far they are from retiring, but rather the fact that the longer their elder peers take to retire, the longer it takes to free up those jobs.

Apart from the usual satire about the situation, what is to be done?

Once again, I have more questions than answers on this, and none of the easy solutions (such as massive government spending programs) make much sense. It certainly bears thinking about if we want to have any hope of a peaceful stepping down of the carbon-intensive economy towards one that is more sustainable, and indeed more fair.

The High Cost of Power, and the Folly of Subsidies

Around the same time that this story came out about electricity prices rising by 50% between now and 2030, a very thoughtful Op-Ed piece was written for the Globe that described why the Provincial Government’s 10% electricity rebate/vote grab was a bad idea.

Simply put, the argument is that if you want to help people who can’t afford electricity, there’s a better solution than letting everybody pay less: Simply give some more money to people who genuinely can’t afford that power.

Gordon’s argument, and I am inclined to agree at this point, is that by offering everybody an equal rebate on power, we negate any conservation that may have been encouraged by high prices.

Now I have written before about the sorry state of disrepair our electricity infrastructure has fallen into, and there are several issues on the horizon that make it all the more important that we repair that infrastructure now.

The first is the looming shortage of fossil fuels that will make repairing/replacing/upgrading built infrastructure considerably more expensive in the near to medium term.

The second, and it’s one I haven’t often heard addressed, is that one of the biggest threats to an electrical system is climate change. Climate change, it has been broadly acknowledged, is responsible for the increase in two things: Average annual temperatures, and the incidence of extreme weather events.

Both of these things play havoc with a power grid.

Three summers ago, I opined that with a record-breaking hot summer being predicted, we would see rolling brown/black-outs by August of that year. In my view, the province was going to have to start rationing power to continue to have energy to provide to job- producing industries, and reducing it’s availability to people who had their AC cranked down to 68F. Fortunately, I was mistaken.

Every year since then, I’ve made the same prediction, and last year, it came true. Kind of. Except instead of Ontario Power Generation rationing the power, the grid just started to sporadically overload and fail. There were several high-profile blackouts to large areas of Toronto that were caused by failing infrastructure and the resulting fires. Smaller, similar problems occurred around the province.

Now, combine that with the prediction that this could be one of the snowiest winters in recent memory, and our dilapidated grid could be in for another rough ride. Nothing stress-tests built infrastructure quite like an Ice Storm, or good ol’ 4’ snow drifts. Feel free to ask anyone in Victoria how badly a good snowstorm can impact built infrastructure.

Unfortunately where we are situated geographically sets us up for the double whammy of extremely hot, humid, power-draining summers, and potentially burying snowfalls during the winter. All as a result (either direct or not) of our insistence on driving one-to-a-car to our jobs in downtown Toronto every day for the last 30-40 years.

All this is to say that as painful as it is, it is crucial to make these investments to upgrade/repair our grid now, before the province either doesn’t have the money, or doesn’t have the resources (e.g. relatively inexpensive fossil fuels).

Offering an across-the-board rebate, however, only serves to undo the important work being done to upgrade the grid, by artificially lowering the price of power, and further incenting people to waste electricity. It has been noted by others that really the only way to change individual behaviour is to provide financial disincentives, and the power situation is no different.

On the other hand, investing in a stable grid doesn’t help the thousands of people who may be shut out of the energy market due altogether due to the accompanying rising costs (read: be left freezing in the dark).

Which is why I think that Gordon’s idea of a direct subsidy for energy to low income households is one that demands serious consideration.