How To Boil A Frog

A great new site popped up yesterday, How to Boil a Frog. Actually, it's not exactly new. But what drew attention to it now (via EnergyBulletin.net) is a new page on peak oil. This is a stunning and highly creative presentation, laid out as a game board, with embedded links leading to a number of well-produced video interview clips with key experts, along with essential articles, books, websites and documentary films. What it amounts to is the best multimedia introduction to peak oil we've seen.

I spent an evening sifting through the entire site, watched all the interview clips, and took notes. The hand-drawn graphics, light humor, and well-produced video segments all make the medicine go down very nicely. A brilliant piece of work, combining .

But I could find anything about the creator of this masterpiece. I did find a a feedback link and fired off a query with kudos. Here's what came back:

Jon Cooksey is a writer/producer who generally works in TV, creating and running drama series (he's currently in development on scripts for a new drama series based on the Marvel comic "Moon Knight", as well as two series pilots for the CBC, both involving action, romance and comedy.) In 2006, he decided he was going to have to take personal action to make sure his daughter didn't end up living on a raft with the last polar bear, and set out to make the documentary "How to Boil a Frog", which has evolved into an eco-comedy about overshoot, and its various symptoms (global warming, peak oil, overpopulation, the war on nature, income inequality, and so on).

In the process of making the documentary (which is still in progress), Jon has interviewed dozens of experts in climatology, sustainability, economics, energy, journalism and many other areas, and also started the movement to save civilization online with the How to Boil a Frog website, at http://www.howtoboilafrog.com/. In addition to offering up youtube-sized mini-documentaries and chunks of his interviews, the website offers a variety of entertaining resources and a chance for people to participate by sharing their own feelings about the mess we're in and what they think our chances are.

The process has also led Jon into various kinds of activism; at present he's focused on getting Vancouver prepared for peak oil with the formation of the Vancouver Peak Oil Executive (http://www.vancouverpeakoil.org/), and has just put up a peak oil page on the website (www.howtoboilafrog.com/peakoil.html) that he hopes will be a unique destination on the web, both funny and informative, for video and other links about the subject, its ramifications for society, and how it feels to recognize that life as we know it is about to change.

Economic Chaos Spreads

Also see Jim Kunstler's latest post, "Fullblown Panic." He concludes:

This is going to be a rough week. Fastening your seat belts may not be enough for this ride. Better superglue yourselves to the floorboards and pray for God's mercy.

Last week, in "Disarray," he wrote:

Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious "wealth" -- and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support. Like any other thing in our national life, finance has to return to a scale that is consistent with our circumstances -- i.e., what reality will allow. That process is underway, anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or not. We will soon hear the sound of banks crashing all over the place. Get out of their way, if you can.

Prepare psychologically for a sociopolitical climate of anger, grievance, and resentment. A lot of individual citizens will find themselves short of resources in the years ahead. They will be very ticked off and seek to scapegoat and punish others. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that did not undergo a sociopolitical convulsion in the past hundred years. But despite what we tell ourselves about our specialness, we're not immune to the forces that have driven other societies to extremes. The rise of the Nazis, the Soviet terror, the "cultural revolution," the holocausts and genocides -- these are all things that can happen to any people driven to desperation.

Great waves of change ahead!

Bush Questions Saudi Arabia as Swing Producer

George Bush raised eyebrows this week with a suggestion that the Saudi's may not be able to higher levels of oil output, something long suspected by analysts such as Matt Simmons. That Bush is publicly questioning their ability to increase production is significant. Here's an excerpt from the PRWeb press release:

On January 15, Terry Moran interviewed President Bush in Saudi Arabia on ABC's Nightline. When asked what he might say to the King of Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices, George Bush responded, "If they don't have a lot of additional oil to put on the market, it is hard to ask somebody to do something they may not be able to do." Nightline Presidential Interview

According to Gail Tverberg, writing as Gail the Actuary of TheOilDrum.com, "If Saudi Arabia doesn't have that much additional oil to put on the market, the veracity of what Saudi Arabia has been saying about extra capacity is brought into question." More importantly, it starts raising questions about Saudi Arabia's true long-term oil production capability. Can Saudi Arabia really ramp up oil production in the future? Are the high reserves posted by Saudi Arabia and other Middle-Eastern countries really indicative of high future production capability? The Oil Drum Article

How Peak Oil Changed My Life

Aaron Wissner, a frequent contributor to Energy Bulletin, has provided us all a valuable service with his brutally honest post about how his life has changed as a consequence of becoming informed about peak oil.

"Peak oil changed my life by altering my expectations and hopes for the future," he says. "I recognized that I was going to have to change myself. I needed to prepare, not only for the possibility of a rapid collapse of the system, but also for the possibility that this descent would take place gradually, over many years, or even decades. To prepare for a rapid collapse, I started doing things and buying things that would help me live apart from the global system, at least for a time: a new pantry stocked with food, containers for water, extra gasoline, extra heating fuel, insulating the windows and door, preparing a large garden, etc. To get ready for a slow decline, I started planning a zero-energy home, to be built on an ample piece of fertile land, near a stream or lake, away from the huge populations of the cities."

Here are some of the resultant changes he reports, many of them familiar to us here:

Peak oil now informs everything I do. It tells the story of a future of great challenge and difficulty, for which I must be prepared.

Peak oil shortens my time horizon. No longer do I worry about my son's college or my own retirement. Now I worry about being able to provide him with the bare necessities. And I wonder, will money be worth anything at all by the time I reach retirement age?

Peak oil informs all of my purchases. I always ask myself, would this be useful during a rapid collapse? How about during a slow decline? If neither, why buy it?

Peak oil alters the way I think about the future. It makes me scoff at the rosy prognostications of our many societal sages; well-paid, kind of heart, but tragically uninformed.

Peak oil drives me to share what I know, and to go further, to illuminate the fundamental failure of our global culture to plan and prepare for its own future. The bleak reality is this: peak oil is not really about the decline of our most precious energy resource. Peak oil is one symptom of our civilization’s inability to find and follow a cultural vision of sustainability.

The Denial Thing

It's been suggested of late that in order for people to be motivated to respond to The Long Emergency (the convergence of global crises such as climate change and peak oil), "it's time to stop blaring dire warnings about the perils... and, instead, start enthusiastically proclaiming solutions." In other words, people are tired of bad news and want to hear the upside.

But, as John McGrath says in a Gristmill post, "I hate to break it to anybody who hasn't been paying attention, but things aren't good, and they're not getting better. Things are bad, and they're getting worse. When the UN releases reports saying 'humanity's survival is at stake,' things are ****ing bleak. I don't see why the green movement should respond to that kind of news by putting on a happy face, or by trying to sidestep the issue. "

He continues: "The core of any advocacy has to be a clear-eyed appraisal of what we're doing. That includes, in this case, the extent of the damage humanity is doing to the earth and to our future. Anyone who says we should downplay that, or sidestep it, is saying we should lie to the public, loudly and consistently, about the most important issue facing us today."

McGrath has a point. Part of what has gotten us to this place of converging global crises (which, after all, has been created by the way we live) is denial. We don't look, and if we don't look we do not see, and if we do not see and know we will not be sufficiently motivated to change course.

Looking and seeing deeply, and formulating incisive actions based on reality is a usually very challenging and uncomfortable process. These days, where that process leads is to the inevitable realization that our demand for solutions is based on false hope and ill-informed idealism. We have unleashed such great and devastating changes in our world that there are no solutions for them. That is, what we are faced with in The Long Emergency is not a problem to be solved, but a long-term consequence of our own actions to which we must now adapt. The frantic effort to develop solutions, then, keeps us from facing the obvious: We must radically change the way we live on the planet. And we must do it quickly.

Next week, a handful of people are planning to sit together for three days to consider all this together. Inspired by Tim Bennett's and Sally Erickson's extraordinary film, "What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire," and the dialogues they've led with audiences around the country, we invited them to come to Boulder to facilitate a "Summit for Leaders, Catalysts, Activists, Therapists, Educators and Facilitators" in the relocalization/transition/sustainability movements.

We sent out invitations to about 120 people, many of them out-of-towners, with this explanation:

We are being called together in this Summit to open up new pathways of response to the imminent Long Emergency of rapidly-converging global crises. Our intention is that in the company of peers we will go deeper than we have ever gone before to break the bonds of denial and inertia, to challenge ourselves to discover what is most urgently needed, and to propel ourselves into unprecedented levels of action and effectiveness.

What we envision is this: Together, we will allow ourselves to more completely face our collective situation—the painful realities and implications of resource depletion, global warming, economic chaos, species extinction, and population overshoot—rooting out the last of our denial, owning our complicity in contributing to this devastating dilemma. We will allow all our guilt, shame, fear and grief to come up to the surface where we can feel them, acknowledge them and process them out in the open with compassion and wisdom. We will get down to the bedrock of our humanity, connecting with our deepest inner resources, where we can begin to see more clearly what must be done and specifically what we must do at this crucial moment in human evolution—and find the direction, inspiration and courage that will enable us to move forward. Then with new clarity we will make sustainable commitments to ourselves, to each other, to our communities, and to the greater community of life on the planet.

I am delighted to report that so far about thirty people are joining our entire staff to share this experience. I think we have an opportunity to create a breakthrough together for relocalization everywhere. I'll do my best to write about this event, what we learn and what the outcomes are.

It'll be a rigorous weekend. Sally has insisted that the process will take three full days, and the schedule on Friday and Saturday is daunting: from 9:00 a.m. to 10: p.m. Sunday is only a little less so, 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Some people of course squawked about the schedule. In response, Sally wrote:

"This is a rare opportunity. We are talking about the end of life as we know it. We are talking about wanting to create a major shift for each of us personally and for the gathered group, and perhaps for 'the movement,' putting our lives on hold in order to enter into a mystical state with one another for the sake of ourselves, our children, the planet. We are encrusted, all of us, in shells of a culture that will need to be shed. That takes time. We are up to a really big thing here. We need to dive in wholeheartedly."

When she says "mystical state," she's not talking about some "altered state" of consciousness or religious experience. What she's referring to is the opportunity to look and see and know together. That's something that happens very rarely in our lives, and it's what is needed now. Later, she clarified:

"With some kind of grace we will sit and listen to one another and perhaps become vulnerable enough to drop our personas and care deeply for each other. That's what I'll hold out for."

That's what I'm holding out for, too.

Perhaps you'd like to join us for this very intense weekend. If so, please send us an email.

I'll close this somewhat rambling post with something from Joanna Macy, in her very important book, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World.

“To be conscious in our world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril… The feelings that assail us now cannot be equated with ancient dreads of mortality… Their source lies less in concerns for the personal self than in apprehensions of collective suffering - of what happens to our own and other species, to the legacy of our ancestors, to unborn generations, and to the living body of Earth… That pain is the price of consciousness in a threatening and suffering world. It is not only natural, it is an absolutely necessary component of our collective healing. As in all organisms, pain has a purpose: it is a warning signal, designed to trigger remedial action. The problem, therefore, lies not with our pain for the world, but in our repression of it.”

Culinary School of the Rockies Goes Local!

This story appeared in today's Boulder County Business Report's BCBRdaily, an encouraging indication that a renaissance of local is indeed unfolding in our midst:

Culinary School of the Rockies, a private cooking school based in Boulder, has launched a Farm to Table curriculum.

The program will provide students with a thorough understanding of ways to source and use local ingredients.

"Farm to table is not a passing trend in the culinary world. It is a lasting cultural shift," said Joan Brett, director and founder of the school, in a statement. "We want our students to respect and understand the intricacies and challenges of sourcing and serving local, seasonal food."

The school, founded in 1991, believes it is the first private cooking school in the country to teach a locally grown program.

Brett's long-standing colleagues, local farmers and food producers will play a mentorship role in the program teaching students about Colorado's agricultural richness firsthand. The five-week externship provides experiential learning opportunities on-site, at area farms and facilities. Highlights will include foods grown in the North Fork Valley, including wild game in addition to fruits and vegetables.

Once the five-week farm portion of the program is complete, students will apprentice at local restaurants with a strong commitment to sustainable practices such as The Kitchen and Frasca Food & Wine, both located in Boulder.

Peak Soil!

Another great local weblog is Peak Soil by Eric Johnson:

Peak Soil is a slogan that came to mind when I started thinking about local food self-sufficiency. Relocalizing food is about turning away from the fossil fuel era, but more importantly it's about turning towards local self reliance. A key element in local food security is improving and protecting the soil. In fact, the better the soil, the more productive the farm or garden. So, the way I see it, peak soil is a good thing -- it's a peak of abundance rather than impending scarcity. In all of our relocalization work, whether the topic is energy, local economies, food security, or something else, let's cultivate an attitude of opportunity, and expand our vision of what's possible.

Be sure to check out his terrific article on Kipp Nash's Suburban CSA.

There is something really exciting happening in the local food scene in Boulder...

...Personally, my take on the project is that it's one of the most inspiring and innovative things I've run across in years. I follow garden goings-on pretty closely in Boulder. I really think this concept is poised to take off, both because it builds community and because of the stunning visual display and high quality of food.