Its funny how a massive and scary idea like Peak Oil can wrap it’s tentacles around the mind and nudge thoughts in particular directions. There is certainly the whole grief dynamic that one must cycle through, of necessity it is a loop and no resolution because we live within the moment of collapse, not the other side.

But Peak Oil was a specific concept that my scientific mind gravitated toward, it seemed like the most likely candidate for the next event horizon.

Its been a somewhat confusing time these past few months because the price shock of 2008 and then the collapse came sooner than PO estimates suggested. It was a non-intuitive dynamic with a non-linear trajectory.

Hindsight that tells us that CDSs and the whole Ponzi nature of the American and global financial system was manifestly unwholesome doesn’t help people like me who didn’t create it, participate in it, profit from it, nor can do even a single thing about it (then or now).

This hindsight only serves to make one feel small, angry, and foolish for buying into the claptrap of the middle class American Dream.

Like any religion, I didn’t have much choice in that indoctrination but that doesn’t lessen the hurt you feel when you learn that there is no santa claus, that what your parents told you to work hard for would in the end not result in a life that improves or equals one’s own upbringing. That would not be such an issue for me except that it took me so long to figure out and here I am fully invested in the middle class nightmare of being excessively educated, well endowed with educational debt, further endowed with the massive debt of a mortgage and with 3 innocent kids. If I were single and childless, all this would be so much less heavy man.

Because of the dogmatic thinking that panic and fear can induce, I have not felt as prepared for this collapse as you might imagine. I feel that my resilience was impaired because I was watching out for one sort of collapse and then was surprised by another. It is a personality flaw of mine, to abhor this sort of surprise. I am still scrambling for footing and that means lack of resilience, sense of perspective and humor, lack of conviction.

It was a whole lot easier last fall when I had a job. It was frustrating because I could not be at home doing things but at least we had income. Even so, we could not use that income for many nifty projects because we were paying down debt that refused to be ignored.

Now that we both remain unemployed, the panic and fear is easier to feel and its quite easy to fall into a malaise of cold sweats, little sleep, dithering fretting and wishful thinking.

One might think that all this free time would translate into homestead related productivity but there are only so many things we could do in the depths of Massachusetts’ winter. I have many seeds started, I have cleaned the raised beds, several times, I have built some cold frames. I am ready to grow. Where we live, the last hard freeze date is MAY 15th so there is a limit as to how early I can get started. No matter how early you start seeds, there is still transplant shock and delay – the growing season is only so long here.

Biology itself is pulling us out of the house into the backyard homestead though. Our dairy goats have been kidding like crazy. It has not all been sweetness and light though. Our first doe to kid was a horrific tragedy (you can read about it at my other homesteading specific blog Humble Garden in this post – RIP Wheatie, our sweet goat girl).

Since that horrible day, we have had 4 easy peasy deliveries and we have 7 precious little LaMancha goat kids.

Our chickens and duck are well and ramping up their egg production. Things are moving forward here, as biology has an inevitable nature and will to live.

On dry days, I stand in the hay/milking shed watching the momma goats nursing their babies and I feel immense contentment. The smell of hay seems to relax me, sending me into rather amorphous thoughts of simple times when this sort of homestead was viable, made sense.

Other times, I stand with the goats and look back at the house and garden and force myself to really get in touch with how we are NOT a closed system and that we have MANY external inputs that make us profoundly vulnerable.

We are MUCH more prepared than many in the US but it serves to reveal the giant gaps between a self-sufficient life/future and the extensively fenestrated lives we live; we are interlinked with incomprehensively complex and vast global networks of technology, energy, politics, and inertia that are infinitely non-intuitive on the ground and intentionally hidden from we consumers.

Going off the grid from that is an almost overwhelming task. For me, its not about electricity or even warmth.

No its about how we will find a way to feed the goats, llama, chickens if the supply chains fall or if we default on the mortgage.

I would say that our almost total lack of resilience is leagues more resilient than your average American but that only serves to scare me even more.

Craving stability in our living arrangements, our food sources, our political and governing state as well as our personal security is a natural enough thing, truly. As babies, this is something we are instinctually driven to do, find food, find our mother’s voice, her smell, her face, her love.

The problem with this is that any stability, any security, is an illusion.

If you open your eyes to this, then you should take the next step and understand how best to view the state of being that is non-stability – transition.

The Buddhists, being the deep thinkers that they have been these past 2,600 years, have a name for the state of transition – Bardo or antarabhava in Sanskrit.

Just as the Inuit, who live in a world of cold, ice, and snow, have many names for snow and ice, Buddhists – who live in a world of honesty relating to our illusions and how we relate to illusion and “reality” and transition – have broken down transitional states into six different types.

• Shinay bardo (Tibetan) – birth and life
• Milam bardo (T) – the dream state
• Samten bardo (T) – meditation
• Chikkhai bardo (T) – the moment of death
• Chönyid bardo (T) – the luminosity of the true nature which commences after the final ‘inner breath’ (available to those who have practiced meditation)
• Sidpai bardo (T) – becoming or transmigration (time between last breath and first breath in next life)

Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede at the Rochester Zen Center (Philip Kapleau’s lineage and home center) did a fantastic teisho on bardo and our present transition time in his December 8th, 2008 podcast that you can listen to at this link (iTunes).

To me the deeply important lesson we must learn is that surviving and thriving through transition requires us to avoid attachment, attachment that will force our ego to hold onto the old even though it has slipped from it’s grasp.

Once it has passed away, the ego is left with illusion and maintaining that illusion is deeply harmful for the growth of the ego to a less suffering state of being.

We Americans are ALL about attachment – it is how a capitalistic individualistic system works, how it thrives. Just because this is the way we have been aculturated, doesn’t mean that this is the best thing for us. It is exactly the wrong worldview for the hard work ahead as we are all forced to power down in a carbon-reduced world.

Quite the opposite. We have traveled just about as far as we can on this fossil fuel bonanza of orgiastic consumerism and debt dollars. Without these things, our way of life will become an illusion that is no longer possible.

Make no mistake, recognition that our worldview makes us blind to the perils of our age doesn’t mean we will magically escape those perils and not suffer.

I know that I am quite deeply attached to many people and to my homestead. I also know that there are many unperceived or dimly perceived attachments that surround me and my family.

I have stood in my garden on warm sunny days in the midst of the abundance, the fruits of so many months of labor and have tried to imagine doing the same in some post-apocalyptic time where chaos has come to distant cities and relatives. Even if we had some how magically survived those times largely intact, our home wired for solar, water well managed, food in abundance, a local economy that provided us with off-homestead things – would I be able to release everything that defined “America” even though those things were never really something I aspired to? (great wealth, vacations, huge houses, second homes, fantastically expensive educations, high paying stressful jobs, excessive power consumption, etc).

Its a continuum, a process. I would prefer to do this on deep levels as well as in the outer world so that I am not coping with surprise even as I cope with loss. I fear that surprise will always be a part of it, expect it.

Even though it has been a week since the Transition Town conference I went to in Cambridge, MA I am still integrating its message. I will write more, I promise, but I wanted to share something that resonated for me.

At the end of this intense 2 day experience one of our moderators told us this touching story of the Hopi Prophecy. Our moderator said that the Hopi say that the time of the “Lone Wolf” is at an end and that there is this fast rushing river of change that is running through our lives, whether we wish to see it or not.

There are many Hopi and other native prophesies that are floating about, especially relating to end times (tho they thought it as a Transition time from one distinct age to another, very different than modern day strip-mall variety Rapture Lore).

He gave us the nugget but I will share the whole thing here:

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.
And there are things to be considered:
Where are you living? What are you doing?
What are your relationships? Are you in right relation?
Where is your water? Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.
This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of
the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.
Least of all, ourselves.
For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a
halt. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

–The Elders, Oraibi, Arizona Hopi Nation

People, Americans, actually DO get peak oil, they know it on some level. Today, Sunday June 8th 2008, CNN ran a poll asking if we think gas prices will back off or “get worse”.

Looks like 95% are getting it

Its not news that this past week, especially this last Friday, was a watershed moment. Perhaps people spent this weekend actually thinking beyond their next fillup of gas. Perhaps not.

If you have begun thinking about peak oil, it will get depressing, I promise.

Your human after all right?

I have pasted an interested and relevant youtube video below that might be of some help in beginning to process the concept of peak oil and dealing with the natural state of despair that may follow.

One of the new sources of news I have been consuming recently is the news aggregator “The Energy Bulletin”.

On May 22, they linked to an article in a Canadian publication (Globe and Mail) entitled “Record oil prices signal ‘new world’”. In this article, they mention the term “Contango”, meant to describe a “rare” trading pattern in the oil industry where speculating traders are buying futures at prices well above current actual (non-futures) prices.

What a funky word, contango.

The wiki says this about contango:

Contango is a term used in the futures market to describe an upward sloping forward curve (as in the normal yield curve). One says that such a forward curve is “in contango” (or sometimes “contangoed”).

Formally, it is the situation where, and the amount by which, the price of a commodity for future delivery is higher than the spot price, or a far future delivery price higher than a nearer future delivery.

The opposite market condition to contango is known as backwardation. (SOURCE)

NPR podcast (August 24, 2006) on this term, visit that page.

Why does there need to be a new jargony term for speculative market manipulation?

The example given in the article is as follows:

May 21st on the NY Merchantile Exchange, crude oil for July delivery rose $4.19 to close at $133.17.

Meanwhile, contracts for future deliveries (I guess July is not in the future? It is May after all) well outpaced those numbers. December 2008 crude rose to $135.24, December 2010 to $135.15, December 2012 to $136.78, December 2014 to $137.52 and December 2016 to a whopping $142.00.

This, by definition, is an artificial construction. Who thinks that what traded on May 21st for those particular deliveries will be the same today? How is this different than betting on futures for a basketball game or on the baseball game your son will play 5 years from now?

How is this not gambling?

The question of whether it is gambling is not about morality in the first derivative. Its the second derivative, the psychology of the traders that moves in the direction of rationalized risk taking that is what makes gambling psychology matter.

I am not naive to think that this is a sea change either. It seems like we humans as a general lot LIKE to gamble on our future, why else would we allow such a system to exist in the first place?

The article says that “seasoned oil traders” claim that this contango arises from the fact that new traders are coming to the party (laying any sort of “blame” on “others”). These new traders seem to be pension fund and hedge fund managers putting one-way bets on oil futures. They say that these new traders are playing the “peak oil” fervor.

I think the real take away message from that article is found in the final lines. Its not speculation itself that is to blame (it is a symptom not the cause) but rather the utter stupidity of the Bush administration’s Fed in it’s mismanagement of the financial structural fundamentals that is giving rise to a weak dollar and a futures market that is destined for such dynamics.

Kevin Cook at Stockhouse.com said:

“Well, a shift is starting to occur that may win the argument for the peak camp. Today, as oil hits another new all-time high, above $129 per barrel, the back month contracts are on the rise too. Normally, futures markets for physical commodities will display a “contango” price relationship, where contracts for further delivery are higher than the near months. This is usually a function of a market where oil for future delivery trades at a premium because producers have fixed costs for storage that must be priced into those contracts. But, the last few months have seen markets driven by the demand spikes in the spot and front month contracts. This forced those near contracts higher, while the back months drifted lower. Now that “backward” market is starting to shift back to the more normal contango pricing.

What’s the reason for this shift?

Some analysts and traders think that the market is recognizing the real possibility of supply disruptions. I spoke to expert oil analyst Phil Flynn from Alaron Research this morning, and he told me that oil traders may be taking a longer-term view here on the situation and instead of discounting the demand spikes by selling the further out contracts, the market is actually acting like it may “pay to put oil away.” In other words, if oil industry participants believe that prices will maintain at these levels, then they will gladly store it in hopes they can charge even more down the road.” (SOURCE)

Stockpiling for profit – this leads to an obvious vicious circle.

I try to not be pessimistic but this seems like a self-propagating situation.