All quiet on the Peak Moment front during this seasonal inward-going time. We’ve taken an extended holiday to visit family and take advantage of unlimited electricity and internet while churning and upgrading internet, email, phones, and getting an iPad online (an investment for our off-grid energy budget). We’re also editing the next program (far more time- and energy-consuming than usual) while taking a welcome break from infrastructure projects at Lone Bobcat Woods.

When our friends at Undriving™ sent this 26 second NASA video, we stopped and watched it. And watched it again, mesmerized to see global temperature changes since the 1880s. What do YOU see happening, especially since around the year 2000? Hint: hockey stick.

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“YERT - Your Environmental Road Trip” is an entire environmental film festival wrapped up in an absorbing and entertaining, fast-paced two-hour documentary that’s both personal and planetary. Friends Mark, Julie and Ben pack themselves into a Prius to tour all 50 states in 52 weeks while aiming for near-zero garbage.

We view environmental problems like Appalachian mountaintop removal, Alaska permafrost melt, and post-Katrina wetlands habitat destruction, southwest water depletion.

We meet problem-solvers like Wes Jackson restoring perennial prairie grasses, farmer Joel Salatin cycling animals through pasture to build soil, and Will Allen growing plants and fish to feed the city.

We meet creative people building houses inside caves, turning compost into worm poop then packaged in recycled plastic, and developing solar panels roadways to replace asphalt in the post-petroleum era.

These twenty-somethings intersperse a lot of playfulness amidst the serious talk and fascinating tours. Silly, funny, gross, wacky. Ben pushes the Prius down the road on “National Bike and Walk Day.” In their five-day Iowa Corn Challenge, Mark chows down only fresh corn while Ben scarfs packaged foods containing corn products (all that high-fructose corn syrup, yuck!).

The trio lets us glimpse real life on the road, up close and personal: moments of elation, crabbiness, joy. Julie discovers she’s pregnant early on and bails from the vegetarian diet. I won’t spoil the ending, but you’ll find out whether it’s a girl or boy, and just how much garbage the trio accumulated.

This well-produced overview of important environmental issues and sampler of creative responses is optimistic without being pollyanna. We loved it. Smiles amid the serious stuff and the inspiring innovators. A chance to meet some of our heros and watch young people learn lots. We hope to follow in their footsteps and bring Peak Moment TV viewers longer chats with many of YERT’s interviewees.

With five film festival awards (and counting), YERT is an inspiring one-movie environmental film festival for EveryTown. Go to yert.com to watch the trailer and other clips, buy a DVD, find a screening, sign up for their e-mail list. Watch a short video with Mark and Ben at TEDx with innovations featured in their film.

We traveled to Berkeley on November 13, 2011 for Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet in which author Derrick Jensen interviews his invited guests. Below are some quotes and notes from the day. Derrick opened with:

“The only miracle we’re going to get is us. Gather your heart and join up with every living being [to fight back against destruction of the planet.]“

Lierre Keith is co-author with Derrick and Aric McBay of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. She spoke about the problem with civilization: its dependence on agriculture, which destroys topsoil the world over, and signaled the start of militarism (to protect stored food and to steal neighboring lands for expanding populations). Lierre points to the need to build a culture of resistance to industrial civilization, based not on individual lifestyle change but change at the societal level. Videos of her two full-length presentations are on YouTube’s DeepGreenResistance channel.

Political cartoonist Stephanie MacMillan’s Code Green cartoons graced the program and her presentation.  “The only weekly editorial cartoon focused exclusively on the environmental emergency,” they poke at industrial civilization’s hypocrisy and short-sightedness, and its assault on nature with dark and delicious humor.

Aric McBay, co-author of Deep Green Resistance, presented information on creating security culture in both aboveground and belowground groups. He pointed out that in resistance movements, only 2% of the people carry arms. The majority of people are needed to raise awareness, and to provide material and psychological support to those at the front lines - to become a culture that supports resistance. He showed examples of resistance movements that have in the past, and are now, making a difference. Videos of Aric’s two full-length presentations are on YouTube’s DeepGreenResistance channel.

Thomas Linzey is a public interest attorney at Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). He’s doing gutsy groundbreaking work with local communities to pass ordinances preventing corporations from trashing their communities: anti-fracking, anti-big box stores, anti-factory farms. Since we taped his local talk “Reclaiming Democracy: How Communities are Saying “NO” to Corporate Rights” in 2008, he has further pushed the edges in those ordinances: besides placing the rights of communities and nature above those of  corporations, recent ordinances are standing up to states.

We first “met” Waziyatawin in the documentary END:CIV: Resist or Die (entire film is online). A Dakota writer, educator and activist, “Waz” spoke about her culture’s resistance to colonization by westerners, removal from their ancestral lands, and destruction of their cultures. She called for indigenous people to resume their role as first defenders of the land — with support from those in the non-indigenous community. It begins, she said, by decolonizing the mind. This quote spoke to me:

“The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land?”  —Vine DeLoria, Jr. from God is Red: A Native View of Religion.

Arundhati Roy read from two recent books Broken Republic: Three Essays and Walking with the Comrades about visiting forbidding forests in Central India, where tribespeople are taking up arms to protect their people and region from state-backed exploiters. Labeled by the Indian mainstream as “Maoist guerillas,” these indigenous groups are fighting corporate interests like multinational mining companies who are cannibalizing India’s natural resources, supported by Indian government agreements and military.

Derrick closed with this reminder:

“The task of an activist is not to navigate the systems of authority with as much integrity as possible, but to take down those systems.”

Read more about Deep Green Resistance in Beyond Protest: Saving our planet with ‘Deep Green Resistance’ by Rady Ananda of Food Freedom.

“So while DGR [Deep Green Resistance] is about fighting back, in the end this movement is about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love.” — Derrick Jensen

It’s been all quiet on the writing front while Robyn and I have set up our winter encampment site for our “Little House” (motorhome). Enormous ancestral black oaks ring Bearhaven meadow, whispering of the Maidu people whose acorn grinding rocks are not far from the year-round spring. Red-shouldered hawk has been a frequent caller, along with a band of curious ravens frequently circling to check us working on outdoors projects.

For electricity, we are supplementing the RV’s generator and her rooftop solar panels with twelve 20-year-old solar panels from our house’s original set. Robyn installed equipment in the RV to optimize both solar systems (contact us if you want details).

Not finding what we wanted commercially, we designed and built lightweight, portable racks to hold the panels off the ground and at angles adjustable for different seasons.

Such a fun project, just about right for the level of our construction skills and portable tools. We started with drawings and a small foamcore model to think through our design.

Each three-panel rack is made of 2×2’s and held together by bolts. (I always envied my boy cousins’ lincoln logs and erector sets back in 1950s era of gender-specific toys. Now that longing is fulfilled.)

Some shovel work to level the ground for each rack, a long wire run from panels to the RV, voila! Extra juice!
We’re warm and cozy now as the cold winter rains descend upon us, grateful for our sweet corner in this wild country, and welcoming an introspective season.

Chris Martenson, author of The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Energy, Economy and the Environment book and video course, just gave two engaging presentations to our community. I wanted an update from our Peak Moment Conversation in early 2010 The Crash Course - Exponential Growth Meets Reality (episode 166), so we taped a conversation that’ll be out shortly.

Chris said that what he predicted back then is exactly what we’re seeing now: slowing economy, high unemployment, debts teetering, possible sovereign debt defaults across Europe, record people on food stamps.

You have to include energy in the economy story, Chris said. “The economy only functions if and only if you have energy.” And not just energy, but liquid fuels. Not only are oil supplies getting tighter, but it’s costing more energy to get energy (deepwater drilling, tar sands, etc.). An economy dependent on growth is getting squeezed by energy constraints.

Chris’s first presentation “Our Predicament” is a capsule version of his “Crash Course” (videos free at chrismartenson.com). Chris is a genius at drawing connections between the three E’s of Energy, Economy and the Environment, showing why the next twenty years will be utterly unlike the last twenty. Bottom line: we’re at the end of growth. Basically, just as population and consumption are exploding exponentially, we’re seeing constraints in oil production and natural resources like minerals, water and topsoil. He calls for a vision of a world worth inheriting, noting the vacuum at the national level, but being tried out in various flavors in communities like ours.

Chris’s second presentation “Investing in the Future” offers his beliefs about what’s ahead of us. Here are some highlights:

• The rules will be changed.
• The markets are rigged.
• Events will unfold very rapidly. Black Swans (the impossible) will become the rule (like the Fukushima nuclear and Deepwater Horizon catastrophes)
• Energy will consume a growing proportion of our disposable income, with food prices mirroring oil prices. Peak oil will stifle growth and starve the economy slowly but surely.
• Simplicity is coming. Complex systems like our civilization require more energy, and energy is declining.
• Things will happen from the outside in. Want to see what’s coming? Look at the margins, like marginalized populations or countries at the periphery (like Greece right now).
• There’s nearly universal insolvency, and he predicts debts will not be paid back.
• Anything that is unsustainable will someday stop… like the fiscal situation in our country — a U.S. fiscal crisis is highly likely.

Chris calls himself a “thrivalist.” He encouraged us to get our own house in order well before the cultural tipping point, advising people to invest in energy efficiency in their homes, long-term food storage, buying items your family will need over the next few years. Personally, he’s holding physical gold and silver as alternate currencies.

Chris’s website offers a wealth of resources [http://www.chrismartenson.com]. (Photo thanks to Jason Wiskerchen).

Summer is gently turning into fall, with beautiful poison oak leaves fading to soft crimson and dusty yellow, and our first brrrrr crisp morning. In harmony with this seasonal contraction, we feel inclined to contract a bit ourselves after three years of extensive output.

We’re taking a travel hiatus as we rent our off-grid house, live in our RV/mobile studio, downsize further, and produce shows we taped on our trip to the Pacific Northwest.

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“How do you define ’sustainability’?” was the opening question asked of me by co-host Peter Dawson Buckland on Pennsylvania State University’s Sustainability Now Radio today (listen to archived interview).

I quoted recent guest Derrick Jensen (How the West HAS Won, episode 200) from his latest book Dreams:

The word “sustainable”… would apply to some action that can be done more or less forever, which means an action (or a way of life) that at the worst does not harm one’s land-base, and more realistically improves one’s land-base on the land-base’s own terms.” (page 428-429)

The land-base’s own terms, not human terms. Given that definition, industrial civilization is totally unsustainable. Industrial society is using up resources from everywhere (way beyond our own land-bases) and spewing out wastes like crazy. All for the short-term (profits) rather than for the long term, for Life.

How do you define “sustainability”?

I want them to find new homes for these books on nature, consciousness, and spirit.

Donate to Peak Moment TV, and email me which books you want. Suggested donation is $5-15 per book including shipping (but please factor in hardcover, large and unusual books.) If overseas, add extra postage. I’d love it if you’d take a a whole topic section — and reduce the per book donation! I’ll update this blog as books are taken. My email is janaia-at-peakmoment.tv (replace -at- with @)

You can include in your order any of the Books for These Times, and Art and Creativity Books, too.

Books already taken (in alphabetical order): A Little Book of Coincidence, A New Covenant with Nature, A Vision of Wilderness, Earth Mysteries, Gaia Star Mandalas, Green Man. Pieces of White Shell, Testimony, The Diary of a Forty-Niner, The Healing Energies of Earth, The World Without Us, This Blue Body is Everything We Know

As I wrote in Books for these times - Books to share, one of my “gazingus pins” is books. This set of art books reflect my fascination with Japanese, Celtic, Islamic, decorative and spiritual art, as well as the creative process and technique.

Rather than store these books, I want them to find new homes. Which is where you come in.

Donate to Peak Moment TV, and email me which books you want. Suggested donation is $10-15 per book including shipping (but please factor in hardcover, large and unusual books.) If overseas, add extra postage. I’d love it if you’d take a a whole topic section — and reduce the per book donation! I’ll update this blog as books are taken. My email is janaia-at-peakmoment.tv (replace -at- with @)

Thanks for helping me reduce my gazingus pin collection. Oh yes, you can include in your order any of the Books for These Times and Books on Nature and Psyche, too.

Books spoken for (in alphabetical order): Birds, Beasts, Blossoms and Bugs; Centering, Learning by Heart, The Courage to Create, The Spiritual in Modern Art, The Tao of Watercolor, The Yoga of Drawing, The Zen of Creative Painting.

(Or, how we spent our summer vacation)

Early in June 2011, a renter for our off-grid house appeared! This will free us to travel for extended periods.

A major downsizing opportunity! We are retaining Robyn’s room for long-term storage. The guest space adjoining our garage will be our backup residence. All told, we’re moving from a 1500 square foot house into about 768 square feet (but actually living in only 200 square feet in the RV). (By comparison, our hero Dee Williams’ portable tiny house has about 84 sq-ft downstairs and a 49 sq ft sleeping loft, and a 14 sq. ft. front porch. Indoors total is 133 sq. ft. We’re doing pretty well with 200 sq. ft. for two of us, which includes two work spaces).

We have about eight weeks to move out of the house.

Weeks 3 and 5. Janaia’s mother Rowena (Ms. Clean) comes for two weeks and gives us a mighty good kick start.

Rowena takes away two packed van loads.

Weeks 1-7. Janaia staging stuff to go out. Buckets of emergency food storage grains go to a friend.

Every week. Pack it out! So far, three utility trailer loads (with Janaia’s art studio and other furniture), seven van loads packed to the rafters (above), and seven large boxes shipped.

Week 7. Robyn’s room with edit bay (left), art and office storage (center), and long-term storage (right). More downsizing opportunities abound.

Week 8. We made it! Clean and ready to rent (Left, dining/kitchen. Right, living room)

Week 8. Janaia drops. Marathon over. At least this phase.

Week 9-10. With the house completed, we turn our attention to the guest room portion of the garage. It is our backup residence and consumables storage. It’s also a staging area for more items to send on. Downsizing continues…

We’ve simplified. We feel much lighter and easier. We’re letting go of ideas and identities along with stuff. I’ve let go of the notion of Lone Bobcat Woods being the hub for a residential community.

Our call for now is to be vagabonds taping Peak Moment shows in the wider world. We’re energized to follow that call, not knowing where it leads, but looking forward to its unfolding. And happy to have less stuff in the little red wagon we’re pulling behind us.