jameswharris

The Children of Science Fiction

I am a child of science fiction and the 1960s. On rare occasions while growing up I’d run into others of my kind, but it didn’t happen often. It’s not like today where most kids love science fiction, even the popular pretty girls. I was a member of many pop culture groups, including the first generation raised on the boob tube that became the hordes that worshipped long hair, rock music and the counter culture. It seems a few us also read Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.

As I type this Jefferson Airplane’s “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil” is blasting through the speakers. The long version. If I had a Venn diagram that collected people born from 1950-1955 and grew up interested in science fiction, astronomy and San Francisco acid rock music of the 1960s, how many of those people would have overlapping interest in all three subjects? How many people out there grew up influence by L. Frank Baum, Robert A. Heinlein, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac?

I know who my blood relatives are, but now I’m wondering, who are my literary relatives? With the advent of the Internet I’m running across my kind more and more. This first started happening back in the 1980s with online bulletin board systems. Just recently I stumbled on a couple of online watering holes, where my SF siblings hang out talking about the classic books of science fiction. These are two Yahoogroup discussion lists:

There are about two hundred science fiction fans signed up between the two groups, with each group reading a classic SF title a month and discussing it, and a subset of those participating are a number of fans my age that started reading SF the same time I did in the early 1960s. We all discuss those old SF books with various levels of passion for the genre, but it seems like science fiction did a number on us that made us different from the normal kids growing up around us, giving us our own unique subculture.

I feel the kids who grew up with Star Wars are much different from my generation that grew up with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Sure we might have evolved some when we started reading Delany, Zelazny and Dick, and the New Wave writers, but we’re strangely tied to that generation of Ace Doubles and Ballantine Books and finding our reading thrills on twirling wired racks. And I wonder if the kids who grow up now with the many forms of science fiction today have any sense of kinship at all. I know about First Fandom, and later generations of SF fans from the 1940s and 1950s that preceded my generation, because dozens of them became the science fiction writers my generation loved.

From my science fiction cousins, born 1950-1955, many also went on to write science fiction too, like Catherine Asaro, Kage Baker, Iain M. Banks, Steven Barnes, Greg Bear, David Brin, Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, Brenda Clough, Julie Czerneda, Karen Joy Fowler, Lisa Goldstein, Kathleen Ann Goonan, K. W. Jeter, Gwyneth Jones, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, Geoffrey Landis, Paul J. McAuley, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Paul Russo, Mary Doria Russell, Geoff Ryman, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Melinda Snodgrass, Bruce Sterling, S. M. Stirling, Michael Swanwick, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Charles Wilson, Timothy Zahn, and many others.

Will their fans be as faithful as my generation for going back now after forty and fifty years and rereading their favorite adolescent books? The 1960s was one strange trip. The times, with rock and roll, Vietnam, the counter culture, civil rights, psychedelic drugs, and all the other pop cultures of the 1960s, seared deeply into our brains. Distinctive smells trigger memories, and science fiction is like newly mown spring onions, dredging up long forgotten past experiences – but artificial ones, one of adventures on far off worlds, induced by a self mesmerizing technique of staring at black marks on cheap paperback pulp pages. I can’t play an oldie rock song without an old science fiction story haunting me. I can’t read an old science fiction story without 60s rock music coming out of that old memory radio.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t exorcise science fiction from my soul, and I have tried. Fifty of my nearly two hundred blog posts have been about science fiction. Science fiction is a toy I’ve never outgrew. No matter how much I try to convince myself into believing that science fiction is merely entertaining stories I can’t deprogram myself. I once wrote, “The Religion that Failed to Achieve Orbit” to be funny, but it’s not. I rejected religion as a tyke, but caught the science fiction bug instead. No matter how much my Zen master beats me with his bamboo cane, I still see the Maya of science fiction.

Is it just me? Or are there other aging science fiction junkies out there still looking for sense-of-wonder fixes? When I turned fifty and decided to go to the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, I intended to write Science Fiction 2.0 stories. I wanted to purify my mind of all the old science fiction tropes and invent new ones for the twenty-first century. Heinlein, for all of his success never achieved escape velocity. The science fiction I grew up with was merely wish-fulfilling fantasies about escaping this problem filled world and running off to enchanting new worlds.

Rereading the classics of science fiction is like retracing the original trail looking for new clues. Joining these Yahoogroups have introduced me to other people doing the same thing. Is it merely nostalgia? Is circling back just a common trait of getting older? Are my efforts just a silly desire to recapture my youth? Is it just a search for lost meaning, or a narcissistic impulse to find importance in my life? Or could it simply be that I want to be a amateur scholar of genre history?

I don’t know if this is true or not, but somehow I feel my generation was more influenced by growing up with science fiction than earlier or later generations of science fiction fans. For most readers of science fiction, the genre is just a category of entertainment. For people growing up with the 1960s, the baby boomers, who felt the whole world was watching, science fiction added an extra dimension of drama about the future. We listened to our rock and roll brothers and sisters sing about the revolution, and thought, “sure thing man!” But we believed the revolution was going to lead mankind into outer space, not some groovy hippie commune.

Now that I’m getting old, and reconnecting with other science fiction fans who are rereading those old classic SF novels from our youth, I think we’re reevaluating the meaning of science fiction. Were we just kids reading repackaged pulp fiction because it was exciting, or was it visionary and educational?

I’m currently listening to METAtropolis, a shared world-building theme anthology edited by John Scalzi and published by Audible.com. The five writers, all newer science fiction writers born 1962-1979, write about cities of the near future with the same kind of 1960s revolutionary excitement. They grew up with science fiction and the Internet, another social revolutionary vector, and they see exciting possibilities. Does that help us?

Unfortunately, the world of science fiction philosophers is tiny, and not as influential as the more famous digital-world philosophers. There is overlap, but I have to wonder if the unfolding of the future has already outpaced the writers of the future. How will John Brunner’s epic experimental Sci-Fi masterpiece, Stand on Zanzibar from 1968 and set in 2010, match up with the real 2010 when it arrives, or even the science fiction writers of 2008 trying to predict the near future?

Using hindsight, and rereading old science fiction, how many of those childhood reads really prepared me for the present? I recently discovered this quote while rereading The Space Merchants by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl:

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

That’s a pretty fascinating quote written originally in 1952. Especially when you realize that this is satire and the conservationists are right even back then. Science fiction is just amateur philosophers thinking about the future. Sometimes, it’s just an action story. Sometimes, it’s a “what if this goes on…” story. Science fiction writers and readers think about all the possibilities. Now the children of science fiction are growing up in the real future. Have their literary parents, the science fiction books they were raised on, prepared them properly?

I’m always surprised to find seeds like the quote above when rereading old science fiction. It makes me wonder if reading science fiction helped program my personality. I’ve been concerned with over population, the limits of growth, pollution, global terrorism, economic collapse, and more, all my life. A certain percentage of the population take global warming very seriously. Another percentage don’t. Is it because they weren’t prepared by reading lots of science fiction scenarios?

I fondly remember hundreds of wonderful science fiction novels, but when I reread them, many aren’t so wonderful today. Foundation by Isaac Asimov has some cool ideas, but the storytelling in that fix-up novel is clunky. City by Clifford Simak is another fix-up novel that still provoked a sense of wonder in me, but failed to work with some of my friends. Strangely, I discover that I admire Philip K. Dick’s old work because he wrote about quirky realistic people who were motivated by their own self interests that often superseded the direction of the plot.

Too often old science fiction novels contained characters that are just mouthpieces for the author to rattle off his pet ideas. That makes for bad storytelling, but is maybe a clue about my personality and why I’m haunted by science fiction. Science fiction wanted to explain reality. It lacked the discipline of science. It was much further out than religion, which was always quite far out, but science fiction sold itself as being scientific, which has never been true. The 1960s was a kooky time, with UFO freaks, drug trippers, Edgar Cayce disciplines, ESP dreamers, so is it not all that strange that a bunch of kids wanted to follow Danny Dunn and Tom Swift Jr. into outer space.

Of course, you know what that means? I reread science fiction in my fifties because I’m wanting to return to the dreams I had in my teens. 2008 is the far future from my kid self of 1968. It’s just not the future I expected or wanted. Is being nostalgic merely wanting to start over again, and maybe this time get it right?

I finish this as Jefferson Airplane starts singing, “Have You Seen the Saucers.” I kid you not.

JWH 11/19/8

Is The Internet Bad For The Economy?

Since the earliest days of Amazon.com I have been buying shelf loads of books from this innovate Internet business every year. Then I stopped going to record shops and bought my CDs from them too. Later on I bought running shoes, electronic gadgets, printer ink, and anything else that was convenient. I buy a lot more books because of Amazon.com’s heavily discounted prices, no state sales tax and free shipping on orders over $25. Now that the economy has taken a fall, I’ve got to wonder if my buying habits helped in knocking it out?

None of my favorite bookstores have gone under, but they’re struggling. All my old record stores are dead. So is the place where I bought my running shoes. And all the small computer shops I used to visit have disappeared. My state is hurting from low revenue, mostly gotten from sales tax rather than an income tax.

I buy a lot of audio books. Audio books used to be $25-150 on cassettes and CDs, but I get them for $9.54 each at Audible.com as a digital download. I never would have bought many titles if I had to pay the old prices, but if retailers now sold them for $15-25 a book, and Audible.com didn’t exist, I would buy 3-4 titles a month.

I used to buy 2-4 CDs a week. Now I buy none because I pay $120 a year for unlimited listening on Rhapsody.com. I used to buy a lot of software, but most of the programs I use today are free. My wife and I used to collect DVDs, but now we have Netflix. We used to pay for photo prints to give to people, but now we email copies.

I’ve got to ask: Is the Internet hurting our capitalistic system? I love the Internet. I would never want to give it up. But survival in this world depends on economic activity. And comfort and security depends on everyone having a job and the economy doing well. A 2% rise in unemployment, which we’ve recently experienced, has brought fear and misery. What will 10% do to our sense of well being? Do you remember the early 1980s? People are talking about this financial crisis being the worse since the Great Depression. 1932 had a peak of 25% unemployed. I have no way of imagining that level of bad times, and I don’t think anyone under 95 can really remember what it was like either. We really don’t want to go there, and need to consider doing almost anything not to.

We all need to be conscious of our economic impact. Spending frugally, staying out of debt, making careful purchasing decisions, and all those lessons financial advisors taught us might not be the right thing to do right now. Would spending a few dollars more for each book and paying the sales tax be a better choice for my local economy than ordering from Amazon?

This afternoon my wife and I wanted to watch a movie together, but there was nothing on at the theater we wanted to see. So we thought we’d go by Target and buy Kung Fu Panda. It was $19.99 plus almost $2 in tax. I could get it from Amazon for $15.99, a savings of almost $6. But we decided to wait a couple of days for when it comes in via Netflix. The rental cost would be less than the tax, thus saving over $20.

We didn’t buy Kung Fu Panda. We just didn’t feel like spending $22 for something so trivial in these economic times. If Kung Fu Panda would have been on sale for $12.99 we would have come home with a new DVD. I wanted to help the economy, and considered a 4 DVD set of Dexter Season One for $17.99 plus tax or a 6 DVD set of Northern Exposure Season 6 for $14.99, both of which seemed like excellent buys, but I’ve been spoiled by Netflix. Why buy something to own when I only expect to watch those shows one time?

See, the Internet has turned me into a bad consumer. It’s saved me a lot of money, plus it’s more efficient because I don’t have to maintain a physical copy of something that would clutter up my house. But I’ve deprived a local business of income, took jobs away from the local economy, and reduced the tax revenue of Tennessee. My gain is a loss for my community.

Either we have to design an economic system with the efficiency of the Internet in mind, or we need to go back to our old ways. I’m reminded of an old science fiction story. I can’t remember the title, but it was about a future where the poor had to consume on schedule, while the rich were free to consume as needed. An example, the poor had to change their shirts several times a day to keep production up in shirt factories.

Do we really want an economy where people need to buy DVDs rather than rent so more people will have jobs? Or buy a new gas-guzzling SUV every three years. I’m sure you get my drift.

Well, the answer might be yes. If we want to keep the old economy going. And we might until they invent a new economy. This is all very hard. What if you could buy a car that would last 300,000 miles, and used little or no gas, being mainly powered by solar panels on your garage’s roof. What does that do to GM or Exxon? If environmental technology, ET, becomes just as efficient as information technology, IT, what does that do to the economy?

What if I took the money I saved by using the Internet and spent it on renovating my house with local labor, buying from local suppliers, but with the goal of making my home more energy efficient? Will that help the new economy, or just delay the death of the old economy? I already bought a new SEER 16 HVAC that’s saving me hundreds of dollars a month on energy. That’s $9300 that went into the local economy, but now my monthly nut to the utility company is smaller. I could start spending money on insulation, better windows, better appliances, and all of that will add to the economy.

Eventually, I’ll have a very energy efficient house, and I’ll start putting much less into the economic system. It’s like switching from buying DVDs to renting them. At some point being efficient leads to less economic activity.

Yes, I think the Internet is bad for my old local economy, and bad for our old national economy. What’s needed is a new economy. It’s called a steady-state economy, one that’s not based on growth. Is the financial crisis that has come down on us going to be the metamorphosis that we must endure before becoming butterflies in a new economic world? Will Barack Obama return to old tricks to solve our new problems? Or can he be Copernicus seeing the Ptolemaic economic solar system with new vision?

We can always go back to a wood-chopping, horse and buggy world. We could turn off the Internet. This financial crisis may force many to give up cell phones, Internet and cable TV. Without the Internet, most people will have little need of a personal computer. Going backwards is possible and may happen. We may have to prop up the old economy, but is that what we want?

It’s very important that we all pay attention. In the next few years, a lot of decisions are going to be made. Where are you going to throw your support? Every dollar spent is a vote.

JWH – 11/15/8

We Need A Number

Go do a Google search on this phrase – “Target Atmospheric CO2” – and include the quotation marks, and you will find 2,400 links. The links point to essays discussing a scientific paper by James Hansen and other scientists called “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” The gist of the story: The likely safe high range for CO2 in the atmosphere is 350ppm, and we’re beyond that at 385ppm. Hansen is the NASA scientist that first alerted Congress to the global warming problem back in 1988. Randomly read some of those essays reacting to the paper and you’ll save me the time paraphrasing it. The paper itself is perfectly readable, if you’re patient, but it’s bumpy with scientific speak, so it might be easier to read the commentaries.

Many of the writers act like 350 is the magic number we need, and in some ways that’s true. It gives humanity a very specific goal. It tells everyone that if we want weather like the nice weather we grew up with, then everybody needs to go on a carbon diet and get the atmospheric CO2 below 350 again. However, that does not convey the sacrifice needed to achieve the goal.

I think we need another number. Scientists need to decide what is the fair share target number we all need to stay under personally to get the job done. Recycling paper and buying compact florescent lights are not going to do the trick. I think until we have a personal number to target, along with proper labeling on everything we buy, people won’t understand how much CO2 they need to cut out of their lives.

How much sacrifice do we need to make? If the nations of the world had a crash program to switch to 100% solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and other sources of clean energy, would that solve the problem? Would that be one way to solve the problem without asking individuals to think about the details? Or should governments just kill off some of the most polluting industries? Do we need to give up the beef industry? Or the paper industry? Or the airline industry? Or all of them plus more? Or would it be better to ask the citizens themselves to take on their own share of global warming responsibility and let them make their own decisions on how to clean up their share of personal waste?

If we had a number to measure our personal use against, we could all decide the sacrifices we’d like to make. Some people might be willing to dry their clothes on the line outside for a year to budget flying to New York City for a vacation. Other people might buy high tech cars that put little CO2 in the atmosphere so they can enjoy living in a larger house. Others might choose to walk to work so eating steaks wouldn’t break their personal greenhouse gas consumption budget.

Many people have suggested having a carbon tax to help fund a Manhattan style project to convert to clean energy power plants. This would discourage waste and finance change. Having a tax would be one way to quantify for the public their duty to humanity. It could also simplify the decisions people make. If gasoline with a carbon tax was $12 a gallon, then you’d think long and hard about wasting it. If the price of electricity from coal went to 4x with a carbon tax, it would give utility companies income to build new plants and customers incentives to make their houses energy efficient.

This would be the easy route. What if in the next ten years we screwed around and didn’t do anything and it became frighteningly obvious we need to do something drastic? Would we make bigger sacrifices then? What if we had to outlaw the gasoline powered car? Or outlaw airplanes? Or ration electricity?

There are thousands and thousands of things we can do now by freely making the choices ourselves before the governments of the world have to get heavy. If we knew what our carbon allotment was, it would be easier to make those choices.

Take for instance paper. I have no idea how much paper contributes to the problem of global warming, but I have seen one number that says that junk mail adds 114 billion pounds of CO2 annually. My reaction is to give up paper completely. I’m phasing out my magazine and newspaper subscriptions, I’m doing my best to never print computer documents, I’m working to reduce junk mail, and I’m finding ways to shop for products with less packaging.

If everyone thought this way, paper magazines would disappear from society and everyone would read electronic periodicals. Is this good or bad? That’s a lot of jobs lost. Potentially, it could mean a lot of businesses would go under. I’d hate to see that, but on the other hand, paper really isn’t needed in our computer networked society. My local newspaper just started offering a weekly electronic edition that looks just like the print edition, but costs less than the Sunday only paper subscription. I’m moving to a paperless lifestyle, but even though it’s logical to me, is it what everyone else should be doing too?

I draw the line at magazines and newspapers, but feel that books are worth their environmental costs because we preserve them and consider newspapers and mags disposable. What if that’s wrong. What if there’s a way to have environmental safe magazines? Unless scientists tell us the values associated with all our consumption we won’t know how to make enlightened decisions. If a National Geographic subscription form came with a number – 24 – for 24 pounds of CO2 added to the atmosphere per 1 year subscription then that would be a big step in understanding the problem.

However, unless I know my allotment number, say 1,000 pounds per year, I wouldn’t be able to practically use the 24 figure I got from National Geographic. So Mr. Hansen, it you and your science buddies would be so kind, give us another number. 350 is cool for the world to know, but we all need another number, a number that would tell us how to live by so all 7 billion people riding on spaceship Earth pulls that 385ppm figure down to 350ppm. That number is the maximum amount in pounds of greenhouse gases we can each safely add to the atmosphere in a year.

President Elect Obama, you could help with this too. Instead of offering another general economic incentive package, offer us tax breaks on buying specific clean energy products and services. That would be another way to quantify a solution. Tax what’s bad for the environment, and subsidized what’s good. Get the U.S. to do more than it’s fair share to get the world below that 350ppm number. We owe the rest of the world.

JWH 11-9-8

Restless

I’m listening to “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” by Tears for Fear, but that just finished and Todd Rundgren begins singing “Change Myself.” That’s a better song for my mood, and it’s a nice transition from Tears from Fear because Todd sings,

I want to change the world
I want to make it well
How can I change the world
When I can’t change myself
Try again tomorrow

But then I go back to Tears for Fear and listen to,

It’s my own design
It’s my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help me make the most
Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever

Every day I wake up knowing what I want to do. I have been struggling for months to work on a short story that I have tried off and on for years to finish writing. I tell myself that’s the one thing in life that I want to complete, yet I can’t, no matter how I apply myself. I guess it’s writer’s block, but since I’m not a real writer I think it’s something else. I can write essays until the all the bovines get back to the barn, but writing fiction is like pushing the molecules of my body through a concrete block.

This leaves me in a state of continual restlessness that I can only fight by occupying my mind with other diversions, such as watching “The Big Bang Theory” or flipping through my 18k of mp3 songs looking for mental stimulation. My restless is often soothed by words, such as Bob Dylan’s,

You will search, babe,
At any cost.
But how long, babe,
Can you search for what is not lost?
Everybody will help you,
Some people are very kind.
But if I,
Can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I’ll keep it with mine.

I can’t help it
If you might think I am odd,
If I say I’m loving you not for what you are
But what you’re not.
Everybody will help you
Discover what you set out to find.
But if I can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I’ll keep it with mine.

The train leaves
At half past ten,
But it will be back
In the same old spot again
The conductor
He’s still stuck on the line
And if I, can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I’ll keep it with mine.

Every evening I am back at this word processor at half past ten. When I can’t paint my own words I stare at words others wrote. I should give up and shoot up some TV. I’m so restless that it eats away at me, but writing about it doesn’t really help. I wish I was a machine so I could program myself to do exactly what I want.

JWH 11-3-8

Plan B 3.0 by Lester R. Brown

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization can be downloaded for free, but I recommend buying a copy and making it your personal Bible. Lester R. Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, continues to monitor the Earth’s economic and ecological health and analyze what needs to be done to build a sustainable future. We’ve all boarded the Titanic, and Lester Brown knows about the iceberg, but few people listen to him. Studying this book gives me so much to contemplate. Just glancing at the subjects in the table of contents will tell you what’s this book is about, and you can read every chapter online, or download a .pdf of each chapter or the whole book, and even download an Excel spreadsheet of the data too, if you like studying numbers.

Just look how he has divided the problems we face:

Deteriorating Oil and Food Security
Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas
Emerging Water Shortages
Natural Systems under Stress
Early Signs of Decline
Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population
Restoring the Earth
Feeding Eight Billion Well
Designing Cities for People
Raising Energy Efficiency
Turning to Renewable Energy
The Great Mobilization

What is My Fair Share?

To ask if God exists, is philosophical speculation. No on knows, and we have debated the question for centuries and will continue to do so. To ask if there is a limit to economic growth is not imaginary speculation. We will soon know the answer, one way or the other. Most people believe there is unlimited economic potential for growth. The economic foundation of our society is based on this belief, just like the builders of the Titanic believed they had built an unsinkable ship.

There are new economists that now see that any model of economics that does not include the ecology of the Earth is doomed to fail. Lester Brown says that any product that doesn’t factor in its complete costs from all sources is doomed to bankruptcy in the market, like Enron failed as a company because it cooked the books and hid part of its true operating costs.

What this means is economics is really a subset of ecology.

If you accept this, then you come to understand that the Earth has limits, and realize that growth based economics means we’re all cells consuming the Earth like a cancer spreading in a host. The idea of steady-state economics is a theory that suggests we can all be healthy cells that live symbiotically within our planetary organism.

Once you realize this, your primary ethical question of existence is: How much can I consume without being cancerous? This is more than just worrying about carbon dioxide and global warming. That’s only one of many cancerous growths attacking the Earth. The answer has to be more than: As little as possible. Economists and ecologists need to set goals for individuals to aim for in their daily lives.

If you could buy a piece of land and live there in a totally sustainable manner, without using resources outside of your property, that might be one answer, but not a practical one. Scientists are just beginning to explore this issue. Think of the parable about the fishes and the loaves, but this time divide them between 7 billion people and then factor in that the supply of wheat and fish should never end.

Another way to think about it would be to let scientists determine how much carbon dioxide can safely go into the atmosphere each year and then divide that number by 7 billion and let us each figure out how we’re going to budget our CO2 use. A recent issue of the New Scientist suggests that might only be 1 ton per person, which means living like someone from Yemen or in the Republic of Congo today.

Since I’m probably using 10-20 times that, I’m quite cancerous. About the only way to get myself down to using 1 ton of carbon per year would be to ride a bike and make my house perfectly energy efficient. A possibility, but not a likely one. The 1 ton per person is a global fair share estimate and much more restrictive than those 50% and 80% reduction goals for American peak usage.

What Happens If We Don’t Change?

Even if we don’t concern ourselves with various forms of pollution, there’s a good chance we’re still heading for economic collapse. If unlimited economic growth is truly unsustainable, then it will also fail for other reasons, other than too much poisonous output. We can also fail for not having enough input. The economy can also crash and burn by not jogging faster than debt, something that’s been dominating the news lately. Other canaries falling dead are stories about shortages. Just before the liquidity scare, it looked like we were about to start running short of oil. Luckily a cure for high oil demand is a slow economy, or is that lucky? What if we ran out of oil but didn’t have renewable energy. What if we ran out of fresh water before we ran out of oil? We could easily face critical shortages of commodities long before we faced surpluses of rising oceans. Reading Plan B 3.0 illustrates the enormity of all the problems we’ll be facing.

Human nature tends to ignore looming icebergs or melting glaciers. We like to focus on what we want, and not people shouting that the sky is falling. However, we have seen great positive social transformations happen quickly – just look at the switch to electricity or going from horse power to horsepower. And isn’t it amazing how fast we all became geeks with our computers, video games and cell phones? I think we’ll all change over and over again, whether changing for good or bad, whether we move into an ecological paradise, or a depression that makes the Great Depression seem like the good ole days.

We can’t avoid change. The real question is whether we can surf change or will change flow over us like a tsunami.

Change is Happening Now

Everything Lester Brown writes about in Plan B 3.0 can be seen on your high definition television right now, if you’re willing to tune in to the right shows. If you only watch Pushing Daisies and Heroes you can delay learning about the iceberg until after it hits. A good way to set up your early warning system is to watch PBS Frontline each week. Keep adding PBS shows, and then documentaries from National Geographic and the various Discovery channels. Watch between the scenes. Count how many references to drought you’ve seen in one week, or how many continents and countries are losing their glaciers. You don’t need a supercomputer or Al Gore to spot trends in global weather patterns.

How Smart Are People?

All the problems mentioned in Plan B 3.0 can be managed. Theoretically, if humans can cause the problems, humans can fix the problems, but that may not be how things play out. What everyone really wants to know is whether they are going to be one of those people at the Superdome after Katrina, or will they be the kind of person who had the resources to get out safely on their own. Being prepared helps. Sometimes luck is merely a coin toss, and other times luck favors those who plan ahead. But how do you prepare for global recession?

Plan B 3.0 is a look at what the people in power need to be doing to solve the transition from the economics of growth to a steady-state economy at the macro level. What we need now are Plan B handbooks for us little guys, advising us what we should be doing to make the same adjustments at the micro levels. This could be books about careers for college students, to how-to books about starting businesses in a steady-state economy. I doubt the plumbing industry will be shaken up, but is there much of a future for jet airline pilots?

JWH – 11-2-8