Monday, February 20, 2012

Gasoline Prices up Bike Riding up

You want to know what gas prices are going to be in the next year ot two? Here’s the math. Over the past decade or so, convention crude oil production numbers are about 6 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil  equivalent used for energy to produce them, so the net gain is 5 barrels of oil to be sold for every barrel of consumed by the oil companies. This means, at today's prices, the oil companies need to get about $500  ($100 per barrel) out of every barrel they consume in producing the oil they sell. BUT, the tar sands oil, and other expensive deep sea stuff, only net about 1.5 barrels of oil for every barrel consumed in production. So now, the oil companies, running out of conventional oil, are going to have to get $500 back from every 1.5 barrels they sell. Prices are going to be $330 per barrel instead of $100. So gasoline is going to be over 3 times as expensive in a few years... for sure...there is no science that can compensate for the increased cost of producing hard to get oil out of the ground. The best way to prepare for our future is to do a lot of bike riding, figure out how to live without a car. 

All other life, and our grandchildren, will be happy if we quit using crude oil.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Let's adopt Respect and Learning to find a goodpath forward

 I want more happening around me of Respect

 for the Red Road of Respect and for the White Way of Learning . Maybe you d like to check out more on this at my web site page http://www.donatopoetry.com/earthbound.html


Soul

Soul is not in the head
It’s in the feet, the sole
Our language knows that
Walking barefoot
Connected to Mother Earth
You are ensouled
Living in high rises
Never going barefoot on earth
Leads to our desolation
De-sole-ation

Nothing more erotic than going barefoot
Try it!!

1500 lb. of soybeans can be grown with the resources it takes to grow only 1 lb. of beef It takes 40 000 lb of water to grow one lb. of beef, only 250 lb of water to grow 1 lb of wheat.

Humans can live well on a diet of plant foods only. The diseases of the rich would disappear, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimers, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, cancer. Medical care costs would drop drastically, all could afford good educations, and good medical care. The competition for scarce money between the old needing medical care and the young needing education, would disappear.

Let us imagine a world and so create a world where children are taught from an early age to treat food as a sacrament, ingesting the products of the soul of the world, so as to manifest ourselves as creative beings, products of the soul of the world, giving back what we have been given.

Teaching children to grow and prepare their own food, and to eat soulfully, we teach them to connect to the earth. Connected to the earth, they stay healthy, to old ages we seldom see now, but which would become normal.

The communal spirit of growing and preparing food and of eating soulfully together, brings people into the right relationship with each other. It forms the basis for peace and resolution fo conflict and inordinate desire. It is the new sacrament.

To eat soulfully is the first and most important ritual of beginning and renewal that brings us into right relationship with others of our kind, with all living and nonliving beings of the universe.

After emerging from the Sweat Lodge of the Red Road, having re-experienced .our birth journey from the Spirit World, we feast. Our feast reminds us we are now here, in this world and must eat in order to stay. If we then feast soulfully, we keep ourselves in the right relationship with the Spirit World, and we will have no fear of returning there, when our time comes.
Love Donato
http://www.donatopoetry.com

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Apocalypse Now

I’m thinking that most of the journal and magazine articles I read, and the news reports of politicians' and think tanks’ outputs, desires and forecasts, are irrelevant. I can only relate them to imagining the Captain of the Titanic at the dinner table, blandly regaling to his special guests his stories of this great ship’s exceptional functioning, all the while as they rush towards that iceberg...... out of sight, just over the horizon, in the dark.

What’s the point now of my adding another rant against the  heedless ignorance of our times, adding to the g growing yet still feeble pile of clear eyed visions published?

It’s time to read, to write,  what i can do to prepare to live in a different land,   
under a different climate, where the basics, food, shelter, community, cannot be taken for granted, have to be built from the ground up, by us as newcomers, who do not yet know the language we must use. In the land we will all shortly occupy we will have to acquire new skills to do the work necessary . We will find few teachers, and so have to invent, or re-invent our own skills of basic survival. We will have greater reasons to fear the predators and  power-seekers among us.

How it has come to this...

Everything we have come to rely on as if of course that is what sensible people do , all the articles and faiths of our present consumerist oil based culture, all are irrelevant and will be swept away by the coming tsunami of global scarcity.

We have overpopulated the planet and are running out of the cheap oil and the readily available resources, of metals, and chemicals (think fertiliser) , and pure water and clean benevolent air, that fuelled our population growth since the 1700’s. The global economic scheme that started with the Industrial Revolution is ending. 80% of what we do, or eat, or wear, or use for medical care, is fuelled by cheap oil. Which will soon be gone. Our children will have to stay close to home, get everything they need for survival near by. Medical care will be seen as the fraud it is, based on the wrong kind of science, a mechanical science, instead of what would work, an ecological and biological science. We are members of a culture, we are not mechanisms with interchangeable, replaceable parts, and will soon have to relearn that fact, forgotten for a mere century. All the speeches and prognostications claiming what we must do to save our education systems, our medical care systems, our economic systems, our democratic organisations, are now all irrelevant. No one knows what the coming collapse will look like, or how to survive it. All we can do to prepare, is to try now to learn to live as if we had no oil, nor any food except local food, nor any medical care or education save that we could  provide ourselves.
with love from Donato

http://www.donatopoetry.com
http://www.postcarbon.org