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

Tiny Township dump site 41 fact sheet

Tiny Township dump site 41 fact sheet

1. The proposed dump site and design is a about as safe as any method of waste disposal could be for this location and this number of users.

By a roadside in Tiny Township there is a pipe flowing clear spring water, needing no pump, year round. People line up to fill their water bottles. the water flows because this part of the Alliston aquifer the pipe taps into is under pressure. Obviously, then, no water from the surface can flow down into it, contaminating it. The Alliston aquifer is enormous in extent, from Georgian Bay to south of Lake Simcoe, almost to the Oakridges Moraine. There are probably dozens of dumps on the surface over it, including the entire city of Barrie. One more small dump is not going to add any significant threat not already present.

2. The citizens of Simcoe County have voted consistently for the past 25 years for county councillors who pushed for this dump. They have spent 25 years, thousands of person hours, and $11 million dollars studying the facts, weighing alternatives and likely costs and compromises. If anybody expected to make short term profits from this, those people are long gone.

3. Only the citizens of Tiny township will be able to use it

5. It would be constructed to confirm to all the environmental assessment and legally required safe guards mandated by the Province of Ontario ( and even and beyond those).

6. The major opponents of the proposal, spearheaded by David Suzuki and Maude Barlow ( Council of Canadians) have put out a huge propaganda and communication effort, unable to be matched by the relatively small number of voters in that County. These environmental jehadists and cohorts from Toronto have not offered, that I can discover, one word of educational description or of science on the facts of this proposal or its likely effect on the environment.

7. This proposal and its success or failure is the responsibility and the accountability of only the residents of Simcoe County None of its outside detractors have any accountability for the results or the costs of their tyrannical overthrowing of local democracy.

8. I am extremely disappointed to discover how those in the media and in the environmental movement, in the forefront of it, can so blithely ignore data and facts, in their pursuit of publicity for their cause.

9. The lesson that the elders and the media are teaching the young over this, is that is far more exciting, and much easier, to try to get decisions by marching and shouting slogans publicly, than it is to study issues, debate, consult, compromise and vote. No wonder young people don't vote, what's the point of going to all that effort, if any bunch of well financed jehadists with time on their hands, wielding false propaganda and media hype, can overturn the tiresome slowness of democracy ?

Donato Cianci Sept. 7, 2009
donato@donatopoetry.com