I've revived this blog, moving it to http://centropic.com/ . I won't be making further posts to this site. All my previous posts have been moved to Centropic.
January 05, 2013
September 25, 2010
The Economy of Sail
My wife isn’t keen on the idea of hauling freight under sail. When I begin talking about the inevitable decline in oil production and the relentless rise of energy costs, her eyes glaze and her attention strays to something more interesting like the annual yield of winter wheat in the Ukraine.
She’s not entirely convinced our future is an economy of scarcity.
And frankly, I’m her husband. Why should she believe me? It isn’t even my idea, hauling cargo under sail, but it’s an idea that resonates.
There already are people delivering produce to market across the Puget Sound from the organic farms of Sequim to the docks of Ballard. They pile their produce onto the deck of a Catalina 34. It’s not the most seaworthy arrangement. Any offshore sailor would cringe at the sight but there’s not a lot of cargo space on a fiberglass production boat. You use the tools at hand until better tools are available.
The Soliton carrying produce to market across the Puget Sound. Photo credit: Ballard News-Tribune. A soliton a mysterious wave that can travel without dissipating energy through non-linear systems, behaving both like a particle and a wave.
A better tool might be a wooden schooner designed for the trade with wide beam, broad decks, large hatches and a cargo hold. A broad beam provides stability and cargo capacity on deck and below. (Schooners often carried deckloads of lumber or livestock—sheep or pigs or even cattle in temporary pens rigged on deck.) And wooden construction relies upon a renewable resource easily repaired and commonly available in the Pacific NW. As well, the harvesting and shaping of wood can be done with little dependence upon fossil fuels if you have none.
It would be lovely to see the Sound fill with working sail again, patched and threadbare sails but still serviceable, standing out to sea or working inshore at the end of day, the westering sun silhouetting their squat hulls and pedestrian rigs like a flock of sea birds settling on the water. Lovely, perhaps, but it begs the question—why?
A schooner leaves little wake or impact upon the earth by its passage. It’s remarkably self-contained, efficient, and cost effective if it isn’t competing against time. The conceit of time—time as money—unmade the age of sail and replaced it with the machine, the age of internal combustion. But the machine has proved a less human tool.
A schooner’s schedule isn’t a promise but a proposition, a negotiation with wind and weather and current.
There is a grace in shaping your course by wind and current, reaching your destination through skill and persistence, acknowledging the wider world rather than willfully disregarding it but the economy of sail can’t compete against cheap oil and a predictable schedule. As oil becomes increasingly expensive and then increasingly difficult to buy at whatever cost, sail becomes a more attractive method of transport. And, I’d argue, a more human method.
I think the question isn’t whether commercial sail will become viable again but when. My guess is sooner rather than later. So many significant factors—climate change, population density, peak oil production, the scarcity of arable land and clean water—are converging to create a perfect storm of change. That storm will overtake us unprepared. We’ll remain convinced of the certainty of our lives until they’re changed forever in an instant and only afterwards will it seem self-evident. Perhaps that’s by design.
Photo credit: Gloucester Schooner Festival.
September 19, 2010
The Age of Altruism
The only thing that will save the human race from ourselves is hope—hope in a future where we treat the earth and each other with dignity, respect, and consideration. Fear isn’t enough to change our behavior, not even fear of death, or patients who’ve had bypass surgery or angioplasty would quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more. It doesn’t happen. Fear isn’t enough to move us—only hope.
Dan Pink’s book Drive includes a remarkable insight. As a person matures, their interests tend to become more altruistic. That isn’t the insight. What’s remarkable is that we’re approaching a unique moment in human history when there will be more people in Western societies over the age of 60 than under the age of 8.
The aging of the West represents a potential wave of altruism the likes of which the world has never seen. It comes at a time when we are gravely threatened by diminishing oil reserves, the end of cheap energy, radical climate change and a human population that can’t be sustained by dwindling resources. If any time in human history desperately needed altruism, it’s now.
We need to recreate our economy based upon sustainability rather than compound greed. We need to use our resources wisely and share equitably or I’m afraid the wars for water, arable land, food and energy will leave human civilization in ashes. And as our days darken we will be at grave risk of surrendering ourselves to another brutal savior, another demagogue promising salvation and security in exchange for our souls, when what we really need is kindness and common sense and the will to act for the good of others.
Only hope will prompt us to action, hope in a better world, hope despite the evidence, despite our history, hope that we can be more than what we’ve been.
Perhaps the unprecedented numbers of people approaching the age of altruism will be the tipping point that makes our hope a reality. It seems to me our last, best hope before the encroaching darkness.
June 20, 2010
You don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction
Charles Thrasher
Technorati Tags: Michael C. Rupert,Collapse,Howard Kunstler,The Long Emergency,Akaya Windwood,Life After Worry,Yes magazine,Charles Thrasher
Recently I watched Collapse, a documentary about the ideas of Michael C. Rupert. Those ideas aren’t unique—the imminence of peak oil production, the unsustainable burden of human population in the absence of cheap energy, and the cascading failures that threaten our entire species as a result. I’ve heard them before when I first read James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency (see Black Plague and Boatwrights.)
If I expect the gruesome end
of humankind, I’ll see evidence
enough all around to justify my
dark faith. But if I live without
fear or worry, what might I see?
This time rather than imagining the worst and despairing, a response which I’ve polished like the family silver, something influenced my response. I read an article by Akaya Windwood in Yes magazine titled Life After Worry.
Yes magazine tends towards unrelenting optimism. I rarely read it cover to cover although I subscribe, probably to ease my sense of guilt for doing nothing to leave the world in better shape than I found it or at least no worse. (I’ve been a dreadful failure at both.) The article caught my attention partially because I had seen Collapse, partially because I’m the consequence of religious fundamentalism.
There is a self-fulfilling force to the belief in apocalypse. The unofficial but persistent faith of America is justified by the world’s end in judgment and retribution. Only the chosen few will survive. It’s the end that we’ve shaped for ourselves if unconsciously. I’ve contributed to that end despite my fall from faith.
Windwood’s article confronted me with the obvious, my attitude was also self-fulfilling. I could face the possibility of our impending collapse with despair, adding my small stone to the cairn we’re piling over the corpse of civilization, or I could approach the same potential future free of that burden, free to act differently, to act freely, to act with grace and spontaneity. Abandoning worry wouldn’t teach me to dance but it might free me from a crippling weight.
It’s a foundational truth of quantum physics that the observer influences what’s observed. We’re all busily influencing reality by our observations and preconceptions. My retreat from the world, my lack of contribution in creating a more humane reality, was just as much an act of creation—an act of observation—as engagement with the world. Every action, even inaction, has an effect. You bring something to the game even if you don’t want to play.
The question then becomes, what replaces worry? If worry isn’t my autonomic response to risk, what is? Compassion? Trust? Meditation? Your choice—my choice—has significant impact upon the future of the world.
Melodramatic, admittedly, but there’s a truth science has discovered about complex systems. Sometimes a small change can have asymmetrical consequences. It’s the Butterfly Effect popularized by chaos theory and a horrible film by Ashton Kutcher. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings over the African coast can create the smallest disturbance in the air, a faint eddy introduced into a complex system (the weather) at the right time and place that can grow into a hurricane that collides with the Eastern seaboard of the United States, impacting the lives of millions of people.
Every act of observation influences what’s observed.
I think it’s equally true that how you observe influences what you see. My emotional baggage has weight and substance. My unexamined history filters my perception. I see what I expect to see. If I expect the gruesome end of humankind, I’ll see evidence enough all around to justify my dark faith. But if I live without fear or worry, what might I see? What might be possible?
We’re approaching a moment that will define our species. It may transform us—or end us. Either way, I’d prefer to face that moment with grace and dignity rather than fear and trembling.
April 18, 2010
The Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead
There are pathways deep in the sea, boundary layers between thermoclines and haloclines where bodies of water differ in temperature or salinity and sound propagates effortlessly, echoing between layers, traveling around the world again and again with little loss of energy. Supposedly sounds have been captured by deep water probes lowered into these channels and by SOSUS buoys, the network of microphones deployed in major oceans to capture the passage of ballistic subs, the boomers that stay hidden in deep water with their payload of ICBMs intended to deter a nuclear war, or start one. Some of these sounds are old.
The sonar technicians peering into their oscilloscopes, intent upon their headphones, may actually be listening to the sound of battles fought at sea during the Second World War.
We’ve gotten used to the concept that the night sky is full of ghosts, the light from stars that have been dead for a thousands years, but the thought of ghost sound is still disturbing. It is unsettling to listen to the sound of ships breaking up under extreme pressure, bulk heads collapsing, hulls ripped by secondary explosions as the wreckage falls through miles of dark water, entombing the bodies of those who fought and died onboard, listening to the sound of their death as if they were occurring in the present and not a lifetime earlier. Uncanny.
The sea shall give up its dead
and the sound of their dying.
It may be only an urban legend. I’ve been able to find only one reference and that in Lyall Watson’s book The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects (perhaps not the most reputable source) but if it isn’t true, it should be. The world would be a more interesting place where such unsettling things still happen.
April 15, 2010
Dark Carnival
Have you never felt your life was set on a stage with players and props and painted scenery and when you moved from place to place, playing your part, speaking your lines, the painted scenery was moved as well, providing a thin semblance of depth and continuity? But what lies behind the familiar painted screens? What exists beyond the stage props? What occupies the shadows past the blinding footlights?
Photo credit: flickr
Something is stirring but I don’t know what it is. Some rough beast may be slouching toward Bethlehem again. Magic is alive, God is afoot, but are we sadly mistaken about the nature of both?
At some point magic comes head to tail
with science like a snake devouring itself.
I am not a religious man. I suspect the purpose of organized religion is to efficiently control people’s behavior through fear. But I begin also to suspect the world is far more mysterious than we’ve imagined and that religion may be a more appropriate response to the mystery than science.
In subtle and unexpected ways science and religion are approaching common if uncertain ground. At some point as the scientific focus becomes more and more specific, as the particles examined by quantum physicists become more and more elusive, magic comes head to tail with science like a snake devouring itself. Mystery escapes its cage of scientific incredulity.
But magic isn’t all wonder and delight. There’s a darkness that occupies the heart of everything living just as there is light. Each strives to consume the other. It’s only in the balance of opposites that we survive. And we’ve long been out of balance.
By the pricking of my thumbs…
March 07, 2010
The Wisdom of Spiders
Commenting on my blog post, Ghost Dogs, Trina said:
I am trying to find some kind of significance with a particular recurring dream/ hallucination..(it’s hard to distinguish). Usually when I am on the brink of sleep I will see the unmistakable figure of a dog in my room. It never makes any sound, only stands and watches me. Sometimes it will scare me awake, but other times it seems more dreamlike. The dog doesn’t have any distinguishable features like eyes or fur it is just a figure. I haven’t come across anything as close to what I’ve been experiencing as this.
It might help following my own crooked path to understanding a recent experience. I don’t mean to imply I have any special understanding of these things. I’m not a professional, not even trained in the interpretation of dreams. Whatever knowledge I’ve gleaned is simply that of a dreamer.
I woke from sleep staring at an immense spider scurrying across our bedroom ceiling. It was a big as a tarantula. My wife is terrified of spiders, a fear bordering on technical phobia. My first thought was to ensure she didn’t see it.
I walked around the end of the bed. The spider dropped silently to the floor and disappeared. My wife asked me what I was doing. I answered that I must have been dreaming but I was awake when I answered. We both went back to sleep. (She’s less afraid of my dreams than unreasonably large arachnids.)
I doubt a broom and dust pan would have been adequate weapons against a spider the size of a Frisbee.
Again I woke to find I was staring at the enormous spider on the ceiling. It was more shadow than substance, more shape and movement than a specific species, but it was undoubtedly a spider and undoubtedly in my house. Again the spider fell silently to the floor. We don’t have spiders the size of tarantulas in Seattle. Rationally I knew it must be a waking dream or hallucination. I suppose they’re the same. But I couldn’t distinguish between the dream and reality. For me they were the same.
It happened three times. The third time I went downstairs to get a flashlight and a broom to hunt down the spider hiding beneath the dresser. I was acting as if it were real because it was real. Our reality is determined by our perceptions. It’s all in our heads. The terrifying hallucinations of a schizophrenics are real to them, as real as the bus stop or McDonalds. I’m not schizophrenic but the difference in experience is only one of degree.
Obviously I never found the spider. I doubt a broom and dust pan would have been adequate weapons against a spider the size of a Frisbee. But I’ve thought about its significance since. It’s disconcerting not knowing the difference between waking reality and a dream.
I believe the experience had meaning, that it wasn’t merely the random misfiring of synapses in my brain. It wasn’t Scrooge’s bit of undigested beef. Whatever meaning would be peculiar to me—the particular bias I’ve built from all the bits and pieces of my experience—but nested within the larger experience of all humanity, our common cultural heritage.
The repetition of three is itself significant. The cock crowed three times in the garden of Gethsemane. The number defines the trinity, a union of duality. It’s repeated in myths worldwide. The repetition of a dream three times adds weight to its meaning and takes it out of the ordinary. (Not that chasing dream spiders across my bedroom is ordinary.)
They are messages, mostly messages to our selves, but so dense that they require unraveling…
I don’t have any particular fear of spiders even if I didn’t collect them as a child. I admire the complexity and beauty of their webs. Years ago when I bought my first Nikon SLR I took dozens of macro photos of spider webs strung across the morning light capturing droplets of fog on Point Reyes. It’s that image I remember first when I think of spiders.
Size often represents importance. Something larger must represent more of a kind—more wisdom, more ferocity, more power, more authority. What are the characteristics of spiders that might be exaggerated by size?
I searched the web for references to dream imagery and spiders. There are a lot of references to spiders in myth, especially native American myths. Among the Southwest tribes Old Spiderwoman is the mother of wisdom. There are myths where the stars themselves are dew captured in a spider’s web woven across the sky. Some of the dream books associate spiders with creativity, especially writing. I’m not sure of the segue between webs and words but I am working well into a novel, not my first attempt but my most promising and most determined. Could the repeated waking dream represent an encouragement to continue the work, to complete it? Could it be reinforcing the importance of the work, at least for me? It seems a strange way to go about it.
And there lies the mystery of dreams. They are messages, mostly messages to our selves, but so dense that they require unraveling, sometimes over years, before they’re understood. They’re like a ball of thread compacted by the gravity of a black hole. The threads each have to be followed before the heart of the mystery is revealed but each thread carries its own meaning. Each thread leads us toward the heart.
Dreams are shaped to capture our attention like a spider’s web. They are webs shaped by a part of ourselves to snare the attention of another part, the waking part which arrogantly thinks itself the only part. The strands of the web are made of images, not words. They require thinking about in a way that precedes words.
So, what’s the meaning of my dream? What’s the meaning of Trina’s? It may take me some time to understand my own but I regard it as important, something worth remembering, something worth reconsidering. It is a message to myself and maybe a message with a larger context. It’s a little scary, surrendering control, acknowledging that my conscious self can be usurped, that dreams can cross over into reality, but also an affirmation that what lies beyond consciousness has tremendous power and potential.
January 01, 2010
November 29, 2009
God, Chess and Einstein’s Dilemma
Tristan Jones once sailed to the Arctic Ocean in a converted lifeboat and the company of a three legged, one-eyed dog. Frankly, I think the dog was the only one he could convince.
Inevitably the ice fields closed around him and the boat was trapped in the lee of an enormous berg. The counterbalancing mass beneath the surface eroded and the berg shifted, positioning thousands of tons of blue ice directly above the lifeboat held fast by the pack ice. Throughout the arctic winter the odds were even whether the pack would free the boat first or the berg would turn turtle and crush it like a rotten melon.
Jones mostly ate burgoo, a loathsome layering of porridge, bacon, and whatever else was at hand, flavored with whiskey and frozen in a barrel on deck. Meals consisted of chipping off bits of burgoo with a hammer and heating it in a paraffin stove. The dog ate the same but probably enjoyed it more.
God lit the fuse that ignited the Big Bang, the dice were rolled, and the game begun.
Jones played chess with himself. A game with proper suspense required he forget his opponents’ strategy, a sort of self-induced schizophrenia. At first he had to wait several weeks between moves until he had forgotten the old strategy of what was now his new opponent. It was awkward.
Over time he perfected his ability to play without cheating. Not only could he bounce between players in the game, occupying the memories and strategy of one while forgetting the other, but a third personality developed, a meta personality that impartially observed both players, cognizant of either strategy, forming judgments and opinions but giving away no clues to the opponents. The lifeboat became rather crowded.
I wonder if God plays chess.
Before the first creation, before the spark that ignited the universe, God was pure potential, the sum of all possibilities but the realization of none. What’s the point of potential if it’s never actualized? I suspect God was like a kid with a new 12-gauge shotgun and nothing to shoot.
Of course it’s absurd to ascribe human emotions to something utterly beyond human experience. Whatever the impetus, God lit the fuse that ignited the Big Bang, the dice were rolled, and the game begun.
There’s a problem. A game is hardly interesting if you already know the outcome. God was faced with Tristan Jones’ dilemma: How do you play a game alone? I suspect God’s solution was the same—forget that all the players are yourself.
It’s an elegant solution if simplistic. Everything comes from God initially; everything returns. In the interim, everything forgets itself in order to play the game convincingly.
Einstein, confronted by the inherent uncertainty of Quantum Mechanics, asserted that God didn’t play dice with the universe. Perhaps he was wrong.
Of course, it’s not my original idea. It’s been kicking about for thousands of years, probably first recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets. God is insatiably curious. Curiosity is the spark that ignited creation. Of course God, being omniscient, already knew what would happen. But we didn’t. We’re continually surprised, delighted, appalled, enraptured, disgusted, intrigued, excited, depressed, disappointed, amazed. In short, we’re immersed and enthralled by the game.
And that may explain those people with near death experiences who don’t remain dead, their entire lives flashing before their eyes in exacting detail complete with emotional soundtrack played in a bubble of timelessness. It sounds rather like a data dump, the incredibly dense data of a person’s entire life.
I find that thought oddly comforting. Nothing is lost, nothing forgotten. Every false start, every failed ambition is remembered. As well, every kindness, every selfless act, and every bit of wonder.
Einstein, confronted by the inherent uncertainty of Quantum Mechanics, asserted that God didn’t play dice with the universe. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps God does play dice. Or chess.
August 08, 2009
Charles Thrasher
For the last 15 years I've been involved in every aspect of online marketing. Before that, I went sailing.
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