There were eight shore excursions in fourteen days. For two weeks in July my mom and I depended on a cruise ship for our well-being, and the captain and crew delivered. So much could have gone wrong, but it was a well-oiled machine. They fed us, kept us healthy and entertained, organized everything, and provided space for us to do nothing if we wished. I have confidence that plans were in place for any contingency, to keep all three thousand of us alive and as comfortable as possible. The camaraderie I felt among those sharing the ship seemed mutual.

The veil of civilization may be as thin on a ship as it is on land, but it felt a little thicker as we could plainly see we were far out at sea, pretty much on our own, and we all just wanted to have fun. We weren’t the only ship on the circuit, however. There was an even larger ship not far behind us, which we saw at the ports.

For me it was a relief to be out of the dry, smoky heat of the North Valley and out on the humid, warm Caribbean with just the sea all around and occasional islands in sight. During the shore excursions I got a sense of what it’s like to live on an island. St. Thomas didn’t get the media attention or recovery funds, I was told, that Puerto Rico received, but they were slowly recovering from last year’s hurricane. St. Maartin, not a U.S. territory, fared worse and may have been hit harder. There the devastation to the homes and hotels from Hurricane Irma has many people living in open ruins still. The beaches remain gorgeous, and the people living there are doing the best they can. They seem to appreciate the arrival of the cruise ships.

Back in Paradise for a week now, I find our ridge is like an island, or else we’re all cruising, all 27,000 of us in Paradise, plus those in the upper decks, Magalia and Stirling City.

With smoke all around, our sister ship Redding is besieged by fire, devastation, and loss of life. We know we could be next, but I have faith that the help showing up for Redding would be there for us too. There are plans, mechanisms in place to keep us alive and as comfortable as possible.

It is with that confidence that I continue to live in Paradise, knowing that the professionals – the firefighters, police, national guard, and others who safeguard us – stand ready to assist. I don’t know how many more fires California and the West in general can take; yet, firefighters are well-connected, helping people regionally, even around the world. I see so many organizations and individuals doing everything they can to help those in Redding that my faith in humanity has jumped up a couple notches this past week.

That’s a good thing, to depend on one another for support, especially as we realize there may be no place safer to go. We must ride out each storm, whatever kind, and help each other deal with the outcome.

Maybe it has to do with getting older, but I get the notion from a growing number of academic sources that an Armageddon will happen in my lifetime. There could be a post-civilization, even post-human era starting in just a few years. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine global dystopia when I see how beautiful the world still is and how nice most people are to each other. We’re all voyagers, shipmates in a way, whether on land or at sea.

Cruisin' on Sea and Land was published in the Paradise Post on August 4, 2018.

It’s been so dry, surely the raindrops, heavy as they were, would pass quickly. Showers were predicted to be intermittent. We figured that the isolated thunderstorms wouldn’t stop the celebration. As darkness set in, we waited where the fireworks display would be awesome.
I was with my mom in Colorado Springs on the 4th of July, at her friend’s home just a bit above the city. Colorado Springs is second, I was told, only to some city in Florida in being the lightning capital in the nation, or maybe in the world. That evening rain was intermittent, with lightning which was strangely without much thunder.

The rain paused about 9:30 PM, good timing for the fireworks show. The four of us towel dried our deck chairs. As we settled into our spots on the porch awaiting the traditional highlight of the annual Independence Day celebration, the lightning bolt show continued over the city.

I said that the fireworks show might pale to the lightning display. There was horizontal lightning, vertical lightning, point lightning with bolts every direction like a flower, and bright spots illuminating huge clouds, all across the horizon for nearly an hour. When the hair on my arm raised from static electricity, I decided to get off the porch and join the ladies inside the sliding glass door.

Inside as we waited for “our fireworks”, we saw fireworks in the distance, at several city parks. We heard the booms of fireworks from the Broadmoor Hotel, and from the front of the house saw them through the trees. But the display where we were wasn’t happening on time. Mom’s friend called, and she was told that if there were no fireworks by 10:00 PM, they were cancelled. Ten o’clock passed, and the rain got heavier. We were grateful for every drop, but the timing was bad. I jumped streams of water getting to Mom’s car, and that was it. We went home. The thirsty city got some water, we enjoyed the company of friends, and we got a different kind of show than we came for.

I had expected to be thinking about America’s independence that evening, and my thoughts turned instead to whether fireworks are to lightning as human activity is to earth’s. It’s humbling to witness the power of nature outshine, and in our case cancel one of the biggest displays of human exuberance. Earth’s shows are bigger. Consider, for example, the energy bursting from volcanic eruptions versus from nuclear bombs or rocket launches. Earth’s power is humbling. About all we can do is try to adapt and survive.

Paradoxically humans are so great that we changed the climate. Civilization generates heat as humans burn fuels and emit massive quantities of greenhouse gasses. Our emissions are warming the oceans, contributing to more atmospheric water vapor, fueling more violent storms. The list of troubling changes caused by human activity is long. Even if civilization stopped now, voluntarily or by some crisis, global warming would not immediately improve due to global dimming. Without the daily generation of pollutants, the air would clear of particulates, and global warming would increase. Greenhouse gasses plus clear air produces a double whammy of heat. Again, all humans can do is to try to adapt and survive.
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Despite our brilliance, our world is made of both fireworks and lightning. Nature rules.
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Reflections on Fireworks vs. Lightning was published in the Paradise Post on July 7, 2018.

The more unpredictable the future, the more difficult it is to cope with change. Failure to adapt is a leading cause of collapse and extinction. Resilience – the ability to adapt – can also lead to failure if it creates short-term stability but long-term vulnerability. If resilience gets us from one crisis to the next, but we don’t transform our community we could still fail.

The Town of Paradise, like all modern municipalities, was essentially designed to operate in an environment of growth. Our annual budgets grew, as did our debts, and to justify raises and pensions, we imagined growth would fill the gaps. This logic prevailed because economic growth has been reliable. Inflation is so dependable that employees expect and generally have received regular raises.

The change that may be permanent is the end of growth. If we don’t adapt, the town could fail to manage its resources, could go bankrupt and then continue to fail such that the town government would cease to exist.

On the next ballot, the Town will be asking for an extension of a modest sales tax increase already in effect, known as Measure C. The extension, if passed, would sunset after a decade. The Town might be, the logic goes, in a better position at that time to get by without the sales tax increase. Without the extension, the Town’s budget could be pinched so tightly that either another round of salary decreases would have to be negotiated, as was done in 2012, or there would be more layoffs and fewer Town services. The Town already downsized in recent years to a bare minimum of employees, including public safety personnel. The Town’s revenue streams have not kept up with expectations, necessities, and debts, namely the pension obligation bond. While the sales tax extension would be set to expire at the same time the pension obligation bond is scheduled to be paid off, there is no assurance that the Town would have sufficient funds then either.

Growth may not return, even while the cost of living may continue to increase. When employees’ cost of living goes up, and their incomes do not, it is frustrating and somehow un-American. The Town proposes Measure C be extended to “maintain Town services such as Police, Fire, Roads and Animal Control.” This means that if the extension of the one-half percent sales tax increase is not passed, such services cannot be maintained.

The key question here is this, “If voters pass the measure, will that make Paradise more, or less resilient?”

We would get short-term stability, but long-term vulnerability because while we hope that the economy will stabilize into its historical growth pattern, that’s just not likely. Obtaining gas will inevitably be costlier because producing petroleum is more expensive now that the high grades of crude in the world are depleting. Our economy, as it is, depends on cheap petroleum.

We’d be more resilient if we developed an economy that does not depend so much on cheap petroleum. That’s hard to imagine, but we don’t have to look that far back to see that our economy used to be local, not global. Of course, that was before refrigerators and cars, but even those products used to be American made, from American fuel, steel, parts, and labor. There was a time that bread in Butte County was local, from locally grown wheat; extraction, production, distribution, and consumption were local.

The Butte County Grand Jury recently reported that, “The town should be proactive in developing a long-term strategy to address future budget requirements.” We need to make fundamental changes to our budgets and to our economy. Passing the Measure C extension is not enough. Shopping locally is not the answer either, if we don’t use local resources to produce what we sell and consume. Relocalization is the way to be less vulnerable to crisis after crisis and to transform our community to cope with change. Let’s do whatever we can to encourage and support those among us who produce, or are thinking of locally manufacturing, products we can use.

I’ve drawn some ideas for this column from The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval, edited by Daniel Lerch. 2017. https://reader.resilience.org/
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Too Much Resilience was published in the Paradise Post on June 6, 2018.

We mostly try not to think about it, but somewhere down deep we know we’re going to die someday. Death is a normal part of the life cycle. From a biological perspective, it’s the purpose of life to reproduce and carry on the species. There’s a conservation biologist who has been saying that the human species is headed for near term human extinction (NTHE), and he’s not alone in his prediction. What if these scientists are right, and climate change is a much bigger deal that we’ve been led to believe in the main-stream media? Our obsession in the news with near term politics blinds us to the bigger picture of where our global civilization is headed. If NTHE is a thing, then how much does it matter who is fired from the President’s cabinet and why? It’s all interesting, but relatively speaking, why do we focus on such trivia in the national news?

Ignorance is a possibility, given our tendency to focus on myopic news versus the big picture. Without great reporting in the mainstream we might not realize what the big reality is. Then there’s the opposition, delegitimizing science and journalism, generating misinformation about the climate realities.

Data shows the Arctic is melting rather fast. This explains quite a bit about changing weather patterns. Methane release accompanies this melt, and methane levels are up due to multiple sources outside the Arctic. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas.
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Few predictions look past 2100 in terms of global warming, and those born after 2000 who might live that long will surely take note. For those in my generation, our grandchildren, or optimistically our great grandchildren may not survive. This is NTHE.

Opposition to the possibility, to the data, is more than scientific critique. Attacking the sources, delegitimizing institutions like NASA which provide data, and putting out misinformation such that the Arctic is somehow getting colder — all of this is part of our “media”.

Meditate on acceptance of NTHE for a moment. Of all the generations that have survived in the United States over our relatively brief yet turbulent history, could it be possible that climate change could be that big of a deal? Could agriculture fail to support us? Could heat consume us? Could any number of self-supporting feedback loops come to haunt us? Failure of the food chain. Water shortage. Disease. War. Yes, some of this has been the doom of previous states, but globally, is an apocalypse a possibility? We are interconnected and interdependent as never before in the time humans have inhabited the earth. So, yes.

With growth as an imperative, it’s inevitable that we will meet a bleak future. The sooner we accept the idea that we have really screwed up our future, the more likely that we can act to try to prolong our collective lives. Or does it work that way? Individuals with a terminal diagnosis tend to act to prolong their lives, but not always. Some want to live fully now, and others want to live as many days as possible no matter the quality of life. It’s unprecedented in human history to have a global civilization so interdependent as we are today, and how much longer can we go on “growing our economies”? There is an end, and might we devise an endgame?

What if we accepted, by-and-large that it is all over, our global civilization and human life on the planet? What would you do the same or different if NTHE were true? What would you do?

Living with a Terminal Diagnosis was published in the Paradise Post on May 1, 2018.

Trade wars are no laughing matter, even if over fruits and nuts. We hope the escalation of tariffs between China and the United States will calm down before anyone is seriously affected. In the meantime, I wonder just how interdependent China and the US have become. Manufacturing has spread to southeast Asia; however, much of what we purchase on a regular basis is made in China.

California farmers are speculating what the higher tariffs set by China on imported foods will have on our local economy. There’s a trickle-down effect when farmers’ profits decline. In a hungry world the markets will surely sort out where food will be sold for the best prices; however, trade agreements and breaches to those agreements undercut a free market and fair trade.

As each nation looks out for its own interests and makes or breaks trade agreements via the World Trade Organization, those in business must adjust. In 2016 the Obama administration challenged China over subsidies that caused unfair trade, hurting American rice, wheat and corn farmers, and opened market access by eliminating “unwarranted trade barriers with trading partners”, in the language of the Office of the United States Trade Representative. Politicized trade is a lot of trouble.

According to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, China imported half a billion dollars’ worth of pistachios and another half a billion dollars’ worth of almonds in 2016-2017. The next most valuable crops on the California tariff list are wine, oranges, grapes, and walnuts which together are worth $458,500,000 – that’s another half a billion.

The fifteen percent tariff increase imposed by China on fruits and nuts will hit home. In Butte County, the top five million-dollar crops are walnuts, almonds, rice, prunes, and cattle. Walnuts, almonds, and rice grown in Butte County are worth half a billion dollars. We’re in the agricultural trade dispute.
I feel happy, nevertheless, to live in the land of fruits and nuts, irrigated by the rich watershed of the northern Sierra Nevada. Let’s keep the situation at the level of trade war, not actual war. We’re more fragile than we may imagine.

When it comes to goods manufactured in China, what if – because of trade wars –  we could no longer buy them cheap? Would we all panic if prices at our favorite discount stores soared? Stock up if you foresee need for anything currently made in China.

We’re feeling the high cost of low prices in America. Homelessness, joblessness, under-employment, etcetera from manufacturing lost to overseas production hurts all of us. Our psyche, our budget deficits, our debts are linked to trade policies.

Eventually, as we return to manufacturing more at home in the US, we may thank China for increasing tariffs and be happy for their success. Interdependence is great, to an extent. Adjustments in the trade structure are overdue. If that means trade war, then so be it. When facing a strong nation-state demanding respect, sometimes it’s best to laugh anyway.

Laughing at Adversity was published in the Paradise Post on April 4, 2018.

You may have heard about the little two-bedroom suburban home in Sunnyvale that sold for $2 million last week, half a million dollars over the asking price. It was listed for two days. There’s a small supply and big demand for homes in the Bay Area. Rents are also crazy high there, and not everyone gets a big enough paycheck, or paychecks as many work more than one job to stay afloat.

Housing here is likewise in high demand and low supply, so the price is up, especially for rentals. Many of us know people living here who work in the Bay Area. Growth has returned to Butte County after a long recession. We see it in Chico and feel it in Paradise. Traffic is up, and the Skyway has become more like a highway.

Isn’t it great? We’ve always been told that growth leads to prosperity, so we welcome growth, if grudgingly. Many of us moved here to not be in the city, to not wake up to traffic reports.

As the story goes, we brought the city with us. Since I moved here in 1989 Chico has more than doubled in population. The graph of growth from 1880 to present is a typical exponential curve, where doubling times shorten. The graph was steepest from 1990 to 2000, but the growth continues. While the population in Paradise and Magalia is fairly flat since about 1990, in Butte Creek Canyon and Butte Valley – both sides of Paradise treasured for its natural beauty – pockets of subdivisions have been popping up, and individual homes along the rivers and ridges continue to be built. It’s lovely, having views of each other’s homes.

But the fish count is down despite the valiant effort of Friends of Butte Creek where the last best run of wild, naturally spawned Spring Run Chinook salmon remains in California. There are constant threats to the survival of salmon runs, despite also being protected by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and other agencies. All this development and population growth is not easy on the fish.

Without fish, it’s hard to fish successfully. Who wants to live in a world where fish must be stocked from some fish farm and fish are bought and trucked in, so families can pretend that the fake lake has fish – like the rivers used to – on kid’s fishing day? Sad ☹

But we can’t go back. We must keep growing because growth means prosperity, or so we’ve been told over and over again. “Grow or die” is a business mantra, albeit one in question. There’s no scientific basis for the maxim; one can run a business and stay the same size. Many businesses go broke trying to expand. It’s a good business plan to have “flat growth”.

Our language about growth shows our beliefs. In economics “negative growth” is the way to describe something that shrinks. “Flat growth” means staying the same size. Growth is the way forward we believe, and with seemingly unlimited land, water, fertile soil, and cheap energy, it was once true.

Now we have conservation policies and create zoning overlays, so we can preserve and stretch our dwindling and increasingly expensive resources – so we can fish, swim, or hike and drive around pretending that we’re a world away from the Bay Area pressures.

​But water is an issue, and growth does not create water prosperity. Water is our economy in Butte County, being at least as foundational to agriculture as land. Water is life, and I must say I am thankful for last week’s cool storm.
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Prosperity Versus Growth was published in the Paradise Post on March 7, 2018.

How can we know the way if we don’t know where we are going? As I write on this first back-to-business day of 2018 I’m thinking about how what we do, our work, affects our lives.

Everyone has power over their own destiny, but no one can control reality. The most powerful work to corral us to a purpose, usually “growing the economy” and increasing our production for profit. We share in that success, to a point. We admire achievement.

We sense. We hear the anxious and the confident. We see economic distress and economic success. What is the world now truly like, and what will happen this year? We consume information through our many digital windows. Surely someone will show us the way, and yet there is a powerful force somewhere in each of us that knows the way to having a regular place at the table of happiness.

It's being suggested that if our glass is half full, we need only use a smaller one to be happy. As the economy grows by increasing productivity, using a smaller vessel each year leads to the glass becoming the size of a thimble. That’s not going to work.

For 2018 I predict that those who grow gardens, ground cover, and flowers will have fresh produce, covered soil, and flowers. Those who raise chickens, will likely have eggs. If we install more solar panels, we will harvest more energy from the sun. If we replace old wood stoves with cleaner burning stoves, clean our chimneys, and burn the fire hot, then we will have fewer particulates in the air we breathe. What work we do this year will determine our well-being in 2019, to a point. It’s cause and effect. Our future is not magic, it’s the application of the solid theory, the conclusion from human analysis using scientific method, formal and informal, that what we do each day sets our course for our future.

We experience a cyclone of information from the time we wake and start looking at our screens to the time we sleep. There we dream. One’s mind tries to make sense of it all by recombining the experiences and ideas of one’s life. Then we wake up to our screens and our conscious lives.

Watchful economic predictions conflict. Mainstream business news outlets are reporting that 2017 was more solid than expected. Their projection for 2018 is for 2-3% growth of the US economy. Digital currencies, notably Bitcoin are figuring into their estimations. Compared to what I see on the streets and in other reporting, their analyses and predictions sound glib. I like to hear good economic news, and I’m looking for verification.

During the holidays as I stood with a visiting friend of the family outside a restaurant after dinner, a healthy looking young man pushed his shopping cart along the sidewalk past us. He tried not to make eye contact; he was looking for valuable cans and bottles that others tossed away. My companion asked me if it’s okay if she gives him some money. I’d been reading about what to do for the homeless in a local paper. I follow the hypothesis that it is better to give to organizations than to individuals, but she can do what she likes. She called him over and gave him some cash. He looked scared and a bit cold. He needed a place to sleep for the night, and he was nowhere near a homeless shelter. Maybe there is no room for a healthy young man. What happened to him? Where are his parents? I wanted to find out, but we were on our way home.

I wonder if that young man also experiences the world through a smart phone. It’s possible with the pay-as-you-go cell phone services available and the free or nearly free phones offered with the service.

There are an increasing number of people on the streets and in the woods, living on the fringes, marginally wild, in need of being corralled into a space safer for everyone. We’re all corralled, domesticated, in large part.

In my little residential space, I look in what’s left of my garden, my economic safety net in need of development. In the darkest part of the year the tomato vines not only have green and slowly ripening fruit, but they are also flowering. Everyone with a garden around here in my real and virtual world tell me that this is weird. Growing tomatoes outside in winter is nice, but it’s strange. A warming planet apparently means we can glean more tomatoes this year.

It’s still cold. Some homeless are better and more careful than others in generating their own heat. There are several well documented incidents in California in 2017 of catastrophic failure to contain a campfire, such as what caused the Ponderosa Fire in August. Last week the young man accused pleaded no contest to causing the fire as he let his campfire smolder during his month-long stay in the woods. In this relatively-so-far dry year, the clear and present danger of a campfire getting out of control is reason enough to moderate the homeless camps in and around Paradise and Magalia.

In short follow various news sources. Some produce reports to inspire confidence, and others produce reports for their own reasons. Like a puzzle we can find the accurate pieces of information and put together a true picture. Scroll right, left, up and down on your screens, and look around often. Direct your life, and if you’re a leader, one of the powerful, remember that the work that you do, or fail to do in 2018 matters to our well-being in 2019.

Life with many windows was published in the Paradise Post on January 3, 2018.
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Certain words began popping up in my work as an environmental advocate with increasing frequency from about 2008. As the national economy nearly crashed and national debt continues to rise, many people are realizing how fragile our economy is. Our outlook has shifted. We opened ourselves up to the notion that America was not as great as we expect. Since then America vested hope in another President who, by his repurposed slogan (Trump like Reagan), would make the nation great again. 

In working my several part-time jobs I heard about the “transition movement” whereby communities were trying to beef up their local economies and become more independent from industrial civilization and global capitalism. Environmentalists insisted on remaining positive, believing that change could only happen if we properly envisioned sustainability. To protect ecosystems on which we depend requires becoming “sustainable”; yet, I became increasingly aware of the reality that our way of life is rigidly unsustainable.  I learned of one self-reinforcing feedback loop after another impacting the climate. “Global warming” became “climate change” then “climate chaos” as hurricanes became more frequent and intense and hit major U.S. cities. If Mother Nature isn’t happy, no one is.

Collapse remains increasingly immanent as we collectively began adopting recycling, reusing, repurposing, over the last decade of our “long emergency” but not fundamentally changing the system. Growth, extraction, planned obsolescence, and consumerism all appear to be deeply imbedded in idea and practice.

Rather than becoming more self-sufficient, our communities have gone the other way. The trend is for less on the shelves of local stores. With the rise of Amazon, online shopping has expanded to the point that even the big-box stores aren’t stocking the quantity or variety that they have in the past. Online companies with “brick-and-mortar” stores are more like show rooms. Your size and color may not be in the store, but the clerk can order it for you and get it quickly, either in the store or delivered to your door.

The ”slow food” movement has had limited success. Instead, online food delivery businesses like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh are booming. Grocery stores have developed online ordering systems, and in cities nationwide one can get an order ready for pick-up to save the bother of hiking the aisles.

We live closer to the edge than ever before. This direction of change is wonderful for those who have adopted Internet “just in time” delivery, if the system continues to work in the finely tuned manner that we expect and need.

A few days ago, I met a man at a dinner party who said he is not a “survivalist”; instead, he is into “disaster preparedness”. What the difference is I don’t know, but whatever words one wants to use, seize the day.

​This column is to appear in the Paradise Post on December 6, 2017. 

I’ve been away from Paradise for the last few months, living with my mother in Colorado, helping her as she recovers from back-to-back hospital stays and adjusts to being the head of house.

Here in Colorado Springs there’s an election on November 7. Politics are the same everywhere; it’s about controlling money. If an initiative to fund critical stormwater projects passes, the mayor says he will propose that more police and firefighters be hired.

Nothing gets past my mom. She remembers the last time, not so long ago, the city council asked the voters for money for stormwater drainage projects. From bait and switch to math tricks, the city staff and council managed to divert much of the new taxes to administration. It’s all legal, probably. Now they want more money for the same issue. The voters tire of the game, and the initiative may not pass this time.

The council has a history of enticing developers by relieving them of paying for the needed infrastructure. More development means more stormwater runoff, which damages homes and streets when the streams overflow. Even with all the growth in this fair city, the costs to the city outpace the growth. Development needs to pay for itself, and the city has to calculate and charge the full costs. Otherwise the taxpayers suffer higher taxes or eroding infrastructure and unchecked crime.

Paradise has its own money and development issues. Keeping up with recent Post columns online, I’ve read about how “shabby” Paradise and Magalia are, and how the retirees are “bored and irascible”. If this is half true, there’s room for improvement, as individuals and as communities.
Do we have the right stuff? Can we recognize and elevate a few individuals who will lead us to improving Paradise and Magalia?

We have a vision of heaven on earth in our name. We know we’re above Chico. Let’s count our blessings. We value our retirees. We have roughly 40,000 wonderful people living up here. We have lots of space to work, empty commercial properties of all sizes and value. We have educated people and schools where everyone can learn a trade. We have banks that can give business loans, community service organizations, churches big and small. You name it, we have it, and we are thankful.

We just have to keep working on our slice of heaven. It’s hard to be humble; yet, as good as we may be, perfection never lasts. We recreate our lives on the ridge every day, building on what we’ve been given.

As we slide from Halloween to Thanksgiving and the dark of winter, let’s focus on the right stuff. There’ll be another election, another chance for leaders to emerge. We can craft initiatives for decisions that will make our communities happier places to live.

The Right Stuff was printed in the Paradise Post on November 1, 2017.