January 25th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Yoda: “I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.”
Obi-Wan: “He will learn patience.”
Me: “Obi-Wan, you’d better be right, because my impatience is slowly creeping toward the far end of the spectrum.”

Just one of the many problems that Generations X-onward have had to contend with is that we’ve never had to wait for anything. Ever. That doesn’t sound like a problem, I know, but it means that we’ve been gifted with an extremely stunted sense of proportion. In the days before cell phones, if you wanted to talk to someone you had to wait until they were at home to call. No instant messaging, no texting, no emails. Before downloading, you had to wait until something was available to the mass market before you could listen to/watch/read it—assuming you could find a store in your area that carried it. If you wanted to buy a house, you saved for a down-payment and talked to a loan officer at the bank.

Things have changed. Now we live in an age of immediate wish fulfillment. You want to talk to your friend? If they’re even slightly plugged-in, you can probably have everything but their precise GPS location at a moment’s notice—and maybe that too. Looking for that new album/movie/book? It’s as close as minutes, even seconds away online—less time than it would take to put on your shoes and coat if you were going to look for it in stores. And, up until recently in the States, you could write your own references for a mortgage with no money down. Why wait for anything? The world never stops rotating, and your life shouldn’t be dependent on things like the rising and setting of the sun. We’ve beaten the system; the rules no longer apply to us. In short, we want—and get—everything now.

I made a monumental life decision a few months back: to move out to the sticks and learn to garden and live naturally—so why don’t I get to do any of that immediately? I know I set a five year goal to own property, and it seemed reasonable at the time, but I want to be doing it now! What’s the hold-up?

Okay, I understand I can’t afford the property, but why can’t I go out and garden?! Oh yeah. The seasons. Right.

I learn skills primarily by doing. I love to read, but if I’m learning something physical I need some hands-on experience. And consequently, if I want to learn how to, say, garden, I have to get out there and work the soil myself. If I’m not doing that—if I’m just reading about gardening, I feel in some regards like I’m not doing anything at all. It’s not the most reasonable perspective—there’s a hell of a lot of information out there that I could be assimilating and keeping on file—but having chosen my new path, I want to set it into motion. It’s more than a little unfortunate on the timing front, though, what with planting season still another few months off. Still, I’m trying to set the prejudices of a generation and deal with the fact I’m not going to be learning much horticulture until the spring.

Which brings us back to patience. The world doesn’t stop spinning, but it does rotate on an annual clock and my constantly stimulated North American, 21st Century, ‘Net savvy self is going to have to get used to the cycles of the year again, because when I plant my first crop (wherever that may be, I don’t have a yard at the moment), I’ll have to wait for the plants to sprout, then grow, then ripen. And if I haven’t shored up my expectations by that point, there’s going to be a rude awakening—one I’m sure I’ll end up texting you about.

January 2nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

I try and keep a log (admittedly more mental than physical) of the songs and writings I find inspirational in working toward my greenpunk goals. ‘Shangri-La’ by the Kinks sums up my feelings on suburbia and its accompanying lifestyle better than most other works I can think of.

Now that you’ve found your paradise
This is your kingdom to command
You can go outside and polish your car
Or sit by the fire in your Shangri-La
Here is your reward for working so hard
Gone are the lavatories in the back yard
Gone are the days when you dreamed of that car
You just want to sit in your Shangri-La
 
Put on your slippers and sit by the fire
You’ve reached your top and you just cant get any higher
You’re in your place and you know where you are
In your Shangri-La
Sit back in your old rocking chair
You need not worry, you need not care
You cant go anywhere
Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La
 
The little man who gets the train
Got a mortgage hanging over his head
But he’s too scared to complain
‘Cause he’s conditioned that way
Time goes by and he pays off his debts
Got a TV set and a radio
For seven shillings a week
Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La
 
And all the houses in the street have got a name
‘Cause all the houses in the street they look the same
Same chimney pots, same little cars, same window panes
The neighbors call to tell you things that you should know
They say their lines, they drink their tea, and then they go
They tell your business in another Shangri-La
The gas bills and the water rates and payments on the car
Too scared to think about how insecure you are
Life ain’t so happy in your little Shangri-La
Shangri-La, Shangri-La la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
 
Put on your slippers and sit by the fire
You’ve reached your top and you just cant get any higher
You’re in your place and you know where you are
In your Shangri-La
Sit back in your old rocking chair
You need not worry, you need not care
You cant go anywhere
Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La

 
And just in case that needed any reinforcement, I’d like to cite Lili Taylor in Say Anything, who, in one of her Joe Songs, also summed up my feelings on the matter quite nicely.

That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be, never be me, no.
 
That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be, never be me, no
 
No. Never. No, never, ever, ever. Don’t you ever think it!

December 13th, 2008 by Chris Eng

“Not only am I not learning, I’m forgetting stuff I used to know. ”
- Milhouse

I was thinking about The Joy of Cooking the other day and how baffling parts of it were to me growing up. “Why,” I thought to myself in dumbfounded bemusement, “do they tell you how to skin and gut animals in here? Do people still do that?” The short answer being yes, just not in as great numbers as they used to.

And that’s the thing of it: the contents of The Joy of Cooking were a standard repository of kitchen practice and advice from 50 or 60 years ago. In half a century, the collective knowledge and wisdom related to food preparation in Western culture has degraded immensely. Catastrophically, really. Witness the CitiGroup ad from earlier this year, featuring a woman standing in a kitchen where every available bit of cupboard space is filled with clothes, about which she proudly boasts: “I don’t cook. So I made my eat-in kitchen a fabulous walk-in closet.” Which isn’t to say it’s a woman’s place to be in the kitchen skinning possums and baking pies and men should be out shooting said possums with their 12 gauge. Not at all. But it is to say that we generally have no idea where our food comes from or the steps it takes to bring it to the table anymore, and even the act of cooking a simple meal is arduous and confusing to the better part of a generation.

If most of our food is already prepared and comes from a box, bag, bottle or can, what will that mean if the cost of shipping the food to the cities from its origin points around the globe becomes so expensive it’s untenable to continue buying it on a daily basis? It means people will have to resort to buying their food locally—fresh food, untouched by preservatives and still in its component parts. And the generation that’s going to have to put it together is the one demanding Kraft Cheese & Macaroni in already assembled microwaveable packages because the original kind takes too much effort and/or skill to prepare.

This loss of knowledge and wisdom is touched upon in a recent essay by Dorothy Woodend. In it, Woodend specifically adresses the concept of what might happen to coming generations if there’s some kind of large-scale emergency spurred on by a global oil crisis. All the skills useful in such a situation (which our grandparents might have known and practiced) are being forgotten and abandoned at such a rapid pace that in a few generations there will be very little first-hand knowledge left to be passed down.

“Still,” as one of my co-workers argued, while we discussed this the other day, “we’ve never been in a situation like we are now, where almost limitless information is available on every conceivable subject at the touch of our fingertips.” Which is true as far as it goes, but Woodend has a convenient and succinct rejoinder for that: “Information is not knowledge, nor even close to wisdom.” And that drives to the heart of the matter. If you want to build a house, you can find blueprints for any one you want, but they won’t teach you the proper way to use your tools. Even if you find good books on foundation-laying, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, tiling, shingling and all of the other trades that go into house-building, you still won’t have the accumulated tips and advice accumulated by doing the same job over the course of your life—the wisdom gained by being an expert in one’s field. That’s what will take the most time to regain, should we find ourself at a point where our culture needs this wisdom again.

And those are my plans for the short term: read up on the various subjects I’m interested in as much as possible, then seek out someone able to impart first-hand knowledge of them. In the case of farming, there’s a number of places around the Lower Mainland that accept volunteers (though not for a few months, at the moment—December/January isn’t really the ideal crop-growing season), and in the case of cooking, there’s Carla. I’m not an awful cook, but she knows tricks and shortcuts around the kitchen that would help me out immeasurably over the course of my life, and conveniently enough lives in the same house as me. In point of fact, there are experts out there willing to give you practical, hands-on training in almost any almost any field you could want—some for money (in places like community colleges), some not—but we have to get our D.I.Y. drives back up and running and quit handing all our problems off to the next person in line. Yes, there’s too much out there to be an expert or even a jack-of-all-trades in every field, but we can learn enough to feel like accomplished, capable and responsible people in our own lives, and maybe the reclamation of that responsibility—and the decision not to fill our kitchen with Manolos—is one of the most responsible acts we can currently strive for.

December 3rd, 2008 by Chris Eng

I’m not sure if Bruce Sterling coined the term ‘greenpunk’, but he was the first one I saw use it. It was here (courtesy of Boing-Boing), used in conjunction with a furthering of the concepts inherent in steampunk (a genre of science fiction that speculates what would have happened if steam power and pneumatics powered our technology). What if, instead of using coal to power Victorian technology, they had instead used alternative and renewable sources of energy? What if we were doing that now? What if, instead of having a dystopian and universally grungy version of cyberpunk where everyone is wired neurally into the ‘Net because no one wants to live in the real world, we had a world run off of solar panels, wind and tidal energy? Technology and green living aren’t (or, at least, don’t have to be) mutually exclusive.

Still, there is the division that appears in most people’s minds, which is you either have computers/technology/whatever trappings and conveniences you take for granted, or you’re living in the sticks with your tallow candles, poorly-sewn hempen smocks and Luddite mentality. Which is stupid. This is not a black and white decision that needs to be made, nor should it be. In the above article, Sterling uses another term that’s appropriate here: ‘hairshirt green’—in essence, those people who martyr themselves for the environmental cause by moving out in the middle of nowhere and living completely off the grid with an anti-technological philosophy. There is nothing to be gained, in a larger sense, by doing this. While martyring yourself for the green cause and removing yourself from the ‘Net ensures your emissions and personal living will impact the environment to a minimal degree, dropping out at this point simply makes certain you’re removed from any further discussions on how to lead our lives in the best possible way. You’re making life unnecessarily harder for yourself when you could have the support and wisdom of thousands of other like-minded individuals, and any contributions you might have made will be felt only by those you have immediate contact with.

I view Greenpunk as a concept in two ways:

1) It’s the continuation of a series of ‘-punk’ genres, blending science, science-fiction, technology and culture together in a melange that might ultimately impact with the real world and produce something more than the sum of its parts. Then again, in the end it may only give us philosophical fodder, but it’s not like that’s valueless either.
2) As a collision of the words ‘green’ and ‘punk’. Punk at its heart has always embodied a spirit of community. At its most idealistic, it’s a vehicle for revolution and no one is (or can be) a revolution on their own. It takes a movement, generally with an anti-authoritarian flair, to change society. Considering that the Internet is the greatest communications tool mankind has ever come up with, it’s not unreasonable to think we could form a community (or, more likely, multiple communities) to help us cooperate, collaborate and reach our goals, both individually and as a group—a group of environmentally-grounded people with a D.I.Y., homegrown, punk attitude.

Together, I see the concepts dovetailing in technologically-minded enviro-punks who have every desire to use technology to make the world (and their lives) better but simultaneously want to reduce their footprint on it and impact in it, preferably by returning to some of the concepts we’ve forgotten over the past 100 years (as well as making the remembrance of those concepts easier through the use of technology we’ve pioneered in the last 30 years or so).

Such a lifestyle is not without its own inherent costs—you can’t have a society that still uses microchip and silicon-based technology and not have environmental damage. If you’re producing anything technological on an industrial level there’s going to be waste and toxic byproducts. Still, there’s a balance we can strike (or at least work toward), and by living as sustainably as we can while exchanging knowledge and building community through global networking it’s something we can possibly achive.

I don’t think that greenpunk is the answer to the world’s problems, but I do think it’s a step in the right direction, and if we’re there to help each other out there’s no telling how many steps we’ll be able to take—locally, nationally and globally. Forty years ago, activists encouraged everyone to turn on, tune in, drop out; currently, I think everyone should log on, pare down, act up.

November 25th, 2008 by Chris Eng

Picture a two-floor log cabin on the edge of the woods. There’s a large vegetable garden beside it, and next to that are the chicken coops and pig pen. Attached to the house is a waterwheel powered off the creek, which in turn powers some of the electricity. The indoor heat is supplied by the wood stove and the air smells like fresh-baked bread. I’m in the living room and so is my wife—we’re watching downloaded British documentaries being played on our PC and shone onto a pull-down screen through a projector. This is the fantasy.

And I’m not unaware that the reality—the lifestyle one my wife Carla and I are working toward—will inevitably be an assload of hard, tough and possibly brutal work. I’m pretty sure it will never match up to the idealized Black-Forest-Meets-Similkameen fantasy in my head, but that’s okay—it’s something to shoot for. And we’ve got five years to get ourselves on the path.

The beginning of this story starts with me, Chris Eng, in 1973, being born into a life of tightly-woven pop-cultural milestones. The first movie I remember seeing in the theatre was Star Wars. I started collecting comics when I was six. I got turned on to Dungeons & Dragons at age nine. We got our first in-house computer when I was 11. Most of my adolescence was evenly split between BBSing, video games and geek culture in general. Punk caught me around 13. I got my first college radio show at 16 and started writing professionally in my twenties (for magazines like Vice and Punk Planet). I was given my first editorship at 28.

I mention all of this not for whatever bragging rights I might accrue on account of packing such colossal geekiness into three decades, but to emphasize what’s missing: there’s not a single mention of country living or a simple life anywhere. This is not selective omission—it’s because there was never a point in my life where I’d considered cabin-based self-sufficiency a viable option.

Growing up in Victoria (the capital of British Columbia, with a population of around 400,000) and eventually leaving for Vancouver (with brief stopovers in Calgary and Halifax) didn’t prepare me for a quiet existence. None of the places I chose to call home are small towns… or, indeed, towns at all. In fact, the most I’d ever really seen of small town life growing up was either passing through on vacation or the Old Town exhibit in the Provincial Museum.

Work-wise, most of the jobs I’ve held over the course of my life were retail (with a few writing-related posts for flavour). There was no tilling, hewing, feeding or gathering anywhere in my past. I would be surprised if there were more than a few isolated incidents of mowing.

Have I convinced you I’m grossly unqualified to lead the dream life described at the top? I have no inborn skills (that I know of) that would be any use in moderate homesteading. Why, then, would I make this decision and turn completely away from the life I’ve spent three and a half decades building up? There’s a few reasons, and I’ll explore them at length in future entries, but it more or less comes down to two things:

1) I’m tired of city living, and
2) The way we, as a society, are living isn’t sustainable, and I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.

So I’m going to give a shot to putting the past behind me by starting my life from scratch just weeks after turning 35. Carla and I have set my 40th birthday as the deadline to be living on our own property and practicing the basics of DIY living. We figure five years is a reasonable amount of time to change our habits and lay the groundwork for what’s to come.

But here’s the crux of it: I’m not giving up my geeky affectations and lifestyle. You can have my internet when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, and those Rock Band instruments aren’t going to play themselves. Still, I want to use different methods of harnessing electricity to take me off the grid as much as possible, and with luck and perseverance the lion’s share of our food will be grown or raised on-site.

On top of everything else, this is an exercise in becoming organized and responsible—two things that weren’t always easy for me. Getting there will teach frugality and patience (possibly the hard way), and will hopefully reemphasize the importance of friends and family as the basic cornerstones of everyday living (though I don’t undervalue either of them now). I don’t expect the journey to be easy, but I do expect it to be rewarding and satisfying.

I also think it will be amusing to see how as unabashed an urban technogeek as myself makes the transition to multifaceted outdoorsman/handyman. So, if you’re interested to see how I pull forward toward my goals (as well as periodically fall flat on my face, I’m sure), please come back and check up. I’m going to try to update a few times a week—whenever I have anything to say. And if you have something to say, please introduce yourself in the comments or at chris@geekunplugged.com.

As one last note: before I begin in earnest, I’d also like to ask for your patience. Being completely new to some of the concepts I’ll be talking about, I’ll likely say some naive, ignorant or simply downright stupid things from time to time. This is going to be an unfortunate part of the learning curve and I apologize to everyone in advance, but there’s nowhere for me to go but up. Thanks!