December 9th, 2008 by Chris Eng

One of the most critical moments for sending me down the path toward self-subsistance was getting my hands on a copy of The Long Emergency by James Kunstler. I plan to review it at length some point soon, but the general thrust of the book is that mankind is headed for a really, really crappy time and it’s going to come within our lifetimes. Kunstler gives a number of reasons for this, but the first one discussed (and the one discussed at the greatest length) is that we’re going to run out of oil.

The phrase used most commonly to describe this problem is ‘peak oil’, and it refers to the point when 50% of the Earth’s supply is used up. The other 50% is the half that’s harder to get out of the ground—in smaller deposits that we’ll have to keep searching for, trapped in hard to extract mediums like the oil sands, etc. Experts figure we’ll hit peak oil somewhere between now and the next 15 years (it will likely be one of those points we won’t know we’ve hit until it’s happened). Meanwhile, the worldwide demand for oil has been climbing ever higher. Both China and India have growing middle classes that want the privilege of driving cars, and the global population continues to skyrocket.

So, what does this mean for the everyman (aside from it being more expensive to drive)? Well, just about everything is reliant on oil. Our food is brought in on trucks; our consumer goods are brought in on tankers; most people commute to work in their own cars. Essentially, the cost of everything will rise. Eventually, when the oil shortage reaches a critical point, the entire system will fail. I’m not going to be some kind of doomsaying prognosticator who lays down an exact date and time when the end of the civilization comes crashing down, but even though I think it’s a ways down the road, that doesn’t mean getting there will be any easier. Society may remain standing in the short term, but if the cost of everything goes through the roof, it’ll be harder and harder to make ends meet.

The tone of The Long Emergency gets a little hysterical from time to time, but its basic arguments about peak oil are pretty sound. In fact, if you distill them to their most basic level, it’s hard to refute them: there is a finite amount of oil in the world and someday we will run out. There’s no Magic Oil Machine to make more when we’re done exhausting our supplies of compressed dinosaurs and algae. Moreover, there’s no eco-friendly substitute to replace oil with. Even if we could make biodiesel a workable option for our cars, we can’t produce it on a large enough scale to power the autofleets of the world. And while hydrogen cells may someday (though not, by the looks of it, any time soon) become viable fuel sources, we can’t retrofit our current cars in order to run off them; we would have to replace all of the cars on the road. On top of that, many of the power plants in North America are run off oil or other fossil fuels like natural gas—which is, itself, running out—or coal. Environmentally-friendly power options like wind, solar and tidal are certainly things that we should be looking to, but we aren’t currently implementing them at a rate that would cover a fraction of our energy needs, and by the time we hit the crisis point it will be much too late. Nuclear energy is a viable option for covering some of the gap, but the concept has essentially become a dirty word and the public doesn’t want it.

So, where will that leave us as supplies dwindle? It will leave us in a world that grows forever smaller. It will become increasingly costly to leave the region we’re currently living in (plane fuel costs grow more expensive all the time, and it’s possible that ultimately none but the richest of us will fly). Prepared food will become more and more expensive, prompting us to grow our own as much as possible. Metropolises will find it harder and harder to support their infrastructure, and small town-life (based on community and local trade) will enjoy a resurgence.

Is there a solution? Not as far as I can see. I don’t think there’s some solution just waiting around the corner that will allow us to keep consuing energy as we have been. Consequently, Carla and I feel its in our best interests to scale back on our consumption (of everything) and plan an exit from Vancouver to our own acreage—growing and raising crops and livestock and taking advantage of small-scale, eco-friendly power generation. Doing so will hopefully allow us to better weather whatever is coming down the road

You don’t have to agree with me on this. I’m not putting this here to enter some kind of protracted argument about whether or not peak oil is a real phenomenon. I know there are plenty of people out there who think it’s a load of crap. That’s fine. They’re welcome to their opinion. I think it’s kind of crazy, but that’s why we live in a society like ours—so we can have differing opinions. Ultimately, peak oil could all turn out to be some horrible dystopian fantasy, but even if it does, the life I have in Vancouver at the moment isn’t the life I want to be leading. Even if it never comes to pass, the race to consume going on every day isn’t what I want to be concerned with. And, ultimately, as long as I manage to get the acreage up and running, I’ll be living the way I want to in a setting I’m happy in.

(Photo courtesy of Michael Foley Photography)

November 27th, 2008 by Chris Eng

When geeks want to start showing off and figuring out who’s superior, they stop short of whipping their cocks out to compare sizes or kicking the crap out of each other in a seedy bar parking lot. No, instead they compare something else: the size of their collections.

Every geek starts building their collection of Stuff at a young age, because there is an ever increasing amount of Stuff in the world and a limited amount of time to track it down in. The importance and relevance of Stuff when computing superiority works exactly the same way the free market does: supply and demand. Rare Stuff trumps common Stuff. If you have a copy of a comic book that was printed in 1963, but got recalled and pulped, leaving only 50 known copies in the world, that beats anything mass-market. On the other hand, if your collection consists of only a few very cool things, but you go up against someone with every single Spider-Man comic ever made, you may have your ass handed to you—quantity sometimes beats quality. Either way, you assemble your collection as best you can.

Up until the turn of the millennium that meant scouring every remotely relevant shop at every available opportunity. It meant making a list and checking the items off at a painfully slow pace. You didn’t come across Harlan Ellison novels every day, and if you did somehow come across a trove of them, as soon as you’d bought them they were gone; you had to move on and look for the next cache. Assembling a collection in this way took years, but it’s not like we had anything better to do. Let me illustrate with Danny Plotnick’s short film Out of Print:



Due to my geeky needs, moving to a small town was never even a vague consideration. Small town life would automatically preclude some of the things I’d come to view as life-sustaining: a comic shop, a punk rock/used record store, and more than one used book store. Sure, thrift stores back then had pretty good selections of weird stuff, but again—once you picked them over, there was a limited chance that they would be restocked with William Burroughs novels or Power Records albums any time soon. Due to that, geeks were basically forced to live in cities (or become intimately acquainted with process of trading or ordering through the mail).

But all of that changed with the rise of the internet. By 2001 or so, there were multiple sites from which to sustain your geeky collections: Amazon for new books, DVDs and CDs; abebooks for used and out-of-print books; and eBay as a clearinghouse for just about everything under the sun. On top of that, if you were just interested in the intrinsic value of an object as opposed to its physical worth, digital copies had become plentiful, even (or perhaps especially) for extreme rarities. Obscure bootlegged albums and concerts turned up with regularity on Soulseek, eMule and Oink, and comics like Night Nurse and The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love—consigned to the dustbins of history—were given second life through file-sharing. If you were interested in having a huge collection of Stuff and were willing to put in the time online, you could live in locations as disparate as Inuvik, Skidegate or Glace Bay. And if you just were amassing knowledge (or a digital archive), well, that was just about as easy and substantially cheaper.

As a consequence of the changing technology, whatever reservations I’d held about small town and country life (in regard to the proximity of cool Stuff) were completely eliminated. I could live wherever I liked, and as long as I had an internet connection, a credit card and a mailbox, I would never be cut off from my lifeline.

There’s an aside that should really be made at this point, touched on in “Out of Print”: when assembling our collections, the chase was a large part of the fun. It was electrifying to be scanning a shelf full of crap in a sub-standard used book store and spot a first edition of Neuromancer. Sure you can order one off of abebooks now and have it in a week, but there’s no sport in that. For that matter, when someone asks you where you managed to find a copy of The Ramones Leave Home with “Carbona Not Glue” on it, it’s less dramatic to say “eBay” than “I found it in an antique shop in Portland underneath a pile of throw rugs.”

Still, that’s the price that’s paid to ensure that geeks have the ability to move at will across the country—and the world—spreading their geeky knowledge and ways, acquiring ever greater collections of Stuff and astounding and baffling their neighbours. Oh, you didn’t know that’s what we were doing? This is Phase One of Project: Germination—see you all at the Comic Fans Meeting in Flin Flon next year.