I've been doing my gloating and kidding around over on Facebook, so it's not going to end up here. Every time somebody gives up and joins me, I don't gloat - I start telling them how to do cool stuff. And the photos in this post are just for the pretty and happy.
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| The Clallam River, recovering and cleaner. |
Thank you to everybody who's spreading the word on this blog - including the people who hate it. Remember, I'm just the messenger - I'm just outing bad behavior, not making it up. And there are a few people, who know the resource/greedhead past is going to die within a generation, who are bringing their kids to me, knowing I won't hurt them and will make their future here, in a decent rural area, possible and hopeful.
I can't clean up your history - there are too many people with photos of exterminated wolves, and pictures of
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| Happy Beach Monster! |
grandpa with walls full of dead bears and cougars, or so proud of themselves standing on the stumps of destroyed forests. The Natives in boarding schools - the survivors still over on Facebook, breaking hearts, talking about the horrors of The Bad Times. You're stuck, like America, with its genocidal past, the whipped slaves, and the pyramid of buffalo skulls. None of us can bury that - nor would decent people want to. But we CAN make a better future.
So, leaving the anger and fear behind, let's all look at the latest possibilities. First of all, arts and entertainment can and will have clean, low-footprint jobs for everybody. This includes forestry and construction. They need real wood and real set-builders. Don't let your forests go to toilet paper and chipboard, when you can carefully steward your future beautiful boards - which
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| Makah Days canoe crew. |
go for huge prices, when treated properly. When you look at a tree, you shouldn't see something to take your anger out at, something to - as I've heard confessed - to enjoy being destroyed - but an ally and friend. Nature gave you a chocolate cake covered in gold. Don't stomp it or shit on it and then expect to be able to spend or eat it.
I speak as pulp-industry spawn. I've seen the bad happen. Listen to the warnings of one who has been there, and doesn't want it here. Not without a fight.
Small point: solar use. First of all - it is NOT the 1970's. Most of what you get from local government is mentally nailed into that era. It's antique. Look at Germany, and pay attention (yes, and that translates as "Achtung!"). Speaking of Germany, it's pretty much solared up - with the same
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| Pebble-roasted, buttered oysters. |
climate as ours - and it's gotten out of gobbling up all the solar equipment. So the prices are dropping!
Everybody up here immediately talks about hooking into PUD and "selling power back." But that's a 1970's concept. It's an attempt to keep the locomotive, when we need the SmartCar. And my dad was a long-distance trucker, who said that forget trying to out-muscle a semi for safety, and get the smallest, fastest, most agile car you could find. You will LOSE a crash with a haulage truck - better to AVOID it. And you people can't DRIVE or PARK those pretend tanks you got now. Let's all get light on our feet - and our footprint.
Speaking of unwieldy crashes:
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| Sequined Hummingbird, Neah Bay. |
We MUST drop the idea of huge grids. Every one of you I've spoken to GETS it when I talk about rivers being kinetic energy, and fossil fuels being second-level fuels. And understands when I say that a huge grid is not only antique, but expensive, inefficient - and hooking directly into a star. A huge grid is capable of not only turning birds into puffs of smoke, but being massively dangerous.
Now, we've handled dangerous things before, because we needed to - and not always well (ask the Russians about that) - but why do it if we can't do it as book says: "Smaller, Faster, Cheaper" - ? (Hard copy at the library). Solar is about little 12-volt appliances, some of them with their
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| In Clallam Bay Park. |
own dinky panels. Solar is about Neah Bay turning neighborhoods into mini-grids, so that a central battery bank keeps chugging, even if one house goes down.
Clallam County is fighting over what kind of meters to have, electronic, or analog. This is like fighting over who gets to make the buggy whips. You're wasting your time, people, over the unimportant. Get your heads in the real game.
Water? Why isn't every neighborhood taking care of all this rainfall? Perhaps bigger grids work in cities, but everything goes out here all the time, including electricity, water and sewer.* We have to think smaller, cheaper, faster. It's just how it is.
Look, folks, sooner or later, every empire eats itself alive, after the resources are cleaned out, and it's been doing war as business. Then Rome has to cut back on the far colonies and take care of the homeland. Guess who we are, out here on the Olympic Peninsula? That's right - Great Britain. And when Rome left, the Dark Ages began.
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| Sprinkles Yogurt, Port Angeles. |
But does it have to be dark here? Why don't we get started, now? Let's take power and water out of the hands of the utilities - except as the base for making and centralizing lower-cost bulk equipment orders and storage - and use that money for the things government is REALLY good for: roads, bridges, public transportation, education, libraries, and health care.
Perhaps if we all buckle down and make our small power work, every single kid could be funded by us to get an education at the Peninsula College - which is the ultimate investment in the future. Let's pay for the good stuff, and take care of the smart basics ourselves.
We can all do this. I KNOW you can - you're all smart enough and you love this place too much to fail. This is the New Frontier - you have a chance. Get started before Earth imposes her deadline - because she will call it in, and then it will be too late; she will drop her mask of Kind Mother and reveal herself, Kali-like, as the great Juggernaut she is, stomping forward in her power, and flipping out any little useless cog (like us) that gets in her way. Don't wait for the deadline; keep Mom happy.
Mom likes fun. Look at the animals when they're on their own, most of their lives. The great thing about the new future is, it will depend on doing what you want, for the fun of it. You are no more on this earth to work yourself to death, than a seagull enjoying September, floating on the waves during Grownup Summer. Neither are your children. Give them the chance. It's being offered to you, with both hands. Stop complaining about how the kids won't dig ditches (have you not heard of the backhoe?) and start being proud of how they're renovating our world for the good.
Get to work. No - Come to PLAY.
(*I didn't bring sewer up until the end, because Americans are big babies about it. We're so scared of considering it, we flush away our poop in our drinking water. Sooner or later, we'll have to organize for disposal without water. Face it, before the typhoid or cholera epidemic starts - and it will. And it's not difficult. Just ask the library for Humanure. Oh, don't whimper. Any of you who have enjoyed Beyond Thunderdome - did you think they'd brought along the pigs to power the cities? If you guys can't face it, ask the moms to work on it - they have to deal with diapers, so it shouldn't freak them out.)
