C-Realm

KMO talks with Danny Nemu about his efforts with an organization called RAIN, which stands for Regenerative Agroforestry Impact Network. They work to restore Brazilian landscapes which have been compromised by slash and burn methods which turn rain forest into short-lived agricultural patches which are soon depleted.

Bernie, if you're going to play, play to win.

KMO welcomes the Angry Animator, Dermot O'Connor, and Bob Brown, technologist and permaculturalist back to the C-Realm to follow up on KMO's recent conversation with Justin Ritchie about the documentary film, Planet of the Humans. Both Bob and Dermot agree that criticisms of the film have focused on trivial details and ignored the point that windmills and solar panels cannot power industrial civilization at our current level of consumption.

KMO talks with Eric Boyd about China's performance during the the Covid-19 crisis as well as the long-term prospects for a CCP-controlled China in the near and intermediate-term future. Grist for the conversation mill came from Peter Zeihan's series of newsletter series, A Failure of Global Leadership.

KMO welcomes Dr. Justin Ritchie, co-creator of the Extraenvironmentalist Podcast, back to the C-Realm to discuss the controversy around the documentary, Planet of the Humans. The film calls out mainstream environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club and environmentalist celebrities like Bill McKibben for endorsing feel-good measures which aim at preserving the industrial lifestyle but which are inadequate for sustaining the bioshpere. Critics of the film respond that the criticisms it levels are all based on information that is long out of date.

Buckminster Fuller talked about how technology can accomplish more and more with less material and energy. Eventually, it will become so effective that it can do anything with nothing. Jim, your ad attacker, has a problem with the name the Fuller gave to this process. In this podcast, he explains why.

KMO compares worldviews with Brent Bednarik. KMO is an ex-Doomer who freely admits that he may have swung too far in the other direction, though he certainly does not identify with the techno-utopianism so derided by the Peak Oil faithful. Brent sees the perennially failed predictions of collapse as a sign that the world is more complicated and less predictable than the prophets of doom present it to be.

Feedback from a Friend of the C-Realm:

Hi KMO,I just finished listening to your recent free episode with Brent Bednarik.  I found this episode, like many of the ones you have put out over the years, to be thought-provoking even if my worldview doesn't quite map with yours (or Brent's for that matter) quite as much as maybe it did in the past.  I had a few thoughts and perspectives on some things you discussed in that episode that I'd like to share.

First, when you referenced Joseph Tainter's work and cited JMG as a kind of counterbalance or different argument I think you may have actually missed Tainter's core thesis, because to be honest it's not very different from JMG's idea of "catabolic collapse," but just looks at the process from a higher viewpoint.  Catabolic collapse is a ground-level view based on the idea that people will start to cannibalize the infrastructure of a declining society to fix the things that can be fixed and cobble together what they need to get through daily life.  Tainter's idea is that civilizations use increasing complexity to solve problems (and this typically involves more complex infrastructure) over time when they are experiencing infusions of energy and capital early on in their development.  However, as time goes on the cost of maintaining the complex infrastructure and social arrangements goes up while the infusions of energy and capital (commonly plunder taken through conquest) starts to decline, thus reducing the rate of return until it turns flat and then even negative.  This process also eats up spare capacity of the civilizations to deal with external shocks such as bad harvests because all that spare capacity is devoted toward maintaining growth rather than kept for when needed (the Anasazi network of sharing food between settlements being the prime example he cites).  Tainter never argued that this would result in a "flash crash" of civilizations -- like Greer he sees collapse as a process that plays out over centuries for most societies affected by it.This brings me to my second point, which is in regards to the idea of "doomers" vs. "technophiles" (for the purposes of simplification).  Like you, I sometimes feel as if I wasted some opportunities to greatly increase my own financial standing because I adopted "doomer" views around peak oil and the likes.  But while I've moderated my views on many of these subjects, unlike you I've also never really left them entirely.  Do you remember the series that JMG did on his old blog about the world after the dissolution of the United States, chronicling an emissary traveling from the nation that comprised the Northeast and New England to that made up of the former Great Lakes states?  Because I think, personally, that the Atlantic Republic as portrayed in that series gives a pretty good glimpse into a likely trajectory in the US.  That society was one that was starkly divided along class lines, with a small elite that was still able to take advantage of all the most recent technological advances and new gadgets while a massive and impoverished underclass went about their days barely able to make ends meet.  I see the trajectory of technology in the US playing out along similar lines, at least vis-a-vis economic activity (especially combined with a state seemingly devoted to its new mission as propping up high finance b...

KMO talks with Jim Kunstler about his new book, Living in the Long Emergency, and about the current moment in which the economy is somewhere between frozen and in free-fall because of the coronavirus pandemic.

KMO and Douglas Lain set out to talk about 2019 and immediately start coloring outside the lines. The conversation continues on the Vault and concludes on YouTube: https://youtu.be/E4hKCCCBxc0

Prof. Harvey J. Kaye

KMO talks with Harvey J. Kaye, author of Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again, about what it means to be radical and how Americans can empower themselves by re-connecting with our history of radical organizing and action. KMO makes reference to The Final Reflection, a Star Trek novel from 1985.

KMO and John Michael Greer met up in Lancaster, PA this week to talk about ecofascism. JMG made a bit of a stir a few weeks back when he published an essay on his blog called The Next Twilight of Environmentalism. His thesis is that we're in the early stages of seeing media power-brokers discredit environmentalism by associating it with Nazis, white nationalists and mass shooters. Later in the podcast, KMO asks JMG about the candidacy of Andrew Yang and his signature policy, the Freedom Dividend.