Save Some for the Kids

Ten or twenty years ago, I often saw bumper stickers on the backs of huge motorhomes on the highway: "We're Spending our Children's Inheritance". This, I think, was supposed to be cute. Now the $90,000 motorhomes are sitting forlornly with For Sale signs, worth a small fraction of their purchase price. The former vacationers? Who knows? Some of them have run completely through their children's inheritance, and are wondering how they can make payments on their own house. The formerly-cute statement is somewhat chilling.

But in a larger sense, that is what we are doing as a community, as a nation, and even as a world. We were gifted with a finite but huge inheritance from Mother Earth in the form of petroleum. In a little over a hundred years, we have squandered about half of it. (That's what Peak Oil means: half of it is gone--the easier half.)
The other half of that petroleum we leave for not just our heirs, but all succeeding generations of humans. And we're not showing significant signs of slowing down our consumption for the purposes of saving some for future generations.

At the beginning of the 20th century, we had a world endowed with ice caps and glaciers, pure air, an Aral Sea. Nature had put a lot of the carbon away safely in the petroleum, in the coal, in the limestone, in the permafrost, in the frozen clathrates in the ocean, in the forests that covered a significant portion of the globe. In the process of claiming our inheritance and that of our descendants, we're cranking that carbon back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

Two hundred years ago the oceans were packed full of beautiful lifeforms, in a highly complex web of life based on plankton. We found that many of these lifeforms were tasty or otherwise useful. The incredible bounty of the oceans made it seem that we could keep pulling out fish and shellfish forever, as much as we wanted, and not even have an effect. Unfortunately, the 20th century factory ships depleted most of the fish stocks, and pollution from land-based activities is causing major dead zones in most estuaries. Plankton is said to be down by 70% over levels earlier in the last century. Another inheritance taken from our kids, and their kids, for generations.

Bringing it closer to home, here in Larimer County we're busily engaged in paving over good farmland, putting up yet more retail space, or developing yet more subdivisions far from the city centers. The only thing that has slowed this process down is the real estate meltdown, not any consideration for preserving the land so that future generations can have food. Our priorities are cock-eyed. Do we need more McMansions, or do we need food? Your choice. As petroleum gets more expensive, importing food from every other country in the world becomes more expensive, and industrial-style farming becomes less cost-effective.

In the economy, we're rolling up a Mt Everest of debt for succeeding generations to cope with, or not, as the case may be. Greed doesn't look so "good" these days as it did in the 90s. The U.S. has been living so far beyond their means, drawing down the inflated equity of their homes, spending their way into their own mountains of debt, that the rest of the world which has been selling us all this stuff is sinking too, now that we're tapped out.

I don't have the answers to these enormous problems. This is too big for one person to have the answers. We all need to be thinking about ways to preserve the wealth and bounty of the natural world for our grandkids, their grandkids, and on into the future. One of the best compliments you can give for someone who died is that he or she made the world a better place than they found it. The generations now on the Earth (us) need to be thinking about how we can make the world a better place, individually and in communities.

We know that the future won't look like the 20th century, and we know that it certainly won't look like the breathless extrapolations common in 20th century science fiction: everybody with their own little copter to get around, colonies on Mars, endless supplies of everything, endless wealth for every inhabitant of the planet.

It's a shock to realize that the supply of everything on Earth is NOT infinite. As you spend some time thinking about it, you go down through layers and levels of thinking. Petroleum scarce? plastics scarce. Then you can think about how our lives are surrounded and supported by plastics. Petroleum scarce? we're not going to be buzzing off to Europe or Australia every year on vacation; maybe we won't be able to see far-flung family members very often, or ever. Natural gas scarce? How do we heat our homes? How do we generate electricity? That opens up another thousand questions. But putting our heads firmly in the sand won't solve the problems, and leaving it for "future generations", i.e. our grandkids, to solve shows a total lack of character and integrity on our part.

So I'm sending this question out into the community: What can we do to "save some for our kids"? What I'd like to save for my grandchildren's children:

* A HEALTHY OCEAN. Let's clean up the plastic waste now, and take steps to ensure that no new plastic waste goes into the ocean. Let's stop overfishing NOW, not in decades to come when the fish are gone. And I don't believe you can have a healthy ocean without the humans controlling their greenhouse gas emissions.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Stop buying fish! Cut down on your plastic consumption. Work hard to prevent pollution from entering the rivers and the oceans.

* HEALTHY SMALL FARMS. This means healthy topsoil and lots of small working farms, and lots of farmers; farms in every locality growing food for their neighbors. We have overshot with the principle that "efficiency" means less human labor and more use of fossil energy, fossil water (aquifers) and agricultural poisons. The most productive farmland in the world is in the form of individual small plots, carefully tended. We have land to do that, in our own backyards, in our public areas, on our schoolgrounds. We just need the will to do it.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Plant a Victory Garden. Support local farms by buying their produce. Work with government entities to protect and expand small farms, and get farms in the hands of young people who want to farm.

* AN INDUSTRIAL BASE in the U.S. This means jobs, where people actually make things and add value. Retail sales and services are the branches and leaves of the tree of the economy. We've cut our tree down at the roots (by outsourcing practically all real manufacturing), and it's just taking a little time for all those unsupported branches and leaves to fall, but fall they will. Have you tried to buy a kitchen brush lately? All from China. Not some but all; every one. Trying to buy American-made goods is an exercise in frustration.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Look for American-made goods, and complain to your store if none are available. Support re-skilling, both personal and industrial; this means that you learn some skills such as knitting, sewing, cooking, gardening, home repair, etc., and support for vocational training for young people (and older, too, for that matter).

* A SOLVENT NATION, STATE, CITY, AND FAMILY. When I think about this subject, the Oxygen Mask analogy comes to mind: Put on your own mask before you help others with theirs. The first thing we all need to do is balance our own household budgets, and live within our means. The CEO of 3M Co., George Buckley, said recently: "...the first responsibility we have as the leaders of companies is to make sure that we ensure the health and survival of our own companies first, not necessarily other people's companies, or, for that matter, the whole U.S. economy." When households, and companies, live within their means, they have a chance of accumulating some assets which can be put to work building factories, making jobs, and improving the community. When our nation stops trying to be a world empire, and becomes a fiscally conservative and responsible world citizen, all the countries in the world will benefit, including ourselves. But the transition will be painful, and we have to expect that.
A FEW THINGS YOU CAN DO: Live within your means! Buy less, pay down debt, bring your material expectations back in line with reality. Choose frugality instead of excess. Choose sensible investments (which can be many things besides stocks or mutual funds) that pay back long-term in reduced energy use, and increased benefits to our communities. Help your local governmental entities in finding ways to balance their budgets too. Let your congressmen/women know how you feel.

I get discouraged sometimes, but I have not lost hope. I think our kids and grandkids can have a good life. It won't look like what we imagined, and it will be worse in some ways, but it can also be better in some ways. I can foresee them getting off the rat race that we're on at the beginning of the 21st century, figuring out what's important in their lives (besides material goods), and having the pleasure of making things that are real, useful, and beautiful.

Happy New Year!