5 Star – Page 139 – Public Intelligence Blog

Scary, Practical, A “Best in Class” Book,

February 7, 2007

Aric McBay

There is an entire literatue on Peak Oil (now, 30 years too late). Of the seven or eight that I have read, this is the single best most sensible book. Easy to read, to “connects the dots” and makes it clear just how tough urban and surban survival is going to be–imagine Baghdad at home.

The author has really knocked the ball out of the park with common sense. This is not a book that states the obvious as much as it is a book that really drives home the importance of obtaining water, treating water, creating latrines and making best use of gray water, keeping food cool, heating for fuel (with a dramatic savings achievable for short-term fuel use augmented by hot box “sitting”), and then ending with lighting and heat.

The layout of the book is first-rate, the diagrams are superb and easy to understand, and the practical list of tools and supplies needed for sustainment survival is explicit, not over-stated, and just plain serious.

Absolutely a great book and a serious contribution to the good of any community.

Other books:
Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage
Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum
The Party's Over: Oil, War And The Fate Of Industrial Societies Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

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2007/02/072009/12/04

Review: The Oil Depletion Protocol–A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Economics, Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Science & Politics of Science, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Bottom Line Deadly Serious,

February 7, 2007

Richard Heinberg

All of the non-fiction reading that I have done supports this author's presenation of both the consequences of doing nothing, and practical bottom line: a 3% reduction per year for the next ten to twenty years, of gross consumption (per capita is meaningless when the number of people are growing rapidly) of oil is the only way to transition gracefully.

Amazon visiters need to be aware that the oil industry, and Exxon in particularly, is applying considerable funds to pay for disinformation and misrepresentation. As Al Gore stated in his briefing to 10,000 Republicans in the Taco Bell Arena of Boise State University, the oil companies (less BP and Chevron) are adopting the precise strategy of the tobacco industry, seeking to turn facts into “theories” that are “in dispute.”

Reality is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the ethics of the Exxon CEO, among others, who choose to lie to the American people and others and take credit for improving gas mileage when what is really needed is a massive turning away from the use of both oil and water.

This book is a great companion to “Peak Oil Survival,” and discusses at the macro levels the implications of oil depletion.

I also like this book because at the back I found a page that informed me that the publisher, New Society Publishers, is both committed to books helpful to society, but that its use of recycled paper as a directly measureable benefit in saving 25 trees, 2,281 gallons of solid waste, 2,512 gallons of water, 3,276 kilowatt hours of electricity, 4,150 lbs of greenhouse gases, 18 lbs of HAPs, VOCs, and AOX combined, and 6 cubic yards of landfill space.

WOW. See my growing list on “true cost” information. Above is the “true cost” for books that do NOT use recycled paper.

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2007/02/042009/12/04

Review: Made to Break–Technology and Obsolescence in America

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, True Cost & Toxicity

Part of a Larger Story,

February 4, 2007

Giles Slade

This is one of the best of the “toxic tech” books in current view, by no means completely original, and certainly not the whole story. It gets five stars for its niche. In relation to other books, for example, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution; The Ecology of Commerce; The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals; Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy; any of the books on Peak Oil, and the original book on the down side of industrialization, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System it falls to a lower level.

What is most important is the emerging literature on Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things We should be LEASING tools and appliances with short lives. The manufacturer should–as that literature recommends–be required to take back the discarded item, and plan for upgrades that do not require the discarding of the entire unit.

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2007/02/042009/12/04

Review: The Omnivore’s Dilemma–A Natural History of Four Meals

5 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Shocking: Iowa an Agricultural Desert, Cannot Eat Its Own Corn!,

February 4, 2007

Michael Pollan

I bought both his books, and now regret buying the Botany of Desire–that book is more of a whimsical discussion of the relation between four plants and humans, while this one is a deeper learning experience that is focused on sustainability. There are a number of gems that I noted down.

In something of a play on words and meaning, the author opens by noting that we have a national eating disorder because we lack a culture that places eating in a proper frame of reference where time spent preparing and enjoying food is valued, and then seques into how damaging to the environment, and to ourselves, are monocultures. At many points through the book the author documents how industrialized foods are less nutricious, more harmful to the human body, and more wasteful of the earth's resources, than organic foods.

The book is especially dramatic and deeply documented with reference to the bastardization of corn from something delicious for humans, to something that is not edible by humans but used to create a machine line for manufactured foods that can be transported great distances. The whole story of corn as the foundation for abusing cows, chickens, and other animals is extremely well told here, and shocking. It stunned me, for example, to read about Iowa as an agricultural “desert,” whose farms cannot support families, only inedible corn destined for beef factories.

As the author notes, the mutation of corn pushed the animals off the local farms and into a factory farm system. The author does not emphasize animal cruelty but that comes across clearly. Animals are grown in confined spaces, and drugs combined with forced feeding take an animal from 80 lbs to 1,100 lbs in 14 months, at which point they are killed.

Side notes on how beaks are cut off chickens to keep them from hurting another another in conditions that make gulags look like country clubs, are reguarly put forward, and very troubling.

The manner in which our mutant agriculture leads to obesity can be illustrated by the author's showing that corn fed beef is “marbled” with fat, and cleverly sold as a feature rather than the flaw that it is.

Processed food wastes energy. Later on in the book the author stresses that grass farming is the fastest way to harness the free renewable power of the sun.

On pages 130-131 he constrasts the two competing systems:

He constrasts industrial vs. pastoral; annual vs. perennial; monoculture vs. polyculture; fossil energy vs. solar energy; global market vs. local market; specialized vs. diversified; mechanical vs. biological; imported fertility vs. local fertility; and myriad inputs including fertilizer and chemicals, vs. chicken feed.

I learn that industrialized organic farming is just as fuel and corn consumptive as industrialized chemical farming.

The author affirms the productivity of local farms, while pointing out that it is the transaction and scaling costs that kill the family famr.

He paints an attractive picture of natural farms as not needing machines, chemicals, fertilizers, and so on, because they manage natural complexity is a way that produces balance, nutrition, productivity, and profit. Localized food is natural.

Chefs get a great deal of credit for helping localized farms survive, as they give testimony with their buying, of how much better the localized product are from the one size fits all drugged up factory foods.

I recommend The Ecology of Commerce or Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution in addition to this book, and also Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy the latter on our chlorine-based industry. I do not recommend the The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World unless you are interested in the spirit of the plant rather than the stabilization of the planet.

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2007/01/302009/12/04

Review: Why Societies Need Dissent (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures)

5 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Philosophy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Essential Contribution to Democratic Dialog,

January 30, 2007

Cass R. Sunstein

It took me a couple of years to get to this book, but I am glad I did. Interestingly, it is dedicated to Judge Richard Posner, who has become quite a celebrity in writing and talking, from a legal point of view, about secret intelligence, in addition to his many other works.

The author's position is not completely new (see for instance Elizabeth Janeway's 1987 classic, “IMPROPER BEHAVIOR: When and How Misconduct Can be Healthy for Society”, and the more standard but still seminal “The Social Construction of Reality.”

The author rises beyond the law to embrace sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and in that vein, reminds me of Norman Dixon's classic work, “The Psychology of Military Incompetence.”

The core of the book addresses what the author names the two influences (most people get most of their information second-hand; and the general desire for good opinion of oneself) and the three phenomena (conformity, social cascades, and group polarization).

He notes that pluralistic ignorance is dangerous; that groups and systems work better when there are incentives for sharing information openly; and that “free speech” requires BOTH legal protection AND cultural acceptance.

He discusses the superiority of the more adaptive and open democratic decision making to that of totalitarian societies, but his description of their pathologies, ideas hatched in secret and for which no opposition will be accepted, sound starkly like Dick Cheney's Standard Operating Procedure–facsist control, lies to the public with impunity, and no tolerance for flag officers, including flag officers like Tony Zinni and General Shinseki, who have the courage to say that invading Iraq is not only nuts, it will be a disaster. For deep insights into Cheney's impeachable suprression of dissent, see “One Percent Doctrine,' “VICE: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency,” and “Crossing the Rubicon”–and of course the various books on impeachment (see my list).

The author concludes with a special focus on the role of Judges and Senators as dissenting voices, and I am reminded of Senator Robert Byrd's courageous and erudite opposition to the illegal war on Iraq, with his speeches available to all in book form as “Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency”).

The author concludes with a very disappointing section on education and affirmative action, and in this section, spoils an otherwise superb book by focusing on the banalities of affirmative action. Like George Bush and Hillary Clinton, he is toying with the cosmetics and avoiding the deep–the really deep–need for a complete recasting of education to fully integrate distance and self-paced online learning, multi-cultural learning, deep historical and cross-cultural understanding; a draconian Manhattan Project to improve desktop analytic tools and the need for an Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) such as Pierre Levy is creating (see his “Collective Intelligence”), as well as life-long learning, the localization of everything, and so on. I beg to emphasize this: it is the agricultural era school schedule (summer off) and the industrial era rote learning rigid structured program, that is killing the creativity of our kids while locking them up in a program that is nothing more than advanced child care with a semblance of prison population, the “club med” aspects for cheerleaders and jocks not-with-standing. Our HIGHEST national priority should be to churn education so that our kids are liberally and broadly educated and armed with all of the tools for thinking that the Central Intelligence Agency still does not have today because it too is a vestige of the Soviet era of gray desks and dumb telephones.

Thomas Jefferson had it right: “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.” Cass Sunstein is arguably, with Lawrence Lessig, one of the greatest lawyers of our generation, but in the final section, he plops quietly.

Never-the-less, a five star book.

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2007/01/282009/12/04

Review: One from Many–VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public)

Innovative Capitalism,

January 28, 2007

Dee Hock

Edit of 30 Dec 07 to add comment and links.

New comment: something big is happening, in both politics and business. Moral green open transparent memes are in overdrive. See links.

I read a lot, a solace and a life line out of the madness of today. I finished up my week-end with this most unusual gem, and it is with some emotion that I put it down and take the time to write this review.

In my lifetime, there have been fewer than four individuals able to understand me and manage me, and Dee Hock now joins that number, sight unseen. This is one of the *good guys*! If he and Bill Bradley and Jim Turner (Transpartisanship) can come together, we can remake the world.

The book benefits from a Foreword by Peter Senge, who notes that VISA as it emerged was a disruptive concept that threatened traditional powers. Senge also notes the importance of distinguishing between enabling technologies, such as the Internet, and what is enabled, such as democracy or equitable wealth creation and sharing. Finally, Senge observes that global complexity requires distributed democracy, to which I and the author would both be quick to add: “and moral capitalism.”

The book is at root about the failure of all of our instititutions, and the need to find a third way between over-bearing centralization and anarchic decentralization. The author coins the word “chaordic” to deswcribe an even-handed and often-changing balance between the two.

Dee Hock is a philosopher-king, and I am reminded of “Voltaire's Bastards” and “Consilience” as I read his denouncement of the Western concept of separability and his own understanding that complexity is about never-ending and alway-changing relationships. In one example with the US Army, he explores how rules-based organizations waste 45-85% of the time and value of their employees. He specifically notes that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource and is abundant, but too often constrained if not crushed by schools, armies, corporations, and so on.

The author's morality shines forth as he describes non-monetary exchanges of value as the best possible foundation for what others call reciprocal altruism. At one point he observes that “leadership is not necessarily constructive, ethical, or open.”

The entire book is about the creation of an organization in which participation is the primal element, agreement is dynamic, and trust and tolerance are the prevailing values. He states that organizational heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgotory is paper and procedure. Hell is rule & regulation.

He realizes early on that fraud and theft are major challenges, and that information is, as he quotes Gregory Bateson, “a difference that makes a difference.”

I have a big note: this is a smart, ethical, practical, inspiring person–one of the good guys!

The author is deeply and empathetically aware of the discord between our industrial era understandings and perceptions, and the bio-cultural realities of the Earth and all its processes. He sees clearly what the “true cost” or natural capitalism literature seeks to teach.

A line jumps out, in which the author is lamenting that we have such a wealth of information, yet have drifted into “collective madness.”

He clearly sees that our current form of predatory immoral “bandit” capitalism specializes at the socialization of cost and the capitalization of gain, which is fancy wording for looting the commons and stealing the profit. He also points out that we are putting the debt on to future generations.

He clearly describes the current form of corporations as inimical to the commons.

The book concludes strongly, lionizing the will to succeed when joined with the grace to compromise, placing VISA on a par with the Internet and LINUX as an organizational model for the future, and noting that growth comes from failure.

On page 284 he lists the following ten attributes from a living organization in Spain that represents the best of the chaordic model:

01 Open membership
02 Democratic organization
03 Worker sovereignty
04 Instrumental subordinate nature of capital
05 Participation in management
06 Wage solidarity
07 Cooperating between cooperatives
08 Social transformation
09 Universal nature
10 Education (he might have added, life-long, unconstrained, free of the prison-rote we now suffer, and teaching sharing as well as learning)

He ends with the story of his recall from his wanderings in the wilderness, to explore examples, models, the intellectual foundation, and organizations by which we might save the Planet and our species, to include the necessary means of mind-crafting for the future.

I actually had goose-bumps as I put this book down. I felt, very strongly, that I had been within the aura of a great leader, a gentle person, a world-class humanitarian, a capitalist Dalai Lama if you will (don't laugh–this author strikes me as quite amazingly special).

I cannot say enough about this book. It joins the very short list of books I have posted on moral leadership through open source intelligence, and it places Dee Hock up there with Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Wheatley, Robert Buckman, and a tiny handful of Senge's and Druckers.

I hope I meet him one day. Right now, he joins Bill Bradley as one of just two people I'd be willing to leave my mink-lined bunker to follow into battle. This book and this author's mind and clarity of communication have simply blown me away.

See the two images I have loaded here to illustrate concepts that I share with this author. You can see other images at Earth Intelligence Network, where you can also use the Amazon Base Page to get access to my 30 lists of books for each of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. I am also creating Amazon discussion pages for each of these.

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2007/01/272009/12/04

Review: Low Carbon Diet–A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds–Be Part of the Global Warming Solution!

5 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Buy Ten Copies–Create Energy-Smart Neighborhood,

January 27, 2007

David Gershon

This book is about more than reducing the carbon foot-print of your home, it is tailor made for creating a good neighborhood by giving busy neighbors distanced by suburban sprawl or urban anonymnity a really fun and rewarding focal point for coming together.

There are twenty-two specific things that one can do in their home or in relation to their local school or community (most have to do with the home).

I see a real opportunity for a third party developer at Amazon to create a niche business–what I really need as a busy professional is a single Amazon URL where I can go and select all of the low-cost products needed to implement this book's recommendations (e.g. the water-saver showerhead with the instant off-on lever), have them charged to my Amazon account, and delivered to my front door.

I'd also like to see a way for people to register their homes the way we register Wildlife Habitats–completing this check-list should allow registry of the home and count toward the appraisal value.

I recommend the book be bought in lots of 10, used to bring together the other 9 houses nearest you, and then passed on down the neighborhood.

The resource section at the end is helpful, and I was especially struck by the disaster resilience recommendations. I know a lot of otherwise mainstream folks that are starting to sign up for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Red Cross courses on disaster relief, earning the green hard-hat and body covering. Something is happening at the grass roots level–a combination of innate fear that the federal and state governments will fail us as they did with Katrina, and a more constructive sense of responsibility, with more people realizing that resilience starts at the local level with specific individuals planning and preparing so as to prevent local disasters from becoming catastrophes.

For related reading on the psychology of what prevents people from preparing and reacting, see my review of “Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster.” Disasters do NOT have to become catastrophes, we make them so through denial before, during, and after.

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Category: 5 Star

Review: Peak Oil Survival–Preparation for Life After Gridcrash

Review: The Oil Depletion Protocol–A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse

Review: Made to Break–Technology and Obsolescence in America

Review: The Omnivore’s Dilemma–A Natural History of Four Meals

Review: Why Societies Need Dissent (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures)

Review: One from Many–VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

Review: Low Carbon Diet–A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds–Be Part of the Global Warming Solution!