00151 Visions of the Future

Anytown USA, some time in the future . . . John’s Story.

I am one of 8 people who live in an older home, built in the 1920s, close to downtown Anytown. We are a diverse group — two married couples, one older, one younger, and the rest of us are singletons (for now anyway).

All of us except Jeremy and Patricia, the original owners of the house, met during college. As we graduated, we started a worker-owned cooperative which is our present source of income. The Change Years were just coming upon us, jobs were scarce, wages weren’t great, we decided we could hardly do worse on our own.

We set ourselves up to offer a variety of support services including tutoring to home-schooling families. We help high school students study for the battery of tests they had to take. It took almost no money to start since we capitalized our knowledge and education as working assets. We took something we had a passion for, an area of endeavor where we already had the necessary knowledge and education, and turned that into a business. With the ongoing problems of the school systems, home schooling and neighborhood private schools became popular.

We were a success because we were flexible. Money became scarce during those years, so we bartered for our services. For a while, until the health cooperatives got organized, we traded tutoring to a doctor and his nurse-practitioner wife for medical services. As people converted their lawn areas to growing food, sometimes we took zucchini and tomatoes in trade. April, our bookkeeper, kept really interesting books in those days listing everything we took in, whether it was cash, gold, recyclable metals, food, services, whatever it was.

How did we know we made a profit? Well, we didn’t starve and we had stuff to trade with others at the various weekend barter fairs that became popular early in the transition. We had more stuff incoming than we could personally consume, so I guess that qualifies as profit. We were just happy to have a roof over our heads, food to eat every day, and some medical care when we needed it. We were doing something useful - creating a new educational system from the ground up, in the vacuum created by the collapse of the statist school system.

Jeremy and Patricia: the house

As things began to fall apart, we knew we would have to adapt fast or things would go hard for us. Our house was in the Georgian style, two stories, full basement, about 2,600 sq. ft., with its long axis running east and west. It is on a 1/7th acre lot, in a neighborhood only 20 blocks from downtown Anytown.

Since fuel was scarce, we knew we had to do a better job of hanging onto what heat we had in the winter. We began by encasing the exterior walls of the house with an insulating foam (made from soybeans), which we covered with stucco. This insulated the walls to R-50. This was the recommendation for attics. We figured if it was good for an attic, it was good in any direction, since heat will move in any direction towards cold.

We insulated the attic using cellulose insulation, to R-50 and did the same with the basement walls and floor, on the inside. Insulation inside the masonry walls wasn’t the best choice, since basements should be insulated from the outside. That is practical only in new construction. We did the best we could with what we had. We built new walls inside the exterior basement walls, a new floor, and we insulated the new cavities these created.

When we finished, our house no longer had any north facing windows. We just covered over them with insulating foam. We extended the porch so it ran all the way across the north face of the house and fitted it with screens and storm windows. In the winter, we put up storm windows and the porch becomes a buffer zone between the north wall and the weather. In the summer, we take them down and enjoy a cool and shady place to sit in the evening.

We hired the foam insulation and storm shutter work done. We did most of the rest of this extreme green retrofit by themselves with the help of some casual labor, which was how we first met John.

Along the south side of the house, we built a low mass sunspace, two stories tall, divided in the middle (horizontally) so it had two stories just like the house. The sunspace has an insulated roof, and insulated east and west walls. The south is all glass except for the necessary supports for the roof, divided in the middle by the floor/roof separating the two floors. This functions as a passive solar heater and it does a great job as long as the sun shines.

The gables over the windows of each story’s sunspace shade the windows in the summer while allowing the lower winter sun to penetrate the windows and heat the house.

To get the air from the sunspace into the rest of the house, we installed ventilation openings at the ceiling level between the house and the sunspace and above every door in the house. The original house windows remain on the south face of the house, only now they are inside of the passive solar sun space. We often open them during the day in the winter to help bring sun-warmed air into the house. In the summer, we open the windows at night for ventilation (in the house and in the sunspace.

We used mostly recycled and scavenged materials for this construction work.

Every window and door in the house has an insulated interior window shutter and an exterior storm shutter. Some have insulated curtains. This includes the large windows of the south-facing sunspace. During the summer — when we want to keep heat out of the house — the shutters stay up during the day and we open them at night. During the winter — when we want to keep heat IN the house — we open the shutters whenever the sun shines through them. We close them whenever the sun stops shining through them.

We evolved our landscaping to emphasize edible plants although of course we kept the roses and the azaleas and the shade trees. All of the former Bermuda grass lawn (front, sides, and back) we converted to growing food. We only have 1/7th acre, but we get a lot out of it even so. Besides the former lawn areas, we grow food on concrete (driveways and private sidewalks) in containers and garden beds we built. We don’t grow food on the public sidewalk because people walk on that and by law the sidewalks must be kept clear.

When it rains, no water runs off our property into the storm sewers. Rain hitting the roof flows from the gutters into storage tanks. Rain falling on the sidewalks and driveway runs into swales which channel the flowing waters into the growing areas.

When the Social Security system collapsed, we decided to open a boarding house to provide some income. Our children lived in other states and did not plan to move home. John saw our notice and immediately he and his friends applied to rent from us. What started out as an economic arranged evolved, over time, into a new “adoptive extended family.” Now eight people now share the space where only two had lived in previously. I guess I should say “8-1/2" since Karen is pregnant.

John

When all this started, none of us had family in the area. We originally came together for work and convenience. We became an extended family by willing adoption. This kind of arrangement became popular when things got hard. The extended family is really popular these days, whether they are by blood kinfolk or as in our case, by adoption. No one except the wealthy would be able to live as a single nuclear family anymore, and there aren’t many “very wealthy” people around anymore, after all mother of all economic crashes that jump started this new way of living.

The evolved house was six studio apartments, sharing three bathrooms, with a large common kitchen, living room, and storage workroom areas.

We ended up forming a housing cooperative, which bought the house from Jeremy and Patricia. Split eight ways, even with the capital payment to Jeremy and Patricia, our household expenses are low (they didn’t ask for any interest on the capital purchase). Taxes are cheap. With the currency reforms, there isn’t any inflation to speak of. I don’t own a car, in fact, no one owns a car at our house or even on our block. I pay the equivalent of four hours salary for my monthly transit pass. Everyone pays into a medical plan, that was cheap too.

One of our routine student math assignments is to figure out the modern cost of goods and services in the old United States dollars, and by that measure, my modern transit pass costing four work hours was a bit more than $100 as valued in 2012, or nearly 14 hours of minimum wage work in the old days. I’m glad that I’m working now and not back then. That transit pass that cost so much money didn’t hardly get you anything in those days. There was only one bus service and the government operated it! It did not run 24 hours/day, seven days a week. It didn’t go everywhere. People paid so much for so little in those days.

Bottom line is that I only work about 20 hours a week to pay my bills and put some surplus aside for the future. We do some other work on gardens and our various food and energy producing activities although that can hardly be considered work. I like to fish, and as we all know, time spent fishing isn’t actually deducted from your time on earth. It's actually safe to eat the fish we catch — although it took several years for that to happen. So we like that (fishing in the river), even if we do raise tilapia and catfish in barrels in the basement.

It wasn’t easy getting to where our society is now. The price was worth the effort because things are certainly better today than they were before the Change Years.

All this was possible because just as our individual living arrangements evolved to meet the new circumstances, so did the economic and political structures. In the old days, it was hard to live sustainably, because the economy and politics of the time encouraged a culture of death attitude about everything. Eat, drink, consume, excrete, be merry, eat some more, drink some more, consume and excrete more, be more merry and etc. Never sober up! That was the theme everywhere. And we wondered why everything was going to hell so quickly, lol.

Now I don’t need to own an automobile because I can get everywhere I want to go either by walking, by bicycle, or by general transit. People don’t go long distances as much as they used to, mostly because there is so much interesting stuff to do in the neighborhood. I think in the old days people were desperate to travel because their lives at home were so empty. They worked forty, fifty, sixty hours a week, at boring jobs, for people they hated and who hated them. They arranged their cities so that anything worth doing was far away from anywhere worth living. How dumb was that? It was certainly no way to live and the only surprise is that it continued for so long before collapsing flat as a pancake.

In the evenings, I like to go to a nearby coffee house. It’s just two houses up the street. While Jeremy and Patricia converted their property into a boarding house that evolved into an extended family, their neighbors, the Jones family, moved upstairs and converted their downstairs into a coffee shop. They have great coffee that they get from a half dozen partnerships they have with cooperatives of coffee growers around the world. They get cacao for chocolate and teas, although they grow a considerable amount of herbs and flowers for teas right there at their place.

Sam and Jenny, two of my house-mates, are musicians, and they often entertain there — Sam on the piano, Jenny on vocals and the occasional flute. If you don’t want to cook, you can get a sandwich or some soup or a nice dessert. Some people go there for all their meals, they don’t like to cook I guess and Mrs. Jones is a great cook.

A bit further down, our street runs into a six-lane street with a wide median. Three of the six lanes (the northbound side) and the median (planted with trees) are a perpetual flea market. There seems to be something going on there from early in the morning until late at night. It’s known as Street-Mart, which was obviously a play on a certain old-style retail corporation that is no longer with us these days. It’s actually about 16 miles long, running from downtown all the way out to the city limits.

Speaking of that street . . . the city reserved the inner two lanes of the southbound lanes actual vehicle traffic. The outer southbound lane had the street car tracks. There isn’t a lot of vehicular traffic. There isn’t much need for it. Mostly its buses and jitneys, emergency vehicles, and trucks and carts that supply stores and market stalls.

People aren’t as interested in personal vehicles as they used to be. Private ownership of fossil fueled motor cars has been out of style for years. No one passed a law against it. People simply stopped buying new cars. Things got really crazy for a while as that process played out, mostly because car ownership wasn’t just a transportation thing, it was psychological. Status was a big deal and then there was the whole masculinity thing.

People used to be very attached to their cars. This was partly necessity because in those days, people might live in one place, work ten miles one way, have their kids in a school 12 miles the other way, and shop at stores 20 miles in a third direction. With such crazy geographies in their daily lives, personal vehicles were essential.

Guys seemed to view their personal vehicles as an extension of their sense of masculinity. They wanted big powerful trucks and fast cars. As times changed, people's attitudes evolved. A joke went around, something about the bigger the truck, the faster the car, the smaller the penis. I don’t know who got that idea circulating, although I vividly remember a late night comic who would show a picture of a giant truck and/or a fast sleek car, look at the camera, wink, and say in grave tones “Small Penis.”

One time he showed a picture of a Hummer and said, “VERY small penis.”

Every year, five years in a row, fewer new cars sold. The car companies went nuts. The government gave them billions of dollars. Ads promised great deals and zero interest rate financing. People just did not buy. Then, in the fifth year, all of the remaining auto manufacturing corporations went completely belly up broke. The government was no longer in any condition to bail them out. Instead, they put money toward humanitarian help for the newly unemployed autoworkers.

As it turned out however, many of those newly unemployed auto-workers had seen the handwriting on the wall and were already working little side jobs and starting coops doing various kinds of useful things that people needed and would pay a little money for, even during hard times. Some of them started making Open Source cars and trucks in their home garages and selling them to neighbors. There wasn’t as much hardship as people supposed would happen.

You can still buy the Open Source vehicle these days, based on plans developed by the Open Source Ecology folks in Missouri. They've got plans for pickups too. Local coops make them all over the nation. Most of them run on ethanol or biodiesel.

After that, the whole car culture thing started just winding down. That same year the entire new road building system shut down. Government funds for building new roads shifted to maintenance, mass transit, and to actually deconstructing some roads in large urban centers, where land was so expensive.

There are more transit options these days and they aren’t all run by the government either. The government maintains the roads and railroad tracks. Track is considered a public good just like roads, and governments construct and maintain it with user fees. Transit cooperatives operate cars and trains on various schedules. They compete for the allegiance of customers. It works well. Some of them sell memberships to customers, so they are hybrid operator/rider transit cooperatives. This was popular in the early days when they needed capital to get going.

Besides the rail-based transit, we have several street-based options. Some are transportation cooperatives owned by neighborhoods, or by workers at industrial cooperatives, or by people who needed work and invented their own job driving small buses along routes. Most of them would pick up within a block or two of their primary route. Just call their dispatch number! There are several systems to connect riders with carriers. That’s one of the jobs that people do out of their homes. They are members of transit connector and dispatch cooperatives.

The development of this diverse transportation system was mostly a matter of cutting through the red tape and eliminating various rules and regulations that limited the ability of people to compete with private ownership of automobiles. As a result, people could design and invent their own jobs in transportation and offer their services to anyone who wanted to buy them. Is that such a radical thought? It’s amazing to think about how much energy in the old days went into actually preventing people from competing with fossil fueled automobiles.

And speaking of fuel, nobody uses fossil fuels for transportation these days. A wide variety of fuels are in use right now — alcohol, biodiesel, wood gas, methane, pedals, animal traction — I swear I saw a camel the other day pulling a surrey with a fringe on top. As it went down the street, it splatted some camel manure (it wasn’t wearing a regulation diaper). Three people zoomed out from Street Mart and there was a minor bit of haggling as they maneuvered to scoop up the free organics. They probably wanted it for their compost pile, or maybe a biogas digester. There’s one stretch of Street Mart which has a big sign — “Diapers Operational for Transit Animals” because people want the horse and mule and oxen and donkey manure provided for free by the traction animals.

Street-Mart has gorgeous public restrooms all up and down its 16-mile length. Some offer free drinks and snacks for those who stop and deposit some humanure or urine. These are operated by cooperatives that make and either use or sell methane produced in their biogas digesters. There’s one I like so much I always try to give them a deposit when I am around there. They have an enormous gaudy sign, brightly lit with LED’s at night, that says simply, “WE WANT YOUR SHIT!” I have always been impressed by the raw commercial honesty of that sign.

Those biogas digesters are everywhere. We have one in our basement. We made it ourselves! In goes all of our humanure and urine and some miscellaneous biomass materials. Out comes methane that we use for cooking plus fertilizer that, after being routed through one of our hot compost piles, feeds our fruit trees and bushes. We sell our surplus gas to a cooperative that aggregates home-scale biogas production for resale to the transportation cooperatives. When we have parties, we always serve lots of liquids and encourage everyone to use our own nicely appointed facilities. It’s considered good manners to leave a bowel movement behind in the host’s biogas digester when you visit someone’s house for a party, to help repay the energy cost of the event. I bet that would seem weird to someone from the Old Days who could somehow peer forward into our time. These days that’s just common sense courtesy and practicality.

Anyway, when I look back to the old days, I think it is weird that people thought of their urine and humanure as waste items to be disposed of out of sight, out of mind, without doing anything useful with it like we do today. Oh well, that’s the attitude of profligate waste that collapsed their civilization and gave birth to ours.

I never understood the popularity of driving a personal automobile. When you drive, you obviously can’t do something else like read your email or watch a movie. I like the little jitneys that work this area. If I want to visit someone across town, I could take one of the trains. The median of the Street-Mart Street had originally been a street car line. After taking out the streetcars in the 1940s, the city planted trees and other amenities dotted the medians. When the City decided to install a streetcar line, no one wanted to cut down the trees. So they gave a lane on the street over to the street cars, and the median together with other lanes evolved into Street-Mart. The streetcars were electric. They weren’t cheap to build, but their operating costs are low.

I can catch the street car two blocks from my house, and go downtown to the Metro Transit Exchange, where I can get a bus or an inter-city train and end up on any of the three coasts or in the depths of Canada. Or I can get to my cousin’s farm, well, close enough to my cousin’s farm for him to send one of his kids to pick me up with their horse and buggy. Our household is a Cooperating Urban Household with his farm. We get most of the food we don’t raise from him and his farmers’ cooperative.

Besides investing in the capital and operating costs, we provide some labor during the intense labor times of harvest and planting.

If you want to fly, the airport is still in business. However, dirigibles fly and land there these days. Most people will only take one or two journeys by air these days during their lifetimes.

There are large theaters downtown, and each of the other urban centers has a collection of live theaters. While we still produce cinema, for at least the past ten years, live theater has been on a roll. Vintage performances abound — one of my favorites of the traditionals is Les Miserables. —New works premier each year. Live music is everywhere.

We still do recorded music — Jeremy and Patricia have an amazing collection of recorded music, spanning the years of actual records (78s and 33 rpms) and through CDs. Now people just use the Cloud for storing the music they buy or record. That makes it accessible to them wherever they go — AND — we don’t have to (a) pack around a bunch of stuff and (b) expend our resources to make storage media.

The larger metropolitan area of Anytown totals about a million people. It was originally structured as one main downtown, with a half dozen suburban cities on the fringe. As time passed, the suburban areas melded into one homogenous urban mass of strip malls alternating with single family occupancy housing. That’s all been radically transformed. If you look at a map of the city, you see a pattern of urban clusters, linked by transportation and communications networks, that radiate out in spirals from the downtown center.

We no longer have zoning except for hazardous activities. One of the things we learned is that you have to be careful what kind of power you give people. Give the wrong kind of people the wrong kind of power, and mischief occurs. Sometimes its more than just mischief, its ecological insanity. When we use permaculture design principles in urban settings, we get a spontaneous natural order that produces much better outcomes. The process involves more people. They bring more knowledge. More people with more knowledge leads to better decisions. When we stop people from distorting the system to benefit their own special interests, things get better for everyone.

While waiting for a bus, I browsed the news on my pad and found an update on the Mars Expedition. It launched two months ago and was nearing the halfway mark. Our students helped with some of the planning for that, as part of two decades of permaculture network design that went into planning and financing the trip. We were among the first million members of the Space Exploration and Emigration Cooperative ( known simply as SEEC, which we pronounce like SEEK), which sponsored the expedition. It is a one-way trip for all hundred people on board. They plan to become Martians, to learn what it means to be human on Mars, to risk the fact that it might not be possible. Then again, the project would not have launched if we didn’t have a good idea that in fact humans would do fine on Mars and would be able to begin the process of greening that planet.

Sarah and Nick and the Anytown Sky Dwellers.

Hi! I’m Sarah and this is my husband Nick. We are pregnant! We know John and Jeremy and the rest of their clan. We live in downtown Anytown, in a 50-story building that was originally built as the headquarters for an oil and gas company. This building is irony personified. The oil company built it just before the crunch years began of the Great Change, when the economic irrationalities, climate instabilities, peak energy, and political criminality problems began to really make life miserable. They went bankrupt. No one bid on the building at the bankruptcy auction. The charter members of our building cooperative got it for free from the city, based on our plan to restore the building and make it our home.

We pay property taxes to the city. That’s OK. It’s a reasonable price to pay for what started life as a billion dollar building.

We are members of an adoptive clan — we call ourselves the Anytown Skydwellers, because we are all the way up on the 49th’ floor — formerly the site of a plush upscale restaurant, as a matter of fact. Originally quite posh, by the time we moved in things had deteriorated substantially. While the building was well built, all that glass is really an issue when it comes to reducing the energy footprint of the building.

But never fear, permaculture design was here. The first generation of the Anytown Skydwellers spent a considerable amount of time observing our floor of the building for an entire year before finalizing our plans. This was in conjunction with the architects and engineers hired by the entire building’s population to help with the refit of the building as the location of what amounts to a small town.

Among other things, we mapped the path of the sun on the exterior windows every day from morning to night in detail, for a full year. With those observations, we replaced some of the windows insulated walls, punctuated with some ventilation openings. On the sunny aspects of the building, we built new insulated walls inside of the existing glass walls, creating a large passive solar sunspace. We constructed insulated curtains for these windows that we use seasonally. During the summer day, when the sun shines, the keep insulated curtain over the windows. It opens at night when we ventilate. During the winter day, we open it when the sun shines and close it at night.

Another refit created an interesting fin-like effect. We installed awnings to shade the windows during the day during the summer. They function as rainwater harvesting structures, which provide a substantial amount of water to every floor of the building. We like that because any water we harvest doesn’t incur an energy price to lift it from the ground to our floor.

Our floor divides into small studio apartments that share larger kitchen, living, and work spaces. Nearly all of us work in this building, either for our Clan Coop (which operates several different businesses) or for someone else. We have a couple of independent contractors doing various jobs.

The building has three floors of market spaces, a theater and restaurant district, and places of religious worship. Thousands of people live here with a minimal per capita energy footprint.

There are wind turbines up top and large biogas digesters down below. Water and humanure flowing down from upper floors turns turbines in the pipes that generate electricity and do other work. Water moves up to higher floors via a variety of mechanical energy devices, some of which are wind powered. The stationary bikes and treadmills in the building’s recreation centers all power mechanical energy devices that provide lift energy.

During the summer, some of the extra energy needed for cooling and ventilation comes from solar thermal installations. The systems are rather complex. Everything operates in accordance with the permaculture plan for the building that was the basis for the initial renovation. We update it with a public design process as circumstances change and the times evolve. Our energy deficit isn’t much and we make that up with bio-energy from our cooperating farms in rural areas, which are the primary sources of our food supplies. We raise more food than most people think is possible right here in the building. We do container gardening as well as aquaponics with fish and people keep rabbits and guinea pigs for meat. We aren’t food sufficient so we trade with our cooperating farms for what we need.

We like our life. There’s always something to do, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We bet our baby likes our life too. We’re investing in the renovation of the old First National Bank Building. It’s never too soon to think about where the kids will live. Maybe they’ll find room here, if not, they’ll have a place right next door.

Jeremy and Patricia.

The Change Years were scary. Everything had been fine for a long time. A few bumps here and there, kind of a slow grind. The system seemed to recover each time although the extreme events increased in frequency and extremity. When things started to devolve, however, it seemed as though everything went to hell in a hand basket quickly. The troubles began as the price of gasoline passed five dollars a gallon. By the time it reached $10/gallon, financial panics were the order of the day. This time even though the government threw a lot of money at Wall Street, things did not get better, they continued to get worse. Factories and distribution systems went out of business. Items disappeared from stores. People started panic buying. Prices went into hyperinflation radically increasing as the value of the currency fell. The last time I went to Wal-Mart, bread was $100/loaf. I didn’t buy any.

The velocity of events boggled the mind. Within 30 days we went from what passed for normality in those days to a very different situation.

The whole social safety net simply collapsed. The government could not pay its workers and could not finance its promised benefits. Welfare and social security and food stamps and Medicaid and housing benefits all just evaporated. This was so shocking that people were just stunned. Fortunately, perhaps miraculously, under the pressure of circumstances, people who knew permaculture design came out of the wood work everywhere and helped people design new systems to meet the radically changed circumstances.

This was true of direct needs like food and water, and indirect issues relating to what permaculture knows as “invisible structures.” It was quickly apparent that the most important invisible structure was that of local government. Local governments everywhere declared martial law and proclaimed moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures. The banks were all closed anyway. While there was some squawking about property rights, the dire situation would not be made easier by evicting tens of millions of people who could not pay their rent or mortgages because the financial system had collapsed.

Those who advocated for that kind of a “market approach” were widely seen as delusional, even by conservatives. There comes a time when ideology has to yield to reality. Otherwise, you get things like what happened in Russia in 1917 or France in 1789.

We looked at our situation and decided that as long as the city could keep the water system going, the first thing we would concentrate on was warmth. Winter was on its way. The phones were out, so we walked to the location of an insulation contractor, and bartered a deal for the foam insulation job on the exterior of our house. We traded our wedding rings, jewelry, and some gold and silver coins for the work. The owner was glad to get the work. We were glad to have the insulation. We put the stucco on the exterior ourselves with the help of some young people in the neighborhood who needed the work.

We found our renters, who became our adoptive extended family, over those first few months. Our own children were doing as well under the circumstances as could be expected, so they didn’t move home like so many other kids did in those days. We have added to our family, in a sense, by forming a household relationship with these young people. It’s a win-win situation for all of us. Our kids are happy there are people here who care for us and watch out for us, since we aren’t getting any younger.

Our local government managed to keep the water and electrical systems going. Trash service disappeared and electricity was available only four to eight hours/day. The only way we managed any electricity at all was that Oklahoma City, in cooperation with other area municipalities, had previously used eminent domain to take over the electrical companies. In some other areas, municipal grid power went down and never came back. My cousin lives in Kansas City, Missouri. They don’t have grid power to this day. I think at this point that is a choice, not a necessity.

Meanwhile, the new permaculture movement helped people to transition right in their own neighborhoods. As it turned out, more people were interested in such things than most people thought. People concealed their interests because they didn’t want people to think that they were weird. They gardened only in their back yards, lest they run the risk of code violations for planting veggies up front. They hid the fact that they used a homemade compost toilet.

But under the pressure of these circumstances, people started talking to their neighbors. When the city announced that they would not be able to keep the sewer systems going, every neighborhood had people to teach their neighbors how to make a compost toilet.

And Anytown was like everywhere else, you’ve got all kinds of people who like to tinker in their sheds and garages with stuff. Those people got to work and produced the first biogas digesters. They design them to solve three problems all at the household level — solutions for humanure, cooking fuel, and fertilizer.

We like our life now. It was scary getting here. It would have been much better if we had all learned about permaculture design before things started to collapse. We might have avoided the collapse entirely. A lot of people died — the medically fragile, people dependent upon medications that experienced a hiatus in their manufacture, suicides. They say the population of this metropolitan area experienced a 10% mortality rate each year for those first three years before things settled down. Some areas did much worse than we did, though, we’re glad we made it through and have a good future ahead of us, thanks to the intelligent application of permaculture design not only to our own household, but to the entire city and region.