Living in Our New World Part 5: Food

There's two kinds of food in the world today: real and artificial.

Real food is what our grandparents and great-grandparents ate. It was what I grew up on in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. Just down the road from us was a farm owned by an elderly Polish couple. One day one of their cows died. My father heard about it and drove his tractor over, dug a deep hole, and buried the cow. It would have taken a long time to dig the hole with a shovel. After that, we would often open the front door to find a basket of fresh produce on our porch. (They also made dandelion wine--the only alcoholic drink my father ever drank. But that's another story.:-)) My mother canned every summer and we enjoyed the results of her work often in the winter. Mom cooked simple food. Real food.

But times changed. Women started working outside the home in larger numbers in the 1970s. There was more disposable income and less time to cook. Convenience foods became the response to "What's for dinner?" With the addition of chemical preservatives and the inclusion of whatever was left over from the production of other foods, we moved from real food to artificial food. Try to understand, or even pronounce, what's on the ingredients panel on that box of breakfast cereal or that microwave dinner and you'll see what I mean.  

In the US, Australia, and Canada, where about 70% of my readers come from, we see a lot of artificial food. Even the meat that people eat is largely artificial. Cows, designed to eat grass, are now fed corn because it's cheaper and easier. Factory-raised farm animals are injected with chemicals and antibiotics to increase corporate profits. Most people eating meat and fish have no idea what is in their food. Suffice it to say it's not "real."

Or read the headlines. We're seeing more and more foods banned from import or being recalled due to contamination scares. From spinach to beef to milk, there are serious problems with our monoculture farms, factory farms, and processing plants.

Then there are all the attendant problems of getting our food to us. Our fruit and vegetables are raised to look good rather than taste good, picked before they're ripe, shipped a few thousand miles, wrapped in plastic, and plunked down on the store shelves under artificial lighting designed to make them look good.

We're already seeing the risk of this corporate-based farm system as even in the U.S., there have been food shortages this year. Try googling "wheat rice shortage." Then add "Costco" and you'll see what I mean.

The answer?

Raise your own, buy local, swap with neighbors, shop at farmer's markets, join a CSA. Get to know the people who grow your food. And the closer to home your food is grown or raised, the better it will taste, the less it will harm the environment, and the healthier it will be for you and your family. The food scandals we've been hearing about are because everything was done behind closed doors. When you isolate yourself from the people who eat what you produce, it’s easy to think only of your own personal gain. Another indication of the sad state our food industry is in? When you visit a factory farm for chickens or cows and have to put on a hazmat suit (garment worn as protection from hazardous materials or substances) you know they're not producing healthy food.

As we transition into our new normal way of living, food will be one of our primary concerns. We have to change the way we think of it. Most homes in the U.S., Australia, and Canada have about three days worth of food on hand. The supermarkets also stock about three days worth of food. In the U.S., both FEMA and the Red Cross are urging people to have two weeks of food and water on hand. FEMA expects people to be self-sufficient in an emergency. So consider that for those first two weeks, you and your neighbors are on your own, and plan accordingly.

After Ike hit Galveston and Houston, there were reports of American Red Cross workers not eating all day. Food was so scarce that volunteers didn't want to eat in front of the people who were desperately in need of food. So the volunteers didn't eat. Many local families could only get one meal a day. In the few weeks after the hurricanes, in the southeastern U.S. there were long lines at gas stations as supplies were severely restricted.

We've gotten used to getting what we want, when we want it. In the "new normal," this will no longer be possible. We're going to need to do some planning. Like our grandparents and great-grandparents did.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our World Part 6: Back Down the Ladder)

Living in Our New World Part 4: Financial Collapse

At the risk of sounding like a Sharon Astyk groupie, I’m going back to her blog for our fourth installment in this series. I would think that you have heard enough about climate change to know what it is so I don’t need to elaborate on it here.

But how can we make sense out of the expanding US financial crisis that we're hearing about daily? Is it really about too many risky mortgages by financial institutions only concerned about profit? Or is there an underlying cause. Or causes. Finding the causes really is like peeling back the layers of an onion.

Peeling the Onion: What’s Behind the Financial Mess?

Sharon  September 25th, 2008

If you want a pat answer to what has caused the financial crisis that is reverbating around the world, and now threatening the derivatives market, we’ve got one. Nearly everyone - in the mainstream media and outside it, tells the same story - that the crisis was caused by the unravelling of the housing market, particularly the US housing market.  And if you ask what’s behind that, well, we’re told there was a bubble.  And if you ask what was behind the bursting of the bubble, well…it is turtles all the way down.

 I’m not a turtles kind of gal, and so I thought it might be worth playing with root causes some more.  Now it is absolutely the case that original causes are virtually impossible to come by - everything is always multicausational. And there’s no question that the housing market was so ridiculously overvalued that in no sense could it have been sustained.  Still, it is sometimes interesting and productive to tease out some of the major causes of our problems, the things that explain why now and how, and I think there’s one that people haven’t been looking too carefully at - and one I think bears some exploration of.

I’m going to suggest that if you peel off the layers of the financial crisis, we’re going to find some pretty basic things.  And one of the basic things is, well, food.  It seems sort of anti-climactic, I think, if you are a pundit, to talk about the cost of rice and soybean oil as part of the root problem of such a massive financial crisis, but I suspect we’ll find it there.  And underneath the food, I think we’ll find oil. 

Most commentators have taken the food crisis, which has run more or less in parallel with the financial crisis - growing gradually through 2007, and beginning to move more dramatically towards crisis in the winter and spring of this year, as an irritating factor, a small push against already strapped consumers.  But I’m not really sure this is the right way to look at this.  Instead, we might look at the question of how the growth economy grows.  Some of it, of course, is through population increase - new workers, new consumers.  But population growth itself has proved over and over again to be insufficient - not only do we need more people, but the industrial growth economy always needs a larger percentage of the populace to serve it.  This is one of the reasons I tend to agree with Vandana Shiva that the population problem is not primarily a cause of our current crisis, but a symptom of it.

We might look at the boom and bust cycle of our economy, and indeed, the world economy, as one moved not just by energy, but by new workers (who then conveniently become new consumers and create new markets - remember, 70% of the economy is consumer spending).  Each boom cycle has followed the move of vast numbers of new workers into the economy, essentially creating more money in the form of productivity, and more income to spread around and lubrication to the economic system. 

So, for example, after the Great Depression, we got the country moving in large part by the industrialization of a large portion of the agricultural population - millions of farmers were brought into the industrial economy either to serve in the service or work in the factories.  After the war, many of them never returned to the farms - and the GI bill and the conversion of wartime industry to peacetime industry encouraged lower income farmers to go to work.  The movement of people employed largely in the subsistence economy into the industrial economy created a huge boost - poor black farmers in the South moved to industrial centers in vast numbers to take advantage of good wages, and low income women who had worked in the factories never did return to pre-war levels of women’s work.

In the 1970s, as the economy began to stagnate again, the answer was a new influx of workers and consumers - quite rapidly, women began entering the workforce in staggering numbers, requiring new work wardrobes, second cars, fast food restaurants and daycare providers to take the place of what we had.  Workers who had primarily provided subsistence labor not counted into the GDP were transferred into the formal economy, and disproportionately as low wage laborers.  The excesses of the 80s began just as the numbers of women workers fully doubled - all of a sudden there was more money to go around - and this is hardly surprising since there was more work being done, and more money being spent both on luxuries and on paying to do the jobs that had previously lived in the subsistence economy.

The next wave of prosperity was a world scale one, running from the 1990s until pretty much the last couple of years - and again, millions of new workers and new consumers were inserted into the world economy, spreading money.  Suddenly there was new movement of funds, new workers doing new things and buying new stuff.  There were new markets again, and plenty of growth to go around.  Again, we find that the growth is primarily produced not by high value, highly educated workers in the new information economy - the most important economic growth during those periods was of new, low wage workers, moving from the subsistence economy into the industrial economy. 

It is worth asking why these low wage workers are so important to each bubble.  There are a couple of reasons.  The first is that even in the booming periods of cheap energy, it was never possible to mechanize or use oil for the majority of jobs - and as energy supplies rose in cost and tightened, it is less and less possible to do so.  The majority of all world farmers, builders and factory workers do use some machinery, but the primary engine of production is human work.  The other thing that matters is while there is a substantial difference in the pay scale of, say, an IT professional over a construction worker or a farmer, and the value of the work of the IT professional in the industrial economy is higher, moving people over to the white collar economy isn’t nearly as effective or profitable as taking people out of the subsistence economy and putting them on the lower rungs of the industrial economy.  First of all, you take a large portion of the productivity of a human being (remember, new industrial workers generally work long, long hours), without any amortized costs to provide him or her with health insurance or education.  That is, the total society investment in someone in the subsistence economy who then moves to working 12 hours a day in the industrial economy is very small, and the amount of work she does is quite dramatically more than what she did to serve the industrial economy when she was a subsistence farmer or a housewife.  Education, on the other hand, is expensive, and white collar workers like things like health care and vacation.  The money is in the new workers.

So what happened? Well, in America and the UK some of it really just was a bubble popping.  But what, oh what funded the bubbles?  To a large degree it was the purchase of various American assets, including a lot of mortgages, by the newly cash flush emerging economies.  And gradually, gradually those purchases have slowed down - they began slowing in the fall of last year, after some rumblings even before that, and the slowdown has accellerate - it hasn’t stopped, but the flow of money into the American economy through various routes, including buying bundled paper, has slowed.  And it has slowed at least in correlation - I do not swear about causality - with the housing market.  Now the assumption has been that the slowing is due to the increase of risk - and that’s probably true to a degree.  But I think some further scrutiny might find that there’s another factor - that it has slowed as the emerging economies have been dragged down.

One of the news stories that came out last week was that in addition to the 100 million starving people that made the UN news last spring, we’ve now got still 75 Million more hungry people in the world than there were before.  The UN announced that essentially all of the progress made on global poverty up until now is being erased by the food crisis.

Now it might be worth asking - where are those 175 million new starving people coming from?  Before they were starving, who were they?  And the answer would be that many of them were the people who left their farms in China and Vietnam and Indonesia and a host of other places to go live in the slums of various cities and work there.  They were the people who were just getting by - the ones who sent a daughter to the factories and who did day labor in construction building up the economies.  They lived quite close to the edge, and then, they crossed the edge when food prices began to rise.   Now these were the lowest level new industrial workers - they weren’t buying cell phones, but they might have bought a few things that they wouldn’t have when they needed every penny for rice or bread - they sent their children, even their daughters to school, and bought clothes and pencils, they might save up for a radio for the family, and all these things, over millions of people, added up.  And they produced more than they were paid for the economy as a whole - their work was more valuable than their salaries could account for, as is the way of things.  But now they aren’t buying those things - their kids are out of school, there is no money for radios or batteries, and there’s no food - so they are working less, getting sick more, contributing less to the industrial economy, unable to make money selling things to the other people in their neighborhoods, because their neighbors have no extra money for anything either.  Not only are they starving, but they’ve stopped adding money into the economy - and stopped spending it on anything but food.

Meanwhile, the next tier up in income were the people who had a little more than just enough - enough and a bit to send back home to their families, to get a cell phone and some jeans and buy meat a bit more often.  These people worked pretty regularly at the new jobs - in factories, in building, in making the new globalized economy.  And they spent money too and moved it around within their communities, and back into the global economy - the spent a little money buying coca cola, which came back this way.  Now they aren’t starving yet, but the rising cost of food has pushed them too - now the coca cola and the meat are gone, except for the holidays, and there won’t be any more jeans.  Because now the money goes for food - they have food to eat, but not enough for those other things.  And so the money increasingly doesn’t move around that much - because the farmer who grew the rice they are buying spent most of his money buying fertilizer.  And so the money is headed mostly back to a few small companies - without a lot of stops around the neighborhood. 

It is easy not to pay attention to such small things, and small people - after all, they aren’t spending much money, and their wages aren’t much. But they produce the stuff we need, they move money around - and hundreds of millions and billions of these small personal economies add up to quite a lot.  And the money that they made went places  - it took trips.  The money a poor Chinese worker generated in productivity went a bit into his pocket - and some of that went back to American corporations that made things.  And a lot of what he generated went into companies that invested in other things that fed our economy.  And some of it went to the Chinese government that used it to buy up dollars and other things that seemed to have some value.  It is perhaps not totally surprising, then, that as the Chinese worker got functionally poorer because of rising food prices, there was less money to pour back - times some millions.

And so it goes, down the latter.  The new workers, and the lubrication they provide in the global money system are being systematically impoverished, and what money they do spend goes to an increasingly narrow band of companies - instead of spreading the money around, money goes for very basic things - mostly food, and mostly basic foods.  And the farmers who make the basic foods mostly send that money back to a very small number of companies - the ones that produce oil and the ones that produce fertilizer - many of them located in the same countries and places. 

What is reducing the amount of productive work accomplished, and moving the money increasingly only into a few pockets?  It is the high price of food.  And what is the root cause of the high price of food?  Well, the single biggest factor, according to a number of studies, including the UN studies, has been the move to food based biofuels.  So if we peel back the onion one more layer, what we find is that one of the major factors slowing the economy has been, well, oil.  The rush to biofuels is a response to tightening oil supplies and rising costs, and the aggregate effect has been to push up food prices all over the world, while doing pretty much nothing to increase energy security, reduce greenhouse gasses or do much of anything else useful.

I’m no economist, and I don’t pretend to be.  But I wonder, when we peel back the layers of the onion later, and look at the history of this Depression, I wonder if we’ll see that in fact, what happened was that we squeezed out the lifeblood of the very thing we’d built our economy upon - new workers/consumers who could be counted on to grow the economy outwards and upwards.  We could have forseen this - but we chose not to - we chose, as we struggled to keep our lifestyle intact on the backs of the world’s poor, not to see that we stand on their backs, and it is people…all the way down.  In killing them, we killed ourselves. It may be that besides the tragedy of starving millions of poor people, we may also have brought down our own system, simply because we did not see, did not realize that the poor matter more to us than we like to admit.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our World Part 5: Food)

Living in Our New World Part 3: Peak Oil

In yesterday's post from Sharon Astyk's blog, the question of why we should be thinking about peak oil was raised. I've written about peak oil briefly, but as I wrote in the first post in this series, our only hope for the future is to understand the present. Well to understand the present in regard to peak oil, we need to step back into the past a bit. So we're moving back down that timeline again.

Rather then try to be an expert in peak oil, I'd like to share an excellent program that was produced by ABC television in Australia in 2006.

click here.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our World Part 4: Financial Collapse)

Living in Our New World Part 2: Sleeping Beauty and the Fairy Godmother

Reading about our new "normal world" can trigger a deep sense of grief and hopelessness about our future. If we're not very careful, we can get stuck in trying to imagine what that world will be like and forget that we have the ability to impact it positively with what we do now. The Buddha taught that with our thoughts we create the world. Our selfish, self-centered thoughts created the world we live in today. A world where bumper stickers declare "It's all about me!" and people live lives of isolation and loneliness.

Thoughts of considering the needs of others, of returning to a simpler way of life, of making sacrifices for the general good, and realizing what can bring us real happiness—not a selfish craving for more stuff happiness—but the happiness that comes from placing others before self. Of giving to others. Of caring for others and being cared for in return. 

Sleeping Beauty and Why You Should Think About Peak Oil (Even If It Seems Much Nicer Not To)

Sharon July 16th, 2008

...I thought it might be good to do a post not so much on what peak oil is...but on why it is better to know what’s going on than it is to not, even when it is scary and overwhelming. And it can be. But there are a lot of resources out there to help you. And the truth is that we need people to screw up their courage and look hard at difficult stuff - because the problems caused by Peak oil, and the related crises (yup, they all go together) of climate change and the financial collapse are not something any of us can afford to ignore.

My guess is that most people reading this have some investment in the future - maybe in their own personal future, maybe in the future of their children or grandchildren, or the children of someone they know and care about, maybe in their dedication to the good of humanity. The truth is that you are needed, right now, to safeguard your own future, and the future of our posterity - that’s not campaign rhetoric, or storytelling - that’s simple truth. If you don’t participate in creating a decent future, we won’t have one. We need you, and you need you to take as hard edged a look as you can.

A lot of what you read about Climate Change, Peak Oil or economic crisis focuses on the future. Their goal is to motivate you to action by describing what may happen. I do some of that, but over the last year or so, more and more I’ve found myself replacing the future tense with the present, describing not what might happen, but what is. Unfortunately, the hard times I’m talking about do not lie in the conveniently distant future but have begun already. The only question is whether you or I have felt them yet.

By this I mean to say that though we do not know the exact shape of the long-term crisis we face from energy depletion or environmental degradation, we miss the point if we focus only on models and hypotheses. Right now we are in the midst of an environmental disaster, at present experiencing the high personal costs of energy depletion, at present losing economic ground to policies designed to increase inequity. I know that many of the people who read this blog won’t necessarily see the makings of a crisis — yet. Others will already be caught up in the early stages of the problem, experiencing job losses, foreclosures or the struggle to keep afloat economically as prices rise. So while we speak of the future, my case that the world is about to change, irrevocably and deeply, rests primarily on the painful fact that it already has begun to do so.

And is there really any doubt that this is true? Is it possible to imagine any other time in American history when we would have consented to see an entire major city laid waste, without ever rebuilding even its most basic infrastructure? Is it possible to imagine another time when we would have shrugged and accepted the knowledge that our basic infrastructure, things like highways, sewers and subways, are simply falling apart and that we have no intention of fixing them? Is it possible to imagine another time when we knew we were in danger of handing our children a future of hunger, poverty and drought, and sat around debating whether congress might want to consider raising fuel efficiency standards? Has there ever been a time in history when citizens felt so powerless to stop the forces that were driving them to disaster?

If, in the face of all the evidence, we find we doubt that things really are falling apart, we might listen to the respected voices issuing the same opinions. There are some out there — despite the overwhelming lack of responsiveness of our government. For example, in the summer of 2007, David Walker, comptroller general of the US General Accounting Office said,

The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable [ad1] policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned … there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.” (http://www.newstarget.com/020930.html) [ad2]

Few of us have put all the pieces together, but when we failed to rebuild New Orleans, when we accepted that we can’t afford the tax base to keep bridges from falling on motorists and sewers from backing up, when we accepted that electric grid failure will kill people in the inevitable heat waves, we implicitly acknowledged what we have not yet faced up to consciously — that things have changed, and many of our problems are going to continue getting worse because we either lack the will or the money or the energy or the time to fix them

When I realized that everything was going to change, I was at first afraid. Because, I thought, if my government or public policy or other choices weren’t going to fix everything, what could I possibly do? What hope was there, if I had to take care of myself, if my community had to take care of itself?

But when I began looking for solutions that could be applied on the level of ordinary human lives, that involved changes in perspectives and pulling together, the reclamation of abandoned ideas and the restoration of strong communities, I began to feel hopeful, even excited. Because I realized that when large institutions cease to be powerful, sometimes that means that people start being powerful again.

And that’s the other reason you should look, even when your instinct is to look away, why you should learn even when it is hard, and frightening to learn these things - because simply learning that we’re in the midst of something very difficult is not the end point. Learning about peak oil doesn’t stop with “we’re doomed.” We’re not doomed - we’re facing very difficult times, and the way we face them will determine whether they are just hard, or disastrous for us. There is an enormous amount of mitigation we can do - personally, on the community level and at the political level. It probably won’t be enough for your life to stay the way you want it to be - I feel like I have to say this upfront. We’ve been told enough lies - we need to know the truth, and the truth is that we waited far too long to fix the energy crisis.

But this is when I remind people of the story of Sleeping Beauty. You see, a King and Queen wanted something desperately. And finally, bounty was showered down upon them, gifts beyond their wildest dreams - a wonderful daughter, one they named Beauty. And in their delight and joy, the forgot something important. They forgot that with gifts come responsibilities - and when they were planning a vast celebration of their good fortune, they forgot to do the unpleasant responsibility of inviting the fairy no one liked very much to the Christening.

Well, the fairy, the embodiment of what we have left undone, what we neglected, she noticed that we’d left it undone. And she came to the Christening, after almost all the fairies invited had given wonderful gifts, and took from the King and Queen what mattered most to them - their posterity. At just the moment that Beauty was coming into her full potential, at just the moment her parents were most proud, she would prick her finger on a spinning wheel, and die.

Well her parents began to keen their grief, and all the guests did too - it was so terribly unfair, they had never intended this consequence, it was all just a mistake. The King, in denial, began to order all the spinning wheels in the kingdom burned, believing that he could control the situation - even one so obviously out of his control.

But over the cries of grief, up spoke one voice. It was the very last fairy godmother, the one who had not yet given her gift. She said, “I cannot break the curse, but I can soften it a little. I can make it so that you don’t lose everything. Instead of dying, Beauty will fall asleep for a 100 years.”

I think this story is remarkably analagous - we received this enormous bounty of fossil fuels, and while we did not mean or intend it, while we did not know what the consequences were, we face consequences for what we have left undone. We can’t make the curse go away.

But each of us a little like that last Fairy Godmother - we can soften the curse a little, we can make it possible, if we have strength and courage, that we in this generation, we who are now adults, can take on the burden of changing our society and our lives, and give our children and grandchildren, if not a perfect happy ending, a great deal more hope.

How often do you get to be the Fairy Godmother? How often do you get to do so much, for something most of us value so deeply?

That's why you need to know.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our New World Part 3: Peak Oil)

Living in Our New World Part 1: Time for a New Normal

For the next week, I am going to focus on a subject that a good number of people will not want to read about. I understand. But I still need to speak. If the subject makes you uncomfortable, I am sorry. If it frightens you, again, I am truly sorry.

But our only hope for the future is to understand the present.

When our leaders and those who have pledged to serve us fail to do so, it is our responsibility to look after ourselves and one another, and to protect our children. And all children are our children. We are in the terrible situation we are because at first we didn't know better. Our parents didn't know better either. But things have changed and now we do. We can't claim ignorance any more. Besides, looking around for a suitable candidate to blame will accomplish nothing. It will only exhaust us and rob of us of valuable time. The reality, which we all know at some level, is that each of us is to blame to some degree.

Earlier this year, I wrote a paper about Climate Change and Peak Oil. I imagine my experience leading to the writing of that paper was similar to that of others who write on these subjects. At first, those of us who stumbled across the right sources of information learned about climate change. Gradually, we read the more frequent reports of what respected scientists, like James Hansen director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, were discovering. It seemed that the forecasts were no longer about the next century or even just five or six decades in the future, they were sliding down the timeline towards us. Rapidly.

Then we began to read increasingly of peak oil, which seemed even closer to us on the timeline than climate change. We realized that these changes were not going to happen many decades away. They were going to happen in our lifetime.

Some people became aware of climate change and peak oil a few decades ago. Some of us have learned much more recently. But I imagine each of us went through a similar learning curve whether it happened gradually or has come rushing at us so fast it's been a constant struggle to adjust.

Recently, as we felt like we were beginning to adjust just a little bit, we began to read more about financial difficulties in the United States. So then we moved from climate change being a few decades off and peak oil affecting us in five or ten years to a financial crisis that was unfolding on the evening news. With the evening news came the realization that we just slid down that timeline so far, that we're no longer in the future. We're here.

We now have a subprime mortgage crisis. Freddie and Fannie, banks, and insurance companies are failing. Retail stores are closing and companies are cutting back their workforce and days worked. Shortages of food and gas are being reported from different cities around the country.

But this is not just a US problem. Whether you look at it from the perspective of globalization or the principle of interconnectedness in Buddhism, one thing is clear—we’re all connected. We’re all in this together.

What is happening in the US will affect every country in the world to some degree. Countless financial institutions worldwide hold US dollars as well as US investments and packages of those subprime mortgages. Also, imports and exports lie at the heart of almost every national economy. Over the past few decades, as the US closed factories and sent production overseas to cut back on operating expenses, it no longer focused on making things. Instead, it became the world’s consumer; a consumer with one very large shopping cart.

A major filler of that shopping cart is China. So the Chinese economy is tied to that of the United States. The interconnectedness doesn’t stop there however. According to an article in the Asian Economic News on May 12, 2008, “China has overtaken Japan to become Australia's largest two-way trading partner in 2007 [and t]he United States is Australia's third-largest trading partner.” So what affects the United States, affects China and Australia and Japan. And then there’s Vietnam, India, Cambodia, and Korea who we have been increasing our trade with. You get the point. One pebble (and the US financial collapse is one extremely large boulder) tossed into the pond of our globalized world will quickly send out—not ripples—but waves of economic repercussions.

So we here sit. I’m in Australia as are a good number of readers. Maybe you’re in the US or Malaysia or Canada. Or maybe you’re in Europe or in one of the dozens of countries that people come from periodically to read this blog. If you’re still with me (and I hope you are :-)) you’re probably wondering where this is leading. Or perhaps you’re thinking that you really don’t want to know and are calculating when this week will be up and you can safely come back and start reading again. ;-)

If we let it, what we have learned can lead us to despair. But we know by now that we have the capacity to focus and control our minds if we try hard enough. I wrote that our only hope for the future is to understand the present. Hopefully, we now understand our “present” just a little better. It’s not the rosy picture we have been lead to believe.

But just because it’s not, doesn’t mean it has to be such a bleak picture that we want to go out and spend like there’s no tomorrow or climb back into bed and never leave again or pretend that the world situation is just a blip in the timeline and that soon everything will return to normal.

The truth is we need a new normal.

And the reality is that it’s already begun.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our New World Part 2: Sleeping Beauty and the Fairy Godmother)