the end of the beginning
After I graduated from college I immediately began trying to Save the World via decarbonizing the built environment. I threw myself at the problem and, mostly, failed.
I didn’t really have my own shit together, is the problem. I didn’t understand the world or myself very well, I was a workaholic and had an unhealthy relationship with broken things, I spent slightly more money than I earned, and I got into debt. This locked me in to a narrow landscape of options and kept me tightly coupled to the logic of the old systems.
I had to work fulltime to service my debt. I had to work 70+ hour weeks due to an inability to see after my own emotional needs, not because of any real urgency or important of the work I was doing. At the same time I had philosophical and intellectual misgivings that the work I was involved with was the right work for me to be engaged with. But I didn’t really have the space to sort it out and so I kept banging my head against the wall.
When I found ERE (aka post-consumer praxis) in 2020 I was close to the end of my rope with respect to my career. I was chasing down a vocational dead end and I think part of me knew it. But I didn’t know what to do about it.
I now think that I simply had the order of things backwards. I was trying to engage with and ‘fix’ things in the outside world from within my own broken household system, and that’s not possible.
I’ve spent the past four years focused on my own system — building a rugged and resilient lifestyle system that affords me a high level of optionality, autonomy, and a significant decoupling from the logistics of old systems. This phase of getting my own life in order is, I think, nearing substantial completion.
There will always be work to do — I’ll never stop tuning and tweaking my personal system — but it’s approaching a level of unconscious competence that means I’ll soon have surplus attention to spend on other things. Things beyond the scope of my own lifestyle system.
From the beginning this has been The Point for me. The focus on lowering my cost of living, on learning broad appropriate skills, and internalizing systems thinking has always been about building a solid foundation for myself that I can use as a platform for engagement and action in the larger world.
Looking over the horizon to the beginning of the next phase is very motivating. I think it’s important that I not get too excited, skip steps, or trip over my own feet so close to a milestone phase shift, but I’m feeling the gravitational pull of my future drawing me in.
(This is, by the way, the overall theme of the book I’m working on finishing by the end of the year. )
Reading: Jaymo on Solarpunk
I stumbled across Jay Springett’s talk Solarpunk Means Dreaming Green and it’s maybe the best solarpunk primer I’ve come across. His website is a great place to poke around for a while. In his talk he said
Everything about solarpunk is possible now.
And I think that’s an underappreciated point. The world we want can be assembled from components that already exist.
Alaska
I spent the whole month of August in Fairbanks, Alaska. I helped Jack McClure build an addition on his cabin, went on long hikes, and soaked up the vibe. I like it here a lot and I’ll be spending more time here in the future.
The first wall goes up on the second story
Jack's Cabin Addition
View from the front porch of a cabin I spent a weekend at
Chena Dome Loop Hike
When this newsletter comes out I’ll be halfway home to the desert.
PS I’m not done with the AMAs - there are still questions in the hopper that I’m working on. Stay tuned.