Hollow Bioeconomics Up in the Hollow talk these days is about what life will be like when the oil runs out. Of immediate concern is the impact on Vermont’s tourism economy. Vermont is extremely dependent on tourism dollars. Nearly 2 million visitors a year get into their cars and take that drive to the Green Mountains. Everyone will at least have a meal here. The recent doubling of the price of gas has not discouraged Americans from driving (zero is the amount of less driving we do, even with the higher prices). Double that again, and we may be in deep doo doo.

Some of our friends have solar cells and windmills, but even in the Hollow this is still a rare sight. I am often reminded of early 1929, when people were walking around saying that the crazy stock market boom just couldn’t last. Everyone knew it would end one day, but almost no one had the stones to pull out while the market was rising. Only Joe Kennedy and a few others did, and the rest is history.

I have never seen a comedy about the Great Depression. That is because it was, well, depressing. Over 80% of Americans were directly affected, and it took 10 years and later, the destruction of Europe, to bring us back on top. Hunger, displacement, the consolidation and stratification of wealth, education and resources; and 10 years of general suffering became the norm. A generation has come and reached retirement without having to experience this. As the memory of the Great Depression fades into the mist (my elementary school age children had no idea what the Great Depression was), and the stock market vacillates between 10,000 and 11,000, (up from 1600 when I was a lad), it is tempting to think that this will never happen again. My glasses are not so rose-colored.

It is a vast and complicated world, and life exists on many levels. It is difficult to know what is true and real, and what is false—just more smoke being blown up our butts for someone else’s enrichment. Fortunately for you, dear reader, this month’s issue includes excerpts from the Handy Hollow Guide to What is Real and What is Bullshit. So listen up:

All living things exist in biological systems. Sunlight is the energy input used to power biological chemical factories within cells, and in the bodies of all living things. Sunlight, water and minerals are transformed into increasingly more complex units, creating the amoeba and the elephant. All biological, chemical and physical systems have general rules they (almost) always follow. By understanding the complex systems of the natural world, we can understand the complex systems of human behavior. Here are a few of these Rules and Principles—Hollow style:

1) The Law of Energy—The more energy you have in a given system, the more shit you have going on.

You can try this at home. Take one normally hyper 10-year-old and put it into a room. Now add 10 to 12 of their friends. See what I mean? Same as with firewood. Bigger pile gives off more BTUs every time. (Now take 1/3 of your woodpile and send it overseas, illustrating the importance of buying local). The US stock market has risen steadily over the past 72 years because we have been steadily increasing the amount of energy in its system. More people. More stuff for those people to buy and use up.

Food and energy are kind of the same, different forms of sunlight really. Which brings us to our next principle:

2) The Law of Population Growth - Increasing available energy increases population

Having learned Law #1, this one’s a snap. Take a bunch of normally hyper 21 year olds. Put them into a room with lots of beer and snacks. Come back in a year. Chances are nearly every female will be pregnant. This illustrates the basic principle that increasing the food supply increases the population. Try the experiment again, only this time starve the kids. Come back in a year. Chances are there will be fewer pregnant females, fewer live births, and few offspring living to adulthood.

Since we now know that food is a form of energy, we can see how cheap oil, a powerful energy source, makes the creation of extremely large populations possible. The inverse is also true of course, in biology or economics. Reduce the energy, and you reduce the amount of shit going on within that system

It is reasonable to assume that the Great Depression, and the Civil War before it, were the inevitable result of the difficulties of transitioning from one energy source to another. Look anywhere, at any time in human history. The transition from one energy source to another is traumatic and bloody. For a while we ran on slaves, then water, and then coal. Now we use electricity, and the dominance of petroleum as fuel, plastics and fertilizer. No aspect of our lives—food, shelter, clothing, warmth, medicine—will remain untouched by the depletion and eventual exhaustion of this ancient energy resource.

So what do we have to look forward to? One thing for certain, reduced available energy (food, gas, money), will reduce the amount of shit going on in the system (economic activity), possibly resulting in a lot of depressed people. Sounds kind of sucky. Maybe I should quit making organic soap and open up a laughing gas factory. Then we can rig our cars to run on nitrous oxide!

There is some talk of the hydrogen economy, and how it will save the day; allowing us to continue the mind boggling population growth and rampant energy use that has characterized the past century. This is a tempting thought, and if I were beholden to the stock market I would immediately focus every dollar the society could spare to make this happen. But I know better. Now, in the last years of the oil empire, with the world controlled by sociopathic oilmen, it is greed, not wisdom, which will prevail in the short term.

Bigger is not better. Sometimes more is really less. Earth simply cannot support 6 billon people—with or without the hydrogen economy. Its systems are sucking air all around us. Two billion humans living at some reasonable level of civilization is the top of it in actual practice.

So there it is. To save our civilization we must destroy it. We must, in a single generation, reduce our world population by 2/3, destroying our economies in the process. We must create a new civilization, using renewable power sources, all the while dealing with a cataclysmic weather and water level shifts.

If you are not overwhelmed - you are not paying attention.

All external activity begins with a change in perspective, the particular way

An oilman has an oilman’s perspective, and this is not the perspective that will build a sustainable civilization and new world economy. For one thing, cheap oil and the perspective it brings means that 80% of your energy is nonlocally produced. In the Hollow economic model 20% is nonlocal, and the rest comes from the region in which you reside.

The oilman’s model is big. Like Texas; big and uninteresting. Just too damn flat for creative thinking. The Hollow model has people taking stock of their immediate local resources; wood, water, sun, tide, wind, temperature differences etc., to create the energy for their local economy. The Texas model is thinking big populations. The Hollow model knows that only a 2/3 reduction in humans will leave anything worthwhile to future generations.

The next 25 years may make the Great Depression look like a box social. There are some little things you can do in the meantime to slow things down: support local businesses and locally produced goods, conserve energy, and invest in renewable energy sources. And use organic soap and cleaners; the job you save may be your own (or mine).

These essays were written for entertainment purposes only. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of Vermont Soap, its employees, board of directors, our Web host, Web designer, the neighbors who live up the road; or any of the thousands of people who use our stuff. Originally published in edited form by Comic News. Many thanks to Seasoned Books, without which, life in the Holler may never have become a reality.