Steve Laguvalin seems to be in a pretty anxious mood of late. He can see what’s coming, and wants to see more activity done in response. Recently, he’s been outlining a strategy, first with “Peak Oil and Community Considerations,” whereby he encourages “Peakniks” to move into small town America (”I would guess that anything over 50,000 people will probably be too great, and anything under 5,000 people may not have enough diversity of labor”), and “retro-fit” the town into sustainability with “sustainable,” organic farming and some green conservation matters. Steve has posted a book review of The Natural Step for Communities, and points to Kinsale, Ireland as a real-life example. Of course, this isn’t the first such suggestion. Kunstler is well-known for his love of small-town America. When MetaFilter was asked, “What should I learn for doomsday?” the single most common answer was, “mostly, farming.” Indeed, the “default option” for most utopian schemes throughout history has been to head out, “get back to nature,” and begin farming. That scheme never quite works out, and in this particular case, it’s probably suicide. Let’s take a moment to consider the shape of collapse in small town America.

Michael Pollan is an author who eventually makes it onto any self-respecting primitivist’s reading list. The Botany of Desire tackles the issues of co-evolution and domestication in an engaging (albeit slightly naive) manner, but “Why Mow?” was an article that helped me begin to see the ways in which the civilized mentality seeps into our daily lives. This past weekend’s New York Times Magazine carried a new article by Pollan, “The Modern Hunter-Gatherer,” taken from his new book to be published next month by Penguin Press, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Thesis #29, “It will be impossible to rebuild civilization,” is perhaps the most controversial of the thirty. I still stand by most of the points I made there, particularly regarding arable land and the effects of climate change and the end of the Holocene. However, none of those have recieved as much scrutiny as the issue of metals in a post-collapse world. I would like to thank my critics; without your criticism, I would not have returned to this subject to examine it in more detail. My thinking on this matter has changed considerably.

When I was in elementary school, we did a unit where we learned about Native Americans. I don’t recall learning about the Hopi or the Navajo, or the Aztecs or the Maya, or the Inuit or the Aleut. Mainly, we learned about the Iroquois and the Algonquin because we were in upstate NY and the field trip sites were close by. I remember standing in a small wood next to a reconstructed longhouse and being told how the Iroquois used to live. They lived in longhouses and roundhouses, they ate deer, they wore buckskins. Everything was in the past tense. I remember a native woman (from which nation I forgot) coming to talk to us in the library about her way of life, as we all sat “indian-style” on the floor. I raised my hand and asked what she used for toilet paper. She told me, “We just use leaves.” I lowered my hand and thought, “Yeah, that makes sense.”

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I’ve finally broken the 280 barrier with this morning’s weigh-in at 278.5. I’ve now officially lost 21.5 lbs. since the beginning of March. Soon, I’ll be hitting my first big milestone, 275, at which point I’ll be one quarter of the way to my goal of 100 lbs. lost.

Yesterday, Giuli and I baked a chocolate and macadamia nut cheesecake from the Foundation Diet’s recipes section. You’ll find two slices already listed in my meal log, in the spreadsheet above. Giuli may not be terribly impressed with the results, but I sure am!

The Oil Drum is one year old today. Salon presented the nicest birthday present of all: an article about that segment of the blogosphere preoccupied with peak oil, titled, “The Oil is Going, the Oil is Going!” It features Matt Savinar, and mentions not only the Oil Drum, but also Energy Bulletin and others.

This weekend, CNN aired a special report: “We Were Warned: Tomorrow’s Oil Crisis.” It tried to broach the topic of peak oil for a mass audience, producing, as the Oil Drum so neatly summaried, pabulum. As the Oil Drum’s “Professor Goose” described it:

There aren’t very many cultural universals. All societies have taboos against incest, though they differ wildly on what constitutes “related,” and thus, what constitutes “incest.” All societies divide labor by gender, but they differ wildly on what work is appropriate to which gender. They all have religions–but those religions are all across the board. And they all have some kind of marriage. Whatever Christian fundamentalists might say, it is most certainly not always between one man and one woman. Not only do you find same sex marriages with some frequency, but every other combination imaginable. In fact, monogamy is in the minority. Of the 1,231 societies recorded in Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, only 186–15.1%–were monogamous. And that’s after the spread of Christianity. The most frequent option was polygyny (one many with multiple wives, of which there were 1,041, or 84.6%), but there was also polyandry (one wife with multiple husbands; 4 societies, for 0.3%).

I was planning on getting married, but now I think I’ll save myself the trouble and just throw all my money in a dumpster. Don’t get me wrong - I very much want to be married. It’s the getting married that I’m starting to really resent. And it’s not because I’m a cheapskate, either: my mother’s generously offered Jason and me $6,000 to pay for the wedding. It’s the mere concept of spending $6,000 on a party. It’s the fact that, compared to the average cost of wedding nowadays, $6,000 - which is twice as much as my first car cost - is a drop in the bucket. Almost a year ago, CNN reported that the average cost of wedding was nearing $30,000. In 1983, your average wedding cost anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 (in 2006 dollars). By 1991, that had risen to $19,000. And by 2002, a wedding cost $24,000. Now that it’s ballooned out to $26,000, the cost has risen $2,000 in less than half a decade. In the 80’s, an era famous for lavish, sequin-intensive weddings, my $6,000 budget would have been perfectly reasonable. Now you can find books like How to Have a Fabulous Wedding for $10,000 or Less. Along with the rising cost comes the length of time required to plan it. People routinely put a year or more between engagement and wedding. Anything less than a year, in some cities, is considered impossible.

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This week’s update was delayed by a series of happenings this weekend beyond my control, including helping a friend move and playing plumber to a flooded bathroom, but it’s also true that the news this week is not as grand as in previous reports. The second week of the diet has lacked the really encouraging numbers I saw in the first week, but that’s not entirely unexpected. My weight as of the morning of 20 March was 283.5, making for 16.5 total pounds lost since the beginning of the month. But, as is clearly shown from the graph above, it’s hardly been steady loss.

That’s a Da Vinci’s Notebook reference–a bit obscure, I know, but too tempting to pass up for The Da Vinci Code’s author, because I have to admit: Dan Brown has balls. The movie was scheduled to premiere in the middle of May, but the trial may delay that. The authors of the original Prieuré de Sion conspiracy book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, are suing, alleging that Brown plagarized them. (Of course, facts can’t be copyrighted, so isn’t this an implicit admission that Holy Blood, Holy Grail is fiction?) Of course, that’s where this niche genre began, all the way back in the misty days of my birth: 1982 Anno Domini. Ever since I first read it almost a decade ago, I’ve had to deal with a new round of this roughly once every two years. Most of the time, it’s a piece of fiction that’s “based on real history!” It’s a lot of other things, too, but to look at one of the most gruesome–and most forgotten–atrocities in European history, and decide that just wasn’t enough–no, you need to defame the victims, too, with the worst insults they could imagine, all the while reducing them to bit characters in a bizarre conspiracy theory, well … that certainly takes muchos huevos grandes.