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I'll be doing a series of events in Ireland around the 26th of September, 2010. That's the first one posted. Many thanks to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas who are organizing and hosting. I won't be focused extensively on the threat model; I believe that terrain is better covered by others. Rather I'll be looking at how infrastructure works and where the levers are for protecting critical infrastructure in severe conditions of whatever kind. I hope we'll get a broad range of participants, including both private individuals and government, at these events. Click for more details.

The problem at the heart of all edgy political movements is that the government is doing the wrong thing, but ignoring the government has three worse consequences:

• the government will punch you in the head,
• other, evil groups (racists, say) will also ignore the government, and
• often simply being free is not enough, you want new control.

The most brutal critique of bottom-up freedom, as exemplified by Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson's Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) movement, one of the cultural foundations of the Burning Man scene, was also the simplest. Bey's chosen temporary autonomous zone is composed of him, your child, and nobody to press charges. The role that Bey's pedophilia (and also) played in the formation of the TAZ philosophy is never discussed: all too obvious. Whether Bey ever actually abused a child is unknown - he has been scrutinized and nobody has uncovered pressed charges - but his personal predilections serve as the perfect frame to discuss governance. Some of the people kicking hardest against the governance of the state are also exactly the people that I personally, and we socially, want on the shortest leashes. I visited a commune closely associated with Bey in the mid 1990s, and it was a scary, creepy place. I met some incredibly beautiful, refined, self-aware people, embedded in a context which just felt wrong in a profound way: freedom achieved, but one wonders about the costs. We can't have nice things because Hakim Bey will molest your children. A more prosaic example, less philosophically significant but pragmatically more relevant is the Radioactive Boyscout, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear pile in his house. Given time and a few more resources, he might have succeeded. The hard part of nuclear piles is not starting them, it's stopping them once they get started. And now to the Pope. Embodied in the Pope we have the opposite problem.

• TAZ, nobody is accountable because there is no authority to make them accountable.
• Catholic church, the Holy Roman Empire, nobody is accountable because the authority which does exist will not make them accountable.

If Peter Lamborn Wilson is a fantasist rather than a predator, there are plenty of examples of lone predators making little pocket worlds with them and their victims. The Catholic problem is different: massive, institutional acceptance of pedophilia as a standard ecclesiastical problem to be managed rather than stamped out. We know a little about the scale of the problem, but it's not until you actually review the relevant data that you get a sense of the scale of the problem: it is enormous. The Jewish example, Shlomo Carlebach is smaller but equally nasty. Imagine the cultural effect of tens or hundreds of thousands of people being abused by the clergy, staggering through their lives with all the psychological scarring that goes along with this ritualized abuse. The public mental health implications are staggering. Sexual trauma is heavily correlated with later mental illness. The impact on people's lives, and the public purse, of taking care of the victims of the clergy throughout their lives... We can't have nice things because the Pope will molest your children. (or at least facilitate their abuse by other people by providing blanket protection for pedophiles in the church) These are the two poles we must find balance between: unaccountable individualism, and unaccountable political power. Every time I get into the Green Libertarianism debate, I have a simple question: what about the Radioactive Boyscout, or the local dump. It's a hard question, because firm authoritarian environmental barriers have to be observed where personal responsibility has failed. There are plenty of people who will go to jail for decades if the money made from environmental destruction feeds their children. The poor are too poor to put the environment ahead of their own needs, hence all the illegal toxic waste dumps in Africa. The Temporary Autonomous Zone is not safe. However, the Empire is not safe either. The power vested in the State continues to subsidize dirty energy production, warming the atmosphere. It continues to turn a blind eye and collude with BP in the gulf. On the other hand, individual factory owners would quite happily dump toxic waste into nearby rivers. The question is not centralized power or individual accountability. The question is "is the environment protected?" How, exactly, environmental protection is achieved does not really matter in a global sense. If we protect the environment, we have time to sort out our political issues. If we do not, we run a real risk of politics becoming largely moot as the world catastrophically warms, and ecosystem chaos hits our food supplies. I think we need some new concepts around regional autonomy with global accountability. For example, I'd like to see a mechanism where a small municipality can ask for some kind of variance as an "ecotown", allowed to make its own building codes and local environmental regulations, with full municipal authority behind these new rules, but minimal interference from local government and central government. The challenge is how to make these regional innovations in environmental regulation accountable so that we do not see the same progressive legislation turned to evil use by, say, mining corporations which using the same regional autonomy regulations to dump into the environment. The ecotown which uses its freedom to destroy is entirely plausible given the legal might of these monsters. We need sub-national innovation in environmental regulation. We need to be able to build what we want to build, and live as we want to live, to pioneer new green lifestyles - but without empowering those who are irresponsible. I've gone after the hardest possible cases to make the point clear, that neither pole of power provides acceptable performance. It is in the middle ground that we must seek our solutions. Beware the concentration of power in the hands of the few.

Buckminster Fuller and Mahatma Gandhi showed that single individuals could transform the world. When I really got started in this game, in 2002, with the invention of the hexayurt, I searched hard for some model of how to be effective. Here's roughly what I came to.

• Institutions which own humanitarian problems have been ineffective for generations.
• Government is exquisitely slow, but the Pentagon has developed some good tech.
• Leaders are turned into managers by building funded organizations.
• Right times for doing things come, but when cannot be predicted reliably.

All roads lead to Richard Stallman. He believes in a very bold vision: freedom and peace for all humanity. He was a single talented individual. He changed the philosophy which we use to develop software, and his values have percolated from software to other fields like music, movies and hardware. By all reasonable reckoning Stallman, for all that his ideas have become diluted as they spread, is winning. I wanted to achieve a Stallman-like victory in housing. I wanted to start with the very poorest and most desperate, because the existing systems were failing them so badly. Also disaster brings capital into otherwise permanently deprived areas. Billions were raised for Haiti, more money than had gone into the country in decades. Because there is no reasonable strategy like copyleft in housing I gave away the technology for Free, with no copyright or patent. I did not found an organization because I wanted to change how all NGOs doing sheltering operate, rather than becoming one more competing NGO at the disaster scene. I took one principle from Buckminster Fuller: let the tech do the talking. As far as possibly I've tried not to preach about why, but focused on what and how. If you don't know that we all deserve a place to live, I ain't gonna teach ya. I'd read Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a teenager. I knew that real change takes time. I expected the hexayurt to take a generational turnover, roughly 15 years, before it was adopted on a large scale. I was prepared to wait because I knew of no other effective alternative. So I split my life into two parts: pushing the hexayurt forwards, and building the rest of the infrastructure (political and social) that I would need to make it effective when the day finally came. That, plus absurd coincidences, took me into government and dealing with the military-intellectual complex, to my surprise, and their frank astonishment. The hexayurt reached Haiti this year. Transitional sheltering (more permanent than a tent) is very stuck in Haiti as of August 2010. They need about 200,000 homes and the Shelter Cluster has built less than 10,000. The issues appear to be land access, which is to say bureaucracy. As a result, the class of shelters in which the hexayurt belongs are just not being built in quantity. We may yet see a few hundred units built. Now we have Pakistan. Unlike Haiti the information coming out of the country is scattered and disjointed and the ongoing, wet and complex nature of the disaster are making it hard to figure out where to pull. But millions are displaced, and there is slack charitable giving because it follows so hard on Haiti. So there is much to do, and little money. Perhaps those conditions will be helped by the design: I do not know. This year there will be several hundred of hexayurts on the playa at Burning Man. Lots and lots of Americans will get to live inside of a shelter they built with their own hands for a few hundred dollars which will keep them warm at night, cool in the day, and safe from the awesome desert dust storms. The line between this activity, and what I would like to see in Pakistan and Haiti and everywhere else that people need shelter is very simple.

• Rather than learning from the internet, people come and teach how to make hexayurts.
• Rather than individuals buying from Home Depot, charities buy the materials and deliver them.

Burning Man is a rehearsal ground for taking care of people after a large scale natural disaster - the Bay Quake. Burners do shelter and infrastructure in very harsh conditions for 50,000 people. As I recall, the Red Cross estimate for a Bay Quake is only 300,000 displaced - six times the size of Burning Man. That the shelter is successful under those conditions is encouraging. Food and housing for everybody in the world was my original goal. Food I largely ignored because there are tens of thousands of people better than me at fixing farming. Housing I had a talent for, so that is where I have worked. I have consistently sacrificed short term demonstrations in favor of building long term institutional understanding, which is a tactic I am reconsidering. But now I must ask myself the hard question: is it working? Am I making progress towards this goal, or am I wasting my time? The oncoming freight train of a global recession increasingly draws my attention: it's a crisis which is going to require all of us to change how we do things, and some of the skills and tools I have built wrestling with housing may directly apply. Getting the essentials right. No, I am not wasting my time. The problems that I've devoted my life to working on are spreading and becoming more complex. I'm not working on the wrong problem. Cheap housing and a way to feed yourself is the most urgent need of the very poorest. But as our situation becomes more complicated globally, the need for the radical economy which designing systems for the very poorest trains becomes more generally applicable. I look at Britain and I see land, people, calories and weather. It's the same equations. I do need to tack, to modify course a little. I've become too spread out, too diluted. I'm covering so many bases, trying to make positive change in a portfolio manner to handle the long latencies which go along with trying to make fundamental changes in hard-problem areas. The rich countries are going to be less willing to help the poor as the recession unfolds. NGOs are poorly suited to handle the likely drop in charitable giving. This may well be the spur needed to start the transformation of the sector by Free Culture. I've always known the future of my project was to be taken over by the people close to the problem - the field agencies and work crews building hexayurts in the disaster zones. The most important part of being a figurehead is letting other people be in charge, and recognizing that starting a thing is not the same as owning it. And this is the key lesson from Stallman: a limited man, with limited capacities, who has changed the world and yet commands nothing. This is true 21st century leadership, and when we're all enjoying the peace and freedom afforded to us by computers which we control, rather than our governments or the corporations, we have him to thank for the seed of the idea, and hundreds of thousands of people cooperating to write the software to thank for its realization. I believe in Free Housing. Simple designs for easy-to-afford, easy-to-build housing for a variety of basic needs. The hexayurt already has two major variants - the Burning Man hexayurt and the plywood hexayurt (pdf). There are lots of other designs for shelter and housing out there - even free machinery for making houses. To get there, for all of us, is going to require as many approaches are there are different needs. Short term, long term, individuals, families, climates, cultures and everything else. No hierarchical organization can manage the diversity. It must be a movement, a collective, shared awareness of possibilities and responsibilities, so we can act together to solve the global housing problem. Cooperation gave us free software. Slowly it is giving us free hardware. Now the rest. The hexayurt is like the tent: it is a shelter who's form is defined by the materials it is constructed in, rather than by the deep needs of its users. It's always going to be temporary, stopgap, interim and awaiting the four bedroom gabled room wonder which is the dream of its residents. My hope is that this year we will begin to replace tents not just at Burning Man, but in Haiti and Pakistan.

Disaster at the Top of the World (ugh, regwall) By Thomas Homer-Dixon, via Eldan.

Policy makers need to accept that societies won’t make drastic changes to address climate change until such a crisis hits. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for them to do in the meantime. When a crisis does occur, the societies with response plans on the shelf will be far better off than those that are blindsided. The task for national and regional leaders, then, is to develop a set of contingency plans for possible climate shocks — what we might call, collectively, Plan Z. Some work of this kind is under way at intelligence agencies and research institutions in the United States and Europe. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has produced one of the best studies, “Responding to Threat of Climate Change Mega-Catastrophes.” But for the most part these initiatives are preliminary and uncoordinated. We need a much more deliberate Plan Z, with detailed scenarios of plausible climate shocks; close analyses of options for emergency response by governments, corporations and nongovernmental groups; and clear specifics about what resources — financial, technological and organizational — we will need to cope with different types of crises. The piece references Responding to Threat of Climate Change Mega-Catastrophes. (pdf)

One common theme through these scenarios is the need to protect large numbers of extremely poor people from the terrible consequences of climate change, or any other contingency. I did a round of work on rehousing populations in developed world countries after nuclear terrorism and I want to expand on a couple of themes from that piece to look at climate refugees. The first model is that there are only six basic threats to people's lives: too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness and injury. Those six needs come in three groups: shelter needs, supply needs, and security needs. These needs can be mapped using the Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps system. So what does it look like to provide these basic needs for, say, 100 million climate refugees?

• 100 million people
• 4 people per acre, to self sufficient farming.
• we assume there will be initial food aid, but that these populations are not returning home
• 25 million acres or 40,000 square miles or a 200x200 mile square
• the most rational deployment model is many tens of thousands of smaller settlements
• Multi-year shelters, that'll be penta-treated hexayurts in osb/plywood with a tinfoil coating.
• $100-$200 each for 10 to 20 years of shelter. Penta treatment is a triage measure only.
• One unit per 4 people, on average. 25 million shelters. $5bn max.
• Water treatment. Options: SODIS, potters for peace filteron, biosand. Biosand filters can be made by hand from ferrocement, and work anywhere, so we'll assume biosand filters.
• Sanitation. The Sulabh toilet, or something better. Again, can be made from ferrocement.
• Water and sanitation costs will be less, possibly substantially less, than $100 per family.
• Seeds, agricultural tools and training to migrate people to self sufficiency, see One Acre Fund
• Medical care is largely going to be health visitors and medical expert systems.
• Security is a hard problem. My off-the-cuff suggestion is mixing in settlements of former UN peacekeepers on the same land as the refugees.

At the basic infrastructure level, these simple, free technologies can be combined together to provide all the basic needs for enormous numbers of people using materials present in vast quantities in the industrial supply chains. It's not a lot of concrete and plywood compared to current global consumption. The construction mechanisms are simple enough that the refugees can do most of the work themselves. Complete technology transfer of ferrocement toilets and water filters has been seen in the field. It would be good to do some test runs of this approach for providing large quantities of cheap emergency life-support housing. The farming side, what we might term emergency permaculture, is still the domain of private individuals rather than being a state-funded research project. I first became sensitized to these issues in 2004, when I wrote a piece on Gunboat Environmentalism. Since then I've been working through the logical consequences of environmental trouble at the scale it is rational to expect we might see, given our collective unwillingness to anticipate trouble, and avoid it. Vinay Gupta is the editor of The Future We Deserve.

We have the ability to transform the world. Previous generations had the possibility to transform society, but since the technological breakout of the 20th century we have attained the power to transform the world. Our first real transformative step was to leave the planet a desolate husk, devoid of life, a quiet radioactive wasteland with occasional airless flags. Fortunately although all the tools and know how and project management were put in place for that job, we didn't quite follow it through. The weapons stayed in their silos, and we waited for better days. We got better days too, as I covered in an earlier post. A generation has passed since the nuclear golfball threat (largely) abated. Now we have a new challenge: we are eating the world. It's that simple - we're no longer harvesting what grows and eating the slow ones in the herds. We have taken the herds into captivity, nothing runs free. The trees and plants are sitting targets as we pave nature to install capitalist ecologies which convert nature into money. We have gone from being the world's cleverest apes to its doom. But still, progress. From ending it all in the nuclear weekend to the current death of a thousand species approach is progress. We are getting less bad. We are improving. This all pivots on solar panels. Konarka and Nanosolar, and various other companies, have the know-how to convert our energy economy from one which is causing destructive chaos in nature to one which will be neutral or benign. These panels are cheap enough to out-compete coal and nuclear energy, and the force of the market will align with what is right for the world. Wind etc. have their part to play too. With these technologies we have a fighting chance of keeping a high tech society and living within natural limits. Without them, it is likely that ecological responsibility will cost us many of the benefits of civilization, at which point it is likely that we will choose to remain rich and foolish for as long as we can. Our problem is that our system of governance has made us unable to absorb pain. There are two men to vote for: one pleads sacrifice, and the other promises plenty. Voters are emotionally motivated, on average, and will vote for the fellow with the reassuring tone and message. Even if he is wrong. Even height makes a difference, never mind gender. Charisma over content. Our behavior through the cold war period makes it perfectly clear that we were putting the wrong people in charge. Our leaders threatened the nuclear annihilation of all life on earth in a debate over how two different cultures chose to divide up scarcity. We are using essentially the same systems of governance to manage global environmental policy, and they are working no better. The idea that democracy is the end-all system of governance is just wrong. The Libertarians chip away at state power at one end. Bioregionalists and similar chip away at the other. But what sits in the middle is a simple belief: that the aggregated will of the average man is the word of god. Advertising shapes elections. What stronger argument against democracy as the right way to handle the worst of our problems could I make? The candidate with a better marketing and PR team carries the day. The taller candidate carries the day. The male candidate carries the day. People's innate biological prejudices are manifested at the voting booth. Putting the wrong people in charge, electing the wrong despots, risks costing us the planet. Democracy isn't working. It is not failing because of the manipulation of the system by corporate interests, it is failing because herding a bunch of mammals together and asking them to pick a leader puts the big one, not the smart one, and certainly not the wise one, at the head of the team. The skill of winning elections is not correlated to the skill of knowing what to do next. If you fan power out to the edges, you get rural Arizona making it legal to dump nuclear waste down canyons "as long as they're far enough away from people, ok?" If you centralize it through some form of world government, all the eggs are in one basket, and if absolute power corrupts absolutely, the whole world is lost. No man (or woman) can be trusted that much. I think the solution is specialized technical councils, which are appointed in a non-revokable way, like Supreme Court judges in the United States of America, to rule on specialized areas like the environment. I think these appointments should be for 20 years or life, and should carry the full weight of legislative power, so they can simply enforce what needs to be done, while the whims of public sentiment come and go. We need people who are good at governing, and fully versed in the technicalities of environmental policy to run the show on environment, not politicians. I think there are four areas that we need these "Supreme Courts" on.

• The environment
• Self-replicating systems (biotech, nanotech, other)
• Nuclear weapons
• Population & resource protection

None of these areas are being managed appropriately by our current short-sighted, election-to-election law-making. All of these areas involve making real sacrifices and forcing populations to do unpopular things for their own future survival. Nobody who speaks the truth on the environment can win a popularity contest, so we need to stop expecting politicians to make good decisions on the environment and start building new power structures above the political level to put the power in safer hands. I am actually pretty serious about this. We have seen the 20th century shattered by the failings of democracy (and the failings of authoritarianism), and we are facing a wall of unprecedented challenges to our ability to govern ourselves, particularly in highly technically complex areas. We need new structures to govern in the areas where democratic governance has been demonstrated to fail: environment, nano/biotechnology, nuclear weapons and population. Take it out of the hands of the politicians, and into the hands of specialized councils selected under the mandate of existing governance structures, with long enough tenure to do the right thing for the future, not just for the next election. I would suggest that these Supreme Courts would have veto power over environmental legislation, but probably not the power to draft legislation. Very careful mechanisms must be designed to give these groups the power to compel a government to act. Without a simple framework of constitutionality, the precise nature of the powers of the court, and the limits to their power must be defined with exquisite care. I believe this could work. I do not believe democracy can.