“It’s my real-world skill for after the Zombie Apocalypse,” she said, half-joking. Okay, maybe mostly-joking, but still…

It was another little glimmer, a small sign of something on the increase these days. It’s okay now, it seems, to mention “food security” or “energy security” in polite circles, as long as it’s just a passing mention. “Eating local” and “buying local” are now perfectly respectable topics that can sustain fairly extensive treatment before the room empties — although “sustainability” itself may not be quite there yet.

Between climate change, energy decline, and meltdowns both nuclear and financial, there’s a growing sense that the world is going to be a very different, very hands-on place by the next decade, if not sooner. The scenarios vary from Mad Max to Humble Green Consumer, with a lot of difference of opinion rushing into the vacuum left by the sheer uncertainty of it.

If the world that comes after the world as we know it needs a name, even as a placeholder, then “Zombie Apocalypse” may as good as any, and maybe better than most for the pop-media irony it offers. There’s kind of a brave, laughing-into-the-jaws-fate appeal to it. You take your morale boosters where you can find them.

For those who scoff at the Doom-and-Gloomers, I’ll cheerfully cop to the first part of the label — but definitely not the second: whether or not you’re gloomy about the prospect of doom depends very much on what, specifically, is to meet its doom. I keep thinking about that occupant of Zucotti Park who held a sign saying “The beginning is near.”

In the face of such uncertainty, though, second-guessing the outcome very much determines what sort of preparation, if any, an individual thinks prudent. For those at one end of the spectrum, it’s wilderness cabins and ample stocks of tinned meat and ammunition. For those at the other end, it’s more scoffing.

Probabilities being what they are, I’d suggest that the most productive behaviors occur in a range somewhere between the two extremes. The nice part here is that, whatever form the Zombie Apocalypse might actually take, be it mild or wild, these are mostly things we should be doing anyway: driving less, walking more, using less, getting out of debt, living closer, growing local, doing it yourself, meeting your neighbors, and so on.

At the very least, none of these are a waste of time, and they all have positive benefits. Whether the benefits prove to be strategic or even life-saving in the longer run remains to be seen, of course. But if you’ve ever had any interest in taking a welding class, now would certainly be as good a time as any.

In a country without ranks and titles, our attempts at drawing class lines typically involve finding some numerical cutoff that we can agree on: the “poverty line” is $20K per year, “middle class” is $40K, and so on. Trouble is, it’s arbitrary and doesn’t really yield much in the way of agreement. Nor insight, for that matter.

The percentages 99 and 1 appear at first glance to be yet another stab at a quantitative divide. Indeed, a graph of  income distribution in America shows a classic “hockey stick” curve that takes its sharp upward bend right at the 99th percentile, so the quantities turned out about right in this case. While it’s good that they did, the class differences that really matter are qualitative.

It’s not just about a difference in number of dollars. There’s a point where enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.  Politically, it’s about the difference in interests. The one percent have an interest in maintaining the system of rewards that grants them a disproportionate share of the wealth, while the ninety-nine percent’s interest lies in getting a share that’s steady enough to keep body and soul together. On a finite planet, these interests will inevitably come into conflict.

Once such lines are drawn, of course, people will go about assigning themselves to one side or the other. Some of it is cultural: a number of solidly middle-class go-getters, for example, are likely to identify with the top one percent based purely on aspiration. Conversely, some millionaires of a populist persuasion will throw in their lot with The Common Man.

For many others, their inner geek will clamor to know exactly what income level puts a person into the literal top 1%. Here’s the short answer: half a million a year.  According to data  from the Brookings Institution, annual income for the 99th percentile (i.e., entry into the top 1%) is $506,553. Any less and you’re down here with us serfs.

These stats are about income, but here’s an item about wealth that I found to be an eye-opener. The Federal Reserve releases quarterly figures for Total Household Net Worth, an amount which is currently at $57.3 trillion. That’s the sum total of all the net worth of all the households in all the land.

There are 114.8 million of them, as it happens, so your average household is worth $499,600.  That’s right — that’s how much there is to go around. To put it another way, an even distribution of wealth would mean every single family in America sitting comfy and secure on a half-million dollar nest-egg. Make of that what you will.

But the truly great divide, I believe, that separates the upper class from the working classes is when you get to leave out the “working” part. At a certain point, income from investments is enough to live on. You don’t have to worry about having a job, because you don’t need one.

Depending on your concept of “enough,” you could be work-optional with as little $2 million to your name. Dividends and interest on that much would put you in the $100,000-a-year bracket fairly easily. For life.

When you’re work-optional, the world looks like a much different place than it does to someone who has to harness up to a paycheck. That’s privilege. That’s the real difference between the top 1% and the rest of us. Our gut-level understanding of this is what the Occupiers have so successfully struck and have finally given a voice to. We can talk about it now.

We seem to define war as “anything an army does.”

The Confucians advised that “Good governance begins with calling things by their right names.”

I suggest that the name “war” does not rightly apply to the things the US military has been doing post-WWII. When we speak of “war” these days, we often run into conundrums and dissonance — “Did we actually win or lose in Vietnam?” or “How do we know what ‘victory’ is in Iraq?” or “Doesn’t this thing ever end?” We have expectations about what war is supposed to be that never quite seem to be met.

Rather, we could take a clue from Harry Truman, who too-rightly described the conflict in Korea as “police action.” This comes much closer to what an empire actually does when it is carrying out the business of empire — policing the periphery. Policing doesn’t have an end; it’s an ongoing function.

And to be clear about the term “empire,” we can use it here to mean “a nation that projects power beyond its borders in such a way that wealth flows from the periphery toward the center.” Every empire in history has had its own unique style, but this is what they all have in common.

Fortunately for those put off by the prospect of such a future, it’s not necessary to gear up and make a big case against it. All that’s needed is to invite advocates to make their case quantitatively. It fails on its own terms.

Usually, the sell for nuclear power presents it as a remedy for CO2 pollution and fossil fuel depletion, envisioning a world where nuclear power is the main source of energy. Let’s say for sake of argument that this project gets the green light. How do they go about making it happen?

The basic measurements:

• Current annual world energy consumption: 550,000 petajoules
• Energy output from a 1 gigawatt plant in a year: 31.5 petajoules
• Current industry estimates for constructing a 1 GW plant: $3 billion
• Uranium oxide used by a 1 GW plant in a year: 200 metric tons

With the resulting requirements:

• Required number of 1 GW plants: 17,428 (550,000 PJ demand / 31.56 PJ per plant)
• Total cost: $52.29 trillion (17,428 plants * $3 billion each)
• Uranium oxide for whole fleet: 3,488,741 metric tons per year (17,428 plants * 200 metric tons per year)

And with these starting conditions:

• Current number of nuclear plants worldwide: 440

• Uranium oxide estimated reserves (IAEA known recoverable resources): 6,306,300 metric tons

Also, the buildout. To complete the project by, say, mid-century:

• Plants built: 447 per year (17,428 plants / 39 years)
• Cost: $1.34 trillion per year (447 plants * $3 billion)

A nuclear-powered future, then? Yes, if we build more than the total number of currently-existing plants every single year at $3 billion apiece. We’d never reach the required 17,000 plants, however, since after about 5,000 of them were built and running, the 6.3 million metric tons of world uranium reserves would be exhausted!

That’s only partly true. Modern civilization means machines, not just in the lab, but machines everywhere: machines we depend on in order to lead our modern lives. To be modern, in the popular conception of it, is to be sophisticated, comfortable, well-fed and well-served — all watched over by machines of loving grace, to borrow Richard Brautigan’s phrase.

But we shouldn’t overlook one central fact. The machines may be sophisticated, and they may take a lot of technological know-how, but for every one of them, something still has to turn the crank.

Early on, it was slaves that turned the crank that made the gadget go; sometimes it was oxen. Occasionally, if you had just the right location, you could get a river to turn the crank. But that took some looking around, and no doubt, meant some pricey real estate.

Little wonder that technology took so long to catch on. Pre-modern people weren’t any less clever than we are, so that’s certainly not it. And they were probably just as inclined to conserve personal energy. Leonardo’s devices, for example, didn’t lack for cleverness, but they all suffered from the same drawback: ultimately, somebody would have to turn the crank.

Then an ironmonger named Newcomen came along and showed that really hot water could turn the crank, given a bit of ironmongery between the two. Best yet, hot water wouldn’t complain about low wages or enslavement, so technology as we know it was off and running. All you needed was a way to boil the water — just put some fuel under it, light up, and you’re in business. In all, a great day for humanity: we could now replace slavery with fuel.

However, the fuel of the day was also in demand for making glass by the acre for ducal mansions and hundred-gun ships-of-the-line for royal navies. Just one of these vessels, James IV’s Great Michael, reportedly “wasted all the oakwoods in Fyfe.” Those trees just weren’t growing back fast enough to keep the dukes and kings happy, and most importantly, the water boiling. A lot of people were rallying to the idea of letting the fuel do the work — enough to transform society, in fact — and for that to happen, it was going to take a lot of trees.

As it did happen, a certain combustible mineral was also available, in use already among certain specialists like ironmongers. It was messy, smelly, a hassle to dig up and godawful unhealthy, but it was available. Moreover, it was available in quantity, which by now was a key factor.

To those with a stake in the crank-turning business, this must have been quite a relief, like a debtor coming into a trust fund. But there was a catch. Whereas an oak forest in Scotland is like a steady income, coal is more like an inheritance. With the one, you’re fine long-term if you stay within your means; with the other, you dip into it again and again until soon the dipping is done. Petroleum is the same way. That’s the trouble with fossil fuels — they’re a one-time deal.

For today and the near future, this could be awkward. If “modern” essentially means machinery in abundance, it also has to mean fuel in abundance. This raises an interesting question: how modern can we expect to be when fuel is scarce?

The abundance of fossil fuel that enabled modern life is starting to be less so, and indeed is heading for scarcity. We are not yet post-modern in that sense, but we soon will be — soon enough that most people alive today are going to be dealing with it. Oil has already peaked and coal is about to, with the added complication that coal’s availability depends on oil for mining and transport.

Whatever fuel comes after fossil fuel, we can only be as modern as the amount of it available. We can invent new machines, but not new sources of energy. Energy sources come to us on their own terms — unfortunately, none of the replacement candidates offer terms as generous as fossil fuels did. Not by a long shot.

We will still have fuel of some kind, just much less of it. We’ll still have a civilization of some kind, perhaps even one that’s advanced in other ways. And we’ll have that celebrated know-how, as well. With a little more of it, we can probably make the transition to a post-modern civilization without too much calamity, but we shouldn’t count on bringing a whole lot of the machinery along with us.

It is the concept of garp. (Please note that this was fully a decade before the John Irving novel.)

Garp, we are to understand, is a theoretical meta-substance that enters our world as a by-product of non-essential human activity. Basically, this includes any extraneous busy-ness in our lives other than:

A) sleeping, or
B) loving.

There’s an obvious and understandable temptation to include eating in this short list. However, it appears that even eating carries with it a considerable garpogenic potential, and is therefore suspect. (As I recall, Jim began to explain this to me in greater detail, but then the pizza was ready.)

Garp has several distinctive properties that identify it. Garp is not directly detected by any of the five senses, but we often are aware of it on some level, aware that it is all around us. Under the right circumstances, often very fleeting, garp may be perceived as sort of cold, colorless, granular stuff, with a tendency to accumulate in the corners of things in persistent little drifts.

The basic correlation between garp and behavior is nicely linear: the more non-essential the activity, the greater the amount of garp generated. This can be referred to as the inanity principle. Or, if you prefer the simpler inverse, just “anity principle.” That is, the more ane the behavior, the less garp it leaves.

Sometimes, we might even swear that there are entire individuals made of garp, but this generally coincides with periods of our own overexposure to it. It follows, then, that if we force ourselves to revisit the essentials, we’ll be able to elude this sneaky form of misanthropy.

Best course of action: take a nap, or give your sweetie a squeeze, or even better, do both.

Progress. There’s a whole book in that one — its history, its roots in Christian theology, its pairing with popular ideas of evolution, even its pervasive effect on language. The basic credo of Progress is simple: tomorrow will always be better than today.

If we say that something is “outdated,” it’s another way of saying “it’s bad.” If we say something is “more modern,” it’s another way of saying “it’s better.” A politician will never be contradicted when calling for the need to “go forward.” Nobody blinks when a science buff refers to “more evolved” species.

In the same way, a technophile might describe the prospect of using lower-energy technologies as “going back to the 19th century.” Obviously, this can’t be literally true without time travel — rather, it’s poetic license issued by the Progress narrative.

The recent reintroduction of horse-drawn rubbish carts in France, for example, will surely attract ridicule in some circles as being the work of Luddites and technophobes. This in spite of the fact that the move was simply pragmatic, a rational response to actual circumstances.

The point is not whether to be phobic or philic about technology. Technology is neutral; it’s a way to help us adapt — in the same way that evolution functions as just a series of successful adaptations to new conditions. Whether or not the result is considered “higher” or “more advanced” has no bearing on the success of it. What matters is how well a given adaptation helps a given critter to get along in its changing environment.

Here’s the thing about Progress: it was only a very particular set of circumstances that allowed us to establish the Progress narrative, shaped as it was by 250 years of fossil-fueled industrial civilization. So wowed were we by the pattern of steady improvements our industrial-age science and technology are so good at, we somehow generalized this special kind of progress into a full-blown paradigm that we’ve cheerfully applied to society at large, if not to most of the human condition.

Unfortunately, those particular circumstances are undergoing a fundamental change. With oil in decline now, and coal not much later, the days of cheap and abundant energy are on the way out, and with them, the essential premise of our industrial, consumer-centric culture.

So-called substitutes for fossil energy will surely come along, but barring the miraculous, they will be neither cheap nor abundant. Believers in technological progress will dispute this loud and long, but to the best of my understanding, the arguments are quantitatively improbable, sometimes to the point of sounding like nothing so much as a brave attempt to bargain with the passing of an era. Our belief in Progress has served us so well for so long that it’s almost all we know, or want to know.

What we don’t know is a new way to break some old habits. For the last two-plus centuries, our favorite means of adaptation has always boiled down to one trick: some variant of “scale up and apply more power.” Now we’re faced with not being able to use that trick any more. Trouble is, we’re not accustomed to thinking outside the energy-intensive box. We’ve forgotten that technology isn’t always about fancier ways to burn energy.

More to the point, we can’t cope with the possibility that tomorrow might in fact be worse than today. Our myth of Progress forbids it. It’s outright heresy.

Within that forbidden realm, though, lie the adaptations that we need to make in order to bring us through the coming energy descent successfully and decently. The sooner we get to it, the better, of course — although it may mean embracing a more suitable story than Progress before much can really happen.

It appears, then, that tomorrow may well bring us a lot more walking, a lot fewer cars, and plenty of time for weeding the potato patch — a tomorrow worse than today, in some ways. But on the upside, there’ll be a lot more walking, a lot fewer cars, and plenty of time for weeding the potato patch. And that, you might say, is the story.

Austin’s position as a blue and green oasis in the middle of a vast red expanse has a distinctive effect on its political and cultural identity, prompting one of its many nicknames: “The People’s Republic of Austin.”

For the benefit of all the urbane, progressive out-of-staters who are surprised to learn about Austin, I usually point out that we’re not actually in Texas, we just happen to be surrounded by Texas. There’s a difference.

My hometown gets its share of attention in the media, mostly for its music and high-tech goings-on. Typically, any mention will take the form of some breathless “whodda thunk” discovery that the place is decidedly cosmopolitan and the living is pretty darn congenial.

However, the reference to it is invariably “Austin, Texas.”

Now, this is a bone that needs picking. You never hear “Seattle, Washington” or “San Francisco, California.” Right? Sure, people are always on a first-name basis with Seattle and San Francisco. Not “Austin Texas,” though. I’m afraid we’re destined to be the Charlie Brown of major cities. Or maybe the Rodney Dangerfield. But heck, there’s more than a million people here. Brood on that, Seattle!

Of course, this is a state where you can actually hear mention of “Paris, France.” As opposed to any other Paris. Well, Texas does in fact have a Paris of its own, so there is an irritating sort of local logic to it.

To be fair, Texas and Texans do get a bad rap, with any number of Yosemite Sam/J.R. Ewing/Billy Roy Boondock stereotypes to go with it. Not that there isn’t a grain of truth there — and more, as I learned in my college days trying to make my way unscathed through the frat-house district looking like I might need a haircut. My only serious objection to Texans is against the ones who think they own the place. They tend to act it out in a big way.

In general, though — to the extent that you can generalize about such things — Texans are a unique breed, with much to admire about them. It’s that affable, salt-of-the-earth, don’t-bullshit-a-bullshitter thing they’ve got going. Ann Richards was a Texan. Definitely salty. Ditto Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower. Even Bill Moyers has that Texan style, in his own low-maintenance sort of way.

John Steinbeck, who was Texan by marriage, grapples eloquently with the paradoxes of Texanhood in his book Travels With Charley:

Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening covey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner. …I’ve studied the Texas problem from many angles and for many years. And of course one of my truths is inevitably canceled by another. Outside their state I think Texans are a little frightened and very tender in their feelings, and these qualities cause boasting, arrogance, and noisy complacency– the outlets of shy children. At home Texans are none of these things. The ones I know are gracious, friendly, generous and quiet.

All of this might lead one to conclude that the Texas paradox, at least in part, is that of a nation fully surrounded by another nation. And with a recursive but satisfying twist, also the plight of Austin. That’s Austin and Texas, comrade — not Austin, Texas.

If there is one thing that draws people into a technical line of work, it’s probably an abiding passion for fiddling with gadgets. To a certain kind of person, there is nothing quite as compelling as being confronted with a brand-new gadget and learning how it works,  figuring out how to make it work better, or getting it to work again when it breaks.

Indeed, therein lies the integrity of technical craft: with gadgets, results are not negotiable. The clear, cool beauty of  technical work is that, in the last analysis, it doesn’t matter where you went to school, or what letters come after your name, or whom you know, or how you negotiate.

What does matter is that you either get the gadget to work, or you don’t. That’s it. People regard you according to your ability to make the thing work. On this alone you rise or fall.

Stark as the proposition may be, it has a certain appeal. To some, it represents an island of rationality in an arbitrary world, a place of known cause-and-effect, where doing counts more than talking, where ability counts more than opinion.

Or maybe it’s just a place where you can get paid to do what you like doing best — fiddling with gadgets.

I used to work in television production. As a line of work, it’s still probably more gadget-intensive than most. Traditionally, any time you wanted to do something to the picture, you pretty much had to go out and get another gadget to plug into all your other gadgets, every last one of them with its own unique potential for fiddling. For the natural-born gadget-wrangler, such is a prescription for bliss.

Enter the computer. The Major Gadget. The Everything Gadget. In a sense, The Last Gadget. Because now, when you want to do something different to the picture, you do it in software. You pick commands off of menus, or you press some keys, or somebody writes more software.

For anyone whose diagnostic repertoire includes a bang on the side of the cabinet, this sounds dreadfully close to negotiating.  We’re supposed to be fiddling with these gadgets, not schmoozing with them.

Technically, of course, software is every bit as mechanistic as a real live steel-and-plastic machine. So theoretically, a program should have much the same fiddle-potential. Even more, actually, because in software, parts are cheap.

Witness, too, how doing practically anything with a computer is astonishingly time-consuming, ninety-nine percent of which time will qualify as fiddling, pure and simple. Software turns out to be a fiddling bonanza.

In the time since television production made the transition to computers, software has of course spread to nearly every working surface on the planet — an exponential boom in virtual gadgetry, with a fiddling demand to match.

As this transition was taking hold, though, many old-school types found there was something in the nature of this particular kind of fiddling that simply does not satisfy. It’s so… abstract.

There’s the guy in the next cubicle, say, fiddling with a database program. He’s mousing around, pointing and clicking, staring at a screen. Alternatively, he might be fiddling with a web editor, trying to get the layout just right. But there, too, he’s just mousing around, staring at the screen.

Confronted with such evidence, some people inevitably concluded that the fundamental, hands-on, gadget-conquering urge to fiddle is just not fulfilled by mousing around on a screen.

Others, more fortunate, were able to understand that the old virtues still apply to the new gadgets, however virtual they may be: you either get the thing to work, or you don’t.

The public view of science tends to be pretty favorable, aside from pockets of dispute concerning favored accounts of human origins. Even in secular settings, science is often embraced with quasi-religious fervor, since it’s the basis of the modern technocratic civilization that we all enjoy.

Popular use of the terminology seems to imply stages of certainty, from “hypothesis” to “theory” to “law.” We look to science for guarantees.

However, by-the-book scientists will always be modest about any claims to “guarantees.” Even when they use the word “law,” it’s pretty loose. You can usually hear the quote-marks around it. It’s a rare scientist who will go so far as to claim “proof” of anything.

For one thing, they want to keep some wiggle room for the next time somebody’s “laws” get shredded, sort of like what happened with Newton’s tidy world when Einstein came along. Now Einstein’s work is getting poked and picked at. Notice it’s seldom called “The Law of Relativity.” At best, “The theory,” and often, “The principle.” Twice shy, perhaps.

So hypotheses do go through phases of more and more experimental support, gaining acceptance over time. “Theory,” contrary to the popular way the word is used in the sense of “hypothesis,” or even “conjecture,” actually refers to the model that ties together related hypotheses and observations; after enough experimentation, theory starts accounting for the observed data, and hopefully, starts making predictions.

For instance, there is the wave theory (model) of light and also the particle theory. Both models are used, depending on the circumstance, and both are useful for making valid predictions. Both are explanatory, while neither makes any claim to be “the real one.”

The empiricist philosopher David Hume pretty much blew up the notion that causality is real. Causality is a metaphysical assumption that we make as a kind of convenience. Getting into philosophy of science, you soon find that science doesn’t do metaphysics — scientists never “prove” anything, they just support hypotheses with more and more experimental data. A long-standing, well-supported hypothesis eventually becomes “accepted,” but never “proven.”

It may seem like a cop-out, but the well-schooled scientist, when asked about “proof” and “reality” will quietly point you to the nearest philosopher.

There’s a good overview called Philosophy of Natural Science by Carl Hempel that I’d recommend highly. Online, you might want to check here for Hempel. I know it’s not everybody’s favorite thing, but personally, I love this kind of stuff.

Now, wasn’t there a bottle of red wine around here somewhere?