Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
By Andrew Nikiforuk
214 pp. Greystone Books – Mar. 2009. $15.95. 

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

If you’ve been following energy news with a discerning eye, then you already know better than to buy into all the hype about the Canadian tar sands. Far from being a panacea for declining supplies of conventional oil, the sands could never contribute more than a proverbial drop in the bucket to daily world oil production. And even achieving this modest rate of production would require such staggering quantities of water, natural gas and boreal forestland as to leave Alberta resembling “a third-rate golf course in the Sudan” before the bulk of the sands’ 175 billion barrels had ever been produced.

The quote comes from Andrew Nikiforuk’s new book Tar Sands, a powerful, eloquent litany of horrors associated with North America’s frenzied dash toward tar sands bitumen as its next fuel of choice. An investigative journalist of formidable caliber, Nikiforuk illustrates how the tar sands’ woeful inability to sustain our cheap-oil-addicted lifestyle is only one in a long list of reasons why their unchecked exploitation must be stopped immediately.

A few of the others include soaring greenhouse gas emissions, colossal ponds of toxic waste that are known to leak, the spike in health problems that has been seen in communities downstream from these leaking ponds and efforts to cover up these health problems by governments that have prostituted themselves to the tar sands lobby. There’s also the unbelievable squalor, crime and corruption that seethe through the tar sands center of Fort McMurray, where a burgeoning population of transient workers seeks to make a quick buck in the sands, but not to give anything back to the community.

A longtime resident of Calgary, Alberta, Nikiforuk has witnessed firsthand this “human ecosystem wastage” visited upon his province by frantic tar sands development. Over the past decade, he has seen Alberta’s social and economic landscape change “practically beyond recognition,” as the bulk of the world’s multinational oil companies have flocked there to create the world’s largest capital project, having invested a combined $200 billion to date. The lax Albertan government, composed as it is of what Nikiforuk calls “petropoliticians,” has approved nearly 100 proposed tar sands projects so far.

This immense mega-project has propelled Canada into first place in terms of exports of oil to the United States, easily eclipsing Mexico and Saudi Arabia. And the “dirty oil” derived from its sands, while amounting to only a drop in the global oil bucket, nonetheless accounts for nearly 20 percent of America’s fuel. These facts certainly come as a surprise to many Americans; but average Canadians, Nikiforuk contends, are not much savvier about the increasing significance of their own filthy fuel.

As for the Canadian and Albertan governments, Nikiforuk argues that they are flying blind, with no plans for bitumen development beyond simply allowing oil companies to liquidate it as quickly as possible, and obediently fulfilling their obligations under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to keep the U.S. economy supplied with all the oil it needs, at any cost. Nikiforuk is quick to point out that Canada would not fare nearly as well as the United States would during an oil shortage, since, unlike most other industrialized nations, it does not have a strategic petroleum reserve for emergencies (he wagers that it’s probably the only advanced nation without such a reserve).

Tar Sands follows a mosaic structure, with each successive chapter painting a portrait of some different ill associated with the sands. Nikiforuk is a first-rate researcher, and he really gets his hands dirty with government documents, conference papers, petitions and even a master’s thesis, in addition to the easy sources of books, news clippings and journal articles. The chapters have titles like “The Ponds,” “Carbon: A Wedding and a Funeral” and “The Money”; and there’s no disputing the concentrated grip of their diatribes.

I found “The Ponds” to be by far the most poignant and pointed. It deals with the huge ponds of toxic waste that have resulted from the water-intensive process of producing bitumen from the sands. Every passing day brings enough new toxic tailings to fill 720 Olympic pools. So far, oil companies’ answer to containing these tailings has been to build massive aboveground ponds using dirt excavated during the mountaintop removal phase of bitumen production. A dozen ponds now stretch along either side of the Athabasca River, towering 270 feet above the forest floor, easily visible from space and looking like some kind of weird pyramids, to borrow Nikiforuk’s simile.

The ponds, which Nikiforuk calls “Canada’s greatest, most cancerous liability,” reek like filling stations, freeze only in the bitterest cold and swarm with carcinogens. The toxins are known to leak into groundwater and the Athabasca River, and toxic wetlands surround most ponds. A physician in one downstream community noted an inexplicable surge in health problems—including an extremely rare, painful cancer that he’s since diagnosed several times—in his patients. When he dared to ask the government to undertake a full study into these ailments, he found himself the victim of a vicious career assassination.

Thousands of geese, ducks and shorebirds die in the ponds every year, as do many deer, beaver and moose. It’s been estimated that the ponds could be toxic for another thousand years; and Nikiforuk notes that long before then an earthquake or torrential rainstorm could easily breech their walls, making for an environmental catastrophe that would beggar description. And, as if all these horrors weren’t enough, Nikiforuk points out that if tar sands development continues unabated, the number of square miles that the ponds occupy will increase by more than three and a half times, to 85 square miles, over the next decade.

This chapter is, I believe, Nikiforuk at his most enterprising, scintillating and rightly caustic and outraged. However, the subsequent chapters exposing urban-China levels of air pollution, gross governmental neglect and secretiveness, the “fiction” of toxic wetlands reclamation, the unproven nature of carbon burial, the scandal of missing tar sands royalties and Canada’s rising status as a leading carbon dioxide emitter are only slightly less compelling.

Nikiforuk also elucidates the great harm done by in situ (or in place) mining operations. This mining technique is used when the bitumen is buried too deep underground to be accessed through mountaintop removal, which is most of the time. In situ projects involve melting the bitumen into a liquid that can be pumped to the surface. They’re especially harmful because of their voracious consumption of water and natural gas, as well as the supporting infrastructure of roads, seismic lines and pipelines that industrializes forestland to the point of being uninhabitable for much wildlife.

Tar Sands concludes with twelve sensible “steps to energy sanity.” Above all, these recommendations stress the need to admit that cheap oil is over, to limit tar sands production rather than expanding it and to use tar sands energy to move beyond our oil dependence, not to cling to it. Nikiforuk observes that since only 3 percent of the bitumen contained in the tar sands has been produced so far, there’s still great potential for catastrophe if we choose the wrong path.

Being written from a Canadian perspective, Tar Sands speaks chiefly to Canadians and the insane role into which they’ve unwittingly been duped as America’s supposed energy savior. But it is nonetheless a vital read for North Americans of any stripe who doubt the need to decrease our oil consumption as rapidly as possible.

Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change
By David Holmgren
126 pp. Chelsea Green Publishing – Apr. 2009. $12.00. 

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

In this short, crisp, well-reasoned book, writer and activist David Holmgren contemplates the possible futures that may lie ahead of us as the threats of climate change and oil depletion grow ever more acute.

The book doesn’t contain much in the way of new information for people who already know about climate change and peak oil. (For those unfamiliar with peak oil, it’s the inevitable, and almost certainly past-tense, point at which world oil production can’t grow any longer and must begin its remorseless, terminal decline.) Serious followers of these issues have long been reading almost daily about so-called oil reserve growth, collapsing exports, the role of energy in shaping human history and accelerated Arctic melting, among other issues on which Future Scenarios’ opening chapters dwell at length. Further, the conclusions that Holmgren draws from this background material in later chapters are mostly obvious ones to those who are informed about the issues.

The book does, however, represent a solid attempt to demystify these concepts for the general reader. It also performs the vital, but seldom undertaken, task of illustrating the synergism that exists between peak oil and climate change, and thus the importance of addressing both of them together.

The method of Future Scenarios is to build on this initial setup in delineating some possible “energy futures” that could potentially await us. These hypothetical futures range from the utopian “techno-explosion,” in which technology miraculously saves the day; to the slightly more credible “techno-stability” scenario, in which renewable energy sources seamlessly carry us from our current continual-growth economy to one built around “steady state” ideals; to the utterly terrifying collapse scenario, which is the least rosy of all.

Holmgren rejects all three of the above in favor of a fourth scenario, which he calls “energy descent.” In this scenario, renewable energy sources prove incapable of sustaining our growth economy in the absence of abundant fossil fuels. Over a period of generations, our civilization undergoes progressive declines in complexity, population and economic activity. Localized rural communities, rather than metroplexes, once again become the focal point of our society. In short, we return to a simpler way of life that honors the ways of our sage preindustrial ancestors.

Since Holmgren believes energy descent to be the most likely scenario, he spends the rest of the book elaborating on it. And he further divides it into four sub-scenarios. This focus on multiple scenarios, as opposed to an explicit espousal of any particular one, is appropriate, since at this point we can’t know exactly how peak oil and climate change will unfold—or how they will play against each other.

In the first of these energy descent sub-scenarios, energy decline is gentle but climate change is severe, leading to vicious climate feedbacks and a host of political ills including fascism and corporatism. In the second sub-scenario (the happiest of the four), both energy depletion and climate change unfold mildly, allowing us to make a graceful transition to sustainable, relocalized communities. The third sub-scenario assumes a drastic drop-off in fossil fuel availability but mild climate change symptoms. It requires us to rebuild our civilization from the bottom up, but without the added horrors of runaway climate change. All that need be said about the final scenario is that it marries the peak oiler’s worst nightmares with those of the climate change prophet—a truly terrifying prospect indeed.

Holmgren, who has a sharp analytical mind and a knack for using charts and statistical analysis, thoroughly probes every dimension of these scenarios. He delves deeply into the social, ecological, agricultural and economic implications of each one, and then draws everything together nicely with a concluding chapter of synthesis and discussion.

It is also to Holmgren’s credit that he makes a compelling case for permaculture—the environmental design concept that he and colleague Bill Mollison pioneered in the midst of the 1970s oil crises—as an effective response to our ecological crisis. Permaculture emphasizes economic relocalization, community building and low-energy design, all of which constitute commonsense mitigation strategies for ever-dwindling energy availability and worsening climate change.

In sum, Future Scenarios serves as a good introduction to the concept of future energy descent/climate change scenarios. Again, it offers nothing too earth-shatteringly novel for the sincere peak oil or climate change follower (who could easily finish it in a couple of hours, with distractions in the background), but it has much to offer someone who’s still working through the learning curve on these issues (who would undoubtedly find it supremely enlightening).

Culture Change: Civil Liberty, Peak Oil, and the End of Empire
By Alexis Zeigler
136 pp. Ecodem Press – 2007. $10.00. 

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

With superb insight, wisdom and erudition—one is almost tempted to say omniscience—Alexis Zeigler’s Culture Change charts an ambitious course for the future of our civilization. The book calls for a revolution to bring about what Zeigler terms a “conscious culture” capable of responding intelligently to our ecological crisis.

In a previous review of Culture Change, author Keenan Dakota pronounced that the encyclopedic Zeigler “has apparently read every book ever written.”* Dakota’s praise is deserved. Zeigler has a formidable grasp of ecology, anthropology, sociology, history and a variety of other disciplines, all of which he brings to bear in mapping out his vision for a sustainable future.

That’s the good news about Culture Change. The bad news is that the presentation does not match the level of the content.  Not only does the book abound with typographical and grammatical errors, but it also repeats quite a bit in places. Both distract from its larger message. It is undeniably urgent to circulate information about our societal predicament; but a hurriedly turned-out manuscript runs the risk of casting doubt on the legitimacy of the message and the earnestness of the author.

Yet in spite of its mechanical failings, I can’t speak highly enough of the book’s arguments or the depth of its scholarship. In a nutshell, Zeigler contends that the Western industrialized world is a blind culture, social understanding in our society having been actively repressed by the ruling elite and other wealthy interests. If we can’t manage to rid ourselves of our social ignorance, Zeigler warns, it will be our undoing during the coming age of resource scarcity. The main point of Culture Change is thus to illustrate the ways in which we’ve been kept blind, and to propose a plan for making us socially aware, so that we’ll be able to make good choices going forward.

In what sense have we been kept ignorant? Zeigler argues that we lack an understanding of the basic forces behind social change in our society. For example, we tend to assume that we’re so much more advanced than the rest of the world because of our ideas and politics. But in reality, ecological and economic factors—namely, a fantastically abundant supply of natural resources and an economic system that thrives on our pillaging them as quickly as possible—are the reasons for our “advancement.”

An adherent of cultural materialism, Zeigler holds that economic and environmental factors determine policy and politics, not the other way around, as is commonly assumed. And he presents compelling evidence that many of the problems that are seen as having wholly political roots (for instance, poverty and encroachments on women’s access to reproductive choices) are actually the result of economic and ecological factors, and can be linked directly to the economic slowdown brought on by oil depletion.

The above tenets must be appreciated and internalized, insists Zeigler, or we’re bound to make disastrous mistakes in trying to address the challenges to come. For example, if we persist in our blindness, we’ll almost certainly continue to foment world hunger and species extinction through the production of biofuels in order to maintain our American, single family home lifestyle.

So what sort of approach will work in meeting the challenges ahead? This is where Zeigler’s notion of a conscious culture comes into play. A truly conscious culture would recognize that the “long curve” of ecology—so named because it moves slowly, over great spans of time—absolutely trumps the “short curve” of politics. With our fleeting attention spans, we tend to focus on the short curve; but it’s the long curve that will need to be successfully negotiated in the future.

The nub of the matter is that right now we are following the long curve (i.e., making minor lifestyle changes that do no real good), but we need to be leading it. The way to lead it is to reduce our energy consumption at a rate faster than the rate at which energy is depleting. If we do that, then we can still live amid plenty even as energy supplies at large are steadily dwindling. But if we don’t do that, Zeigler admonishes, we’ll descend into a totalitarian state of existence, just as many civilizations before us have done upon finding themselves besieged by acute ecological stresses.

How does Zeigler propose that we go about instilling social consciousness into the general population? To begin with, he would have us fundamentally restructure the educational system so that it emphasizes empowerment over conformity, which is precisely the opposite of what it does now. In addition to being empowered, students would also be imbued with the social intelligence necessary to create their own social institutions and to see the dominant society’s lies, witch hunting tactics and other deceptions for what they are.

Zeigler’s discussion of educational reform is more than a little sketchy and skimpy, considering how critical education would be in bringing about his conscious culture. (There’s no doubt, however, that Zeigler could easily write the syllabi for any number of classes that he might envision, so profound is the depth of his knowledge on these issues.)

Zeigler has plenty of practical recommendations on how to curtail energy consumption so as to stay well ahead of the long curve. Most of these suggestions are common sense to those involved in the peak oil and sustainability movements. For example, he reiterates the familiar advice regarding economic downscaling/relocalization, living communally and cooperatively, taking measures to help reduce population, limiting consumption of animal products and establishing local currencies.

The tips on communal living have the greatest ring of authenticity, drawing directly on Zeigler’s own experience in this area. Zeigler has happily lived among intentional communities his entire adult life so far. (And he has also constructed a good many sustainable homes himself, being an accomplished green builder as well as an activist and a thinker.) He also gets around totally without a car, using a bike around town and Amtrak to get to speaking engagements during his tours—as he did when he visited our group recently as part of his Culture Change Constructive Panic Amtrak Tour.

There’s no doubting Zeigler’s accomplishments or the validity of his arguments in Culture Change. He has thought and read deeply about these issues, and it shows. There’s neither a single gap to be found in his logic nor a claim made without hard evidence or examples. He writes cogently, compellingly and with the fevered urgency of a peak oil messenger not content to remain a Cassandra. Now he just needs to hire an editor.

*Alexis Zeigler, “Welcome to the Conscious Cultural Evolution Website!,” Conscious Evolution, http://conev.org/ (accessed Feb. 20, 2009).

Links to Zeigler’s work and details about the Culture Change Constructive Panic Amtrak Tour can both be found at http://conev.org/.

Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
By Riki Ott
327 pp. Chelsea Green Publishing – Nov. 2008. $21.95. 

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

Riki Ott’s book Not One Drop is a history of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, told from the perspective of those most affected by it. Cutting through the cloak of willful deception, public relations campaigns and skewed, corporate-sponsored science, it finally exposes the truth about Exxon Valdez‘s devastating effects on the city of Cordova, Alaska, the fishing community where the spill struck.

On a broader level, the book also makes yet another compelling case for weaning off fossil fuels. In making this case, Ott does more than simply invoke the threat of future catastrophic oil spills. She also, refreshingly, points to the growing consensuses about both climate change and the peaking of world oil production (issues that aren’t often discussed together). Further, she highlights new studies suggesting that insidious carbon emissions from our tailpipes and power plants have long been contributing to a broad range of health problems. In short, her argument for getting off oil is a powerful one of unusual scope, even if it is rightly subordinated to the story of Cordova.

Ott is a marine biologist by training, and her dream had always been to write books about science intended for the general population. The route that ultimately led her to that destination couldn’t have been less likely.

A freshly minted Ph.D. in the summer of 1985, she needed to take a break from her academic work, and so she spent the entire summer crewing on a salmon fishing boat up in Alaska—a place she’d always wanted to visit. She immediately fell in love with Cordova, its culture and people, and also with the wilds of pristine Prince William Sound. What began as a summer adventure evolved into an ardent, abiding commitment to this astonishing place.

Ott quickly became a prominent Cordova “fisherma’am” and an advocate for fishermen’s issues. Because commercial fishing and big oil are so deeply intertwined in Alaskan politics, Ott’s involvement in fishing politics inevitably led her to an investigation of shady practices by the major oil companies operating out of the Sound. For instance, she helped uncover how, even long before Exxon Valdez, oil companies had been deliberately polluting waterways through a loophole in the Clean Water Act. In the years that followed, Ott became “the Erin Brockovich of the Exxon Valdez disaster,” to quote Fran Korten of YES! magazine.* And indeed, the comparison is quite apt. Although her research, advising, testimony at hearings and drafting of legislation may have been done on a completely voluntary basis, she nonetheless was truly a force with which to be reckoned.

In telling us her story, Ott revels in the way she made herself a thorn in oilmen’s sides simply by bringing out the facts. Her war stories are unfailingly riveting and often very funny. Unable to buy or intimidate this determined, pugnacious, resourceful, lone woman, oilmen quickly realized that they had no idea just what to do with her. Their desperation led to measures as drastic as hiring off-duty cops to stand guard at an Exxon shareholder meeting at which she was present, and duping her into an arrest and a day in jail.

On a more solemn note, the two-decades-long saga of environmental devastation, ruined livelihoods, broken marriages, stunted lives, failing health and vicious litigation stemming from the Exxon Valdez spill is both heartbreaking and infuriating. Ott’s premise is that most people have been kept ignorant of this story. In the book’s introduction, she writes, “There is an unfulfilled need among spill survivors to have other people understand what happened to us…This story is an attempt to fill that need.”

In demonstrating how Exxon misled the public, she cites a formidable array of reports, journal articles, books, newspaper stories and firsthand accounts. She shows how the corporation soft-pedaled the extent of the spill and claimed that it was all cleaned up when it wasn’t. How it submitted beaches to a brutal steam cleaning, even when it knew full well that this technique scalded beach life and sickened cleanup workers. How it denied citizens’ groups access to cleanup sites—and how, when these groups finally were allowed to see beaches for themselves, they were appalled by Exxon’s deceptive public relations. How it hired scientists to conclude that life was once again thriving in the Sound (using statistical sleight of hand like pooling data and taking biased samples), while simultaneously attempting to suppress all other scientific evidence gathered during lawsuits that arose from the spill.

But worst of all, Ott chronicles how Exxon promised to make the people of Cordova “whole” again, but then proceeded to fight the $5 billion punitive award in court for nearly 20 years, until the amount had been slashed to a measly $507 million. In that time, more than 6,000 claimants had died without any closure, and untold numbers had reached the brink of bankruptcy, foreclosures and abject financial servitude because the damage done to their way of life by the collapse of the Sound’s fisheries was never repaid.

Moreover, the very social fabric of the community had come undone as Cordova devolved into what sociologists refer to as a “corrosive community,” one too divided by fighting and strife to engage in collective decision-making. Cases of diagnosed anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder surged, along with domestic violence and alcohol abuse. There was even one high-profile case of suicide, in which the suicide note specifically mentioned the trauma of dealing with Exxon as a motivating factor. The litigation process only acted as a “secondary disaster,” preventing people from moving on with their lives. Perhaps most tellingly, sociologists came to consider Cordova a case study on how to help communities in general to work through disaster.

Ott stresses that while Cordovans are definitely on the road to recovery, Exxon Valdez is still very alive for them. Exxon seemed to go out of its way to leave the tragedy unresolved, through two decades of legal stalling and a refusal to accept liability for a punitive award that would truly make Cordovans whole. Thus, Ott’s unflinching exposé could hardly be a more honorable attempt to give these people the closure that they so desperately need.

But Not One Drop is far more than simply an attempt to bring closure to Cordovans by communicating the extent of their loss to others. It is also an attempt to spell out the lessons learned from this disaster, so that it won’t be repeated. Ott concludes that our legal system no longer works in cases like that of Exxon Valdez, since it allows corporations to exercise constitutional rights that were originally intended for people. In the book’s final chapters, she goes into great detail about the kinds of reforms that will be necessary in order to prevent this abuse of the legal system from continuing into the future.

Not One Drop is a heroic book. It is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the calamitous consequences of our society’s addiction to oil, or of corporations’ ability to avert punishment by claiming “corporate personhood.”

* “Chelsea Green Bookstore : Nature & Environment : Not One Drop,” Chelsea Green, http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/not_one_drop:paperback/praise/ (accessed Jan. 13, 2009).

Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for Twenty-First Century Activists

By Jason Del Gandio

235 pp. New Society Publishers – Nov. 2008. $17.95.                

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

Radical activists are in the midst of a crisis. They have important messages to share, but they don’t do nearly a good enough job of communicating those messages to the general public. And their messages and actions too easily fall victim to the distortions of skewed, corporate mass media and the remonstrations of political pundits. In short, radical activists find themselves in a rhetorical crisis—one that urgently needs to be addressed if they are to have any chance of changing the world.

That’s the assessment of Jason Del Gandio, himself a longtime radical activist and professor of rhetoric and communication at Philadelphia’s Temple University. In his book Rhetoric for Radicals, Del Gandio entreats his fellow radicals to recognize the importance of effective communication, and then proceeds to outline the basics of writing, public speaking, body rhetoric and other rhetorical mainstays.

Rhetoric for Radicals is intended for college-aged activists and organizers, and for the most part it’s written in a relaxed, approachable style. It does get a bit cerebral and academic in places—in demonstrating how the book builds on the previous literature—but this material is kept to a minimum. On the whole, Rhetoric for Radicals is an invaluable, comprehensive how-to book that will greatly benefit beginning and seasoned rhetors alike.

Del Gandio begins the book with a “call to rhetorical action,” followed by a debunking of some commonly held misconceptions about the role of rhetoric in radical social change. Among these misconceptions are that “a big heart alone can change the world” and that “rehearsal and craft make our communication less authentic.” After this initial setup, Del Gandio moves to the heart of the book: sets of rules and strategies to follow when crafting a piece of rhetoric—be it a persuasive newspaper column, a story, a speech or a street theater vignette.

The first of these “labors of the multitude” to be tackled is public speaking. Del Gandio acknowledges the courage that it takes to speak in front of a group, and lays out practical tips on how to deal with this, as well as on how to become a better speaker and hold people’s attention. Of primary importance are speaking with immediacy and crafting your content for the ear rather than for the eye. For example, you must keep your speech light on numbers and facts, and cover only as many points as necessary. Del Gandio also provides some words-to-minutes conversion guidelines (one spoken minute equals a short paragraph; 10 spoken minutes, a three-page, single-spaced document) and many detailed pointers on delivery.

The book’s next section focuses on writing. Del Gandio excellently spells out the steps involved in the writing process, and affirms the conventional wisdom among writers that reading widely and prodigiously is one of the best ways to improve one’s writing. He also suggests carrying around a pen and scratch pad for those moments when inspiration unexpectedly strikes. And he takes readers step-by-step through the processes of creating a “rhetorical package”—an organizing device that forces you to think about your message, audience and goals—crafting a narrative story and fashioning an argument out of claims and evidence.

Given how pervasive propaganda is today, it’s appropriate that Del Gandio’s next chapter focuses on the manipulative power of language and how to see propaganda for what it is. Central to appreciating the power of language, Del Gandio argues, is understanding that it doesn’t just describe reality, it creates reality. Our thoughts, perceptions and experiences—and even our realities—are all shaped by language.

Del Gandio defines language and then details the steps involved in using clear, understandable, politically correct and, above all, exciting language. As for how to detect propaganda, Del Gandio describes several propaganda techniques that can often serve as tip-offs, including repetition, association, card-stacking and omission of critical details. Lastly, he notes that words, just like living things, have limited life spans. Among the old words that have largely lost their effectiveness are “Communism,” “socialism” and “anarchism.” In contrast, some examples of new words that are quickly gaining ground include “freeganism,” “participatory democracy” and “global justice.”

In spite of the great power of words to change our consciousnesses and realities, Del Gandio is quick to point out that they are not the sole purveyors of rhetoric by a long shot. There’s also “body rhetoric,” whereby our bodies communicate messages and arguments or embody our ideals, without the benefit of words. Del Gandio shows how this is constantly done through deeds like using a bike rather than a car or supporting responsible companies; activities such as rallies and protests; aspects of one’s physical appearance like tattoos or hairstyles; and works of art such as street theater. He then takes readers step-by-step through the process of creating a body argument, and explores the human “vibe” as a form of embodied rhetoric.

Rhetoric for Radicals concludes on a hopeful note, with the wish that its activist readership will internalize the book’s rhetorical tools and tactics, and will be that much better equipped to become “the rhetors of the past who created the future.” And indeed, there can be but little doubt that this thorough, well-organized, accessible—and even personal—little handbook is the best instrument imaginable for fulfilling this purpose.

My Energy Bulletin piece titled ‘The post-oil novel: a celebration!’ reviewed Jim Kunstler’s ‘World Made by Hand’ and several other novels depicting a world after oil. The present article adds yet another book to this canon, Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s ‘Ill Wind.’ While this book is not directly about peak oil, it certainly envisions a post-oil world—and thus it deserves to be counted among the post-oil novels.

By Frank Kaminski

Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s novel Ill Wind (Tor Books, 1995) is a masterfully wrought science fiction epic depicting a world after oil—and, in the process, touching on a number of peak oil-related themes.

However, unlike the other post-oil novels published so far, Ill Wind isn’t about peak oil. In those other novels, oil has gradually dribbled away while we’ve steadfastly ignored the warning signs. But in Ill Wind, the world’s oil vanishes suddenly after some bizarre, experimental oil-eating microbe is unleashed on a massive tanker spill, and then runs amok. What Ill Wind and those other novels do have in common, however, is that they imagine a future world without oil.

(more…)