Let’s create a bridge to a more sustainable future.

It seems we need a kick in the butt to get there. We need ingenuity and inspiration to move forward.

Our future beings, the children embodied as horned animals, prod us past our insufficient excuses and buts... “But I recycle... But I need to drive to work... But solar power is so expensive...” But really the big But is… ....But what will we do after fossil fuels?

We can implement solutions with new mindsets: bicycles as wild horses inspire us to genius level sustainable inventions. The skull mindset reminds us that the fossil fuel clock is ticking away, about to fall off track. But to no avail, as this mindset constantly runs off its tracks and out of time.

Let’s wise up with a matured mindset that draws its power from the natural forces like solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and wind. We see ourselves finally starting again to be connected to the elements and powers that are healthier for the whole planet and more plentiful in the long run. This change of mindset reflects a more vibrant lifestyle starting to live in harmony with our environment, feeding ourselves healthily, living with less impact to our surroundings, living and consuming more locally, learning new basic skills that we will need in a world with dwindling and eventually no fossil fuels.

We have taken inspiration in this particular mindset from the common sense practices of the worldwide permaculture movement. And finally, we need a future with Your bright ideas. A glowing swarm of babies are birthed from our minds. These babies show us the million small ways in which we all show responsibility for our future. Babies seven generations away are cooing and smiling.

-Lead Artists Bart Buch, Kevin Long and Janaki Ranpura

End of Fossil Fuels?

The MayDay storyboarding task of exploring “prepare for a post-collapse world” fell to us as a parade section. In order to explore this line of thinking we found it necessary to define what we meant by collapse. We needed a baseline to work from. We found it curious that as a group, when the idea of collapse surfaced in our conversations, we all accepted the notion not only as a possibility, but also, seemingly, as inevitability if we, as a society, continue on our current course. No one asked what was meant by collapse. We all understood the notion in our own way.

We are puppeteers, not fortune tellers or scientists. We can not tell the future. We decided for this section of the parade that it was important for us to stay grounded in reality while allowing our imaginations to run like wild horses. We decided that for our purposes we would define “collapse” as “the end of the age of fossil fuels.”

Transportation - Energy - Food

Imagine building a bridge from our present way of life to a sustainable way of living in accord with the earth in a post fossil fuel world. Depletion of fossil fuels will affect many aspects of life in our current society. We chose to focus on three that seemed important: transportation, energy, and food.

Transportation is tricky. In this country our transportation infrastructure centers on the car. There is much discussion yet little action these days about gas mileage and alternative fuels. From hybrids to electric cars to ethanol to bio-diesel to fuel cells, everyone seems to have their own opinion as to what the answer is. Each of these answers is the subject of debate.

The fact is that combining the maximum output of all current forms of renewable alternative fuels will likely not provide enough energy to keep our car culture running in a way that we are familiar with. We need to creatively rethink how we get around and how we move stuff around without cheap oil.

Being puppeteers and not transportation experts, we chose to focus our efforts on a mode of transportation that we feel is beyond debate: the bicycle. We are not saying that the bicycle is a complete answer, but we feel it has a crucial role to play in a sustainable transportation system without fossil fuels. The bicycle is sustainable horsepower. Plus it is fun to ride.

We use fossil fuels for much more than transportation. Fossil fuels heat our homes. Fossil fuels give use electricity. Fossil fuels power much of our manufacturing. Fossil fuels are used to make plastic. Fossil fuels power our current system of agriculture. Just as with transportation, there is no one complete easy answer. Combinations of creative local strategies are needed to address these issues.

In 2006 Sweden announced a phase out of all fossil fuels and nuclear energy by the year 2020. With our new Mind Set, this kind of action would be the norm rather than a rarity.

For energy we chose to focus our imagery on solar power and wind power, clean and available sources of energy which we are presently not taking full advantage of. We point to the sun and the wind not as cure-alls, but as useful tools for forging a sustainable bridge to the future.

Our current system of food production and distribution relies heavily on the use of oil. Largescale factory farms are made possible by oil. Oil runs the machines. Petroleum is used to make pesticides and herbicides. Petroleum is used to manufacture packaging for much of our food. And of course petroleum gets our food from the farm to us. In the United States food travels an average of 1500 MILES from the farm to your mouth. In the absence of cheap oil it will be come necessary to re-localize our food production and our economies.

In our thinking about food production and distribution we have taken inspiration from the concepts of permaculture. The term permaculture was coined in the 1970’s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. According to Mollison permaculture design principles extend from the position that “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.”

First published in 1993, the book Permaculture in a Nutshell describes Permaculture in this way:

“Permaculture includes many ideas and skills that are not unique to it; some are traditional farming practices, others involve modern science and technology. What does make it unique is that it is modeled very closely on ecosystems, which are natural communities of wild plants and animals, such as forests, meadows, and marshes.

Imagine a natural forest. The production of plant material is mind-boggling compared, say, to a wheat field which is only a single layer and about half a metre high.

To achieve this great production of biomass, the forest needs no inputs but Sun, rain, and the rock from which it makes its own soil. By comparison, the wheat field is a sorry state. It needs regular ploughing, cultivating, seeding, manuring, weeding, and pest control. All of these take energy, human or fossil fuel. If we could create an ecosystem like the forest, but an edible one, we could do without all that oil.

That is the basic idea of permaculture: creating edible ecosystems.”

In the parade, the pâpier-mâché garden grown by our new Mind Set is modeled after a permaculture forest garden. We probably got some details wrong but all the food grown in our pâpier-mâché garden is grown right here in Minnesota.

Using our new Mind Set we can shift our current practices of food production and distribution to a new model that is reliant not on fossil fuels but on the intricate delicate balance of life that we are so lucky to be a part of. Plants capture energy from the sun. This miraculous act transfers the sun’s energy into forms that other species (including us) can use. We are truly, literally what we eat. We are food. Every living thing is food for another. Our new “Mind Set” allows us to recognize that disrupting this sharing of energy at any level affects us and throws the intricate delicate system of life out of balance.

Kevin Long