Thirteen days between posts isn’t unheard of here, but it’s certainly noteworthy. This past month has been unbelievably stressful for us at the Tribe of Anthropik. Some of it got hashed out in public, but like an iceberg, what you got to see was only the smallest tip. Truthfully, most of it isn’t even related. Giuli & I are getting married at the end of July, and that comes with a lot of stress all its own–to say nothing of a lot of half-buried problems that it can dreg up in a family, things never quite resolved and left almost forgotten for years on end, until something like this happens to bring them all back up at once.

Reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated.

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Burlay’s Foundation Diet challenges its readers to try the diet for four weeks, and judge the results for yourself. Four weeks out, and I’m already 25% of the way to my goal. Starting at 300 lbs, I want to reach 200, and after four weeks, I’m at 272.5 lbs. In four weeks, I’ve lost 27.5 lbs. Where most diets are content with a pound a month; I’m usually losing half a pound a day.

To accept the inevitability of collapse can be a thing of terrible despair. It has earned this blog a reputation as morbid, depressing, and pessimistic. It has garnered me, specifically, such titles as “macabre ghoul,” and far worse. Unfortunately, there are far too many that agree with Rob McMillin’s view that we’re “cheering on the iceberg,” or Wood Connection’s review, “The Anthropik Network has no worry about civilization : these guys are waiting for the collapse, and they think that’s funny. … [T]his global blog tackles the problem from a quite selfish point of view : I’m in the system, and i plan to get out of it as soon as possible.” Ironically enough, the assessment of our situation that I agree with most comes from Alfred Lotka, in 1925:

Toby Hemenway is a full-blown permaculture guru, and an Anthropik reader, but I really have to take issue with his latest essay, posted to the Energy Bulletin today, “Apocalypse, Not.” I’m not sure how much of it is a response to Anthropik specifically, but it would be pure hubris for me to suggest that we’re alone in our belief that peak oil is, if not the sole assurance of our civilization’s end, at least a contributor to the “perfect storm” brewing in the near future. Hemenway makes the argument that collapse is neither imminent, nor even terribly likely, because we’ve weathered such problems before. With all due respect, I think the problems we face are being underestimated in this analysis, and the problems we have solved, overestimated. I think the basis of Hemenway’s analysis is to misunderstand the classes of problems we face–in short, there are problems, and then, there are problems.

Scientific reductionism is the cornerstone of modern scientific thought. It is the axiomatic belief that everything can be understood by breaking it down into smaller and smaller components, so biology can be understood in terms of chemistry, which can itself be understood in terms of physics. Reductionism is the philosophical foundation whereby scientists try to reduce a problem to its most basic components, control for other factors, and test only a single hypothesis at a time. It is an undeniably powerful tool, but the exuberance of the Enlightenment has proclaimed it as the One Right Way to know everything. Like any other tool, reductionism has its flaws, and there are times when other ways of knowing are actually better.

In any given society three main elements work together to reinforce and stabilize each other, and in turn stabilize that society. These three elements are language, myth, and religion. No human culture has ever been found without all three, and they feed into one another in a very stable system.

I’m one of those people that say, “Well, come on already, Collapse Already!!!” This mostly stems from frustration with civilization and everything that comes with it. Things being futile, greed, intense depression, and of course rent. Knowing that Collapse is coming somehow makes it worse in ways. I know it’s coming, I’m waiting for it, but in the meantime I’m stuck. I feel trapped in this life of school, paying bills, and people that are fake. Hey, I know they can’t really help it. Civilization creates people that act fake. Sad, but true.

This is post #300. At this writing, there have been 5,732 comments made, or 19.1 comments per post, on average, but many of the older articles were archived from earlier versions of the site, and thus have none of the (sometimes quite long) discussions they sparked. The Anthropik Network was reincarnated in its current form (see “The Dream That Was Anthropik“) 1 February 2005. Since moving to the new server in June 2005, according to Webstats, we’ve had 369,894 unique visits. According to Yahoo’s ad tracking, we had 100,000 visitors in the first 60 days of 2006. Technorati lists 392 links to the Anthropik Network, from 140 sites, giving us a rank of 10,970, out of the 33.4 million sites and 2.2 billion links Technorati tracks. The Tribe of Anthropik has four full members, and two pending.

Ultimately there is only one way to do something: to do it. If you want to go to Ocean City thinking about it is insufficient, the only way to get there is to pack your bags and get going. The dream is wonderful: It can encourage. It can motivate. It can invigorate. But if the people with this dream never sit down to do it, then it remains a fantasy.