[ Henry T Fiddler's Home Page, www.htfiddler.net ]
Plan S, Sustainable Living for the Long Term, www.plan-s.org 
Plan “S” = sustainable, stable, success, survival, species, solar,
shift, save the world, solution box, steady state, systems theory

New pages, based on Plan S, just added October 17, 2008:

Understanding the Market Crash and Our Sustainable Future
click here:  plan-s.htfiddler.net/resource1_intro.htm

References:
1918: The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler
1961: A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee
1988: The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter
2004: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond
2008: Reinventing Collapse, The Soviet Example and American Prospects, Dmitry Orlov
 

Planet Earth From SpacePhoto of Henry Fiddler
 

Last updated: October 26, 2008
This page is under construction.  Please check back often!

Email Henry here: henry@htfiddler.net


What is Plan S?
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.  –Albert Einstein

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. –R. Buckminster Fuller

Plan S seeks to understand the root cause of our problems: the human mind.  The three brain-mind disciplines of Evolutionary Psychology, Personal Development, and Neuroscience, reveal a path to success.  Their integration reveals why as a species, we behave as we do, how this has caused our failure, and what we can do to move towards success.  Since we are uninformed regarding how our minds work, we have been unintentionally and naively programming them for failure (i.e. collapse), rather than success (i.e. sustainability).  Everything that Personal Development (the success industry) teaches can be applied not only to individual success, but also to species success.  This is the key insight at the core of Plan S, which can lead humanity to live sustainably for the long term.  Plan S is unique in the sense that it integrates all three brain-mind disciplines, along with hundreds of others, to move us into the realm of generalist thinking and problem solving (i.e. outside the box thinking).  The result is paradigm shift.


 

Links to Plan S documents

Plan S is a multi-generational project, that will never really be "finished".  I've been working on it on and off for four decades, and quite intensively for the past 5 years.  What follows are links to a variety of documents, which are in various states from "a bunch of random cryptic notes" to "completed papers".  I normally wouldn't publish some of these in such an unfinished state, but am called to do so due to the urgency of our times.  There is an enormous quantity of information here.  If this is your first visit, I would suggest clicking on these links and scrolling thru them quickly, just to get a sense of the scope and detailed nature of Plan S.  Then come back later for more intensive study of the parts that interest you.

Many of these are needing a lot of work, and I need help moving Plan S along much more rapidly.  So I'm making them available here on the web, so you can get a sense of what Plan S is all about and get involved.  Since futurism and sustainability have been my hobbies, most of this information has been co-mingled with my personal files, and has included personal information of some of my closest friends.  It has taken me a couple of months to comb through these files, prep them for upload, and pull much of this personal information.  I've changed some names to protect identities.  If you "see yourself" in here and would like me to remove these references, just let me know.

These are arranged in rough order of importance, from top to bottom.  I have ranked them (Rank column) on a scale from 1 to 9 in terms of their level of "ease of comprehension or understanding", with 9 being the easiest, and 1 being the least easy to understand.

If you want to help, find bad links, have questions or suggestions, please email me

Technical help for files that won't open, hung windows or slow downloads

Some of these files are in Microsoft Word or Excel formats.  If you have Microsoft Office or an Open Office product installed on your computer, they should open just fine.  If not, I've provided alternative forms of these documents in html or have uploaded them to Google Documents.  In this case some formatting has been lost but the content is all there.  Alternative links are all listed in the table below.

If you're on dialup or a slower connection, the larger files will download slowly.  The sizes of the larger ones are shown in the Link column.  If you left click, a new window will open and will appear to "hang".  It's hanging because the file is downloading slowly, and depending on your browser, you may not be able to watch the progress.  My suggestion is to close that hung window, right click, Save Target As to your hard drive.  This way you can watch the speed and progress of the download.

Still having trouble?  email me
 

Description Link Rank
Six page overview paper, written in May, 2007.  This is a completed paper and is a quick read.  It includes 6 images. paper02.doc
1.2 meg
9
same as above, html version paper02.htm
.5 meg
9
19,000 word paper explaining Plan S, S-Day, paradigm shift, resource based economy, root causes of humanity's problems, and many other topics.  It is illustrated with several charts, diagrams and YouTube videos.  This paper was originally uploaded 10/17/08.  It was written in response to the worldwide financial market crash that started in September, 2008.  Therefore, this one heavily focuses on the economic aspects of Plan S.  It is available in 3 formats:  screen, printer, and audio book (htm, doc, mp3).  This link goes to an intro page, from which you can navigate to the format of your choice.
Understanding the Market Crash and Our Sustainable Future
(htm, doc, mp3)
9
Some key concepts of Plan S are S-Day, paradigm shift, a transition period, moving to renewable energy, and a transition to a DNA/Gene centered worldview.  This is an unfinished diagram showing how these concepts all fit together.  This smaller one will fit on a 1024x768 monitor, but might be a little fuzzy. puzzle.slide.sm.gif 6
Same as above for higher resolution monitors.  If the small one is too fuzzy, try this one, however you might get scroll bars. puzzle.slide.lg.gif 6
Plan S is a generalist's plan for paradigm shift, that integrates hundreds of diverse concepts.  It is a general systems approach to sustainable living for the long term.  This is the opposite of our current specialist orientation.  This spreadsheet table is the master knowledge base for Plan S.  It has been abbreviated here to ~300 entries that are listed in 11 major categories.  This is an Excel file with heavy comments.  If they are hard to read, try the version below which put the comments at the bottom of the page. knowledge.base.xls 5
Same as above at Google Docs.  Spreadsheet table opens in your browser.  Comments are down at the bottom of the page. Knowledge Base Spreadsheet, Plan S 5
Description Link Rank
40 page detail paper, written in March, 2007.  This is a completed paper with a few rough spots.  It includes 11 images of various paper files that need archiving.  Since it was written over a year ago, it is somewhat dated and misses some key concepts.

This document contains many links, both internal and external.  The external links should work fine, however the internal links may or may not work properly, depending on which word processor your browser opens it with.  If you have this problem there are 2 workarounds.  The easiest is to use the html version below.  The other fix is to save this file to your hard drive (right click, Save As) and open it in your word processor directly (instead of in a browser window).

paper01.doc
2.6 meg
8
same as above, html version paper01.htm
1 meg
8
As a generalist, I have several thousand links to webpages.  I have stored most of them in this Excel spreadsheet.  These have provided much of the info that underlies Plan S.  Links are grouped by categories, however these categories are not arranged in any particular order.  You will find all the links in column B.  If your mouse changes to a hand pointer, you can click on that link.  Column C only contains notes (no links here).  Column D contains the raw link text and can be ignored for the most part.  I just included it for searching purposes.  Some cells have comments.  If they are hard to read, try the version below which shows all comments at the bottom of the page.

This file used to be called bm.xls (bm=Bookmarks), but I changed the name to the more intuitive links.xls for uploading here.  There are still many references within other files to bm.xls or @bm.xls.  If you see these, look here in links.xls.

links.xls
.7 meg
6
Same as above at Google Docs.  Spreadsheet opens in your browser.  Comments are down at the bottom of the page.  Here I just saved the most important 2 columns. Links Spreadsheet, Plan S 6
Description Link Rank
These next three files (notes ...) contain my raw notes that haven't been formally written up yet, although some of these concepts are covered in the files above.  They run the gamut from being totally cryptic to actually quite lucid!  notes.xls is an index file for notes.htm, 2 rows down from here.  This indexes about 100 items that can be found by searching within notes.htm, by using your browser's "Edit-Find" function.  Ultimately I want to expand all this to where it makes some sense, and load it all into a textual database, which can then be used as the basis for further writings and media creation.  Please see my explanation 2 cells below for instructions on how to use notes.xls to index notes.htm. notes.xls 4
Same as above at Google Docs.  Spreadsheet opens in your browser. Notes Spreadsheet, Plan S 4
This is the main body of my raw notes, as explained 2 cells above.  This is actually a conglomerate of about a dozen smaller text files that were created with an outliner.  They had filenames from saa.txt thru sap.txt, so I just copied them sequentially and pasted them together in this file, notes.htm.  There is no obvious order here at all, which is why notes.xls was created as an index.

Here is how to decipher these 2 files.  In notes.xls, the 2 columns on the left are called cat and fn, where cat=Category and fn=File Name.  To use the index, find an item of interest and look in column C for the 3 letter filename.  For example, let's lookup the topic: "waste: energy efficiency, energy conversions list ...".  It shows to be in saj.  You can then use your browser's "Edit-Find" function to search within notes.htm for the topic directly, or for saj.txt.  I know this might be confusing.  If it is, let me know and I'll provide examples.

You can also just browse through notes.htm sequentially or just skip around and find things that interest you.  As you will see, Plan S needs a lot of help!

Warning: raw unedited notes.
Included only due to urgency!
 
 

notes.htm
.6 meg

3
Description Link Rank
This is the original farewell.txt paper posted by Jay Hanson at Yahoo! Group: the_dieoff_QA.  Jay is the creator of dieoff.org, the world's first Peak Oil website.  Jay explains in this short 4 page paper that there are two fundamental sets of laws that underlie our quest for sustainability, namely, #1 Energy Laws, and #2 Biological Evolution Laws.  Plan S uses these core concepts (among many others), and this is a good short intro to Jay's thinking.  I apologize for Jay's never ending pessimism.  This paper was written in 2003 and he seems to have lightened up a bit since then.  Regardless, Jay is a great source of information relating to sustainability. farewell.txt 9
This timeline spreadsheet reduces the last 13.7 billion years to a 10 year timespan and shows when various events occurred in years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.  In this 10 year timespan we see that cars and the petroleum era started just 2.3 seconds ago. timeline.xls 8
Same as above at Google Docs.  Spreadsheet opens in your browser. Timeline Spreadsheet, Plan S 8
The initial spark for Plan S came on July 4th, 2003, and this webpage, The Solution Box, was created the next day.  It was the first webpage I created in my life, and I've moved it here for both archival and nostalia reasons.  The Solution Box eventually became Plan S.  Since this page is over 5 years old, much of it is very dated, and it isn't a good overview of Plan S.  However several sections do provide useful information, that won't be found in other files here.
The Solution Box, tsb.htm
9
This is my booklist arranged to some extent by years books were read.  The first 2 sections, libyear2.txt and libyear1.txt are books I've read.  The last 3 sections, liblist3, 2 and 1 are lists of books I'd like to read someday.  I haven't yet pulled books unrelated to Plan S from this list.  Eventually I'd like to get this and the video list below into a bibliographic database. books.htm 8
These are videos, movies, DVD's, and other visual media.  Like the booklist above, I haven't pulled unrelated items yet.  Here, everything is just a big jumble between videos already watched and those I'd like to watch.  The ones I've watched are asterisked. videos.htm 8
Quotations list, not in any particular order.  If there are several by the same person, they tend to be grouped together near the top.  Many of these apply to Plan S, especially those relating to personal development. quotations.htm 8

 

Existing Plans

We can count in the thousands the number of messages that have been written in the past 50 years about the problems facing humanity.  They all have a similar tone, namely, "If we don't change the way we live, we're going to be in big trouble!"  And, unfortunately, they were right.  What I've been looking for is existing plans for solutions, and there aren't many.  Here's a list of some others that I've discovered.  I'm providing this list to give credit where credit is due, and to allow you to compare Plan S, with these others.  I truly believe it's going to take all of us pooling our best ideas and working together to solve our problems.  If you know of other plans or solutions that exist, please let me know.

 1. A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies, Howard, T. Odum and Elisabeth, C. Odum

 2. Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Lester Brown

 3. Plan C, The Community Solution, Yellow Springs, Ohio  |  Book: Plan C, Pat Murphy

 4. San Diego's Jim Bell, former candidate for mayor, jimbell.com

 5a. Global Marshall Plan [1], from Al Gore's Earth in the Balance, Chapter 15

 5b. Global Marshall Plan [2] (GMP), from Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)  |  FAQ for this GMP

 6. Winning the Oil Endgame, Amory Lovins, oilendgame.com

 7. Buckminster Fuller Institute, bfi.org

 8. Ted Trainer's "The Simpler Way", from Australia

 9. Joseph George Caldwell's, foundationwebsite.org

10. The Oil Depletion Protocol, Colin Campbell, Richard Heinberg, oildepletionprotocol.org

11. Hubbert's Prescription for Survival, A Steady State Economy

12. Jay Hanson's, www.warsocialism.com

13. T. Boone Pickens', Pickens' Plan, www.pickensplan.org


To all enthusiasts of sustainable, stable living, I am scheduling presentations on Plan S, along with screenings of five related DVD’s.

    1. What a Way to Go: Life At the End of Empire (2007)
    2. The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001)
    3. The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006)
    4. The 11th Hour (2007)
    5. The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream (2004)
Presentations will be done on a donation basis, and can be done in homes, churches, schools, businesses, etc.  To schedule, please send me an email.  A projector and screen may be needed.  For more information on these DVD's and links to websites and trailers, please see the section below: About the DVD's.

I’m screening these DVD’s as an introduction to both the severity of the problems we face, and also to solutions that are already working.  The major issues covered are:  Peak Oil, Climate Change, Species Extinction, Overpopulation, and the power of the human mind to successfully overcome adversity.  These topics naturally lead into a discussion of Plan S, as a path to long term sustainability for humanity.


About the DVD's

1. What a Way to Go: Life At the End of Empire (2007).  This film just came out in mid 2007, and is the best one I've seen yet at "connecting the dots" of the major problems humanity faces.  It goes far beyond Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour, which don't even mention Peak Oil.  Major topics are: Peak Oil, Climate Change, Species Extinction, and Overpopulation.  There are two trailers at YouTube: Way Way Better  &  We're Killing It!.  While this film does a great job on the problems, it says nothing about solutions, which is why the other films are being presented.

2. The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001).  Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to Antarctica, is often considered the greatest survival story in history.  Against impossible odds, Shackleton rescued all 28 of his men after a 2 year ordeal.  I am showing this film, since it demonstrates the power of the human mind to overcome extreme adversity, and provides hope for the future of humanity.

3. The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006).  When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half – and food by 80 percent – people were desperate. This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time.  There is a trailer on this webpage or, click here for a large size trailer at Google Video.  I am showing this film to demonstrate that some people are already facing and solving their problems, and with a degree of success.

By screening the above three films, I am showing both the extent of our problems and also providing hope that we can come together and solve them.  Plan S provides a detailed plan of action towards that solution.  I will discuss Plan S both before and after DVD screenings.

4. The 11th Hour (2007).  This is Leonardo DiCaprio's film on climate change.  It includes interviews with 54 experts and presents valuable information, however it doesn't mention Peak Oil.

5. The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream (2004).  This was the first major film to document the Peak Oil issue.  Peak Oil is covered adequately in What a Way to Go.  However I am travelling with a copy of End of Suburbia, and am making it available for screenings.