Today, the last day of May, is your last chance to get in on the ground floor of the 90% reduction project!! There are nearly 100 people signed up, and more than 25 blogs going! We would be thrilled if you wanted to join as well. Remember, you can start anytime, and you don't have to achieve 90%.
Here's the link to Miranda's blog where the rules, FAQ and Intro are posted if you want to learn more about the project: http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/riot-for-austerity-90-reduction-project-intro/
If you want to discuss the project, we have a yahoogroup devoted to the subject - you can join by sending an email here: 90PercentReduction-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
How many people do you think we can get this up to? Enough for a press release? A movement? A revolution? When Miranda and I cooked this up, we had no idea it would be so popular - we're so excited.
In the spirit of our really riotous reduction, I've been thinking about how to cut my cooking energy down as much as possible. Here are 25 ways I've come up with to cut cooking energy.
1. Turn off the stove/oven before you are finished. This is fairly simple - when you soup is almost hot, turn off the stove - it will continue to heat for a while. When your bread is 15 minutes short of baked, turn off the oven and let it sit in the hot oven. You can do this for longer with things that are hotter for longer, or less sensitive, like casseroles. Be cautious with meat - you don't want food poisoning. Experiment.
2. Eat more salads, sandwiches and raw foods that don't require cooking.
3. Make a hay box cooker - insulated a box with a blanket, hay or other good insulator. Get your food nice and hot, and then put it in that insulated box and let the retained heat do the cooking.
4. Use a pressure cooker - they save a lot of time when cooking beans, grains, stews and such.
5. Capture heat whenever you can. Instead of heating up several pots of water for tea or soup each day, heat that water and put it in a thermos, and use it for tea when you need it.
6. Use a wood cookstove to heat your house and cook at the same time. Save heavy canning and long cooking projects for times when you would be heating the house anyhow.
7. Or, if you heat with wood but don't have a cookstove, cook on your heating stove. Put your kettle on the stove. Keep soup on the back of the stove. Have someone build a sheet metal oven for you (just a metal box) that will enable you to bake on the stove.
8. Build an earth or masonry oven outside and use twigs and other scrap wood to bake and cook. A hot earth oven will stay hot enough for you to start by making pizza, then move down to bread, stew and finally dehydrating. Info in _Build Your Own Earth Oven_ by Kiko Denzer and _Capturing Heat Two_ by Still, Hatfield and Scott of the Aprovecho Research Center.
9. Build or buy a solar oven. Instructions for making your own are available on many sites, and in _Capturing Heat: Five Earth Friendly Cooking Technologies and How to Build Them_ by Still and Kness of the source above. The Maria Telkes Solar Cooker gets a bit hotter than some other models, as does the commercial ones.
10. Build a solar dehydrator for food preservation instead of using an electric one. Here's a cool one: http://greenbluebrown.blogspot.com/2006/10/tomato-dehydrating-update.html
11. Don't preheat your oven - that is, put your food in while the oven is preheating to capture that heating energy. The only exceptions where this isn't a good idea are a few really delicate baked goods, but generally this works fine, although you may have to slightly adjust your timing. Practice makes perfect.
12. If you have an electric oven, convert to natural gas or propane - they are much more efficient ways of making heat.
13. Build a rocket stove or rocket bread oven as seen in the first _Capturing Heat_ - a rocket stove uses biomass fuel much more efficiently than a woodstove or earth oven. A rocket bread oven can cook 20 loaves at a time.
14. Have a baking day, or two a week. Do all your oven work then and store your baked goods.
15. Use a crockpot if you have an electric stove - a crockpot generally will use less energy than an electric stove, although not a gas one.
16. Only bake in a full oven - plan ahead and while you are baking your bread, also consider roasting a pan of vegetables or baking that pie you'll want later.
17. Don't open your oven or remove pot lids more often than necessary. Keep the heat in.
18. Use a microwave instead of a stove (I personally hate microwaves, but they are more efficient).
19. Make large batches of things and reheat, cooking less often (although this might not make sense if you would give up fridge or freezer otherwise - think it through carefully).
20. Lactoferment pickles, kimchi, etc... and don't can them. Just keep them in a cool place, and save the canning energy.
21. Switch from a coffee percolator to a press coffee maker.
22. Soak beans overnight in cold water to reduce cooking time.
23. Use cast iron or other heavy cookware that retains heat better than cheap aluminum. That way, you can turn things off even sooner.
24. Make your own low-heat charcoal, cook over the process, and then use agrichar to improve your garden soil.
25. Get your cat to sit on the butter warmer (covered of course) when you need it melted. Ok, this one isn't a real suggestion, but I'm one short, and it probably would work, if you could persuade the cat not to eat the butter.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Feels Like I'm Dying...From that Old Used-to-Be
"I got the blues...Won't you save me?
I got the blues...as far as I can see.
I got the blues...Won't you save me?
Seems like I'm dying, from that old, used-to-be."
-Lyle Lovett
I tend to be an optimist, at least by the standards of peak oil activists (which isn't very hard). By that I mean that I believe in individual action and I believe that we could overturn the system that we live within and make better choices. But I also think this is less likely than that we'll do the wrong thing, and part of it is that our brains are trying to kill us (or at least our kids). That is, we've gotten into habits of thought so destructive and so automatic that we don't even recognize their basic failures. And if we don't recognize the failures in our own heads and overturn them, we're in big trouble. One of those problems is that we can't stop looking for a quick fix.
I liked this essay by James Kunstler quite a bit, and I recommend it to you, because he has a useful grasp of essentials,
" It only made me more nervous, because this longing for "solutions," strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth's ecosystems (and human civilization with it). And I think such a wish is, in itself, at the root of our problem -- certainly at the bottom of our incapacity to think clearly about these things.
I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of my fellow festival attendees."
I, like Kunstler, think that the phrasing of the call for "solutions" as "ways to keep things mostly the way they are" is completely mistaken. Trying to keep the cars going and growth capitalism up and running is a. futile and b. destructive. Not only will we be doing the wrong thing, but we don't seem to grasp that none of these represents a real solution in any meaningful sense.
Ethanol, biodiesel, solar panels - all of these are tremendously fossil fuel intensive. We can't make a solar panel without using a whole lot of silicone and metals that are mined, smelted, crafted, assembled, sold and transported using...fossil fuels. The day that we can create a solar panel made from cradle to grave with renewable energies, I'll buy the notion that we're all going to be running around in electric cars fed by solar panels.
Now when I say that, people start arguing that it is hypothetically possible that someday we'll use bioplastics and mine metals using electrically powered machinery. And again, I point out, show me a case of having done it, having made even 5 solar panels that way, and I'll buy it. Heck, I'll write a free ad.
Because most people don't grasp that solar panels, or wind generators or ethanol aren't a magic bullet unless they represent a self-perpetuating system. Oil was nicely self perpetuating, at least for a good long time - you used oil based equipment to get oil out of the ground in a nice ration of energy returned over energy invested (EROEI) of 100-1. But we don't have the infrastructure, or the grid system, or the renewables, or the tools, or in some cases the technology to make things like solar panels or wind generators entirely out of renewables. They take fossil fuels at 20-50 different spots along the ride. When you add up all the fossil fuels involved, the EROEI of most renewables is somewhere between 1 to 1 and 20-1, probably on the low side for most of them. That means that even to match our current energy needs, we'd need 5 times as much power generated from wind as coal and 50 times as much generated from solar as natural gas. Do you begin to grasp the scale of the problem?
And these alternative energies aren't a permanent solution - it is true that a solar panel might last 20-30 years. It is also true that they might not, and that the batteries certainly won't. That grid intertie that keeps you from having batteries - that uses lots of fossil fuels quite regularly and needs quite a lot of regular maintenence and other energy inputs. And even if your windmill lasts you two decades, unless we can make them again with renewables, that means that we're just sticking the problem on our kids.
That is, let's say we do a massive build out of windmills and solar panels, enough to keep our whole society going (never mind that we could never fund it or engineer it). We use up a huge amount of our remaining fossil reserves to keep everyone comfy and in their cars, and we go into massive debt to do it. Well, five years from now, all the solar panels need new batteries. But we don't have any manufacturing plants that make batteries from solar panels. So we need to do it again, with fossil fuels, plus fix the solar panels that got broken and replace a few parts on the windmill. And all the metal, and the chemicals and the little pieces need to be made, mined, manufactured...with fossil fuels. And then five years later we have to do it again, and then a decade after that we have to do it on an even bigger scale - to replace all the worn out windmills and solar panels. And as we go along, supply constraints are increasing, and prices of fossil energies are rising. Capital costs go up, investment costs go up, and remember, since energy costs are way up, there may not be as much money around to invest.
Where is the energy and the money for all these fossil inputs going to come from in our nice, "renewable" society? In order to keep things going on renewables, we'd have to vastly *expand* our existing infrastructure - not only would we have to make enough windmills to keep the grid going, but also to run the electric cars, to power the mining equipment, to make bioplastics, and smelt aluminum, to manufacture titanium parts - all things that were done comparatively efficiently with oil and gas (because they are heat intensive) now must be done much less efficiently by electricity. So we'd have to build enough windmills not just to power things as they are, but to produce 3 times as much electricity - and rebuild the grid. This would costs trillions of dollars, tons of oil and natural gas...and in a few years, we'd have to do again.
Whenever I bring this up from people looking for techno solutions, they all tell me that eventually we'll be able to make things from renewables, of course. Hmmm...of course. That is, we're betting our kids lives on the hope that at some point renewables will become self-perpetuating, even though we have no idea how that will happen, that would require major, multiple large scale technical breakthroughs in many cases that might or might not happen, AND, we're not willing to do it now, when we have energy to burn, lots of money and no crisis - instead, we're going to bet the farm (and lives) on the fact that we'll be able to do this 20 or 30 years into a depletion crisis with much less money, much less oil, much less availability in a society that we simply don't know the shape of. That is, we're going to stick the next generation with the problem, and hope it isn't too serious. But if we can't do it now, when we have lots of energy and lots of money and all the time in the world, the chances are excellent we won't be able to do it.
"Hey kids, when you are poorer, more indebted, and energy costs are up at 250 bucks a barrel, guess what? The techno people want to offer you the chance to keep the society going. And if you can't afford it, or get the energy to do it, well...tough. You can adapt then, even though every infrastructure adaptation will cost you more and require more scarce resources. What, you wanted to use your precious legacy of remaining fossil fuels for cancer treatment drugs? Tough - we used it to build batteries so we could have windmills. Oh, but you can't have windmills or cancer drugs. But feel free to scavenge in our debris."
So what we're offering our kids is for them to take on the real burden. We, we are told need "transitional" solutions - ones that would enable poor rich us to be able to get comfy with a more sustainable life. We need our electric cars because we can't be expected to change hard - that will be much, much easier for our children. Does anyone else see a problem here? Like the wacko, immoral reversal of what parents and grandparents are supposed to do for children - we're supposed to be willing to work our behinds off and make sacrifices for the wellbeing of future generations. And what we're really saying is fuck them, I don't want it to be too hard for me. How did we get here? How did we turn into this?
Well that's been the strategy for the last 50 years, right? Let's stick the next generation with the problem and not worry our pretty little heads about whether it is sustainable. In the 1970s, when we became widely aware that the oil was going to run out, the people who were able to vote (not me, I was 5) decided to elect Ronald Reagan and go for denial, instead of starting to build renewable energy systems. So now it is my problem. And their parents, after World War II, decided to destroy the nation's agricultural system, which meant that the chemicals and the pesticides became my parent's problem, and my problem, and my kids' problems. Wow, so that's what an inheritance is!
I would suggest that the "find a short term solution solution" even if it were feasible (probably not) is morally bankrupt, ugly, inelegant and in part responsible that each generation's children seem to want less to do with their parents than the last one. The notion that there's a techno solution out there is probably wrong, but even if we could find one, Kunstler's right, would we want it? Would we want to be people who said, "Let's just put it off a little longer so that someone else has to deal?" Would we want to be the opposite of the generations who made huge personal sacrifices so their kids wouldn't have to?
The thing is, there is a solution, and like most good solutions is really, really simple, and equally elegant. Stop being rich. Seriously, that's all there is to it. Stop living like rich people. Right now you probably have a servant to wash your dishes, another to do your laundry, another to transport you to your destination. These aren't people servants (somehow we're convinced that paying other people is wrong), they are electrical or oil based. But you live like a lord in a castle. Your castle is probably huge by world standards. You probably have a whole bunch of servants. You take a lot of wealth from poorer people (ie, you buy cheap things manufactured by virtual slaves that are cheap because of that), also like lords in castles.
The answer is really simple. Get off your ass, and dump the castle, or at least move a few more people into it. Get rid of most of the servants. Start doing for yourself without using power. Stop buying anything you want and eating like a king. Live like a peasant. Wear peasant clothes. Do peasant work. Eat peasant food. Get comfortable with it.
The thing is, peasantry isn't really that bad. Peasant clothes are sturdy and comfortable - peasants don't have to wear pantyhose, get botox shots or wear a necktie much. Peasant work isn't that bad - the fact is that 11th century serfs managed to feed themselves working just over half the year - the rest of the time was spent drinking beer. Ladakhis work hard 4 months a year, and spend the rest partying. The !Kung people can meet their needs in 3 hours a day. Once you get good peasantry, it really isn't that hard. Peasant food is great - fancy restaurants in cities serve peasant food and call it "Trattoria" or "Bistro" fare.
The craving for a solution that will mean things don't *REALLY* have to change in any deep way is not just a sign that we're missing the point. Because even when confronted by the obvious and simple truth, we choose denial or simply not to give a flying fuck. I'm not always sure which one it is. I suppose if I have to choose one, I'd rather we were stupid than evil, but, as my husband once said, "no dichotomy where dualism will do!"
But I still want to believe that we can count without our fingers, figure out when things don't make sense, take our heads out of collective asses, and stop killing our children with our old-used-to-be. It might even be true.
Sharon
I got the blues...as far as I can see.
I got the blues...Won't you save me?
Seems like I'm dying, from that old, used-to-be."
-Lyle Lovett
I tend to be an optimist, at least by the standards of peak oil activists (which isn't very hard). By that I mean that I believe in individual action and I believe that we could overturn the system that we live within and make better choices. But I also think this is less likely than that we'll do the wrong thing, and part of it is that our brains are trying to kill us (or at least our kids). That is, we've gotten into habits of thought so destructive and so automatic that we don't even recognize their basic failures. And if we don't recognize the failures in our own heads and overturn them, we're in big trouble. One of those problems is that we can't stop looking for a quick fix.
I liked this essay by James Kunstler quite a bit, and I recommend it to you, because he has a useful grasp of essentials,
" It only made me more nervous, because this longing for "solutions," strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth's ecosystems (and human civilization with it). And I think such a wish is, in itself, at the root of our problem -- certainly at the bottom of our incapacity to think clearly about these things.
I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of my fellow festival attendees."
I, like Kunstler, think that the phrasing of the call for "solutions" as "ways to keep things mostly the way they are" is completely mistaken. Trying to keep the cars going and growth capitalism up and running is a. futile and b. destructive. Not only will we be doing the wrong thing, but we don't seem to grasp that none of these represents a real solution in any meaningful sense.
Ethanol, biodiesel, solar panels - all of these are tremendously fossil fuel intensive. We can't make a solar panel without using a whole lot of silicone and metals that are mined, smelted, crafted, assembled, sold and transported using...fossil fuels. The day that we can create a solar panel made from cradle to grave with renewable energies, I'll buy the notion that we're all going to be running around in electric cars fed by solar panels.
Now when I say that, people start arguing that it is hypothetically possible that someday we'll use bioplastics and mine metals using electrically powered machinery. And again, I point out, show me a case of having done it, having made even 5 solar panels that way, and I'll buy it. Heck, I'll write a free ad.
Because most people don't grasp that solar panels, or wind generators or ethanol aren't a magic bullet unless they represent a self-perpetuating system. Oil was nicely self perpetuating, at least for a good long time - you used oil based equipment to get oil out of the ground in a nice ration of energy returned over energy invested (EROEI) of 100-1. But we don't have the infrastructure, or the grid system, or the renewables, or the tools, or in some cases the technology to make things like solar panels or wind generators entirely out of renewables. They take fossil fuels at 20-50 different spots along the ride. When you add up all the fossil fuels involved, the EROEI of most renewables is somewhere between 1 to 1 and 20-1, probably on the low side for most of them. That means that even to match our current energy needs, we'd need 5 times as much power generated from wind as coal and 50 times as much generated from solar as natural gas. Do you begin to grasp the scale of the problem?
And these alternative energies aren't a permanent solution - it is true that a solar panel might last 20-30 years. It is also true that they might not, and that the batteries certainly won't. That grid intertie that keeps you from having batteries - that uses lots of fossil fuels quite regularly and needs quite a lot of regular maintenence and other energy inputs. And even if your windmill lasts you two decades, unless we can make them again with renewables, that means that we're just sticking the problem on our kids.
That is, let's say we do a massive build out of windmills and solar panels, enough to keep our whole society going (never mind that we could never fund it or engineer it). We use up a huge amount of our remaining fossil reserves to keep everyone comfy and in their cars, and we go into massive debt to do it. Well, five years from now, all the solar panels need new batteries. But we don't have any manufacturing plants that make batteries from solar panels. So we need to do it again, with fossil fuels, plus fix the solar panels that got broken and replace a few parts on the windmill. And all the metal, and the chemicals and the little pieces need to be made, mined, manufactured...with fossil fuels. And then five years later we have to do it again, and then a decade after that we have to do it on an even bigger scale - to replace all the worn out windmills and solar panels. And as we go along, supply constraints are increasing, and prices of fossil energies are rising. Capital costs go up, investment costs go up, and remember, since energy costs are way up, there may not be as much money around to invest.
Where is the energy and the money for all these fossil inputs going to come from in our nice, "renewable" society? In order to keep things going on renewables, we'd have to vastly *expand* our existing infrastructure - not only would we have to make enough windmills to keep the grid going, but also to run the electric cars, to power the mining equipment, to make bioplastics, and smelt aluminum, to manufacture titanium parts - all things that were done comparatively efficiently with oil and gas (because they are heat intensive) now must be done much less efficiently by electricity. So we'd have to build enough windmills not just to power things as they are, but to produce 3 times as much electricity - and rebuild the grid. This would costs trillions of dollars, tons of oil and natural gas...and in a few years, we'd have to do again.
Whenever I bring this up from people looking for techno solutions, they all tell me that eventually we'll be able to make things from renewables, of course. Hmmm...of course. That is, we're betting our kids lives on the hope that at some point renewables will become self-perpetuating, even though we have no idea how that will happen, that would require major, multiple large scale technical breakthroughs in many cases that might or might not happen, AND, we're not willing to do it now, when we have energy to burn, lots of money and no crisis - instead, we're going to bet the farm (and lives) on the fact that we'll be able to do this 20 or 30 years into a depletion crisis with much less money, much less oil, much less availability in a society that we simply don't know the shape of. That is, we're going to stick the next generation with the problem, and hope it isn't too serious. But if we can't do it now, when we have lots of energy and lots of money and all the time in the world, the chances are excellent we won't be able to do it.
"Hey kids, when you are poorer, more indebted, and energy costs are up at 250 bucks a barrel, guess what? The techno people want to offer you the chance to keep the society going. And if you can't afford it, or get the energy to do it, well...tough. You can adapt then, even though every infrastructure adaptation will cost you more and require more scarce resources. What, you wanted to use your precious legacy of remaining fossil fuels for cancer treatment drugs? Tough - we used it to build batteries so we could have windmills. Oh, but you can't have windmills or cancer drugs. But feel free to scavenge in our debris."
So what we're offering our kids is for them to take on the real burden. We, we are told need "transitional" solutions - ones that would enable poor rich us to be able to get comfy with a more sustainable life. We need our electric cars because we can't be expected to change hard - that will be much, much easier for our children. Does anyone else see a problem here? Like the wacko, immoral reversal of what parents and grandparents are supposed to do for children - we're supposed to be willing to work our behinds off and make sacrifices for the wellbeing of future generations. And what we're really saying is fuck them, I don't want it to be too hard for me. How did we get here? How did we turn into this?
Well that's been the strategy for the last 50 years, right? Let's stick the next generation with the problem and not worry our pretty little heads about whether it is sustainable. In the 1970s, when we became widely aware that the oil was going to run out, the people who were able to vote (not me, I was 5) decided to elect Ronald Reagan and go for denial, instead of starting to build renewable energy systems. So now it is my problem. And their parents, after World War II, decided to destroy the nation's agricultural system, which meant that the chemicals and the pesticides became my parent's problem, and my problem, and my kids' problems. Wow, so that's what an inheritance is!
I would suggest that the "find a short term solution solution" even if it were feasible (probably not) is morally bankrupt, ugly, inelegant and in part responsible that each generation's children seem to want less to do with their parents than the last one. The notion that there's a techno solution out there is probably wrong, but even if we could find one, Kunstler's right, would we want it? Would we want to be people who said, "Let's just put it off a little longer so that someone else has to deal?" Would we want to be the opposite of the generations who made huge personal sacrifices so their kids wouldn't have to?
The thing is, there is a solution, and like most good solutions is really, really simple, and equally elegant. Stop being rich. Seriously, that's all there is to it. Stop living like rich people. Right now you probably have a servant to wash your dishes, another to do your laundry, another to transport you to your destination. These aren't people servants (somehow we're convinced that paying other people is wrong), they are electrical or oil based. But you live like a lord in a castle. Your castle is probably huge by world standards. You probably have a whole bunch of servants. You take a lot of wealth from poorer people (ie, you buy cheap things manufactured by virtual slaves that are cheap because of that), also like lords in castles.
The answer is really simple. Get off your ass, and dump the castle, or at least move a few more people into it. Get rid of most of the servants. Start doing for yourself without using power. Stop buying anything you want and eating like a king. Live like a peasant. Wear peasant clothes. Do peasant work. Eat peasant food. Get comfortable with it.
The thing is, peasantry isn't really that bad. Peasant clothes are sturdy and comfortable - peasants don't have to wear pantyhose, get botox shots or wear a necktie much. Peasant work isn't that bad - the fact is that 11th century serfs managed to feed themselves working just over half the year - the rest of the time was spent drinking beer. Ladakhis work hard 4 months a year, and spend the rest partying. The !Kung people can meet their needs in 3 hours a day. Once you get good peasantry, it really isn't that hard. Peasant food is great - fancy restaurants in cities serve peasant food and call it "Trattoria" or "Bistro" fare.
The craving for a solution that will mean things don't *REALLY* have to change in any deep way is not just a sign that we're missing the point. Because even when confronted by the obvious and simple truth, we choose denial or simply not to give a flying fuck. I'm not always sure which one it is. I suppose if I have to choose one, I'd rather we were stupid than evil, but, as my husband once said, "no dichotomy where dualism will do!"
But I still want to believe that we can count without our fingers, figure out when things don't make sense, take our heads out of collective asses, and stop killing our children with our old-used-to-be. It might even be true.
Sharon
Monday, May 28, 2007
Digging Dollars: Make-Work, Agriculture, and Empire
Most work is busywork.
This is an ugly realization for most of us, especially those of us who have "careers" rather than jobs, for which we trained many years. But if, all of a sudden your work was to disappear from the planet - no one was doing it - how much would anyone really suffer? For some jobs, the absence of anyone doing them would hardly be noticed - we could do entirely without literary critics, theoretical astrophysicists (please note these two are the careers my husband and I trained for), psychics, pet psychologists, virtually everyone involved with television or advertising, make up artists, many beaurocrats, etc...
Oh, certain things about our society might change, and we'd have to find other jobs for those people, but no harm would come. In some cases, a bit of good might even occur - a few fewer trees would be slain on the form of the romantic sublime or the precise shape of a black hole, or people might wear a little less wallpaper paste on their faces. It is conceivable that some dogs might be a bit more angsty without their therapists, but couldn’t we all live with that?
In many other cases, maybe even most, at least half of the people who do your job could disappear, and while it would change the nature of our society some, it wouldn't do any serious harm. We could get along with half as many (or vastly fewer) lawyers, novelists, retail salespeople, IRS employees, soldiers, plastic surgeons, drug dealers, housing developers, engineers, architects, fryolator tenders, etc... In fact, having less of all these things would probably be necessary in a sustainable society.
Even people who do useful things could be done without in many cases. Yes, we will always need doctors and nurses. But we could dramatically cut our nursing home employees, for example, by keeping our parents and grandparents at home with us whenever possible. Quite a few nations have similar lifespans to ours, but use 25-50% less medical care - think about it - they take 1/4 to 1/2 as many drugs, see the doctor that much less often, and they still live just as long as we do, and often report higher quality of life. Yes, doctors and nurses are valuable, but we could make significant cuts in their numbers, or keep the same numbers, and give the doctors and nurses much higher quality of life by simply reducing their working hours. The same is true with teachers - who are extremely valuable, but if more parents taught their children, particularly in the early years, we wouldn't need so many. Why do so few parents do so? In part because they go out to jobs, and don't have the time. Hmmm...
The simple fact is that we are mostly not needed to do any *particular* job - the fact is, we need work, but our careers are mostly optional. Somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of the American populace does truly essential work, and the rest of us mostly spread little pieces of paper around, shooting them back and forth. John Maynard Keynes, the famed economist, made the case that having enough work to do was so important to morale (and morale to the economy) that he argued that one potential way that government could stabilize the economy was to bury money in the ground and pay people to dig it up - that is, Keynes said that what was important was that we have some work, not that it be useful or valuable. Productivity and utility had their places, but mostly, we need some busy work to keep the economy and our lives running.
And a lot of our jobs actually operate funded by nasty, awful things we say we deplore. We may oppose global warming, but we make our money directly or indirectly by selling cars with low mileage standards or by driving long distances to our jobs. Perhaps we, like many people, are trickle down beneficiaries of things like the oil industry, the chemical agriculture industry or the military. Often, the military, with its endless wars.
Because Keynes didn't claim that the government could put us to work forever, of course. His argument was that in times of economic trouble, the government should borrow money to put people to work, ideally on things with social utility, but if necessary, doing make work. And when prosperity returns, Keynes argued that the government must cut back its spending and its make work and let the larger economy take over again, while paying off our indebtedness. Keynesianism was largely the model for the New Deal. But the New Deal was never popular with most serious capitalists, and good or bad, we've replaced classical Keynesianism with military Keynesianism.
Military Keynesianism was first described by the term used by a Polish Economist to describe Nazi Germany, but it describes much of our economy quite well. That is, our current economy, to a large degree, owes its success to military expansionism and imperialism. People are put to work not at rebuilding the domestic infrastructure, but at war. The military industry and its offshoots (of which the web is one), account for an enormous portion of our economy and our GDP, and millions of jobs, particularly among lower income people. The war in Iraq alone is estimated by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes to cost about 2 *TRILLION* dollars - dollars that get paid out to soldiers and Halliburton consultants, folks in the aerospace industry and janitors in the Pentagon, to government beauracrats and construction companies that build military facilities. And in turn, those dollars get paid out to Wal-Mart and fast food restaurants, bookstores and movie theaters, and trickle down to the rest of us.
Chalmers Johnson, in _Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic_ documents that 60% of GDP growth in just 2003 was attributable to defense spending, and that defense spending represents 50% of the government's discretionary spending - that is, 50% of the things the government chooses to spend money on are about our ability to blow things up. The American defense budget annually exceeds the combined defense budget of every other nation in the world. And, we should note, we are still losing the war in Iraq and precious human lives to people who build 300 dollar roadside bombs. Perhaps this should tell us something about the utility of all this spending.
This was how the Nazis got their economy moving during World War II - they turned their nation into a war machine. And we have done the same intermittently since World War II, most recently since September 11. Instead of burying cash in the ground and digging it up, we've built up a need for war and an imperial culture, and then made up reasons to use them - we can‘t justify all that money without someone to kill. We now make ourselves more vulnerable to terrorist attacks by invading Muslim countries and letting them kill our family members, only to use those deaths as a justification for further imperialism and violence. And all of it, in part, as Johnson deftly documents, because we don't have anything else to feed our economy.
But right now, war is not a money making venture - we're doing it on debt, and sooner or later, we'll pay the price for that. As Johnson points out, that might actually be the only way we can come out of this a truly democratic nation - after all, the price of our imperialism has been the loss of the things we say we value in democracy - if you look at the Bill of Rights, for example, and go down the list, you'll find that the only rights that haven't been undermined, infringed upon or stripped from us are the rights to bear arms and not to have Hessian troops quartered in your bedroom. And I wouldn't hold my breath forever on that last one if it seems convenient to the Bush administration. Johnson argues that only economic collapse could break off our imperial project, and he might be right. On the other hand, it might be possible to do it another way.
It isn't enough to deplore military Keynesianism. It might be useful to do more than deplore it (Americans are told in their own founding documents that if their government becomes tyrannical they have an obligation to overthrow it. Now I'm a non-violent sort, but I do sometimes wonder what level of tyranny we are waiting for before we get serious about choosing something else? Our government supports "disappearing" people without trial, a la Guatemala, torture a la China, spying on its own citizens a la the former Soviet Union...what do we have to do before we start calling it a tyranny and arranging the proper response? This is something I mull over now and again.), but if we're ever to have an alternative economy, one that doesn't depend on finding people to make war against, that doesn't depend on exploitation and murder, we're going to have to do more than get rid of military Keynesianism, we're going to have to get rid of the make work and do useful things. And pay people more for doing useful things than for doing pointless ones.
That sounds obvious, but it isn't at all under the auspices of modern capitalism. Many economists and politicians have been dedicated for a long time to the notion that it is best to pack poor young men and women off to be soldiers, to invest tens of thousands of dollars in their equipment, their training and their bodies, pack them off around the world, and let them discover that a million dollar helicopter is often no match for a 1000 dollar rocket launcher and that a 600,000 dollar tank can be blown up by a 120 dollar IED, because people fighting to get invaders out of their countries almost always trump expensively trained people just doing their jobs - all so that the young man can buy food and pay a mortgage. We believe it is better to do this, than to invest 10,000 dollars once in a young man, to give him training, a few acres of land, and a little equipment so he could grow food for himself and enough to pay his mortgage (or, gasp, build a house without one).
Now the reason for this is that it is deemed to create jobs to do it this way - the military base commander, the drill sergeant, the people who build military housing, body armor and tanks, the fast food place where the soldier eats, the government administrator that helps his family get food stamps because the military pays so poorly, the VA doctors that help him rehabilitate, the Halliburton employees that supply food and transport, the people who manufacture the body bags - all of them get a little piece of this, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of times.
On the other hand, if we had spent that same money setting the same man up as a small scale subsistence farmer, how many people would have gotten jobs out of that? Certainly the manufacturer of hoes, nails and boots, maybe even small horse drawn or efficient tractor equipment. The sawmill guy who cut the boards to build his barn, the logger who cut the trees for house and barn, some seed growers and a feed store. Maybe the local diner once in a while. But you can't run a global economy on that, can you? Where's the R and D money for high technology so we can shoot people out of space with lasers? Where's the money for the people who will treat the soldier's drug problem and find him an apartment when he ends up homeless because of PTSD? You can't pay for global spy satellites off of the income of a small scale subsistence farmer - he barely pays any taxes, and he doesn't need McDonalds to feed him, because he grows his own food or a drug company to treat his obesity induced hypertension, because he doesn't sit on his ass all day, or anything much more technical than a few good tools and a way of getting his crops to market. Heck, if he could have land outside a city, he could do it with a bicycle cart.
Exactly. You can’t rule the world with a nation of farmers (ok, the Romans and Bulgarians did, but their empire was proportionally vastly cheaper to run). You can't support a global network of military bases on a simple economy, based on things people really need - food, houses, clothing, tools. If we encouraged young people to do things that were actually useful, and paid them fairly for it, we couldn't have this empire - we couldn't afford it. If we made less money, if we earned less money to buy things we don't need, we couldn't afford to make up excuses to go to war, because China and Japan wouldn't fund us to do so. If we mostly did for ourselves and met most of our own needs in self-sufficient communities and regions, we couldn't afford to do anything other than defend ourselves from real threat.
Wow, doesn't that sound terrible. The answer to the military industrial complex is pretty simple. It runs on money. It runs on our money. It runs on the money we pay in taxes for things we buy, and the money we pay on taxes from money we earn. Stop earning so much money, stop buying so much stuff, and the economy slows and the taxes stop pouring in. If enough of us cut our expenses, and our earnings to the bone, if enough of us stop being willing to fund this war and the next one, stop being willing to buy the oil that the war is about and the garbage about the way of life that the war is about - it will stop. Congress has tried (not very courageously) and failed miserably to cut off funds. But guess what - their funds come from ...me. You. Us. We can cut them off anytime we're willing to make the sacrifice. We just have decide it is worth it to us to make some economic sacrifices (if we can - I know everyone cannot, but many of us could), rather than sacrifice the lives of young men and women.
Your job is probably make work. Most of our work is. Or perhaps it is a little necessary - but perhaps not full-time, suck you dry necessary. I know you need a job to eat, to pay your taxes, to pay your mortgage. I understand that, and I'm not blaming anyone for taking the work they can. We do that too. But every dollar you earn above the absolute necessities, and every dollar you spend in the larger economy helps feed the war machine, and the economy that supports it. And it lends credence to the basic presumption that the largest purpose of our economy is to give us make work. I know you want economic security, a nice nest egg for retirement, a comfortable home, a pretty house. But all those things make globalization, and the wars that enable it possible. Is it worth it?
Now maybe it would be morally acceptable to do make work, regardless of its collateral damage, if there was nothing else important to do. But we know that isn‘t true. Our make work is causing us to take shortcuts - our pointless jobs are causing us to break down and buy fast food because we don't have time to cook. They encourage us to dump chemicals on our gardens and lawns, rather than build soil - we don't have time for that. Our make work is cutting into the time we could spend playing with our kids, or educating them, taking care of elderly people we love or volunteering with others. It cuts into our time for community building, chopping wood, growing gardens, cleaning up messes, avoiding pollutants, being frugal, cooking dinner, making love, stopping the war.
We're doing things that don't matter that actually make things worse. So we've got to stop. I'm not saying instantly. I'm not saying tomorrow, and I‘m not saying everyone. This is hard. But maybe, just maybe, we could stop this war and improve our lives if we started to ask "what needs doing" not "what can I do to make money." Everything we do to stop needing money, to meet our needs at home and in our local community - by growing food, fiber, fertility, or making things, or helping one another and caring for one another, is something that means we need to pour less cash into the war coffers and less cash into the make-work economy.
How do we do this? We start rethinking our relationship to our work. If you can, one spouse quits their job, or gets a new one doing something that is useful and important. If you haven’t got a spouse, and can, cut back on overtime, or offer to take less money in exchange for one day off per week. Or both of you drop your hours back and work less. Maybe you are just getting by where you are, but living in a less expensive place, or taking in your sister as a roommate, or caring for your parents would make it easier. Or maybe you can’t do anything at all - you can’t get along any other way, or your job is so desperately important you can‘t stop. Ok, but those of us who can, need to. Even if we've trained for a make-work career, maybe we need to switch to something that really matters, like caring for the sick and disabled, or making things we import from other nations, or fighting for justice. Each year, perhaps we can grow a little more food or buy a little less, live more within our means and make our means a little smaller. And some
people can slip out of the public economy altogether and become war tax protestors. Most of us can't. But we could make less, spend less, give more to the causes we care about directly, and less to the war effort and the public economy.
The bad news is that if enough of us did this, it would crash the public economy. The reality, however is that a crash in the public economy is probably inevitable, and more importantly, sometimes you have to break some eggs. Economists are fine with this when, for example, we are trashing our manufacturing sector and throwing people out of work - then it is called creative destruction. I suspect they'll be less happy about trashing the capitalist economy so that we can get rid of the war machine. But in the end, sometimes, you do what's right. That was one of the great arguments about slavery, about the end of the British Empire - the nay sayers said “It will hurt us financially to do this.” And yes, that was true. Not stealing money from other people, not enslaving them makes the people who had been stealing and slaving less rich. But some things you do because they are right, not because they are expedient. Ceasing to fund evil, ceasing to support imperialism you do because it is right.
The good news is that worldwide, only about 1/4 of all the work we do takes place in the public economy, the world of GDPs and tax accounts. The rest of the things that the world go round, most of the work that most people in the world do, is subsistence labor, or under the table labor, barter or other things that don't get counted in the GDP. That is, most people in the world get their eating money and the things they need not from their company who is traded on a stock market, but from Raoul down the road who repairs shoes and takes chickens, and from Mama who loaned us enough money to buy the house without interest, and from cousin Lao who trades work with you at harvest time. The peasant economy, as Teodor Shanin, the sociologist who named it observes, is robust, vital and alive, and based on networks of family and community. And we could live far more in the peasant economy than we do now. Many of us could live fairly comfortably deriving most of our income from the communal and peasant economy, with just enough participation in the larger economy to pay taxes, buy a few luxuries and visit people now and again. Getting out of the public economy does not mean living in poverty - it simply means living differently.
The people in the world who most need to quit their jobs, or cut back their earnings, to work less or live on one income, or a collection of half incomes are the richest people in the world. That's us. We pay taxes that fund the war. We buy the crap that funds our trade deficit. We burn the oil that warms the planet, and get people to make stuff for us by burning oil and then shipping that stuff to us. Money correlates with a whole lot of things, including emissions, environmental impact and your implication in the political system we've acquired. It is, I fear, simply not possible to be rich and not be complicit with doing a great deal of harm. So one of the projects we all have to address is how to be less rich. How to live on less. How to earn less. How to have security with less. How to take only a fair share of the world's wealth, as well as its resources.
Most of us don't want to put our jobs on the table. We don't want to admit that the software we design or the products we sell or the message we give out is not only unnecessary, but destructive, contributing to the things we deplore. Unfortunately, it is true. And true is better than the lies we want to tell ourselves. And if it is true, we have to change - period. On the other hand, wouldn’t it feel better to be doing something other than burying things and digging them
up endlessly?
Sharon
This is an ugly realization for most of us, especially those of us who have "careers" rather than jobs, for which we trained many years. But if, all of a sudden your work was to disappear from the planet - no one was doing it - how much would anyone really suffer? For some jobs, the absence of anyone doing them would hardly be noticed - we could do entirely without literary critics, theoretical astrophysicists (please note these two are the careers my husband and I trained for), psychics, pet psychologists, virtually everyone involved with television or advertising, make up artists, many beaurocrats, etc...
Oh, certain things about our society might change, and we'd have to find other jobs for those people, but no harm would come. In some cases, a bit of good might even occur - a few fewer trees would be slain on the form of the romantic sublime or the precise shape of a black hole, or people might wear a little less wallpaper paste on their faces. It is conceivable that some dogs might be a bit more angsty without their therapists, but couldn’t we all live with that?
In many other cases, maybe even most, at least half of the people who do your job could disappear, and while it would change the nature of our society some, it wouldn't do any serious harm. We could get along with half as many (or vastly fewer) lawyers, novelists, retail salespeople, IRS employees, soldiers, plastic surgeons, drug dealers, housing developers, engineers, architects, fryolator tenders, etc... In fact, having less of all these things would probably be necessary in a sustainable society.
Even people who do useful things could be done without in many cases. Yes, we will always need doctors and nurses. But we could dramatically cut our nursing home employees, for example, by keeping our parents and grandparents at home with us whenever possible. Quite a few nations have similar lifespans to ours, but use 25-50% less medical care - think about it - they take 1/4 to 1/2 as many drugs, see the doctor that much less often, and they still live just as long as we do, and often report higher quality of life. Yes, doctors and nurses are valuable, but we could make significant cuts in their numbers, or keep the same numbers, and give the doctors and nurses much higher quality of life by simply reducing their working hours. The same is true with teachers - who are extremely valuable, but if more parents taught their children, particularly in the early years, we wouldn't need so many. Why do so few parents do so? In part because they go out to jobs, and don't have the time. Hmmm...
The simple fact is that we are mostly not needed to do any *particular* job - the fact is, we need work, but our careers are mostly optional. Somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of the American populace does truly essential work, and the rest of us mostly spread little pieces of paper around, shooting them back and forth. John Maynard Keynes, the famed economist, made the case that having enough work to do was so important to morale (and morale to the economy) that he argued that one potential way that government could stabilize the economy was to bury money in the ground and pay people to dig it up - that is, Keynes said that what was important was that we have some work, not that it be useful or valuable. Productivity and utility had their places, but mostly, we need some busy work to keep the economy and our lives running.
And a lot of our jobs actually operate funded by nasty, awful things we say we deplore. We may oppose global warming, but we make our money directly or indirectly by selling cars with low mileage standards or by driving long distances to our jobs. Perhaps we, like many people, are trickle down beneficiaries of things like the oil industry, the chemical agriculture industry or the military. Often, the military, with its endless wars.
Because Keynes didn't claim that the government could put us to work forever, of course. His argument was that in times of economic trouble, the government should borrow money to put people to work, ideally on things with social utility, but if necessary, doing make work. And when prosperity returns, Keynes argued that the government must cut back its spending and its make work and let the larger economy take over again, while paying off our indebtedness. Keynesianism was largely the model for the New Deal. But the New Deal was never popular with most serious capitalists, and good or bad, we've replaced classical Keynesianism with military Keynesianism.
Military Keynesianism was first described by the term used by a Polish Economist to describe Nazi Germany, but it describes much of our economy quite well. That is, our current economy, to a large degree, owes its success to military expansionism and imperialism. People are put to work not at rebuilding the domestic infrastructure, but at war. The military industry and its offshoots (of which the web is one), account for an enormous portion of our economy and our GDP, and millions of jobs, particularly among lower income people. The war in Iraq alone is estimated by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes to cost about 2 *TRILLION* dollars - dollars that get paid out to soldiers and Halliburton consultants, folks in the aerospace industry and janitors in the Pentagon, to government beauracrats and construction companies that build military facilities. And in turn, those dollars get paid out to Wal-Mart and fast food restaurants, bookstores and movie theaters, and trickle down to the rest of us.
Chalmers Johnson, in _Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic_ documents that 60% of GDP growth in just 2003 was attributable to defense spending, and that defense spending represents 50% of the government's discretionary spending - that is, 50% of the things the government chooses to spend money on are about our ability to blow things up. The American defense budget annually exceeds the combined defense budget of every other nation in the world. And, we should note, we are still losing the war in Iraq and precious human lives to people who build 300 dollar roadside bombs. Perhaps this should tell us something about the utility of all this spending.
This was how the Nazis got their economy moving during World War II - they turned their nation into a war machine. And we have done the same intermittently since World War II, most recently since September 11. Instead of burying cash in the ground and digging it up, we've built up a need for war and an imperial culture, and then made up reasons to use them - we can‘t justify all that money without someone to kill. We now make ourselves more vulnerable to terrorist attacks by invading Muslim countries and letting them kill our family members, only to use those deaths as a justification for further imperialism and violence. And all of it, in part, as Johnson deftly documents, because we don't have anything else to feed our economy.
But right now, war is not a money making venture - we're doing it on debt, and sooner or later, we'll pay the price for that. As Johnson points out, that might actually be the only way we can come out of this a truly democratic nation - after all, the price of our imperialism has been the loss of the things we say we value in democracy - if you look at the Bill of Rights, for example, and go down the list, you'll find that the only rights that haven't been undermined, infringed upon or stripped from us are the rights to bear arms and not to have Hessian troops quartered in your bedroom. And I wouldn't hold my breath forever on that last one if it seems convenient to the Bush administration. Johnson argues that only economic collapse could break off our imperial project, and he might be right. On the other hand, it might be possible to do it another way.
It isn't enough to deplore military Keynesianism. It might be useful to do more than deplore it (Americans are told in their own founding documents that if their government becomes tyrannical they have an obligation to overthrow it. Now I'm a non-violent sort, but I do sometimes wonder what level of tyranny we are waiting for before we get serious about choosing something else? Our government supports "disappearing" people without trial, a la Guatemala, torture a la China, spying on its own citizens a la the former Soviet Union...what do we have to do before we start calling it a tyranny and arranging the proper response? This is something I mull over now and again.), but if we're ever to have an alternative economy, one that doesn't depend on finding people to make war against, that doesn't depend on exploitation and murder, we're going to have to do more than get rid of military Keynesianism, we're going to have to get rid of the make work and do useful things. And pay people more for doing useful things than for doing pointless ones.
That sounds obvious, but it isn't at all under the auspices of modern capitalism. Many economists and politicians have been dedicated for a long time to the notion that it is best to pack poor young men and women off to be soldiers, to invest tens of thousands of dollars in their equipment, their training and their bodies, pack them off around the world, and let them discover that a million dollar helicopter is often no match for a 1000 dollar rocket launcher and that a 600,000 dollar tank can be blown up by a 120 dollar IED, because people fighting to get invaders out of their countries almost always trump expensively trained people just doing their jobs - all so that the young man can buy food and pay a mortgage. We believe it is better to do this, than to invest 10,000 dollars once in a young man, to give him training, a few acres of land, and a little equipment so he could grow food for himself and enough to pay his mortgage (or, gasp, build a house without one).
Now the reason for this is that it is deemed to create jobs to do it this way - the military base commander, the drill sergeant, the people who build military housing, body armor and tanks, the fast food place where the soldier eats, the government administrator that helps his family get food stamps because the military pays so poorly, the VA doctors that help him rehabilitate, the Halliburton employees that supply food and transport, the people who manufacture the body bags - all of them get a little piece of this, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of times.
On the other hand, if we had spent that same money setting the same man up as a small scale subsistence farmer, how many people would have gotten jobs out of that? Certainly the manufacturer of hoes, nails and boots, maybe even small horse drawn or efficient tractor equipment. The sawmill guy who cut the boards to build his barn, the logger who cut the trees for house and barn, some seed growers and a feed store. Maybe the local diner once in a while. But you can't run a global economy on that, can you? Where's the R and D money for high technology so we can shoot people out of space with lasers? Where's the money for the people who will treat the soldier's drug problem and find him an apartment when he ends up homeless because of PTSD? You can't pay for global spy satellites off of the income of a small scale subsistence farmer - he barely pays any taxes, and he doesn't need McDonalds to feed him, because he grows his own food or a drug company to treat his obesity induced hypertension, because he doesn't sit on his ass all day, or anything much more technical than a few good tools and a way of getting his crops to market. Heck, if he could have land outside a city, he could do it with a bicycle cart.
Exactly. You can’t rule the world with a nation of farmers (ok, the Romans and Bulgarians did, but their empire was proportionally vastly cheaper to run). You can't support a global network of military bases on a simple economy, based on things people really need - food, houses, clothing, tools. If we encouraged young people to do things that were actually useful, and paid them fairly for it, we couldn't have this empire - we couldn't afford it. If we made less money, if we earned less money to buy things we don't need, we couldn't afford to make up excuses to go to war, because China and Japan wouldn't fund us to do so. If we mostly did for ourselves and met most of our own needs in self-sufficient communities and regions, we couldn't afford to do anything other than defend ourselves from real threat.
Wow, doesn't that sound terrible. The answer to the military industrial complex is pretty simple. It runs on money. It runs on our money. It runs on the money we pay in taxes for things we buy, and the money we pay on taxes from money we earn. Stop earning so much money, stop buying so much stuff, and the economy slows and the taxes stop pouring in. If enough of us cut our expenses, and our earnings to the bone, if enough of us stop being willing to fund this war and the next one, stop being willing to buy the oil that the war is about and the garbage about the way of life that the war is about - it will stop. Congress has tried (not very courageously) and failed miserably to cut off funds. But guess what - their funds come from ...me. You. Us. We can cut them off anytime we're willing to make the sacrifice. We just have decide it is worth it to us to make some economic sacrifices (if we can - I know everyone cannot, but many of us could), rather than sacrifice the lives of young men and women.
Your job is probably make work. Most of our work is. Or perhaps it is a little necessary - but perhaps not full-time, suck you dry necessary. I know you need a job to eat, to pay your taxes, to pay your mortgage. I understand that, and I'm not blaming anyone for taking the work they can. We do that too. But every dollar you earn above the absolute necessities, and every dollar you spend in the larger economy helps feed the war machine, and the economy that supports it. And it lends credence to the basic presumption that the largest purpose of our economy is to give us make work. I know you want economic security, a nice nest egg for retirement, a comfortable home, a pretty house. But all those things make globalization, and the wars that enable it possible. Is it worth it?
Now maybe it would be morally acceptable to do make work, regardless of its collateral damage, if there was nothing else important to do. But we know that isn‘t true. Our make work is causing us to take shortcuts - our pointless jobs are causing us to break down and buy fast food because we don't have time to cook. They encourage us to dump chemicals on our gardens and lawns, rather than build soil - we don't have time for that. Our make work is cutting into the time we could spend playing with our kids, or educating them, taking care of elderly people we love or volunteering with others. It cuts into our time for community building, chopping wood, growing gardens, cleaning up messes, avoiding pollutants, being frugal, cooking dinner, making love, stopping the war.
We're doing things that don't matter that actually make things worse. So we've got to stop. I'm not saying instantly. I'm not saying tomorrow, and I‘m not saying everyone. This is hard. But maybe, just maybe, we could stop this war and improve our lives if we started to ask "what needs doing" not "what can I do to make money." Everything we do to stop needing money, to meet our needs at home and in our local community - by growing food, fiber, fertility, or making things, or helping one another and caring for one another, is something that means we need to pour less cash into the war coffers and less cash into the make-work economy.
How do we do this? We start rethinking our relationship to our work. If you can, one spouse quits their job, or gets a new one doing something that is useful and important. If you haven’t got a spouse, and can, cut back on overtime, or offer to take less money in exchange for one day off per week. Or both of you drop your hours back and work less. Maybe you are just getting by where you are, but living in a less expensive place, or taking in your sister as a roommate, or caring for your parents would make it easier. Or maybe you can’t do anything at all - you can’t get along any other way, or your job is so desperately important you can‘t stop. Ok, but those of us who can, need to. Even if we've trained for a make-work career, maybe we need to switch to something that really matters, like caring for the sick and disabled, or making things we import from other nations, or fighting for justice. Each year, perhaps we can grow a little more food or buy a little less, live more within our means and make our means a little smaller. And some
people can slip out of the public economy altogether and become war tax protestors. Most of us can't. But we could make less, spend less, give more to the causes we care about directly, and less to the war effort and the public economy.
The bad news is that if enough of us did this, it would crash the public economy. The reality, however is that a crash in the public economy is probably inevitable, and more importantly, sometimes you have to break some eggs. Economists are fine with this when, for example, we are trashing our manufacturing sector and throwing people out of work - then it is called creative destruction. I suspect they'll be less happy about trashing the capitalist economy so that we can get rid of the war machine. But in the end, sometimes, you do what's right. That was one of the great arguments about slavery, about the end of the British Empire - the nay sayers said “It will hurt us financially to do this.” And yes, that was true. Not stealing money from other people, not enslaving them makes the people who had been stealing and slaving less rich. But some things you do because they are right, not because they are expedient. Ceasing to fund evil, ceasing to support imperialism you do because it is right.
The good news is that worldwide, only about 1/4 of all the work we do takes place in the public economy, the world of GDPs and tax accounts. The rest of the things that the world go round, most of the work that most people in the world do, is subsistence labor, or under the table labor, barter or other things that don't get counted in the GDP. That is, most people in the world get their eating money and the things they need not from their company who is traded on a stock market, but from Raoul down the road who repairs shoes and takes chickens, and from Mama who loaned us enough money to buy the house without interest, and from cousin Lao who trades work with you at harvest time. The peasant economy, as Teodor Shanin, the sociologist who named it observes, is robust, vital and alive, and based on networks of family and community. And we could live far more in the peasant economy than we do now. Many of us could live fairly comfortably deriving most of our income from the communal and peasant economy, with just enough participation in the larger economy to pay taxes, buy a few luxuries and visit people now and again. Getting out of the public economy does not mean living in poverty - it simply means living differently.
The people in the world who most need to quit their jobs, or cut back their earnings, to work less or live on one income, or a collection of half incomes are the richest people in the world. That's us. We pay taxes that fund the war. We buy the crap that funds our trade deficit. We burn the oil that warms the planet, and get people to make stuff for us by burning oil and then shipping that stuff to us. Money correlates with a whole lot of things, including emissions, environmental impact and your implication in the political system we've acquired. It is, I fear, simply not possible to be rich and not be complicit with doing a great deal of harm. So one of the projects we all have to address is how to be less rich. How to live on less. How to earn less. How to have security with less. How to take only a fair share of the world's wealth, as well as its resources.
Most of us don't want to put our jobs on the table. We don't want to admit that the software we design or the products we sell or the message we give out is not only unnecessary, but destructive, contributing to the things we deplore. Unfortunately, it is true. And true is better than the lies we want to tell ourselves. And if it is true, we have to change - period. On the other hand, wouldn’t it feel better to be doing something other than burying things and digging them
up endlessly?
Sharon
52 Weeks Down - Week 5 - Eat Seasonally
For a lot of us, now is a good time to start seasonal eating - there is a lot of food being produced right now. So commit, this week, to making a couple of seasonal meals, where most or all of the ingredients are things that are locally available.
The thing about eating this way is that it is so much better tasting than regular food, and it makes everything special. When asparagus is in season, we eat it as often as we can, and then we talk about it dreamily occasionally for months...but to have it at another time would diminish the pleasure. The same is true of everything we anticipate - right now there are huge strawberries with very little taste in the stores, but we're holding out for the first flush of ripe berries from our own patch. The children visit the little white berries every day, and we dream of them at night. But none of us wants to rush it with something old and false and not as flavorful.
There's a food to every season for us - from the first dandilions of spring, through rhubarb and asparagus, to the new potatoes, earthy morels and peas, green beans, apricots and sweet cherries of early summer, on to peaches, watermelon, sweet corn, peppers, eggplants and tomatoes. Then come the grapes and apples, the first cravings for hearty roots, dried beans, stews and squash. We await the late apples, and the first frosts that sweeten the brussels sprouts and kale, and even in the winter there are new flavors - the taste of sugary parsnips dug out of the ground in December and February, the first bok choy flush on the sun porch in January, the old hen in the pot for chicken and dumplings, the apples and squash that taste best after a few months in storage somehow transformed into something transcendent. And then...the dandilions, spinach and chives again and they've never tasted so good because they've been so long absent. We wouldn't eat any other way.
What's locally available right now? It depends on where you are, of course. In some places not too much. In others, all of summer bounty is already out. Where I am, we have lots of greens - lettuces, spinach, kale, arugula, fresh herbs, dandilions galore (it doesn't have to come from a farm!), asparagus, rhubarb, eggs, scallions, fiddleheads and radishes. What can you make with that?
Well, I made a salad nicoise the other day. I mixed all the greens with chives and sorrel, hardboiled some eggs, steamed some asparagus and added a can of tuna and some steamed potatoes from last year. We made a dijon vinagrette, and it was absolutely delicious with some home baked bread and white bean spread (cooked white beans, fresh sage and chives, garlic, lemon).
What else could you do with it? A lot of us don't eat a lot of greens, but our family can't get enough of them. Eli, my oldest, will gladly eat an entire plate of spinach sauteed with garlic, and Simon begs me to make asparagus sauteed with (vegetarian - comes from mushrooms) "oyster" sauce. We look forward to fresh spring greens. Instead of putting cucumber and tomato in our salads (since they aren't here yet), we might put chopped apple and dried cranberries (apple stored from last season). If we wanted it to be dinner, some blue cheese or cheddar crumbled in is good, or it could be a side dish to something else.
Maybe a spicy omlet? Most people know how to make an omelt, so just fill it with sauteed mushrooms, fresh greens lightly sauteed, perhaps dried tomatoes and hot pepper relish from last year (if you like that sort of thing), and some garlic, of course. Or you could go simpler - just the greens, some onions, fresh herbs.
Or you could make an asparagus sandwich. I used the last of the white bean spread on the bread, but I've also done this with cheese. I sprinkle some garlic vinegar on some toasted bread, add steamed asparagus and scallions, and melt cheese over the top (I like goat cheese, but you can use anything - lots of milk around this time of year).
Want dessert? We make rhubarb compote a lot in the spring - nothing too it, just chop up the rhubarb in the pot, add water (a little makes it thick, a lot makes it thin), sugar (or honey, or maple syrup), and we like a drop or two of almond extract.
Or how about bread pudding? Sooner or later, we all end up with stale bread, and there's milk and eggs galore now. Take your stale bread (if you don't have enough, you can stick it in the freezer until it accumulates), lay it in a pan, mix up a bunch of eggs and milk (an 8 inch pan might take 3 eggs and 2 cups of milk to soak it all - skim milk is fine, or whatever you have, cream will make it scarily rich, but really good), some sweetener (depending on how much you want), some vanilla or almond extract, cinnamon and any fruit you have lying around - overripe bananas aren't seasonal, but sometimes they are cheap and the store throws them out, so we take them. Or whatever berries are ripe (nothing here yet), some leftover rhubarb compote, applesauce, or perhaps you've got something else you'd like to put in - fresh mint, or lemon verbena or a rose geranium leaf or two. Just shove the bread in to the pan, pour the milk mixture over it, add fruit or flavorings and bake for 45 minutes. I shouldn't tell you how good this is with whipped cream, but it really is.
Happy Eating!!!
Sharon
The thing about eating this way is that it is so much better tasting than regular food, and it makes everything special. When asparagus is in season, we eat it as often as we can, and then we talk about it dreamily occasionally for months...but to have it at another time would diminish the pleasure. The same is true of everything we anticipate - right now there are huge strawberries with very little taste in the stores, but we're holding out for the first flush of ripe berries from our own patch. The children visit the little white berries every day, and we dream of them at night. But none of us wants to rush it with something old and false and not as flavorful.
There's a food to every season for us - from the first dandilions of spring, through rhubarb and asparagus, to the new potatoes, earthy morels and peas, green beans, apricots and sweet cherries of early summer, on to peaches, watermelon, sweet corn, peppers, eggplants and tomatoes. Then come the grapes and apples, the first cravings for hearty roots, dried beans, stews and squash. We await the late apples, and the first frosts that sweeten the brussels sprouts and kale, and even in the winter there are new flavors - the taste of sugary parsnips dug out of the ground in December and February, the first bok choy flush on the sun porch in January, the old hen in the pot for chicken and dumplings, the apples and squash that taste best after a few months in storage somehow transformed into something transcendent. And then...the dandilions, spinach and chives again and they've never tasted so good because they've been so long absent. We wouldn't eat any other way.
What's locally available right now? It depends on where you are, of course. In some places not too much. In others, all of summer bounty is already out. Where I am, we have lots of greens - lettuces, spinach, kale, arugula, fresh herbs, dandilions galore (it doesn't have to come from a farm!), asparagus, rhubarb, eggs, scallions, fiddleheads and radishes. What can you make with that?
Well, I made a salad nicoise the other day. I mixed all the greens with chives and sorrel, hardboiled some eggs, steamed some asparagus and added a can of tuna and some steamed potatoes from last year. We made a dijon vinagrette, and it was absolutely delicious with some home baked bread and white bean spread (cooked white beans, fresh sage and chives, garlic, lemon).
What else could you do with it? A lot of us don't eat a lot of greens, but our family can't get enough of them. Eli, my oldest, will gladly eat an entire plate of spinach sauteed with garlic, and Simon begs me to make asparagus sauteed with (vegetarian - comes from mushrooms) "oyster" sauce. We look forward to fresh spring greens. Instead of putting cucumber and tomato in our salads (since they aren't here yet), we might put chopped apple and dried cranberries (apple stored from last season). If we wanted it to be dinner, some blue cheese or cheddar crumbled in is good, or it could be a side dish to something else.
Maybe a spicy omlet? Most people know how to make an omelt, so just fill it with sauteed mushrooms, fresh greens lightly sauteed, perhaps dried tomatoes and hot pepper relish from last year (if you like that sort of thing), and some garlic, of course. Or you could go simpler - just the greens, some onions, fresh herbs.
Or you could make an asparagus sandwich. I used the last of the white bean spread on the bread, but I've also done this with cheese. I sprinkle some garlic vinegar on some toasted bread, add steamed asparagus and scallions, and melt cheese over the top (I like goat cheese, but you can use anything - lots of milk around this time of year).
Want dessert? We make rhubarb compote a lot in the spring - nothing too it, just chop up the rhubarb in the pot, add water (a little makes it thick, a lot makes it thin), sugar (or honey, or maple syrup), and we like a drop or two of almond extract.
Or how about bread pudding? Sooner or later, we all end up with stale bread, and there's milk and eggs galore now. Take your stale bread (if you don't have enough, you can stick it in the freezer until it accumulates), lay it in a pan, mix up a bunch of eggs and milk (an 8 inch pan might take 3 eggs and 2 cups of milk to soak it all - skim milk is fine, or whatever you have, cream will make it scarily rich, but really good), some sweetener (depending on how much you want), some vanilla or almond extract, cinnamon and any fruit you have lying around - overripe bananas aren't seasonal, but sometimes they are cheap and the store throws them out, so we take them. Or whatever berries are ripe (nothing here yet), some leftover rhubarb compote, applesauce, or perhaps you've got something else you'd like to put in - fresh mint, or lemon verbena or a rose geranium leaf or two. Just shove the bread in to the pan, pour the milk mixture over it, add fruit or flavorings and bake for 45 minutes. I shouldn't tell you how good this is with whipped cream, but it really is.
Happy Eating!!!
Sharon
Friday, May 25, 2007
The Riot for Austerity Meets the Emperor of Ice Cream
"Let be be finale of seem
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."
-Wallace Stevens
Miranda has graciously put together a yahoogroup for us to discuss our rioting for austerity project - she and I are having trouble keeping up with all the comments on all the different posts, so we're trying to bring the discussion together. You can subscribe by sending an email to this address 90PercentReduction-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (I'm supposed to be able to set up a link, but so far no luck - but if you go over to Miranda's blog at www.simplereduce.wordpress.com, you can do it there in a 1 click - have you noticed that Miranda is much cooler than I am? I have.)
You can still post comments on the blogs, or link in through the webring Miranda has put together, but the nice thing about a yahoogroups is that it allows us to have threaded discussions. I really hope you'll join. And don't forget, if you have a blog or website where you are discussing this, link it through Miranda!
I thought it might be worth pointing out why it is we're doing all this one more time. I think it is easy to get caught up in the logistics, and the worries - the "I can'ts" or "it is too hard." And what we are doing is, in one sense, very difficult. As someone says in some now-forgotten baseball movie I once saw, "Of course its hard. That's what makes it great. If it was easy, everyone would do it." I don't know if this being hard makes it great, but I think it is truly possible that by making it clear that this can be done, we might actually get to everyone doing it. And that would probably make us better than we are.
So here are 5 reasons to participate in the 90% reduction challenge.
1. Because we need to make be be the finale of seem. Instead of seeming to act, instead of talking about things like raising mileage standards on new cars, we need to deal with the reality that most of the cars have to come off the road. Instead of talking about biofuels as though they are meaningful substitute for oil, we need to start talking about feeding people in an increasingly hungry world. Much of what is happening now seems to be action, but isn't. The lie that we can keep things basically the same, only with windmills needs to be killed and buried, and the truth brought forth, with all its horny feet.
2. Because what we are doing is simply rational preparation for what is to come. Dave Pollard's analysis of the economic impact of further rises in gas prices is really important http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2007/05/23.html#a1873- the fact that we've absorbed 3.50 gallon gas is no indication that we can continue to absorb price rises. I think Pollard's conclusion is an important one, and should remind all of us that we *will* be making massive cuts in our energy usage sooner or later. But sooner is better for the earth and better for us - voluntary cuts are a lot less painful than mandated ones.
3. Because with great power comes great responsibility. We're rich. If you use a computer and can read this blog, the odds are excellent you are among the richest 10-15% of the people on the whole earth. Yes, I know you don't always feel rich, but you are. So making major, voluntary cuts is not impoverishing yourself - it is balancing the scales a little, making things a little more just.
4. Because in order to keep up our lifestyle, we're doing things like this: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,484661,00.html, and that's just plain wrong. Does anyone think that the damned war wasn't about the oil anymore? The less of it you buy, the less incentive you give the bastards who orchestrated this to keep killing them.
5. Oh, and it helps stop global warming too ;-).
Remember folks, the emperors are posturing scum who don't believe that other people matter as much as money and oil. I'm pinning my hopes on be, and the Emperor of Ice Cream!
Sharon
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."
-Wallace Stevens
Miranda has graciously put together a yahoogroup for us to discuss our rioting for austerity project - she and I are having trouble keeping up with all the comments on all the different posts, so we're trying to bring the discussion together. You can subscribe by sending an email to this address 90PercentReduction-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (I'm supposed to be able to set up a link, but so far no luck - but if you go over to Miranda's blog at www.simplereduce.wordpress.com, you can do it there in a 1 click - have you noticed that Miranda is much cooler than I am? I have.)
You can still post comments on the blogs, or link in through the webring Miranda has put together, but the nice thing about a yahoogroups is that it allows us to have threaded discussions. I really hope you'll join. And don't forget, if you have a blog or website where you are discussing this, link it through Miranda!
I thought it might be worth pointing out why it is we're doing all this one more time. I think it is easy to get caught up in the logistics, and the worries - the "I can'ts" or "it is too hard." And what we are doing is, in one sense, very difficult. As someone says in some now-forgotten baseball movie I once saw, "Of course its hard. That's what makes it great. If it was easy, everyone would do it." I don't know if this being hard makes it great, but I think it is truly possible that by making it clear that this can be done, we might actually get to everyone doing it. And that would probably make us better than we are.
So here are 5 reasons to participate in the 90% reduction challenge.
1. Because we need to make be be the finale of seem. Instead of seeming to act, instead of talking about things like raising mileage standards on new cars, we need to deal with the reality that most of the cars have to come off the road. Instead of talking about biofuels as though they are meaningful substitute for oil, we need to start talking about feeding people in an increasingly hungry world. Much of what is happening now seems to be action, but isn't. The lie that we can keep things basically the same, only with windmills needs to be killed and buried, and the truth brought forth, with all its horny feet.
2. Because what we are doing is simply rational preparation for what is to come. Dave Pollard's analysis of the economic impact of further rises in gas prices is really important http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2007/05/23.html#a1873- the fact that we've absorbed 3.50 gallon gas is no indication that we can continue to absorb price rises. I think Pollard's conclusion is an important one, and should remind all of us that we *will* be making massive cuts in our energy usage sooner or later. But sooner is better for the earth and better for us - voluntary cuts are a lot less painful than mandated ones.
3. Because with great power comes great responsibility. We're rich. If you use a computer and can read this blog, the odds are excellent you are among the richest 10-15% of the people on the whole earth. Yes, I know you don't always feel rich, but you are. So making major, voluntary cuts is not impoverishing yourself - it is balancing the scales a little, making things a little more just.
4. Because in order to keep up our lifestyle, we're doing things like this: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,484661,00.html, and that's just plain wrong. Does anyone think that the damned war wasn't about the oil anymore? The less of it you buy, the less incentive you give the bastards who orchestrated this to keep killing them.
5. Oh, and it helps stop global warming too ;-).
Remember folks, the emperors are posturing scum who don't believe that other people matter as much as money and oil. I'm pinning my hopes on be, and the Emperor of Ice Cream!
Sharon
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Childhood, Industrialized
One of the consequences of living in a rich culture is that we sometimes get confused about what really matters. A good example of this is a situation I came upon recently. I got to chatting with a local Mennonite couple that we know slightly (mostly because since we're religious Jews, we stick out as the other people in the neighborhood wearing funny hats), and they told me that they'd contacted their local social services office because they'd like to adopt children. Their five kids are getting older - two are now nearly grown, and they thought it would be nice to share their home with some kids who need one. They were interested in adopting hard-to-adopt kids, including kids with disabilities.
The thing is, not only did they end up not signing up for adoption training, but they were scared to death that a social worker would come investigate their own kids. Because when they told the woman they spoke to on the phone that they had no electricity or running water, the woman started asking pointed questions and demanded their address. When they tried to explain that this was for religious reasons, they were told, "oh yes, we've heard that before." Given that New York state has a plentiful Amish population, I'm sure they have.
And, in fact, in 2004 there was a case in North Carolina of parents of a family losing custody because of neglect. How had they neglected their children? The family was poor, and refused to take handouts or subsidies, and so lived without electricity or running water. By all accounts the children were loved and well fed, simply lived the way our great-grandparents all did.
In 2006, here in New York, the state labor board began invesigating Amish families for their labor practices. The Amish send their children to school only through eighth grade, after which the children are apprenticed out. The state began investigating them for child labor violations - even though the children were being educated in a trade. Apprenticeship has a long history. It can be abused, but there was no evidence that the children involved were having unusual or unjust demands made of them. The problem was that the children, instead of spending their time learning calculus, were learning to work with their hands, work we don't think of as "educational."
Or to use another example, my oldest son is disabled and not yet toilet trained. We would prefer to use cloth diapers with him, but the school legally will not permit my son to use cloth. It doesn't matter that they wouldn't have to do anything more than send the dirty diapers home at the end of the day, instead of throwing them in the trash. The law is the law, so we buy disposables. Fortunately, we can afford them. But if we couldn't it wouldn't matter.
Or even simpler. I still remember the neighbor of my MIL in New York City who asked, "what activities do you do with your child." The child in question was about 15 months old. So when I said we really didn't do any - that we played outside and went to the library occasionally, she didn't quite know how to respond. Parenting a toddler, for her, was taking them to music and art classes. To me, it was having him help to hang the laundry, but I knew what she was asking - was I giving my child a good start?
We've become so accustomed to our wealth and comfort that even childhood has been industrialized. You can now literally lose custody of your children for being poor, or living the way your grandmother did. Good parenting, to a large degree, is defined as taking your kids places so that other people can teach them things, and buying them things - whether toys or experiences. We want our children to have "every opportunity," and most opportunities we value are things you can purchase - that trip to Disneyland, the week at space camp, the computer, the beautiful children's books.
There are two problems with this. The first is that we're raising consumptive children who are being taught that what they can buy matters more than anything. This has been exhaustively documented in books like _Born to Buy_ and _Affluenza_. Among other things, the authors of Affluenza observe,
As affluenza becomes an airwave-borne childhood epidemic, America's
children pay a high price. Not only does their lifestyle undermine the
children's physical health, but their mental health seems to suffer too.
Psychologists report constantly rising rates of teenage depression and
thoughts about suicide, and a tripling of actual child suicide rates since
the 1960s.
Much of this stems from the overscheduling of children to prepare them
for our adult world of consumerism, workaholism and intense competition.
In some places, this reaches truly ridiculous levels. Since the passage of the
No Child Left Behind At, nearly 20 percent of American school districts
have banned recess for elementary school children. The idea, as one
Tacoma, Washington, school administrator put it, is to 'maximize instruction
time to rpepare the children to compete in the global economy.' This is nuts
We're talking second graders here....
What kind of values do our children learn from their exposure to
affluenza? In a recent poll, 93 percent of teenage girls cited shopping
as their favorite activity. Fewer than 5 percent listed, 'helping others.'
In 1967, two thirds of American college students said 'developing a
meaningful philosophy of life' was 'very important' to them, while fewer
than one-third said the same about 'making a lot of money.' By 1997
those figures were reversed. A 2004 poll at UCLA foudn that entering
freshmen ranked becoming 'very well off financially' ahead of all
other goals.
Juliet Schor survyed children aged ten to thirteen for their
responses to the statement 'I want to make a lot of money when I grow up.'
Of those children, 63 percent agreed,; only 7 percent thought otherwise.
Asked about their 'highest priority' in a 1999 poll taken at the University
of Washington, 42 percent of those surveyd cited, "looking good/having good
hair." Another 18 percent listed "staying inebriated," while only 6 percent
checked "learning about the world."
(Affluenza, 61-62)
We have come to believe that good parenting is something you buy, and our children have, as children do, understood us a bit too well - they have learned that the things that matter are all things you buy. We no longer think of poverty as ordinary - we no longer look at a small, simple shelter, with enough food and some clean clothes and love and say "that's like our house." Because our house doesn't look like that. And we have a lot more than that. And most people look at simple, everyday, ordinary poverty with fear, distaste and a hint of judgement - ordinary people must have failed somehow. Our children know that. They know that not having stuff and being poor are bad - even if they are poor. Especially if they are poor. Think about that - in a world where all of us are a little less rich, what are we teaching our kids?
But the second problem is even more insidious. It isn't just that we're raising children whose morals are deeply skewed, but more importantly, we're creating a culture in which good parenting is equated with being wealthy. That is, good parenting has become not the provision of love and basic food and shelter, but a host of things that are both superficial and impossible to achieve if you are very poor. In a world where more of us may become poor someday, that means any one of us could face state intervention because of things we can't control. If electricity and running water, your own room and not having to do too many chores are requirements for an ordinary life, what happens if those things cease to be available?
A friend who has read about these CPS cases emailed me recently and asked whether I should keep talking about all the energy cuts we're making. And I worry that she might be right - maybe I shouldn't. For now I still am. But I am aware that in cutting my energy usage down to what represents a fair share, I am risking something more than discomfort - and all parents who do so are taking those risks. That's a fearful thing, if we are to enter into a world where all of us take only our fair share.
I tend to hope that these are isolated cases, and that as long as we love our children and take good care of them, use good judgement and keep them safe, that is enough. I don't demonize social workers -my mother worked for DSS in Massachusetts for more than a decade, and I've met enough foster kids to know that most social workers are honorable and do the best they can at an overwhelming and difficult job. And they don't exist in isolation - they are products of their culture, and it is the culture as a whole that is the problem here. And sometimes poverty does come with all sorts of bad stuff. But not always. And if we cease to be able to seperate out ordinary human poverty from real suffering, we lose something - something that may matter to us personally, and that matters to our society.
Economic status is not virtue. We do not have our wealth because we are better or smarter or wiser than poor people - in this country or any other. I doubt many people would admit to believing that the poor are inferior, and yet we act as though there is something inherent that divides us from the ordinary poor people around us. And we live our lives as though we view material things as more important than kindness, a sense of justice or love for one another. Unfortunately, our children see this. We live our lives as though we are good because we are rich. And children, being children, understand the underlying message. They learn that poor is bad, that wealth is what matters, and they begin to judge us by the standards we teach them.
Children have begun to substitute the objects in their lives for the virtues we wish for them. A good home is good not because of what it does for the child, but because of what it has. And that's wrong - it is a wrong way of thinking, and it may yet come back to haunt us. We start substituting things for experiences, and that way lies...well, we're finding out. It does not appear to lead to closer or happier families.
The problem is us. The longer we think that normalizing being rich and priveleged and lucky will keep the wolf away from our door, the longer we pretend we can all live like the people on tv, the longer we pretend our children hear what we say, but don't watch what we do, the worse off we'll be. And the richer we are, the poorer we are - that is, the less likely we are to raise children who fully understand what self-sacrifice, honor, courage and integrity are - because, in the end, we cannot have those virtues and be rich ourselves - not in a world of increasing scarcity, where our wealth is borne on the backs of others.
Sharon
The thing is, not only did they end up not signing up for adoption training, but they were scared to death that a social worker would come investigate their own kids. Because when they told the woman they spoke to on the phone that they had no electricity or running water, the woman started asking pointed questions and demanded their address. When they tried to explain that this was for religious reasons, they were told, "oh yes, we've heard that before." Given that New York state has a plentiful Amish population, I'm sure they have.
And, in fact, in 2004 there was a case in North Carolina of parents of a family losing custody because of neglect. How had they neglected their children? The family was poor, and refused to take handouts or subsidies, and so lived without electricity or running water. By all accounts the children were loved and well fed, simply lived the way our great-grandparents all did.
In 2006, here in New York, the state labor board began invesigating Amish families for their labor practices. The Amish send their children to school only through eighth grade, after which the children are apprenticed out. The state began investigating them for child labor violations - even though the children were being educated in a trade. Apprenticeship has a long history. It can be abused, but there was no evidence that the children involved were having unusual or unjust demands made of them. The problem was that the children, instead of spending their time learning calculus, were learning to work with their hands, work we don't think of as "educational."
Or to use another example, my oldest son is disabled and not yet toilet trained. We would prefer to use cloth diapers with him, but the school legally will not permit my son to use cloth. It doesn't matter that they wouldn't have to do anything more than send the dirty diapers home at the end of the day, instead of throwing them in the trash. The law is the law, so we buy disposables. Fortunately, we can afford them. But if we couldn't it wouldn't matter.
Or even simpler. I still remember the neighbor of my MIL in New York City who asked, "what activities do you do with your child." The child in question was about 15 months old. So when I said we really didn't do any - that we played outside and went to the library occasionally, she didn't quite know how to respond. Parenting a toddler, for her, was taking them to music and art classes. To me, it was having him help to hang the laundry, but I knew what she was asking - was I giving my child a good start?
We've become so accustomed to our wealth and comfort that even childhood has been industrialized. You can now literally lose custody of your children for being poor, or living the way your grandmother did. Good parenting, to a large degree, is defined as taking your kids places so that other people can teach them things, and buying them things - whether toys or experiences. We want our children to have "every opportunity," and most opportunities we value are things you can purchase - that trip to Disneyland, the week at space camp, the computer, the beautiful children's books.
There are two problems with this. The first is that we're raising consumptive children who are being taught that what they can buy matters more than anything. This has been exhaustively documented in books like _Born to Buy_ and _Affluenza_. Among other things, the authors of Affluenza observe,
As affluenza becomes an airwave-borne childhood epidemic, America's
children pay a high price. Not only does their lifestyle undermine the
children's physical health, but their mental health seems to suffer too.
Psychologists report constantly rising rates of teenage depression and
thoughts about suicide, and a tripling of actual child suicide rates since
the 1960s.
Much of this stems from the overscheduling of children to prepare them
for our adult world of consumerism, workaholism and intense competition.
In some places, this reaches truly ridiculous levels. Since the passage of the
No Child Left Behind At, nearly 20 percent of American school districts
have banned recess for elementary school children. The idea, as one
Tacoma, Washington, school administrator put it, is to 'maximize instruction
time to rpepare the children to compete in the global economy.' This is nuts
We're talking second graders here....
What kind of values do our children learn from their exposure to
affluenza? In a recent poll, 93 percent of teenage girls cited shopping
as their favorite activity. Fewer than 5 percent listed, 'helping others.'
In 1967, two thirds of American college students said 'developing a
meaningful philosophy of life' was 'very important' to them, while fewer
than one-third said the same about 'making a lot of money.' By 1997
those figures were reversed. A 2004 poll at UCLA foudn that entering
freshmen ranked becoming 'very well off financially' ahead of all
other goals.
Juliet Schor survyed children aged ten to thirteen for their
responses to the statement 'I want to make a lot of money when I grow up.'
Of those children, 63 percent agreed,; only 7 percent thought otherwise.
Asked about their 'highest priority' in a 1999 poll taken at the University
of Washington, 42 percent of those surveyd cited, "looking good/having good
hair." Another 18 percent listed "staying inebriated," while only 6 percent
checked "learning about the world."
(Affluenza, 61-62)
We have come to believe that good parenting is something you buy, and our children have, as children do, understood us a bit too well - they have learned that the things that matter are all things you buy. We no longer think of poverty as ordinary - we no longer look at a small, simple shelter, with enough food and some clean clothes and love and say "that's like our house." Because our house doesn't look like that. And we have a lot more than that. And most people look at simple, everyday, ordinary poverty with fear, distaste and a hint of judgement - ordinary people must have failed somehow. Our children know that. They know that not having stuff and being poor are bad - even if they are poor. Especially if they are poor. Think about that - in a world where all of us are a little less rich, what are we teaching our kids?
But the second problem is even more insidious. It isn't just that we're raising children whose morals are deeply skewed, but more importantly, we're creating a culture in which good parenting is equated with being wealthy. That is, good parenting has become not the provision of love and basic food and shelter, but a host of things that are both superficial and impossible to achieve if you are very poor. In a world where more of us may become poor someday, that means any one of us could face state intervention because of things we can't control. If electricity and running water, your own room and not having to do too many chores are requirements for an ordinary life, what happens if those things cease to be available?
A friend who has read about these CPS cases emailed me recently and asked whether I should keep talking about all the energy cuts we're making. And I worry that she might be right - maybe I shouldn't. For now I still am. But I am aware that in cutting my energy usage down to what represents a fair share, I am risking something more than discomfort - and all parents who do so are taking those risks. That's a fearful thing, if we are to enter into a world where all of us take only our fair share.
I tend to hope that these are isolated cases, and that as long as we love our children and take good care of them, use good judgement and keep them safe, that is enough. I don't demonize social workers -my mother worked for DSS in Massachusetts for more than a decade, and I've met enough foster kids to know that most social workers are honorable and do the best they can at an overwhelming and difficult job. And they don't exist in isolation - they are products of their culture, and it is the culture as a whole that is the problem here. And sometimes poverty does come with all sorts of bad stuff. But not always. And if we cease to be able to seperate out ordinary human poverty from real suffering, we lose something - something that may matter to us personally, and that matters to our society.
Economic status is not virtue. We do not have our wealth because we are better or smarter or wiser than poor people - in this country or any other. I doubt many people would admit to believing that the poor are inferior, and yet we act as though there is something inherent that divides us from the ordinary poor people around us. And we live our lives as though we view material things as more important than kindness, a sense of justice or love for one another. Unfortunately, our children see this. We live our lives as though we are good because we are rich. And children, being children, understand the underlying message. They learn that poor is bad, that wealth is what matters, and they begin to judge us by the standards we teach them.
Children have begun to substitute the objects in their lives for the virtues we wish for them. A good home is good not because of what it does for the child, but because of what it has. And that's wrong - it is a wrong way of thinking, and it may yet come back to haunt us. We start substituting things for experiences, and that way lies...well, we're finding out. It does not appear to lead to closer or happier families.
The problem is us. The longer we think that normalizing being rich and priveleged and lucky will keep the wolf away from our door, the longer we pretend we can all live like the people on tv, the longer we pretend our children hear what we say, but don't watch what we do, the worse off we'll be. And the richer we are, the poorer we are - that is, the less likely we are to raise children who fully understand what self-sacrifice, honor, courage and integrity are - because, in the end, we cannot have those virtues and be rich ourselves - not in a world of increasing scarcity, where our wealth is borne on the backs of others.
Sharon
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Austerity Riot Intro and FAQ are Up!
Here's the Intro to the Austerity Riot/90% Reduction Project: http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/riot-for-austerity-90-reduction-project-intro/
Here's the FAQ:http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/90-faqs/
And if you are looking for them, here are the rules and regs, over at Miranda's site where they look so much cooler:http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/2007/05/17/90-reduction-the-rules/
If I can ever figure it out, I'll put a permanent link like the ones Miranda has on my blog. Don't hold your breath for technical competence from me, though ;-).
Ok, gotta go garden - the weather is finally decent for a change!
Sharon
Here's the FAQ:http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/90-faqs/
And if you are looking for them, here are the rules and regs, over at Miranda's site where they look so much cooler:http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/2007/05/17/90-reduction-the-rules/
If I can ever figure it out, I'll put a permanent link like the ones Miranda has on my blog. Don't hold your breath for technical competence from me, though ;-).
Ok, gotta go garden - the weather is finally decent for a change!
Sharon
Monday, May 21, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 4 - Grow Food
Now there are so many good reasons to grow your own food that it seems silly to list them, but I will anyone. No melamine. No carcinogens. No GMOs. You know where it came from, and where it has been. Your kids can pick a strawberry or tomato and pop it their mouth without wondering whether they'll get cancer. Oh, and it tastes better, is more nutritious, fresher and nicer. And it doesn't burn fossil fuels, warm the planet, or require a hog manure lagoon. Really one of those win-win situations.
If you haven't been paying attention to the contamination of our food supply, you might want to check out these two articles, detailing the simple truth - the melamine isn't really all that unusual. What's abnormal is that we noticed.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21krugman.html&OQ=_rQ3D1&OP=6734ad29Q2FNQ24!Q2ANignppiNjdd,NdfNjQ25NpBQ5CuQ5CpuNjQ251n(xQ60yuPWiQ60Q7B
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/19/AR2007051901273.html
Now some of us already have big gardens, and some of us are just getting started. This week's project is to grow more of your own food - in many places, now is a good time to start your garden. If it isn't - if now is your dry season or your winter, just hold this thought and revisit during garden season.
Now if you don't grow any of your own food, the step up from 0 may seem like a big deal, but it isn't really very hard. Get a windowbox or two. Or a pot. You don't have to buy it - cut off the top of a big tin can that you get from a restaurant nearby, and poke holes in the bottom. A 5 gallon bucket (again, with holes), or just about anything will do. Put it in a sunny spot. Add dirt, and your own compost if possible. Plant some food. Put in a few basil plants and a head of lettuce. Or if you have a big container, like a 5 gallon bucket, put in a cherry tomato, with a few lettuce plants underneath. In your window boxes, plant some gem marigolds (good in salad), nasturtiums (even better in salad) and arugula - voila, a decorative salad. Pat Meadows, who knows more than anyone I've ever met about container gardening (she used to run a seed company devoted to container-friendly varieties) has a great container gardening yahoo group - well worth joining by sending an email here:
ediblecontainergardens-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Or you could join a community garden and get a plot of land. There's no better way to learn to garden than hanging out with lots of other gardeners. Community gardens are cool, and one of those plots is a great way to learn to maximize your return.
Or perhaps you can start on your own lawn. You might consider checking out the books _Food Not Lawns_ and _Micro-Eco Farming_, not to mention Toby Hemenway's wonderful _Gaia's Garden_ about home scale permaculture. Maybe replace some of your foundation plantings with blueberries while you are starting your garden. You don't have to dig raised beds or do anything fancy - just lay some plain cardboard or newspaper over the ground, wet it thoroughly, put some compost, grass clippings and maybe composted manure (or whatever you've got) on the ground and plant right into what you've made. It really isn't that much work!
Don't have enough lawn? How about growing in a neighbor's yard and sharing the proceeds. Aaron has a terrific article about how he did just that with an elderly neighbor. This could both give you more food and improve your community. Here's that article - well worth a read, and one of his best. http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/search?q=sunny+spot
If you've already got a garden, what about expanding it? Consider adding fruit trees and bushes, or if you mostly grow food for fresh eating, how about dry corn for cornbread and dry beans? Perhaps you simply need to grow more potatoes or apples or cabbage or onions to last you through the winter? Or maybe if you built a simple coldframe, you could have fresh greens for salad through the whole winter. Perhaps you are one of those people who puts your garden in on Memorial Day and harvests everything before the first frost - you could have fresh food for months more on either side in many cases, with simple season extension techniques like cold frames and row covers.
Or maybe you already do all that. Well, how about a bigger challenge. Maybe you've already got a small farm and livestock. Do you grow any food for your animals? What about some small grains like buckwheat, oats or corn for your hens and your family? You can grow all small grains like grasses in an ordinary garden plot and thresh and eat them - or just give them whole to the hens or goats or whathaveyou. Or maybe you need to expand - maybe you grow all the food you need - could you start a small CSA? When people hear the word "CSA" they think "must be a big farm." But that's not true - we started with 5 customers, and a CSA can be as simple as "I'll grow enough veggies for both of our families if you'll buy the seeds."
There's a huge range of possibilities, depending on where you are. But everything you do to produce your own food makes you more secure, your family healthier and improves the state of the earth. All you need is dirt and a seed to get started - you can grow as you go.
Sharon
If you haven't been paying attention to the contamination of our food supply, you might want to check out these two articles, detailing the simple truth - the melamine isn't really all that unusual. What's abnormal is that we noticed.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21krugman.html&OQ=_rQ3D1&OP=6734ad29Q2FNQ24!Q2ANignppiNjdd,NdfNjQ25NpBQ5CuQ5CpuNjQ251n(xQ60yuPWiQ60Q7B
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/19/AR2007051901273.html
Now some of us already have big gardens, and some of us are just getting started. This week's project is to grow more of your own food - in many places, now is a good time to start your garden. If it isn't - if now is your dry season or your winter, just hold this thought and revisit during garden season.
Now if you don't grow any of your own food, the step up from 0 may seem like a big deal, but it isn't really very hard. Get a windowbox or two. Or a pot. You don't have to buy it - cut off the top of a big tin can that you get from a restaurant nearby, and poke holes in the bottom. A 5 gallon bucket (again, with holes), or just about anything will do. Put it in a sunny spot. Add dirt, and your own compost if possible. Plant some food. Put in a few basil plants and a head of lettuce. Or if you have a big container, like a 5 gallon bucket, put in a cherry tomato, with a few lettuce plants underneath. In your window boxes, plant some gem marigolds (good in salad), nasturtiums (even better in salad) and arugula - voila, a decorative salad. Pat Meadows, who knows more than anyone I've ever met about container gardening (she used to run a seed company devoted to container-friendly varieties) has a great container gardening yahoo group - well worth joining by sending an email here:
ediblecontainergardens-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Or you could join a community garden and get a plot of land. There's no better way to learn to garden than hanging out with lots of other gardeners. Community gardens are cool, and one of those plots is a great way to learn to maximize your return.
Or perhaps you can start on your own lawn. You might consider checking out the books _Food Not Lawns_ and _Micro-Eco Farming_, not to mention Toby Hemenway's wonderful _Gaia's Garden_ about home scale permaculture. Maybe replace some of your foundation plantings with blueberries while you are starting your garden. You don't have to dig raised beds or do anything fancy - just lay some plain cardboard or newspaper over the ground, wet it thoroughly, put some compost, grass clippings and maybe composted manure (or whatever you've got) on the ground and plant right into what you've made. It really isn't that much work!
Don't have enough lawn? How about growing in a neighbor's yard and sharing the proceeds. Aaron has a terrific article about how he did just that with an elderly neighbor. This could both give you more food and improve your community. Here's that article - well worth a read, and one of his best. http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/search?q=sunny+spot
If you've already got a garden, what about expanding it? Consider adding fruit trees and bushes, or if you mostly grow food for fresh eating, how about dry corn for cornbread and dry beans? Perhaps you simply need to grow more potatoes or apples or cabbage or onions to last you through the winter? Or maybe if you built a simple coldframe, you could have fresh greens for salad through the whole winter. Perhaps you are one of those people who puts your garden in on Memorial Day and harvests everything before the first frost - you could have fresh food for months more on either side in many cases, with simple season extension techniques like cold frames and row covers.
Or maybe you already do all that. Well, how about a bigger challenge. Maybe you've already got a small farm and livestock. Do you grow any food for your animals? What about some small grains like buckwheat, oats or corn for your hens and your family? You can grow all small grains like grasses in an ordinary garden plot and thresh and eat them - or just give them whole to the hens or goats or whathaveyou. Or maybe you need to expand - maybe you grow all the food you need - could you start a small CSA? When people hear the word "CSA" they think "must be a big farm." But that's not true - we started with 5 customers, and a CSA can be as simple as "I'll grow enough veggies for both of our families if you'll buy the seeds."
There's a huge range of possibilities, depending on where you are. But everything you do to produce your own food makes you more secure, your family healthier and improves the state of the earth. All you need is dirt and a seed to get started - you can grow as you go.
Sharon
Will Peak Oil Save us from Global Warming?
There's a swedish article over at energy bulletin worth having a look at:http://www.energybulletin.net/29845.html. In it, Kjell Aleklett of Uppsala University argues that we simply don't have enough carbon to burn to bring about the worst case scenarios of global warming, and that the energy crisis will prevent the outside temperature increases.
I know I'll be watching the responses to this piece, because I'm certainly no climate scientist. In many ways I'd be thrilled to see that Aleklett was correct - I think dealing with peak oil but not with global warming is a much more manageable situation.
On the other hand, I have my doubts, particularly because Aleklett's arguments are based on the IPCC numbers, which are terrifically conservative. The thing is, the Potsdam Institute estimates that our best chance of keeping temperatures below the critical 2 degree threshold means keeping the parts per million of atmospheric carbon below 440 (at which point have 2 out of 3 odds - not that great - of maintaining the lower temperatures). But the IPCC estimate is that we are now at 469 ppm - that is, in order to stabilize the climate we have to lower the atmospheric carbon levels dramatically, because we're already over the line. The IPCC, being a political document, holds the 500 ppm line, but the facts don't back this up. At 500 ppm, we have only a 30% chance of avoiding the critical 2 degrees of warming.
Now Aleklett is right that we probably do have to hold atmospheric carbon levels for some time in order to have a dramatic warming effect, but I think his article, because of its focus on the IPCC, underestimates the time we need to be burning carbon. Even if the direst predictions are right - that oil is past peak, natural gas is about to peak and coal will do so within the next 10-15 years, that means at least another decade of heavy carbon energy use, including a great deal of coal. While it is true that the IPCC models show long term human carbon contributions, what may matter most is simply having enough carbon long enough to get the earth into an irrevocable cycle. In fact, emissions rates are rising much faster than the IPCC report indicates - a paper published today by scientists at the Global Carbon Project shows that the rate of emissions increase tripled between 2000 and 2004 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/05/22/1179601340054.html. We're burning more carbon, faster, than the IPCC or anyone expected, which means that the IPCC models are dangerously conservative, and Aleklett's analysis is impacted by that.
Now the reason we're trying to hold things below the 2 degree mark is this - climate change has an ugly tendency to accellerate on its own, but most of the things that cause it to snowball are left out of the IPCC report because they are controversial. No one knows exactly how much methane the seas might release, or the soils. So for the most part, the IPCC models leave out the worst possible consequences - that we might already or soon be past the point of no return, at which the earth simply takes over. By setting his baseline against the very conservative IPCC report, which includes comparatively few of the factors that might cause accelleration, Aleklett ignores the reality that we may get to the worst case scenarios even given peak oil.
Now were these factors merely speculative, there would be a case for Aleklett's arguments. But while the exact impact of these factors is not known, most of them represent *observed* phenomena - not speculation about what might happen, but things that are already occurring. That is, this week a report was released that showed that the southern oceans are now saturated and ceasing to absorb carbon http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070517.wocean0517/BNStory/Science/home
Last year, British scientists began to observe soils releasing their carbon, and artic researches spotted bubbles of methane newly released by northern seas. And of course, the rainforests are already heating up, catching fire and burning - tens of thousands of acres have done so in the last year.
Is Aleklett's analysis possible? It is. Is it complete - I don't think so. For example, none of these take into account the issue of global dimming, which by itself might be enough to push the climate over the edge. Nobel winning professor Paul Creutzen estimates that if global dimming - the particulate emissions that cut the sun's impact on the earth - were taken out, temperature rises would be between 7 and 10 - on the apocalyptic end of things. Global dimming is a particularly important factor if Aleklett is right, because those particulate emissions that are keeping the sun from heating up the planet even more are also products of fossil energy consumption - that is, as we are priced out of fossil energy, or begin to radically conserve, the sun's heating effect is likely to increase dramatically. Even demand destruction is likely to accellerate global warming - one of those rock and a hard places things.
What Aleklett's essay seems to me to imply is something that worries me a great deal - we may have time to up our emissions, but not enough time to get them down. Think about it this way - let us say that Aleklett is correct, and that all three major fossil sources will have peaked by the end of the next decade, and energy prices will get off their undulating plateaus shortly and begin to rise even more radically. What does that do to the world economy? What does that do to our daily lives? And how likely is it that we will then begin a major build out of renewable energy, infrastructure changes, etc...?
The thing is, switching over, even to a very limited and low energy society (one which is largely human powered), much less the "we can have it all with renewables fantasy that most people cling to" - is a hugely energy and money intensive project, much more so that simply going on the way we are. And it depends on our basic ability to keep the economic balls up in the air - that is, having enough capital to invest in even basic public transport, letting our hospitals run on renewables and reinsulating our houses depends on the economy going forward. And right now, our current, debt based economy going forward depends on the economy continuing to grow, which requires a ton of energy.
It is much less energy and capital intensive to simply go on the way we are, letting the market gradually price people out of things like gas and electricity. So if we're as close to the end, there's a good chance that we can keep things going as long as we don't try and mess with it too much, but we'll have a tough time starting big projects - that is, we have the ability to keep burning the carbon, but not the ability to stop burning it in a productive way.
Aleklett is absolutely right that an analysis of the impact of peak oil on global warming is absolutely necessary, and reliable energy numbers are necessary. I have my doubts that he's right that peak oil will stave off global warming, though.
Sharon
I know I'll be watching the responses to this piece, because I'm certainly no climate scientist. In many ways I'd be thrilled to see that Aleklett was correct - I think dealing with peak oil but not with global warming is a much more manageable situation.
On the other hand, I have my doubts, particularly because Aleklett's arguments are based on the IPCC numbers, which are terrifically conservative. The thing is, the Potsdam Institute estimates that our best chance of keeping temperatures below the critical 2 degree threshold means keeping the parts per million of atmospheric carbon below 440 (at which point have 2 out of 3 odds - not that great - of maintaining the lower temperatures). But the IPCC estimate is that we are now at 469 ppm - that is, in order to stabilize the climate we have to lower the atmospheric carbon levels dramatically, because we're already over the line. The IPCC, being a political document, holds the 500 ppm line, but the facts don't back this up. At 500 ppm, we have only a 30% chance of avoiding the critical 2 degrees of warming.
Now Aleklett is right that we probably do have to hold atmospheric carbon levels for some time in order to have a dramatic warming effect, but I think his article, because of its focus on the IPCC, underestimates the time we need to be burning carbon. Even if the direst predictions are right - that oil is past peak, natural gas is about to peak and coal will do so within the next 10-15 years, that means at least another decade of heavy carbon energy use, including a great deal of coal. While it is true that the IPCC models show long term human carbon contributions, what may matter most is simply having enough carbon long enough to get the earth into an irrevocable cycle. In fact, emissions rates are rising much faster than the IPCC report indicates - a paper published today by scientists at the Global Carbon Project shows that the rate of emissions increase tripled between 2000 and 2004 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/05/22/1179601340054.html. We're burning more carbon, faster, than the IPCC or anyone expected, which means that the IPCC models are dangerously conservative, and Aleklett's analysis is impacted by that.
Now the reason we're trying to hold things below the 2 degree mark is this - climate change has an ugly tendency to accellerate on its own, but most of the things that cause it to snowball are left out of the IPCC report because they are controversial. No one knows exactly how much methane the seas might release, or the soils. So for the most part, the IPCC models leave out the worst possible consequences - that we might already or soon be past the point of no return, at which the earth simply takes over. By setting his baseline against the very conservative IPCC report, which includes comparatively few of the factors that might cause accelleration, Aleklett ignores the reality that we may get to the worst case scenarios even given peak oil.
Now were these factors merely speculative, there would be a case for Aleklett's arguments. But while the exact impact of these factors is not known, most of them represent *observed* phenomena - not speculation about what might happen, but things that are already occurring. That is, this week a report was released that showed that the southern oceans are now saturated and ceasing to absorb carbon http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070517.wocean0517/BNStory/Science/home
Last year, British scientists began to observe soils releasing their carbon, and artic researches spotted bubbles of methane newly released by northern seas. And of course, the rainforests are already heating up, catching fire and burning - tens of thousands of acres have done so in the last year.
Is Aleklett's analysis possible? It is. Is it complete - I don't think so. For example, none of these take into account the issue of global dimming, which by itself might be enough to push the climate over the edge. Nobel winning professor Paul Creutzen estimates that if global dimming - the particulate emissions that cut the sun's impact on the earth - were taken out, temperature rises would be between 7 and 10 - on the apocalyptic end of things. Global dimming is a particularly important factor if Aleklett is right, because those particulate emissions that are keeping the sun from heating up the planet even more are also products of fossil energy consumption - that is, as we are priced out of fossil energy, or begin to radically conserve, the sun's heating effect is likely to increase dramatically. Even demand destruction is likely to accellerate global warming - one of those rock and a hard places things.
What Aleklett's essay seems to me to imply is something that worries me a great deal - we may have time to up our emissions, but not enough time to get them down. Think about it this way - let us say that Aleklett is correct, and that all three major fossil sources will have peaked by the end of the next decade, and energy prices will get off their undulating plateaus shortly and begin to rise even more radically. What does that do to the world economy? What does that do to our daily lives? And how likely is it that we will then begin a major build out of renewable energy, infrastructure changes, etc...?
The thing is, switching over, even to a very limited and low energy society (one which is largely human powered), much less the "we can have it all with renewables fantasy that most people cling to" - is a hugely energy and money intensive project, much more so that simply going on the way we are. And it depends on our basic ability to keep the economic balls up in the air - that is, having enough capital to invest in even basic public transport, letting our hospitals run on renewables and reinsulating our houses depends on the economy going forward. And right now, our current, debt based economy going forward depends on the economy continuing to grow, which requires a ton of energy.
It is much less energy and capital intensive to simply go on the way we are, letting the market gradually price people out of things like gas and electricity. So if we're as close to the end, there's a good chance that we can keep things going as long as we don't try and mess with it too much, but we'll have a tough time starting big projects - that is, we have the ability to keep burning the carbon, but not the ability to stop burning it in a productive way.
Aleklett is absolutely right that an analysis of the impact of peak oil on global warming is absolutely necessary, and reliable energy numbers are necessary. I have my doubts that he's right that peak oil will stave off global warming, though.
Sharon
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Getting My Numbers Down
I promise, the FAQ is coming early this week. In the meantime, I'm finding myself mulling over the ways that I can get my numbers down. A surprising amount of it involves buying new stuff, which is worrisome in some ways, but also, I think inevitable. That is, I think all of us are going to end up spending some money this year if we're to make this a permanent way of life. Hopefully what I save will offset them economically, but there will be an energy cost.
Miranda and I have been worrying about how to calculate those purchases - should we give everyone a break on their responsibility for the emissions of things that will lead us to fewer emissions in the long run? Miranda, I think, is pro, and for good reasons - she points out that people want to succeed, and she's afraid that we're risking making people feel like they've failed right up front. So even though this year is to be transitional, she thinks we should give credits for those necessary things - insulation, or clothelines or solar ovens - that make this possible in a comfortable way. And I think she's got a point.
On the other hand, there's an anal part of me that says "But even good stuff creates emissions in manufacture. Shouldn't we be responsible for those things, even if we need them." I also worry because I think that reasoning is seductive to the selfish part of me. I've had people say to me, "You should come talk in our far away place, because you'll help more people save more energy." But I wonder - what if I don't? What if I'm not quite inspiring enough, and I'm just using this as an excuse to take a trip? What if people don't go home and plant gardens or stop using their dryers, and then I just flew all this way? All of which is just a way of saying that I worry about my own temptation when excuses are put my way. Would it be just a little too tempting to buy something mostly just to buy it, rather than because of its environmental benefits. I know myself well enough to know I like loopholes ;-). Anyway, we're still figuring this one out, but I suspect I'm tarring other people with my own occasional bouts of weakness here. Apologies if I'm maligning the rest of you by thinking you might be as easily tempted into cheating as me ;-).
Speaking of cheating, am I the only person out there doing this who is having a "oh, crap, gotta do X before it starts "counting."" Now of course, we all know it counts anyway, so I'm trying really hard to keep those urges under control, but I think I will get a couple of things I need anyway - shoes that my oldest son can't take off easily and lose in the yard, more clothespins, vodka for making homemade liqueurs, and my husband will be buying some beer. I will not buy yarn. I will not buy books. I really, really won't buy yarn or books. I believe my own statements. Really.
Ok, down to the plans for how to reduce my emissions. The one I'm worried the most about is water. First of all, I really like my shower (often the only cone of silence I get in a day), and my kids are usually so filthy by the end of the day that spot washing them would require more water than a bath does. Second of all, you should see the clothing at the end of the day. It poured here for two days, and Eli resembled the swamp thing from the comic book more than a child by the end of the afternoon. In weather like this, with the six of us, and two and half in diapers, I wash every day.
I also need to set up a more formal grey water system than "dumping the water out in buckets." Which means a call to our friend Woody, who fixes cool stuff and tries not to laugh at how un-handy we are. He's already building us two nice looking composting toilets, so we can stop using the commode we inherited from Eric's grandparents for that purpose. Pee already goes straight to the garden anyway. But I'm definitely going to have to think about this water one. Do you think the children will stop getting dirty any time soon ;-)? On the bright side, Isaiah is nearly toilet trained - hurray! He wore underwear to synagogue this weekend, which is quite a milestone. Let us just say that that's one of the last bastions of training pants.
Electricity - I think I'm going to have to get a laptop. The desktop uses a crazy amount of power. The thing is, it is probably necessary anyway, now that Simon wants to use the computer in homeschooling so much. I've been resisting because of the embodied energy, but I've got *two* book contracts for this year, and I think I'm going to have to have better access and less energy intensive solutions than I've got now. We can sell the desktop. I'd use the local library, but that's a five mile walk or drive, and they have a 45 minute time limit. The fridge is going to go - we're going to keep the freezer for a while and see how that goes, but we'll unplug the fridge and use rotating ice packs in a cooler to keep food cool. We've already got some solar lanterns, and we use pretty minimal lighting. The killer will be the electric stove - I'm hoping to build at least one more solar oven, and maybe buy a professional one, since mine don't get much over 320 except on crazy hot days - which we don't have many of. We're also going to build an outdoor masonry oven, as seen in the book _Earth Ovens_ so we can use small quantities of wood to bake and keep the heat out of the house. Also, a good tip I got at Sue Robishaw's website www.manytracks.com - whenever the solar oven is empty, heat water in it, and use thermoses to keep it warm - instant soup, tea, coffee or whatever water.
Heating will be tough because the house is so crazy huge. We always shut off a portion of it, but the problem is that we have a lot of guests, and while we don't mind having the heat at 55, not everyone really likes it. Most of our wood will be no problem, but I'm not sure what we're going to do about the visitor thing. The thing is, we love our visitors - they are people who are generally important to us, and we want them to be happy because they've often travelled a long time on a rare occasion to get out to the boonies to visit us. I don't want everyone to respond to being here by running rapidly into the night.
Ok, more on this when I get a chance, because my soup, cornbread and asparagus are waiting!
Sharon
Miranda and I have been worrying about how to calculate those purchases - should we give everyone a break on their responsibility for the emissions of things that will lead us to fewer emissions in the long run? Miranda, I think, is pro, and for good reasons - she points out that people want to succeed, and she's afraid that we're risking making people feel like they've failed right up front. So even though this year is to be transitional, she thinks we should give credits for those necessary things - insulation, or clothelines or solar ovens - that make this possible in a comfortable way. And I think she's got a point.
On the other hand, there's an anal part of me that says "But even good stuff creates emissions in manufacture. Shouldn't we be responsible for those things, even if we need them." I also worry because I think that reasoning is seductive to the selfish part of me. I've had people say to me, "You should come talk in our far away place, because you'll help more people save more energy." But I wonder - what if I don't? What if I'm not quite inspiring enough, and I'm just using this as an excuse to take a trip? What if people don't go home and plant gardens or stop using their dryers, and then I just flew all this way? All of which is just a way of saying that I worry about my own temptation when excuses are put my way. Would it be just a little too tempting to buy something mostly just to buy it, rather than because of its environmental benefits. I know myself well enough to know I like loopholes ;-). Anyway, we're still figuring this one out, but I suspect I'm tarring other people with my own occasional bouts of weakness here. Apologies if I'm maligning the rest of you by thinking you might be as easily tempted into cheating as me ;-).
Speaking of cheating, am I the only person out there doing this who is having a "oh, crap, gotta do X before it starts "counting."" Now of course, we all know it counts anyway, so I'm trying really hard to keep those urges under control, but I think I will get a couple of things I need anyway - shoes that my oldest son can't take off easily and lose in the yard, more clothespins, vodka for making homemade liqueurs, and my husband will be buying some beer. I will not buy yarn. I will not buy books. I really, really won't buy yarn or books. I believe my own statements. Really.
Ok, down to the plans for how to reduce my emissions. The one I'm worried the most about is water. First of all, I really like my shower (often the only cone of silence I get in a day), and my kids are usually so filthy by the end of the day that spot washing them would require more water than a bath does. Second of all, you should see the clothing at the end of the day. It poured here for two days, and Eli resembled the swamp thing from the comic book more than a child by the end of the afternoon. In weather like this, with the six of us, and two and half in diapers, I wash every day.
I also need to set up a more formal grey water system than "dumping the water out in buckets." Which means a call to our friend Woody, who fixes cool stuff and tries not to laugh at how un-handy we are. He's already building us two nice looking composting toilets, so we can stop using the commode we inherited from Eric's grandparents for that purpose. Pee already goes straight to the garden anyway. But I'm definitely going to have to think about this water one. Do you think the children will stop getting dirty any time soon ;-)? On the bright side, Isaiah is nearly toilet trained - hurray! He wore underwear to synagogue this weekend, which is quite a milestone. Let us just say that that's one of the last bastions of training pants.
Electricity - I think I'm going to have to get a laptop. The desktop uses a crazy amount of power. The thing is, it is probably necessary anyway, now that Simon wants to use the computer in homeschooling so much. I've been resisting because of the embodied energy, but I've got *two* book contracts for this year, and I think I'm going to have to have better access and less energy intensive solutions than I've got now. We can sell the desktop. I'd use the local library, but that's a five mile walk or drive, and they have a 45 minute time limit. The fridge is going to go - we're going to keep the freezer for a while and see how that goes, but we'll unplug the fridge and use rotating ice packs in a cooler to keep food cool. We've already got some solar lanterns, and we use pretty minimal lighting. The killer will be the electric stove - I'm hoping to build at least one more solar oven, and maybe buy a professional one, since mine don't get much over 320 except on crazy hot days - which we don't have many of. We're also going to build an outdoor masonry oven, as seen in the book _Earth Ovens_ so we can use small quantities of wood to bake and keep the heat out of the house. Also, a good tip I got at Sue Robishaw's website www.manytracks.com - whenever the solar oven is empty, heat water in it, and use thermoses to keep it warm - instant soup, tea, coffee or whatever water.
Heating will be tough because the house is so crazy huge. We always shut off a portion of it, but the problem is that we have a lot of guests, and while we don't mind having the heat at 55, not everyone really likes it. Most of our wood will be no problem, but I'm not sure what we're going to do about the visitor thing. The thing is, we love our visitors - they are people who are generally important to us, and we want them to be happy because they've often travelled a long time on a rare occasion to get out to the boonies to visit us. I don't want everyone to respond to being here by running rapidly into the night.
Ok, more on this when I get a chance, because my soup, cornbread and asparagus are waiting!
Sharon
Pandemic flu, Meet Peak Oil.
Miranda and I are hard at work on some minor revisions and an FAQ for the 90% down project, but I wanted to direct your attention to a recently released Pentagon report on the military's preparations for bird flu. I think this is important for several reasons. Here's a summary of the report: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070510/pl_afp/healthfluusmilitary_070510181445 - a link to the direct report is contained within.
The military is preparing for a sustained, recurrent epidemic of avian flu, with a mortality rate of about 1 out of 100, major societal and economic disruptions, and to see our medical infrastructure totally overwhelmed, and many of us in effective quarantine. There are two reasons why this is important. The first is that this could actually happen - every account I've seen suggests that at some point our bodies will come into contact with a flu variant we've not got much immunity to, and the results will be disastrous. For example, even allowing for the possibility of many unrecognized cases, the mortality rates of avian influenza in humans are extremely high, especially among young children. This is, to say the least, worrisome.
Now it is also unlikely to happen in any given year. This essay is not intended as scaremongering - the likelihood of the virus mutating quickly is comparatively small. The issue here is prudence - is it serious enough to be worth thinking about? I think so. And are the intersections of avian flu likely to affect other factors, that is, to bring about some kind of crisis? I think for that we have only to look at Hurricane Katrina - to the New Orleans still not rebuilt, to the refugees who remain refugees two years later. Our society has proved its inability to cope with a localized, if severe disaster. Why on earth would we believe it could handle a national one?
An article in Foreign Affairs (which is not a hype-driven source) estimates that worst case scenarios suggest up to 20% of those affected could die - 16 *million* people. Now that is unlikely, and extreme - the military is expecting the death rate to be much more in line with CDC averages - about 1 in every 100 people. But that's an awful lot as well. The Foreign Affairs article is here: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84401/laurie-garrett/the-next-pandemic.html, and it is worth noting that its estimate of the economic costs is sky high - 166 billion dollars just for medical care, not including vaccination (a vaccine for a specific strain will require a minimum of 6-9 months, if it is possible at all - and remember, viruses mutate - by the time we have one, it may not be the same virus). There is no firm estimate of the national or world economic costs, but think about it.
All transport between communities is restricted. That's it for the travel industry for the duration. Schools are closed, as are entertainment venues, churches, mosques and synagogues, malls and all non-essentials. And this could last for 18 months or longer - how long before widespread unemployment leads to basic, structural breakdowns in the economy. And given that our economy is already stressed by high energy prices, inflation, housing problems and currency difficulties, it wouldn't take long to push the US over to a major recession. Think about the lines for basic goods, or the shortages of things you rely on - food, water, clothing, tools. Think about nutritional imbalances likely in food distribution, and the way information is likely to fail to travel.
During periods of influenza outbreaks, how many of us believe that we'll be hard at work on adapting our infrastrucutre to climate change and energy depletion? How many of us will be at community meetings, or at our jobs keeping the grid in order or helping people reinsulate their houses? How much time will be lost to illness and quarantine, and when things level off, will we be able to get started again? I'm not much for fast crisis/crash scenarios, but this one seems like it really could deeply affect our long term ability to deal with economic and energy crises (not to mention climate change).
The healthcare infrastructure will likely be overwhelmed - millions of people, 50% of those affected, are expected to be treated in hospitals. Given that medical personnel are likely to contract the disease early, those facilities will likely to be totally overwhelmed. Estimates of hospitalizations are listed here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/ops/hsc-scen-3_flu-pandemic-deaths.htm. Which means that everyone with a brain will want to stay as far away from medical care as possible whenever possible - because if you go in to the hospital or pharmacy to pick up of a prescription or deal with a broken arm, nearly everyone is likely to have the flu around you. So there will be corrollary casualties, and a real need to be able to meet your own health care needs.
Now my rural area has nothing like enough beds, hospitals or medical care to tend the sick, and neither does any region I'm aware of. So we should translate the Pentagon's plans to quell rioting and guard hospitals as "even if you are very sick, you may not get any medical care." The US has very minimal stocks of flu relieving drugs, and as we mentioned, a vaccine may not come quickly. We have seen in Hurricane Katrina and with the response to the recent tornadoes that the military tends to be most concerned with "securing" an area, rather than actually helping anyone. That is, if the military comes to your region, there is every chance that they will be there to point guns at people who want to do things like travel for medical care or to help out family, and less chance that you will find them helpful. The references to rioting probably mean scared, sick, hungry, desperate people who would like to have a better situation, and the military who will probably try and stop them from things like taking food out of stores. Perhaps this sounds cynical. It probably is. It there is also a decent chance it is accurate.
But there's another reason why we should be concerned about pandemic flu and this military report. Pandemic avian influenza (or some other form of pandemic - a new strain of swine flu appeared recently, although it is rarely mentioned) might not be that big a deal. It may turn out that the high death rates lower as the virus mutates to become communicable. Or it may not be that communicable, giving our bodies time to adapt to it. The reality about flu pandemics is that we're due for one - sometime in the next century. All this worry may be for nothing.
Except, it probably isn't nothing. That is, it is worth noting that pandemic flu is an excellent excuse for instituting nation-wide martial law, limiting basic freedoms, and controlling freedom of assembly, public discourse and access to both information and goods. Now, if we hadn't seen the last 7 years, you could rightly call me a wacko-conspiracy theorist for this. But can anyone who has seen Guantanamo really believe that the current administration wouldn't use a flu crisis to consolidate power? In fact, they might even be right to institute restrictive measures - no one will probably no how severe the outbreak will be until it has been around a while. The question is, how likely will our government be to simply relinquish power in a crisis. Hmmm....
This means we should be worried about two things. The first is that pandemic flu might be a true medical disaster. The second is that it might not be, but it might still result in economic, political and other crises, because it represents a really good way for our government to take power - and it represents something to blame the current concatenation of economic factors on. Flu may become the bad guy for all sorts of problems - which is important to know, because we're very much unlikely to do what is necessary if all the fault lies in the flu.
Now let's add the current situation into the mix, and assume that a human form of avian influenza develops this fall or next. Oil is peaking, energy prices are rising steadily - we certainly expect $4 per gallon gas this year, and potentially even higher prices and gas lines. The economy is teetering as well, as is the housing market which has funded nearly 20% of all jobs, directly or indirectly (that is, not just jobs building houses, but jobs decorating them, and also jobs in travel and shopping which is what people are spending their equity on).
It seems likely that among other things, whether it is true or not, avian flu will be held responsible for whatever crisis occurs (remember that juggling thing?). And that a firm response will have to be taken. Now I don't know what form a firm response would take, but it is likely to put things like climate change and peak oil on the back burner, further delaying our response. It is also not likely to make us happier or freer. And I'd be just shocked, shocked and appalled (I really would be appalled!) to find that it affects the outcome of our elections.
As I've said, I'm not much for fast crash scenarios, and I don't think this is hugely likely. But at a minimum, it offers a model in which things could go from 0 to hell in a very short time, and all our mitigation strategies might collapse underneath us. Again, the problem is that at some point, our ability to cope begins to fall apart.
Are you ready for an economic crisis that begins this fall, restricts your access to basic goods and adaptive tools, and stresses the economy? Are you ready to spend 3-18 months mostly quarantined in your house, with distribution of food, water and information controlled by your military?
On a personal level, knowing that our government is thinking mostly about how to keep us contained, not how to treat us in a medical crisis, we should all be fairly well prepared to deal with things on our own. And that's a problem, because the best possible response to peak oil and climate change is community organizing. And in a quarantine situation, where everyone is struggling to feed themselves and avoid getting sick, our community structures are likely to collapse under us, as is our collective ability to deal with longer-term crises.
Here is what I would take from these materials.
- Be prepared to meet most of your basic needs for an extended period - the timeline is probably 3-5 months for the first outbreak, followed by another within 3-10 months. In a worst case scenario, much of the nation and its economy could be shut down for months, even more than a year. Government unemployment would run out, communities ability to collect taxes from people not being paid would collapse, and health care costs would overrun everything else. So have food, medicine and the ability to handle a sustained crisis at home. Make sure you can live with power outages, because, as the Foreign Affairs article notes, grid crisis is a possible outcome. Store food. Store water. Store basic medication. Get basic medical knowledge together so you can treat medical problems yourself if possible (be careful doing this). Keep healthy - and think hard about what risks you want to take, particularly if you have elderly people, children or the disabled in your house. Ultimately, try and have the means to live without your jobs for a good long time if necessary - you don't want to risk a serious illness because you need to make money to feed yourself.
- Get prepared *NOW* - that is, assume that this could happen as early as this year. It isn't likely, and I don't want people to panic, but it also isn't impossible. So where you are now, and what you have now or can do in the next months is likely to effect you for some time. There's no reason to stop planning a move or a change, but make sure you can meet your own needs where you live right now. Find a way to collect water, store food, start a garden, plant some fruit trees, stock up on blankets and flashlights. It can't hurt, and it might just help someday.
- Don't count on government help, including military help. Remember, we had a tough time dealing with one, highly localized tornado crisis, or with the Gulf Coast. Now imagine that there are multiple crises all across the nation. The military is likely to be heavily hit by the flu, simply because they are widely dispersed across the world, and pulling them suddenly out of Iraq or Afghanistan is likely to cause a crisis too. Even the best intentioned government (and when was the last time we had one of those?) is likely to be incompetent.
- Because of the potential economic consequences, I would expect quarantine orders to come in well after it was optimal. That is, we've seen that this government is most concerned with keeping the economy happy, regardless of cost. So I wouldn't wait for your community to close schools or tell workers to telecommute - make your own plans based on your own risks and level of concern.
- We've seen how the mainstream news responds in a crisis. Try and keep real truth moving along - write and talk about what is really happening in your community whenever possible. If we can't gather in person, resist in writing. Don't let this be an excuse to lose what is left of our freedom.
- If avian flu turns out not to be the disaster it could be, we have to keep our eyes on the real problems - on preparing for energy crises and climate change. Keep advocating that we keep our focus.
- Think about how your community would manage its infrastructure if gathering was impossible. Come up with an alternative to the "everyone for themselves" strategy our government is proposing. Consider community food stockpiles, phone trees, local non-electric water sources, virtual town meeting set ups, ways of distributing food, checking on the elderly and educating kids without person-to-person contact.
- The better prepared your community is, the less likely you are to see federal troops on your ground. Remember, your personal security also depends on the stability of your community and the region around you.
- Finally, recognize that although it is not likely, a fast crash scenario is possible - that is, it is possible that a short term crisis like avian flu (or for that matter a widespread natural disaster) could cause enough disruption that when the crisis is over, we no longer have the resources to make major infrastructure changes. Move your timeline up accordingly, although recognize this is not a time for panic, and it is not the most likely scenario. That is, be rational. Be prepared to get along, but also recognize that it will probably be ok.
I'm sorry that this is depressing. But it is better to know than not to.
Sharon
The military is preparing for a sustained, recurrent epidemic of avian flu, with a mortality rate of about 1 out of 100, major societal and economic disruptions, and to see our medical infrastructure totally overwhelmed, and many of us in effective quarantine. There are two reasons why this is important. The first is that this could actually happen - every account I've seen suggests that at some point our bodies will come into contact with a flu variant we've not got much immunity to, and the results will be disastrous. For example, even allowing for the possibility of many unrecognized cases, the mortality rates of avian influenza in humans are extremely high, especially among young children. This is, to say the least, worrisome.
Now it is also unlikely to happen in any given year. This essay is not intended as scaremongering - the likelihood of the virus mutating quickly is comparatively small. The issue here is prudence - is it serious enough to be worth thinking about? I think so. And are the intersections of avian flu likely to affect other factors, that is, to bring about some kind of crisis? I think for that we have only to look at Hurricane Katrina - to the New Orleans still not rebuilt, to the refugees who remain refugees two years later. Our society has proved its inability to cope with a localized, if severe disaster. Why on earth would we believe it could handle a national one?
An article in Foreign Affairs (which is not a hype-driven source) estimates that worst case scenarios suggest up to 20% of those affected could die - 16 *million* people. Now that is unlikely, and extreme - the military is expecting the death rate to be much more in line with CDC averages - about 1 in every 100 people. But that's an awful lot as well. The Foreign Affairs article is here: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84401/laurie-garrett/the-next-pandemic.html, and it is worth noting that its estimate of the economic costs is sky high - 166 billion dollars just for medical care, not including vaccination (a vaccine for a specific strain will require a minimum of 6-9 months, if it is possible at all - and remember, viruses mutate - by the time we have one, it may not be the same virus). There is no firm estimate of the national or world economic costs, but think about it.
All transport between communities is restricted. That's it for the travel industry for the duration. Schools are closed, as are entertainment venues, churches, mosques and synagogues, malls and all non-essentials. And this could last for 18 months or longer - how long before widespread unemployment leads to basic, structural breakdowns in the economy. And given that our economy is already stressed by high energy prices, inflation, housing problems and currency difficulties, it wouldn't take long to push the US over to a major recession. Think about the lines for basic goods, or the shortages of things you rely on - food, water, clothing, tools. Think about nutritional imbalances likely in food distribution, and the way information is likely to fail to travel.
During periods of influenza outbreaks, how many of us believe that we'll be hard at work on adapting our infrastrucutre to climate change and energy depletion? How many of us will be at community meetings, or at our jobs keeping the grid in order or helping people reinsulate their houses? How much time will be lost to illness and quarantine, and when things level off, will we be able to get started again? I'm not much for fast crisis/crash scenarios, but this one seems like it really could deeply affect our long term ability to deal with economic and energy crises (not to mention climate change).
The healthcare infrastructure will likely be overwhelmed - millions of people, 50% of those affected, are expected to be treated in hospitals. Given that medical personnel are likely to contract the disease early, those facilities will likely to be totally overwhelmed. Estimates of hospitalizations are listed here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/ops/hsc-scen-3_flu-pandemic-deaths.htm. Which means that everyone with a brain will want to stay as far away from medical care as possible whenever possible - because if you go in to the hospital or pharmacy to pick up of a prescription or deal with a broken arm, nearly everyone is likely to have the flu around you. So there will be corrollary casualties, and a real need to be able to meet your own health care needs.
Now my rural area has nothing like enough beds, hospitals or medical care to tend the sick, and neither does any region I'm aware of. So we should translate the Pentagon's plans to quell rioting and guard hospitals as "even if you are very sick, you may not get any medical care." The US has very minimal stocks of flu relieving drugs, and as we mentioned, a vaccine may not come quickly. We have seen in Hurricane Katrina and with the response to the recent tornadoes that the military tends to be most concerned with "securing" an area, rather than actually helping anyone. That is, if the military comes to your region, there is every chance that they will be there to point guns at people who want to do things like travel for medical care or to help out family, and less chance that you will find them helpful. The references to rioting probably mean scared, sick, hungry, desperate people who would like to have a better situation, and the military who will probably try and stop them from things like taking food out of stores. Perhaps this sounds cynical. It probably is. It there is also a decent chance it is accurate.
But there's another reason why we should be concerned about pandemic flu and this military report. Pandemic avian influenza (or some other form of pandemic - a new strain of swine flu appeared recently, although it is rarely mentioned) might not be that big a deal. It may turn out that the high death rates lower as the virus mutates to become communicable. Or it may not be that communicable, giving our bodies time to adapt to it. The reality about flu pandemics is that we're due for one - sometime in the next century. All this worry may be for nothing.
Except, it probably isn't nothing. That is, it is worth noting that pandemic flu is an excellent excuse for instituting nation-wide martial law, limiting basic freedoms, and controlling freedom of assembly, public discourse and access to both information and goods. Now, if we hadn't seen the last 7 years, you could rightly call me a wacko-conspiracy theorist for this. But can anyone who has seen Guantanamo really believe that the current administration wouldn't use a flu crisis to consolidate power? In fact, they might even be right to institute restrictive measures - no one will probably no how severe the outbreak will be until it has been around a while. The question is, how likely will our government be to simply relinquish power in a crisis. Hmmm....
This means we should be worried about two things. The first is that pandemic flu might be a true medical disaster. The second is that it might not be, but it might still result in economic, political and other crises, because it represents a really good way for our government to take power - and it represents something to blame the current concatenation of economic factors on. Flu may become the bad guy for all sorts of problems - which is important to know, because we're very much unlikely to do what is necessary if all the fault lies in the flu.
Now let's add the current situation into the mix, and assume that a human form of avian influenza develops this fall or next. Oil is peaking, energy prices are rising steadily - we certainly expect $4 per gallon gas this year, and potentially even higher prices and gas lines. The economy is teetering as well, as is the housing market which has funded nearly 20% of all jobs, directly or indirectly (that is, not just jobs building houses, but jobs decorating them, and also jobs in travel and shopping which is what people are spending their equity on).
It seems likely that among other things, whether it is true or not, avian flu will be held responsible for whatever crisis occurs (remember that juggling thing?). And that a firm response will have to be taken. Now I don't know what form a firm response would take, but it is likely to put things like climate change and peak oil on the back burner, further delaying our response. It is also not likely to make us happier or freer. And I'd be just shocked, shocked and appalled (I really would be appalled!) to find that it affects the outcome of our elections.
As I've said, I'm not much for fast crash scenarios, and I don't think this is hugely likely. But at a minimum, it offers a model in which things could go from 0 to hell in a very short time, and all our mitigation strategies might collapse underneath us. Again, the problem is that at some point, our ability to cope begins to fall apart.
Are you ready for an economic crisis that begins this fall, restricts your access to basic goods and adaptive tools, and stresses the economy? Are you ready to spend 3-18 months mostly quarantined in your house, with distribution of food, water and information controlled by your military?
On a personal level, knowing that our government is thinking mostly about how to keep us contained, not how to treat us in a medical crisis, we should all be fairly well prepared to deal with things on our own. And that's a problem, because the best possible response to peak oil and climate change is community organizing. And in a quarantine situation, where everyone is struggling to feed themselves and avoid getting sick, our community structures are likely to collapse under us, as is our collective ability to deal with longer-term crises.
Here is what I would take from these materials.
- Be prepared to meet most of your basic needs for an extended period - the timeline is probably 3-5 months for the first outbreak, followed by another within 3-10 months. In a worst case scenario, much of the nation and its economy could be shut down for months, even more than a year. Government unemployment would run out, communities ability to collect taxes from people not being paid would collapse, and health care costs would overrun everything else. So have food, medicine and the ability to handle a sustained crisis at home. Make sure you can live with power outages, because, as the Foreign Affairs article notes, grid crisis is a possible outcome. Store food. Store water. Store basic medication. Get basic medical knowledge together so you can treat medical problems yourself if possible (be careful doing this). Keep healthy - and think hard about what risks you want to take, particularly if you have elderly people, children or the disabled in your house. Ultimately, try and have the means to live without your jobs for a good long time if necessary - you don't want to risk a serious illness because you need to make money to feed yourself.
- Get prepared *NOW* - that is, assume that this could happen as early as this year. It isn't likely, and I don't want people to panic, but it also isn't impossible. So where you are now, and what you have now or can do in the next months is likely to effect you for some time. There's no reason to stop planning a move or a change, but make sure you can meet your own needs where you live right now. Find a way to collect water, store food, start a garden, plant some fruit trees, stock up on blankets and flashlights. It can't hurt, and it might just help someday.
- Don't count on government help, including military help. Remember, we had a tough time dealing with one, highly localized tornado crisis, or with the Gulf Coast. Now imagine that there are multiple crises all across the nation. The military is likely to be heavily hit by the flu, simply because they are widely dispersed across the world, and pulling them suddenly out of Iraq or Afghanistan is likely to cause a crisis too. Even the best intentioned government (and when was the last time we had one of those?) is likely to be incompetent.
- Because of the potential economic consequences, I would expect quarantine orders to come in well after it was optimal. That is, we've seen that this government is most concerned with keeping the economy happy, regardless of cost. So I wouldn't wait for your community to close schools or tell workers to telecommute - make your own plans based on your own risks and level of concern.
- We've seen how the mainstream news responds in a crisis. Try and keep real truth moving along - write and talk about what is really happening in your community whenever possible. If we can't gather in person, resist in writing. Don't let this be an excuse to lose what is left of our freedom.
- If avian flu turns out not to be the disaster it could be, we have to keep our eyes on the real problems - on preparing for energy crises and climate change. Keep advocating that we keep our focus.
- Think about how your community would manage its infrastructure if gathering was impossible. Come up with an alternative to the "everyone for themselves" strategy our government is proposing. Consider community food stockpiles, phone trees, local non-electric water sources, virtual town meeting set ups, ways of distributing food, checking on the elderly and educating kids without person-to-person contact.
- The better prepared your community is, the less likely you are to see federal troops on your ground. Remember, your personal security also depends on the stability of your community and the region around you.
- Finally, recognize that although it is not likely, a fast crash scenario is possible - that is, it is possible that a short term crisis like avian flu (or for that matter a widespread natural disaster) could cause enough disruption that when the crisis is over, we no longer have the resources to make major infrastructure changes. Move your timeline up accordingly, although recognize this is not a time for panic, and it is not the most likely scenario. That is, be rational. Be prepared to get along, but also recognize that it will probably be ok.
I'm sorry that this is depressing. But it is better to know than not to.
Sharon
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Making The Change - 90% Emissions Reduction Rules and Regs
The first thing you will all notice about this is that it says "90%" up there, instead of 93%. The reason for this is twofold. First of all, I did all the calculations out with 93%, and then looked at Monbiot's actual book, and realized that it was 94%. Now you will know what small, petty person I am when you hear that my immediate reaction to that was "Oh, crap - I don't want to give up another 1%, and I really, really don't want to run the numbers again!" But that's not the main reason fro the change. The main reason is this - doing this will involve a lot of regular, daily math. Now if you are one of those ultra smart people who can do fairly complex math in their heads, congratulations. And if you are one of those super-organized people who keeps their records so perfectly that the hope the IRS will audit so they can show off their superior bookkeeping, congratulations again. I hate to tell you this, but I'm a slob, and a lazy slob. While I'm more than willing to live like a Chinese peasant, I'm not at all willing to sit around every afternoon thinking..."Ok, carry the one..ok, I can have 1/17th of a gallon of oil..."
And I suspect that I am rather more like other people than not - that is, I think this whole project will go better if we all use nice round numbers and don't make ourselves too crazy with the calculations. My consultants, Miranda and Aaron also seemed happier with the nice round numbers. So I picked 90% as a target figure, because that means we can all work with the same basic figures, only at 1/10th the average. I also rounded most averages to the nearest round number. On the other hand, I was conservative in other ways, as you'll see, so I think this comes out solidly at or below 90%. And 90% is a big old cut, especially without any government help. But I'm happy to try and continue the cuts after 90%, because once we're down to 10% of the average, we're working with nice round numbers again - that is, each additional percentage is a convenient 10%. But let's concentrate on getting down 90%, and we'll go from there.
If you'd like to do this more precisely, I'll gladly send you my original figures, and you can calculate your stuff any way you'd like.
The Rules of the Game are as follows:
1. EVERYONE can play. Even if you only think you can make a major reduction in a few categories, or 1, you are invited to join us. Every drop in your emissions is a huge accomplishment, and another person who can stand up and say "I can do it, even without any systemic help - therefor, we can all do it." The goal is to reach 90% - but some of us will probably fail. A 20% reduction is still something to be proud of.
2. The time period is 1 year - the goal is to reach a 90% reduction (or the best each of us can do) *AND KEEP IT THERE* after 1 year. That is, we're not dropping our emissions instantly and then going back to business as usual later - the goal is to use this year to figure out what we need to do, what kind of adaptations we need, and how to change things. I suspect for a lot of us, initially the project will be figuring out what we need and acquiring or making those things, so particularly the consumption and garbage portions of this may be difficult initially.
3.Ideally, we'll all calculate and post our approximate usage at the beginning of our personal projects. Please do send in an official "I'm in and here are my numbers email as soon as you can manage it, so we can keep head counts and info around."
4. Every week we post an update - you can put yours on your blog (email your blog links to Miranda at, and she'll hook you up), or update on the comments section of either Miranda's or my blog. Let us know how you are doing, what you are having trouble with, what your numbers are, what you want help with, what your best ideas are. We want to hear how it is going!!!
5. Otherwise, you are in charge of making choices. We have left categories like health care and housing out of this, on the assumption that you aren't going to buy a new house, or give up needed medical attention. If you want to include some of these issues, great. If you need to opt out of a category altogether, fine. If you disagree with my assessment, say, of how things should be calculated, certainly tell me - you may have a better method than I do - but you can also feel free to make your calcuations differently. Just tell us what's going on.
6. If you live in another country than the US, you'll have to do your own baseline - it isn't very hard, and your government websites should have the information. For Canada, Australia and the US, Monbiot's calculation is that reductions must be above 90%, so you'll probably want to use the 90% figures with your own national averages. Most of the rich EU nations are in the mid-to-high 80s, and he doesn't offer figures for other nations. I leave it up to those from other countries to figure out whether they want to try for the 90% reduction ,or choose another number - 80% or 85%. Those are the only numbers Monbiot lists, but I can probably help you figure out an approximate for your country if you email me.
7. If you use a renewable or sustainable resource that I haven't mentioned, email me. I'll add it to the list, and come up with a figure for it.
8. One of the things I think is most important is that we admit when/how/where we fail. We're trying to do something very difficult, and we're doing it without the support that would make this much easier. If there are places where a lot of people can't accomplish a reduction, this is a good argument for some kind of larger intervention.
Some things will be easy for one of us, but not another. I think food will be easy for my household, but gas a real struggle. Other people might find the opposite.
9.Ultimately, this is a support network. We're trying for real and radical change, and also to offer up a model for other people who might want to make these changes. Be kind and be supportive.
10. Remember, when you falter, we can do this. And that Miranda and I are very grateful that you are doing this along with us!!!
Ok, here are my calculations. I've done my very best to make this simple. Whenever possible, I have rounded numbers, so that it would be easy to figure out specifics. Also, whenever possible I have used individual usage and short time periods. Unfortunately, I haven't always been able to find data for shorter periods or for individual usage, in which cases, I've put household, or annual figures. This is imperfect science, but you do the best you can - I think it mostly evens out. But final calculations will be made as yearly, household figures. That is, if your spouse has a job and you stay home with the kids, you can give some of your gas allotment over to her for her commute. And if you need a/c 2 months a year to survive, you can cut back more in the winter. The goal is to be able to meet these goals annually.
The estimates I'm giving for renewable resources may be controversial. I welcome discussion of the subject, or better guidelines - remember, better, but simple. I've tried to be very conservative - that is, I'm trying to err on the side of greater emissions reduction whenever possible. In that interest, I've measured, for example, the net energy return of some renewables as much lower than, say, a company that makes them would. For example, I give no credit at all for ethanol or biodiesel, since I think they are no better and perhaps worse in the emissions department. In the end, if you really disagree, feel free to use your own numbers, just explain how you are calculating things.
We're dividing this into 7 categories. You do the calculation for each one. We've included water, even though it isn't by itself a greenhouse gas problem, because water stress is one of the most serious and immediate consequences of global warming.
If you work out of the home, or spend large quantities of time out of your home, you should include calculations for your work environment, or school environment - % of your time, energy used, divided by number of people using it. Now you may not have much control over this measurement, and if you don't, I suggest you keep three tallies - one for home energy, one for work energy, and one for your total energy in each relevant category. But the good thing about including your work is that this offers incentives for trying to get your work to be more efficient as well. Who knows, you may fail, but it is worth a try.
If you want to look at the figures, you can find most of them here:http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/consumption/index.html. Statistics for water are quite variable, but the best I came up with is this: http://www.hydra.iwr.msu.edu/lw/faq-answer.asp?ID=1. Garbage figures are here:http://www.wisegeek.com/how-much-garbage-does-a-person-create-in-one-year.htm, and consumer spending is from the updated version of Juliet Schor's _The Overspent American_. Food data came mostly from Marion Nestle's _Food Politics_ and Dale Pfeiffer's _Eating Fossil Fuels_.
Here are the 7 categories:
1. Gasoline. Average American usage is 500 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR. A 90 percent reduction would be 50 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR.
-No reduction in emissions for ethanol or biodiesel.
-Public transportation and Waste Veggie Oil Fuel are deemed to get 100 mpg, and should be calculated accordingly.
2. Electricity. Average US usage is 11,000 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, or about 900 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH. A 90% reduction would mean using 1,100 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR or 90 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH
- Solar Renewables are deemed to have a 50% payback - that is, you get twice as many watts.
-Hydro and Wind are deemed to have a 4 to 1 payback over other methods - you get 4 times as many.
3. Heating and Cooking Energy - this is divided into 3 categories, gas, wood and oil. Your household probably uses one of these, and they are not interchangeable. If you use multiple sources, you are going to have to do some more complicated math to figure out how to divide things proportionally. If you need help, email me. If you use an electric stove or electric heat, this goes under electric usage.
- Natural Gas (this is used by the vast majority of US households as heating and cooking fuel). For this purpose, Propane will be calculated as the same as natural gas. Calculations in therms should be available from your gas provider.
-US Average Natural Gas usage is 1000 therms PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% reduction would mean a reduction to 100 therms PER HOUSEHOLD PER YEAR
-Heating Oil (this is used by only about 8% of all US households, mostly in the Northeast, including mine).
-Average US usage is 750 Gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% cut would mean using 75 gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. Biodiesel is calculated as equivalent.
- Wood. This is a tough one. The conventional line is that wood is carbon neutral, but, of course, wood that is harvested would have otherwise been absorbing carbon and providing forest. There are good reasons to be skeptical about this. So I've divided wood into two categories.
1. Locally and sustainably harvested, and either using deadwood, trees that had to come down anyway, coppiced or harvested by someone who replaces every lost tree. This is deemed carbon neutral, and you can use an unlimited supply. This would include street trees your town is taking down anyway, wood you cut on your property and replant, coppiced wood (that is, you cut down some part of the tree but leave it to grow), sustainably harvested local wood, and standing and fallen deadwood. You can use as much of this as you like.
2. Wood not sustainably harvested, or transported long distances, or you don't know. 1 cord of this is equal to 15 gallons of oil or 20 therms of natural gas.
4. Garbage - the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean .45 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY.
5. Water. The Average American uses 100 Gallons of water PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean 10 gallons PER PERSON, PER DAY.
-Rainwater you collect is unlimited.
6. Consumer Goods. The best metric I could find for this is using money. A Professor at Syracuse University calculates that as an average, every consumer dollar we spend puts .5 lbs of carbon into the atmosphere. This isn't perfect, of course, but it averages out pretty well.
The average American spends 10K PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR on
consumer goods, not including things like mortgage, health care, debt service, car payments, etc... Obviously, we recommend you minimize those things to the extent you can, but what we're mostly talking about is things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, paper goods, etc... A 90% cut would be 1,000 dollars PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR
-Used goods are deemed to have an energy cost of 10% of their actual purchase price. That is, if you buy a used sofa for $50, you just spent $5 of your allotment. The reason for this is that used goods bought from previous owners put money back into circulation that is then spent on new goods. This would apply to Craigslist, Yardsales, etc... but not goodwill and other charities, as noted below. This rule does not apply if you know that the item would otherwise be thrown out - that is, if someone says, "If you don't buy it, I'm going to toss it." Those items are unlimited as well, because they keep crap out of landfills. Because garbage is such a heavy methane producer, making use of stuff that would be thrown away is a great improvement!
-Goods that were donated are deemed to be unlimited, with no carbon cost. That is, you can spend all you want at Goodwill and the church rummage sale. Putting things back into use that would otherwise be tossed should be strongly encouraged.
7. Food. This was by far the hardest thing to come up with a simple metric for. Using food miles, or price gives what I believe is a radically inaccurate way of thinking about this. So here's the best I can do. Food is divided into 3 categories.
#1 is food you grow, or which is produced *LOCALLY AND ORGANICALLY* (or mostly - it doesn't have to be certified, but should be low input, because chemical fertilizers produce nitrous oxide which is a major greenhouse contributor). Local means within 50-100 miles to me (you can choose your own metric - we'll be using 50). This includes all produce, grains, beans, and meats and dairy products that are mostly either *GRASSFED* or produced with *HOME GROWN OR LOCALLY GROWN, ORGANIC FEED.* That is, chicken meat produced with GM corn from IOWA in Florida is not local. A 90% reduction would involve this being AT LEAST 70% of your diet, year round. Ideally, it would be even more. I also include locally produced things like soap in this category, if most of the ingredients are local.
#2 is is *DRY, BULK* goods, transported from longer distances. That is, *whole, unprocessed* beans, grains, and small light things like tea, coffee, spices (fair trade and sustainably grown *ONLY*), or locally produced animal products partly raised on unprocessed but non-local grains, and locally produced wet products like oils. This is hard to calculate, beause Americans spend very little on these things (except coffee) and whole grains don't constitute a large portion of the diet. These are comparatively low carbon to transport and produce. Purchased in bulk, with minimal packaging (beans in 50lb paper sacks, pasta in bulk, tea loose, by the pound, rather than in little bags), this would also include things like recycled toilet paper, purchased garden seeds and other light, dry items. This should be no more than 25% of your total purchases.
# 3 is Wet goods - meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, milk etc... (we're going to assume you'll buy organic whenever possible, but transporting water and wet things around is still way too energy intensive) transported long distances, and processed foods like chips, soda, potatoes. Also regular shampoo, dish soap, etc... And that no one should buy more than 5% of their food in this form. Right now, the above makes up more than 50% of the average person's diet.
Thus, if you purchase 20 food items in a week, you'd use 14 home or locally produced items, 5 bulk dry items, and only 1 processed or out of season thing.
Ok, let me know what you think and if you are still in! My brain hurts!
Here are our best estimates: Right now we're using:
Gas: We've achieved a 71% reduction - I think this will be our toughest category, especially dealing with Eli's bus ride to the private school for the disabled he attends.
Electricity: We've achieved a 60ish percent reduction - we're still trying to estimate the impact of Eric's job and Eli's school, but 60 is about right.
Heating oil: We used about 55% less than average last year, because our original woodstove was disconnected during the house renovations. We used almost no wood for the same reason.
Garbage: This one isn't clear to me, because we've never weighed our garbage before this week ;-). But if the last week is any representative, we make about 1/3 the garbage of the average family.
Water: We've got about a 60% reduction, less than we would have if our new composting toilets were finally set up. We haven't been as conservative about water, particularly for bathing, as we might be, because we live in a wet climate. This will make us be more careful. It'll also make me get the cistern finished!
Consumer goods: This year is probably not very representative, because we're still on our not-buying things year. We actually are very close to a 90% reduction, and most of what we spent was on seeds and plants, and I'm not sure whether this should fall under food or goods. I actually suspect we'll get to buy more stuff - because we can rescue used goods - doing this than we have in the last year ;-).
Food: Again, we're not very far off of this one right at the moment - maybe 80%? But the change on this one will be somewhat difficult because it will mostly involve our kids, especially Eli, who is very attached to certain things like popsicles and cheerios.
So we've got a lot of work to do. I'm excited, and nervous. I hope you are excited too!
Sharon
And I suspect that I am rather more like other people than not - that is, I think this whole project will go better if we all use nice round numbers and don't make ourselves too crazy with the calculations. My consultants, Miranda and Aaron also seemed happier with the nice round numbers. So I picked 90% as a target figure, because that means we can all work with the same basic figures, only at 1/10th the average. I also rounded most averages to the nearest round number. On the other hand, I was conservative in other ways, as you'll see, so I think this comes out solidly at or below 90%. And 90% is a big old cut, especially without any government help. But I'm happy to try and continue the cuts after 90%, because once we're down to 10% of the average, we're working with nice round numbers again - that is, each additional percentage is a convenient 10%. But let's concentrate on getting down 90%, and we'll go from there.
If you'd like to do this more precisely, I'll gladly send you my original figures, and you can calculate your stuff any way you'd like.
The Rules of the Game are as follows:
1. EVERYONE can play. Even if you only think you can make a major reduction in a few categories, or 1, you are invited to join us. Every drop in your emissions is a huge accomplishment, and another person who can stand up and say "I can do it, even without any systemic help - therefor, we can all do it." The goal is to reach 90% - but some of us will probably fail. A 20% reduction is still something to be proud of.
2. The time period is 1 year - the goal is to reach a 90% reduction (or the best each of us can do) *AND KEEP IT THERE* after 1 year. That is, we're not dropping our emissions instantly and then going back to business as usual later - the goal is to use this year to figure out what we need to do, what kind of adaptations we need, and how to change things. I suspect for a lot of us, initially the project will be figuring out what we need and acquiring or making those things, so particularly the consumption and garbage portions of this may be difficult initially.
3.Ideally, we'll all calculate and post our approximate usage at the beginning of our personal projects. Please do send in an official "I'm in and here are my numbers email as soon as you can manage it, so we can keep head counts and info around."
4. Every week we post an update - you can put yours on your blog (email your blog links to Miranda at, and she'll hook you up), or update on the comments section of either Miranda's or my blog. Let us know how you are doing, what you are having trouble with, what your numbers are, what you want help with, what your best ideas are. We want to hear how it is going!!!
5. Otherwise, you are in charge of making choices. We have left categories like health care and housing out of this, on the assumption that you aren't going to buy a new house, or give up needed medical attention. If you want to include some of these issues, great. If you need to opt out of a category altogether, fine. If you disagree with my assessment, say, of how things should be calculated, certainly tell me - you may have a better method than I do - but you can also feel free to make your calcuations differently. Just tell us what's going on.
6. If you live in another country than the US, you'll have to do your own baseline - it isn't very hard, and your government websites should have the information. For Canada, Australia and the US, Monbiot's calculation is that reductions must be above 90%, so you'll probably want to use the 90% figures with your own national averages. Most of the rich EU nations are in the mid-to-high 80s, and he doesn't offer figures for other nations. I leave it up to those from other countries to figure out whether they want to try for the 90% reduction ,or choose another number - 80% or 85%. Those are the only numbers Monbiot lists, but I can probably help you figure out an approximate for your country if you email me.
7. If you use a renewable or sustainable resource that I haven't mentioned, email me. I'll add it to the list, and come up with a figure for it.
8. One of the things I think is most important is that we admit when/how/where we fail. We're trying to do something very difficult, and we're doing it without the support that would make this much easier. If there are places where a lot of people can't accomplish a reduction, this is a good argument for some kind of larger intervention.
Some things will be easy for one of us, but not another. I think food will be easy for my household, but gas a real struggle. Other people might find the opposite.
9.Ultimately, this is a support network. We're trying for real and radical change, and also to offer up a model for other people who might want to make these changes. Be kind and be supportive.
10. Remember, when you falter, we can do this. And that Miranda and I are very grateful that you are doing this along with us!!!
Ok, here are my calculations. I've done my very best to make this simple. Whenever possible, I have rounded numbers, so that it would be easy to figure out specifics. Also, whenever possible I have used individual usage and short time periods. Unfortunately, I haven't always been able to find data for shorter periods or for individual usage, in which cases, I've put household, or annual figures. This is imperfect science, but you do the best you can - I think it mostly evens out. But final calculations will be made as yearly, household figures. That is, if your spouse has a job and you stay home with the kids, you can give some of your gas allotment over to her for her commute. And if you need a/c 2 months a year to survive, you can cut back more in the winter. The goal is to be able to meet these goals annually.
The estimates I'm giving for renewable resources may be controversial. I welcome discussion of the subject, or better guidelines - remember, better, but simple. I've tried to be very conservative - that is, I'm trying to err on the side of greater emissions reduction whenever possible. In that interest, I've measured, for example, the net energy return of some renewables as much lower than, say, a company that makes them would. For example, I give no credit at all for ethanol or biodiesel, since I think they are no better and perhaps worse in the emissions department. In the end, if you really disagree, feel free to use your own numbers, just explain how you are calculating things.
We're dividing this into 7 categories. You do the calculation for each one. We've included water, even though it isn't by itself a greenhouse gas problem, because water stress is one of the most serious and immediate consequences of global warming.
If you work out of the home, or spend large quantities of time out of your home, you should include calculations for your work environment, or school environment - % of your time, energy used, divided by number of people using it. Now you may not have much control over this measurement, and if you don't, I suggest you keep three tallies - one for home energy, one for work energy, and one for your total energy in each relevant category. But the good thing about including your work is that this offers incentives for trying to get your work to be more efficient as well. Who knows, you may fail, but it is worth a try.
If you want to look at the figures, you can find most of them here:http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/consumption/index.html. Statistics for water are quite variable, but the best I came up with is this: http://www.hydra.iwr.msu.edu/lw/faq-answer.asp?ID=1. Garbage figures are here:http://www.wisegeek.com/how-much-garbage-does-a-person-create-in-one-year.htm, and consumer spending is from the updated version of Juliet Schor's _The Overspent American_. Food data came mostly from Marion Nestle's _Food Politics_ and Dale Pfeiffer's _Eating Fossil Fuels_.
Here are the 7 categories:
1. Gasoline. Average American usage is 500 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR. A 90 percent reduction would be 50 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR.
-No reduction in emissions for ethanol or biodiesel.
-Public transportation and Waste Veggie Oil Fuel are deemed to get 100 mpg, and should be calculated accordingly.
2. Electricity. Average US usage is 11,000 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, or about 900 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH. A 90% reduction would mean using 1,100 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR or 90 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH
- Solar Renewables are deemed to have a 50% payback - that is, you get twice as many watts.
-Hydro and Wind are deemed to have a 4 to 1 payback over other methods - you get 4 times as many.
3. Heating and Cooking Energy - this is divided into 3 categories, gas, wood and oil. Your household probably uses one of these, and they are not interchangeable. If you use multiple sources, you are going to have to do some more complicated math to figure out how to divide things proportionally. If you need help, email me. If you use an electric stove or electric heat, this goes under electric usage.
- Natural Gas (this is used by the vast majority of US households as heating and cooking fuel). For this purpose, Propane will be calculated as the same as natural gas. Calculations in therms should be available from your gas provider.
-US Average Natural Gas usage is 1000 therms PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% reduction would mean a reduction to 100 therms PER HOUSEHOLD PER YEAR
-Heating Oil (this is used by only about 8% of all US households, mostly in the Northeast, including mine).
-Average US usage is 750 Gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% cut would mean using 75 gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. Biodiesel is calculated as equivalent.
- Wood. This is a tough one. The conventional line is that wood is carbon neutral, but, of course, wood that is harvested would have otherwise been absorbing carbon and providing forest. There are good reasons to be skeptical about this. So I've divided wood into two categories.
1. Locally and sustainably harvested, and either using deadwood, trees that had to come down anyway, coppiced or harvested by someone who replaces every lost tree. This is deemed carbon neutral, and you can use an unlimited supply. This would include street trees your town is taking down anyway, wood you cut on your property and replant, coppiced wood (that is, you cut down some part of the tree but leave it to grow), sustainably harvested local wood, and standing and fallen deadwood. You can use as much of this as you like.
2. Wood not sustainably harvested, or transported long distances, or you don't know. 1 cord of this is equal to 15 gallons of oil or 20 therms of natural gas.
4. Garbage - the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean .45 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY.
5. Water. The Average American uses 100 Gallons of water PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean 10 gallons PER PERSON, PER DAY.
-Rainwater you collect is unlimited.
6. Consumer Goods. The best metric I could find for this is using money. A Professor at Syracuse University calculates that as an average, every consumer dollar we spend puts .5 lbs of carbon into the atmosphere. This isn't perfect, of course, but it averages out pretty well.
The average American spends 10K PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR on
consumer goods, not including things like mortgage, health care, debt service, car payments, etc... Obviously, we recommend you minimize those things to the extent you can, but what we're mostly talking about is things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, paper goods, etc... A 90% cut would be 1,000 dollars PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR
-Used goods are deemed to have an energy cost of 10% of their actual purchase price. That is, if you buy a used sofa for $50, you just spent $5 of your allotment. The reason for this is that used goods bought from previous owners put money back into circulation that is then spent on new goods. This would apply to Craigslist, Yardsales, etc... but not goodwill and other charities, as noted below. This rule does not apply if you know that the item would otherwise be thrown out - that is, if someone says, "If you don't buy it, I'm going to toss it." Those items are unlimited as well, because they keep crap out of landfills. Because garbage is such a heavy methane producer, making use of stuff that would be thrown away is a great improvement!
-Goods that were donated are deemed to be unlimited, with no carbon cost. That is, you can spend all you want at Goodwill and the church rummage sale. Putting things back into use that would otherwise be tossed should be strongly encouraged.
7. Food. This was by far the hardest thing to come up with a simple metric for. Using food miles, or price gives what I believe is a radically inaccurate way of thinking about this. So here's the best I can do. Food is divided into 3 categories.
#1 is food you grow, or which is produced *LOCALLY AND ORGANICALLY* (or mostly - it doesn't have to be certified, but should be low input, because chemical fertilizers produce nitrous oxide which is a major greenhouse contributor). Local means within 50-100 miles to me (you can choose your own metric - we'll be using 50). This includes all produce, grains, beans, and meats and dairy products that are mostly either *GRASSFED* or produced with *HOME GROWN OR LOCALLY GROWN, ORGANIC FEED.* That is, chicken meat produced with GM corn from IOWA in Florida is not local. A 90% reduction would involve this being AT LEAST 70% of your diet, year round. Ideally, it would be even more. I also include locally produced things like soap in this category, if most of the ingredients are local.
#2 is is *DRY, BULK* goods, transported from longer distances. That is, *whole, unprocessed* beans, grains, and small light things like tea, coffee, spices (fair trade and sustainably grown *ONLY*), or locally produced animal products partly raised on unprocessed but non-local grains, and locally produced wet products like oils. This is hard to calculate, beause Americans spend very little on these things (except coffee) and whole grains don't constitute a large portion of the diet. These are comparatively low carbon to transport and produce. Purchased in bulk, with minimal packaging (beans in 50lb paper sacks, pasta in bulk, tea loose, by the pound, rather than in little bags), this would also include things like recycled toilet paper, purchased garden seeds and other light, dry items. This should be no more than 25% of your total purchases.
# 3 is Wet goods - meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, milk etc... (we're going to assume you'll buy organic whenever possible, but transporting water and wet things around is still way too energy intensive) transported long distances, and processed foods like chips, soda, potatoes. Also regular shampoo, dish soap, etc... And that no one should buy more than 5% of their food in this form. Right now, the above makes up more than 50% of the average person's diet.
Thus, if you purchase 20 food items in a week, you'd use 14 home or locally produced items, 5 bulk dry items, and only 1 processed or out of season thing.
Ok, let me know what you think and if you are still in! My brain hurts!
Here are our best estimates: Right now we're using:
Gas: We've achieved a 71% reduction - I think this will be our toughest category, especially dealing with Eli's bus ride to the private school for the disabled he attends.
Electricity: We've achieved a 60ish percent reduction - we're still trying to estimate the impact of Eric's job and Eli's school, but 60 is about right.
Heating oil: We used about 55% less than average last year, because our original woodstove was disconnected during the house renovations. We used almost no wood for the same reason.
Garbage: This one isn't clear to me, because we've never weighed our garbage before this week ;-). But if the last week is any representative, we make about 1/3 the garbage of the average family.
Water: We've got about a 60% reduction, less than we would have if our new composting toilets were finally set up. We haven't been as conservative about water, particularly for bathing, as we might be, because we live in a wet climate. This will make us be more careful. It'll also make me get the cistern finished!
Consumer goods: This year is probably not very representative, because we're still on our not-buying things year. We actually are very close to a 90% reduction, and most of what we spent was on seeds and plants, and I'm not sure whether this should fall under food or goods. I actually suspect we'll get to buy more stuff - because we can rescue used goods - doing this than we have in the last year ;-).
Food: Again, we're not very far off of this one right at the moment - maybe 80%? But the change on this one will be somewhat difficult because it will mostly involve our kids, especially Eli, who is very attached to certain things like popsicles and cheerios.
So we've got a lot of work to do. I'm excited, and nervous. I hope you are excited too!
Sharon
The Juggler's Lament, Ecological Collapse and Making Change
I really recommend that you check out this article at The Oil Drum, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2534. Professor Francois Cellier does a fascinating analysis of the impact of ecological footprints, the Human Development Index and the problem of population. Although I don't agree with everything Professor Cellier says, I think he does an excellent job of reviewing the peculiar, and serious stresses on our society and environment. He leaves some important points out, including the possibility of further reducing our footprints voluntarily, and also of voluntarily reducing populations.
Now I'm going to play prophet for a moment, with the caveat that I'm really no better at it than anyone else, and that I'm often wrong. But my guess is that within the next two decades, probably sooner, things will get very, very different, and not in a very nice way. And that when we get there, instead of our being able to point to a single cause "Oh, it was peak oil" or "Damn that climate change" the problem will be a concatenation of factors, many of which we won't recognize when they happen.
Believe it or not, that true of the great depression. Economists and historians still don't have a clear consensus on why the great depression happened, or why it lasted as long as it did. There are theories and arguments, but there is no single event that one can point to. And I predict that we'll find ourselves puzzling (to various degrees) about what went wrong eventually.
One of the most fascinating passages in _The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update_ is one that describes the way their computer models began to show collapses not due to any single factor, but due, ultimately, to the system being unable to cope.
Wait a minute, you say, _The Limits to Growth_? Didn't we debunk that a long time ago? Actually, the answer is no. The original LTG was a series of models that offered projected possible outcomes. What people remember about it was the direst set of predictions, which were only one of three such models offered up, and which authors specifically said were not intended to be specifically predictive. When you look at the moderate predictions offered by LTG, in fact, it turns out that it was fairly accurate. The problem lay mostly in the publicity.
Since then, the original authors from the Club of Rome have put together two further volumes, the most recent of which was released in 2004. They are now using even more complex computer modelling (than existed in the 1970s), but generally speaking, their current modelling validates their older models as well.
In the 30 year update, Meadows, Meadows and Randers ran multiple models of their "World 3" program, with different inputs. In some of their models, a single factor brought about a crisis - pollution and global warming, or resource depletion. But in others, the origins of the problem were multicausational - the intersection of multiple problems like capital shortages, failures of food production, pollution, soil degradation, depletion began to intersect and exacerbate one another. As they write,
"A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope." (TLG30, 223)
In one scenario, society addresses the fundamental problem of pollution, but cannot, because of it, resolve the problem of declining agricultural yields. In another, so much capital is diverted to compensatory strategies for dealing with loss of services and new crises that the economy collapses. Or investment in human resources (education, health and welfare, etc...) are eternally deferred to fund war or address crises, until it isn't possible to resolve the technical problems forthcoming.
Over at Running on Empty, Robert Waldrop recently made the connection between the news that tornado cleanup and response were delayed because too many national guardsmen were off at war, the failure of Hurricane Katrina and this basic problem - the inability of the system on a small scale to cope with one too many problems. We can juggle only so many balls in the air before they start to fall, one by one, to the ground. Whether or not Robert's contention is right, one of the reasons I am less than wholly optimistic about our long term future is simply this - we now have an awful lot of balls in the air. I know most of you already know this, but just in case, let's go over some of them:
1. As far as anyone can tell, world oil production seems to have peaked in Spring of 2005. There are some new fields coming on line, although they will not do more than (at best) offset the massive declines of major energy sources. Cantarell (Mexico) is declining at double digit rates. The Saudis are down by 8% in the last year, and show no signs of being able to raise production - in fact, they are predicting decreasing demand due to conservation (probably wishful thinking), which looks awfully like an excuse for not producing. While we may yet see a slightly later peak, the GAO report notes that a majority of petroleum analysts now believe we are at peak.
2. Natural gas is likely to reach its peak in the next decade, and has peaked for the US, and probably North America as well. Two new studies on coal resources suggest that we could reach the halfway mark on coal extraction in as little as 10 to 15 years. Since a vast majority of mitigation plans for climate change have depended on the vision of "clean" coal as an unlimited resource, this means a real reduction in the likelihood that this will be possible. Add to that the fact that the Americas are most likely already past their peak, and that coal is tremendously expensive to transport (as is LNG), and it seems unlikely that either fuel will fill the depletion curve.
3. Climate change is likely to take between 2 and 20 percent of the whole world's GDP for mitigation over the next decades. As a large group of scientist warned recently, week, almost everything about climate change is proceeding faster than predicted in any model. The one consistent truth about climate change is that we have no idea exactly what we're getting into, but it is probably bad.
4. Americans are increasingly living on the edge. Americans now have a negative savings rate, which means that they are living on borrowed money to an enormous degree. The housing market has fueled much of this borrowing, but seems to be on the verge of a crash - foreclosures are rising rapidly, and are expected to increase by 4000 percent over last year in California alone. Most major economists are now predicting a recession - which means job losses. Right now, people are able to get along spending more than they make and borrowing more than they can repay - what happens when job losses begin to rise and people begin to seriously lose their houses?
4. The American economy is also over-extended. We are enormously indebted, and there are troubling signs that China and Japan may not want to loan us money we have no hope of repaying forever. Our national credit rating has been effectively downgraded, and China particularly has been making noises about ceasing to buy US Treasuries. Since this is what is propping up our currency to a large degree, cessation will mean inflation, economic crisis, etc...
5. We are involved in failing wars on two fronts, and we are investing money we could spend on domestic resources in getting our own kids blown up in the middle east. There is every reason to believe that our current president plans to open a third front with Iran, perhaps via Israel, to give us a formal excuse to intervene. Meanwhile, domestic priorities are languishing. Real wages are falling, as are high school and college graduation rates. The percentage of Americans with no insurance is rising, as is the percentage who are food insecure and truly poor. Social support programs like fuel assistance and food pantries are increasingly overwhelmed.
6. Worldwide, agricultural yields are falling while populations rise. We are eating our grain reserves, and because of our growing reliance on biofuels, we are risking starving the poor world, inflating prices for the rich world while depleting our remaining agricultural resources to keep our cars going. The world now has less than 3 weeks grain reserves, as Australia essentially gives up on a meaningful harvest and Europe struggles with a spring drought.
7. Economic inequity of every sort is on the rise. 60% of China's much vaunted wealth is in the hands of less than 1% of its population. American economic inequality is as bad as it was right before the stock market crash. One out of every 7 Americans currently lives on $7 per day, which is roughly equivalent to the $2 per day that constitutes absolute poverty in third world nations - that is, one out of every seven Americans would, but for the increasingly shredded safety net, be living in the equivalent of a third world slum. Growing shantytowns in California and Arizona actually do look just like third world slums.
8. By 2050, one out of every 3 people in the world is expected to be short of water, and 1 person out of 7 can expect to be displaced. According to some climate models, much of the American west has a 100% chance of severe, annual warm season droughts. The same is true for much of Australia, the Mediterranean and Southern Europe, and vast parts of Europe and Asia. Almost 1 billion people may be water refugees.
There are more, of course - we could write about the decreasing critical thinking and educational skills of average Americans, the aging population, rising anger and rejection of the political process, corporate power, the problem of dealing with an increasing number of disasters, the structural problem of dismantling and rebuilding infrastructure like car based transportation systems and globalized economies, but you get the point. The problem isn't peak oil, or climate change, or water depletion in and of itself. The problem is that the juggler has all the balls in the air right now, and more are coming. And no matter how deft and graceful, at some point, the juggler falters.
So here is the question. Can we voluntarily give things up? Can we change our rate of consumption, and choose what amounts to voluntary peasantry? Can we drop our ecological footprint, our needs and desires, our habits and practices enough that we can be ready when the juggler drops the ball? Or maybe even help the juggler hold on?
I know some of you don't really believe in collapse. After all, the 20th century meant the invention of world-scale collapse, and ever since we discovered we could actually kill pretty much the whole human race, we've been fascinated with it and going on about it. If you are a baby boomers, you've lived through nuclear annhilation drills and ice age predictions, an energy crisis, worries about epidemics and y2k, and you are still a middle class guy with a mortgage. So why believe in this one?
I'd say for two reasons. The first is that the odds are so good - again, look at the models. Remember, TLG didn't predict a likely collapse in the 1970s - new reporters fixated on TLG did. The timing proposed wasn't radically dissimilar to the one we're actually seeing. Is collapse inevitable? No, it isn't. But there is no question that if you start using up your capital, someday you will be broke. And we're using our capital at an alarming rate - we're depleting the soil our kids will grow food on. We're burning the forests that they will use to modulate temperatures. We're polluting and using up the water they will want to drink. I do not think we should bet on ths problem never coming home to roost - or on their forgiving us for it.
But more importantly, look back at your parents and your grandparents. How many of them went through their lives without something that resembled a major disaster - a war or three, a depression, a pogrom, a decolonialization, a revolution, a monetary collapse, inflation, or something more person - hunger, disability, disease without safety net. Why is it that we've come to believe that 3 generations of peace and prosperity means that nothing bad will ever happen again? I'm pretty sure that during the prosperous late 10th and early-to-mid 11th century in Britain, most of the peasants thought nothing bad would ever happen again too. After all, Britain had been at peace and prosperous for nearly a hundred years, or so they thought in 1065.
We really only have two choices, whether viewed from an ethical or a practical perspective. One of them is to stop hoarding all the cookies, stop stealing from future generations, stop fucking over the poor, and start living, right now, like an ordinary person in an ordinary world. We need to stop believing our wealth can protect us from everything, and accept that a certain degree of vulnerability is a reality. We need to be willing to make the ordinary sacrifices that other generations have made for their own children - that is, to give up our comforts and wealth and risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor in order to ensure a future for our kids.
The other choice is to let it happen on its own, and to see if we can inhabit the space of collapse. See if we can get along - if we'll be as fortunate as the Cubans, or if this will be more like the Soviet Union, where lifespans dropped into the 50s, or like Iraq. And the choice is to be known to the rest of the world as people who took up their responsibilities, or as the most hated nation in the world, the ones who kept fiddling while the earth burned.
Which brings me to the project I wrote about in "Starting the Riot For Austerity" - Miranda and I (and a bunch of you - have I mentioned how grateful I am to have the company!?) are going to try and make massive cuts in our emissions and energy use. When I proposed this project, I didn't realize quite how difficult it would be even for us. I thought "we're used to consuming little, what's a bit less." But this is a lot less - we're looking at living a lot more like Chinese peasants (at least in terms of energy consumption, if not lifestyle) than like Americans. And that's scary - for all that we know that the life of an ordinary peasant (that is, most human beings through most of history) was not inevitably a hell, Americans are opposed to being peasants. The message of America is "I'm extraordinary, and I'm entitled to everything I can get my hands on." Peasants are ordinary. Their entitlements are traditional, fairly simple, and imperfect.
I wish I could say that I'd have the courage to do this simply because it was morally right. I'm not sure that's true. I'm a coward sometimes. But we've moved past right to moraly necessary. If we are to inhabit our future, we can do it gracefully, or be dragged kicking and screaming along by events. I choose grace, or I think I do.
I'll be posting more information about our emissions/energy cuts project later today or tomorrow. We've made some revisions and are still working on the details of setting up simple calculations.
Shalom,
Sharon
Now I'm going to play prophet for a moment, with the caveat that I'm really no better at it than anyone else, and that I'm often wrong. But my guess is that within the next two decades, probably sooner, things will get very, very different, and not in a very nice way. And that when we get there, instead of our being able to point to a single cause "Oh, it was peak oil" or "Damn that climate change" the problem will be a concatenation of factors, many of which we won't recognize when they happen.
Believe it or not, that true of the great depression. Economists and historians still don't have a clear consensus on why the great depression happened, or why it lasted as long as it did. There are theories and arguments, but there is no single event that one can point to. And I predict that we'll find ourselves puzzling (to various degrees) about what went wrong eventually.
One of the most fascinating passages in _The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update_ is one that describes the way their computer models began to show collapses not due to any single factor, but due, ultimately, to the system being unable to cope.
Wait a minute, you say, _The Limits to Growth_? Didn't we debunk that a long time ago? Actually, the answer is no. The original LTG was a series of models that offered projected possible outcomes. What people remember about it was the direst set of predictions, which were only one of three such models offered up, and which authors specifically said were not intended to be specifically predictive. When you look at the moderate predictions offered by LTG, in fact, it turns out that it was fairly accurate. The problem lay mostly in the publicity.
Since then, the original authors from the Club of Rome have put together two further volumes, the most recent of which was released in 2004. They are now using even more complex computer modelling (than existed in the 1970s), but generally speaking, their current modelling validates their older models as well.
In the 30 year update, Meadows, Meadows and Randers ran multiple models of their "World 3" program, with different inputs. In some of their models, a single factor brought about a crisis - pollution and global warming, or resource depletion. But in others, the origins of the problem were multicausational - the intersection of multiple problems like capital shortages, failures of food production, pollution, soil degradation, depletion began to intersect and exacerbate one another. As they write,
"A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope." (TLG30, 223)
In one scenario, society addresses the fundamental problem of pollution, but cannot, because of it, resolve the problem of declining agricultural yields. In another, so much capital is diverted to compensatory strategies for dealing with loss of services and new crises that the economy collapses. Or investment in human resources (education, health and welfare, etc...) are eternally deferred to fund war or address crises, until it isn't possible to resolve the technical problems forthcoming.
Over at Running on Empty, Robert Waldrop recently made the connection between the news that tornado cleanup and response were delayed because too many national guardsmen were off at war, the failure of Hurricane Katrina and this basic problem - the inability of the system on a small scale to cope with one too many problems. We can juggle only so many balls in the air before they start to fall, one by one, to the ground. Whether or not Robert's contention is right, one of the reasons I am less than wholly optimistic about our long term future is simply this - we now have an awful lot of balls in the air. I know most of you already know this, but just in case, let's go over some of them:
1. As far as anyone can tell, world oil production seems to have peaked in Spring of 2005. There are some new fields coming on line, although they will not do more than (at best) offset the massive declines of major energy sources. Cantarell (Mexico) is declining at double digit rates. The Saudis are down by 8% in the last year, and show no signs of being able to raise production - in fact, they are predicting decreasing demand due to conservation (probably wishful thinking), which looks awfully like an excuse for not producing. While we may yet see a slightly later peak, the GAO report notes that a majority of petroleum analysts now believe we are at peak.
2. Natural gas is likely to reach its peak in the next decade, and has peaked for the US, and probably North America as well. Two new studies on coal resources suggest that we could reach the halfway mark on coal extraction in as little as 10 to 15 years. Since a vast majority of mitigation plans for climate change have depended on the vision of "clean" coal as an unlimited resource, this means a real reduction in the likelihood that this will be possible. Add to that the fact that the Americas are most likely already past their peak, and that coal is tremendously expensive to transport (as is LNG), and it seems unlikely that either fuel will fill the depletion curve.
3. Climate change is likely to take between 2 and 20 percent of the whole world's GDP for mitigation over the next decades. As a large group of scientist warned recently, week, almost everything about climate change is proceeding faster than predicted in any model. The one consistent truth about climate change is that we have no idea exactly what we're getting into, but it is probably bad.
4. Americans are increasingly living on the edge. Americans now have a negative savings rate, which means that they are living on borrowed money to an enormous degree. The housing market has fueled much of this borrowing, but seems to be on the verge of a crash - foreclosures are rising rapidly, and are expected to increase by 4000 percent over last year in California alone. Most major economists are now predicting a recession - which means job losses. Right now, people are able to get along spending more than they make and borrowing more than they can repay - what happens when job losses begin to rise and people begin to seriously lose their houses?
4. The American economy is also over-extended. We are enormously indebted, and there are troubling signs that China and Japan may not want to loan us money we have no hope of repaying forever. Our national credit rating has been effectively downgraded, and China particularly has been making noises about ceasing to buy US Treasuries. Since this is what is propping up our currency to a large degree, cessation will mean inflation, economic crisis, etc...
5. We are involved in failing wars on two fronts, and we are investing money we could spend on domestic resources in getting our own kids blown up in the middle east. There is every reason to believe that our current president plans to open a third front with Iran, perhaps via Israel, to give us a formal excuse to intervene. Meanwhile, domestic priorities are languishing. Real wages are falling, as are high school and college graduation rates. The percentage of Americans with no insurance is rising, as is the percentage who are food insecure and truly poor. Social support programs like fuel assistance and food pantries are increasingly overwhelmed.
6. Worldwide, agricultural yields are falling while populations rise. We are eating our grain reserves, and because of our growing reliance on biofuels, we are risking starving the poor world, inflating prices for the rich world while depleting our remaining agricultural resources to keep our cars going. The world now has less than 3 weeks grain reserves, as Australia essentially gives up on a meaningful harvest and Europe struggles with a spring drought.
7. Economic inequity of every sort is on the rise. 60% of China's much vaunted wealth is in the hands of less than 1% of its population. American economic inequality is as bad as it was right before the stock market crash. One out of every 7 Americans currently lives on $7 per day, which is roughly equivalent to the $2 per day that constitutes absolute poverty in third world nations - that is, one out of every seven Americans would, but for the increasingly shredded safety net, be living in the equivalent of a third world slum. Growing shantytowns in California and Arizona actually do look just like third world slums.
8. By 2050, one out of every 3 people in the world is expected to be short of water, and 1 person out of 7 can expect to be displaced. According to some climate models, much of the American west has a 100% chance of severe, annual warm season droughts. The same is true for much of Australia, the Mediterranean and Southern Europe, and vast parts of Europe and Asia. Almost 1 billion people may be water refugees.
There are more, of course - we could write about the decreasing critical thinking and educational skills of average Americans, the aging population, rising anger and rejection of the political process, corporate power, the problem of dealing with an increasing number of disasters, the structural problem of dismantling and rebuilding infrastructure like car based transportation systems and globalized economies, but you get the point. The problem isn't peak oil, or climate change, or water depletion in and of itself. The problem is that the juggler has all the balls in the air right now, and more are coming. And no matter how deft and graceful, at some point, the juggler falters.
So here is the question. Can we voluntarily give things up? Can we change our rate of consumption, and choose what amounts to voluntary peasantry? Can we drop our ecological footprint, our needs and desires, our habits and practices enough that we can be ready when the juggler drops the ball? Or maybe even help the juggler hold on?
I know some of you don't really believe in collapse. After all, the 20th century meant the invention of world-scale collapse, and ever since we discovered we could actually kill pretty much the whole human race, we've been fascinated with it and going on about it. If you are a baby boomers, you've lived through nuclear annhilation drills and ice age predictions, an energy crisis, worries about epidemics and y2k, and you are still a middle class guy with a mortgage. So why believe in this one?
I'd say for two reasons. The first is that the odds are so good - again, look at the models. Remember, TLG didn't predict a likely collapse in the 1970s - new reporters fixated on TLG did. The timing proposed wasn't radically dissimilar to the one we're actually seeing. Is collapse inevitable? No, it isn't. But there is no question that if you start using up your capital, someday you will be broke. And we're using our capital at an alarming rate - we're depleting the soil our kids will grow food on. We're burning the forests that they will use to modulate temperatures. We're polluting and using up the water they will want to drink. I do not think we should bet on ths problem never coming home to roost - or on their forgiving us for it.
But more importantly, look back at your parents and your grandparents. How many of them went through their lives without something that resembled a major disaster - a war or three, a depression, a pogrom, a decolonialization, a revolution, a monetary collapse, inflation, or something more person - hunger, disability, disease without safety net. Why is it that we've come to believe that 3 generations of peace and prosperity means that nothing bad will ever happen again? I'm pretty sure that during the prosperous late 10th and early-to-mid 11th century in Britain, most of the peasants thought nothing bad would ever happen again too. After all, Britain had been at peace and prosperous for nearly a hundred years, or so they thought in 1065.
We really only have two choices, whether viewed from an ethical or a practical perspective. One of them is to stop hoarding all the cookies, stop stealing from future generations, stop fucking over the poor, and start living, right now, like an ordinary person in an ordinary world. We need to stop believing our wealth can protect us from everything, and accept that a certain degree of vulnerability is a reality. We need to be willing to make the ordinary sacrifices that other generations have made for their own children - that is, to give up our comforts and wealth and risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor in order to ensure a future for our kids.
The other choice is to let it happen on its own, and to see if we can inhabit the space of collapse. See if we can get along - if we'll be as fortunate as the Cubans, or if this will be more like the Soviet Union, where lifespans dropped into the 50s, or like Iraq. And the choice is to be known to the rest of the world as people who took up their responsibilities, or as the most hated nation in the world, the ones who kept fiddling while the earth burned.
Which brings me to the project I wrote about in "Starting the Riot For Austerity" - Miranda and I (and a bunch of you - have I mentioned how grateful I am to have the company!?) are going to try and make massive cuts in our emissions and energy use. When I proposed this project, I didn't realize quite how difficult it would be even for us. I thought "we're used to consuming little, what's a bit less." But this is a lot less - we're looking at living a lot more like Chinese peasants (at least in terms of energy consumption, if not lifestyle) than like Americans. And that's scary - for all that we know that the life of an ordinary peasant (that is, most human beings through most of history) was not inevitably a hell, Americans are opposed to being peasants. The message of America is "I'm extraordinary, and I'm entitled to everything I can get my hands on." Peasants are ordinary. Their entitlements are traditional, fairly simple, and imperfect.
I wish I could say that I'd have the courage to do this simply because it was morally right. I'm not sure that's true. I'm a coward sometimes. But we've moved past right to moraly necessary. If we are to inhabit our future, we can do it gracefully, or be dragged kicking and screaming along by events. I choose grace, or I think I do.
I'll be posting more information about our emissions/energy cuts project later today or tomorrow. We've made some revisions and are still working on the details of setting up simple calculations.
Shalom,
Sharon
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Cow Dance
Just about three years ago, I was planting corn. It was a damp, drizzly day, which was good, because we needed the rain, but muddy. So I decided to try planting corn a different way than my usual "hoe to cover technique." I dropped the corn seeds in the wet furrow, and then, instead of hoeing them, I took off my shoes and danced in the mud, using my bare feet to cover up the corn. I joked to myself that I might be able to call down a good, soaking rain that way.
Now you have to understand that my house is between two hills, and at the time (we've since acquired a nearer neighbor), the nearest neighbors were at least a quarter mile away. Now during the daytime, our street usually gets about a couple of cars an hour, so generally speaking, I wasn't too worried about being spotted and laughed at.
Well, I must have gotten pretty engrossed in what I was doing, because I was dancing away, and our young dog Rufus was napping underneath the wheelbarrow, when all of a sudden, I looked up, and there were a dozen cows, standing about 5 feet from me, watching me dance.
Now I live in the country, and it is dairy farming territory, so there are cows about, but not usually in my garden. While once in a while someone's cow breaks a fence and blocks traffic for a few minutes (if you ever come to visit, you should know that neither cows nor slow hay trucks respond to horns, so don't even bother ;-), but a dozen cows right next to me are something a bit unusual.
There was a long pause, while the cows and I considered one another. My thought pattern went something like this. "Ummm...something strange...does not compute...are there supposed to be cows here? I wasn't dancing for cows. (I have no idea why I immediately jumped to the mad conclusion that somehow this had something to do with my dancing - proof of insanity, I think.) Hmmm...better find out where they came from..." I have no idea what the cows were thinking, but it was probably rather more lucid than my own thoughts, which included a brief moment of embarassment that the cows had seen me dancing. Why, I have no idea.
Unfortunately, just as I realized I should feed the cows something (other than the basil they were eyeing) and call my dairy farming neighbors to find out which ones were missing some cows, Rufus woke up, and apparently went through a similar, if doggier thought process, approximately "Huh? What the... Cows! Wait a minute, no one said anything about cows here. Must. Bark. Furiously." And the cows rather rapidly disappeared across the road.
I was planting corn yesterday, and thus thinking about my cow dance, and I was briefly tempted to try and use the cows as a metaphor for the weird-seeming things we all are doing in our little efforts to conserve. Thankfully, though, since it would have been awkward and tendentious, I spare you that. Plus, the thing about the cows that was important was that the cows didn't seem at all troubled by what I was doing. It was me who was worried about what things looked like. To the cows, it was just interesting.
I leave to you, then, to take what you might from this story. Perhaps it could be a useful object lesson that the gazes we sometimes worry about are often just curious. Or perhaps a story of magical realism, in which it turns out that we ordinary people do have almost-magical powers to bring things about - but the things we bring about aren't the ones we intend. We dance for rain, and we get cows, and the challenge is to be happy about the cows and put them to use.
Or, perhaps I'm low on blog material today, and this is just a story about a goofy woman, with corn to plant, dancing in the rain, watched by a herd of cows. Who knows?
Sharon
Now you have to understand that my house is between two hills, and at the time (we've since acquired a nearer neighbor), the nearest neighbors were at least a quarter mile away. Now during the daytime, our street usually gets about a couple of cars an hour, so generally speaking, I wasn't too worried about being spotted and laughed at.
Well, I must have gotten pretty engrossed in what I was doing, because I was dancing away, and our young dog Rufus was napping underneath the wheelbarrow, when all of a sudden, I looked up, and there were a dozen cows, standing about 5 feet from me, watching me dance.
Now I live in the country, and it is dairy farming territory, so there are cows about, but not usually in my garden. While once in a while someone's cow breaks a fence and blocks traffic for a few minutes (if you ever come to visit, you should know that neither cows nor slow hay trucks respond to horns, so don't even bother ;-), but a dozen cows right next to me are something a bit unusual.
There was a long pause, while the cows and I considered one another. My thought pattern went something like this. "Ummm...something strange...does not compute...are there supposed to be cows here? I wasn't dancing for cows. (I have no idea why I immediately jumped to the mad conclusion that somehow this had something to do with my dancing - proof of insanity, I think.) Hmmm...better find out where they came from..." I have no idea what the cows were thinking, but it was probably rather more lucid than my own thoughts, which included a brief moment of embarassment that the cows had seen me dancing. Why, I have no idea.
Unfortunately, just as I realized I should feed the cows something (other than the basil they were eyeing) and call my dairy farming neighbors to find out which ones were missing some cows, Rufus woke up, and apparently went through a similar, if doggier thought process, approximately "Huh? What the... Cows! Wait a minute, no one said anything about cows here. Must. Bark. Furiously." And the cows rather rapidly disappeared across the road.
I was planting corn yesterday, and thus thinking about my cow dance, and I was briefly tempted to try and use the cows as a metaphor for the weird-seeming things we all are doing in our little efforts to conserve. Thankfully, though, since it would have been awkward and tendentious, I spare you that. Plus, the thing about the cows that was important was that the cows didn't seem at all troubled by what I was doing. It was me who was worried about what things looked like. To the cows, it was just interesting.
I leave to you, then, to take what you might from this story. Perhaps it could be a useful object lesson that the gazes we sometimes worry about are often just curious. Or perhaps a story of magical realism, in which it turns out that we ordinary people do have almost-magical powers to bring things about - but the things we bring about aren't the ones we intend. We dance for rain, and we get cows, and the challenge is to be happy about the cows and put them to use.
Or, perhaps I'm low on blog material today, and this is just a story about a goofy woman, with corn to plant, dancing in the rain, watched by a herd of cows. Who knows?
Sharon
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
How To Keep Your House
Well, it has been a few weeks of really nasty economic news for poor folks. To recap, we've been told that gas will probably go to $4 per gallon (which many of us laud as a good thing, but is effectively the 'screw the poor' method of encouraging conservation), with a decent chance of shortages, that Con Ed here in New York will raise its electric prices by 12%, that a minimum of 1.1 million additional foreclosures are expected next year, that the price of food is up 12% in the US (and more than 25% in poor nations where people already spend 60% or more of their income on food), that in Boston 8,000 people stand to have all their utilities cut off for non-payment and that pretty soon the Southwest is going to choose between having power and water to drink. Plus, of course, there's the IPCC mitigation report, which does not quite add up to "we're all gonna die" but given that the world target figures of even the most ambitious nations don't come near making the full cut in in the full amount of time, are not good news. Oh, and guess what - clean coal, always an illusion, just got a little more illusory, with coal peaks in the next 10-20 years according to two seperate analyses
A few months back, I wrote an essay about how likely it is that many of us will not have grid-supplied electricity in the future, not because I'm prognosticating the apocalyptic end of the grid, but because we won't be able to afford it. The essay is here:
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/it-isnt-gridcrash-that-makes-lights-go.html if
anyone is interested. Unfortunately, I think this is one of the predictions I've made that is turning out to be right - as energy costs rise, a (at first) small but increasing number of people will be priced out of fossil fuels altogether in the US, just as many of the poorest people in the world are losing their access to fossil fuel due to rising prices. Most of the people who read this blog probably haven't been affected yet. But give it time.
You must be wondering why I'm going on about utilities when this post is titled, "how to keep your house." But the two are connected. When people lose property to foreclosure, they've often already gotten themselves in deep in other ways as well. And sometimes, the problem ends up being that you have to pay so many other high priced bills that you can't pay the mortgage. But there are ways to reduce the sheer number of bills you have to pay, including turning off your utilities.
Now on to the official subject - what happens if you are one of the million (s) of people who stand to lose their homes in the next year or two, due to rising interest rates, a stumbling economy and inflation for everything else? Even if you don't think you fall into this category, you may yet be surprised. So far, job growth has merely slowed - we're not seeing large scale layoffs. But it doesn't take much to tip the economy into a real recession, and most of the major economic figures are now starting to predict one. Given the confluence of unpleasantness facing us, do you really want to bet your life that you'll keep your job? And how long could you keep up your mortgage payments without a salary? Or what if your employer drops health insurance and other benefits - how long before the costs of meeting basic family needs made it impossible for you to keep up with everything else? Americans are very poorly prepared for the coming crisis - they are overwhelmingly in debt, have little or no savings (the average Baby Boomer has less than 10K saved for a rapidly approaching retirement - and they have more than the rest of us), and has a large mortgage. American national savings rates are at -.5, but that's actually misleading - the savings rate doesn't count in the costs of housing, which are wildly inflated. So the amount we're overspending our income, some analysts estimate is really more like *5%* annually - that is, Americans are spending significantly more than they earn every single year. With the dollar falling, we can expect to see prices rising for a good long time. That's the makings of a real mess. So none of us should be too complacent about what we have.
First of all, I hate to say this, but you should think seriously about whether your house is worth saving, or savable. That is, before I offer any suggestions on how to avoid being foreclosed upon, take a clear eyed and hard look at your life and think about whether you want to even try. Because there are some people who are going to lose their houses anyhow, and others who may be pouring good money after bad to keep something they don't need.
The questions you should ask yourself are these. Did I buy my house at the price peak? Because if you did, sorry to say, there's a good chance you'll never regain your equity. So you need to ask yourself, do you want to spend 30 years paying off a house that cost too much? Will you be able to pay it for the next 30 years? Can you afford this house? Think seriously about this one. But, you say, I can't get my house price back. Well, but if this is a long term decline, you won't be getting it anyway. Are you prepared to see equity drop even further, to stay in your house for a decade or more, or to take an even bigger loss? Sometimes it is better to cut and run.
Did you put much money down? Do you have an ARM (adjustible rate mortgage, or g-d forbid, an interest only loan?) And how much of your income goes to this mortgage? If it is more than 1/3 of your household income, and you absolutely need both jobs to pay your mortgage, while having little or no equity, you should start looking for a buyer today. Because the odds are good that sooner or later you'll lose your house - or be trapped in it forever, scrimping and struggling to own a property that will never be worth what you paid for. It is always better to get out on your own terms than to have the bank foreclose on you. Even if you lose some money, it is better than your losing everything you've paid into the house up until now.
Remember, banks don't really want to own houses. They don't like foreclosing (although they don't dislike it so much they won't do it, unfortunately.) And they also know that the longer they can keep you paying for something, the better off they come out in a foreclosure situation. So they are likely to be extremely "kind" for a good while, offering to lower payments or help you out with late ones. But only you know if this is real kindness - there's nothing helpful to you about you paying a lot of money to the bank that you'll never see again, only to lose the house later. Again, if you think you will have to get out, do it on your own terms.
Do you want to live in this house for the long term? If you bought this house in the hopes trading up, if it has no yard, or is in an area with restrictive covenants and high property taxes, if it is house that shows off your lifestyle more than meets your needs, perhaps getting out and buying a much cheaper property somewhere else is worth it.
Remember, there are areas of the country that are not overvalued. And even if that means changing jobs or careers, you might have a better, more secure life if you lived less on the financial edge. We tend to think that our jobs and careers are non-negotiable - "I have to live here - that's where the jobs are." But there's no need to fetishize your job - it is, presumably, mostly how you manage to keep body and soul together, not the whole reason for your existence. And if that is true, consider carefully whether you might not be able to live as well somewhere else, being paid a bit less or doing something somewhat different. Obviously, this won't work for everyone, and there are those for whom a job is a passion. But if your job isn't your life, and you live in an expensive place, and are already concerned about keeping up, think seriously about going somewhere cheaper. Salaries will be lower, but then, so will costs.
But assuming that you do want to stay in your house, but that you are already struggling or forsee difficulties, how do you do it? Of course, the first thing is to get the heck out from under any other debt you have if possible. If you can see this coming while you still have an income, then the first thing you do is cut *WAAAAAAYYY* back on everything. That means no more meals out, no more cable, no more keeping the heat and a/c at 70, get rid of the car with the payment and replace it with a junker or take the bus, buy everything used that you can, and don't buy much of that. Get rid of the dryer and line dry your clothes Plant a garden and eat that instead. For many of us, this isn't news. For the rest, this will be hard. You won't die from it, though. Divide the money you save (track it!) into two funds - one savings, one debt reduction. Pay off the highest interest rates first. Consider consolidating to a short term 0% interest credit card, and then paying it off diligently.
Are things more urgent than that? Are you starting to feel the pinch already? Well cut back some more - sell the computer, and give up the internet - go to the library instead. Find a carpool and give up your car. Dump the tae kwon do for the kids, and teach them to cook from scratch and play pick up soccer instead. Go vegetarian. Give up luxuries like coffee and beer. Make your fun at home. Turn the thermostat way down (or up, depending on whether we're talking about heating and cooling), cut the water bill by limiting showers to 3 minutes. Again, use the money to pay down debt and build some savings.
But what if you are already in trouble - the utility people are threatening to shut you off, the mortgage people are threatening to foreclose, the bill collectors are calling day and night? What then?
First of all, the bill collectors can't call you if you tell them not to. Tell them not to. And don't panic or go into denial. It is easy to feel that you "just can't deal" with all of this, or to be so ashamed that you can't focus on fixing it. Right now, people are getting poorer - real incomes are falling, inequities are rising. If you are one of them, you should not buy into the notion that you are a bad person, who is making bad choices. And if you have made bad choices, remember, all of us have. So forgive yourself, resolve not to do it again, recognize that this isn't your fault, or wholly your fault, and get your butt in gear and concentrate on ensuring yourself a stable place to live. One of the most remarkable things about American culture is how much we blame poor people for being poor - we isolate them, tell them it is a moral failure and that they are scum. DON'T BUY IT! This is the beginnings of a systemic failure, and if it is hitting your before your neighbors, that's probably mostly bad luck. Even if you made mistakes, everyone does - yours just hit you harder.
Second of all, if things are that dire, make an order of priority. First is food. Get the cheapest healthy food you can - don't live on ramen noodles. But buy whole grains and beans and live on bread and bean soup, along with the dandilions from your yard and produce you buy at the very end of the day for bargain prices at the farmer's market. Second, is needed medicine. Every state now has insurance programs for poor children - get your kids on them. Check out drug company programs if you are genuinely dependent on some medication. But also think about whether you really need what has been prescribed for you - we are the most overmedicated people on the planet. Yes, I know that you are about to say that you really, really need your drugs. And maybe you do. But think about whether if you could rest more or live differently or relax a little more you might not be able to get away without things. Remember, Americans use the health care system more and take more drugs than anyone in the world - but other places have longer lifespans and higher qualities of life. It may be that a little less medication would help. Or perhaps you could choose a cheaper, older drug. Talk to your doctor about this, and don't mess with it on my advice alone, of course.
The next thing should be your house - the reason you should keep your house (assuming it is worth keeping as above) is that the land you are on allows you to grow food, the house is shelter, etc... So you need to keep your home and garden going. Make sure you are planting every inch of lawn with fruit trees, bushes and gardens. You'll want to eat that food. Call up your extension agents and ask if they can help you find sources for divisions and inexpensive seeds, or hook you up with a garden mentor. Every dollar you don't spend on food is one you can put towards the mortgage. If you are older, and can't do as much, call your local garden club or 4 H and explain your situation - tell them you need to garden, but can't put one in, could some nice strong teenagers help you out.
Consider adding more people to your house - allow a friend, college student or relative to come live with you in exchange for a small rent. Or perhaps you could take in a local elder who can't live independently, but can meet most of their own needs. Those giant houses we've been building all these years of the boom - the problem is that there aren't enough people in them
If you have children, talk to them about what's going on, and enlist their help. Any child over 10 can work to meet some of their own needs, or even give a little money to the family to help. I know, you don't want to do that - you don't want to worry them, you don't want to ask your kids to help support the family. Well, I'm going to be blunt. First of all, they already know things are dire - they aren't stupid. What they may not know is exactly what's wrong, but unless you are very, very gifted at denial they've already felt your fear, seen your stress, heard you fight, etc... So sitting down and talking to them (at an age appropriate level) can only make it better, and help them work out their own anxieties. And giving them something productive to do, while valuing their contribution, is actually good for them. I don't mean that your kids should quit school, but saying, "It would be a big help if you would mow lawns for your snack and activity money" or "If you could watch your sister so that Daddy could look for a job, we'd be grateful." One of the real problems our society has is that children don't do enough work, and they don't feel valued. Let your kids help you out of this one. You may worry it will scar them to have to give up activities and go to work - once upon a time, we used to call this "building character." I suspect we will again.
Sell stuff. Don't just turn off your freezer, sell it. Get rid of the big appliances. Get rid of fancy, newer stuff and replace it with cheaper older stuff. It may not seem like selling those new sofas would be worth it, but if you can get $250 off of Craig's List, and then get another for $50, you are $200 ahead. To be blunt, the whole nation got into an economic mess by looking at pretty pictures and thinking "I want that. I should have that." Well, we need to go back to houses that reflect our real standard of living - poorer. That's no shame and we'll have to get used to it. And while we're at it, stop reading the catalogs, the magazines and watching tv - don't look at the pretty pictures that create desire.
Because mortgage payments and property tax assessments are such a large part of your costs, the idea is to cut back wherever you can elsewhere. You may be able to reduce your tax assessment if property prices have fallen in your area. Consider requesting a new assessment.
And you can (you may not like it much) cut back in a myriad of ways. That is, it is perfectly possible to continue living in your house without electricity or heat in many cases. It won't be easy. But if you consider you consider your house worth it, think seriously about it. The average American could save more than a thousand dollars a year by giving up utilities. First you minimize, but if things get tough, turn it off. You can keep cool by sitting outside in the shade with your feet in a 5 dollar kiddie pool, and turn off the a/c. You can keep warm by bundling up, moving around a lot and drinking hot tea. There's no reason for anyone to ever die of heat stroke or cold in a house - I know it happens all the time, but it doesn't *have* to.
Most people who die of heat stroke are elderly, small children or disabled, and they don't realize they are becoming stressed and confused. But with simple attentions, things as basic as cool cloths and a footbath can keep someone from overheating in very hot weather, and warm clothing, moving around, hot stones or hot water bottles and blankets can keep you more than adequately warm in the cold. It takes preparation and thought, but you do not need either heating or cooling to live - as evidenced by the billions of people who live without them.
You do need water, and that may mean electricity. It also might mean a hand pump, if you can get ahold of one. They cost a few hundred dollars, but can pump water up from 200 feet down by hand. Or some rainbarrels (food grade only), or even a hand-dug cistern (dig a deep hole, line it with stone or cement, let the water wash off your roof into it. Don't drink it without filtering. Consider a handmade composting toilet. John Jenkins's _The Humanure Handbook_ is available for free download online - google it, and try building one. It really requires only a bit of scrap wood and a five gallon bucket, and is easy to do. I would reccomend being quiet about it, though.
And *do not* skimp on water for washing hands - your health depends on this, and you can't afford to get sick.
I'd keep lights and a stove as long as possible, but it is possible to do without even these things. A simple solar cooker can get you through the summer, and you can build an outdoor oven for the winter - make it with bricks or cement, and use little bits of wood and kindling to get it hot enough to bake/cook stews and casseroles in.
Get a push mower for your lawn, so that the neighbors don't complain too much, if you can, or quietly go to a neighbor and work out a barter arrangement to borrow their mower. I mention this not because I care about your lawn - personally, I'd rather see it turned into food plants - but because your neighbors are more likely to remain your allies if they are aware you are paying attention to their property values.
This will not be easy or pleasant. The one thing I would do is caution you to avoid letting people know that you have turned off your utilities. There are a few cases of over-zealous social workers taking children out of homes without power because this is a necessity. A Mennonite family I know approached a social worker in my state about wanting to adopt disabled kids, and were told that they could lose their own children for not having running water. Later on, they were told this was not true, but this isn't something you want to mess with. Try and avoid making a big public thing about this.
On the other hand, feel free to make use of support programs and other resources if necessary. If your kids need school lunches or breakfasts, get them. If you can't buy clothes, check the free bin. If you need food, don't be ashamed to use the food pantry. Just remember - pay it back and then some when you can. Because the next time, it will be your neighbor.
Ultimately, the moment you know your house is in danger, you should go into triage mode - first, decide whether to keep it. If you are going to keep it, make your focus ensuring that that can happen, and recognize that everything else is secondary. You can do this - the life you are changing towards is likely to be familiar to many of us in time. And it is eminently doable.
I hope this helps someone.
Sharon
A few months back, I wrote an essay about how likely it is that many of us will not have grid-supplied electricity in the future, not because I'm prognosticating the apocalyptic end of the grid, but because we won't be able to afford it. The essay is here:
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/it-isnt-gridcrash-that-makes-lights-go.html if
anyone is interested. Unfortunately, I think this is one of the predictions I've made that is turning out to be right - as energy costs rise, a (at first) small but increasing number of people will be priced out of fossil fuels altogether in the US, just as many of the poorest people in the world are losing their access to fossil fuel due to rising prices. Most of the people who read this blog probably haven't been affected yet. But give it time.
You must be wondering why I'm going on about utilities when this post is titled, "how to keep your house." But the two are connected. When people lose property to foreclosure, they've often already gotten themselves in deep in other ways as well. And sometimes, the problem ends up being that you have to pay so many other high priced bills that you can't pay the mortgage. But there are ways to reduce the sheer number of bills you have to pay, including turning off your utilities.
Now on to the official subject - what happens if you are one of the million (s) of people who stand to lose their homes in the next year or two, due to rising interest rates, a stumbling economy and inflation for everything else? Even if you don't think you fall into this category, you may yet be surprised. So far, job growth has merely slowed - we're not seeing large scale layoffs. But it doesn't take much to tip the economy into a real recession, and most of the major economic figures are now starting to predict one. Given the confluence of unpleasantness facing us, do you really want to bet your life that you'll keep your job? And how long could you keep up your mortgage payments without a salary? Or what if your employer drops health insurance and other benefits - how long before the costs of meeting basic family needs made it impossible for you to keep up with everything else? Americans are very poorly prepared for the coming crisis - they are overwhelmingly in debt, have little or no savings (the average Baby Boomer has less than 10K saved for a rapidly approaching retirement - and they have more than the rest of us), and has a large mortgage. American national savings rates are at -.5, but that's actually misleading - the savings rate doesn't count in the costs of housing, which are wildly inflated. So the amount we're overspending our income, some analysts estimate is really more like *5%* annually - that is, Americans are spending significantly more than they earn every single year. With the dollar falling, we can expect to see prices rising for a good long time. That's the makings of a real mess. So none of us should be too complacent about what we have.
First of all, I hate to say this, but you should think seriously about whether your house is worth saving, or savable. That is, before I offer any suggestions on how to avoid being foreclosed upon, take a clear eyed and hard look at your life and think about whether you want to even try. Because there are some people who are going to lose their houses anyhow, and others who may be pouring good money after bad to keep something they don't need.
The questions you should ask yourself are these. Did I buy my house at the price peak? Because if you did, sorry to say, there's a good chance you'll never regain your equity. So you need to ask yourself, do you want to spend 30 years paying off a house that cost too much? Will you be able to pay it for the next 30 years? Can you afford this house? Think seriously about this one. But, you say, I can't get my house price back. Well, but if this is a long term decline, you won't be getting it anyway. Are you prepared to see equity drop even further, to stay in your house for a decade or more, or to take an even bigger loss? Sometimes it is better to cut and run.
Did you put much money down? Do you have an ARM (adjustible rate mortgage, or g-d forbid, an interest only loan?) And how much of your income goes to this mortgage? If it is more than 1/3 of your household income, and you absolutely need both jobs to pay your mortgage, while having little or no equity, you should start looking for a buyer today. Because the odds are good that sooner or later you'll lose your house - or be trapped in it forever, scrimping and struggling to own a property that will never be worth what you paid for. It is always better to get out on your own terms than to have the bank foreclose on you. Even if you lose some money, it is better than your losing everything you've paid into the house up until now.
Remember, banks don't really want to own houses. They don't like foreclosing (although they don't dislike it so much they won't do it, unfortunately.) And they also know that the longer they can keep you paying for something, the better off they come out in a foreclosure situation. So they are likely to be extremely "kind" for a good while, offering to lower payments or help you out with late ones. But only you know if this is real kindness - there's nothing helpful to you about you paying a lot of money to the bank that you'll never see again, only to lose the house later. Again, if you think you will have to get out, do it on your own terms.
Do you want to live in this house for the long term? If you bought this house in the hopes trading up, if it has no yard, or is in an area with restrictive covenants and high property taxes, if it is house that shows off your lifestyle more than meets your needs, perhaps getting out and buying a much cheaper property somewhere else is worth it.
Remember, there are areas of the country that are not overvalued. And even if that means changing jobs or careers, you might have a better, more secure life if you lived less on the financial edge. We tend to think that our jobs and careers are non-negotiable - "I have to live here - that's where the jobs are." But there's no need to fetishize your job - it is, presumably, mostly how you manage to keep body and soul together, not the whole reason for your existence. And if that is true, consider carefully whether you might not be able to live as well somewhere else, being paid a bit less or doing something somewhat different. Obviously, this won't work for everyone, and there are those for whom a job is a passion. But if your job isn't your life, and you live in an expensive place, and are already concerned about keeping up, think seriously about going somewhere cheaper. Salaries will be lower, but then, so will costs.
But assuming that you do want to stay in your house, but that you are already struggling or forsee difficulties, how do you do it? Of course, the first thing is to get the heck out from under any other debt you have if possible. If you can see this coming while you still have an income, then the first thing you do is cut *WAAAAAAYYY* back on everything. That means no more meals out, no more cable, no more keeping the heat and a/c at 70, get rid of the car with the payment and replace it with a junker or take the bus, buy everything used that you can, and don't buy much of that. Get rid of the dryer and line dry your clothes Plant a garden and eat that instead. For many of us, this isn't news. For the rest, this will be hard. You won't die from it, though. Divide the money you save (track it!) into two funds - one savings, one debt reduction. Pay off the highest interest rates first. Consider consolidating to a short term 0% interest credit card, and then paying it off diligently.
Are things more urgent than that? Are you starting to feel the pinch already? Well cut back some more - sell the computer, and give up the internet - go to the library instead. Find a carpool and give up your car. Dump the tae kwon do for the kids, and teach them to cook from scratch and play pick up soccer instead. Go vegetarian. Give up luxuries like coffee and beer. Make your fun at home. Turn the thermostat way down (or up, depending on whether we're talking about heating and cooling), cut the water bill by limiting showers to 3 minutes. Again, use the money to pay down debt and build some savings.
But what if you are already in trouble - the utility people are threatening to shut you off, the mortgage people are threatening to foreclose, the bill collectors are calling day and night? What then?
First of all, the bill collectors can't call you if you tell them not to. Tell them not to. And don't panic or go into denial. It is easy to feel that you "just can't deal" with all of this, or to be so ashamed that you can't focus on fixing it. Right now, people are getting poorer - real incomes are falling, inequities are rising. If you are one of them, you should not buy into the notion that you are a bad person, who is making bad choices. And if you have made bad choices, remember, all of us have. So forgive yourself, resolve not to do it again, recognize that this isn't your fault, or wholly your fault, and get your butt in gear and concentrate on ensuring yourself a stable place to live. One of the most remarkable things about American culture is how much we blame poor people for being poor - we isolate them, tell them it is a moral failure and that they are scum. DON'T BUY IT! This is the beginnings of a systemic failure, and if it is hitting your before your neighbors, that's probably mostly bad luck. Even if you made mistakes, everyone does - yours just hit you harder.
Second of all, if things are that dire, make an order of priority. First is food. Get the cheapest healthy food you can - don't live on ramen noodles. But buy whole grains and beans and live on bread and bean soup, along with the dandilions from your yard and produce you buy at the very end of the day for bargain prices at the farmer's market. Second, is needed medicine. Every state now has insurance programs for poor children - get your kids on them. Check out drug company programs if you are genuinely dependent on some medication. But also think about whether you really need what has been prescribed for you - we are the most overmedicated people on the planet. Yes, I know that you are about to say that you really, really need your drugs. And maybe you do. But think about whether if you could rest more or live differently or relax a little more you might not be able to get away without things. Remember, Americans use the health care system more and take more drugs than anyone in the world - but other places have longer lifespans and higher qualities of life. It may be that a little less medication would help. Or perhaps you could choose a cheaper, older drug. Talk to your doctor about this, and don't mess with it on my advice alone, of course.
The next thing should be your house - the reason you should keep your house (assuming it is worth keeping as above) is that the land you are on allows you to grow food, the house is shelter, etc... So you need to keep your home and garden going. Make sure you are planting every inch of lawn with fruit trees, bushes and gardens. You'll want to eat that food. Call up your extension agents and ask if they can help you find sources for divisions and inexpensive seeds, or hook you up with a garden mentor. Every dollar you don't spend on food is one you can put towards the mortgage. If you are older, and can't do as much, call your local garden club or 4 H and explain your situation - tell them you need to garden, but can't put one in, could some nice strong teenagers help you out.
Consider adding more people to your house - allow a friend, college student or relative to come live with you in exchange for a small rent. Or perhaps you could take in a local elder who can't live independently, but can meet most of their own needs. Those giant houses we've been building all these years of the boom - the problem is that there aren't enough people in them
If you have children, talk to them about what's going on, and enlist their help. Any child over 10 can work to meet some of their own needs, or even give a little money to the family to help. I know, you don't want to do that - you don't want to worry them, you don't want to ask your kids to help support the family. Well, I'm going to be blunt. First of all, they already know things are dire - they aren't stupid. What they may not know is exactly what's wrong, but unless you are very, very gifted at denial they've already felt your fear, seen your stress, heard you fight, etc... So sitting down and talking to them (at an age appropriate level) can only make it better, and help them work out their own anxieties. And giving them something productive to do, while valuing their contribution, is actually good for them. I don't mean that your kids should quit school, but saying, "It would be a big help if you would mow lawns for your snack and activity money" or "If you could watch your sister so that Daddy could look for a job, we'd be grateful." One of the real problems our society has is that children don't do enough work, and they don't feel valued. Let your kids help you out of this one. You may worry it will scar them to have to give up activities and go to work - once upon a time, we used to call this "building character." I suspect we will again.
Sell stuff. Don't just turn off your freezer, sell it. Get rid of the big appliances. Get rid of fancy, newer stuff and replace it with cheaper older stuff. It may not seem like selling those new sofas would be worth it, but if you can get $250 off of Craig's List, and then get another for $50, you are $200 ahead. To be blunt, the whole nation got into an economic mess by looking at pretty pictures and thinking "I want that. I should have that." Well, we need to go back to houses that reflect our real standard of living - poorer. That's no shame and we'll have to get used to it. And while we're at it, stop reading the catalogs, the magazines and watching tv - don't look at the pretty pictures that create desire.
Because mortgage payments and property tax assessments are such a large part of your costs, the idea is to cut back wherever you can elsewhere. You may be able to reduce your tax assessment if property prices have fallen in your area. Consider requesting a new assessment.
And you can (you may not like it much) cut back in a myriad of ways. That is, it is perfectly possible to continue living in your house without electricity or heat in many cases. It won't be easy. But if you consider you consider your house worth it, think seriously about it. The average American could save more than a thousand dollars a year by giving up utilities. First you minimize, but if things get tough, turn it off. You can keep cool by sitting outside in the shade with your feet in a 5 dollar kiddie pool, and turn off the a/c. You can keep warm by bundling up, moving around a lot and drinking hot tea. There's no reason for anyone to ever die of heat stroke or cold in a house - I know it happens all the time, but it doesn't *have* to.
Most people who die of heat stroke are elderly, small children or disabled, and they don't realize they are becoming stressed and confused. But with simple attentions, things as basic as cool cloths and a footbath can keep someone from overheating in very hot weather, and warm clothing, moving around, hot stones or hot water bottles and blankets can keep you more than adequately warm in the cold. It takes preparation and thought, but you do not need either heating or cooling to live - as evidenced by the billions of people who live without them.
You do need water, and that may mean electricity. It also might mean a hand pump, if you can get ahold of one. They cost a few hundred dollars, but can pump water up from 200 feet down by hand. Or some rainbarrels (food grade only), or even a hand-dug cistern (dig a deep hole, line it with stone or cement, let the water wash off your roof into it. Don't drink it without filtering. Consider a handmade composting toilet. John Jenkins's _The Humanure Handbook_ is available for free download online - google it, and try building one. It really requires only a bit of scrap wood and a five gallon bucket, and is easy to do. I would reccomend being quiet about it, though.
And *do not* skimp on water for washing hands - your health depends on this, and you can't afford to get sick.
I'd keep lights and a stove as long as possible, but it is possible to do without even these things. A simple solar cooker can get you through the summer, and you can build an outdoor oven for the winter - make it with bricks or cement, and use little bits of wood and kindling to get it hot enough to bake/cook stews and casseroles in.
Get a push mower for your lawn, so that the neighbors don't complain too much, if you can, or quietly go to a neighbor and work out a barter arrangement to borrow their mower. I mention this not because I care about your lawn - personally, I'd rather see it turned into food plants - but because your neighbors are more likely to remain your allies if they are aware you are paying attention to their property values.
This will not be easy or pleasant. The one thing I would do is caution you to avoid letting people know that you have turned off your utilities. There are a few cases of over-zealous social workers taking children out of homes without power because this is a necessity. A Mennonite family I know approached a social worker in my state about wanting to adopt disabled kids, and were told that they could lose their own children for not having running water. Later on, they were told this was not true, but this isn't something you want to mess with. Try and avoid making a big public thing about this.
On the other hand, feel free to make use of support programs and other resources if necessary. If your kids need school lunches or breakfasts, get them. If you can't buy clothes, check the free bin. If you need food, don't be ashamed to use the food pantry. Just remember - pay it back and then some when you can. Because the next time, it will be your neighbor.
Ultimately, the moment you know your house is in danger, you should go into triage mode - first, decide whether to keep it. If you are going to keep it, make your focus ensuring that that can happen, and recognize that everything else is secondary. You can do this - the life you are changing towards is likely to be familiar to many of us in time. And it is eminently doable.
I hope this helps someone.
Sharon
Monday, May 14, 2007
52 Weeks Down: Week 3: Make It Yourself
Welcome to week 3 of our 52 week energy cut. I'm hoping that this is starting to be helpful for some of you, and that you've found that the first changes I suggested weren't too overwhelming.
This week's project is "make something you usually buy." By doing so, you cut down on your need to drive to stores, reduce packaging and cut costs. I'm trying to do more of this myself - this week's project at our house is crackers. My kids like them, and I don't like to buy them, since most of the ones in the store aren't super healthy. Way back when I was testing recipes out of Carla Emery's _Encyclopedia of Country Living_, I tried all her cracker recipes, and some were extremely good, but I sort of forgot about them, and occasionally bought bulk wheat crackers instead. But I noticed that my family often has leftover oatmeal (favorite breakfast here) lying around, and so I've started making her "gruel crackers" (sounds awful, doesn't it, very Oliver Twist, but we really like them).
For someone just beginning, one of the best things you can make is bread. I don't know about you, but our family eats a lot of bread, and we like it best fresh. The thing about store bread is that you never get to eat it the way it tastes best - straight out of the oven! You don't need anything really special for this - bread is easy, it just takes practice - and it tastes and smells so much better than the store stuff. Or maybe you might want to try yogurt. I know my kids will eat all the yogurt they can get, and I want to avoid those little plastic containers. Or how about granola bars as a snack? NoImpactman has a lovely post about making yogurt here: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/do_a_dance_for_.html, and I got my recipe for granola bars via Pat Meadows who got it from an old Mother Earth News. The recipe is listed below.
Or how about something that isn't a food. You could try shampoo - I've started washing my scalp with baking soda a few times a week to stretch out my need to shampoo, and when I do wash my hair, I do it with diluted castile soap, which comes in a giant bottle and is about 20 times cheaper than shampoo. Miranda writes about the benefits of the baking soda technique here: http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/unshampoo/ Or you could make toothpowder, about 100 times cheaper than toothpaste, out of salt, baking soda and a little cinnamon oil.
Or, if you are really fancy, you could make something complicated, like a pair of socks. I don't know about you, but I like socks, and I like to knit and crochet. Way back when I wrote a blog post about the fact that everyone needs to be able to make socks, because no matter what happens, you are bound to have to replace your socks someday. You can read it here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2005/02/great-sock-rant-of-05.html Or you could make a shower sponge. My friend Aaron famously makes loofah sponges, and they are really cool. Now you can't do that in a week, but you could start the seeds today. Here are instructions:http://groovygreen.com/groove/?p=689
But if you are new to this making rather than buying, start simple. Make a loaf of bread. A little yogurt. Mix some baking soda and water together instead of squirting from that shampoo bottle. Do it for a week, and see if you like it. Don't get overwhelmed, it is easy, and it doesn't take nearly as much time as you think it will. The thing is, not only are these things usually cheaper and more environmentally friendly, they are better too. The real secret about living sustainably is that it is more fun and a better life, better food and more pleasure. But shhh...don't tell ;-).
Recipes:
_Molasses Wheat Bread_
(My husband makes 4-6 loaves of this most weeks - it is his favorite quick and easy bread. You can substitute for many of the ingredients, and it is a very good introduction to bread making. I would recommend that absolute bread beginners do the recipe using the first listed ingredient the first time, and then experiment. This recipe was taken from Marcia Adams's _New Recipes from Quilt Country_)
4 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups white flour (you can use all whole wheat, but if you are new to breadmaking, some white is probably better while you start)
2 pkgs dry yeast
2 1/4 cups of milk (or water, or buttermilk or whatever you've got)
1/4 cup oil (whatever sort you have, or you substitute mashed squash or pumpkin)
1/4 cup molasses (or sorghum, or honey, or sugar (but add some extra liquid) - we've also made this with maple syrup and blackstrap molasses - both have a much stronger taste, but are pleasant enough, but be prepared for a strong flavor if you use them)
1 egg, beaten
Stir together 2 cups of flour (doesn't really matter which), the salt, and yeast. Combine the milk, oil and molasses in a saucepan or solar oven and heat until just warm - stick your finger in to test. Add the warm liquid and the egg to the flour mixture. Beat for 3 minutes with a whisk or wooden spoon. Gradually add the remaining flour until the dough is soft but elastic. Knead for 2 minutes (knead means to smoosh it flat, fold it over, smoosh it some more and generally whack it around for a while).
Place the dough in a bowl in a warm place, covered by a slightly damp cloth (the cloth shouldn't touch the dough - it is merely to provide humidity), and let it double - 1-2 hours (we actually generally do the above the night before and leave it sitting around on the kitchen counter until morning. It does just fine. That way, we get fresh bread in the am without bothering with a breadmaker.)
When it has risen (or when you are awake enough to contemplate it), divide the dough into two portions and turn it into something vaguely loaf shaped. Let rise for an hour or so somewhere warm. Bake at 350 for 40 -45 minutes, until the bread is nice and brown and sounds a little hollow.
This bread keeps quite well for days, and freezes extremely well.
_Gruel Crackers_
(Boy does this recipe need a better name - eek! But it is a great use of leftovers, and really very tasty despite the awful name. Perhaps I'll rename them "Oliver Twist Crackers.")
Take 2 cups of leftover grains or beans. (They should be at the borderline soup/stew stage - if they aren't add some water and thin them out. I've tried this only with split peas and oatmeal so far, but Carla says you can use anything).
Add 1/4 cup of oil (you could probably substitute mashed veggies, but I haven't tried it)
1 t salt or soy sauce
whatever seasonings you want on your crackers (we like garlic, or chilies, but I bet cheese or sage would be really good - experiment)
2-3 cups of flour (2 cups of this really should be whole wheat flour, but the other cup can be anything, and should be - cornmeal, or rye, or millet or whatever suits you).
Oil a baking sheet, roll or press flat, cut or dot so you can break them, and bake at 400 for 10-15 minutes (the original recipe calls for 425, but mine burned at that temp).
_Homemade Granola Bars_
(These originally came from Mother Earth News, but I've amended them some to make them more local and sustainable for my diet - you can play around with what you have and make them suitable to your diet pretty easily.)
3 cups rolled oats (old fashioned or instant)
1/4 cup amaranth, or coconut
1 cup peanut, almond or cashew butter
1/4 cup sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds or pepitos (pumpkin seeds)
1/2 cup wheat germ or bulghur
1/2 cup slivered almonds or chopped hazelnuts
4 tablespoons butter or oil
3 tbsp brown sugar
1/4 cup honey, molasses or sorghum
1 cup raisins, dried cranberries or other dried fruit (chopped to raisin size if bigger)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon
(you can leave things out if they don't suit or aren't available)
Bake the oats, coconut/amaranth, sunflower/sesame seeds, wheat germ/bulghur and nuts on a 9-by-12-inch baking sheet for 20 minutes, starting as you preheat your oven to 300 degrees.
Heat the butter, brown sugar, nut butter and honey in a small saucepan, simmeringwhile the dried ingredients are baking. (I leave the sugar out if the peanut butter is already sweetened -
if you are using the natural stuff, you might want it.)
Add the raisins/dried fruit to the toasted mix as soon as it's removed from the oven.
Remove the saucepan from the heat, mix in the vanilla extract and pour the liquid mix over the oat mixture, stirring until all the dried mixture is coated.
Press the granola firmly into the bottom of a greased 8-by-8-inch pan and place the pan in the still-warm oven to bake (at 300 degrees) for 20 minutes. You can cut the batch into bars after the granola has cooled slightly, but wait to take the bars out of the pan until they're completely cool.
It really is no trouble to adapt this recipe to what you have - flavor it with anything you want, just keep the rough proportions of wet to dry the same. We like them with dried apricots and strawberries in them, and I once let my kids dip them in chocolate but that's not going to win me any awards either for environmentalism or healthy parenting, so we'll skip over the details. And we'll leave out how many *I* ate ;-).
Cheers, and a good week to you all!
Sharon
This week's project is "make something you usually buy." By doing so, you cut down on your need to drive to stores, reduce packaging and cut costs. I'm trying to do more of this myself - this week's project at our house is crackers. My kids like them, and I don't like to buy them, since most of the ones in the store aren't super healthy. Way back when I was testing recipes out of Carla Emery's _Encyclopedia of Country Living_, I tried all her cracker recipes, and some were extremely good, but I sort of forgot about them, and occasionally bought bulk wheat crackers instead. But I noticed that my family often has leftover oatmeal (favorite breakfast here) lying around, and so I've started making her "gruel crackers" (sounds awful, doesn't it, very Oliver Twist, but we really like them).
For someone just beginning, one of the best things you can make is bread. I don't know about you, but our family eats a lot of bread, and we like it best fresh. The thing about store bread is that you never get to eat it the way it tastes best - straight out of the oven! You don't need anything really special for this - bread is easy, it just takes practice - and it tastes and smells so much better than the store stuff. Or maybe you might want to try yogurt. I know my kids will eat all the yogurt they can get, and I want to avoid those little plastic containers. Or how about granola bars as a snack? NoImpactman has a lovely post about making yogurt here: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/do_a_dance_for_.html, and I got my recipe for granola bars via Pat Meadows who got it from an old Mother Earth News. The recipe is listed below.
Or how about something that isn't a food. You could try shampoo - I've started washing my scalp with baking soda a few times a week to stretch out my need to shampoo, and when I do wash my hair, I do it with diluted castile soap, which comes in a giant bottle and is about 20 times cheaper than shampoo. Miranda writes about the benefits of the baking soda technique here: http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/unshampoo/ Or you could make toothpowder, about 100 times cheaper than toothpaste, out of salt, baking soda and a little cinnamon oil.
Or, if you are really fancy, you could make something complicated, like a pair of socks. I don't know about you, but I like socks, and I like to knit and crochet. Way back when I wrote a blog post about the fact that everyone needs to be able to make socks, because no matter what happens, you are bound to have to replace your socks someday. You can read it here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2005/02/great-sock-rant-of-05.html Or you could make a shower sponge. My friend Aaron famously makes loofah sponges, and they are really cool. Now you can't do that in a week, but you could start the seeds today. Here are instructions:http://groovygreen.com/groove/?p=689
But if you are new to this making rather than buying, start simple. Make a loaf of bread. A little yogurt. Mix some baking soda and water together instead of squirting from that shampoo bottle. Do it for a week, and see if you like it. Don't get overwhelmed, it is easy, and it doesn't take nearly as much time as you think it will. The thing is, not only are these things usually cheaper and more environmentally friendly, they are better too. The real secret about living sustainably is that it is more fun and a better life, better food and more pleasure. But shhh...don't tell ;-).
Recipes:
_Molasses Wheat Bread_
(My husband makes 4-6 loaves of this most weeks - it is his favorite quick and easy bread. You can substitute for many of the ingredients, and it is a very good introduction to bread making. I would recommend that absolute bread beginners do the recipe using the first listed ingredient the first time, and then experiment. This recipe was taken from Marcia Adams's _New Recipes from Quilt Country_)
4 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups white flour (you can use all whole wheat, but if you are new to breadmaking, some white is probably better while you start)
2 pkgs dry yeast
2 1/4 cups of milk (or water, or buttermilk or whatever you've got)
1/4 cup oil (whatever sort you have, or you substitute mashed squash or pumpkin)
1/4 cup molasses (or sorghum, or honey, or sugar (but add some extra liquid) - we've also made this with maple syrup and blackstrap molasses - both have a much stronger taste, but are pleasant enough, but be prepared for a strong flavor if you use them)
1 egg, beaten
Stir together 2 cups of flour (doesn't really matter which), the salt, and yeast. Combine the milk, oil and molasses in a saucepan or solar oven and heat until just warm - stick your finger in to test. Add the warm liquid and the egg to the flour mixture. Beat for 3 minutes with a whisk or wooden spoon. Gradually add the remaining flour until the dough is soft but elastic. Knead for 2 minutes (knead means to smoosh it flat, fold it over, smoosh it some more and generally whack it around for a while).
Place the dough in a bowl in a warm place, covered by a slightly damp cloth (the cloth shouldn't touch the dough - it is merely to provide humidity), and let it double - 1-2 hours (we actually generally do the above the night before and leave it sitting around on the kitchen counter until morning. It does just fine. That way, we get fresh bread in the am without bothering with a breadmaker.)
When it has risen (or when you are awake enough to contemplate it), divide the dough into two portions and turn it into something vaguely loaf shaped. Let rise for an hour or so somewhere warm. Bake at 350 for 40 -45 minutes, until the bread is nice and brown and sounds a little hollow.
This bread keeps quite well for days, and freezes extremely well.
_Gruel Crackers_
(Boy does this recipe need a better name - eek! But it is a great use of leftovers, and really very tasty despite the awful name. Perhaps I'll rename them "Oliver Twist Crackers.")
Take 2 cups of leftover grains or beans. (They should be at the borderline soup/stew stage - if they aren't add some water and thin them out. I've tried this only with split peas and oatmeal so far, but Carla says you can use anything).
Add 1/4 cup of oil (you could probably substitute mashed veggies, but I haven't tried it)
1 t salt or soy sauce
whatever seasonings you want on your crackers (we like garlic, or chilies, but I bet cheese or sage would be really good - experiment)
2-3 cups of flour (2 cups of this really should be whole wheat flour, but the other cup can be anything, and should be - cornmeal, or rye, or millet or whatever suits you).
Oil a baking sheet, roll or press flat, cut or dot so you can break them, and bake at 400 for 10-15 minutes (the original recipe calls for 425, but mine burned at that temp).
_Homemade Granola Bars_
(These originally came from Mother Earth News, but I've amended them some to make them more local and sustainable for my diet - you can play around with what you have and make them suitable to your diet pretty easily.)
3 cups rolled oats (old fashioned or instant)
1/4 cup amaranth, or coconut
1 cup peanut, almond or cashew butter
1/4 cup sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds or pepitos (pumpkin seeds)
1/2 cup wheat germ or bulghur
1/2 cup slivered almonds or chopped hazelnuts
4 tablespoons butter or oil
3 tbsp brown sugar
1/4 cup honey, molasses or sorghum
1 cup raisins, dried cranberries or other dried fruit (chopped to raisin size if bigger)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon
(you can leave things out if they don't suit or aren't available)
Bake the oats, coconut/amaranth, sunflower/sesame seeds, wheat germ/bulghur and nuts on a 9-by-12-inch baking sheet for 20 minutes, starting as you preheat your oven to 300 degrees.
Heat the butter, brown sugar, nut butter and honey in a small saucepan, simmeringwhile the dried ingredients are baking. (I leave the sugar out if the peanut butter is already sweetened -
if you are using the natural stuff, you might want it.)
Add the raisins/dried fruit to the toasted mix as soon as it's removed from the oven.
Remove the saucepan from the heat, mix in the vanilla extract and pour the liquid mix over the oat mixture, stirring until all the dried mixture is coated.
Press the granola firmly into the bottom of a greased 8-by-8-inch pan and place the pan in the still-warm oven to bake (at 300 degrees) for 20 minutes. You can cut the batch into bars after the granola has cooled slightly, but wait to take the bars out of the pan until they're completely cool.
It really is no trouble to adapt this recipe to what you have - flavor it with anything you want, just keep the rough proportions of wet to dry the same. We like them with dried apricots and strawberries in them, and I once let my kids dip them in chocolate but that's not going to win me any awards either for environmentalism or healthy parenting, so we'll skip over the details. And we'll leave out how many *I* ate ;-).
Cheers, and a good week to you all!
Sharon
Friday, May 11, 2007
The Sustainable Marriage
I'd planned to write about coal today, since there's a lot of news about our surprisingly limited coal supply. But I happened to get several messages in my inbox this week with various people asking me some variation on, "I want to prepare for peak oil/live more sustainably/change my life to deal with climate change" and my spouse (and/or the rest of my family) don't want to, or don't think it is important enough. And this is something I've heard over and over - marriages struggling when partners have different ideas about what the right thing to do is. I've known several that have broken up over this issue, and a couple of others that are teetering on the brink. And besides the fact that divorce is always sad and traumatic, there are real and serious reasons that people are better off going into hard times with stable marriages and good support systems. Divorce impoverishes everyone, adds to stress levels, tends to reduce the quality of life for children and makes joint decision making difficult. How, for example, will two intertwined but hostile divorced families, decide whether a move to a cooler climate or a more walkable neighborhood is appropriate?
Now I'm not at all sure I'm the right person to give advice here, but as long as it has been asked, never let it be said that I didn't have something, however useless to say ;-). We will assume for the purposes of this discussion that the marriage was basically loving and healthy, and that if it isn't - if there are deep, insoluble problems, violence or other bad stuff, you'll either involve professionals or reconsider being married. We'll also assume (which I think should be obvious, but just in case it isn't) that when I say "marriage or family" I mean "the person or people you love, care for, share stuff with and live your life with" regardless of gender, number or formal legal relationships.
I'm pretty lucky on the marriage front. My husband is a confirmed pessimist, and deeply opposed to change of any kind, but he's also a professor of astrophysics, and he teaches things like space and planetary biology, the history of space exploration, environmental physics and geophysics. So when we met, Eric was already generally aware of peak oil and climate change, and concerned about them, although not enough to overcome his basic sense that change is bad ;-).
Either fortunately or unfortunately, my husband married a perennial optimist who adores change, gets bored easily, and believes in personal solutions. He has described being married to me as hanging on for dear life to a runaway freight train, and he regularly observes that if it were left up to him, we might be engaged by now (we've been together 11 years - he thinks he might have been ready to pop the question by now ;-). Had I warned him when I was harassing him into getting married that a decade later he'd have four kids, 27 acres and be a farmer, I'm pretty sure he'd have run screaming into the night. Right before my talk at the Community Solutions conference, while on the phone with my beloved, I told him I was praying for courage when I got up there, and Eric answered (with the exaggerated patience he uses when he thinks his wife is completely over the edge), "Honey, do you think you could pray for something you don't already have an excess of...like common sense." (This made me laugh so hard I couldn't talk for a while, which was helpful for me, and probably restful for him.)
All of which is just a way of saying that I not only have had the experience of disagreeing with my spouse about what should be done and when and how fast, but I also have some sympathy for him. The problems in marriages often come from both sides. I say this also as a person who has been divorced (brief, early marriage, still friends - hi Matt!) and who is the child of several generations of divorce. I have no illusions that dealing with this stuff is easy. Which leads me to axiom number 1 about the sustainable marriage.
#1 The Problem Might Be You
Let's say you recently discovered peak oil, and you are aware that energy shortages are likely forthcoming. Or perhaps you are concerned about climate change and want to make radical emissions cuts. You want to preserve the future for yourself and perhaps your family. And it doesn't seem like you have a lot of time. Now your spouse has looked at a few of these things, but they haven't the dozens of hours researching that you have, and after obsessively reading websites and trying to figure out what to do, you go to your spouse of a decade and tell them, "Ok, we have to get a farm. And goats. And grow all of our own food. We have to get rid of your jeep right now and get a hybrid. And reinsulate the house. The end of the world is coming. Stockpile food. Give up your hobbies. Stop going to movies. And I'm way, way, way too stressed to have sex." Now I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this really does sound crazy ;-).
I think a lot of people, confronted with the realization that the world is changing and that they have to change too, panic. It can be difficult for even the most loving spouse to absorb the new material, or deal with the fact that they darling has decided that they have to change their entire life and lifestyle *right now.* If there are kids, this can be even tougher, both because kids sometimes don't want their lives to be changed, and also because it can be very hard for parents to envision a future in which their children are deprived or in any way impoverished. While you may believe that the climate change/peak oil future means impoverishment anyway, and that it is better to prepare ahead, your spouse may just be hearing "My husband doesn't want my kids to be normal/have as much as we had/be safe and secure."
I think the first and most important thing to recognize is that in any troubled marriage, some of the problem is almost certainly you. And since someone has to compromise, it might as well be you - at least half of the time, maybe even a little more. Remember, even if this stuff hits you like a ton of bricks, other people absorb things differently, over time. Back off a little. Let things go if you have to. Vicki Robin wisely said, at the Community Solutions Conference, "sometimes it isn't important to be right." You may be right, but the cost of being the right one may not be worth it. So take a deep breath, go slow, and try again in a few days or weeks. See if maybe it is your approach, rather than your partner's intractability. I say this as someone who really likes to win arguments. It has taken me some time to recognize that it isn't always worth winning, and sometimes, winning is losing.
But let's say you have backed off, or that you approached the issue calmly to begin with. How do you get a reluctant spouse to consider changing? This leads me to axiom #2.
2. The Best Techniques Are the Ones that Already Work
My husband is cheap. As a graduate student, in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, he managed to accumulate a savings of 18K over 5 years - never making more than that in a year, and paying nearly half his income in rent. Eric never met a dollar he didn't want to put away. And I've found over the years, one of the best techniques to get him to do things is with the enticement that it will save us money.
In other cases, you might connect with a spouse by emphasizing the excitement to be had, or the good physical exercise, the better food, the weight loss, the shared time together, the more relaxed lifestyle, the family bonding, the spiritual benefits. Remember, your spouse isn't you - they aren't necessarily motivated by the things that motivate you. So if you are driven by the desire to live ethically, remember, that your spouse might be more driven by the desire to live beautifully - and if you can phrase this in aesthetic terms, as a way of extracting greater quality from fewer resources, you might be more persuasive.
I'm not suggesting you manipulate your spouse, or at least not do so sneakily (do any marriages exist where there isn't a sort of mild mannered, friendly, self-conscious mutual manipulation?). But my observation is that carrots are usually better than sticks, and honey is better than vinegar, and if you've been paying attention to this person you love at all, you'll know what kind of honey to offer.
What if that doesn't work? Then comes aphorism #3.
3. Treat It as a Hobby
If you simply can't get your spouse on board, but you want to make changes, you may have to accept that the onus for doing this stuff is on you. In that case, what you want is for your spouse to accomodate you as much as possible. And for that, you need to present your new sustainability project as your wacko hobby.
The thing is, as long as you present this as a moral imperative, your spouse will keep arguing with you (or at least mine would ;-) - because, after all, if this is an imperative, there's no getting around it. But if you present your passion for off grid living as your crazy obsession, that your wife/husband can roll his/her eyes at and tell his/her friends, "yeah, some people's wives/husbands collect classic cars or reenact the civil war, travel around the country attending chili cookoffs or decorate their entire home in pig themes - my nutcase spouse believes that we're entering a period of energy depletion and rising global temperatures and wants to do the laundry with a hand washer and put solar panels on the roof. At least it is better than Lee's husband who insists on taking all their vacations to places where he can photograph radio towers. Sigh."
The beauty of this is precisely that many people, even most, have obsessions that cost their family money and time and about which their spouses mostly roll their eyes and complain. But generally speaking, the eye rolling and complaining isn't too serious. This is what you want, if you can't get outright cooperation. That is, the goal is to have your spouse complain with a certain of amusement that this is the price they have to pay for loving you. What you do not want, under any circumstances, is for your spouse to feel that they truly do have to pay a high price for loving you.
It goes without saying, however, that you can only have one nutjob hobby at a time. So if you are going to be obsessed with preparing for environmental depletion, you have to give up your giant collection of salt and pepper shakers shaped like cartoon characters, your first edition buying habits or the three half-rebuilt boats on your front lawn. Sorry, but no spouse on earth has to put up with more than one crazy hobby. Two is reasonable grounds for divorce ;-).
Axiom #4 is: Give it Time and Get them Involved with Community
Give it time seems to me self evident. Remember, the evidence that we were going to run out of cheap oil has been in front of all of our noses for decades - but a lot of us chose not to know. The evidence for climate change has been mounting for 30 years and more - but a lot of us chose not to know. And then, one day, it clicked. But it is important to remember that you, just like your partner, were in denial. And just because their denial hasn't collapsed yet doesn't make them bad, any more than you were.
The thing is, the longer they live with you and the more they are confronted with evidence and reality, the better the situation is likely to become. I know several people whose spouses initially felt that they simply couldn't handle hearing all the bad news all the time, but who gradually have come to be more comfortable with this. Some people learn things slowly and gradually, and you need to give your partner time. This can be really hard when you feel like we may only have a short time of relative prosperity to prepare. But remember, you can begin preparing on your own, where you are, with what you have. You can start learning to dehydrate food, chop wood, grow a garden anywhere, even if just in a window box. You can buy less, do less, live more gently anywhere.
The other thing that works well, I think, is to involve your spouse in a community. That is, take them to a local environmental group, a peak awareness group, or a local conference. Let them make friends. I think it can be hard for people who have found community on the net to imagine how seperate from this your spouse may feel without any such community. And some partners just aren't the net type - Eric isn't. He likes hands on, direct contact with people. The first time my husband met another homesteader he was thrilled, because he finally saw, viscerally, that there were other people like us.
Sometimes all someone needs is a support network, or to see that they aren't the only weirdo around, or to add some people to their circle of friends who will validate what they do. Or perhaps they need to hear things from someone more authoritative than their spouse. I know this is hard for us to understand, but occasionally the fact that your spouse has seen you naked, scratching your ass means that they might not be inclined to take every word that comes from your mouth as though it were conveyed from on high. It can be helpful for them to hear the same information from people who wear clothes and whose baby pictures they've never seen.
Axiom #5 Give Credit Where Due
I think this is really important. Because it is easy for the person interested in sustainability to say "you don't care about the environment." And the other person ends up eternally cast as the bad guy, which no one likes. If you want your spouse to appreciate that you are trying to preserve a future for yourselves and your kids and future generations, you need to appreciate both the things they do that are already environmentally sound, or the places they are willing to make changes, but also appreciate *why* they are reluctant or concerned.
By this I mean that it is not only important to thank your spouse for doing things that matter to you, but also important to understand that their motivations are legitimate. For example, the spouse that doesn't want to see your children singled out and rejected because they can't got to McDonalds any more, or who doesn't want to "look poor" and be pitied has a legitimate concern, and deserves to be appreciated both for what they care about and what they do.
It is hard to make changes for your children, to live with less in a society that values more, to say to your friends "we're not going to do this thing we've always done." Your spouse is not bad because they are worrying about these things. The appropriate solution is to come up with ways around these problems, or find communities that share your values, but this takes time, and it takes understanding. And when a spouse does, despite their fears, make an effort, they deserve to be loved and appreciated because of it.
I think people who are environmentally conscious like to cast themselves as independent thinkers. I hate to tell you, but we're just as susceptible to peer pressure as everyone else - we've just chosen different peers. Or at least, I am. I know when Colin Beaven (aka NoImpactMan) decided to turn his electricity off, it made me feel competetive, which leads me to believe that perhaps, just perhaps, I too pay attention to what other people think of me. I'm going to bet that you do too, at least a little. So don't give your spouse a hard time for caring what her buddies or his mother think of this project. Everyone lives in the world, and has to deal with it.
The hardest issues are the really big fundamental ones. And of course, a lot of these are deeply tied up with peak oil and climate change. That is, things like "what kind of home shall we live in?" "What shall I do to make a living and how much money should we have?" "What standard of living will we have?" "How often shall we visit our families?" "Should we have children?" "How many children?" These are tough questions, and a couple that has been on the same page until now may find that they are unable to resolve them. Which leads me to the hardest axiom, #6.
6. Sometimes, it is Better to Lose the Game and Win the Series
The above is the only baseball metaphor I've ever used or am likely to use ;-). This one is awfully tough, and while I've got experience here, it isn't something that I really want to give airplay on the blog. But suffice it to say, early on my husband and I had a really, really bad time. And in the end, the thing that I think salvaged the relationship was that when we reached an impasse, I gave in, and did something I thought was not the right choice, simply because I loved him. I could have fought it as a scorched earth battle, but I would have lost my not-yet-husband, and more importantly, it would have established a precedent that meant that next time, he would never have an incentive to give in. That's not why I did it - it wasn't a tit for tat thing - but ultimately, the marriage could only survive if both of us were willing to cede to the other for the other's benefit sometimes.
Now all of this assumes that your marriage is worth the price, but if it is, I'd say that you should give in on at least half, and preferrably more than half of the tough issues. That's not to say you should do things you think are morally wrong, but at the very least you should recognize that someone has to give way sometimes.
Things get more complicated if there are children involved. What happens if you think that they choice, say, to stay on the Gulf of Mississippi might lead to the death of your kids? Or what happens if you feel it is absolutely wrong to bring a child into this world, and your spouse wants a baby? In those cases, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I can only hope that you and your spouse both love each other enough to find compromise ground - maybe to move to higher ground in the region, or to adopt together. I don't pretend it is easy. But again, I think the best possible precedent you can set for one another is to have a long history of saying to one another, "Ultimately, I care about you and your happiness enough to make some compromises."
Axiom #7 - Make it Fun
Extracting the most joy and quality of life from the fewest resources is really cool. Period. No debate. It is true that our culture hasn't much validated the optimization exercise view of life, but that's simply because growth capitalism requires the exact opposite model - discontentment is required to live, and more is always necessary. But the more you can make your spouse see how much pleasure there is in changing your life and living sustainably, the happier that life will be.
There's really no reason to spend your spare time fixating on the darkest parts of this, and the spouse that says they don't want to hear it all the time may just be protecting their own mental health (Eric refused to read _Heat_ for a good long time, for example). Instead of focusing on "the end of the world is coming, do this now." How about "fresh salsa from the garden is so much better than this jarred stuff, and I've heard that bread made from wheat you grind yourself is much, much tastier." Or "I miss the smell of line dried sheets." Or "wouldn't it be fun to walk together to the store and pull the kids in the wagon?"
My friend Robert Waldrop says he almost never talks about peak oil at all - he talks about good food and good health, supporting local farmers and saving money. I think that's the right message for every spouse - tell them what is good about this, and why they should be excited by it. Hook them into a community of people who are in the same place as they are. Let them roll their eyes, and watch their faces when they taste the bread and the fresh strawberry jam. Kiss them hard, and share the taste. The rest will come with time in many cases, and if it doesn't, what you have may still be enough.
Shalom,
Sharon
Now I'm not at all sure I'm the right person to give advice here, but as long as it has been asked, never let it be said that I didn't have something, however useless to say ;-). We will assume for the purposes of this discussion that the marriage was basically loving and healthy, and that if it isn't - if there are deep, insoluble problems, violence or other bad stuff, you'll either involve professionals or reconsider being married. We'll also assume (which I think should be obvious, but just in case it isn't) that when I say "marriage or family" I mean "the person or people you love, care for, share stuff with and live your life with" regardless of gender, number or formal legal relationships.
I'm pretty lucky on the marriage front. My husband is a confirmed pessimist, and deeply opposed to change of any kind, but he's also a professor of astrophysics, and he teaches things like space and planetary biology, the history of space exploration, environmental physics and geophysics. So when we met, Eric was already generally aware of peak oil and climate change, and concerned about them, although not enough to overcome his basic sense that change is bad ;-).
Either fortunately or unfortunately, my husband married a perennial optimist who adores change, gets bored easily, and believes in personal solutions. He has described being married to me as hanging on for dear life to a runaway freight train, and he regularly observes that if it were left up to him, we might be engaged by now (we've been together 11 years - he thinks he might have been ready to pop the question by now ;-). Had I warned him when I was harassing him into getting married that a decade later he'd have four kids, 27 acres and be a farmer, I'm pretty sure he'd have run screaming into the night. Right before my talk at the Community Solutions conference, while on the phone with my beloved, I told him I was praying for courage when I got up there, and Eric answered (with the exaggerated patience he uses when he thinks his wife is completely over the edge), "Honey, do you think you could pray for something you don't already have an excess of...like common sense." (This made me laugh so hard I couldn't talk for a while, which was helpful for me, and probably restful for him.)
All of which is just a way of saying that I not only have had the experience of disagreeing with my spouse about what should be done and when and how fast, but I also have some sympathy for him. The problems in marriages often come from both sides. I say this also as a person who has been divorced (brief, early marriage, still friends - hi Matt!) and who is the child of several generations of divorce. I have no illusions that dealing with this stuff is easy. Which leads me to axiom number 1 about the sustainable marriage.
#1 The Problem Might Be You
Let's say you recently discovered peak oil, and you are aware that energy shortages are likely forthcoming. Or perhaps you are concerned about climate change and want to make radical emissions cuts. You want to preserve the future for yourself and perhaps your family. And it doesn't seem like you have a lot of time. Now your spouse has looked at a few of these things, but they haven't the dozens of hours researching that you have, and after obsessively reading websites and trying to figure out what to do, you go to your spouse of a decade and tell them, "Ok, we have to get a farm. And goats. And grow all of our own food. We have to get rid of your jeep right now and get a hybrid. And reinsulate the house. The end of the world is coming. Stockpile food. Give up your hobbies. Stop going to movies. And I'm way, way, way too stressed to have sex." Now I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this really does sound crazy ;-).
I think a lot of people, confronted with the realization that the world is changing and that they have to change too, panic. It can be difficult for even the most loving spouse to absorb the new material, or deal with the fact that they darling has decided that they have to change their entire life and lifestyle *right now.* If there are kids, this can be even tougher, both because kids sometimes don't want their lives to be changed, and also because it can be very hard for parents to envision a future in which their children are deprived or in any way impoverished. While you may believe that the climate change/peak oil future means impoverishment anyway, and that it is better to prepare ahead, your spouse may just be hearing "My husband doesn't want my kids to be normal/have as much as we had/be safe and secure."
I think the first and most important thing to recognize is that in any troubled marriage, some of the problem is almost certainly you. And since someone has to compromise, it might as well be you - at least half of the time, maybe even a little more. Remember, even if this stuff hits you like a ton of bricks, other people absorb things differently, over time. Back off a little. Let things go if you have to. Vicki Robin wisely said, at the Community Solutions Conference, "sometimes it isn't important to be right." You may be right, but the cost of being the right one may not be worth it. So take a deep breath, go slow, and try again in a few days or weeks. See if maybe it is your approach, rather than your partner's intractability. I say this as someone who really likes to win arguments. It has taken me some time to recognize that it isn't always worth winning, and sometimes, winning is losing.
But let's say you have backed off, or that you approached the issue calmly to begin with. How do you get a reluctant spouse to consider changing? This leads me to axiom #2.
2. The Best Techniques Are the Ones that Already Work
My husband is cheap. As a graduate student, in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, he managed to accumulate a savings of 18K over 5 years - never making more than that in a year, and paying nearly half his income in rent. Eric never met a dollar he didn't want to put away. And I've found over the years, one of the best techniques to get him to do things is with the enticement that it will save us money.
In other cases, you might connect with a spouse by emphasizing the excitement to be had, or the good physical exercise, the better food, the weight loss, the shared time together, the more relaxed lifestyle, the family bonding, the spiritual benefits. Remember, your spouse isn't you - they aren't necessarily motivated by the things that motivate you. So if you are driven by the desire to live ethically, remember, that your spouse might be more driven by the desire to live beautifully - and if you can phrase this in aesthetic terms, as a way of extracting greater quality from fewer resources, you might be more persuasive.
I'm not suggesting you manipulate your spouse, or at least not do so sneakily (do any marriages exist where there isn't a sort of mild mannered, friendly, self-conscious mutual manipulation?). But my observation is that carrots are usually better than sticks, and honey is better than vinegar, and if you've been paying attention to this person you love at all, you'll know what kind of honey to offer.
What if that doesn't work? Then comes aphorism #3.
3. Treat It as a Hobby
If you simply can't get your spouse on board, but you want to make changes, you may have to accept that the onus for doing this stuff is on you. In that case, what you want is for your spouse to accomodate you as much as possible. And for that, you need to present your new sustainability project as your wacko hobby.
The thing is, as long as you present this as a moral imperative, your spouse will keep arguing with you (or at least mine would ;-) - because, after all, if this is an imperative, there's no getting around it. But if you present your passion for off grid living as your crazy obsession, that your wife/husband can roll his/her eyes at and tell his/her friends, "yeah, some people's wives/husbands collect classic cars or reenact the civil war, travel around the country attending chili cookoffs or decorate their entire home in pig themes - my nutcase spouse believes that we're entering a period of energy depletion and rising global temperatures and wants to do the laundry with a hand washer and put solar panels on the roof. At least it is better than Lee's husband who insists on taking all their vacations to places where he can photograph radio towers. Sigh."
The beauty of this is precisely that many people, even most, have obsessions that cost their family money and time and about which their spouses mostly roll their eyes and complain. But generally speaking, the eye rolling and complaining isn't too serious. This is what you want, if you can't get outright cooperation. That is, the goal is to have your spouse complain with a certain of amusement that this is the price they have to pay for loving you. What you do not want, under any circumstances, is for your spouse to feel that they truly do have to pay a high price for loving you.
It goes without saying, however, that you can only have one nutjob hobby at a time. So if you are going to be obsessed with preparing for environmental depletion, you have to give up your giant collection of salt and pepper shakers shaped like cartoon characters, your first edition buying habits or the three half-rebuilt boats on your front lawn. Sorry, but no spouse on earth has to put up with more than one crazy hobby. Two is reasonable grounds for divorce ;-).
Axiom #4 is: Give it Time and Get them Involved with Community
Give it time seems to me self evident. Remember, the evidence that we were going to run out of cheap oil has been in front of all of our noses for decades - but a lot of us chose not to know. The evidence for climate change has been mounting for 30 years and more - but a lot of us chose not to know. And then, one day, it clicked. But it is important to remember that you, just like your partner, were in denial. And just because their denial hasn't collapsed yet doesn't make them bad, any more than you were.
The thing is, the longer they live with you and the more they are confronted with evidence and reality, the better the situation is likely to become. I know several people whose spouses initially felt that they simply couldn't handle hearing all the bad news all the time, but who gradually have come to be more comfortable with this. Some people learn things slowly and gradually, and you need to give your partner time. This can be really hard when you feel like we may only have a short time of relative prosperity to prepare. But remember, you can begin preparing on your own, where you are, with what you have. You can start learning to dehydrate food, chop wood, grow a garden anywhere, even if just in a window box. You can buy less, do less, live more gently anywhere.
The other thing that works well, I think, is to involve your spouse in a community. That is, take them to a local environmental group, a peak awareness group, or a local conference. Let them make friends. I think it can be hard for people who have found community on the net to imagine how seperate from this your spouse may feel without any such community. And some partners just aren't the net type - Eric isn't. He likes hands on, direct contact with people. The first time my husband met another homesteader he was thrilled, because he finally saw, viscerally, that there were other people like us.
Sometimes all someone needs is a support network, or to see that they aren't the only weirdo around, or to add some people to their circle of friends who will validate what they do. Or perhaps they need to hear things from someone more authoritative than their spouse. I know this is hard for us to understand, but occasionally the fact that your spouse has seen you naked, scratching your ass means that they might not be inclined to take every word that comes from your mouth as though it were conveyed from on high. It can be helpful for them to hear the same information from people who wear clothes and whose baby pictures they've never seen.
Axiom #5 Give Credit Where Due
I think this is really important. Because it is easy for the person interested in sustainability to say "you don't care about the environment." And the other person ends up eternally cast as the bad guy, which no one likes. If you want your spouse to appreciate that you are trying to preserve a future for yourselves and your kids and future generations, you need to appreciate both the things they do that are already environmentally sound, or the places they are willing to make changes, but also appreciate *why* they are reluctant or concerned.
By this I mean that it is not only important to thank your spouse for doing things that matter to you, but also important to understand that their motivations are legitimate. For example, the spouse that doesn't want to see your children singled out and rejected because they can't got to McDonalds any more, or who doesn't want to "look poor" and be pitied has a legitimate concern, and deserves to be appreciated both for what they care about and what they do.
It is hard to make changes for your children, to live with less in a society that values more, to say to your friends "we're not going to do this thing we've always done." Your spouse is not bad because they are worrying about these things. The appropriate solution is to come up with ways around these problems, or find communities that share your values, but this takes time, and it takes understanding. And when a spouse does, despite their fears, make an effort, they deserve to be loved and appreciated because of it.
I think people who are environmentally conscious like to cast themselves as independent thinkers. I hate to tell you, but we're just as susceptible to peer pressure as everyone else - we've just chosen different peers. Or at least, I am. I know when Colin Beaven (aka NoImpactMan) decided to turn his electricity off, it made me feel competetive, which leads me to believe that perhaps, just perhaps, I too pay attention to what other people think of me. I'm going to bet that you do too, at least a little. So don't give your spouse a hard time for caring what her buddies or his mother think of this project. Everyone lives in the world, and has to deal with it.
The hardest issues are the really big fundamental ones. And of course, a lot of these are deeply tied up with peak oil and climate change. That is, things like "what kind of home shall we live in?" "What shall I do to make a living and how much money should we have?" "What standard of living will we have?" "How often shall we visit our families?" "Should we have children?" "How many children?" These are tough questions, and a couple that has been on the same page until now may find that they are unable to resolve them. Which leads me to the hardest axiom, #6.
6. Sometimes, it is Better to Lose the Game and Win the Series
The above is the only baseball metaphor I've ever used or am likely to use ;-). This one is awfully tough, and while I've got experience here, it isn't something that I really want to give airplay on the blog. But suffice it to say, early on my husband and I had a really, really bad time. And in the end, the thing that I think salvaged the relationship was that when we reached an impasse, I gave in, and did something I thought was not the right choice, simply because I loved him. I could have fought it as a scorched earth battle, but I would have lost my not-yet-husband, and more importantly, it would have established a precedent that meant that next time, he would never have an incentive to give in. That's not why I did it - it wasn't a tit for tat thing - but ultimately, the marriage could only survive if both of us were willing to cede to the other for the other's benefit sometimes.
Now all of this assumes that your marriage is worth the price, but if it is, I'd say that you should give in on at least half, and preferrably more than half of the tough issues. That's not to say you should do things you think are morally wrong, but at the very least you should recognize that someone has to give way sometimes.
Things get more complicated if there are children involved. What happens if you think that they choice, say, to stay on the Gulf of Mississippi might lead to the death of your kids? Or what happens if you feel it is absolutely wrong to bring a child into this world, and your spouse wants a baby? In those cases, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I can only hope that you and your spouse both love each other enough to find compromise ground - maybe to move to higher ground in the region, or to adopt together. I don't pretend it is easy. But again, I think the best possible precedent you can set for one another is to have a long history of saying to one another, "Ultimately, I care about you and your happiness enough to make some compromises."
Axiom #7 - Make it Fun
Extracting the most joy and quality of life from the fewest resources is really cool. Period. No debate. It is true that our culture hasn't much validated the optimization exercise view of life, but that's simply because growth capitalism requires the exact opposite model - discontentment is required to live, and more is always necessary. But the more you can make your spouse see how much pleasure there is in changing your life and living sustainably, the happier that life will be.
There's really no reason to spend your spare time fixating on the darkest parts of this, and the spouse that says they don't want to hear it all the time may just be protecting their own mental health (Eric refused to read _Heat_ for a good long time, for example). Instead of focusing on "the end of the world is coming, do this now." How about "fresh salsa from the garden is so much better than this jarred stuff, and I've heard that bread made from wheat you grind yourself is much, much tastier." Or "I miss the smell of line dried sheets." Or "wouldn't it be fun to walk together to the store and pull the kids in the wagon?"
My friend Robert Waldrop says he almost never talks about peak oil at all - he talks about good food and good health, supporting local farmers and saving money. I think that's the right message for every spouse - tell them what is good about this, and why they should be excited by it. Hook them into a community of people who are in the same place as they are. Let them roll their eyes, and watch their faces when they taste the bread and the fresh strawberry jam. Kiss them hard, and share the taste. The rest will come with time in many cases, and if it doesn't, what you have may still be enough.
Shalom,
Sharon
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Starting the Riot for Austerity
In his book _Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning_ George Monbiot makes the compelling case that if we are to stop catastrophic global warming, we must reduce world emissions to 2.7 tons per year by 2030. Right now, the world emits a bit over 7 billion tons. So that means a worldwide reduction of at least 60% (it is probably actually more, because the IPCC figures have risen since the publication of Monbiot's book). The thing is, however, you can't just institute across the board 60% cuts - and say, thus to a village in Chad that uses electricity to light their school, clinic and pump water for the communal well, "Oh, sorry, you have to give up the clinic and the well." The only just solution is to hold the largest emitters proportionately responsible. Which means in the US, a cut of our emissions of 93 or 94% (depending on who you ask).
Monbiot observes that we lack the political will to make this happen, and says "no one has ever rioted for austerity." By that he means that there's never been a worldwide political movement demanding "we want less." As Monbiot observes in his latest London Guardian article, the governments of rich nations have pretty much decided that environmental apocalypse is more politically expedient than actually doing what's necessary. The most radical plans proposed in the US represent only an 80% cut in emissions by 2050 - which is simply too little, too late. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2069395,00.html
All of which means one thing - unless we do something entirely unprecedented in our history, that is, demand that our governments take action to give us a world that consumes less and uses less power, our governments will let billions die for reasons of expedience.
But it is important to note that we do have power over our governments. We can make it so that isn't politically expedient to do that much harm. And one of the ways we can do that, is to stand up and represent a visible reproach to the notion that reducing our emissions that much is impossible, that Americans would never do this. As soon as some of us can stand up and say "I did it." "I did it." "My family did it." "We did it...and you can too." We can offer living proof to those who believe falsely that we must choose between "the American way of life" and "leaving the next generation a world worth living in."
Miranda, over at SimpleReduce (http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/) and I have decided that someone has to do it - and it might as well be us. Our goal is, over the next year (but continuing steadily over time...this isn't something short term) to reduce our emissions down to 7% of the average American's. Now obviously, this is one of those things that would be vastly easier with the help of social programs and new initiatives - but we're going to do it without those things, to prove that it is possible to live and live well without destroying the earth.
We're still working out the parameters, and would welcome advice and suggestions on how to set things up. At the moment we're talking about making 93% reductions in emissions in 7 areas - sometimes by simply not using a thing, other times by using renewables, or by a combination.
1. Electricity
2. Gasoline
3. Heating fuel
4. Food energy
5. Water
6. Consumer purchases
7. Garbage production
We're still figuring out the exact metrics for calculating the consequences of our lifestyle, but we invite others to join us, and to write a weekly update on your blog (or post one in the comments sections of one of ours). We'll link blogs together and talk about how the project has gone for all of us. And at the end of this, we can at least give the lie to the notion that "Americans would never do this."
I think this is going to be fun - optimizing your life so that you get the most out of the least inputs is one of the most fascinating projects I can imagine. Plus, the world needs a few more good riots, even quiet ones.
Sharon
Monbiot observes that we lack the political will to make this happen, and says "no one has ever rioted for austerity." By that he means that there's never been a worldwide political movement demanding "we want less." As Monbiot observes in his latest London Guardian article, the governments of rich nations have pretty much decided that environmental apocalypse is more politically expedient than actually doing what's necessary. The most radical plans proposed in the US represent only an 80% cut in emissions by 2050 - which is simply too little, too late. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2069395,00.html
All of which means one thing - unless we do something entirely unprecedented in our history, that is, demand that our governments take action to give us a world that consumes less and uses less power, our governments will let billions die for reasons of expedience.
But it is important to note that we do have power over our governments. We can make it so that isn't politically expedient to do that much harm. And one of the ways we can do that, is to stand up and represent a visible reproach to the notion that reducing our emissions that much is impossible, that Americans would never do this. As soon as some of us can stand up and say "I did it." "I did it." "My family did it." "We did it...and you can too." We can offer living proof to those who believe falsely that we must choose between "the American way of life" and "leaving the next generation a world worth living in."
Miranda, over at SimpleReduce (http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/) and I have decided that someone has to do it - and it might as well be us. Our goal is, over the next year (but continuing steadily over time...this isn't something short term) to reduce our emissions down to 7% of the average American's. Now obviously, this is one of those things that would be vastly easier with the help of social programs and new initiatives - but we're going to do it without those things, to prove that it is possible to live and live well without destroying the earth.
We're still working out the parameters, and would welcome advice and suggestions on how to set things up. At the moment we're talking about making 93% reductions in emissions in 7 areas - sometimes by simply not using a thing, other times by using renewables, or by a combination.
1. Electricity
2. Gasoline
3. Heating fuel
4. Food energy
5. Water
6. Consumer purchases
7. Garbage production
We're still figuring out the exact metrics for calculating the consequences of our lifestyle, but we invite others to join us, and to write a weekly update on your blog (or post one in the comments sections of one of ours). We'll link blogs together and talk about how the project has gone for all of us. And at the end of this, we can at least give the lie to the notion that "Americans would never do this."
I think this is going to be fun - optimizing your life so that you get the most out of the least inputs is one of the most fascinating projects I can imagine. Plus, the world needs a few more good riots, even quiet ones.
Sharon
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
The UN Admits Organic is Better!
Here's an interesting bit of analysis. There's a summary here:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070505/un-organic-food and more at the FAO site:http://www.fao.org/organicag/ofs/docs_en.htm Thanks to Aaron for pointing me to this one!
The gist of the thing is this - even allowing for a dramatic fall in yield from organic agriculture (which is by no means inevitable), poor farmers would be better off using organic techniques for two important reasons. The first is that reduction in costs would offset any loss in yields for individual farmers - that is, they might be growing less food, but they'd also be spending much less of their limited funds to grow it, and would have more money to spend on food. The second is that the soil damage and other consequences would be sufficiently less that their long term food security would be enhanced by organic agriculture.
Now there are some problems with these models - one of them is the assumption that in a world with vastly more organic agriculture, that organics would still command higher than average prices. But it is worth noting that the UMichigan study suggests we can feed the whole world without Monsanto, ADM and Cargill.
Sharon
The gist of the thing is this - even allowing for a dramatic fall in yield from organic agriculture (which is by no means inevitable), poor farmers would be better off using organic techniques for two important reasons. The first is that reduction in costs would offset any loss in yields for individual farmers - that is, they might be growing less food, but they'd also be spending much less of their limited funds to grow it, and would have more money to spend on food. The second is that the soil damage and other consequences would be sufficiently less that their long term food security would be enhanced by organic agriculture.
Now there are some problems with these models - one of them is the assumption that in a world with vastly more organic agriculture, that organics would still command higher than average prices. But it is worth noting that the UMichigan study suggests we can feed the whole world without Monsanto, ADM and Cargill.
Sharon
Monday, May 07, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 2 - Turning Things Off
Here's a simple, but vitally important one. This week, we're going to practice turning things off. I know, I know, it sounds easy, but these things are so little it is easy to forget them. The best estimate is that if everyone in the nation simply avoided unnecessary energy waste we could reduce our national consumption by 15%. All of us can use a reminder here.
So here's what we're going to do this week - walk around your house, your office, your life and look for places to turn things off, or down. That means when you run to the post office or pick up your kids from school, don't idle the car. Unless you are baking, put your food in the oven when you go to preheat things (your food will warm with the oven) and then turn the oven off 10-30 minutes before you expect your food to be done - it will still be hot. Disconnect all those phantom loads - the VCR, the microwave. Don't leave your cell phone plugged in after it is charged. Turn your computer *off* over night, and make sure you turn off the printer. Turn down the heat or up the air conditioning. Turn off the heat cycle of the dishwasher, or open it up when you get to the drying part. Try doing some things by hand - knead your bread, mash the potatoes, wash a few dishes, hang your laundry. Find as many ways as possible to cut back, and get your family in on the game. Perhaps offer to take everyone out to dinner/lunch/ice cream with the amount you save over last year on this month's electric bill. If it is a lot, they get something fancy, if a little, they have to share junior cones. Find some way to get everyone in on the game.
Do it for a week, and it gets to be a habit!
Sharon
So here's what we're going to do this week - walk around your house, your office, your life and look for places to turn things off, or down. That means when you run to the post office or pick up your kids from school, don't idle the car. Unless you are baking, put your food in the oven when you go to preheat things (your food will warm with the oven) and then turn the oven off 10-30 minutes before you expect your food to be done - it will still be hot. Disconnect all those phantom loads - the VCR, the microwave. Don't leave your cell phone plugged in after it is charged. Turn your computer *off* over night, and make sure you turn off the printer. Turn down the heat or up the air conditioning. Turn off the heat cycle of the dishwasher, or open it up when you get to the drying part. Try doing some things by hand - knead your bread, mash the potatoes, wash a few dishes, hang your laundry. Find as many ways as possible to cut back, and get your family in on the game. Perhaps offer to take everyone out to dinner/lunch/ice cream with the amount you save over last year on this month's electric bill. If it is a lot, they get something fancy, if a little, they have to share junior cones. Find some way to get everyone in on the game.
Do it for a week, and it gets to be a habit!
Sharon
Sunday, May 06, 2007
No More Scrod
When in Boston, she said, it makes sense,
To go for the specialty, hence,
I've come to get scrod.
Her friend said, that's odd!
Why use the past pluperfect tense?
-My Favorite Dirty Limerick, sometimes attributed to Isaac Asimov
For those of you who are higher minded than I (this would not be difficult), I apologize for the lowering of the tone of this blog. I'd say I'll never do it again, but we all know that's not true.
By now most of you may have read the study that says that the oceans will be entirely depleted of edible fish by 2048 at present rates of consumption. Now speaking as a girl from the Massachusetts coast, the granddaughter and step-sister of fishermen, and someone who thinks that there really is no such thing as too much sushi, fish is practically an article of faith. And within my lifetime, it may all be gone. I've cut way back on fish over the last few years, because mercury and PCB contamination are bad news for pregnant women and nursing mothers, but I do miss it.
Now this is terrifically sad for me, of course - my culture too is tied up in its food - but it is really terrifying for people whose indigenous diets revolve around fish. Most Island and Arctic peoples rely on fish for a large percentage of their diet. They're already struggling with rising seas, melting ice and mercury and PCB contamination of their staple food - and now they stand to lose fish altogether.
There are 1 billion people who rely on fish or fish predators as their primary source of animal protein, and another 3 billion people who eat it regularly. But the big problems come from industrialized nations - the US, Japan, Britain, where we increasingly want to eat a lot of fish and seafood imported from far away. Our own waters are depleted, so we go off to the waters of other people, and take their fish. And the oceans cannot endure it.
This is an even bigger problem because we are entering a period in which food supplies themselves are destabilizing. Recent research documents that we are already seeing significant declines in crop yields because of global warming, and that over the next few decades we may be producing up to 30% less per acre of most staple grain crops, including wheat, rice, soy and corn. Add that to increasing desertification, increasing soil and water depletion, the movement towards using food crops for fuel, a rising population (by 2030 at present rates of increase, China alone will consume 2/3 of the world's grain harvest), and risings costs and potentially decreasing availability of fossil fuels for agriculture, and over the next 4 decades, we may well see a world much shorter of food than we are now.
You all know what I'm going to say, of course - we simply cannot afford to lose fish too. Which means we in the industrialized world have to eat less fish - period. Even those of us on coasts, who can fit fish into our local diets need to cut *way* back. I must sound like a broken record here - first I tell you to give up flying, then so much meat, now fish. I imagine people are wondering "are we allowed any pleasures at all?
Well, I've decided I can eat sushi once a year. For the rest, time to switch my beloved fish and corn chowder down to just (or mostly) corn. And that's it for most of the scrod - at least of the fishy type - the other sort, well, that's low impact, sustainable, good exercise and a good distraction from lack of fish at dinner ;-). So yes, there's still at least one pleasure left ;-).
Sharon
To go for the specialty, hence,
I've come to get scrod.
Her friend said, that's odd!
Why use the past pluperfect tense?
-My Favorite Dirty Limerick, sometimes attributed to Isaac Asimov
For those of you who are higher minded than I (this would not be difficult), I apologize for the lowering of the tone of this blog. I'd say I'll never do it again, but we all know that's not true.
By now most of you may have read the study that says that the oceans will be entirely depleted of edible fish by 2048 at present rates of consumption. Now speaking as a girl from the Massachusetts coast, the granddaughter and step-sister of fishermen, and someone who thinks that there really is no such thing as too much sushi, fish is practically an article of faith. And within my lifetime, it may all be gone. I've cut way back on fish over the last few years, because mercury and PCB contamination are bad news for pregnant women and nursing mothers, but I do miss it.
Now this is terrifically sad for me, of course - my culture too is tied up in its food - but it is really terrifying for people whose indigenous diets revolve around fish. Most Island and Arctic peoples rely on fish for a large percentage of their diet. They're already struggling with rising seas, melting ice and mercury and PCB contamination of their staple food - and now they stand to lose fish altogether.
There are 1 billion people who rely on fish or fish predators as their primary source of animal protein, and another 3 billion people who eat it regularly. But the big problems come from industrialized nations - the US, Japan, Britain, where we increasingly want to eat a lot of fish and seafood imported from far away. Our own waters are depleted, so we go off to the waters of other people, and take their fish. And the oceans cannot endure it.
This is an even bigger problem because we are entering a period in which food supplies themselves are destabilizing. Recent research documents that we are already seeing significant declines in crop yields because of global warming, and that over the next few decades we may be producing up to 30% less per acre of most staple grain crops, including wheat, rice, soy and corn. Add that to increasing desertification, increasing soil and water depletion, the movement towards using food crops for fuel, a rising population (by 2030 at present rates of increase, China alone will consume 2/3 of the world's grain harvest), and risings costs and potentially decreasing availability of fossil fuels for agriculture, and over the next 4 decades, we may well see a world much shorter of food than we are now.
You all know what I'm going to say, of course - we simply cannot afford to lose fish too. Which means we in the industrialized world have to eat less fish - period. Even those of us on coasts, who can fit fish into our local diets need to cut *way* back. I must sound like a broken record here - first I tell you to give up flying, then so much meat, now fish. I imagine people are wondering "are we allowed any pleasures at all?
Well, I've decided I can eat sushi once a year. For the rest, time to switch my beloved fish and corn chowder down to just (or mostly) corn. And that's it for most of the scrod - at least of the fishy type - the other sort, well, that's low impact, sustainable, good exercise and a good distraction from lack of fish at dinner ;-). So yes, there's still at least one pleasure left ;-).
Sharon
Friday, May 04, 2007
Food Preservation and Democracy
The rhubarb is up. And it has me thinking about democracy, justice and what to have for dinner. We've talked here about how the opposite of poverty is self-sufficiency, and why it is that self-sufficiency is our best bet going into the future. But what does that actually look like? How do you live? What do you do? What do you eat? What is it like to live that way? And what, perhaps most importantly, would change about our culture if we ate that way?
I was lucky enough to know one of the people on the earth who knew the most about this, Carla Emery, author of _The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book_. Before her death in 2005, Carla was travelling the nation trying to help people get ready for a life with much less energy. She'd done almost everything in her book (and it is a big book) at least once, and new more than anyone I've ever met. Here's what she says about how she makes sure her family is fed,
"All spring I try and plant something every day - from late February,
when the early peas and spinach and garlic can go in, on up to mid-
summer, when the main potato crop and the late beans and lettuce
go in. Then I switch over and make it my rule to try and get
something put away for the winter every single day. That lasts
until the pumpkins and sunflowers and late squash and green
tomatoes are in. Then comes the struggle to get the most out of
the stored food - all winter long. It has to be checked regularly,
and you'll need to add to that day's menu anything that's on the
verge of spoiling, wilting or otherwise soon becoming useless.
Or preserve it a new way. If a squash gets a soft spot, I can gut
it out and cook, mash, can or freeze the rest for a supper vegetable
or pie, or add it to the bread dough.
You have to ration. You have all the good food you can eat right
at arm's reach and no money to pay...until you run out...
People have to choose what they're going to struggle for. Life is
always a struggle, whether or not you're struggling for anything
worthwhile, so it might as well be for something worthwhile.
Independence days are worth struggling for. They're good for me,
good for the country and good for growing children."
(Emery, 493-494)
Her "Independence Days" were the ones in which her family ate from their own land and gardens. She was right in this - independence is worth striving for. Not only is it worth striving for because it is good for us, our nation and our families, but also because someday we may depend on these skills and knowledge - and right now we might have a better country if we did this.
I'm no Carla Emery, unfortunately, although I work at being as much like her as I can. Every spring, I sit down and inventory our food stores, particularly the things I put up the previous year. At the back of my mind is this question: "If we had to live on what I could produce, could we?" And the answer is generally, "not as well as we'd like."
Some years that was because of the CSA - in years when we've been short on a crop, all of it, or the best of it goes to our customers. We eat the tomatoes with the bird pecks, or the two eggplants left over. Sometimes the problem is that I didn't put up enough, or harvest things at the right time, and sometimes there's something else. One year we lost most of our potatoes, all our strawberrries and a heck of a lot of other things to heavy flooding (the first two years we lived here were drought, so we didn't discover until year three that one of our large garden patches lays wet), another year Eric accidentally left the door to the storage area open on a bitterly cold night - poof, four months worth of potatoes, onions and apples were gone. I think this last year the problem was that I forgot that four growing boys keep growing.
All of which is just a way of saying that after years of practice, I still don't have the feeding ourselves down to a perfect science. I'm still embarassed about the year I made blueberry jam and didn't check the seals - every jar was moldy when we opened them. I'm not perfect and I have made every mistake you can possibly imagine. The good thing about all those mistakes is that eventually, you get to the point where it isn't as hard. We still buy some of our grains and beans, and are still grateful that if the potato harvest doesn't measure up, we can go to the local farmer's market and supplement our needs, and we enjoy bananas and citrus as much as the next person, along with spices and seasonings from far away. But we also keep trying to feed ourselves, and we get better at it every year. We're now to the point where most years, we probably could surivive, we just wouldn't be eating our preferred diet.
But here's the thing - even if we never achieve perfection - if we never manage to raise every single thing we want to eat, there's a great deal of satisfaction in putting by and getting better at it. Because even right now, every bite of food we don't purchase is a gift - it represents money we don't have to spend on groceries and can devote to other things. Every bite closer we get to feeding ourselves means we eat better.
Americans tend to believe that hunger could never come their way. They forget that just two generations ago, during the depression, as many as 25% of urban school children were malnourished, and people stood in bread lines. They forget that the experience of privelege we've known in these wealthy nations is very odd - a historical anomaly. That pretty much all human beings starting with our grandparents and going back knew periods of food insecurity - and that the majority of people in the world know hunger at some point in their lives. Should we bet the farm on the notion that this magical immunity to the plague of hunger will go on forever?
Growing your own food is only one part of the project - the next is preserving it, and making sure you have enough to eat, and things you like. Most places in the world have a period where you can't grow much food, either because it is too hot or too dry, too cold or too wet. So we have to put up food for those times. And then there's the job of resource management - if I left things up to my kids, I'd have strawberry jam every single day, until there wasn't any more, and then they'd complain until the next year's strawberry harvest. Someone has to be the one to say, "ok, apricot this time - let's save some of that strawberry for early spring when we'll all want something sweet." Someone has to look at the apples and the pears and take the ones that are getting soft off and make them into sauce or dried apples before they rot and spoil, literally, the whole barrel.
The thing is, being involved with your food means being really seriously involved with your food. It means changing the way we've come to think about the world back to the way that we once did - revisiting a life of seasonality, with a time to plant, a time to sow, a time to harvest and a time to rest. It isn't just a song, or a Bible verse, it becomes a way of life. And that's ok, because that link to nature may be the thing that we've been missing in our lives. There's growing evidence that people who work in the dirt, live with the seasons and connect to nature are happier and healthier than those who in more artificial circumstances.
So like all springs, my job now is to figure out how many cucumbers I need to plant next year, so that this time, the pickles (devoured by my three pickle-fiend sons) make it all the way until July, when I can make more. And how many potatoes to grow - and can I grow more of the cranberry colored ones that everyone liked do much? And I want to grow more of my own animal feed this year - the cost of corn is rising, and I'd like to stop buying feed altogether. How much room in my garden do the chickens need? How about the rabbits? Which of those weeds can I dry for hay? What I can I grow for them?
Preserving food is every day work - it begins now, with the first rhubarb that will be dried or canned or made into sauce (and a reminder that I still have a bit left of last year's to eat). Next come the strawberries (I don't bother to preserve asparagus - doesn't taste as good as fresh), and nettles (very nutritious dried in tea), and then the cycle begins in earnest. It really doesn't take much time, once you get into a routine, and is well worth it. There are alwasys some busy days in the summer, but it isn't too hard to put berries in the dehydrator after work or mix up pickle brine while making dinner.
Even if you don't grow your own, preserving what is seasonal and fresh can provide you with a great deal of economic and food security - if you go to the farmer's market at the end of the day, you may be able to get bushels of produce for almost nothing. Then comes the work of dehydration, or canning, or pickling. But the work is worth it - both because it enables you to eat a local diet and frees you from dangers in the food supply, but also because it means you don't depend on corporations or others to provision you.
And that last point may be the most important. Food preservation, and food production are keys to democracy. We accept that a politician who is dependent on the money special interests provides cannot be wholly independent in their thought, and know that no matter how much personal integrity they may have, their intentions are fundamentally corrupted by being beholden to others.
Well the same is equally true of individuals - as long as we depend on large corporations to meet our basic needs, we'll never be able to judge them fairly or recreate our society. That is, we cannot simultaneously call for an end to multinational monoliths and also pay them to feed us. As long as we admit we are dependent on corporations, any attempt at reform or culture change will fail, because we ourselves are corrupted by that dependence. We cannot deplore McDonalds, and then complain because poor people cannot buy their food from the equally troubling industrial organic producers who sell through whole foods. We need to recognize that our food dependence affects not just what we eat, but the fundamentals of our democracy and our political power.
We should not owe our lives to entities we deplore. And the only possible escape from that bind is to declare food independence - to meet as many of our basic needs as possible ourselves, and through small, sustainable farms with which we have real and direct relationships. And that means not just growing food, but ensuring a stable food supply, reasonable reserves and a dinner that depends on no one. Worth struggling for indeed!
I'd best get cracking!
Cheers,
Sharon
I was lucky enough to know one of the people on the earth who knew the most about this, Carla Emery, author of _The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book_. Before her death in 2005, Carla was travelling the nation trying to help people get ready for a life with much less energy. She'd done almost everything in her book (and it is a big book) at least once, and new more than anyone I've ever met. Here's what she says about how she makes sure her family is fed,
"All spring I try and plant something every day - from late February,
when the early peas and spinach and garlic can go in, on up to mid-
summer, when the main potato crop and the late beans and lettuce
go in. Then I switch over and make it my rule to try and get
something put away for the winter every single day. That lasts
until the pumpkins and sunflowers and late squash and green
tomatoes are in. Then comes the struggle to get the most out of
the stored food - all winter long. It has to be checked regularly,
and you'll need to add to that day's menu anything that's on the
verge of spoiling, wilting or otherwise soon becoming useless.
Or preserve it a new way. If a squash gets a soft spot, I can gut
it out and cook, mash, can or freeze the rest for a supper vegetable
or pie, or add it to the bread dough.
You have to ration. You have all the good food you can eat right
at arm's reach and no money to pay...until you run out...
People have to choose what they're going to struggle for. Life is
always a struggle, whether or not you're struggling for anything
worthwhile, so it might as well be for something worthwhile.
Independence days are worth struggling for. They're good for me,
good for the country and good for growing children."
(Emery, 493-494)
Her "Independence Days" were the ones in which her family ate from their own land and gardens. She was right in this - independence is worth striving for. Not only is it worth striving for because it is good for us, our nation and our families, but also because someday we may depend on these skills and knowledge - and right now we might have a better country if we did this.
I'm no Carla Emery, unfortunately, although I work at being as much like her as I can. Every spring, I sit down and inventory our food stores, particularly the things I put up the previous year. At the back of my mind is this question: "If we had to live on what I could produce, could we?" And the answer is generally, "not as well as we'd like."
Some years that was because of the CSA - in years when we've been short on a crop, all of it, or the best of it goes to our customers. We eat the tomatoes with the bird pecks, or the two eggplants left over. Sometimes the problem is that I didn't put up enough, or harvest things at the right time, and sometimes there's something else. One year we lost most of our potatoes, all our strawberrries and a heck of a lot of other things to heavy flooding (the first two years we lived here were drought, so we didn't discover until year three that one of our large garden patches lays wet), another year Eric accidentally left the door to the storage area open on a bitterly cold night - poof, four months worth of potatoes, onions and apples were gone. I think this last year the problem was that I forgot that four growing boys keep growing.
All of which is just a way of saying that after years of practice, I still don't have the feeding ourselves down to a perfect science. I'm still embarassed about the year I made blueberry jam and didn't check the seals - every jar was moldy when we opened them. I'm not perfect and I have made every mistake you can possibly imagine. The good thing about all those mistakes is that eventually, you get to the point where it isn't as hard. We still buy some of our grains and beans, and are still grateful that if the potato harvest doesn't measure up, we can go to the local farmer's market and supplement our needs, and we enjoy bananas and citrus as much as the next person, along with spices and seasonings from far away. But we also keep trying to feed ourselves, and we get better at it every year. We're now to the point where most years, we probably could surivive, we just wouldn't be eating our preferred diet.
But here's the thing - even if we never achieve perfection - if we never manage to raise every single thing we want to eat, there's a great deal of satisfaction in putting by and getting better at it. Because even right now, every bite of food we don't purchase is a gift - it represents money we don't have to spend on groceries and can devote to other things. Every bite closer we get to feeding ourselves means we eat better.
Americans tend to believe that hunger could never come their way. They forget that just two generations ago, during the depression, as many as 25% of urban school children were malnourished, and people stood in bread lines. They forget that the experience of privelege we've known in these wealthy nations is very odd - a historical anomaly. That pretty much all human beings starting with our grandparents and going back knew periods of food insecurity - and that the majority of people in the world know hunger at some point in their lives. Should we bet the farm on the notion that this magical immunity to the plague of hunger will go on forever?
Growing your own food is only one part of the project - the next is preserving it, and making sure you have enough to eat, and things you like. Most places in the world have a period where you can't grow much food, either because it is too hot or too dry, too cold or too wet. So we have to put up food for those times. And then there's the job of resource management - if I left things up to my kids, I'd have strawberry jam every single day, until there wasn't any more, and then they'd complain until the next year's strawberry harvest. Someone has to be the one to say, "ok, apricot this time - let's save some of that strawberry for early spring when we'll all want something sweet." Someone has to look at the apples and the pears and take the ones that are getting soft off and make them into sauce or dried apples before they rot and spoil, literally, the whole barrel.
The thing is, being involved with your food means being really seriously involved with your food. It means changing the way we've come to think about the world back to the way that we once did - revisiting a life of seasonality, with a time to plant, a time to sow, a time to harvest and a time to rest. It isn't just a song, or a Bible verse, it becomes a way of life. And that's ok, because that link to nature may be the thing that we've been missing in our lives. There's growing evidence that people who work in the dirt, live with the seasons and connect to nature are happier and healthier than those who in more artificial circumstances.
So like all springs, my job now is to figure out how many cucumbers I need to plant next year, so that this time, the pickles (devoured by my three pickle-fiend sons) make it all the way until July, when I can make more. And how many potatoes to grow - and can I grow more of the cranberry colored ones that everyone liked do much? And I want to grow more of my own animal feed this year - the cost of corn is rising, and I'd like to stop buying feed altogether. How much room in my garden do the chickens need? How about the rabbits? Which of those weeds can I dry for hay? What I can I grow for them?
Preserving food is every day work - it begins now, with the first rhubarb that will be dried or canned or made into sauce (and a reminder that I still have a bit left of last year's to eat). Next come the strawberries (I don't bother to preserve asparagus - doesn't taste as good as fresh), and nettles (very nutritious dried in tea), and then the cycle begins in earnest. It really doesn't take much time, once you get into a routine, and is well worth it. There are alwasys some busy days in the summer, but it isn't too hard to put berries in the dehydrator after work or mix up pickle brine while making dinner.
Even if you don't grow your own, preserving what is seasonal and fresh can provide you with a great deal of economic and food security - if you go to the farmer's market at the end of the day, you may be able to get bushels of produce for almost nothing. Then comes the work of dehydration, or canning, or pickling. But the work is worth it - both because it enables you to eat a local diet and frees you from dangers in the food supply, but also because it means you don't depend on corporations or others to provision you.
And that last point may be the most important. Food preservation, and food production are keys to democracy. We accept that a politician who is dependent on the money special interests provides cannot be wholly independent in their thought, and know that no matter how much personal integrity they may have, their intentions are fundamentally corrupted by being beholden to others.
Well the same is equally true of individuals - as long as we depend on large corporations to meet our basic needs, we'll never be able to judge them fairly or recreate our society. That is, we cannot simultaneously call for an end to multinational monoliths and also pay them to feed us. As long as we admit we are dependent on corporations, any attempt at reform or culture change will fail, because we ourselves are corrupted by that dependence. We cannot deplore McDonalds, and then complain because poor people cannot buy their food from the equally troubling industrial organic producers who sell through whole foods. We need to recognize that our food dependence affects not just what we eat, but the fundamentals of our democracy and our political power.
We should not owe our lives to entities we deplore. And the only possible escape from that bind is to declare food independence - to meet as many of our basic needs as possible ourselves, and through small, sustainable farms with which we have real and direct relationships. And that means not just growing food, but ensuring a stable food supply, reasonable reserves and a dinner that depends on no one. Worth struggling for indeed!
I'd best get cracking!
Cheers,
Sharon
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Rural Exodus?
For a while now, I've been arguing that the first phase of peak oil will see a lot of people leaving rural and exurban areas to live closer to jobs/schools/public transportation. Even though that's the exact opposite of what we need to have happen, it seems to me inevitable. We're seeing preliminary signs here, including a group of 8 butt-ugly McMannsions that have now been on the market 14 times in less than 6 years, and a reader in Vermont may be the real canary in the coal mine. She lives in a rural town a good ways from a major city, and she reports that at a recent community event, many of her friends told her they were either moving or planning to move because it was simply too difficult and expensive to commute to work, drive the kids back and forth to activities and school, etc...
This isn't at all surprising, of course, that people would start feeling the pinch. Gas and oil prices are rising steadily, with $4 predicted for this summer. At the same time, real wages have fallen or remained stagnant for the last decade, so people's paychecks aren't going as far s they used to. Food prices are also rising steadily, in part driven by ethanol production, and 23% of our current economy has been driven by the housing market - a market now in serious trouble. Despite the claim that we've bottomed out, foreclosures in California are expected to rise by *4000* percent by the end of next year. And the problems of the Alt-A market have barely begun. Even the stock market rise is largely fueled by the fall of the dollar and inflation - none of them very good for your average consumer.
The way that Americans have been paying for these rising costs is by increasing their debt. Americans now have a negative savings rate and personal debt has risen steadily over the last decade - the average American carries 14K of consumer debate, not including car, student and housing loans. We have no reserves to tap - our houses can no longer serve as our bank accounts and we can't rely on our savings. Even the people who profited the most over the last decade, the baby boomers have, on average, less than 10K saved for retirement, and boomers are being foreclosed upon at a rate 3 times the national average. And so far mortgage interest rates have remained stable - a rise in interest rates will be disastrous to millions of people carrying adjustable or interest only mortgages.
The people who are struggling the most, however, are younger families, in their 20s and 30s, who often were never able to buy into the housing market before it spiraled out of their range, and who are came out of college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In _Generation Debt_ X documents that people my age and younger are overwhelmingly doing less well than the boomers at the same age. Not coincidentally, these young families are the ones who are leaving their comfortable rural neighborhood to move closer to things.
And most of the people who moved to the country over the last two decades weren't people seeking to homestead or farm, or even live the country lifestyle. They were people who wanted cheap housing, or natural beauty, or privacy, but expected their lives to come with the full complement of cheap energy goodies. While some of these people came to fit in, others are the ones who moved in next to dairy farms and complained that they could smell manure, or that they heard roosters crowing. It may be, in the end, that some people who leave the countryside are better suited to population centers. But not all of them, and if the move is done badly, it could cripple agricultural communities for a long time.
On the face of it, moving inwards sounds like the right thing to do for most people - after all, don't we all need to drive less and consume less? But the problem is, as my correspondent wisely observed, that they are assuming that the only thing that will change is energy prices - they aren't thinking in the long term. Their assumption is that they will keep their jobs, keep sending the kids to swimming lessons and soccer practice, keep driving to school - that essentially, life will go on as it has in the past. And that's an understandable, but potentially dangerous assumption - both for the people who leave rural communities and those who stay.
Why is it dangerous? Let's play the scenario out, and think about what the consequences for the nation as a whole and the future might be. Now let us also note that I'm not an economist, a real estate professional or a psychic - things might not go this way. The best I can offer is my own version of common sense reasoning. So let us imagine. In the very short term, a migration from outer suburbs and rural areas might seem like a good thing - more people buying and selling houses might fuel the market a bit more. But wait.
Up to now, the strongest declines in housing prices have occurred in cities, especially in poor cities and in the most inflated markets like San Francisco, New York and Boston. But what if there is a mass movement of people who are finally grasping that higher energy prices are here to stay, but don't see the full implications of peak oil and climate change? Assuming that the whole housing market doesn't crash (in which case we'd expect to see a lot of people staying put, unable to sell at all) immediately, what you might begin to see is a lot of people from the outer suburbs and rural areas moving into urban centers and suburbs just outside them, especially those that offer public transportation.
But here's the thing - the young families that moved out to the country to buy houses most likely did so for several reasons, but a big one is because they could afford it. Real estate agents call it "drive till you can buy." The less money you have, the further out you have to go - in some extremes, that means people working in New York City commuting 3 hours to Pennsylvania. In many places, it means living in formerly rural areas that had small economies, and commuting into population centers. Even if they didn't choose where they lived because of money, in many cases, they won't have seen the large equity gains that urban areas did - even compensating for the fall in urban prices, the sale of most country houses won't buy a comparable one near many large population centers.
If many of these families want to move closer to cities, they will find that even in these economically declining times, the houses they sell don't buy as much housing nearer urban centers. That means that this movement away from rural areas will put pressure on the bottom end of the housing market - these young families leaving rural towns aren't going to be competing for the best place in town, but for the cheaper part of the market.
And this is likely to have several results. One is that if possible, I suspect a lot of people who are uncomfortable having their standard of housing and living decline, will take out bigger mortgages and more debt in order to have a home that isn't a big step down. Keeping up appearances drives a lot of us more than we'd like to admit - someone who owned a comfortable home in the country is going to have a tough time going to the rattiest ranch in the neighborhood. So they'll probably push their financial limits, which is likely not to be good for them or the economy as a whole.
The second issue is that a large movement of people away from rural areas towards urban ones will crash rural housing prices. The first folks to make the move will probably do fine, just take out a bit more debt, but what about those who see housing prices fall and houses stall for years on the market? Many of them will probably either take a further step down in housing quality, or they will rent. That means some pressure on rental markets, which haven't grown anywhere near as quickly as ownership. And if that's true, that means that poorer urban folk are likely to feel more economic pressure. In the longer term, they may well end up living in rural areas, commuting four to a car into the city. Which means those rural areas are likely to see a permanent decline in their property taxes, a rise in need for services, etc... Because the cost of energy and commuting will mean all those poor people get a little bit poorer every year.
My correspondent in Vermont was grieved because she stands to lose her community, including her peak aware friends. Because it is young families leaving, she's worried about her small local school closing, the loss of her food coop, and the economic decline of her town. And she's right to worry. Aging populations (since older folks won't feel the same pressure to move), rising foreclosures, falling property taxes, closing shops, disrupted communities are probably the name of the game for those of us in the country.
But let's play out the scenario a little bit further - what happens when rural areas and exurbs lose their commuters, housing prices out in the middle of nowhere drop like a stone and everyone wants to go live near the public transport and their jobs? In the short term, it may even give a flagging economy a boost, but as the inexorable realities of peak oil and climate change begin to strike, the move starts looking like less of a good idea. Most people simply don't grasp that the long term economic consequences of peak oil and climate change are poverty - much more poverty, affecting people who simply don't see themselves as becoming poor, because they never have been. That means all of us.
If, in fact, we are near or at peak, we can expect over the next decade to see the job we moved towards disappear, and the centralized schools we move closer to begin to close because they can't run the buses or heat the buildings (school closings were common during the 1970s oil crisis, which resulted from only a 5% decline in energy assets - we can expect a 2-3% decline per year). We can expect the cost of food and energy, housing and the servicing of our enormous debt to rise, while wages fall and jobs get scarcer. It isn't just an issue of moving closer to the things you are accustomed to in your middle class existence. It is matter of a real and fundamental change in lifestyle.
And for many of us, our economic security will depend upon our ability to meet our needs outside the official economy - that is, when unemployment and poverty rise, our ability to eat is dependent either on the charity of others equally caught up in the crisis, or in our ability to grow food. As energy prices drive inflation, everything costs more - and the things you don't have to buy are the most affordable ones. If you can heat your home and feed your family without money, you can use that money for things like avoiding foreclosure, and buying shoes - even as the price rises.
And the unfortunate reality is that not only is there less land close to urban centers, but the people who move away from the country will probably have bought the houses in their neighborhoods with small yards and little growing space - because that's what their equity from the country could afford. So while in the short term, reduced gas consumption seems like an economically viable idea, in the long term, these people are risking a long term decline, potential foreclosure and in many ways, becoming less well off than they were before - while involuntarily trashing the economies and cultures of the communities they left behind.
I have long said that even very dense cities can grow much more of their food than they do - and indeed, many Asian and African cities produce between 1/2 and 1/4 of their produce and meat within the city limits. This is not intended as a screed against urbanism or moving inwards per se. But I tend to think that for people my age and younger, moving inward represents a long term potential fall in security and comfort. I believe that many cities and regions can feed themselves, or at least meet part of their needs from the cities and immediate suburbs. But some of our food will always have to come from the countryside - every region is going to need people who are producing food on a larger scale than 1/4 acre. And more densely packed populations far away from where food is produced means that people are more and more reliant on energy-powered infrastructure for basic needs like food.
Now at some point in this process, it will become obvious to people that land=security. In most places in the world, that connection was never erased, but here, land represents something to show, a revelation of one's wealth, but not an enhancement of it. Right now, land says "I can afford lots of property taxes and a landscape service." But the time is rapidly approaching when land says, "I can feed my family. I can heat my house."
The thing is, no one's interests (except, perhaps, in the worst case scenario the interests of large corporations) are served by rural depopulation. Those who stay become less able to produce food because their populations age, their tax base collapse and their community structures fail. Those who move, at a minimum, are now dependent in part on communities left behind, as are the great mass of urban and suburbanites who will never meet their whole food needs.
And the question becomes, as rural land is devalued by a move to the cities, who will buy it up. Who will buy land from the farmers, whose average age is in their late 50s and early 60s, and who will be ready to retire soon? Their wealth is in their land. Who will buy the country property that rich urbanites and suburbanites have been using for their gasoline powered projects, like ATVing and snowmobiling - that are now unaffordable? Who will buy the houses on five acres and the old farmhouses half renovated on 50?
My prayer is that the urban poor, especially immigrant populations, will mostly do this. This would be good for rural communities in many ways, although difficult to adapt to in others. But what I worry about is that the land will be bought up by those who see the opportunity to hold a new source of wealth. And when the young families who sold out to begin with realize their future is in the country, with more affordable housing and land to grow food for their families, they will no longer be able to buy in. Instead, new serfdoms will arise, and large landowners will find that sharecropping is remarkably profitable in this new economy.
This has happened in other nations - during economic crises in South America in the 1990s, large landowners took advantage of out migration to consolidate holdings into private hands in many cases. We have seen the colonization of industrial agriculture by Cargill and Monsanto, who now often own the grain elevator, the tractor dealership, the bank, the pigs, the farmer's building, the feed store, the feed and the seed - and effectively own many farmers themselves. Will we see a similar transformation of the countryside into private, corporate hands?
Perhaps none of this will happen. I don't claim to have a useful crystal ball or psychic powers. But it seems to me that we are just beginning to take the first steps on a path that leads, in the long term, to consolidation of rural lands, the destruction of rural communities, the loss of young workers from rural areas, and the further impoverishing of a generation. All of these are bad things.
If we are to ask people who live in rural areas to change their lives and begin producing food, we must offer something to them. That is, we must make it possible for them to make much or all of their living from their land. We must strengthen the urban-rural connection, so that people who live in and around cities have a real relationship with the people 50 miles away who grow their food. The CSA model is one way to do this, but it is tough to make weekly deliveries this way. We need, among other things, a vast expansion of the CSA model - so that grain farmers are growing grain directly for families, and sheep farmers deliver wool, or blankets or sweaters to people who have already invested in them. We need to think about ways to link urban, suburban and rural communities around a central population center not into communities of us and them, but into a shared way of thinking about the massive project of feeding and living together.
I'm no economist, I'm not an expert on real estate, and you should take my advice for what it cost you. But common sense can get us some surprising places, and frankly, taking the advice of economists and real estate experts the last few years is what got us in this mess to begin with.
So use your own judgment. If it were me (and it is me - I live out in the country too), I'd sit tight if possible. I'd do it even if it meant giving up a lot of family activities, homeschooling, advertising for fellow carpoolers, or even spending one night per week at the office or in a friend's apartment nearer work. The problem is that many of the people who moved out to the country to begin with did so with the expectation that their lives would be no different from the lives of their suburban counterparts. But country life is different, and we're going to have to go back to living the country life. Instead of expecting your kids to keep up with the neighbor kids, you'll need to find other things to value - instead of their skill at soccer, value their skill at raising livestock. Instead of swimming, send them out of chop wood or climb trees.
I don't minimize the price of this - I recognize that I'm suggesting people endure real inconvenience and cost. I don't doubt many older children will be angry that their parents expect their lives to change. But it is important to remember that in many ways, the things that we now take as essential to the world of childhood and work are things that are *substitutes* for the things country life provides. That is, shopping is substitute for growing your own, not a virtue in itself. Sports are great, but in part they are commonplace in children's lives because children are now so inactive - but country children have plenty to do. The same is true with the gym - give up the weight lifting, get rid of the riding mower and start mowing your lawn by hand.
It is possible to create in the country a viable, different, rural culture that is less car dependent than the one we have now. For example, in my neighborhood we have had homemade summer camps, in which parents put together "Camp Days" with activities, each family trading off one day to take all the kids. Adults got free time, kids got social exposure and fun activities, and no one spent any money. It is possible to value and validate what you have in rural areas, and it may well be worth preserving them, even at some cost to yourself. In the end, someone is going to hold that land and have the security and resources it offers - who better than you?
This is a choice every family must make for themselves, and there are clearly those who will have no choices - they are too far indebted. But the key to food sovereignty and real food security lies in the tremendous resource of soil around us. Without loving owners to husband that soil, and care for it, we can expect a far bleaker future.
Sharon
This isn't at all surprising, of course, that people would start feeling the pinch. Gas and oil prices are rising steadily, with $4 predicted for this summer. At the same time, real wages have fallen or remained stagnant for the last decade, so people's paychecks aren't going as far s they used to. Food prices are also rising steadily, in part driven by ethanol production, and 23% of our current economy has been driven by the housing market - a market now in serious trouble. Despite the claim that we've bottomed out, foreclosures in California are expected to rise by *4000* percent by the end of next year. And the problems of the Alt-A market have barely begun. Even the stock market rise is largely fueled by the fall of the dollar and inflation - none of them very good for your average consumer.
The way that Americans have been paying for these rising costs is by increasing their debt. Americans now have a negative savings rate and personal debt has risen steadily over the last decade - the average American carries 14K of consumer debate, not including car, student and housing loans. We have no reserves to tap - our houses can no longer serve as our bank accounts and we can't rely on our savings. Even the people who profited the most over the last decade, the baby boomers have, on average, less than 10K saved for retirement, and boomers are being foreclosed upon at a rate 3 times the national average. And so far mortgage interest rates have remained stable - a rise in interest rates will be disastrous to millions of people carrying adjustable or interest only mortgages.
The people who are struggling the most, however, are younger families, in their 20s and 30s, who often were never able to buy into the housing market before it spiraled out of their range, and who are came out of college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In _Generation Debt_ X documents that people my age and younger are overwhelmingly doing less well than the boomers at the same age. Not coincidentally, these young families are the ones who are leaving their comfortable rural neighborhood to move closer to things.
And most of the people who moved to the country over the last two decades weren't people seeking to homestead or farm, or even live the country lifestyle. They were people who wanted cheap housing, or natural beauty, or privacy, but expected their lives to come with the full complement of cheap energy goodies. While some of these people came to fit in, others are the ones who moved in next to dairy farms and complained that they could smell manure, or that they heard roosters crowing. It may be, in the end, that some people who leave the countryside are better suited to population centers. But not all of them, and if the move is done badly, it could cripple agricultural communities for a long time.
On the face of it, moving inwards sounds like the right thing to do for most people - after all, don't we all need to drive less and consume less? But the problem is, as my correspondent wisely observed, that they are assuming that the only thing that will change is energy prices - they aren't thinking in the long term. Their assumption is that they will keep their jobs, keep sending the kids to swimming lessons and soccer practice, keep driving to school - that essentially, life will go on as it has in the past. And that's an understandable, but potentially dangerous assumption - both for the people who leave rural communities and those who stay.
Why is it dangerous? Let's play the scenario out, and think about what the consequences for the nation as a whole and the future might be. Now let us also note that I'm not an economist, a real estate professional or a psychic - things might not go this way. The best I can offer is my own version of common sense reasoning. So let us imagine. In the very short term, a migration from outer suburbs and rural areas might seem like a good thing - more people buying and selling houses might fuel the market a bit more. But wait.
Up to now, the strongest declines in housing prices have occurred in cities, especially in poor cities and in the most inflated markets like San Francisco, New York and Boston. But what if there is a mass movement of people who are finally grasping that higher energy prices are here to stay, but don't see the full implications of peak oil and climate change? Assuming that the whole housing market doesn't crash (in which case we'd expect to see a lot of people staying put, unable to sell at all) immediately, what you might begin to see is a lot of people from the outer suburbs and rural areas moving into urban centers and suburbs just outside them, especially those that offer public transportation.
But here's the thing - the young families that moved out to the country to buy houses most likely did so for several reasons, but a big one is because they could afford it. Real estate agents call it "drive till you can buy." The less money you have, the further out you have to go - in some extremes, that means people working in New York City commuting 3 hours to Pennsylvania. In many places, it means living in formerly rural areas that had small economies, and commuting into population centers. Even if they didn't choose where they lived because of money, in many cases, they won't have seen the large equity gains that urban areas did - even compensating for the fall in urban prices, the sale of most country houses won't buy a comparable one near many large population centers.
If many of these families want to move closer to cities, they will find that even in these economically declining times, the houses they sell don't buy as much housing nearer urban centers. That means that this movement away from rural areas will put pressure on the bottom end of the housing market - these young families leaving rural towns aren't going to be competing for the best place in town, but for the cheaper part of the market.
And this is likely to have several results. One is that if possible, I suspect a lot of people who are uncomfortable having their standard of housing and living decline, will take out bigger mortgages and more debt in order to have a home that isn't a big step down. Keeping up appearances drives a lot of us more than we'd like to admit - someone who owned a comfortable home in the country is going to have a tough time going to the rattiest ranch in the neighborhood. So they'll probably push their financial limits, which is likely not to be good for them or the economy as a whole.
The second issue is that a large movement of people away from rural areas towards urban ones will crash rural housing prices. The first folks to make the move will probably do fine, just take out a bit more debt, but what about those who see housing prices fall and houses stall for years on the market? Many of them will probably either take a further step down in housing quality, or they will rent. That means some pressure on rental markets, which haven't grown anywhere near as quickly as ownership. And if that's true, that means that poorer urban folk are likely to feel more economic pressure. In the longer term, they may well end up living in rural areas, commuting four to a car into the city. Which means those rural areas are likely to see a permanent decline in their property taxes, a rise in need for services, etc... Because the cost of energy and commuting will mean all those poor people get a little bit poorer every year.
My correspondent in Vermont was grieved because she stands to lose her community, including her peak aware friends. Because it is young families leaving, she's worried about her small local school closing, the loss of her food coop, and the economic decline of her town. And she's right to worry. Aging populations (since older folks won't feel the same pressure to move), rising foreclosures, falling property taxes, closing shops, disrupted communities are probably the name of the game for those of us in the country.
But let's play out the scenario a little bit further - what happens when rural areas and exurbs lose their commuters, housing prices out in the middle of nowhere drop like a stone and everyone wants to go live near the public transport and their jobs? In the short term, it may even give a flagging economy a boost, but as the inexorable realities of peak oil and climate change begin to strike, the move starts looking like less of a good idea. Most people simply don't grasp that the long term economic consequences of peak oil and climate change are poverty - much more poverty, affecting people who simply don't see themselves as becoming poor, because they never have been. That means all of us.
If, in fact, we are near or at peak, we can expect over the next decade to see the job we moved towards disappear, and the centralized schools we move closer to begin to close because they can't run the buses or heat the buildings (school closings were common during the 1970s oil crisis, which resulted from only a 5% decline in energy assets - we can expect a 2-3% decline per year). We can expect the cost of food and energy, housing and the servicing of our enormous debt to rise, while wages fall and jobs get scarcer. It isn't just an issue of moving closer to the things you are accustomed to in your middle class existence. It is matter of a real and fundamental change in lifestyle.
And for many of us, our economic security will depend upon our ability to meet our needs outside the official economy - that is, when unemployment and poverty rise, our ability to eat is dependent either on the charity of others equally caught up in the crisis, or in our ability to grow food. As energy prices drive inflation, everything costs more - and the things you don't have to buy are the most affordable ones. If you can heat your home and feed your family without money, you can use that money for things like avoiding foreclosure, and buying shoes - even as the price rises.
And the unfortunate reality is that not only is there less land close to urban centers, but the people who move away from the country will probably have bought the houses in their neighborhoods with small yards and little growing space - because that's what their equity from the country could afford. So while in the short term, reduced gas consumption seems like an economically viable idea, in the long term, these people are risking a long term decline, potential foreclosure and in many ways, becoming less well off than they were before - while involuntarily trashing the economies and cultures of the communities they left behind.
I have long said that even very dense cities can grow much more of their food than they do - and indeed, many Asian and African cities produce between 1/2 and 1/4 of their produce and meat within the city limits. This is not intended as a screed against urbanism or moving inwards per se. But I tend to think that for people my age and younger, moving inward represents a long term potential fall in security and comfort. I believe that many cities and regions can feed themselves, or at least meet part of their needs from the cities and immediate suburbs. But some of our food will always have to come from the countryside - every region is going to need people who are producing food on a larger scale than 1/4 acre. And more densely packed populations far away from where food is produced means that people are more and more reliant on energy-powered infrastructure for basic needs like food.
Now at some point in this process, it will become obvious to people that land=security. In most places in the world, that connection was never erased, but here, land represents something to show, a revelation of one's wealth, but not an enhancement of it. Right now, land says "I can afford lots of property taxes and a landscape service." But the time is rapidly approaching when land says, "I can feed my family. I can heat my house."
The thing is, no one's interests (except, perhaps, in the worst case scenario the interests of large corporations) are served by rural depopulation. Those who stay become less able to produce food because their populations age, their tax base collapse and their community structures fail. Those who move, at a minimum, are now dependent in part on communities left behind, as are the great mass of urban and suburbanites who will never meet their whole food needs.
And the question becomes, as rural land is devalued by a move to the cities, who will buy it up. Who will buy land from the farmers, whose average age is in their late 50s and early 60s, and who will be ready to retire soon? Their wealth is in their land. Who will buy the country property that rich urbanites and suburbanites have been using for their gasoline powered projects, like ATVing and snowmobiling - that are now unaffordable? Who will buy the houses on five acres and the old farmhouses half renovated on 50?
My prayer is that the urban poor, especially immigrant populations, will mostly do this. This would be good for rural communities in many ways, although difficult to adapt to in others. But what I worry about is that the land will be bought up by those who see the opportunity to hold a new source of wealth. And when the young families who sold out to begin with realize their future is in the country, with more affordable housing and land to grow food for their families, they will no longer be able to buy in. Instead, new serfdoms will arise, and large landowners will find that sharecropping is remarkably profitable in this new economy.
This has happened in other nations - during economic crises in South America in the 1990s, large landowners took advantage of out migration to consolidate holdings into private hands in many cases. We have seen the colonization of industrial agriculture by Cargill and Monsanto, who now often own the grain elevator, the tractor dealership, the bank, the pigs, the farmer's building, the feed store, the feed and the seed - and effectively own many farmers themselves. Will we see a similar transformation of the countryside into private, corporate hands?
Perhaps none of this will happen. I don't claim to have a useful crystal ball or psychic powers. But it seems to me that we are just beginning to take the first steps on a path that leads, in the long term, to consolidation of rural lands, the destruction of rural communities, the loss of young workers from rural areas, and the further impoverishing of a generation. All of these are bad things.
If we are to ask people who live in rural areas to change their lives and begin producing food, we must offer something to them. That is, we must make it possible for them to make much or all of their living from their land. We must strengthen the urban-rural connection, so that people who live in and around cities have a real relationship with the people 50 miles away who grow their food. The CSA model is one way to do this, but it is tough to make weekly deliveries this way. We need, among other things, a vast expansion of the CSA model - so that grain farmers are growing grain directly for families, and sheep farmers deliver wool, or blankets or sweaters to people who have already invested in them. We need to think about ways to link urban, suburban and rural communities around a central population center not into communities of us and them, but into a shared way of thinking about the massive project of feeding and living together.
I'm no economist, I'm not an expert on real estate, and you should take my advice for what it cost you. But common sense can get us some surprising places, and frankly, taking the advice of economists and real estate experts the last few years is what got us in this mess to begin with.
So use your own judgment. If it were me (and it is me - I live out in the country too), I'd sit tight if possible. I'd do it even if it meant giving up a lot of family activities, homeschooling, advertising for fellow carpoolers, or even spending one night per week at the office or in a friend's apartment nearer work. The problem is that many of the people who moved out to the country to begin with did so with the expectation that their lives would be no different from the lives of their suburban counterparts. But country life is different, and we're going to have to go back to living the country life. Instead of expecting your kids to keep up with the neighbor kids, you'll need to find other things to value - instead of their skill at soccer, value their skill at raising livestock. Instead of swimming, send them out of chop wood or climb trees.
I don't minimize the price of this - I recognize that I'm suggesting people endure real inconvenience and cost. I don't doubt many older children will be angry that their parents expect their lives to change. But it is important to remember that in many ways, the things that we now take as essential to the world of childhood and work are things that are *substitutes* for the things country life provides. That is, shopping is substitute for growing your own, not a virtue in itself. Sports are great, but in part they are commonplace in children's lives because children are now so inactive - but country children have plenty to do. The same is true with the gym - give up the weight lifting, get rid of the riding mower and start mowing your lawn by hand.
It is possible to create in the country a viable, different, rural culture that is less car dependent than the one we have now. For example, in my neighborhood we have had homemade summer camps, in which parents put together "Camp Days" with activities, each family trading off one day to take all the kids. Adults got free time, kids got social exposure and fun activities, and no one spent any money. It is possible to value and validate what you have in rural areas, and it may well be worth preserving them, even at some cost to yourself. In the end, someone is going to hold that land and have the security and resources it offers - who better than you?
This is a choice every family must make for themselves, and there are clearly those who will have no choices - they are too far indebted. But the key to food sovereignty and real food security lies in the tremendous resource of soil around us. Without loving owners to husband that soil, and care for it, we can expect a far bleaker future.
Sharon
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
52 Weeks Down...Week 1
As a stab at offering a guide to the basics of energy consumption reduction, I offer here a Monday morning, weekly suggestion for fairly simple changes that can be integrated into daily life. My worry about doing this is that it will duplicate too many other things on the web, but it I also don't want to disappear into arcana. So let us see how this goes.
My theory about this is that once you try something for a week, you have a fairly good idea as to whether you can hack it or not, so it might actually end up in your daily life.
Week 1: I bet you thought I wanted you to change all your lightbulbs to CFs. But no, I'm going to assume you've already done that one.
My first suggestion: Stay Home! We spend a lot of time on the road running errands or back and forth to places. Pick one day this week (and every week ideally), and don't drive that day. Out of milk? Make something without it. Having a tough time picking a day because there's soccer practice one day and school the next? Think about whether you could consolidate activities or give some of them up.
Now while you are home, have some fun. Everyone in America claims that they never have any time to just relax. Well, now's your chance. You aren't going anywhere. Picnic in the yard. Take a nap. Work in the garden. Cook a nice dinner. Read a book. Play catch with your kids. All those good life things take time at home - with everyone there. Not only do you not pollute for a whole day, but you get a little slice of the stuff that we all say we want more of.
More next Monday!
Sharon
My theory about this is that once you try something for a week, you have a fairly good idea as to whether you can hack it or not, so it might actually end up in your daily life.
Week 1: I bet you thought I wanted you to change all your lightbulbs to CFs. But no, I'm going to assume you've already done that one.
My first suggestion: Stay Home! We spend a lot of time on the road running errands or back and forth to places. Pick one day this week (and every week ideally), and don't drive that day. Out of milk? Make something without it. Having a tough time picking a day because there's soccer practice one day and school the next? Think about whether you could consolidate activities or give some of them up.
Now while you are home, have some fun. Everyone in America claims that they never have any time to just relax. Well, now's your chance. You aren't going anywhere. Picnic in the yard. Take a nap. Work in the garden. Cook a nice dinner. Read a book. Play catch with your kids. All those good life things take time at home - with everyone there. Not only do you not pollute for a whole day, but you get a little slice of the stuff that we all say we want more of.
More next Monday!
Sharon
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