The Bullseye Diet

I'm stealing this idea from my co-author, Aaron Newton - but it was so cool I couldn't not write about it. In the process of writing our book about how to de-industrialize agriculture _A Nation of Farmers_ Aaron suggested that instead of one 100 mile (or 200 mile or whatever) diet, we think in terms of a bulls eye model, which emphasizes bringing as much of your diet as possible home to your local area.

This would look like a dart board, with a bullseye in the center. That center dot would be your home. And the first question is "how much of my food can I produce here." For some people, the answer will be very little - only sprouts and a few windowboxes, perhaps. For people like me, the answer will be 'a lot' - but the first step is to evaluate your home for food production possibilities. Be imaginative. You think you can't keep any livestock, right? What about rabbits for angora wool, or meat. How about bantam chickens, kept in cages like pet birds for eggs? What about bees or worms?

You can't garden out front, because of zoning restrictions? Well how about replacing your front yard lawn with ornamental edibles - beautiful blueberry bushes, grapevines trained to an arbor, a pecan tree. Got shade? Rhubarb and gooseberries will tolerate it, as will many medicinal herbs. And the bottlebrush beauty of black cohosh will look just like you planted it for pretty.

We all know that growing food is important, but it is necessary to realize just *how* important. Industrial conventional agriculture is an ecological disaster. Industrial organic agriculture is increasingly organic only in name - and is just as doused in petroleum as conventional. Agriculture of all kinds is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses. But moreover, food yields are levelling off and falling due to climate change. North Africa lost 2/3 of its grain crops this year, the Australian grain crops dropped by more than 50%. The world has its lowest food reserves since measures have been taken. This is a recipe for famine - large scale, worldwide - even here.

The smaller the plot of land you work, the more productive it is (after some practice). A person with one garden bed who manages it inch by inch can produce yields per square foot that dwarf anything a conventional farmer can produce. A farm of 2 acres is often 200 times more productive in total output (according to Peter Rosset's Paper _Small is Beautiful__) than a conventional farmer's use of land. Industrial agriculture is far to *inefficient* in its land use for us to risk continuing it, when human lives are at stake.

Up to now, we've thought of efficiency in terms of less labor - if few people could produce more food, that was an efficiency. But it was only efficient because energy was cheap and abundant, and we're at the end of those days. Now, with a growing world population, climate change and falling yields, we need to return to efficiency PER ACRE - the project of generating the most possible food from each bit of productive land we engage with. Doing so means land for wildlife habitat, the chance to restore stripped soils, the hope of arresting some of the ecological crisis we've encountered.

The key, then, is getting as many people involved in farming and gardening as possible. My own assessment is that we need 100 million new Farmers, broadly construed. That is, we need about 1/3 of the American population to take real responsibility for producing some of their own food. It isn't enough just to create demand - more is going to be asked of all of than simply wanting. Because one out of three means taking responsibility. If we're to raise food on a small, highly productive scale, we need much more participation. I've written more about this here:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/12/50-million-100-million-200-bazillion.html.

The next ring would be the food in your neighborhood. Is there a community garden? Could you create one in a public park or on a vacant lot? Is anyone else growing food? Could you get someone else growing food? I got my neighbor to start a food producing garden by offering to put one in for her as a thank you gift. Aaron gardens on the land of his elderly neighbors, growing food and sharing it with them. My old friend Laurie is growing a garden on her church grounds. Are there churches, businesses, or other folks with land you could engage with? What about getting the neighborhood teenagers involved?

What about foraging in your neighborhood? Even in Manhattan, Wildman Steve Brill offers foraging classes to teach people to eat their local weeds. How much of your food could you get from the neighborhood that way?

Ok, next step would be your town. Are there right to farm laws? Could you get some instituted? How about changing zoning to permit livestock or front yard gardens? Are there any farmers there? Can you patronize them? Have you considered advertising? Put up a sign saying "I would like to buy organic produce from within my community" - maybe someone will start up a market garden. Check into local immigrant communities - many brought their agricultural traditions with them, and they may have surpluses for sale if you ask. Are there old farms with retiring or aging owners - does your town have a plan for protecting that land from development?

So the first three bullseyes are probably all within 10 miles of you. The goal is to get as much as possible, as close as possible. For me, that would be quite a bit. I can get milk, eggs, meat, and most of my produce locally. That isn't normal - but a gardening movement that gets food back on people's properties means that this will be increasingly possible.

The next step would be your immediate bioregion - perhaps 25 miles from your town. And then outwards to 50 and 100 and 250. But remember, every community, every region has a foodshed (like a watershed) that has to feed it. The further out you go, the more likely you are to bump into someone else's foodshed. For example, if you live in Manhattan, by the time you get 100 miles in any given direction, you've bumped into the foodshed for at least one other medium to large city, as well as a number of heavily populated suburbs and small cities. For example, if you look towards Connecticut, the foodshed for Manhattan at 100 miles is also the foodshed for New Haven, Hartford, Providence (in the sense that it is less than 100 miles for each of these), as well as Bridgeport, Stamford, Waterbury and a host of suburbs and cities. Go north towards me, and you've run into the foodshed for Poughkeepsie, Albany, etc...

I'm not criticizing the notion of a 100 mile diet, which has been a powerful tool in teaching people to look locally for food sources. And now, at the beginning of this movement, the 100 mile or 250 mile diet is a great tool. But what if the movement grows, as we hope it will. Can 8 million New Yorkers (or 8 million people in Tucson/Pheonix - I'm using NYC as an example here) have a 100 mile diet? The answer is probably not - it means the foodshed for the region will have to expand. But the only way we can do that fairly is to ensure that as much food as possible is being grown where the people are. That means Victory Gardens on every lawn, in city parks, in neighborhoods. And it means prioritizing food from your very immediate foodshed - from the center circles of your bullseye.

That won't be easy for many people, and it is a long term project. We can't necessarily do it today. But the local food movement is growing fast, and demand alone won't ensure that hunger never strikes Americans, and that we always have enough excess to offer succor and hunger relief to the people who are running out of food because of climate change we caused. If we're to burn carbon sending grains around the planet, they should be going to the world's hungry, not to us, whenever possible.

Like a darts game, you won't always hit your circle. But with practice, you can get a little closer every time. The more food you create in your community, the better off we all are.

Sharon

Putting Another Log on the Fire

So I got my first internet based marital proposition from someone in federal prison (minimum security, I was assured!) the other day. I'm so proud. Not since I got debunked by the right wing wackos at junkscience.com has a tribute to my work meant so much. I hear Ann Coulter gets 150 proposals a day, but this is my very first
;-). I'll call him "Rambo" since he mentioned that movie twice in his (long) email to me.

Now ordinarily I wouldn't make fun - not all prisoners are bad guys, and it certainly has to be one hell of a lonely life. But the gentleman in question was not overly subtle about his goals in marrying this "rollecking farm girl with a survival orientation" (ok, I really liked that phrase, even though he seemed unaware or unconcerned he was proposing bigamy...can we just skip the Groucho Marx puns here ;-), and I feel it acceptable to make a bit of fun, given the language of the proposition. Particularly since he wanted me to wait until his parole in 2013. I was forced to tell him that a. I'm happily monogamous and b. if I weren't, I'm really not into delayed gratification.

Now this is pretty funny for me. I'm not the sort of woman that people get agonizing unrequited crushes on. The only way I'll ever be the loveliest girl in the room is if I have dinner with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and these days a date with my husband is an evening spent romantically planting corn or shoveling out the compost pile. I suspect the gentleman in question noticed I was female, the only real relevant requirement, and decided to take a shot. And a lovely esteem enhancement it was, despite the use of the unfortunate term "lay" to describe my person ;-).

What really interested me about the email I got was this - the gentleman in question
graciously offered me his protection in the coming hard times, including an explanation of his experience and training. He knows I live somewhere in the state of New York, and he warned me that I could expect to be overrun by "hordes" of people from Manhattan any time now, when the peak oil apocalypse comes. And as appreciative as I am - Eric, while a wonderful man with many gifts has no experience in underwater demolitions (although given that I live in upstate NY and the creek on my property is rarely more than a foot deep, that might not be tops on the list of survival skills I'm seeking), I did have to decline, if only because I doubt we have until 2013 before the consequences of peak oil begin.

The gentleman in questions seemed sincere, if a little crude, but the proposition he seemed to be making seems a bad sort of deal for me. He'll protect me from marauding hordes while I farm, have babies for him (oh yes, this was specifically mentioned - I don't think he realizes that babies already come with the package), and do the "woman-stuff" (his term). Now I'm no starry eyed idealist, nor am I a pacifist. I have a fairly firm and practical relationship to the preservation of my family, my life and my livestock. Guns are useful tools out here in the country, and while I'm not buying my ammo by the crate, I'm also a pragmatist - I'll use whatever works in my quest to keep coyotes from eating my geese and the wolf from the door.

But I, apparently, get to do all the easy girl work of growing the food while breastfeeding, and cleaning. How nice for me! The gentleman was very clear on this fact - he has no agricultural knowledge of his own, and it seemed as though the "farm" was even more compelling than the "rollicking" part (I just like to write "rollicking.") Oh, and he mentioned cooking too - he wanted to know if I was a good cook. Well as it happens, I am, and not a half-bad farmer either. And I conceed that in some conceivable situations I might need someone to hold the shotgun while I'm mulching the corn, somehow, the "you cook, clean, plant, harvest, hoe, and I'll play Rambo" deal didn't seem like the best trade off I've ever gotten. See, I've gotten oddly accustomed to sharing work equally, with a real partner. Some days are more equal than others, but the "protection for sex and dinner" deal just doesn't look that good from my end.

May I offer a suggestion to the male survivalist lovelorn (and any really tough lesbians with the same assumptions ;-)) - peak oil doesn't actually mean that we get to go back to living the "Put another log on the fire" life (And ain't I gonna take you fishin' with me someday/Now a man can't love a woman more than that...). There are whole forums out there are of people who imagine that handling peak oil is just a matter of a good gun, an isolated homestead and someone to do the cooking and sewing. I've got to say, I suspect that the reason those forums tend to have a 8-1 male female ratio (and half the guys seem to be single), may have something to do with the fact that underneath the rhetoric there's a "Yay, back to the stone age with all the girls" theme. Often, women are referred to as "our women," most often by people who don't own any ;-).

But the thing is, it doesn't matter how many guns you have or how much ammo you've got - unless you live in the movies, if the purple haired mutants come around, two people are going to get their asses kicked by 3 or more people. Isolated homesteads aren't that common, actually - most of them are surrounded by other people who also like isolated homesteads, and they all get to be isolated together. And unless you plan to revise our incest taboos, at least once a generation (and probably quite a bit more often), everyone is going to have to come out of their cave and get to know the neighbors.

So obviously, soloing isn't the answer (sorry Rambo!). Which means communities. Which means doing the work of community building - you know, having relationships with people. I'm not talking about setting up an ecovillage (no implied attacks on people who are, just not my thing) - I'm talking about building community with the people who live near you. And the way you do that is usually not exciting or dramatic - it rarely (at this stage) involves everyone learning to work together to defeat the marauding whatevertheyare a la the Magnificent Seven (Shoot, I was aiming for the horse!). Mostly, it involves knowing people well enough to trust them. And how do you do that? The boring way. You stop up and have a chat. You ask after the baby or the grandkids. You bring soup when someone gets sick and have a party now and again. You barter. You trade. You talk. You offer to help with something, show up, do a solid day's work, and do it again next time, proving that you mean what you say. That is, you do all the girly (and men do it too - I'm making fun here) stuff of talking, having relationships, being nice, paying attention and helping out.

Now I can't swear that Rambo's services might never be useful. But I do know, that fixating today on Rambo's solution is the quickest way to bring about the nasty future he wants to protect me from. Social breakdown and violence happens when infrastructure fails. So building shadow infrastructure - ordinary people prepared to pick up the slack when institutions fail is a #1 priority. What we need right now is as much engagement as possible with other people. And even with Rambo at my back, I can only fight off, oh, maybe 12 (yeah, right) marauders (personal nukes are on my "to get" list right after the solar panels ;-). Ultimately, a bigger group of people, or a luckier one or one with less to lose can always take what they want. The best hope I have is to make sure that things don't degrade that far. Because if they do - I've already lost. Civilian casualties, accidental deaths and friendly fire constitute almost 40% of all deaths in any given conflict - not starting the battle is my potential salvation. Speaking as a Mom, I don't want to win anything that involves my kids getting hurt even accidentally. If it ever (g-d forbid) comes to that, we'll deal. But when you've got an investment in the long term, short term thinking is a big mistake.

So Rambo, I'm afraid we just weren't meant to be. But I do want to throw his offer open - he didn't strike me as a picky sort, and I do have quite a few female readers. So if anyone is looking for a man with demolitions experience and an eye to survival, I'm sure he won't mind if I pass his email along.

Sharon

Discipline and Pleasure

What a fun title for an essay, don't you think? Nicely evocative of Foucault, and equally of S&M, it sounds like we're on entirely different sort of blog, doesn't it ? Unfortunately for all of you (and my chances of getting rich writing this stuff), I'm not speaking of anything quite so sexy, but of the pleasures of self-discipline.

And that's a tough sell in America. We tend to associate pleasure with the release of discipline - sex is all about letting go, and so are our personal pleasures - we get our fun from exceeding limits, refusing to be constrained. Fun is blowing too much money shopping or eating a quart of Ben and Jerry's alone. And trust me, I've done my share of that sort of fun.

But there are other categories of pleasure that depend on self discipline. Consider sports, for example. If you run the bases backwards, you've ruined the baseball game. We make all sorts of limiting rules to make sports fun to play, fun to watch - and the delight is in seeing how one can produce the best results within the disciplinary structure of the rules. If we blow them off, we're entitled to shout (if we're being extremely polite) "but that's not sporting." And the notion of sportingness - the idea that some kind of structured fairness is required to get the best possible results is a deep one.

Or art, for that matter. Sonnets without form aren't sonnets. Even the freest art forms begin with limiting structures - the frame around the canvas, the first positions of ballet, the language of poetry. The limits get pushed all the time, but before you push the limits, you understand them, you work within them, so that you know what you are extending.

How about childhood? It isn't just to keep Mom and Dad from going crazy that parents establish discipline. Research has shown that children are most comfortable within firm, and known boundaries. It is scary to have no limits, to run wild in the world without constraint. 'No" and "we do this, but not this" help children understand and adapt to their world. Chances are, most of us have fond memories of the structures created by discipline - if they were part of our lives, we usually remember sit down family dinners, coming in when the street lights go on and homework time with a mix of irritation and fondness - but more fondness, often, than irritation. We take pleasure in childhood in part because of its boundaries.

Courtesy and manners are another kind of self-discipline that can come with enormous pleasures. Who doesn't like to receive a thank-you note, or doesn't prefer a stiff "let's agree to disagree" to a punch in the face. When important events occur, the structure of how we birth and wed, welcome and mourn become a means of comfort.

The simple fact is that discipline is part of culture. The way we limit ourselves is also the way we indicate our membership, and our love.

Several people have reminded me that in order to be compelling, the Riot for Austerity has to convince people that they will have fun doing it. And they are right. But in order to call this optimization exercise fun, we have to think hard about what fun is.

Fun is both blowing all the limits occasionally, and living gracefully within them. I'm all for feasting, celebration, riot (that's why we're doing this, after all), dancing in the streets, mocking power, getting drunk, welcoming guests - occasionally. This is fun stuff, and we need it in our lives. But we can't spend every day drunk, or spending too much, or overeating. The simple fact is that we've lost our sense of balance, and we often do these things too frequently.

Everyday pleasures are different. They come from self-discipline. The discipline that creates ritual, routine, self-comfort. They come from culture and limitation. Within these limits - within the straits of "what we customarily eat, do, say, don't say" is where our comfort lies. This is, perhaps, the art of daily life, the creation of beauty and artistry, craft and delight from the simple boundaries set around you - your time, the people, the way you treat each other. This is the pleasure of storytime, chicken soup and bread for dinner, singing together, playing your game or climbing your tree or reading your book. It is what we do, and it is constrained because without constraint, it wouldn't be ours.

And that's where the pleasure of the Riot for Austerity lies for me. It increases my taste for the festival moments, makes the day of special foods or wild dancing a deeper pleasure, and at the same time, it reinforces the delight of ritual. Self-discipline requires that I think, be mindful and aware of what I am doing, what choices I'm making. It requires I extract the maximum pleasure and comfort from each use of energy, instead of heedlessly simply taking.

In the Riot model, the food is better, fresher, tastier, and cooked at home. It is more nutritious and offers more sensory delight. The shower I take is more deeply appreciated, because I can't use water heedlessly. There is less waste, and less burden of managing waste. There is more reason to be in the moment, less reason to run from place to place, a slower pace, more quiet, more reason to watch and listen and learn. There is a greater intimacy with the world around me - an awareness of my watershed, my foodshed, the sources of my energy. It turns out, that for me, I can easily derive the same amount of pleasure or more from less - so what was my past usage for?

But more importantly, there's a sense of life as art. It requires a greater creativity and imagination than my daily life before the riot. What I do is now a dance of balance, a poetic form they didn't teach me about in graduate school, in which economy and discipline combine to create something a little more than what I had before.

Sharon

Getting Over Picky

Yesterday's project was a serious strawberry harvest, and today I'll make lots and lots of jam - 50 pints, I estimate. Strawberry is the univeral favorite among the kids, so we grow lots. The kids helped (hindered ;-)) with the picking in their own inimicable ways. Eli plopped himself down on the straw and began a two-fisted strawberry eating project, with an occasional languid toss of one into a basket. Isaiah took his bucket and began a quest for only the biggest, reddest, ripest strawberries, which meant his picking rate was about 6 an hour, 4 of which were promptly eaten. Asher likes to pick, but by the time the strawberries get from his little hands to the bucket, they often must be discretely disposed of, while lavish praise for helping is dispensed. Only Simon really picks at this stage, and he takes great pleasure in bossing people around while he does it. "Don't step there, Eli, you'll squish the strawberries." "Isaiah, no eating!" (Here Mommy intervenes to say that Eli is fine and so is eating - her mouth is full, so she's no hypocrite ;-). And when Asher accidentally ate a green strawberry and said "yuk," Simon erupted in outrage "No saying yuk!"

Now this last is a firm rule in our household, although there are exceptions for babies eating truly gross things like green strawberries or dog food (don't ask). But my kids are powerfully enjoined never, ever to complain that food is "yucky" or "gross." They can say "this isn't my favorite." They can say, "no, thank you." They are not required to eat anything they don't like (although seconds and dessert, if any, depend on reasonable eating). But the first "ugh" or "yuk" gets you a very stern warning, and a second means you leave the table and don't eat again until your next meal. The same is true about discussing food that is not present in the same terms. None of my children have ever had to have this happen more than once.

This rule also applies to regularly visiting other children who I babysit for, and has been applied by Isaiah (to Mommy's horror and embarassment) to a visiting guest who was describing a meal she strongly disliked. And while we had a long talk afterwards about how being a good host and not embarassing guests or making them uncomfortable, I've never been sorry about this rule. My children can recite our reasoning as well, "This is very important to Mommy. All her jobs are about making other people have enough to eat, so we don't waste food and we don't say mean things about it, and we do say a blessing before we eat."

The world is a hungry place. Millions of people world wide don't get enough food - 2 billion are food insecure, including millions in our own country. Hunger and its associated illnesses kill millions of people every day. Saying "gross" to food that is good for you, nutritious and just doesn't happen to suit your palate seems to me to be wrong. Everyone has food preferences - but the notion that there's an inherent ickiness to anything someone considers food is just wrong - or rather, it isn't anything more disgusting that what you eat.

Seriously, think about it. Grossed out by someone who eats organ meats? Why is muscle tissue somehow nicer? Don't like the idea of fermented, spiced kimchi? But you eat the coagulated milk of live animals as cheese? Grossed out by vegemite? Well, other people think peanut butter is just as vile. You eat pringles, and you want to tell someone their rutabagas are bad ;-)?

Me, I don't like anything gelatinous (no aspic) and I avoid soft boiled eggs. Never acquired a taste for vegemite, and I'm only so-so about chocolate (I like adulterated with other things, like peanut butter and fruit, and in milk form - people who are serious chocolate people tell me this is heresy). I keep kosher at home, and won't eat non-kosher animals when out, and I try to eat sustainably whenever possible, although I don't bitch when I'm a guest somewhere else. But I don't find anything wrong with the things I don't eat, and there are circumstances in which I would eat all of them. Visiting a distant connection on Java, for example, we were fed an elaborate meal by a very poor family. I'm still not totally clear on what sea animal was involved, although I'm sure it wasn't kosher - but it was delicious, and offered with generosity and kindness.

I'm one of the less-picky people on the planet. I've eaten things in my travels that ordinarily get a chorus of "EWW!" - and liked many of them. My husband is similar, and together we've managed to raise four comparatively unpicky kids. A lot of this is sheer luck - you spin your wheel, you take your chances. For example, we have an autistic son, and autistic children are notoriously poor eaters, often because they have strong sensory issues with food textures and smells. Eli is a spectacularly good eater by autistic standards (actually, compared to many of my friends' kids he's a spectacularly good eater, although there are things he avoids, like cheese) This is a huge advantage in our quest to cut emissions and eat sustainably - because it means that we can truly take advantage of what is fresh, local and in-season. Some of it, however, I think is a product of two things. We eat everything. And we garden.

I was talking strawberries to a friend of mine the other day, and she was saying she buys them all year 'round for her daughter because they and bananas are the only fruits her daughter will eat. We, on the other hand, eat strawberries like mad for a month in June, and then enjoy dried strawberries, strawberry sauce and strawberry jam until the next year's harvest. When the first strawberries come in, everyone eats the few bites with reverence. A few days later, when there are enough, we gorge until the juice pours down our faces. By the end of the month, we've eaten strawberries every day, canned dozens of jars of jam, lived with the scent of dehydrating strawberries, and we're ready for something else. And here come cherries, peaches, plums, raspberries and blueberries to take up the slack.

But, of course, my children *eat* cherries, peaches, plums, raspberries and blueberries. But a child who eats only strawberries and bananas can't eat a seasonal diet - even imagining a modest importation of bananas, that's a tough, fruit-free life. And since this child also doesn't eat whole grains, chicken in non-nugget forms, greens, peppers, carrots, broccoli or any vegetables other than corn, peas and cucumbers, that lack of fruit is a real problem, health wise.

And why doesn't this sweet little girl eat any fruit? Well it is possible that there's a real underlying issue to her pickiness - that she has sensory issues, unrecognized food allergies or some other deep reason. But I know her family well enough to guess not - I'm guessing the root is simply that her Mom is a picky eater too. Her Mom doesn't eat cranberries, eggplant or beans of any kind, squash, sweet potatoes, any cheese but cream, brown rice, brown bread, or drink unflavored beverages (ie, water). And Mom, perhaps because she too knows the pain of eating something she doesn't like, doesn't require her kids to try things, and gently passes along her own prejudices. When they came to dinner, older child would eat only plain rice (white) or pasta (also white) at my house, and they would ask me to produce a seperate bowl of these, even if they weren't on the menu. Now I'm big on guests being curteous to hosts, so I did, but there was some discreet eye-rolling.

Now I'm not talking here about food allergies, medical conditions or religious and ethical scruples, or distaste for stuff we shouldn't be eating anyway (hostess snowball prejudices are good with me) but about garden variety pickiness, the "I just don't like it." And most (not all!) of the picky kids I know come from picky parents, or non-picky parents who make food into one of the BIG DEALS. I've never met a little kid whose parents made a big thing about not liking things who didn't do the same, or one whose parents scrutinized every bite and worried a lot about it (and again, I'm not talking about people with medically fragile kids who need to worry about these things) who didn't appear, at some point to have thought "Cool, found a button to push - fun!"

The thing is, most picky parents don't really admit the connection. A friend of mine's son suddenly went from eating all vegetables to nearly none, but his Dad ardently denies it has any connection to the fact that Daddy only eats lettuce and peppers. Friends of mine wince when their kid complains about the food at my house (and no, not because we make a big deal about it - they don't even know about our rule), but I've heard the mother say, "No, honey, you won't like that. I'll get you something else." Hmmm...

I'm going to take the risk of ticking a lot of people off by saying that at least 80% of food pickiness in the absence of aggravating conditions (sensory stuff, toddlerhood, etc...) is of parental creation. We're tolerating it, even encouraging it - and there's a real and serious price. We've somehow got the wacky idea that their health is less important than that they screw up their courage and eat some brown rice. Yes, it is fine to hate lima beans. Everyone is allowed a couple of things they don't eat simply because they don't want to. But if you also don't eat tepary beans, black beans, soy beans, pinto beans, adzuki beans, along with 20 or 30 other things, you've cut signficantly back on your ability to adapt to a changing world and diet. Dealing with children's picky eating, which is really important, starts with dealing with adult pickiness.

In children, elderly people and the sick, this can actually be fatal. Studies done in World War II Britain on dietary changes caused by the war showed that young children, elderly people and sick people will, when confronted with a major, sudden, crisis induced dietary change will simply stop eating - the medical term is "appetite fatigue" and it is real and serious phenomenon. Most of them eventually adapted, but periods of malnutrition can have long term consequences for babies, young children and people made vulnerable by illness and disability. And sometimes people just died, unable to make dietary adaptations.

So (and g-d forbid) given a situation where favorite foods became suddenly unavailable, people in your family who don't have a wide-ranging diet, particularly one of foods that are often available without trucking, could really suffer from this. The solution is to get used to eating your local diet now - while also trying lots of new things - new grains, new tastes, new ways of eating things, particularly those that suit your area.

It certainly reduces your ability to eat locally and sustainably if you are a picky eater. You can join a CSA, but you are likely to get a basket full of things that you don't want to eat sometimes - maybe if you have a friend whose pickiness is a perfect mirror image of yours it would work, but otherwise, it means wasting food. You can grow a garden, but a lot of the best storing crops and the things that get you through a winter are "hard" foods - if you don't any root crop but onions and potatoes, it'll be one long winter. How much richer would things be with beets, celeriac, shallots, carrots, parnsips, parsley root, kohlrabi and turnips?

How do grownups get over long-ingrained habits of not eating things, of thinking "yuck?" Well, first we realize how high the stakes are. In a rich, priveleged world, where your emissions don't matter and you can buy the three vegetables you like every week, and if you don't enjoy the meal at the dinner party, well, you go home and eat again, it doesn't matter what you eat much. You still get fed. You still get a reasonable approximation of balance (in some cases - we're most of us not eating enough produce, and we've certainly got dietary health problems up the wazoo). But we don't live in that world any more - none of us do. Pretending we can is lying to ourselves.

We don't have the luxury of not caring about our impact. We don't have the luxury of wasting food - food I waste at home means more at the store out of my budget and more ecological impact, and moral problems in a increasingly food scarce world. And the day may not be too far away when more and more of us can't afford to be picky - food prices are rising rapidly, in large part because of the ethanol boom. Millions of Americans are hungry now - it may not be that long before we are affected. So we simply can't throw good food out, or demand only expensive, extra meals for ourselves. Health care costs are rising fast enough that we simply can't afford to get sick because we don't eat well. And if hard times do come, not being adapted to a locally, sustainbly available diet could actually kill people, harm our children's growth, and make us sick.

The same is true for even healthy people about abrupt dietary transitions. If you eat a lot of meat 3 times a day, and suddenly your protein source has to shift to legumes because of poverty or lack of access, you are in for some serious intestinal distress. Have you only been eating processed foods and bleached grains? Well, tolerating whole grains, especially lots of whole wheat will not be a pleasant or easy experience. Have you always, always, always used canned cream of mushroom soup in your Christmas greenbeans? How traumatic will it be in hard times to switch to chard with a homemade sauce? It is far easier to adapt to eating whole grains right now, to put some beans in your diet gradually, change your holiday specialties one at a time.

But if you've hated broccoli for fifty years, it will be a challenge to start eating it. Now if you have plenty of locally available, healthy green options you love around, there's no reason to choose the broccoli over the kale. But what if broccoli is it - if the bugs got the kale crop? You need to eat it and you might as well like it. Or what if you are a meat and potatoes person, and now you are being told that you can only eat grassfed meat, and not that much of it? How do you get there? Now the good news is that you only have to do this for local, seasonal, sustainable foods - if you think twinkies are vile, you don't have to do anything about that. No worries about your extreme distaste for barbecue chips, and go right on hating McNuggets - in fact, we encourage that. The other good news is that the things your are learning to like - whole grains, fresh vegetables, not so much meat - these things are really good for you. There's really no down side.

The first thing to remember is that you have overcome instinctive food preferences before. There are exceptions, but comparatively few people loved coffee, beer, wine, tea, sushi or strong cheese the first time they tasted it. It took a while to develop a liking for these tastes. Similarly, I'm going to bet that your idea of a perfect day no longer involves candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Tastes change. You can change them. We just have to do the work. They say a toddler often has to see a food on their plate 20 times before it seems familiar enough to eat it.

What's the magic trick? Lie. Like a rug. Lie to yourself. Lie to your kids (but don't do in an obvious way - kids are really not stupid). Explore your acting talent. You are going to convince yourself to not only like X hated food (one at a time), you are going to enjoy it. So the first step is to tell yourself you will like it, and to eat a little. Trust me, it won't kill you. Try the kindergarten method - three bites. And then keep putting it on your plate. Smile at it. Think friendly thoughts. Think how wonderful it is to try something new. Think how lucky you are to have it. Find something you like about the taste.

Perhaps the problem is the cooking method - do you cook vegetables until they are grey? Do you like highly seasoned foods, and most veggies are kind of bland? Try a quick steam, or eating it raw. Or perhaps you should add hot sauce, lots of garlic or herbs. Learn to cook your food well. Throw it in with something you do like - put the greens in with the bacon, or toss the peppers in with your pasta salad. Decide to like it - and keep trying for at least a few months, introducing the food regularly to your table. Cook it several ways - my mother likes peeled broccoli stems and raw, fresh picked asparagus, but not broccoli florets or steamed asparagus. Try it raw, steamed, pureed, tossed with pasta, covered with something you like.

Convince yourself that meat isn't the main part of every meal - a lot of this is simply attitude adjustment. Maybe you'll always prefer turkey to baked beans, or no kale to kale. But being able to eat the kale and the baked beans enriches your life.

Don't complain about your food. Be grateful for it - don't call it names, and if you can thank someone or something for it - G-d, the farmers who grew it, the soil it came from. Food matters in this world. We can't afford to treat it lightly.

Teach your kids the same lessons. Remember, no matter how many faces they make, it won't kill them to eat kale. It is a time-honored tradition to torture your children with green vegetables, and as far as I know, no one has died yet. Don't over-sympathize with their distaste - kids tastes are much more malleable than yours, and you aren't doing them any favors.

IMHO, the best hardline method is simply to keep serving them the same meal until they eat it - won't eat beans? Ok, but nothing else is offered, and there will be beans again for lunch tomorrow. When they get hungry enough, they'll eat. Loving every bite is not a prerequisite for life, and missing the occasional meal won't kill anyone.

I admit, I'm usually not that hardline. But you don't get seconds or dessert unless you eat everything. You don't get snacks between meals - if you are hungry, that plate of beans is still there. And you don't, under pain of getting to know just how yucky hunger is, complain about the food.

But hardline alone isn't enough to make your kids really good eaters - they also need to know what's wonderful and fun about food. That means getting them involved - bringing them into the kitchen, the garden, out to the farmer's market. Get them involved in the process - where did that carrot come from? Take them to the pick your own and let them get their own apples. Let them have their garden and have them help in yours. Let them have their own chickens, care for them and be in charge of the eggs.

There's something really different about food you've grown yourself. Kids who wouldn't touch a zucchini or eat eggs normally will beg their parents to help them cook zucchini frittata (assuming someone's mentioned that there is something you can do with both those things) if it is *their* zucchini and *their* eggs. Simon and Isaiah were very resistant to salad, but they've invented their own - rainbow salad. It has chopped nuts, dried fruit, greens they pick and edible flowers - johnny jump ups, daylily petals, begonia petals, borage flowers, nasturtium blossoms. With lemon-herb dressing they'll eat their weight, and pick the ingredients as well.

Food is, afterall, fun. It tastes good. If they don't have to compete with sugarfrosted flakes, there's really nothing not to like about a ripe peach, or a berry. If you act like you like homemade tofu marinated in garlic sauce as much as steak, your kids will never know that the two aren't supposed to be equally good. And since they both *are* good, your kids will grow up liking them both, most likely. Who knows, after a little practice at this deception, you might even believe it yourself.

If you are looking to eat a local diet now, when in many places options are at their broadest, try joining Liz at Pocket Farm on her "One Local Summer" project http://www.pocketfarm.com/?cat=21

Cheers,

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 9 - Deplasticize Your Life

If you didn't see the article on plastic oceans (the one with the horrible turtle pictures), you should definitely read it here - this is really important:http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2.shtml. Because we all knew that plastic never breaks down entirely, but I don't think everyone realized that what happens is that plastic fragments and mixes in with your water, your soil, your food, and the food and water of plants and animals, and then it makes its way into our bodies. How is a really troubling and scary story. Definitely read the article.

Now this is stuff never, ever meant to be ingested - full of endocrine disrupters (messes with your hormones), carcinogens (warm plastic mixed with liquid creates dioxin among other things), traces benzene (liver cancer) and all sorts of things that no one ever meant for us to eat, breathe and bathe in.

Now this plastic warms the planet a couple of times - when it is manufactured from oil, when it is recycled (if it is, most isn't - more on this in a minute), and when it goes into a landfill and helps mix with organic garbage to produce methane. And since cancer treatment isn't exactly low input, you could argue that it warms the planet again - when we have our surgeries and other treatments from the illnesses caused by becoming a plastic world.

The plastics industry has spent a long time convincing us that plastics are recyclable - they have those nice arrows, so they must be ok, right? But in fact only a few varieties of plastic are recyclable, plastic recycling is quite energy intensive, and after you recycle that plastic container into a bumper or recycled plastic lumber, that's it - next stop is the landfill or your water table.

So what do we do about this? The first thing is to buy no new plastic, or as little as humanly possible. Don't take that plastic bag at the grocery store - when you do so, you are saying "make another." Don't buy things packaged in plastic if you can avoid it - and tell your store manager "I'd really like to purchase that - but not with all that plastic packaging." Whenever possible, buy things with no or minimal packaging, or that uses recycled glass, metal or paper only. The only way to stop the plastic plague is stop making a market for it.

That's never going to be perfect - there are some necessary things that only come in plastic. In our house it is disposable pull-ups required by law for our disabled son. Computers only come in plastic - and electronic waste is a whole 'nother issue, to be discussed soon. But the less you use, the better. In other houses it will be something else - but minimize plastic usage and keep looking. Here's a fascinating blog by a woman who trying to spend a whole year without plastic
http://plasticfree.blogspot.com/.

What about the plastic you do have? The first thing you want to do is get it out of contact with hot food, acidic foods or liquids. Food grade plastic buckets are probably fine for dry goods you keep cool. But I strongly recommend avoiding plastic for things like olive oil, honey, molasses, etc... I don't like plastic bristle toothbrushes, plastic baby bottles or anything else that goes into your mouth, although we have some too. Personally, I also dislike plastic bath toys, although I haven't fully eliminated them. But pthlates (soft plastics) and hot water don't mix, especially in the bodies of little people. I often wonder whether when we finally trace the origins of autism, we'll find it is a plastic problem - but that's just my personal speculation.

The easiest way to avoid plastic at the grocery store is to bring cloth bags, buy in bulk (particularly in places that will allow you to bring your own glass containers for things like honey, olive oil, vinegar and molasses), and choose items packaged as minimally as possible. Remember, metal and glass are more energy intensive in manufacture than plastics, although their lifetime impact is less because they can be recycled multiple times - so minimizing all packaging is a good idea. Plastics are also in a number of makeup and body care products - I don't know about you, but I don't think "pretty" is worth the PBDEs and POPs and their consequences. Buy plastic free.

While having plastic mixed with your food isn't such a good idea, it is always a good idea to reuse the plastic you do have - don't just throw it out. When you do that, you begin the process of putting it into the world's food chain. Plastic materials can and should be used for any non-food or bath purpose you can think of, because the longer they are in use in your house, the longer their total time before they start shredding into the soil. So store your screws, crayons and stitch counters in those plastic containers. Wear those acrylic sweaters until you've worn them out, and replace them with wool or organic cotton. Fix that plastic stuff whenever you can, don't just throw it out. We brought it into the world - we have the obligation to keep it useful as long as possible.

And the plastic you *can* justify purchasing is recycled plastic, especially for long term usage - go ahead and use plastic lumber on your deck, as long as it is made from 100% recycled plastic. We want more of the plastic we have to be recycled - at the same time that we stop making more. But most important is simply to stop buying it - to find alternatives whenever possible and tell people "I don't want to bring more plastics into the world."

Sharon

Constitutionally Unsuited to the 21st Century

The last two weeks have been madness here - multiple end of school events, a big synagogue charitable event, deadlines for articles, for submission of homeschooling materials, for preparation for a class I'm teaching, various social and community obligations, lots of short notice changes, appointments and schedulced events, and, of course, lots and lots of work in the gardens and on various books.

I've found myself living a life rather like the one that a lot of my friends do, in which days are scheduled to the hilt, much time is spent running around or getting ready to run around or doing things. This is rather unlike my own life, and that's by intent. Generally speaking, we try hard to keep a comparatively slow pace, but things snuck up on us. And I don't it like it very much. I hate when I'm saying "ok, we're home from 2:30 to 3:15, and then we've got to..."

Perhaps there's something wrong with me, because I know plenty of people who arrange their lives this way and seem contented. Two of my dearest friends maintain two fairly high powered jobs, their kids have a full schedule of activities, they are active volunteers at the synagogue, the school she teaches at and the university he does. Their kids play sports, have music lessons, all sorts of social activities and they seem not only happy, but comfortable. They are actually remarkably good at this life - most of the trouble comes from the fact that neither parents sleeps more than 5 hours a night.

I on the other hand seem to be ill designed for this. I find myself rushing, and worrying about being late, and that's when I start snapping at the kids "Simon, come *ON* - get your shoes, we have to leave *RIGHT NOW!*" I don't feel I write well or think all that clearly when my mind is on something else as well. And it leads me to wonder whether there's something wrong with me personally, whether, in fact, I am simply constitutionally unsuited to the pace of 21st century life, or whether there's something wrong with the expectation that we'll all run around like this.

My kids mostly seem to have inherited this lack of taste for running around. My three year old, Isaiah is a particular homebody, who will happily spend hours picking chard and flowers for the table, and often asks if he can stay home with whoever is not going somewhere. This week pushed all of us - my 20 month old was calling 'Go home, go home' by the end of the day yesterday, in which we dropped of educational materials, brought end of school thank you gifts (which Mommy had stayed up making the night before) to eldest child's school, dropped Mommy off to volunteer at the shul, took the kids out for a picnic with friends, came back, picked me up, rushed home, cleaned the house, baked cookies for playdate, had playdate and sent husband out to make music with his new banjo while I stayed behind to make tofu, do laundry and catch up on email.

Now I really am open to the notion that it might be me. Except that a lot of the people I know, even the ones who do it to themselves quite voluntarily (as opposed to the folks I know who work 2 or 3 jobs just to get by), seem to worry about it. A lot of them talk about looking forward to a slow down period, or needing a rest, or feeling stressed out. And, in fact, it turns out that Americans in general seem to think that they really need to relax pretty badly.

For example, I recently received a magazine in the mail that seemed mostly to be about how people could "pamper" themselves. Advertisements like "You Work Hard. You Deserve to Be Pampered" and "Life is Hard. Embrace Luxury. Pamper Yourself" certainly seemed to emphasize how stressed out we are and how badly we need to be taken care of by someone. Since that person couldn't possibly be ourselves - that is, we couldn't meet our own needs for care - someone else has to do it, preferrably at an expensive spa, cruise or resort. Or, if you can't afford that, several of the ads suggested you could, in fact, come up with an inferior version of self-pampering if you were to purchase perfume, body lotion or the right underwear.

Now the infantilizing description of pampering isn't an accident, I suspect. Because only if we are stressed, exhausted, miserable and regressed to toddlerhood will we really miss the basic point - the 4K that the pampering vacation requires as a prerequisite requires you to work your heinie off during the year getting stressed and miserable. If, as seems likely for most Americans, you put it on your credit card, well, by the time you pay it off, you may have worked an extra 2 or 3 weeks just to justify that one week of "pampering." Even if you get a massage every day, and lie in the pool and the sun, is it really worth that much extra labor?

In _Deep Economy_ Bill McKibben does a careful analysis of a great deal of data on personal happiness trying to answer the question of whether the life we live really does make us happy or not, and the answer he comes up with is a general "no." There's been a steady drop in the number of people who consider themselves happy since the 1950s. The most fascinating figures in McKibben's book is the one that documents that money buys happiness up to a point - that until about the 10K (American equivalent) income ceiling. But, for example, when homeless peopel are housed, even in a slum, their estimates of their own satisfaction are about the same as the average college student's. Which suggests to me not only does money not buy happiness after a certain point, but that our life as a whole isn't good even for very young, comparatively unfettered people.

The message we get - we're all supposed to work really, really hard, all the time, except when we regress into total consumption is a crazy one, but, of course, it is useful to the economy at large. Tired, stressed out people don't have the energy to make dinner - much better to run through the drive through (and don't think I'm judging anyone here - the only reason we *don't* do this is that all the drive throughs are so far away we couldn't possibly justify the trip as faster ;-)). They don't have the energy to make things or do things - easier to watch tv. They don't have the energy even to *think* critically about stuff. In fact, I find that myself after a high stress week - I find that when I'm tired and overwhelmed, it is very hard to care about other people, or the future or much of anything. I just want to be fed and nurtured and entertained and not have to think. Those are the days I want the 20 minute hot showers, the take out meals, mindless television and someone, anyone to "pamper" me.

Now for comparatively lucky and wealthy (by world standards) people like me, you can make trade offs on this one. My family's household income is in the mid 30s most years. It stays pretty stable because if I make more money, we compensate for that by Eric working less. Some of that is necessity - we don't have daycare, and the kids are homeschooled, so someone has to be around. And some of it is desire - we don't want to rush too much. This year is unusual - I've got two book contracts and am working *a lot* more than usual - and I'm not always too thrilled about it. Both books should be done by early next year, and after that, if I ever get to write another, I've sworn we'll never live like this again. And by the standards of your average overscheduled family, we're still pretty low-key.

But what about most people in the world, who need to work long hours in order to stay employed and feed their families? They don't really have a choice. Or what about parents who don't have our advantages in education and who feel like they need their kids to have a lot of experiences for them to be able to compete? What about single parents, or those supporting disabled or elderly family members, people without health insurance? That is, what about most people, who might prefer to work less, but also feel unable to give up security in order to have a little breathing room?

One of the things that helps us is having a Sabbath. One day a week, we rest - and it can be a challenge to let go and stop work. But one day a year stands as a real holiday in our week, an oasis of relaxation, peace and pleasure in which we simply do not do the same work we do every day. On our sabbath we don't consume, we don't clean, the children don't have chores, we try not to drive (except for religious and community things), we don't spend money. We do nap, take walks, spend time with friends, eat good food, read, sing, talk, play. And every week we emerge, restored. It isn't alway easy - but we consider this a great gift.

Whenever I tell this to people, they immediately reply that they couldn't do that. And I do understand - many people can't. But many could - religious Jews, rich or poor, for centuries have insisted - we will not work Saturdays, we will not buy Saturdays, we will act, in our own homes, as though we are free and at peace, even if the world around us mistreats us. There's something powerful in claiming the right to a day of rest and peace, an act of resistance to the notion that there are those who have the right to compel you to do things - to work, to buy, to do. Of course, there are those who simply can't find the power to do this alone. But we don't always have to be alone

The options for those who would take more time away but lack the resources to do so are poor for individuals. But there are alternatives for people acting together. It was the labor movement that managed to get us the 5 day work week, the abolition of child labor, and all other changes. The women's movement and concerted advocacy got women in the job market and access to almost all work. Over the next decade, we're likely to experience a vast national retirement - baby boomers are going to be moving out of the workplace and leaving jobs open. By necessity, there are going to be fewer people working full time and more people out of the job market. This is likely to be stressful in many ways, as productivity makes some falls (fewer people doing more work), and there's more work for fewer bodies. This is also likely to make workers more powerful - and that's a good thing. It is conceivable that workers might be able to get their hours cut, or reduce the sheer numbers of workers in the workforce while raising salaries back to the days of one worker (although who shouldn't be decided, as it once was, by gender) being able to actually support a family. This, of course, requires a degree of economic stability that may not happen - but on the off chance it does, we ought to take advantage.

Alternately, of course, if the more likely economic crisis occurs, we may not have much bargaining power at all - people desperate for work don't. But then, the creation of local economies and local markets will be all that much more urgent, and we'll only be grateful for any work we've done now on those things.

But whether or not we can work less, there are things we can choose to do in order to slow the pace of our lives. One of them is to try and make in our communities the things we now go far afield for. Things like food coops, babysitting coops, community gardens, farmer's markets, local swap groups, small cottage businesses, homeschool groups, afterschool programs, play groups, summer stuff for kids to do.... Because the less we have to run around to meet our needs for support, friendship, good food, and other basics, the more we can relax. Those of us with the luxury of time can offer to share it with those who don't have that luxury - "Can I pick up some stuff for you at the farmer's market?" "Can I give you some basil?" "Could Rose come over and play with Steve and Annie after school one day a week?" "Could we get together once a month and bake together, and freeze extras?

And for all of us, a little work and time on self-sufficiency can reduce our need to work overtime, or maybe allow one family member to work part time or not at all. Reducing our needs, producing more of our own basic wants and needs, these things can be the key to more time, more freedom, less clock punching and more time doing whatever it is that makes you happy.

And perhaps we can change our notion of what constitutes luxury or pampering. There's no doubt that time for yourself and time for pleasure are an enormous factor in our quality of life. But the person who works 55 hours a week and then comes home to dishes and laundry, 51 weeks a year so they can have someone bring them drinks and rub their backs the other week doesn't sound lucky to me - it sounds to me like someone who doesn't get nearly enough pleasure or luxury. Pampering, in the sense of being able to take care of yourself and have a little private joy is something that most of us should work to make an everyday thing - that doesn't mean expensive luxuries or fancy scented crap - that means being able to do what brings you joy on a regular basis, whether that's playing with your kids, or listening to the birds sing, reading on the couch or tinkering in your workshop, praying or singing, dancing with friends or playing pickup basketball. Instead of working long hours just to have those things, we should be seeking ways to meet those needs not once a year, but daily, and as part of a more peaceful life.

Sharon

We Simply May Not Have Time to Wait for the Technology Fairy

The simple facts are these - the IPCC report, which is scary enough, is vastly more conservative than it should be. It turns out that by every measure, the earth is warming faster than expected, and feedback loops are starting to build. In a paper released yesterday, major climate scientists evaluated 400,000 years of climate data and suggested that climate change could be far more deadly and far more rapid than we think.

Here's the article, sent to me by several people:http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece

It turns out that we have much less time to fix this than the IPCC or anyone else believes - a decade at most. And that our future is that much bleaker. And this article speaks only of one of the

The most disturbing bit of the article is the last line, particularly when read in parallel with the last comment of Ban Ki-Moon in the article I posted about yesterday.

Here's what climate scientists say it will take to save the world, *along with* "draconian" emissions limits: "We conclude that a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air."

Now here's what Mr. Ban says about saving Africa from climate change induced drought: "Any real solution to Darfur's troubles involves sustained economic development," perhaps using new technologies, genetically modified grains or irrigation, while bettering health, education and sanitation" (if you missed this article, the link is here:
http://www.france24.com/france24Public/en/administration/afp-news.html?id=070616212708.ymevxrx6&cat=null)

That is, at the end of each article where a little hope is supposed to be offered, we are told that the only hope is a technological breakthrough - that is, that the authors can't imagine anything that would fix this except a magic visit from the technology fairy. I don't think I'm pushing the evidence to admit that in both cases, the speakers don't fully know what to do, and they are, if not scared, at a loss to offer a real and immediate solution.

I've talked about the problems of waiting for technologies to emerge before. The whole process of developing them is quite carbon intensive, and with a decade to keep the planet from roasting, and vastly less to keep more violence from breaking out in Africa, we need a faster plan than "hope for new technologies."

Moreover, just as our plans for renewable energies at this stage are working on the (wrong) assumption that we can still keep our private cars and still keep our houses at 70 degrees, and still be affluent, so too is at least Mr. Ban working on the assumption that we're inevitably stuck with the same economic and political models. The simple hopelessness of his call is based, in part, on the inability to imagine real change. And it is hopeless within those parameters. It is hopeless if we have to wait for technology fairies. It is hopeless if we have to keep growth capitalism up and running forever.

The only hope we have is the notion that the assumptions we make are merely assumptions - that we don't actually have to live as we do right now. That we don't have to extract food from the third world, while burning our own dinners in our cars. That we don't have keep growing - in fact, we can't. That we can't reduce our usage by not 50%, but 90 or 95%.

As far as I can tell, there is no better plan than this. Build soil. Plant trees. Grow food. Make Do. Do Without. Give what you can to others. Fix your mistakes. Cut your emissions to the bone, and then cut them some more. And every time it hurts (and it will sometimes), close your eyes and imagine your nieces and nephews or your children or grandchildren or your friend's beloved children grown to womanhood and manhood in a world where there is food and peace and water. And then imagine them without. And ask yourself "What else don't I need so I can bring about a decent future."

Otherwise, when we say we can't do it, we're choosing the next generation's future. The places we love underwater. Wild creatures that live only in zoos. The deaths of more than a billion people from drought and famine - some of them people we love personally, and all of them people we should be capable of caring about.

On the plus side, the Riot for Austerity is growing *FAST.* We're working on transitioning to the creation of local groups in people's communities - because that's how we need this to spread, house to house, neighbor to neighbor. I know, it is hard that way - some of your neighbors won't care. But give it time - the great thing about human beings is that very quickly, under the right cultural pressure, they forget they ever objected. Think about it - how many people living in the US will admit to having been a racist? Three? And yet there were tens of thousands of people all over the country who once were unashamed to admit to it - maybe millions. If you ask in Germany whose parents were involved, you'd get the impression that the Nazi party was 8 guys in a beer hall. The reality is that we re-write our history pretty fast. The neighbor who paves his lawn and loves his Hummer today is tomorrow's "I was an environmentalist back before it was cool." Our job is to nod and grin.

So put up a flyer in your library or at your post office, put an ad up online. Start a local group today! Link it to something else - "Carbon conscious banjo players" or "Fantasy Baseball Rioters for Austerity." Make it fun. Throw a party. Get in the pool. Eat some good, local food. And remember, live your life with joy, but as though other people's lives depended on it - they do.

BTW, I'm going to be on KMO's C-Realm Podcast going up today http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/ - I'm flattered, because KMO has a lot cooler people than me on. In fact, he invited me on to discussion population issues raised by his prior guest, Dr. Albert Bartlett, but I also got to talk a little about sustainable agriculture, democracy and why my turkeys won't stop pooping on my porch and eating my geraniums. I have infinitely slow dial-up, so those of you with decent connections will probably hear it long before I do - let me know if I said "umm..." every six seconds or not ;-)

Sharon

Elegy in Fragments

I receive news feeds on various issues from several sources. Every morning I get up and check my email, and see as many as 30 or 40 related news items on climate change, economic policy, energy, international events. I call it my in-box of doom, because so often the news is truly frightening, or achingly sad. And every once in a while, this vast grief of prose turns into poetry. That happened yesterday when Roel sent me this statement by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon:

""The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.
UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.
"This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming," the South Korean diplomat wrote.

"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," Ban said in the Washington daily.
When Darfur's land was rich, he said, black farmers welcomed Arab herders and shared their water, he said.
With the drought, however, farmers fenced in their land to prevent overgrazing.
"For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out," he said.

A UN peacekeeping force may stop the fighting, he said, and more than two million people may return to rebuilt homes in safe villages.
"But what to do about the essential dilemma: the fact that there's no longer enough good land to go around?""

:http://www.france24.com/france24Public/en/administration/afp-news.html?id=070616212708.ymevxrx6&cat=null.

Think about those words. "For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out."

Think about how mystifying it must be to see the water stop coming and the food run short and know that other people are making this happen. Where does your anger go, except to the person next to you?

I read recently an interview with a Bangladeshi peasant who lost his farm and his land to flooding. He will now live in a slum, and eat and drink what he can get, in a house that is not his, rather than farming the land his grandparents farmed. He said, "I am told that all of this is because of electricity, but I promise you, I have never had even a single light bulb?"

How many lightbulbs have I had? Have you?

Roel appended a prose of statistics to append to his own elegaic observation "What will peacekeepers do in Darfur? Grow food? Make land?"

What indeed? I can grow food. Apparently, we can flick a switch and stop the rain. But I can't make land, and I cannot make it rain.

Here are some numbers. That the drought in Australia comes with only 10% less rain - but that higher temperatures and increased evaporation mean 70% less water. Rainfall in sub-saharan Africa decreased 40% in 20 years. That 1/3 of all arable land has been rendered unusable or is in immanent danger of doing so from poor agricultural practices. That in the last 50 years, the population of Africa has tripled.

That yesterday, here in America, we made 5 BILLION gallons of ethanol from food people might have eaten. And today we'll do it again. And again. Energy independence, you know.

That today each one of us will turn on a light switch, throw some clothes in the dryer, toss on a load of laundry, and a man without a lightbulb will wonder if he lost his land because it was his fault.

And when it is our turn to learn what it is like not to have enough food and water, where will the fighting break out?

I once wrote that peak oil and climate change aren't the end of the world, that life goes on. And it does - for some of us. And for the rest, a small and endless, and desperate series of apocalypses ensues.

We did this. We have to fix it. What will we do?

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 8 - Lose the Petro-Lawn

I live far enough away from my neighbors that I can't hear what they do now, but I have vivid memories of Saturday morning in my small city, when all of a sudden, sleep was interrupted by the sound of a rhino passing a kidney stone. Oh, wait, it was just everyone in the neighborhood firing up their lawnmowers.

The average American uses 18 gallons of gas on their lawn a year - lawnmower, leaf blower, string trimmer, sprinkler, hauling the products, and landscaping eats up half our average personal water use. The average homeowner is putting 20xs the pesticides on their little lawn per acre that commercial farmers use on their land. Many of those chemicals are untested, undertested, and carcinogenic. The extras, along with the chemical fertilizers, run off into our local water tables. And running your lawnmower for an hour puts as much greenhouse gasses into the air as driving 20 miles, according to the EPA, not to mention particulate pollutants that cause asthma and other illnesses, and noise pollution as well that can damage hearing and reduce your ability to be outside and enjoy your neighborhood. Mowing the lawn is especially toxic for the mower.

And think about all the *time* you are spending on your lawn - it isn't just eating up oil and gas and chemicals, but every Saturday morning (or whenever) you are devoting your limited free time to standing behind a lawn mower that smells bad, makes so much noise you can't hear nature. Instead of listening to the birds and smelling the fresh air, you are riding or walking behind a big old machine. And for what? So the neighbors can glare at you if you let the lawn get over 1.5 inches long?

Time to re-think the lawn rituals. There's a lot we can do. First and foremost, consider checking out H.C. Flores's _Food Not Lawns_ - an inspiring book about all the things your lawn could be.

First of all, think about replacing your lawn with something else. How about trees that shade and cool your house, protect them from winter winds, and absorb carbon? How about native grasses and wildflowers that would attract beneficial insects and native pollinators? How about xeriscaping that wouldn't require watering? Or replace it with a vegetable garden - grow a beautiful "V" of eggplants, kales or peppers, and wait for the neighbors to ask you about it.

We need millions more small, even tiny farmers in order to de-industrialize our food system. And the places we most need food producers is in the places people live right now - in your neighborhood. During World War II, American Victory Gardeners produced 40% of the nation's produce - many of them in cities. We can ensure a safe, reliable, healthy food supply by growing food on our lawns - in fact, we need to do this.

We can also use permaculture techniques to design a gorgeous landscape of edibles and medicinals on your lawn. Many food producing and useful plants are gorgeous - you don't have to tell anyone that you eat the acorns from your white oak, that those flaming autumnal bushes are blueberries, not burning bush, that you had daylily petals in your last salad and that last time you got a cold, you treated it with something from the border of coneflowers. Toby Hemenway's _Gaia's Garden_ is a great place to start here, as is the magazine _Permaculture Activist_.

But say you've got to have a lawn - the deed restrictions say so. Well, if I were you I'd start talking to local zoning boards about changing the rules - all these zoning restrictions about lawn heights, no clotheslines, no front gardens, no chickens...these are energy wasters. If we're going to be aware, we need to change the rules. But if you can't do that, the next best thing is to cut down on the energy you use on your lawn - reduce fertilizer, mowing, water use, and dump the chemicals altogether.

You can still mow the lawn with a push mower. My family uses one - we mow over 1/2 acre with it, and don't find it too strenuous. If you've only ever used an old push mower, you'll be shocked at how well they work. My 5 year old can push it, and when his friends come over, they fight over who gets to mow the lawn. It is quiet, pleasant to use, and will save you money on gym memberships, because it provides a nice upper body workout.

You could also switch to an electric mower, or to sheep, if you can get them in past the covenants. But I really love my push mower. The other tool we use constantly is a scythe - with 27 acres, the only way to keep things up is to let some of the longer grass go to hay, and scythe it down when we're done. Scything is a *ton* of fun - relaxing, pleasant, soothing. Eric's birthday is tomorrow, and when I asked him what he wanted to do, he asked if he could spend the day scything one of our fields. I am not joking - scything is a blast. Now this might not work for everyone, but it also substitute for string trimmer.

If you do need a powered mower, cut the grass less often - optimal height is around 3 inches. There's no reason to devote all your spare time to this. And don't leaf blow, rake - it really won't kill you. If you can't do these things yourself, teenagers are a time honored tradition. Show them the push mower and the rake, pay them well and don't forget the occasional glass of lemonade.

Instead of using groundwater or city water to water your lawn, either let it go dormant in hot weather, or collect rainwater whenever possible and use that. If you stop adding commercial fertilizer and replace with compost, more organic matter in the soil will also improve its water holding ability. But remember, dormancy is a normal, natural response - when it gets hot and dry, that's what the grass is supposed to do.

Don't fight the weeds unless you really have to - most of them are products of disturbed soil and some are edible or useful. Remember, your land is an ecosystem - no ecosystem has just one species in it. And get out on your lawn - don't just mow and go back into the house, but get outside. Put a table out, or chairs, and wave to your neighbors as they pass by. Use those lawns to build community. Invite people to join you. Put up bird baths and bat boxes, make butterfly gardens and plant some tubular red flowers for the hummingbirds - invite not just your human neighbors but your flying ones as well. Track your ecosystem. Make lists of the birds and animals you see. Get out a magnifying glass and identify bugs. Get to know your lawn as a living thing, and invite more living things to enjoy the space.

Best of all, tell your neighbors what you are doing and why. We can turn our lawns into something more than a way to make noise on a Saturday morning.

Sharon

Free Nitrogen! Comes with a Handy Dispenser!

Sometimes I think that having grown up with a lesbian Mom and step-Mom and two younger sisters, I was inadequately prepared for life with a husband and four sons. Now don't get me wrong - it isn't as though I didn't know anything about males. I have a father, and male friends, uncles and during college and graduate school, I lived with more men than women. But by 18 or so, and certainly by graduate school, the men in question had learned that getting girls required a bit more grace than waving your genitals in their faces. Mostly.

But my background makes me much better qualified to answer questions about first periods, whether boys will really die from blue balls and when a bra is officially required for gym class than Isaiah's recent query about whether when he grew up he could pee all the way up to the sky or not. Thank G-d for Daddy.

After a long and tedious toilet training process, my son Isaiah finally clicked into big-boyhood last week, when he discovered peeing on trees outside. He was *so* excited and pleased with himself - now he and big brother Simon can try and hit a spider on a leaf from 5 paces (sorry, spider!), and discuss who went further at considerable length, to Mommy's utter bemusement. Some days it seems like they spend more time with their pants down than up, but who am I to ruin their fun?

We do have some firm rules. No peeing in the container plants (I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my poor impatiens). No peeing off the porch when Mommy is sitting and reading just below it (hmmm...rain...that's funny.. not a cloud...ick!!!). And strong encouragement to pee in the nice bucket that we keep. Because while Mommy may not fully grasp just how cool it is to play "shoot the grasshopper," Mommy is a major fan of free nitrogen.

You see, we all of us, during garden season, fertilize our garden with our urine. I use a commode we inherited from Eric's grandparents, and the rest of them use a bucket outside, and the commode in. Human urine is powerful fertilizer - every day people in the US discard 7 million pounds of nitrogen and trace minerals in the form of human urine. In fact, if you go to the farm store, you can buy artificial pee, called "urea" - except that that stuff is made with natural gas and lots of fossil fuels, whereas the other stuff comes out whether you like it or not.

The thing is, one of the scariest elements of the forthcoming energy peak is that we are terrifically dependent on anhydrous ammonia and other artificial nitrogen sources, mostly derived from natural gas, to feed ourselves. If we are to keep eating, we need to find another source of nitrogen. Conveniently, the artificial nitrogens that have been supporting the human populace (in our food) gets recycled through our bodies and comes back out in highly usable form. You just have to dilute it 1-10 to keep it from burning your plants.

And natural nitrogen, rather than the artificial stuff, is much gentler, and somewhat less likely to float downstream destroying the oxygen in the oceans. We apply way more artificial nitrogen than soils can absorb, and it is creating the famous dead zone in the gulf of Mexico - fish can't live there because a vast excess of nitrogen has destroyed the capacity of the sea to carry oxygen.

While feces can contain all sorts of bacteria, urine is generally sterile, and there's virtually no health risks to putting urine on your garden. Even if you have a UTI or salmonella (one of the few things that can be excreted in your urine), exposure to air means that pathogens die pretty fast afterwards. The most conservative estimates are that you shouldn't use urine directly on plants a month or less before harvest. Since we tend to pour it on teh ground around them, that's not a problem, and for our personal use, we don't worry much about the urine (if you live in a place where tropical diseases like leptopirosis and schistosoma are endemic, you probably want to have your household tested before you use your urine and not take anyone else's free pee - these could be passed on if you had them, which is pretty unlikely). We don't use it on sale crops, however.

In Sweden, however, farmers often use urine from city toilets (urine diversion systems are in place, and the urine is held in tanks until it is collected) on the farms that feed Stockholm. Swedish studies have found urine to be similar in composition to fish emulsion, which is great because the little fish like menhaden and others that are used to make fish emulsion are important to ocean ecosystems and feed larger fish. Those little fish are being depleted for organic agriculture, and aren't a great alternative in the long term (there are some sustainably harvested fish emulsions).

You can also compost urine, or put it in a big barrel (six months in a barrel in your garage and it will stink to high heaven, but be pathogen free). You can pee on a few straw bales, leave them for a rain and then mulch your garden with them. You can use it to water your houseplants. Ideally, just don't dump it in drinking water and flush it away!

Now us girls can collect our pee easily enough, but boys really have a natural advantage in this regard, plus my three year old regards it as a potential hobby, the kind of thing you really devote a lot of time and energy to. And I'm very grateful, even if I don't quite understand the appeal. Plants fertilized with urine really grow beautifully. Peter Bane of _Permaculture Activist_ says that a person's yearly urine output can provide all the high nitrogen fertilizer a half acre needs.

So I spend a lot of my time smiling at the "Mom, look, I peed on a *big* tree this time." I just nod and tell Isaiah how proud I am of him. And I am. I did laugh, however, the other week when he was in the bath, flipped over onto his stomach and complained to Daddy, "Daddy, my penis gets in the way." Daddy's reply? "Get used to it, sweetie." There are times when I *know* I'm just not up to a task. Thank G-d for Daddy, because that just wasn't in my manual ;-).

Happy Father's Day!

Sharon

I've Deleted "Environmentalism as Spectacle"

Just FYI, I've deleted the "environmentalism as spectacle" thread, because I think I shouldn't have written it. My apologies to those whose comments are lost.

Sharon

Could Rationing Be Made Palatable?

Could a system of energy rationing, or even rationing of high energy goods and foods work in the US? The conventional answer is that it is politically impossible to even consider it, and that the public would never go along with it. But a closer look at the history of rationing during the second World War suggests that it might not be so unthinkable, and that in fact, rationing has historically been viewed as highly positive, pro-democratic and good public policy by the general populace. Now there are obvious historical differences between now and the past, but the framing of rationing may be more important than the exact historical context - in World War II, for example, where few real risks of famine or severe shortage existed, rationing was quite popular. Now, facing actual shortages and potential crisis, rationing is probably not as hard to sell as many people believe.

This is important because there are a number of public policy initiatives that include rationing plans. Among the most important are Richard Heinberg and Colin Campbell's Oil Depletion Protocol, discussed in Heinberg's book of the same title and George Monbiot's proposal for carbon credit cards described in _Heat_. These are excellent and highly rational programs that create just responses to difficult issues, and they deserve to be given more attention than they have. I believe that in part, they have been underestimated because of the assumption that rationing is politically infeasible.

Formal rationing, whether voluntary or mandatory, is preferable to traditional capitalist rationing by price or taxation models. For genuinely scarce items for which everyone has a basic need, rationing is really the only just system. Energy, food, water and many basic consumer goods (shoes, energy lowering infrastructure adaptations, basic clothing) fall in the category of things that should not be rationed by price if they come up short. Otherwise, we risk doing irrevocable harm to the poor and those who are disproportionately unable to handle service disruptions - the elderly, the disabled and children. Rationing by price also penalizes those who already use the least energy in many cases, rather than those who use the most, and thus is less effective than formal rationing at reducing usage. It also creates strong social unrest and internal conflict, including violent conflict, at times when unity and engagement are most necessary. In short, rationing just plain makes sense.

It is also worth noting that rationing is not a distant hypothetical. State and local government imposed rationing of water is already occurring in Australia and in some parts of the American southwest, in response to extended, devastating droughts. Projected short term and regional summer shortages of gasoline could also result in localized rationing. Rationing is something that is beginning, for the first time since the 1970s, to re-enter the American parlance again. Understanding how rationing works within the culture is an important first step to making rational and wise rationing policy choices. If we make errors in initiating rationing, we risk turning the public against the whole procedure, and cutting rationing out of our options. On the other hand, careful public education about rationing, and framing of its implications can make rationing a political success in the face of both local energy and environmental crises and world wide ones.

One of the assumptions people make about rationing is that it was always resisted and resented. In fact, that's not the case - generally speaking, rationing, if instituted fairly, has been viewed fairly positively, as patriotic and necessary, a chance for everyone to contribute in whatever national crisis is being averted. As Amy Bentley documents in her excellent book _Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity_, in February 1942, rationing had a two to one approval rating. More than 60 percent of those responding to a poll asking what the government ought to have done differently during the first year of World War II responded that they felt that rationing should have been instituted sooner, and the OPA, which regulated prices and rationing had extremely high approval ratings (Bentley, 23)

Women especially liked rationing. Throughout this essay, I will be talking about the history of rationing, mostly in World War II America (I am focusing on the US because the US needs to reduce its energy usage most). Generally speaking, before rationing women were angry about shortages, frightened about nutritional deficiencies and often anxious about their own participation in the war effort as husbands and sons went to war and left them wanting to participate. Rationing, with the strong message that food was a battlefield we could win, was a way of engaging women, and to a lesser extent, older men and those unable to fight (men were the largest percentage of victory gardeners). Knowing that things would be fairly distributed not only relieved women's private fears of shortage, but enabled them to participate more in war and community work - for example, for women who took over factory work from men, knowing that they could expect to find food in the shops even at the end of the work day meant they were free to participate without fear of their children going hungry.

It is presently even more urgent that we engage women on the subject of rationing - American women make or strongly influence 90% of all purchases, cook 77% of all meals, and spend much more time with children than men do, thus influencing the not-inconsiderable purchasing impact of children. In general, women schedule, organize and plan household activities more than men - that is, they are responsible for finding time for sustainable practices (this is not how it should be, merely how it is). In the growing organic movement, according to Michael Pollan, women make 80% of all purchases (Pollan, 89). All of these things mean that rationing will not succeed if it is positioned without regard to gender. Thus far, programs like the ODP and Carbon Credit Card model haven't sought to use women's communities or women as spokespeople and advocates, and that may have something to do with their lack of popular support.

Historically speaking, because most rationing has involved food and clothing, it has been focused on women, and often led by them. In fact, ration systems have often been empowering for some women - the best example being women in India during Gandhi's revolution, but this is also true for women in the US during every major war and crisis. Energy rationing has largely focused on corporations and nations (mostly led by men) or it has been presented by men, with a heavy emphasis on technical details, and, in the case of Monbiot, with a strong dismissal of the power of the personal. But like it or not, the personal is often the currency of female discourse, and much of the energy consumption, along with consumption of energy intensive items like food and goods is driven by women - they need to hear this message, and because they are not being addressed, they are tuning out.

It isn't that people preferred rationing to no rationing, but they vastly preferred it shortages, lines and fears of inadequate nutrition. For example, in the 1970s, it was not rationing that came in for the greatest criticisms, but the long gas lines that people were forced to endure. Americans generally speaking were willing to go along with rationing during World War II and in the 1970s, and in other wars to voluntarily boycott, embargo and self ration goods. What they don't like is to have some people get things and others not - this is widely perceived as anti-democratic. This notion was reinforced by much US and British advertising - it was patriotic and democratic to use only your fair share, fascist and anti-democratic to buy on black markets, price gouge or hoard. The most important thing was that we all be in it together.

Writing about the American Revolution, the historian Timothy Breen coined the term "Rituals of non-consumption" to describe the ways that in a culture of constraint, people derive satisfaction, power and pleasure from not buying things, or living within strictures. He argues in "Consumer Virtues in Revolutionary America" that in fact, the American Revolution was in part a revolution of buying habits. Extending Breen's idea to the present, this idea of ritualized non-consumption and consumer revolution becomes a powerful way of drawing connections between the radical change required for a low carbon, low fossil fuels society, and between the founding political event of America (at least for Americans ;-). In fact, most wars have involved radical changes in consumer culture and behavior, including new communal cultures dedicated to enabling change and encouraging compliance.

For example, during the American revolution, British woolen products, cloth and other materials were embargoed by American patriots. Despite the fact that Americans had been discouraged from sheep farming and wood industry, almost overnight a homespun culture grew up, with thousands of women now producing their own fabrics and wool. In the northern states during the civil war, a similar embargo on cotton led to women making homespun again out of wool.
Not buying things is one of the most radical acts a community can engage in, and a powerful one. During times of war and crisis, leaders have always asked their constituents to refrain from using or buying something, or to replace it with homemade goods. During World War I, there was no formal rationing in the US (although there was all over Europe), but average citizens instituted voluntary rationing - in _A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove_ Laura Schenone records that Herbert Hoover believed formal rationing unnecessary, that in fact, the public would do it for him out of patriotism without the expense of a formal program, and he was quite correct.

"...Hoover urged, begged and shamed American women into voluntarily conserving food. 'Food will win the war,' he proclaimed. His sacred mantra was repeated over and over again on billboards, posters, and pamphlets, and disseminated by state and local governments, libraries, schools, colleges, businesses, women's clubs of every stripe and even chain stores. A master of the media, Hoover also got newspapers and magazines to scold women on a daily basis to save more food for the sake of liberty and democracy...Wouldn't American women conserve for the sake of their starving sisters across the Atlantic?"

And, in fact, American women responded enthusiastically. They cut food waste by 20%, reduced consumption of dairy products and meat dramatically, even formed "vigilance committees" to keep an eye on communal garbage cans for waste. 14 million "liberty gardens" were planted, and American women initiated "meatless days" and "wheatless days" that would, during World War II, be made mandatory. Millions of women participated, with no more incentive than that it was patriotic.

Herbert Hoover was a political conservative who believed very strongly that conservation of resources for the war effort should be voluntary. I'm not a political conservative, but it should be noted that it isn't merely conservatives who worry about handing the power to ration over to governments. In fact, the success of Hoover's model might be an important lesson for those of us engaged in voluntary reduction models - a way of resisting government beaurocracy and interference is to ration voluntarily sufficiently that external controls need not be extended.

And I must note here that despite the fact that Schenone clearly disapproves of Hoover's paternalism, Hoover's success should point out the possibilities of grassroots self-rationing. The fact that less than 100 years ago, an entire nation voluntarily went on rationing without any more government support than advertising should give us a vision of what is possible from a purely voluntary movement. It is well within the realm of possibility that a self-imposed model rationing program that grew popular enough (think the Compact, Craggers, or, dare I say, even our own Riot for Austerity ) might become the blueprint for a national program, with national support. At a minimum, such programs represent not just models, but existing social structures through which to transmit education material and support for those engaged, programs that might be put to use by governments in times of rationing. This is something to think about.

It is also essential to recognize that movements towards self-rationing indicate that rationing itself is not automatically viewed as an evil. In fact, often it is perceived as a meaningful way to make change. This also gives further evidence that the oft asserted claim that voluntary conservation can't lead anywhere is wrong - what was once done can be done again. Instead, this provides a powerful contrary model of privately led, voluntary programs. That said, however, even privately led programs were made much easier by government *assistance* and to make meaningful reductions on a large scale, government must either lead or follow, it cannot ignore the problem.

In 1942, the Roosevelt administration instituted mandatory rationing in the US. Some items, like meat, shoes and coffee, were rationed because of genuine shortages of the item - increased demand, reduced transport availability, or producers gone to war were among the reasons that these items were not often unavailable in shops, and rationing ensured that spot shortages would stop, that those who were not free to stand in line would still get their fair share. Others, like gas were rationed not because there was any gas shortage, but because a study panel determined that gas rationing was the best way to save tires, and rubber sources were being held by the Japanese. Some proposed rationing programs were dismissed, including rubber rationing for girdles. Women overwhelmingly protested this call for the end of the girdle, arguing that the back support provided by foundation garments was essential to their productivity. They won.

Other items were de facto rationed - factories were prohibited from making refrigerators, new cars and other luxury items, and there were simply none in stores. Again, American consumers were told it was their patriotic duty to invest their money in war bonds and other patriotic activities, rather than luxury goods. There was surprisingly little controversy on these points.

In 1941, there were real fears of shortages, inadequate nutrition, and hunger to match that experienced by much of Europe during the war. By 1942, Russians and Scandinavians really were starving to death, and the British were experiencing desperate food shortages. Americans were shipping food abroad, and being asked to share what they had with millions of other hungry people - to consume less so that others could have more. A famous poster of the period showed a middle class white man, his wife and two children at a table, joined by two American soldiers, and a stereotypical Russian, Englishman and Mexican in serape. The American family is reassured that they will get the majority of American food, but are told that we must make room at our table for our allies. "Don't begrudge it - but produce and conserve, share and play square with food." We have a strong precedent, then, from both World War I and II for a rationing that isn't simply based upon local shortages, but upon a world-wide mutual interest and concern.

Americans, for example, have in the past been willing to make do with less so that others will be less hungry. Again, this is a powerful iconography, one that argues strongly against the notion that only personal suffering would make the case for rationing. This is a strategy that might well be deployed by advocates of the ODP and Carbon rationing programs - the notion that Americans have to do with less to preserve the lives of their allies is not merely rhetoric any more - with global warming and the tragic consequences of rising fuel prices for poor nations, this might, in many ways be a more compelling argument than peak oil itself for a national rationing program.

In fact, in 1946, shortly after rationing was finally lifted, when it became obvious that 800 million people world wide were in danger of starvation because of disrupted food supplies and war related crop failures, more than 70% of Americans, in three separate polls, indicated that they would prefer to have rationing reinstated. Historians make a great deal of the orgy of consumerism of the 1950s, perceived as a response to war rationing. But it is perhaps even more significant that at the end of the war, most Americans were not only willing but enthusiastic about cutting back on their own new supplies of meats and sweets so that others would not go hungry. Bentley quotes a Mrs. E.H. Gembel as writing to Truman, "Sir, we support any measure necessary to provide for the starving people of the world. Get tough." (Bentley, 146). In fact, it was the US government, led by Herbert Hoover again, that resisted citizen calls for rationing. Women especially expressed their willingness to go back to rationing and eat less in order to serve the hungry. Again, addressing discussion of rationing to women may bear more fruit than discussing it before congress.

This flies in the face of the oft assumed notion that Americans would not be subject to arguments that are mostly about other people's needs. Now it is true that we live in a different era - but that works in more ways than one. We are, of course, less accustomed to privation. But we also have much more leeway to give. Again, what has been done can often be done again.

The iconographic World War II poster was Norman Rockwell's famous "Freedom from Want" poster, reproduced since in a thousand places. Rockwell created a series of posters to illustrate Roosevelt's four freedoms that should apply world wide. The Office of War Information, in charge of propaganda posters initially rejected Rockwell's images, which are among the most famous American paintings in the world now. Rockwell's images of "Freedom of Speech" "Freedom of Worship" and "Freedom from Fear" are among his best work. The "Freedom from Want" poster was more troubling and controversial in many ways - American allies criticized it because the image of the festival meal with giant roast turkey on it seemed a slap in the face to those going hungry, to say that, as Bentley puts it, "The scene illuminated the 'inalienable right' of Americans to eat their familiar and abundant foods in their traditional ways, and not just at Thanksgiving. (60)." But the image can be read another way - that what was powerful about Rockwell's illustration was his capacity to invoke the stability of the festival in times of restriction. That is, the image of Thanksgiving and the unified family (everyone, including the young men are home to eat here) is the reminder that restriction and the festival can exist simultaneously, indeed, that one can be made possible by the other. This too is an important message - instead of offering absolute restrictions, the notion that one conserves to celebrate, that careful husbandry enables generosity and abundance is important here was well.

Despite the disproportionate emphasis given to the famous "Freedom from Want" poster, it is important to remember that Rockwell's dinner image appeared in context with the other three posters both in its initial publication in the _Saturday Evening Post_ and later in many reproductions. Thus, Thanksgiving, that in many households begins with a prayer is juxtaposed with images of people praying in the "Freedom to Worship" image, with the blue collar man who speaks up at the town meeting in "Freedom of Speech", and with the mother and father tucking their children safely into bed together in "Freedom from Fear." That is, these things are associated with each other - food rationing, not explicitly mentioned but in the psychological background, and its commitment to fairness and thus abundance for everyone is linked to democratic participation, to religion and religiousness, and also to security. Add to this posters such as the little girl canning at her mother's side, saying "We'll have lots to eat this winter, Mommy, won't we?" And we see the context that rationing must derive from - it isn't merely about scarcity, it is about enabling the creation of a moral context for us to eat and live within.

The same things could be said of the current 100 Mile Diet, and recent books that call for a moral commitment to better food - _Fast Food Nation_, _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ and Barbara Kingsolver's recent (and lovely) _Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_. For a long time, moral context in America has read "Religious Prohibitions about Sexual Behavior" - but even many American conservatives are rejecting this model, what Rod Dreher calls the "Look, it is Janet Jackson's unsheathed ta-ta" model of political conservativism. Calls for a wider, more environmentally conscious sense of moral context have pervaded religious communities of all stripes, as well as secular and political ones. Rationing advocates have the chance, if they are wise enough to take it, to frame rationing as a moral response to insufficiency, and to link it to other justice movements, and to imbue the act of conservation with a larger, collectivized meaning.

In fact, the whole notion that rationing is about democracy, equality, and sharing - not just with your literal neighbors but with your neighbors around the world is what made rationing acceptable, even preferable to other systems, such as price based rationing. Millions of American homemakers signed a pledge abjuring black markets, promising not to buy from shopkeepers who price gouged, and swearing to turn in ration coupons for their goods. The message, both promulgated by the state and argued by women themselves was that their willingness to play fair meant a shorter war, a more democratic system and a greater degree of justice. Women were justifiably proud of their willingness to ration.

There was anger over rationing - some shortages were greeted with frustration, particularly coffee. And there was a great deal of resentment over unequal treatment. For example, gas rationing was a particular point of contention, both in the US and Britain, where often political figures and people of local influence were able to get larger rations. Anyone who doesn't grasp the anger directed at Al Gore or Tony Blair for their failure to conserve when ordinary people, particularly blue collar people, are being pressured to do so ought to take a serious look at this phenomenon. Rationing can be perceived as just, fair and reasonable, but only if the exceptions are minimized, and limited to the truly needy.

World War II was remarkable because of the widespread, egalitarian participation. Everyone's sons went to war, not just the poor. Male Hollywood celebrities enlisted. All four Roosevelt sons went to war and the White House table went without sugar and coffee. While hardly perfect, even racial segregation was to some degree reduced and the stage set for greater change by the desegregation (fiercely resisted) of the armed forces. Women of all classes participated, if not perfectly equally, then in a way that marked radical change, in war work and endured largely the same restrictions. Famous women like Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall ran Stage Door Canteens, not only performing for soldiers, but making them sandwiches, washing the dishes themselves and dancing with the soldiers.

It wasn't that all hierarchy or inequality broke down - far from it. In fact, some labor gains were lost, and the Japanese internment camps represented a remarkable instance of simply hideous repression. But most people were bound by similar restrictions, and to an astounding degree, the restrictions were obeyed. Rich families as well as poor went without meat, or ate offal. Rich people as well as poor bought their shoes with ration coupons. In 1942, when a poll asked whether the government should ration items that *might* be in short supply in the future, 73 percent voted for immediate rationing to avert shortages and to increase the fairness of distribution. More than communal culture, the abiding concern was *fairness* - restrictions were acceptable, but they had to be applied across the board.

All of this should show that any rationing program must emphasize fairness and democratic equality - there need to be few exceptions, and the more people who share in deprivation, the more unifying the overall effect. Celebrities should be enlisted, and application must be regardless of class, race, gender and political affiliation. Environmental activists right now often make the case that their flying or traveling "enables others to use less energy" - but for every person we influence directly, another person is alienated because our message doesn't match our personal habits. Those who wish to advocate for these kinds of programs must lead the way personally - that means getting off the planes, and finding other ways to lead, except in the most urgent exceptions.

In a news item today, India announced it won't do anything about global warming until the rich nations do. The rule about fairness being an absolute policy applies across national borders, it seems - and justifiably so. Anyone who proposes to argue for rationing must argue for as just a system as possible - and must model that rationing. Hypocrisy gets us nowhere.

Along with egalitarian applications, education was absolutely essential to rationing in every era.
Recipes for meatless, wheatless and sugarless dishes flew down from national administrations, out of women's magazines and from neighbor to neighbor. Suggestions for how to build looms and make substitutes for tea and sugar were exchanged by women during the American revolution, and ways of preserving food without salt were passed through women's teas in the South during the civil war. Patterns for socks for soldiers, new card games that could substitute for going out driving or taking vacations - all of this was absolutely essential, for several reasons. First of all, because it helped people find ways to conserve and make do. But also because exchange is a central way we interact with one another - in a conserving society, where gifts and luxury foods are restricted, the exchange of suggestions, advice, kindness and mutual support substitute for goods and luxuries. When those things are taken away, the loss is felt more acutely.

Generally speaking, programs with the greatest success used *existing* social and community structures to transmit not just the requirement to conserve, but also classes and suggestions as to how to do it better. Such material was best absorbed within one's community - during World War II, attempts were made to offer nutrition classes to working class women, but the economic gap between them and the nutritionists was too great to engender good results. Eventually, a highly successful program of paying "block captains" to take classes and transmit knowledge within their neighborhoods and communities was undertaken, and immigrants, African Americans and working class people learned from their neighbors.

One of the important emphases of rationing was freedom of choice - the point system, applied to most foods, enabled people to choose how to use their rations. The US government, according to Bentley, made heavy emphasis of the link between the freedom to choose how to use your limited assets and democratic freedom. Both the ODP and Carbon Credit Cards are tradable rationing systems - politically speaking, this is likely to appeal to capitalist cultural assumptions, and can be linked to freedom, and also to justice for ordinary working people. The fact that ordinary people already use less energy than the rich is potentially a political selling point for those interested in appealing to those "squeezed" by things like lack of health insurance and increased food costs. The dual emphasis - that tradable rationing can improve the economic stability of lower middle and lower class households and that people are still free to choose how to use their energy should be strongly emphasized, and linked to democracy.

We need to make clear that the question is not "will we ration" but "will we ration by price, or will we ensure everyone gets some." Any system of rationing needs to draw very clearly a picture of the alternative - of shortages, lines, hunger, poverty. These are real consequences, and rationing should be portrayed as the collective, fair, and above all anti-elitist option.

The victory garden movement reiterated that what we do not buy, the ritual of non-consumption is even more important than what we do buy, and it did it while valuing anti-elitist skills such is agriculture and physical strength - it cut across racial and class lines. In parts of the south more than 90% of African Americans, often angry at their government in other respects, grew Victory gardens. The call for national victory gardeners was phrased as a form of military participation as essential as military itself. In a poem engraved on a statue dedicated to Victory Gardeners, we learn,

"Not he alone, nor the family that gathers at his table -
But all men everywhere, fighting for Freedom's cause,
Are richer for his work.
For the food he does not buy is theirs to have...
In camps, in ships on every bloody sea,
On battle fronts where food is life itself....
And in those dark and hungry lands now being freed -
Where food is more than life...
Where food means tyranny's long hoped for end.
The seeds of Victory are planted in his garden...."

The poem is heavy handed, of course, but it links ordinary acts, like daily gardening, placed in the context of rationing, to resistance to tyranny, and makes them available to ordinary people. These kinds of links are tremendously powerful rhetorically - more powerful, I would suggest, than the simple statement of necessity or any fear mongering. People are willing to endure remarkable things in order to feel powerful and valued. A rationing movement must make it clear that the consequence of participation is that you are doing something important. Fortunately, that's true.

Many people can be persuaded to view their ordinary actions, including their ordinary actions of conservation, and acceptance of rationing as acts of resistance and power. Ultimately, selling rationing will be about de-emphasizing what you don't have and about emphasizing the returns - particularly the returns in terms of social goods. Particularly emphasizing that individuals are acting in powerful ways by resisting is important - for example, in discussing Carbon Rationing, George Monbiot is somewhat dismissive of personal solutions. But to make rationing politically palatable, it must be represented as an independent way of resisting, shared by everyone. There is, of course, an inherent contradiction between these two things, and yet it is possible for them to function towards both ends in truth and in representation.

It is important to note that the recognition that acts of non-consumption are important and powerful is one that is extremely scary to corporate powers. All through World War II, Doris Kearns Goodwin documents that the rights of consumers and the rights of corporations were in constant tension. In fact, members of the OPA were appointed specifically to represent consumers against corporate authority. In some cases, consumers found that they were newly empowered to resist corporate authority. For example, a group of activist women in Syracuse, NY challenged the dairy industry on rising milk prices. When one of the leaders was derisively asked "Have you ever produced milk?" The woman in question stood up and announced in public that yes, indeed she had, that she had several children and had produced quite a quantity of milk, and moreover, that as a mother of soldiers and a war worker, she had a right to resist price gouging. In this case, a movement towards non-consumption had the undesirable (to corporations and many government figures) effect of empowering consumers, and encouraging them to resist corporatism. While this is by no means a certain result, a growing movement towards better, safer, local food has the potential to reduce corporate power in all spheres, simply by the fact that rationing means that consumption is political. Once people begin to see that, this extends into other areas of their lives. Framing energy rationing as a logical continuation of consumer movements like the slow food movement is likely to help bring public opinion around to accepting rationing as a structure.

All of this was predicated upon, of course, a reasonable threat of shortage and crisis. But such things are easy to come by these days - it is more than likely that this year will see shortages of gasoline for summer driving, and that the next cold winter will see a jump in natural gas prices. As climate change wrought drought continues, experiences of shortage and rationing by price will become more and more normal. And as we have seen, rationing has its virtues, particularly over shortages and unequal distribution. We have reasons to ration already. What we lack is a full articulation of the benefits of rationing.

It does not seem unlikely to me that a case for rationing energy (a la the ODP) and carbon emissions could be made compellingly within the next few years. Existing self rationing programs could be expanded, and should think carefully about how they might be adapted into regional, state or even national programs. Craggers and compact members may find that what they've created is the base structure for something much larger. Models will be needed, and existing community structures will be required. Getting outside the internet and outside of the current political parameters of peak oil and climate change will be important - there are large numbers of people who simply won't be involved with something they perceive as elitist or leftist in origin, but who would be willing to ration for reasons of patriotism, and because their neighbors are doing it. So one of the most important things voluntary rationers can do is bring rationing into their churches, to their local republican party, to their neighbors - not in a threatening way, but in a celebratory one. Support groups to help people cut emissions, reduction picnics and parties, recipe exchanges, techniques and cool tricks, sermons and library talks, movies and parties - these are the exchange medium of change. More importantly, these communal activities become a substitute for what is given up.

Rationing is both possible and potentially quite palatable, as long as it occurs in the context of public education and strong connections to current events. Rationing is democratic - much more so than price rationing, and making a good case for rationing is essential to good public policy.

Today "We" is One More.

The Riot for Austerity/90% Reduction made NoImpactMan today here:http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/getting_concret.html#comment-72477916. Thank you Colin!!!

Looking at the responses to Colin's wonderful post, I think a lot of people's initial reaction to this project is fear, or perhaps "I might do it if you make me but I could never volunteer." And I genuinely understand that reaction - after all, my own reaction when I saw the real numbers was "what if we can't." I understand that this is a bigger change that many people are ready to make, and that's ok. But I do want other people to understand that "I can't" is merely a first reaction.

Because, what if we can do it? Right now, the yahoo list is at about 150 participating families, with a total of nearly 500 people involved. And 500 hundred people are, in themselves, enough to make a real stand. To face the people who say "we can't or won't do this" and say "We have to. We believe in the future. And each of us is living proof we can." We can put the faces of all of us, men and women, children and the elderly who are doing this out there and say "when they tell us it is impossible to do what is necessary, they are wrong!" 500 people is a bigger group than started the American revolution.

I never dreamed we'd have 500 people. Now I'm starting to dream even bigger. What about 1,000 people? What could they do? How many people would they tell, speak to, influence? We could make music, video, art. We can speak out with a collective voice, and say not only "We can. You can" but also "We're here and we won't go away. This is too important." Less than 1,000 people began the march across India in Gandhi's revolution.

5,000 people all over the world who cut their emissions would be a constituency, a PAC, a political power, a voice of quiet joy and anger. 5,000 people alone could save 25,000 barrels of oil from being burned. Less than 5,000 people changed the 2000 US elections.

When 10,000 voices speak, you cannot help but hear. When 10,000 people stand up and say "We did. We can. We must" those who would rather not hear us have to pay attention. 10,000 people have changed the course of history hundreds of times.

50,000 can march and stop traffic. 100,000 can change the world. 1 can change the world if it is the right 1 - just not all alone. I don't know how many people it will take before my kids and your kids and everyone's kids get to live in a world with water and reasonable security - but getting to that number starts with one and only goes up until we reach it. We don't have a choice - I didn't make these numbers up, and science doesn't negotiate. The simple fact is that these are the numbers that give us the best chance of having a future - and that's worth any price to me, and to a lot of other people.

This started out with Miranda and I challenging one another. Neither of us wanted to do this alone, so we thought we'd be better together. Neither of us ever thought that there would be 150 participants in a matter of a few weeks. Now we wonder - what is possible? We are, of course, sometimes overwhelmed and frightened. But hope is a heady and joyous thing, and that makes the fear subside. And with friends, and allies, neighbors and community, and eventually the dragging feet of political support, it gets easier and easier and easier...

I leave you with an excerpt from Marge Piercy's _The Low Road_

....Alone you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With xis
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousands, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no, it starts
when you say "We"
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
-Marge Piercy "The Low Road"

Welcome, to today's 1 more!!!

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 7 - Cool Down

It is easy for me, here in breezy upstate NY, to propose that people cut back on their air conditioning, of course. We don't have it - we have maybe a half dozen days above 90 degrees every year, and even during hot periods, it only rarely stays over 70 at night. When people mention that they've had a two weeks over 100, with night-time lows of 80, well, again, it is easy for me to say. But remember, you can laugh at me in January when you are wearing sweaters and picking kale and the temps are -15 with 3 feet of snow here. Trust me, when the time comes, we'll be talking about heat too.

But at a minimum, now is a good time to think about ways of minimizing your use of cooling technologies. I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who are more expert than I at this by necessity, but here are some suggestions. The first is to minimize a/c use - use fans whenever possible, get good air circulation going, open windows at night to cool things off and close them during once things warm up to keep the coolth in, pull down shades to reflect light. You can consider an attic fan (they make solar models too, get wet (take a quick shower, or visit a public pool, lake or ocean, or just sit with your feet in a pan of cool water - works miracles), keep hydrated, and above all adapt. The simple fact is that we react most strongly to heat when our bodies encounter temperatures for the first time - or think they do. That is, after a day in an air conditioned office, an 85 degree evening feels unpleasantly hot, while a day spent getting accustomed, adapting and dealing with the temps might be one on which you notice a real cool down when things drop from 90 to 85.

If you are considering investing in a/c, the money might be better spent adding insulation. If you are building a house, consider thermal mass to keep things cool. Or perhaps you can spend your summers in your basement. If the problem is heat at night, the classic solution is to sleep outside - consider setting up a screen house or a tent, and spending your nights out during the worst weather. I've heard good things about the "Chillow" as well, a pillow with an interior cooling device to keep it cool. I don't think they are safe for kids, though.

You can cook outside as well - consider an outdoor oven, or even building a summer kitchen, so you can dissipate the heat into the outdoors. Solar ovens are a logical solution to avoiding heating up the house, and turning off your computer, changing over to CFLs, and unplugging a lot of your electronics will cut the ambient heat in your home from electric devices.

Those in very dry climates might well do well with a swamp cooler, but they don't work well in humid places. But many hot, wet, poor places, where a/c is an unaffordable luxury handle the issue by showering or using water. In Vietnam, "have you showered" is as frequently asked as "have you eaten" and often the "shower" is simply a bucket or a tin can with holes punched in it - but it is remarkably refreshing. The water can be retained and used for irrigation on non-food plants later.

If you do need a/c, keep it up as high as you can tolerate - 80 should be enough to keep everyone from heat stroke, and don't use it if the day is cool enough to tolerate, or when you aren't home. Or perhaps you could get away with using public a/c on the worst days - really hot days are a good time to head to the library. If you can avoid using private a/c late in the day, you may cut the risk of local brown and black outs, which tend to happen at the end of very hot work days, when businesses aren't shut down yet and people go home and flick on the a/c.

The most vulnerable people to heat stroke are very young children and the elderly. But even they can often manage without air conditioning if they have enough care and attention. For example, many elderly people simply feel cold even when it is hot - but their bodies know otherwise, and react normally. My husband's grandfather wanted to wear heavy sweaters on 90 degree days, and it really took a lot of attention to ensure that he was kept hydrated, coolly dressed and comfortable. Remember, water can substitute for a/c in many cases (and for those in dry climates, the water you use to cool your body may well be less than the demand for water created by power companies) - consider putting children in a small pool (under supervision, or helping an elderly person sit with their feet in the water or a wet bandana on the back of their necks. Make sure you visit and get to know your elderly neighbors - you could keep them alive in a heat wave.

Ultimately, there are times and places where some cooling is necessary - and in a warming world, that's likely to remain true for a while. But the irony is that as we deal with our personal comfort, we make the world more toxic and hotter for others, so we need to, as much as possible, cut back on our cooling energy use.

Sharon

The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged, Either

In _Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed_, Jared Diamond observes that the vast majority of technologies create more problems then they solve, and in the aggregate, technology virtually always fails to keep up with the unintended consequences it generates. The more we're able to do, the more net damage we do. He observes about people who advocate one or many technical solutions to our environmental problems all seem to be making the same basic error in reasoning,

"All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems: that's why we're in the situation in which we now find oursleves. What makes you think that, as of January 1 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problems while it just solves the problems it previously produced?" (Diamond, 505)

To me, this query of Diamond's is an important reminder that we have blinders on when it comes to the real feasibility of our solutions. For example, let us consider one commonly discussed solution to global warming - telecommuting. If only we could just get all those workers out of the office, we wouldn't have to heat those offices, we wouldn't have people sitting in traffic, etc... And that might even be true. Now it is worth noting that this is a solution heavily weighted to the benefit of rich folk - the person who cleans your toilet, the person who builds your house, the person who cooks the dinner you normally get by take out, those folks aren't going to be permitted to telecommute - in fact, some will lose their jobs. But that in itself isn't an argument against widespread telecommuting.

But the problem is that all those telecommuters would be buying more and better technology for their homes in order to be able to do the work they normally do at the office, and spending more time overnighting documents, heating their own homes, and doing all sorts of other things. Now it might well turn into a net gain - you never know. But it is worth noting, for example that recent evidence suggests that all of us on our computers are a huge global warming problem http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2640428.ece - as bad as flying all over the planet. All those new computers would be built and shipped, as would all that new software, and those extra laptops and fax machines, and the old ones would go leak mercury into the groundwater in Lagos (I bet you didn't know that when your computer dies, it gets to take a long vacation to a poor nation to be disposed of - lucky it!).

Now I'm not opposed to telecommuting solutions per se, but I think it is worth noting, for example that the miracles of computer technology have not come with the environmental miracles we were already promised. Remember how we were supposed to all go paperless, and it would save a billion trees a year or more? Didn't happen - worldwide paper usage rose by 4%, and it rose faster in the developing world. Remember how we were supposed to be getting greater efficiency from lower energy use - it turns out that between 2000 and 2004, worldwide energy emissios rose by 3 times what had been expected, and much of that was in the US, Europe and Australia, so we can't blame China. Oh, and I bet you remember all the extra free time we were told we'd have, in a new "leisure society" - that didn't happen either, as we all know.

Now I'm a Luddite by nature, inclination and political persuasion. For those who aren't familiar with them, the word "Luddite" does not actually mean, as it has come to in the popular parlance, "someone who hates or is afraid of technology for no particular reason." The original Luddites were those who were angered at the notion that they ought to sacrifice their livelihoods and starve to death in order to serve "progress." They resisted and demanded that technology be bounded by recognition of human needs. Now they lost the battle (did you notice?) despite the leadership of the mythical "Ned Ludd," and mostly were executed or starved. But they were right, and they weren't afraid of technology - they simply didn't think that they should be sacrificed for the greater economic good. Now we've gotten so used to the notion that that should happen we hardly notice it - but the simple fact is that economic systems are intended to serve us, not the other way around, and so is technology.

Modern Luddism is very simple - it merely observes that technology has consequences, and technologies shouldn't be adopted without a clear eyed analysis of their net benefits and consequences, and a real assurance that the technology is improving lives (on a wholistic scale) more than it is harming them). The preference is for less dependence, rather than more, simpler rather than harder, things you can fix rather than things you have to throw away, human or animal power rather than fossil power or even "renewable" energy power.

Which brings me back to the computer. I am fond of mine. I make part of my living as a writer, and as a blogger, a notable irony. The internet is bringing a lot of people together who might never have been aware of environmentalism. And yet, all this time we spend blogging, and reading other blogs, and emailing each other has consequences. Some of them are the technological ones - when the computers break down, we replace them. We buy new software and games and update our stuff, and all that good stuff, along with all the time we spend talking about our sustainability goals is warming up the planet. It is so easy and so compelling to let the computers off the hook - after all, aren't we changing the world? Don't we need all this information at our fingertips? We don't stop to count the costs of the infrastructure very often.

Well, it turns out that all this information isn't making us better informed. We're about as stupid as we used to be, according to a recent poll. And it isn't changing the world, either. Our energy usage is going up, while we all sit around and talk about how to get it down - and while the climate warms faster and faster and faster. And just as some elements of the internet have saved us some energy and made some people's lives better, it looks like the net harm is probably greater than the net savings. I know none of us like to hear this, of course. A lot of us derive a lot of satisfaction from the internet. But overwhelmingly, it isn't making us smarter, or know more, saving us energy or changing the world. It is just another technology, doing some good and some bad, and probably a little more bad than good.

A recent Ohio educational study suggests that the average American 10th grader runs educationally behind the average Amish 15 year old - and the Amish kid left school two years before and no only doesn't have a computer in her classroom, she doesn't have electric lights. Poor adults in Kerala who get their news not by television or computer (don't have 'em) but by weekly newspaper are overwhelmingly better informed than average American adults, according to Bill McKibben. An political research firm in the Netherlands found that Brazilian 10 year olds in favelas had a slightly better understanding of globalization than middle class Americans with computers.

What about community? After all, that's what the internet gives us, right, the chance to bond with people like us. Well I love that too - don't get me wrong - but I hear more and more from people who say they can't get along with the people they actually live near, who are on an endless quest for people just like them, to spend their post-peak time with the mythical community of perfectly like-minded people. I hear more and more that someone can't have a relationship with their neighbors and the people near them, and need to move somewhere else. Now that can be true - there are places that are just disheartening after a while. But the sheer number of people I hear from in those places suggest to me that there's more too it. Perhaps that's an unintended consequence of the internet, no? Now that we've experienced the joy of little clubs filled entirely with people focused on X or Y shared thing, we're less able to get along with the people whose common connection to us is a place, or a history or a more formal relationship? Certainly we're more alienated from our families, more likely to be divorced or live far away from kids and loved ones. The internet may be bringing us together, but it seems as though it is also enabling us to be apart.

What we do see is that people are less happy now than they were two decades ago. We have fewer social ties, and fewer emotional connections. Screen time is associated with mental illness and depression in both adults and children, and overwhelmingly, adults rate their screen time as less pleasurable than time they spend with other people - even when they are nominally "connecting" with others. It may be that the internet creates some of the problems it also relieves. Don't get me wrong - I love the internet, and I've been its beneficiary in many ways. But our computers aren't doing for us what they are purported to do, and it is worth being clear about this. I'm not suggesting we turn them all off - but perhaps more of us could spend less time on the computer, or share them more. Perhaps your household only needs one, or none - perhaps you could use the library computer a few times a week.

The thing is, it isn't just that X technology won't save us (insert preferred technofantasy where "X" is - hydrogen, desert sized solar panels, electric cars, etc...), it is that all of them won't save us. There's simply no way, as Diamond points out, of only producing "good" technologies - that's not how it works. Pouring billions of dollars into R and D for how to make a better solar panel or wind generator isn't going to fix the problem - and at some point, we aren't going to have billions.

The only way we can fix the problem is to back up. We have spent several centuries asking "can we do it." And often enough the answer was a resounding "yes we can!" But instead, what we need to ask is this - should we do it? We need to switch away from the engineering mode and towards the ethical. We could, if we chose, begin from the assumption that in most areas (some exceptions perhaps exist) we have done all the R and D we ever need to do.

What a radical concept that is, and how alien from the notion that we will always be able to make things better by simply taking the next step. I'm not trying to hinder science - I have no objection to tinkerers tinking away. But instead of devoting our economy to technical research, and to funding it with our government or with our personal dollars, spent on R and D after we buy stuff they've already developed, what if we tried to optimize what we already have?

What if instead of turning vast resources to making more things and different ones, we backed up and started asking "what is the best way for us to get what we need." What if we took a look back at intermediate technologies, and considered how we might improve them. Someone once observed that if we'd put the same energies and money into breeding open pollinated corn as we have into hybrids and GMO, there's no telling what we'd have. The same is true about a technological society that thinks that the next step is already better. What would happen if we backed up, and thought about how we could improve the wood cookstove, the solar oven or the hand washer?

Luddism may be the only answer. Unless we are willing to ask "is this really good for us, now and forever" we are likely to be trapped in the assumption that the next thing will magically set us free. And it won't. The next thing will further invest us, and move us a little closer not to a solution, but to a collapse. What we want is to step away from the collapse - and the answer there is simple. Need less. Use less. Substitute human power and human scale tools for fossil based power and industrial scale tools. Back up. Slow down. Remember, the price isn't what we think it is.

As a practical solution, I'm trying to turn my computer on only four days a week. I've always kept a sabbath, now I'm cutting back further. If I have to write my book and these posts in longhand and type them out quickly afterwards, perhaps it will be salutary to my writing (it could only improve my editing ;-). It isn't that I don't love the speed of composition, the relationships, the research at my fingertips. It is simply that I don't love them enough to pay the price, or to ask other people to pay it.

Sharon

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back - 90% Reduction Week 1

Well, the first full week of the 90% reduction is up, and things are proceeding, more or less. I should start by saying that we are NOT going to make our garbage quota this week. The reason is that while I was cooking dinner on Wednesday, I suddenly heard a thunderous crash. The metal shop shelving on which I keep much of my food storage had collapsed entirely, transforming itself into a twisted heap of metal. On the top shelf were all my pickles, which came crashing rapidly down, with predictable results, on three 50lb bags of oatmeal and wheat that I had just acquired and hadn't gotten around to transferring into buckets. The metal sliced open all three bags, soaked them with pickle juice and filled them with fragments of broken glass and pickle. So besides the metal shop shelving, and the pickle juice, I found myself with 150lbs of wet, pickle-smelling grain with lots of glass in it. Unfortunately, that can't even be composted. So we produced about 4 times the garbage we were supposed to produce.

The other thing adding to the garbage problem is that 3 years ago, I got a bunch of perennial plants cheaply from a nursery that was closing. I've wanted a big, ornamental perennial bed for a long time, never mind that weeds had mostly overtaken even the foundation plantings - I just wanted it. My husband's grandparents had, in their collection of garden items, a lot of landscape fabric, and I thought "Oh, what would it hurt, just this once, to use it. After all, then I wouldn't have to worry about weeds and even permaculturists sometimes use landscape fabric, never mind that its made of nylon or something."

Well, there were several errors in thinking here. First of all, the stuff is butt ugly (yes, you cover it with mulch, but it inevitably peeks through somewhere), and the effect of perennials seperated by landscape fabric is rather gas-station-esque. And then the weeds start to grow *on top* of the fabric, and it is way harder to weed the top of these things than to just pull out the plants. Oh, and then it starts falling apart in little shreds. So by year 3, I had a large garden of landscape-fabric topped weeds with some perennials sticking through. So this year, I ripped the stuff up - boy was that fun. The years of attached mulch certainly weighed a ton, and did I mention the tendency to rip into tiny little shreds. Sigh. Even after I scraped all the mulch off, that didn't help my garbage allotment any.

I must digress by noting that there's clearly a total idiot living in my house. Someone decided to do this landscape fabric thing. Someones stacked the shelves way too heavily. Someone let the Canada thistles go to seed near the garden and now has to pull 1000 little thistles out of the ground). I've never had a great deal of patience with stupidity and incompetence, so I'm particularly appalled that my house has this moron living in it. It isn't my husband or my kids (trust me, I'd blame them if I could), so it must be someone...but who?

We did a great job with consumer spending this past week, although today killed it all. We hadn't spent a penny of the $80 per month we're allotted, but today at the local yard sales, I ran into an 80 year old metal jab corn planter (works great!) for 20 bucks, and my husband found a good condition banjo with strings for $50. Used items are discounted, of course, bu t we're still nearly halfway through our monthly budget. Still, Eric's birthday was coming up, and the banjo was well worth it.

We drove 3 days last week, and we're still organizing which days we'll need to drive over the summer. If we can really get organized and rearrange some existing schedule things, we may be able to get our driving down to two days a week over the summer - Saturdays (to synagogue) and Tuesdays (old son's swimming lessons, errands, and every few weeks, the dump). We'll have to see.

Food was easy - we've got stuff in storage, but for the summer, we've simply given up the grocery store. We can buy everything we need at the local farm store and the bulk shop nearby. Our very first strawberries came ripe this week! Yay, homemade biscuits, local cream and strawberries!

Our electric was up a little for May, because we were running the brooder lamp for our chicks and turkey poults. I've got to think about alternatives to that - maybe get the birds in June instead of May so it is warmer next year. We're back down now - the critters are all feathered out. The next project is weaning my scared-of-the-dark 5 year old over to an led nighlight, rather than the kind we've been using, and turning off the fridge.

We've been turning off the fridge during at least part of each winter (these weird warm winters have played some havoc with this), but we're going to turn it off for the summer as well. We also have a seperate freezer, which for now, we're going to keep. It will provide ice packs for the cooler that we'll use instead of a fridge. For now, however, the challenge is to get rid of all the half-eaten jars of things that are crowding up the fridge. I don't want to throw them out, so we're using them as fast as we can - cheese and chutney sandwiches, anyone?

Keeping the heating bill to 0 wasn't too much trouble this week, even though it was 37 on Wednesday night and 92 on Friday. Not that I'm not used to the northeast and its temperature swings, but this is a little much for my taste.

We averaged 14 gallons per person per day, which isn't too bad. I'm hoping the guy will come to dig the cistern in the next few weeks - we should be able to get things way down then. I've decided I prefer showering at night, when I shower - I have a tough time getting into bed cruddy from the garden.

Everyone here is enthusiastic about this project. The boys have been helping make more raised beds for the dooryard kitchen garden, and are enthusiastic harvesters of spinach and strawberries. Isaiah has learned to operate the hand drill (the great thing about manual tools is that they are often much safer for small people to use), and Simon is full of energy cutting ideas (my personal favorite is that if we built him a set of wings like Daedalus built, he could fly around the house cooling it down without fans. We're getting right on that.) Simon and Isaiah are excited that we're going to make gingerale for Daddy's birthday. Eli has become a good chicken feeder - he's learned to fill the pans. And even Asher loves to assist (umm, hinder), shouting "Ashie help!."

Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back. But even then, we still got a little bit ahead this week.

Shalom,

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 6 - Dispense with Disposables

Ok, time to get rid of the big wasters - the things we use once and throw away. Each of these items comes with a cost in embodied energy and embodied pollution. What's that? Embodied energy and pollution are the sum of all the stuff that was required to make these things - for example, the energy required to manufacture the paper towels, the bleaches and chemicals used to make them white, the gas used to ship them around the country. All that energy goes in, and then we use them for a few minutes or an hour, and they get thrown out. But all of those things can be replaced with things that can be readily reused.

You can replace everything, and often the replacements are much nicer, and they are always cheaper - you can save a lot of money this way. Sometimes they even make you look cool, gracious and elegant - think about the difference between cloth napkins and paper ones.

Paper towels = Rags. The great thing is that these are free - you use your worn out clothes, old tshirts too ratty for even goodwill to sell. The good thing is that if they are 100 percent cotton, you can compost them, so you can even use them for those messes (we won't discuss what) that are so gross that you can't possibly ever wash and reuse the thing that has been cleaned up. But since you are using a scrap of fabric that would have been thrown out anyway, and composting it, it is way more ethical than tossing a paper towel. Plus, we all know those messes don't come along that often (thankfully!).

Napkins = cloth napkins. Almost all of mine come from yard sales, but you can also make these by hemming pretty fabric. When I was a kid, my step-mom made beautiful, individual napkin rings so that you could keep track of whose napkin was whose, and easily reuse them. I need to do that, so we can cut down on washing. You just put your napkin, folded up, back in your ring and reused it until it got too icky. You can also carry cloth napkins in your purse/bag/diaper bag for eating at restaurants that give out paper.

Plastic shopping bags = cloth or other permanent material shopping bags. I like making these - you can crochet string bags (do a google search for patterns), or make a knitted bag and felt it so that it can handle a big load from the farmer's market. My local food coop actually deducts some money for each cloth bag you bring.

Paper hand towels = cloth towel you bring with you. Ok, you go to a restaurant, and wash your hands. Do you use a towel, or one of those things that wastes electricity to make hot air? If you are a slob like me, you probably wipe your hands on your jeans, but a more elegant solution is simply to carry a hand towel with you.

Tissues = Handkerchiefs. I was resistant to this one initially, but they really are a lot nicer, and you always have them when you need them. You can cut up a sheet or piece of cloth with pinking shears (thanks, Pat for this suggestion) or if you like to sew, you can hem them. Or, if you can find cloth bandanas, they make a good sized, colorful handkerchief. Besides, there's something very elegant about being able to offer someone who is sad or dirty or sick a clean handkerchief. Very gracious.

Plastic Diapers = Cloth Diapers and Pull ups = Training Pants - You may have read a study where people compared the environmental impact of cloth to plastic, and concluded that they were about the same. That study was funded by Pampers, and they compared plastic diapers to a diaper service model where you washed the diapers in boiling hot water 3 times with bleach. And that may be necessary if the same diapers are being passed out among different families. But if you buy your diapers, and wash them (only the poopy ones need anything other than cold water an a little mild detergent - we use borax for those) like normal folk, there's no question, cloth uses much less energy. It also, I find, cuts down on diaper rash, and may be safer for little boys (there's some evidence that little boys who wear plastic diapers have lower sperm counts as adults). I've used my share of plastic diapers, not claiming otherwise, but I've always gone back to cloth. I particularly like soft wool diaper covers, since wool doesn't smell when it gets peed on - so you don't have to wash it every time it gets wet. You just let the wool cover (or liner) dry, and use it again, and then wash it once a week or so. That cuts down on energy even further. My favorite source (no connection with them, I just love their diapers) is Pumpkin Butt www.pumpkinbutt.com . They sell wool diaper covers, hand crocheted wool liners (not that hard to make yourself) and hemp diapers, along with cloth-and-plastic-reusable training pants. And no, the wool isn't scrachy or uncomfortable, or hot - my son wears them quite comfortably on warm days and doesn't get the red marks that plastic diapers cause.

Baby Wipes = Washcloths - you can find washcloths at yard sales, or goodwill, or make them out of terrycloth towels. I've seen dollar stores sell them 3 for a buck. Works great, no big deal.

Disposable Menstrual Pads and Tampons = Cloth Pads, and the Keeper or the Diva Cup. Ok, first off, I don't want to hear any whining from men who seem to think that just reading the word menstruation will cause brain damage ;-). Get over it - or skip this part. Seriously, these are great - many, many times better than disposable pads. I remember that once a student in one of my writing classes wrote a paper about menstrual taboos, and she included the information that, outrage of outrages, women had once worn reusable cloth pads and had to wash them. You should have seen the horror on her face when I pointed out that I wore cloth pads right now. My cloth pads come from Glad Rags, but you can find patterns on the web to make your own. I hate to sew, so I bought them. They are great for overnights and after childbirth - if you are expecting a baby, or prefer pads to tampons, I really recommend them. They are more comfortable, and because they button or snap on to your underwear, they stay in place better - no more sudden, horrible realizations.

The Keeper and the Diva Cup are essentially the same thing, but the keeper is rubber and the diva cup is silicone. I own a Diva Cup, and am a very happy user, but I know people who are equally content with their Keepers. They reduce your risk of toxic shock syndrome, cut your budget, and again, are nicer than tampons. They are both certain to last at least a decade, probably longer.

Disposable Pens = Fountain Pens. My father collects fountain pens, and because I found this hobby unutterably boring when I was a kid, I made a big point of using bics. But they are wasteful - really wasteful. A reusable fountain pen will last you a long, long time (my Dad is still writing with ones more than 100 years old).

Plastic utensils, plates etc... = Real plates, utensils, etc... This one takes a little getting used to. We're so convinced that picnic = plastic. But it isn't hard at all to find cheap, reusable materials. I like enameled granny ware from lehmans - lightweight, easy to rinse off with a hose, simple to clean. Like a lot of these solutions, not only is the picnic basket much nicer, but it has an air of elegance and beauty to it - in fact, almost all of these things (the rags don't really, and let's be honest, you probably won't be showing people your elegant Keeper) come with a sense of graciousness, comfort and warmth. It really isn't hard to keep a picnic basket around for those occasions.

Toothbrushes = Replaceable head toothbrush. The Source Toothbrush allows you to keep the handle and simply replace the head, cutting the amount of waste in landfills. Here's a link: http://www.radiustoothbrush.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=16

Toilet Paper = Mullein leaves, Stachy leaves, washcloths, bidets or homemade bidet (cup of water). Ok, this probably isn't for beginners, and I'll admit, I don't do this one yet - or rather, I've done the leaf thing, but not the washcloths for adults. But realistically, toilet paper is a big waster, and billions of people in the world live without it. We have a lot of wild mullein around here, and they are soft, big leaves, and lambs ears work fine too. As for the washcloths - let's be honest, if you are wiping the behinds of your babies, what's the big deal?

But it is really ok to start with the cloth bags and rags ;-).

Sharon

Depletion, Racism and Paving the Road to Hell

A while back a gentleman named Harvey Winston sent me an email, trying to explain why it is that the peak oil and climate change movements are as lily white as they are. I had asked in another post what we had to do to engage poor people, particularly poor non-white people, who are, after all, already the biggest victims of rising energy prices and climate change. Winston sent me some answers that are right on the money. And he kindly gave me permission to quote him and discuss this publicly.

Because this is a really important issue - the people who are currently suffering from energy depletion and climate change are overwhelmingly not white, both in this country and around the world. Whether we intend it or not, climate change and peak oil are operating to make non white people poorer, more vulnerable, sicker and less safe. And the people who are preparing most, and getting their communities organized are mostly white and comfortable. That disparity is bad for all of us for many reasons, and its wrong.

But the only way to change that disparity is to engage African-American, Native American, Asian and Latino people in finding real, local, community solutions for themselves - that's not up for debate. We need engaged activists to help devise the right strategies for a voluntary, sustainable energy descent for their communities. There are plenty of activists out there - they mostly, however, have not been drawn into the peak oil movement. Externally imposed solutions are likely to be both inappropriate and smack of condescension. But even more importantly, we need this engaged body of non-white environmentalists because they have a great deal to teach us. Many poor, non-white communities have been using less energy than we have all along. They've been making do and adapting to things like food availability challenges, budget cuts and loss of utilities for a long, long time. Non-white people in the US and the rest of the world have created lifestyles that use less energy and fewer resources, and we need to learn from them.

For example, without meaning any disrespect to Colin Beavan, aka NoImpactMan, tens of thousands of people read his blog and watch him on television describing how he lives without electricity in New York city. They are fascinated by this project. But thousands of poor people, many of them not white, live in housing projects and poor neighborhoods of New York city without power or with only intermittent utilities. They already know how to do their laundry, deal with electricity loss do to inability to pay, how to live cheaply and on what is available in your neighborhood. We have glamorized the choice of wealthy, white people to live much like poor people in our own country do now. And I'm delighted Colin is doing this - anything that awakens people to energy depletion is good. But we need to hold up as role models the people who have already pioneered this life and reality. Frankly, the fact that we are looking on this as a novelty doesn’t say anything very good about us - it says that we mostly admire this stuff when it is done by people like us.
During and after Hurricane Katrina, we learned the reality - if you don't own a car, you don't count. You’ll be left to die. This outrage ought to have been a rallying cry for environmentalists everywhere. The victims of hurricane Katrina, mostly poor and black, were also models of community centered, low impact living in many cases. But while the hurricanes themselves inspired climate change activists, few people recognized the victims as potential role models, or the community they'd created as something to be emulated. I find it unlikely that the same would be true if any of the fancy new urbanist communities built in Florida had been so devastated.

Winston gave me a list of 5 reasons why non-white people who encounter the peak oil or climate change movements have been turned off. Here they are, paraphrased by me.

1. The public bigotry of some of our spokes people is a turnoff .
2. Doomerism is a turnoff because it makes the disaster for poor and non-white people seem inevitable, and thus not worth resisting.
3. The war of all against all destroys trust - that is, poor people know that they are the evil marauding hordes everyone is talking about shooting.
4. A lot of prominent peak oil figures don't believe in collective action
5. Poor people are priced out of most of the solutions available.

I think he's on the money with all five, and I'd like to discuss why, and what we can do about that. There is no question that onus is largely upon the environmental and peak oil movement to be inclusive - period. There's no excuse otherwise.

In regards to #1, Mr. Winston used James Kunstler as an example of someone who alienates non-white people with bigotry. And while I admire Kunslter's writing and think he's really smart, I have to say, this is almost certainly true. Kunstler comes very close to being a simply misanthropist - but it is hard not to notice that he's surprisingly more tolerant of people who are a lot like him. My friends and I laugh about his nasty stereotyping of southern white people, and his claims that Asian pirates and Mexican nationalists are going to overrun the country, but what you get, in the end, is a sense that Kunstler thinks that any place that isn't mostly white northeasterners is doomed, mostly because it has a lot of non-white people in it. This is bigotry, and we need to point that out.

Winston mentioned only Kunstler, but I'm going to also suggest that there's a good deal of very subtle racism and classism (in the US it is almost always difficult to separate these two) among peak oil writers, who tend to pitch their discussions to their fellow rich white liberals. I'm guilty of this as well, and it alienates. Because of where I live and who the largest part of my audience is, I tend to justify this by saying that it is we rich, fortunate people who most need to cut our energy usage. But that in no way justifies speaking in a way that closes off discussion, or narrows my audience. It is easy to call people bigots and hard to put the hat on your own head, but in the interest of justice, it is worth taking a clear eyed look at what we've personally done to make the movement unfriendly to non-white people.

When I've attended or spoken at peak oil events, most of the faces in the audience are white, and the faces on the stage are *ALWAYS* pretty much all white (and usually pale males at that). ASPO is trying to get Bill Clinton, Willie Nelson and has managed to get T. Boone Pickens. Not to pick on them (I do, a little, and this isn't entirely fair - they at least had a Brazilian ethanol farmer, which is more than Community Solutions can say), but I wonder if it occurred to them to try and get Wilma Mankiller, who has been talking about the impact of nuclear power on Native communities, or Michael Franti, whose songs about oil depletion have a vast following among people who are not over 50, male and former energy executives. Do they even know who Michael Franti is? He's got a biodiesel vehicle as well, I hear. We could get Harry Belafonte instead of Willie Nelson (no offense to Willie, who I worship) - he's been involved with the Venezuelan oil program to bring poverty relief to people in the US, and that's certainly relevant. The thing is, when pale males start looking for public speakers, they often come up with, shall way, a disparate number of fellow PMs.

I had occasion, recently, to discuss the Oil Depletion Protocol with Richard Heinberg in email, and one of the things I asked him is what I should tell a poor, black, urban woman who wants to join the project but whose energy usage is already dramatically lower than the general populace. Heinberg, who I think is actually one of the peak oil figures most conscious of racial issues, pointed out that the ODP wasn't really for her - that is, there's no incentive for her to sign on. And while I understand his reasoning, it struck me as troubling that a major public initiative to reduce our energy usage has little to say to poor people who are already priced out of energy markets, and offers no particular means to engage them. Now I don't say this to pick on Heinberg, who I admire a great deal, and who I am not, in any way, accusing of bigotry - but I think it does go to show how entirely we are excluding non-white populations from the policy discussions that must go forward.

What do we do about this one? We cut the crap. I have no doubt that some people are going to claim that this is an issue of “pcism” - and that’s just silly. The simple fact is that all of us can achieve giant-assholedom if we really try. But the challenge is not to try - to try to be better than the biggest assholes in the room. Implicit or explicit racism and exclusion are, besides being ethically wrong, asshole behavior. Any one of us can be better than that. Heck, all of us can be better than that.

I've written before about the ways that peak oil and climate change can justify our worst impulses, but I think this is particularly alienating for non-white people who encounter a vision in which the worst excesses of racism are naturalized as inevitable because we can no longer do anything about them. Given that we have managed some pretty hideous excesses, this is scary stuff. This was Winston's second point, and a particularly well taken one.

Die-off, for example, envisions a living hell a la Mad Max in the cities, where, coincidentally, a lot of non-white people live. It envisions this as inevitable, irrevocable, and irresolvable. Thus, there's no point in talking about things reducing infant mortality, health insurance for the poor, better democracy, sustainable urban food systems - the end of the world is already inevitable, and because it is inevitable, we white folks can just sit around and lament, without actually feeling responsible for any of it.

Well, that's nonsense, and we all know it. Will the energy transition be difficult? No doubt. Is it hopeless - absolutely not. If we use peak oil and climate change as an excuse for doing harm to others, or not mending that harm, we're being assholes, we're not bowing to inevitability. For example, we have models - Cuba, for one, of societies that give priority in energy descent to things like health and social welfare, food and poverty abatement. Our society could choose those things as well. We could choose them right now - and use our resources to create infrastructure that would equalize inequities today, and would make the descent much less painful for tens of millions of people. We have not - but mostly because we have a long tradition of choosing policies that can best be summed up as "fuck the poor, benefit the rich." This is not inevitable. It is s choice, and every single participant in our democracy is morally responsible for it. We cannot vacate that responsibility by moaning that it is hopeless.

We have a lot of choices, and we need to call our choices by the correct name. If we pick high gas prices instead of rationing, let’s be explicit about what we’ve chosen - we’ve decided to ration by price, and screw the poor again. If we end up not doing anything about food systems in urban centers because we’re unwilling to demand that commercial buildings grow food on their roofs or because we care more about parking than the fact that many kids don’t get dinner, we need to call the proverbial spade a spade and admit that we chose to fuck over poor hungry kids, so that we’d have parking. Making all the bad stuff seem inevitable is lying.

#3, the notion that we're all going to be at war with one another is a really destructive ideology for everyone, and most of all for the urban poor. We've all seen the end of the world scenarios, and they all somehow look a lot like the movies, with individual (white) people holed up in their survivalist camps shooting the purple haired mutants, who happen to come from the cities. This is hardly helped by books like _Lucifer's Hammer_ and Heinlein's _Farnham's Freehold_, in which the cannibals just coincidentally are black ;-P - often read by such people and cited as evidence of something or other.

Even if you aren't a whack-job survivalist, there's definitely an "us vs. them" theme to peak oil planning. Winston notes that Jan Lundberg writes about the town of Willits, CA and whether they might blow up the bridges leading into the town to keep the starving urban hordes. He wrote that he wondered if it was him who would be left to starve on the other side of that bridge.

I think some of us don't really grasp that not everyone identifies with those blowing up the bridges. I see a lot of rhetoric attacking potential "refugees" - a term that often operates as a code word for non-white people. After all, most of our images of refugees are non white - both Katrina victims (who loathed the word "refugees" because it implied that they were not citizens) and foreign victims of disruption. Refugees are victims, but we turn them into something to be feared and hated. It is worth noting that the people who are potential refugees, many of whom have compelling reasons to stay where they are - lack of money, lack of resources, community, the ability to live a low money life - see themselves being described as "them" and understand exactly what that means, even if we deny publicly that we mean anything by it.

Frankly, I hadn’t seen this comment by Lundberg, but I think it is horrifying if Winston is correct. Willits is often proposed as a model community for people preparing for sustainability. But if our only solutions to dealing with our neighbors are to watch them die, how sustainable is it? Again, we need to watch what we say, and think hard about why we say it. We need a little more compassion and a lot fewer bridges blown.

Winston's fourth point was that there's a lot of dismissal of the possibility of change in the peak oil movement, particularly collective action. He points out that there's a great deal of shooting down ideas, particularly ideas about radically changing the economic or political system, or making cities sustainable. And there is also a great deal of resistance to the notion of real redistribution of wealth.

Frankly, I think most of us are afraid of this stuff. For example, I think that my readers tend to be a pretty radical bunch - but my peasant comments really got a strong negative reaction. But realistically, a society where everyone uses no more than 4 acres for their ecological footprint probably is a peasant society, for most people. But even among my readers there's a lot of instinctive fear of living like poor people. Some of that is justified - but how do you tell real poor people who are living like this now (for example, Keralans, for example, in most health and welfare measure live about as well or a little better than poor people in urban Cleveland), "Yeah, we're just not prepared to redistribute the goods that far - sorry, too hard - we don't want to be like you." There is no question that if rich people give up some privelege, they are going to be giving up some things they might not be happy about losing. The only possible argument here is that there's a greater good involved.

A lot of what the negativity I think comes from fear - real and legitimate fear, but that's still a bad place. We are still willing to justify what we do for personal reasons - :"well, I *have* to use more than my share because of (insert job reason/family reason/personal problem/medical problem.) I think we need to be absolutely clear what those kinds of rationalizations sound like to people who are already experiencing real rationing of things like medical care, good food, safe housing, transportation - people who are already priced out of those things that we say we desperately need because of our personal reasons. It isn't like none of them have long trips to their jobs, or health problems, personal justifications or family issues. What they don't usually have is luxury of using that justification.

Realistically, if we're talking about something more than the survival of the richest, we're talking about equitable redistribution, and that means finding a way to live on only your share - period. It doesn't mean saying "oh, well, I'll just take a little more - the poor people won't mind." They mind. Is it scary? Absolutely. But places like Cuba and Kerala show that it doesn't have to be hell, or even that bad. And the fact is, we have no choice but to do the right thing - and the right thing means living not with a little less, but a lot. Again, call a spade a spade. If you think that poor people in Cleveland and Mexico should have less food or electricity because your very important job as a lawyer makes it too hard for you to do the dishes by hand, say so. Own to it - after all, Mexican peasants and poor urban janitors don‘t work hard at all ;-P. But don’t cover it up with icing and call it cake. None of us is perfect, and in many ways it is as hard to get down as it is get poor people raised up. But we need to shake off the garbage and the lies we tell ourselves.

Again, it would be helpful if we privileged and well educated white people would turn to the poor native American, black, Asian and Latino people and ask, "how do you do it? Can you teach me?" instead of assuming that they won't mind if we just use a little more than our share, because after, all, we're very busy and very important, and our reasons count more than theirs. Without some kind of recognition that we are being led by our own poor communities, our relationship with them will always be one of dismissal.

The problem of being priced out of solutions is one I'm really passionate about. My assumption has always been that most people won't have big fancy solar systems, they won't be able to buy a lot of land, and they won't be able to have every tool they want. When we focus our solutions on expensive renewable energies, as though those are feasible for most poor people in America, we are in danger of increasing an already extant energy-inequity, in which electricity or heat are the privilege of the wealthy and comfortable. Those of us with our private solar systems have visible reminders to those who can't afford them that electricity is not to be theirs.
Most intentional communities and other group alternatives preparing for a post-peak future are very expensive to buy into - they are oriented towards people who already have houses and money and jobs, not to people who don't have those things. They are simply out of the question for most ordinary lower income people - and thus, they end up mostly white.

Winston points out that things like intentional communities seem oriented to people who are using them as a substitute for family and community - but that many non-white people already have strong communities and family ties, and are alienated by the assumption that they should make their connections based on preparedness, rather than the important relationships they already have.

He notes that he knows some people who have become peak oil deniers because they are so alienated by the seemingly anti-progressive message of the peak oil movement, which at times denies that we'll have time or energy for the elderly, the disabled, the vulnerable. Speaking as the mother of a disabled child, this is something I've seen too, that I find deeply disturbing - we have the resources to become a better society, not a smaller, more selfish one. I don't blame people for getting the sense that preparedness is for rich, healthy white people. It is worth noting that many poor societies and poor communities do a much better job of caring for vulnerable people than the richest of us - that is, they tend to do so as family and community, rather than as a job you pay someone for.

At Community Solutions, a woman told me about a friend's daughter who is wheelchair bound. She said that the daughter thinks that peak oil activists are looking for a world cleansed of inconvenient and energy intensive people like her. She noted that walkable communities where no vehicles are allowed are tough on the elderly and disabled, and that almost all discussions of medical care end with a shrug. Well that's not a good enough answer, and people with disabilities and non-white people cannot be blamed for suspecting that in our heart of hearts, the post peak future is one that is sanitized of inconvenient people. None of us think that consciously, but it is worth noting that our rhetoric does this on its own. Can you imagine how terrible, and frightening that is?

There are a lot of non-white people who need jobs, and many, many who have skill sets that would be extremely useful and valuable to us - but these people are not being welcomed or encouraged - how many of us are seeking to bring Latino farmers into our neighborhoods and preparedness communities, or to provide jobs for Hmong immigrants with agricultural skills? We could and should be welcoming whole communities of poor people who already know the things we need to know. I am reminded of a story I read once, in which a group of recent Hmong immigrants went to visit Plymouth Plantation, a historical reenactment museum. When they saw the huts made of wood and thatch, and the chickens and gardens, the head of the community asked if, instead of being relocated to their apartments in Providence, they could simply live there. They noted that this was all they wanted - a simple place to live and land to farm. Instead, we have overwhelmingly displaced poor, non white people into cities, where they compete for jobs with people who have urban skills and fail. They then end up on welfare (the same thing happened to southern black farmers over the course of the last century) and over time loose their agricultural skills. We simply can't afford to have that happen again to this generation's agrarian population.

How many of us with businesses are employing non-white people? How many of us are seeking out community activists in non-white communities and asking them to teach us about energy descent? How many of us are seeking ways to get immigrants into our communities, rather than keep them out? How many of us are actively looking for non-white voices to speak on these subjects? How many of us are devoting our time to improving poor schools and bringing things like food and gardening projects to them?

We need to make sure that when we’re talking about broad, national solutions, we aren’t just talking about the middle class, the healthy and the fortunate. We can’t just talk tax cuts - poor people often don’t benefit from them. We need to talk subsidies, redistribution, justice. We need to grasp right now that peak oil and climate change are justice issues - as much as civil rights were. In fact, they are civil rights. If we price people out of things that they should have a basic human right to - food, shelter, basic medical care - and those people just happen not to be white, we’re no better than those guys with the fire hoses shooting at black kids during the civil rights movement. We’re just better at hiding our responsibility.

Honestly, my message to activists and engaged people from non-white communities is this. There is little doubt that you stand potentially, to be royally screwed again. There are some out and out bigots in these movements, and a lot of people whose awareness levels are lower than they should be, almost certainly not excluding me. But you should come out anyway and get involved, because the doomers are wrong, and the one bright spot in this future is that peak oil and climate change represent the greatest hope for reallocation of wealth and justice in the world. But I don't think we'll do it without someone to keep us honest. I can’t promise it will be the most rewarding work in the world. But it may be the most necessary.

Shalom,

Sharon