My friend and co-author Aaron Newton has a wonderful post over at his site here:
food sovereingty and the collapse of nations
This is definitely worth a read, and I think his response to other readers in the comments section is also excellent.
Now it is too soon for me to make really strong assertions about why the Soviet Union did collapse - I do read Russian, but so slowly that I might as well just wait for the translation. But there's no question that this book raises a really important about the security and stability of nations, and I think Aaron's take is a good and wise one.
We give lip service to food security in our nation, but we don't really know what the term means. It is worth noting that almost 1/4 of all American households experience food insecurity - that is, they aren't sure where their next meal is coming from. That number is indubitably rising as food prices rise. And America as a nation doesn't really know where its next meal is coming from - literally in some cases, as we discover toxic food imports are rising - and metaphorically, because almost a third of think potatoes grow on trees.
If the book turns out to say what is implied in the article, it may turn out that national security at food security are more deeply intertwined than any of us had expected.
And yes, I know it would be better if I could get the links to work. Despite all the good advice, I'm apparently incapable. Working on it.
Sharon
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 14 - Halve It!
If you are just getting comfortable with environmentalism, it can be helpful to think in terms not of giving things up, but of halving them - using a combination of techniques to stretch things out a bit, and let you use or need only half as much. Because everything you halve, means half as much pollution, half as much waste, half as much money. Sometimes we think too quickly in terms of all or nothing - start in the middle.
Now one can't cut everything in half, but if you use what the manufacturer recommends or what fits in those little convenient measure containers products give you, you almost always can cut it in half, or at least get more out of it. For example, I use an environmentally friendly dish detergent. When I get a bottle, I squeeze half of it into an old bottle, and fill both the other half with water - ta da! Two times the dish detergent, and I don't find I need any more on the container.
By washing my scalp with baking soda and rinsing with vinegar, I only need to shampoo half as often. By using old shirts as "table bibs" for my messy kids, I only need to wash half as many clothes.
If your water isn't very hard, most dishwashers and washing machines will work fine with half the detergent called for, or even less and still get things plenty clean. Unless you have terrible allergies or are a slob like me who really needs to do these things *more* often, you could probably vacuum half as often and clean your toilet half as often as you do now.
Unless you've already pared down, you could probably get rid of half of the clothes in your closet without really noticing - studies suggest most of us only wear about 1/3 of what we own regularly. If you changed your style slightly, you could probably get your hair cut professionally half as often (unless you can cut it yourself, which is even better - I can't). You could almost certainly buy half as many consumer goods as you usually do each year, and still have everything you need.
You could eat dessert half as often, and unless you are super careful about fats, you could use half as much oil, sugar and salt and be the better for it. The average American could cut their meat/dairy use in half and replace it with half again as many whole grains and fresh vegetables. You could commit to producing half as much food waste, and really work carefully on using up leftovers and making sure things don't rot in the fridge.
If you live within a few miles of a store, you could take half of your trips by foot or bike, and feel better as well as limiting emissions. You could commit to trying to consolidate your errands and try and make only half as many trips in the car over the course of the year. You could try and cut your vacation distance travelled by half - see something local you've always been meaning to explore.
You could watch half as much tv, and try and use the rest of the time for trying out a new skill, catching up on sleep or volunteering. You could spend half as much money on some special luxury you care about - makeup, or trips, or something, and donate the rest to charity.
Halving it doesn't mean giving up anything you love - it simply means extracting as much pleasure as possible from every bit of what you have, and taking the extra, and making good and wise use of it. All of us can do that. In the peculiar mathematics of good fortune, often you get more than twice as much pleasure - you feel healthier, save money, improve the environment, have more time, more peace, more quiet, a slower pace. Sometimes half as much means vastly more than double the return.
Sharon
Now one can't cut everything in half, but if you use what the manufacturer recommends or what fits in those little convenient measure containers products give you, you almost always can cut it in half, or at least get more out of it. For example, I use an environmentally friendly dish detergent. When I get a bottle, I squeeze half of it into an old bottle, and fill both the other half with water - ta da! Two times the dish detergent, and I don't find I need any more on the container.
By washing my scalp with baking soda and rinsing with vinegar, I only need to shampoo half as often. By using old shirts as "table bibs" for my messy kids, I only need to wash half as many clothes.
If your water isn't very hard, most dishwashers and washing machines will work fine with half the detergent called for, or even less and still get things plenty clean. Unless you have terrible allergies or are a slob like me who really needs to do these things *more* often, you could probably vacuum half as often and clean your toilet half as often as you do now.
Unless you've already pared down, you could probably get rid of half of the clothes in your closet without really noticing - studies suggest most of us only wear about 1/3 of what we own regularly. If you changed your style slightly, you could probably get your hair cut professionally half as often (unless you can cut it yourself, which is even better - I can't). You could almost certainly buy half as many consumer goods as you usually do each year, and still have everything you need.
You could eat dessert half as often, and unless you are super careful about fats, you could use half as much oil, sugar and salt and be the better for it. The average American could cut their meat/dairy use in half and replace it with half again as many whole grains and fresh vegetables. You could commit to producing half as much food waste, and really work carefully on using up leftovers and making sure things don't rot in the fridge.
If you live within a few miles of a store, you could take half of your trips by foot or bike, and feel better as well as limiting emissions. You could commit to trying to consolidate your errands and try and make only half as many trips in the car over the course of the year. You could try and cut your vacation distance travelled by half - see something local you've always been meaning to explore.
You could watch half as much tv, and try and use the rest of the time for trying out a new skill, catching up on sleep or volunteering. You could spend half as much money on some special luxury you care about - makeup, or trips, or something, and donate the rest to charity.
Halving it doesn't mean giving up anything you love - it simply means extracting as much pleasure as possible from every bit of what you have, and taking the extra, and making good and wise use of it. All of us can do that. In the peculiar mathematics of good fortune, often you get more than twice as much pleasure - you feel healthier, save money, improve the environment, have more time, more peace, more quiet, a slower pace. Sometimes half as much means vastly more than double the return.
Sharon
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Understanding the Demographic Transition
My most recent post on Population, _Talking Population with the Old Men_ was mostly about the way the personal has informed my own political take on the subject. This one is about something far more concrete or abstract - the shift in world population that is occurring right now, how it works, what causes it, and what we can do to encourage it.
The term "Demographic Transition" describes the movement of human populations into a roughly steady state. Initially birth rates are high, but so are infant mortality and other death rates, and population may rise, but it does so quite gradually. In Europe and North America, the Demographic Transition occurred over two centuries - gradually, as hygenic practices changed, medicine improved and other factors lowered death rates, women grew up noticing "hey,five kids aren't necessary - I can have three and be assured of getting them to adulthood." Thus, the average TFR (that's the total fertility rate) dropped steadily from 6 to 2.8 and then down further. Now the developed world has an average TFR of 1.8, below replacement rate.
This began in the 19th century in the rich world, but didn't happen in much of the poor world until the mid-20th century or later. Generally speaking, however, the third world has undergone a much faster demographic transition than the rich world did - in many cases, radical change has come in less than 50 years. And because in many places in the third world, there has been considerable instability, the factors that lead to a transition haven't been consistently available in many places.
And, in fact, this is happening right now all over the world. We all know that rich world nations like Japan and Italy have a TFR well below replacement, but more than half of all poor nations are below replacement rate, and the rest are following. The highest reproductive rates are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and those too are following the pattern of other poor nations, but are 20 years behind them. Subsaharan Africa now has a TFR of 5.0, down from 6.3 in 1990. Latin America is now at 2.6 as a whole, and has nearly halved in merely 20 years. All over the world, population rates are generally falling much faster than even the most radical demographers expected.
What's most interesting about the demographic transition is that birth control had comparatively little impact on it - that is, in America, for example, we dropped our birthrate to 2.8, before disseminating birth control information was even legal. Despite a widespread increase in birth control availability after World War II, American birth rates rose well above what they were in the era of the Comstock laws when birth control was illegal. Birth control is estimated to affect about 15% of demographic decline - but that's a comparatively small percentage. In their book _Understanding Reproductive Change: Kenya, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Costa Rica_, editors Bertil Egero and Mikail Hammerskjold observe that fertility change seems largely unlinked to contraception access. That is, people tend to have about the number of children they want, regardless of access to birth control. The question is how do people come to want a particular family size.
And the answer to that question is that generally speaking, people make fairly rational choices, based on their personal economics, their personal situation, their need to have a child of a particular sex, their need for workers, their need for someone to help them in old age. Time and time again, studies like Pritchett's on "Desired Fertility" demonstrate that women worldwide, in every situation, mostly make fairly rational choices for themselves about their family size. And when circumstances change, and give them positive incentives to want fewer children, they hae them.
The current, ongoing demographic transition is not, as it is commonly thought, primarily a feature of the rich world. Poor nations as diverse as Albania, Costa Rica, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Philippines have rapidly declining birth rates. And what factors do most of these nations have in common? Generally speaking, basic commodities are widely available - that is, people get to eat. For example, a 1996 USAID report documents a direct link between subsidizing rice in Sri Lanka and a drop in TFR from 3.1 to 2.0 in less than a decade. Basic access to medical care is widely available. Women have high literacy rates and political power. Women are comparatively well protected from rape, and can choose their husbands. A 1994 study by Yale Economist Paul Schultz fournd that female literacy was perhaps the most defining factor in TFR in poor nations. In India, Kerala, with a 100% female literacy rate has a 1.7 TFR, compared to a 4.1 TFR in regions with a 30% literacy rate
But, all the individual factors together add up to what Jeremy Seabrook rightly observes is "security." If kin are the only safety net you have access to, then you will have children as a form of security and wealth. If there are other options, you will turn to those. Education represents the possibility of work if a husband dies, knowledge of laws, access to information - it is not in itself a reproductive constraint, but an aid to security. What most people want when they have children is security, pleasure and comfort. If 2 children can do that as well or better than 5, they will have two.
A reader in my _Talking Population with the Old Men_ discussion took me to task for not making the link between population and poverty more clear. He argued that large populations cause poverty, and that the only hope of increasing wealth is populations stabilization. But I must say, I disagree. For example, it is manifestly the case that population *density* simply doesn't cause poverty - otherwise, Hong Kong, Japan and England would be vastly poorer than Georgia and Peru. The evidence for whether high TFR causes poverty is, at best, mixed. For example, prosperity in India has grown dramatically despite a fairly high TFR. Even Paul Ehrlich, famed Zero Population Growth advocate and author of _The Population Bomb_ and _One with Nineveh_ admits in the latter volume that the answer is extremely difficult to sort out, and that there's limited evidence on that subject. Generally speaking, the demographic transition occurs as a result of a certain degree of wealth - that is, there's now money for infrastructure improvements such as water systems and sewers. But very poor nations can and sometimes do prioritize these solutions, for example, desperately poor Tanzania uner Nyerere did so, and saw its level of wealth rise while its population was still increasing.
What is true is that population instability does create poverty - for example, the death of 20 million people in Africa to AIDS has left economies stripped, societies filled with children and elderly people caring for them, while the central working generation is ill and dying. Into this situation comes greater poverty, lower educational levels for women, despair, greater need for young women to become prostitutes, and a rising birth rate in some places, massive economic gaps in others. A slow stabilization of population is probably better than wild fluctuations brought about by short term conditions.
The factors that work to limit population growth deserve some greater attention than my quick summary above, because they way they seem to work is as important as the fact that they do. They give us a sense of what kind of society we'd need to create in order to achieve population stabilization well below 10 billion. So let's consider them a bit more carefully.
The first factor, education, works in several ways. Literacy for women benefits families in a number of ways. It increases her health (a literate woman can read material about health and hygeine practices), it increases her family's security (if her husband dies, she can get a better job), it increases her desire to see her children receive education and it increases her political power - she can read and understand national issues. Mandatory education for all children serves to remove children from the labor pool, and makes children not producers, but consumers, and thus parents are forced to view their children in that light.
Food security, including price supports, and many other possible programs improves the likelihood of having healthy and non-disabled infants, it makes it less necessary to set children to work finding food, and it makes it possible for women to reserve time for public participation.
The security of elderly people and the disabled can be assured in a number of ways - public support a la social security is one. Traditions of family obligation are another - were we to treat our obligations to aunts and cousins as strongly as we treat those to sisters and parents, as some societies do, the requirement that individuals have more children is greatly reduced.
Basic health care and hygeine matter because they reduce infant and child mortality, reduce harm in childbirth, and enable women to take advantage of contraception when they want it. They also make childbearing less dangerous, which paradoxically reduces birthrates, because it increases family stability and reduces rates of disability and death within families that drive children out to work at early ages.
Another powerful factor is sexual practices in regards to rape, marriage, prostitution and birth control. Birth control, is, surprisingly, the least important of these factors. Discouraging men from seeing prostitutes, in the Gambia reduced fertility rates significantly, as prostitution is generally a result of extreme poverty and often precludes the use of expensive birth control. In Libya, enforcement of existing rape laws was found, to reduce TFR signficantly. All of these factors are associated with the status of women, and the more cultural and political power women have in a society, the fewer unwanted pregnancies she has. These are factors that generally speaking are mended by cultural pressures - for example, in the US, where rape and prostitution are huge problems, how many of us sit down with our sons and not only discuss rape in detail, but talk about prostitution?
Freedom from war is perhaps the most underestimated factor. People who fear that their children will be taken from them by the state have every reason to have extras to ensure their survival. And because war disrupts security, it is hard for families to make rational choices in the face of war. Genocide and racial conflict encourage the harmed parties to increase fertility rates to compensate. And similarly, the state (or other instigators) have every incentive to encourage women to have as many children as possible in the interest of the state. Despite Albert Bartlett's claim to the contrary, rising death rates due to war actually tend, over the long term, to increase birth rates. And the environmental impact, so critical to the I=PAT formula (explained in my previous post on the subject, "Talking Population to the Old Men") of military action raises the impact of any individual child. Militaries worldwide are responsible for up to 10% of global emissions and 11% of global resource use. We would have considerably more earth to work with without the massive military industrial complex.
Like war, nationalism itself represents a serious incentive to have more children. Low TFR nations like Japan and Italy that also have strong anti-immigrant sentiments have experienced periodic public calls for a pro-fertility campaign. The notion that national interests should have higher priority than the well being of the world as a whole has led us to short term thinking on population, as so many issues.
It may sound as though achieving a worldwide population stabilization is impossible -as though we must fix all human problems first. But that's not the case. In fact, it turns out that the total investment in reducing world fertility levels voluntarily is comparatively low. Because most of the changes are human powered, low input, and comparatively cheap. That is, most of what would be required would simply be to prioritize these things. Fossil fuels, for example are not required to have small local schools, small amounts of fossil and renewable energy are required for some basic medications, but as we can see from the timing of the European and North American example, the demographic transition in the rich world was mostly not a product of fossil fuel based medicine, but a result of improvements in nutrition, hygeine and access to food and water. Political power for women is not a product of fossil fuels either. States can far better afford price supports for local farmers and public cafeterias where prices are kept low than they can afford war, famine relief, etc...
Can we do this in the face of peak oil and climate change? Absolutely. We are going to need to make massive changes in our infrastructure. Thus far, much of the discussion of what to do about peak oil has been about trains and renewable energy, new economies and new extraction technologies. And as long as the conversation stays there, we'll be missing the point. Because ultimately, people care most about being fed, having their kids live to grow up, having safe water, basic housing, etc... As long as we continue the "growth and replacement" model of discussion, we'll miss the basic point - that what we need most to concentrate on is health, education and social well being.
But what would be required is that we make it a priority - that we reallocate wealth from rich nations to poor ones, something that would require, among other things, a real reduction in worldwide emphasis on short term, national interests. That is, unlike the person who wrote the amazingly stupid ASPO article (which I can't presently find) some while back that called to close the borders of Britain, enforce a one-child policy by any means necessary and beef up the military (presumably with senior citizens, since there won't be many young people to expand it with - but hey, 70 year old geezers can defend the shores of Britain from...I can't remember, was it the French?)
Now the gentleman who complained that I didn't conceed to his claim that poverty is a consequence of high birth rates also complained that I brought up China, because, as he said, it the only example of compulsory fertility control. But, of course, that isn't true - states have a long history of manipulating fertility, sometimes through compulsion, sometimes through effective compulsion - in the interest of the state. China's policy is merely the most recent - for example, the American Eugenics policy was a direct result of the demographic transition. The Intelligentsia argued that we needed to reduce the number of "unfit" children, and increase the birthrate of the fit. Not quite coincidentally, the unfit were the poor, the disabled, the nonwhite, and the disenfranchised. Anyone want to take bets on who the "fit" were? US Courts regularly ordered poor people sterilized against their will, and sterilized non-white women after birth without bothering to get their consent.
And, of course, the state often feels free to encourage birth rates. And if we believe that the state has the right to manipulate fertility rates in its own interest, then we have opened the door to changes in population policy when racial and military conflict arise, or when economic conflict is in play. The minute we say that the state should be in the business of telling people how many children to have, we've opened the door to a kind of policy making that we don't much want to mess with. What the state can and should do is reduce or remove existing incentives to have more children (for example, eliminate the child tax credit or cap it at two children), and then focus its efforts on meeting basic human needs.
I think it is really important to assert that population reduction works best when it is wholly voluntary - really voluntary, with the state focusing its interests on improving the lives of the people who actually make the real, everyday decisions about what to do. It is worth noting that China's present TFR is just below 2.0, while many poor nations have successfully reduce their TFRs well below China's without such measures. Our focus, in that case, ought to be on reallocation of wealth, creating infrastructure to enable and preserve basic things like basic medical care and adequate food for all, both in the rich world and the poor, and most of all, ceasing to think of our own interests as primarily tied to those of our nation state, and recognizing that our interests are the interests of the world as a whole.
The UN estimates that World Population will stabilize between 8.5 and 9 billion people by 2050, and then gradually begin to decline. There's fairly compelling evidence that we can feed that many people, if we chose to do so, and if we choose to act justly. That would mean giving up ethanol, reducing our meat consumption, and radically reducing our consumption of goods. It would mean living a much simpler lifestyle, and devoting more of the resources of the rich world, while we have them, to education, health and welfare and sharing our good fortune. The benefits we reap would be enormous. Worldwide, nations that have prioritized food security, basic health care and stability for its populace have seen an average fall of their TFR to below 2 - in many cases, well below it. At that rate, by 2150, the world's whole population would be below 3 billion, without a massive die off.
I think it is worth it, no?
Sharon
The term "Demographic Transition" describes the movement of human populations into a roughly steady state. Initially birth rates are high, but so are infant mortality and other death rates, and population may rise, but it does so quite gradually. In Europe and North America, the Demographic Transition occurred over two centuries - gradually, as hygenic practices changed, medicine improved and other factors lowered death rates, women grew up noticing "hey,five kids aren't necessary - I can have three and be assured of getting them to adulthood." Thus, the average TFR (that's the total fertility rate) dropped steadily from 6 to 2.8 and then down further. Now the developed world has an average TFR of 1.8, below replacement rate.
This began in the 19th century in the rich world, but didn't happen in much of the poor world until the mid-20th century or later. Generally speaking, however, the third world has undergone a much faster demographic transition than the rich world did - in many cases, radical change has come in less than 50 years. And because in many places in the third world, there has been considerable instability, the factors that lead to a transition haven't been consistently available in many places.
And, in fact, this is happening right now all over the world. We all know that rich world nations like Japan and Italy have a TFR well below replacement, but more than half of all poor nations are below replacement rate, and the rest are following. The highest reproductive rates are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and those too are following the pattern of other poor nations, but are 20 years behind them. Subsaharan Africa now has a TFR of 5.0, down from 6.3 in 1990. Latin America is now at 2.6 as a whole, and has nearly halved in merely 20 years. All over the world, population rates are generally falling much faster than even the most radical demographers expected.
What's most interesting about the demographic transition is that birth control had comparatively little impact on it - that is, in America, for example, we dropped our birthrate to 2.8, before disseminating birth control information was even legal. Despite a widespread increase in birth control availability after World War II, American birth rates rose well above what they were in the era of the Comstock laws when birth control was illegal. Birth control is estimated to affect about 15% of demographic decline - but that's a comparatively small percentage. In their book _Understanding Reproductive Change: Kenya, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Costa Rica_, editors Bertil Egero and Mikail Hammerskjold observe that fertility change seems largely unlinked to contraception access. That is, people tend to have about the number of children they want, regardless of access to birth control. The question is how do people come to want a particular family size.
And the answer to that question is that generally speaking, people make fairly rational choices, based on their personal economics, their personal situation, their need to have a child of a particular sex, their need for workers, their need for someone to help them in old age. Time and time again, studies like Pritchett's on "Desired Fertility" demonstrate that women worldwide, in every situation, mostly make fairly rational choices for themselves about their family size. And when circumstances change, and give them positive incentives to want fewer children, they hae them.
The current, ongoing demographic transition is not, as it is commonly thought, primarily a feature of the rich world. Poor nations as diverse as Albania, Costa Rica, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Philippines have rapidly declining birth rates. And what factors do most of these nations have in common? Generally speaking, basic commodities are widely available - that is, people get to eat. For example, a 1996 USAID report documents a direct link between subsidizing rice in Sri Lanka and a drop in TFR from 3.1 to 2.0 in less than a decade. Basic access to medical care is widely available. Women have high literacy rates and political power. Women are comparatively well protected from rape, and can choose their husbands. A 1994 study by Yale Economist Paul Schultz fournd that female literacy was perhaps the most defining factor in TFR in poor nations. In India, Kerala, with a 100% female literacy rate has a 1.7 TFR, compared to a 4.1 TFR in regions with a 30% literacy rate
But, all the individual factors together add up to what Jeremy Seabrook rightly observes is "security." If kin are the only safety net you have access to, then you will have children as a form of security and wealth. If there are other options, you will turn to those. Education represents the possibility of work if a husband dies, knowledge of laws, access to information - it is not in itself a reproductive constraint, but an aid to security. What most people want when they have children is security, pleasure and comfort. If 2 children can do that as well or better than 5, they will have two.
A reader in my _Talking Population with the Old Men_ discussion took me to task for not making the link between population and poverty more clear. He argued that large populations cause poverty, and that the only hope of increasing wealth is populations stabilization. But I must say, I disagree. For example, it is manifestly the case that population *density* simply doesn't cause poverty - otherwise, Hong Kong, Japan and England would be vastly poorer than Georgia and Peru. The evidence for whether high TFR causes poverty is, at best, mixed. For example, prosperity in India has grown dramatically despite a fairly high TFR. Even Paul Ehrlich, famed Zero Population Growth advocate and author of _The Population Bomb_ and _One with Nineveh_ admits in the latter volume that the answer is extremely difficult to sort out, and that there's limited evidence on that subject. Generally speaking, the demographic transition occurs as a result of a certain degree of wealth - that is, there's now money for infrastructure improvements such as water systems and sewers. But very poor nations can and sometimes do prioritize these solutions, for example, desperately poor Tanzania uner Nyerere did so, and saw its level of wealth rise while its population was still increasing.
What is true is that population instability does create poverty - for example, the death of 20 million people in Africa to AIDS has left economies stripped, societies filled with children and elderly people caring for them, while the central working generation is ill and dying. Into this situation comes greater poverty, lower educational levels for women, despair, greater need for young women to become prostitutes, and a rising birth rate in some places, massive economic gaps in others. A slow stabilization of population is probably better than wild fluctuations brought about by short term conditions.
The factors that work to limit population growth deserve some greater attention than my quick summary above, because they way they seem to work is as important as the fact that they do. They give us a sense of what kind of society we'd need to create in order to achieve population stabilization well below 10 billion. So let's consider them a bit more carefully.
The first factor, education, works in several ways. Literacy for women benefits families in a number of ways. It increases her health (a literate woman can read material about health and hygeine practices), it increases her family's security (if her husband dies, she can get a better job), it increases her desire to see her children receive education and it increases her political power - she can read and understand national issues. Mandatory education for all children serves to remove children from the labor pool, and makes children not producers, but consumers, and thus parents are forced to view their children in that light.
Food security, including price supports, and many other possible programs improves the likelihood of having healthy and non-disabled infants, it makes it less necessary to set children to work finding food, and it makes it possible for women to reserve time for public participation.
The security of elderly people and the disabled can be assured in a number of ways - public support a la social security is one. Traditions of family obligation are another - were we to treat our obligations to aunts and cousins as strongly as we treat those to sisters and parents, as some societies do, the requirement that individuals have more children is greatly reduced.
Basic health care and hygeine matter because they reduce infant and child mortality, reduce harm in childbirth, and enable women to take advantage of contraception when they want it. They also make childbearing less dangerous, which paradoxically reduces birthrates, because it increases family stability and reduces rates of disability and death within families that drive children out to work at early ages.
Another powerful factor is sexual practices in regards to rape, marriage, prostitution and birth control. Birth control, is, surprisingly, the least important of these factors. Discouraging men from seeing prostitutes, in the Gambia reduced fertility rates significantly, as prostitution is generally a result of extreme poverty and often precludes the use of expensive birth control. In Libya, enforcement of existing rape laws was found, to reduce TFR signficantly. All of these factors are associated with the status of women, and the more cultural and political power women have in a society, the fewer unwanted pregnancies she has. These are factors that generally speaking are mended by cultural pressures - for example, in the US, where rape and prostitution are huge problems, how many of us sit down with our sons and not only discuss rape in detail, but talk about prostitution?
Freedom from war is perhaps the most underestimated factor. People who fear that their children will be taken from them by the state have every reason to have extras to ensure their survival. And because war disrupts security, it is hard for families to make rational choices in the face of war. Genocide and racial conflict encourage the harmed parties to increase fertility rates to compensate. And similarly, the state (or other instigators) have every incentive to encourage women to have as many children as possible in the interest of the state. Despite Albert Bartlett's claim to the contrary, rising death rates due to war actually tend, over the long term, to increase birth rates. And the environmental impact, so critical to the I=PAT formula (explained in my previous post on the subject, "Talking Population to the Old Men") of military action raises the impact of any individual child. Militaries worldwide are responsible for up to 10% of global emissions and 11% of global resource use. We would have considerably more earth to work with without the massive military industrial complex.
Like war, nationalism itself represents a serious incentive to have more children. Low TFR nations like Japan and Italy that also have strong anti-immigrant sentiments have experienced periodic public calls for a pro-fertility campaign. The notion that national interests should have higher priority than the well being of the world as a whole has led us to short term thinking on population, as so many issues.
It may sound as though achieving a worldwide population stabilization is impossible -as though we must fix all human problems first. But that's not the case. In fact, it turns out that the total investment in reducing world fertility levels voluntarily is comparatively low. Because most of the changes are human powered, low input, and comparatively cheap. That is, most of what would be required would simply be to prioritize these things. Fossil fuels, for example are not required to have small local schools, small amounts of fossil and renewable energy are required for some basic medications, but as we can see from the timing of the European and North American example, the demographic transition in the rich world was mostly not a product of fossil fuel based medicine, but a result of improvements in nutrition, hygeine and access to food and water. Political power for women is not a product of fossil fuels either. States can far better afford price supports for local farmers and public cafeterias where prices are kept low than they can afford war, famine relief, etc...
Can we do this in the face of peak oil and climate change? Absolutely. We are going to need to make massive changes in our infrastructure. Thus far, much of the discussion of what to do about peak oil has been about trains and renewable energy, new economies and new extraction technologies. And as long as the conversation stays there, we'll be missing the point. Because ultimately, people care most about being fed, having their kids live to grow up, having safe water, basic housing, etc... As long as we continue the "growth and replacement" model of discussion, we'll miss the basic point - that what we need most to concentrate on is health, education and social well being.
But what would be required is that we make it a priority - that we reallocate wealth from rich nations to poor ones, something that would require, among other things, a real reduction in worldwide emphasis on short term, national interests. That is, unlike the person who wrote the amazingly stupid ASPO article (which I can't presently find) some while back that called to close the borders of Britain, enforce a one-child policy by any means necessary and beef up the military (presumably with senior citizens, since there won't be many young people to expand it with - but hey, 70 year old geezers can defend the shores of Britain from...I can't remember, was it the French?)
Now the gentleman who complained that I didn't conceed to his claim that poverty is a consequence of high birth rates also complained that I brought up China, because, as he said, it the only example of compulsory fertility control. But, of course, that isn't true - states have a long history of manipulating fertility, sometimes through compulsion, sometimes through effective compulsion - in the interest of the state. China's policy is merely the most recent - for example, the American Eugenics policy was a direct result of the demographic transition. The Intelligentsia argued that we needed to reduce the number of "unfit" children, and increase the birthrate of the fit. Not quite coincidentally, the unfit were the poor, the disabled, the nonwhite, and the disenfranchised. Anyone want to take bets on who the "fit" were? US Courts regularly ordered poor people sterilized against their will, and sterilized non-white women after birth without bothering to get their consent.
And, of course, the state often feels free to encourage birth rates. And if we believe that the state has the right to manipulate fertility rates in its own interest, then we have opened the door to changes in population policy when racial and military conflict arise, or when economic conflict is in play. The minute we say that the state should be in the business of telling people how many children to have, we've opened the door to a kind of policy making that we don't much want to mess with. What the state can and should do is reduce or remove existing incentives to have more children (for example, eliminate the child tax credit or cap it at two children), and then focus its efforts on meeting basic human needs.
I think it is really important to assert that population reduction works best when it is wholly voluntary - really voluntary, with the state focusing its interests on improving the lives of the people who actually make the real, everyday decisions about what to do. It is worth noting that China's present TFR is just below 2.0, while many poor nations have successfully reduce their TFRs well below China's without such measures. Our focus, in that case, ought to be on reallocation of wealth, creating infrastructure to enable and preserve basic things like basic medical care and adequate food for all, both in the rich world and the poor, and most of all, ceasing to think of our own interests as primarily tied to those of our nation state, and recognizing that our interests are the interests of the world as a whole.
The UN estimates that World Population will stabilize between 8.5 and 9 billion people by 2050, and then gradually begin to decline. There's fairly compelling evidence that we can feed that many people, if we chose to do so, and if we choose to act justly. That would mean giving up ethanol, reducing our meat consumption, and radically reducing our consumption of goods. It would mean living a much simpler lifestyle, and devoting more of the resources of the rich world, while we have them, to education, health and welfare and sharing our good fortune. The benefits we reap would be enormous. Worldwide, nations that have prioritized food security, basic health care and stability for its populace have seen an average fall of their TFR to below 2 - in many cases, well below it. At that rate, by 2150, the world's whole population would be below 3 billion, without a massive die off.
I think it is worth it, no?
Sharon
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The Time is Now
Cheery news on the climate change and peak oil front this week. If you aren't actually witnessing climate change in all its glory, say in Britain (massive flooding, officially confirmed to be connected to global warming) China (massive flooding some places, drought and desertification elsewhere), the Amazon (drought), The Southwest and Southeast US (drought) or somewhere else, there's increasing evidence that the Arctic Ice will be gone within the next decade or so. This is not good news. Add to that the new study that suggests that the Amazon Rainforest may essentially be destroyed within the next few years http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10392615&pnum=0, and we're facing two climate tipping points - not at the end of the century, but in the next few years.
Virtually all research suggests that most climate change isn't very gradual at all - the IPCC report imagines linear, slow, moderate climate change, which is scary enough. But there's ample science suggesting that in fact, what happens is radical, quick change, in non-linear ways - ice melt, for example, simply doesn't proceed the way the IPCC report has presumed. It is not at all out of the question to imagine that we could experience massive climate change over the course of decade - arriving suddenly in a world we don't recognize. Oh, and just plain old pollution is getting nasty - 75,000 Chinese people a year, 30,000 in the US: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/8f40e248-28c7-11dc-af78-000b5df10621.html
On the peak oil front, The Oil Drum suggests a more significant decline in Russian production (up until now the only major oil producer not showing significant declines in supply) than otherwise expected: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2716. If Russia starts declining as Mexico and Saudi Arabia have, we can expect to see radically higher energy prices very soon. Goldman Sachs reiterated that we could see $100 barrel by 2009 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news? , and Pat Robertson apparently told his 700 Club listeners to get bicycles, that peak oil was here. And a newly translated book argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused largely by too many farmers leaving the land:http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0723/p15s01-wmgn.html?page=1 . Sound like anything anyone has heard of?
If you've been to the grocery store lately, you know that the price of food is way, way, way up. Last week the price of powdered milk rose by *300%* - and almost everything else has risen by 25% or more over the last year. I'm starting to see working people ask how they are supposed to get by. And that's a real question. Tens of thousands of Americans and Australians are now experiencing "transportation poverty" - that is, they spend so much on gas getting to work that they can no longer buy basic essentials. And if you are struggling to make ends meet, well, you can feel you are in good company - the UN last week announced that because of the ethanol boom and its effects on food prices, it will no longer be able to provide food aid to millions of hungry people http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7345310a-32fb-11dc-a9e8-0000779fd2ac.html. That is, we're going to let millions of people starve to death so we can have more gas in our cars - and realistically, ethanol is a very short term boom - as fossil fuel prices rise and the environmental consequences become clear, ethanol, which provides a very, very minimal energy return, if that, is going to disappear. One of our last big build outs was wasted making booze for our cars. I'm sure we'll be glad we did that. Since food production is expected to halve in developing nations over the next 20 years, due to environmental constraints, the UN will certainly have more people not to feed:http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Rich_world_s_consumerism_may_cause__07012007.html. We're warned that unless we lower our rate of consumption of just about everything, millions of people will starve. How much *do* we want that spongebob basketball set? That steak? That beer? Those shoes?
And does anyone still eat industrially produced food? There's botulism in your chili, plastic in your dog food, salmonella in your peanut butter, and ecoli on your bagged spinach. Leaving your food production to corporate America can't just kill you by giving you cancer, heart disease and diabetes - it can do it instantly! Whee!
We're more indebted and our economy is shakier than at any time since right before the Great Depression. China and Japan are showing signs that they don't want to prop up our economy forever. A new film suggests that without credit cards, many middle class people would be genuinely poor. Up to 60% of the British economy and 70% of the American is directly or indirectly tied up in our housing http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2133131,00.html. And there are few people who think we're anywhere near the bottom of the housing market, or the foreclosure crisis.
Now it is perfectly possible that a few or some or even the aggregate of all this information is wrong. It is possible that magic bullets will be found, comfortable forms of adaptation will occur, and that everything will be less severe than the most acute forecasts. And realistically, I think that's even likely - for some of us. The thing is, these circumstances won't hit everyone the same way. Some of us will still be mulling over whether to install the sustainably harvested cork floors in their new "eco kitchen" while most of us are wondering whether the kids will have shoes.
Now some of you are on board, of course, but I'm sure there are plenty of readers here who think I'm overreacting - after all, the world is always going to hell in a handbasket, isn't it? Why not just watch "24" reruns, and not worry about it?
So we come to the question of when and how to act. And I'm going to suggest that everyone who reads this take 10 basic actions to provide for their security right now - this year, whenever possible. I could be absolutely off base, but it seems like the combination of peak oil, financial instability and climate change is going to strike us hard, and soon. Now maybe you disagree - you expect technological solutions, or things to be gentler. But even if you do, there's good reason to hedge your bets, invest a few resources and a little energy into preparation, so that just in case the crazy lady on the blog was right, your family, your community will be a little bit better off.
All of these things are ideas you can implement with very little money, very little time and without people thinking you are a weird-assed loon. They don't even have to notice. So if you aren't yet willing to come out and admit to anyone that you've been reading my site ;-), just do me this favor - make a few quiet plans, spend a little bit of money, and then laugh your ass off at me if I'm wrong. It will make me feel better, and I think you, too. Because, after all, the consequences of my being wrong are pretty small - a couple less dinners out, one less magazine subscription and you wait on the new car lease for an extra six months. The consequences of me being right on your family, however, could be pretty big. Life and death. So why not indulge your own family's security just a little.
1. Wherever you are, begin to adapt to lower energy living. I've written before about my basic assumption, which is that regardless of any apocalyptic visions of grid crash (which I have no strong opinion on), poor people get their utilities shut off a lot. In fact, shutoffs are rising dramatically all over the US right now, and tens of thousands of people are now in debt to their utility companies. A lot of us may have to choose between food and electricity, and it would be insane to prioritize electricity, which is merely a convenience. Here's my take on the issue, if you are interested: http://www.energybulletin.net/26246.html.
At a minimum, you should get prepared to be able to get water from the sky or your well without power, keep yourselves tolerably warm or cool without central heating or a/c, etc... For those who aren't convinced, this can be a fairly low input project - a pvc pipe turned into a well bucket costs about $5. Cap it with a plastic cap, make sure it is smaller than the diameter of your well, and ta da! Or try this:http://www.countrysidemag.com/issues/1_1999.htm#drilled%20well. Alternately, get some rainbarrels and a gravity fed filter - camping stores have them. The filter may set you back a bit ($75-100 for camping style, $200+ for a good table top whose filters will last a year www.britishberkefield.com), but clean water is a good thing.
Make a homemade composting toilet using leaves and a bucket.
For heat, go to yard sales and thrift shops and buy blankets, long underwear, and warm clothing. If you can, you might put in a woodstove, but you *can* live in a house with no heat without freezing to death. People have done it for centuries. Dress warmly, move around during the day, and at night, rig a four poster bed, with cloth covers over your bed and hung for curtains will create a small, tight space that is well insulated and heated by your body. Try not to let anyone sleep entirely alone - kids can sleep together or with parents. Or encourage the cat or dog to join you.
For heat, you'll have to stay outside most of the time, open windows at night and keep them closed during the day. Do your cooking in the early morning and at night, and eat cold things during the day. Don't do heavy exercise during the day, if you can avoid it, and keep a close eye on small children and elders, who are much more vulnerable to heat than most adults. Use cool water to cool people down.
2. Start a garden. It isn't too late to start one today in most cases. Build some raised beds, or sheet mulch (cover with newspaper and a lot of organic material - manure, grass clippings, non-weed seed yard waste, compost), and let it all decompose. Or plant some herbs and vegetables in pots. But whatever you do, start thinking ahead to your long term food security. Every meal and nutritious bit of produce you grow is something you don't have to buy. Many seed companies have fall sales - stock up on extra seeds for yourself and your neighborhood, just in case next year your food budget is stretched.
3. Store food. With rising food prices, it would be nuts not to. Buy local and organic when you can, but store bulk local grains, local honey, dried beans, and put up some other items. Food storage doesn't have to be costly - each week, alot $10 to food storage. The first week, you might buy 10lbs of organic, whole wheat pasta, or 20lbs of organic rice. The next, a 5lb box of salt and two bags of dried pinto beans. The following week a bottle of vitamins. As it gets cooler, and fall produce starts to come in, a cooler on your back porch will store bulk potatoes and onions that often can be purchased at very little. Buy a little extra of everything you eat, and practice cooking it. Remember, one of the consequences of hard times is family lose their homes and security. You may want this food not because there's none in stores, but because you have no money, and the food pantry is stretched to the limit, or you may want it because your sister in law and her two kids are sleeping in your living room after their house was foreclosed upon, or perhaps you'll want to be able to continue to give to charity, even when your resources are stretched by rising gas and food prices. Don't forget to put some water in old soda bottles and other heavy duty beverage containers, and store it in your freezer or add a little bleach and put it in a cool, dark place.
4. Get out of debt! I can't emphasize this too strongly - make some cut backs and start paying down your credit cards. Get rid of the cable, the dinners out, the Sunday drive, the hobby expenditures. Pay down consumer debt first, car loans next, then your mortgage. The more equity you have in your home, the less likely you are to lose it if you stop being able to pay the mortgage.
5. Get to know your neighbors. Talk to them. Make friends with them. Find out about them. Have an open house, a barbecue, a neighborhood party. Start a local community group, a home church, a local minyan. Get the kids together to play. Start thinking in terms of neighborhood solidarity - can I pick up some stuff for you at the farmer's market? Why don't you borrow my vacuum cleaner, instead of replacing yours? Can I feed your cats/help you out, etc... You need them and they need you. Start carpooling. Start a community garden. Get together to knit, or can or just talk. But start something.
6. Have a plan. That is, think about what you would do if your income was halved or prices doubled? What if someone lost their job? What about health insurance? What if the power was out for an extended period, or like millions of Britons today, you had no safe water supply? What if something happened when the kids were at school and parents at work - how would you get in touch with one another? Cell phones may not be working - do you have a meeting place? If you had to evacuate, do you have the basics - copies of id, enough gas to get somewhere safe, food and water for a few days, changes of clothes, basic medical care? Think about what is most possible in your area, and be prepared for it.
7. Get on your bike and start riding, on your feet and start walking. Most of us aren't used to getting around by human power anymore, and we need to be. Suburbia is often pretty feasible if you have a bike. A 5-10 mile bike ride is quite doable for most healthy people, and even many unhealthy ones can cover a few miles on an adult trike or recumbent - my father, overweight, with lung disease and severe arthritis and nearly 60 rides his every day. A five mile round trip walk should be doable for most of us. And most of us do have some resources within walking distance. It just takes practice and energy. Cheap bikes are widely available, although investing more money will often get you a more comfortable one.
8. Gradually start to replace powered items with human powered ones. Get a manual grain grinder for grinding flour for bread - fresh ground tastes better anyway. A push mower for the lawn. Some hand tools. A crank flashlight or two and a crank cell phone charger. You don't have to go crazy, but as things need replacing, used items come up or opportunity arises, make sure you can be comfortable.
9. Protect the vulnerable. Breastfeed your baby if at all possible, and don't wean early - disease proliferates where hunger or flooding or other problems come. If you run out of food, you'll make milk for a little while in a crisis. Keep the lives of babies and young children as stable and secure as possible, and watch their nutrition carefully. Prepare for older children in an unstable situation - buy clothes and shoes in larger sizes at yard sales, and help them understand what is happening. Be prepared to teach your kids at home for a while if necessary. Also be ready to take elderly people into your home, to check on neighbors. Stock extra medications, and have backup plans for caring for seniors and the disabled.
10. Support your local poverty support programs, and build new ones. Local food pantries and fuel assitance programs are stretched to the max. Show up at yours and help them find new sources of food - grow food for them, volunteer, raise funds. You may need them someday.
Now the neat thing about all of this is that if you do these things, you'll save some money in the long run, get more exercise, eat better, have better tasting food, a happier neighborhood, and a greater degree of personal security. Most of these preparations can be undertaken for very little money - and some are free. So get too it, folks - mock away, but protect yourselves.
Cheers,
Sharon
Virtually all research suggests that most climate change isn't very gradual at all - the IPCC report imagines linear, slow, moderate climate change, which is scary enough. But there's ample science suggesting that in fact, what happens is radical, quick change, in non-linear ways - ice melt, for example, simply doesn't proceed the way the IPCC report has presumed. It is not at all out of the question to imagine that we could experience massive climate change over the course of decade - arriving suddenly in a world we don't recognize. Oh, and just plain old pollution is getting nasty - 75,000 Chinese people a year, 30,000 in the US: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/8f40e248-28c7-11dc-af78-000b5df10621.html
On the peak oil front, The Oil Drum suggests a more significant decline in Russian production (up until now the only major oil producer not showing significant declines in supply) than otherwise expected: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2716. If Russia starts declining as Mexico and Saudi Arabia have, we can expect to see radically higher energy prices very soon. Goldman Sachs reiterated that we could see $100 barrel by 2009 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news? , and Pat Robertson apparently told his 700 Club listeners to get bicycles, that peak oil was here. And a newly translated book argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused largely by too many farmers leaving the land:http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0723/p15s01-wmgn.html?page=1 . Sound like anything anyone has heard of?
If you've been to the grocery store lately, you know that the price of food is way, way, way up. Last week the price of powdered milk rose by *300%* - and almost everything else has risen by 25% or more over the last year. I'm starting to see working people ask how they are supposed to get by. And that's a real question. Tens of thousands of Americans and Australians are now experiencing "transportation poverty" - that is, they spend so much on gas getting to work that they can no longer buy basic essentials. And if you are struggling to make ends meet, well, you can feel you are in good company - the UN last week announced that because of the ethanol boom and its effects on food prices, it will no longer be able to provide food aid to millions of hungry people http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7345310a-32fb-11dc-a9e8-0000779fd2ac.html. That is, we're going to let millions of people starve to death so we can have more gas in our cars - and realistically, ethanol is a very short term boom - as fossil fuel prices rise and the environmental consequences become clear, ethanol, which provides a very, very minimal energy return, if that, is going to disappear. One of our last big build outs was wasted making booze for our cars. I'm sure we'll be glad we did that. Since food production is expected to halve in developing nations over the next 20 years, due to environmental constraints, the UN will certainly have more people not to feed:http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Rich_world_s_consumerism_may_cause__07012007.html. We're warned that unless we lower our rate of consumption of just about everything, millions of people will starve. How much *do* we want that spongebob basketball set? That steak? That beer? Those shoes?
And does anyone still eat industrially produced food? There's botulism in your chili, plastic in your dog food, salmonella in your peanut butter, and ecoli on your bagged spinach. Leaving your food production to corporate America can't just kill you by giving you cancer, heart disease and diabetes - it can do it instantly! Whee!
We're more indebted and our economy is shakier than at any time since right before the Great Depression. China and Japan are showing signs that they don't want to prop up our economy forever. A new film suggests that without credit cards, many middle class people would be genuinely poor. Up to 60% of the British economy and 70% of the American is directly or indirectly tied up in our housing http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2133131,00.html. And there are few people who think we're anywhere near the bottom of the housing market, or the foreclosure crisis.
Now it is perfectly possible that a few or some or even the aggregate of all this information is wrong. It is possible that magic bullets will be found, comfortable forms of adaptation will occur, and that everything will be less severe than the most acute forecasts. And realistically, I think that's even likely - for some of us. The thing is, these circumstances won't hit everyone the same way. Some of us will still be mulling over whether to install the sustainably harvested cork floors in their new "eco kitchen" while most of us are wondering whether the kids will have shoes.
Now some of you are on board, of course, but I'm sure there are plenty of readers here who think I'm overreacting - after all, the world is always going to hell in a handbasket, isn't it? Why not just watch "24" reruns, and not worry about it?
So we come to the question of when and how to act. And I'm going to suggest that everyone who reads this take 10 basic actions to provide for their security right now - this year, whenever possible. I could be absolutely off base, but it seems like the combination of peak oil, financial instability and climate change is going to strike us hard, and soon. Now maybe you disagree - you expect technological solutions, or things to be gentler. But even if you do, there's good reason to hedge your bets, invest a few resources and a little energy into preparation, so that just in case the crazy lady on the blog was right, your family, your community will be a little bit better off.
All of these things are ideas you can implement with very little money, very little time and without people thinking you are a weird-assed loon. They don't even have to notice. So if you aren't yet willing to come out and admit to anyone that you've been reading my site ;-), just do me this favor - make a few quiet plans, spend a little bit of money, and then laugh your ass off at me if I'm wrong. It will make me feel better, and I think you, too. Because, after all, the consequences of my being wrong are pretty small - a couple less dinners out, one less magazine subscription and you wait on the new car lease for an extra six months. The consequences of me being right on your family, however, could be pretty big. Life and death. So why not indulge your own family's security just a little.
1. Wherever you are, begin to adapt to lower energy living. I've written before about my basic assumption, which is that regardless of any apocalyptic visions of grid crash (which I have no strong opinion on), poor people get their utilities shut off a lot. In fact, shutoffs are rising dramatically all over the US right now, and tens of thousands of people are now in debt to their utility companies. A lot of us may have to choose between food and electricity, and it would be insane to prioritize electricity, which is merely a convenience. Here's my take on the issue, if you are interested: http://www.energybulletin.net/26246.html.
At a minimum, you should get prepared to be able to get water from the sky or your well without power, keep yourselves tolerably warm or cool without central heating or a/c, etc... For those who aren't convinced, this can be a fairly low input project - a pvc pipe turned into a well bucket costs about $5. Cap it with a plastic cap, make sure it is smaller than the diameter of your well, and ta da! Or try this:http://www.countrysidemag.com/issues/1_1999.htm#drilled%20well. Alternately, get some rainbarrels and a gravity fed filter - camping stores have them. The filter may set you back a bit ($75-100 for camping style, $200+ for a good table top whose filters will last a year www.britishberkefield.com), but clean water is a good thing.
Make a homemade composting toilet using leaves and a bucket.
For heat, go to yard sales and thrift shops and buy blankets, long underwear, and warm clothing. If you can, you might put in a woodstove, but you *can* live in a house with no heat without freezing to death. People have done it for centuries. Dress warmly, move around during the day, and at night, rig a four poster bed, with cloth covers over your bed and hung for curtains will create a small, tight space that is well insulated and heated by your body. Try not to let anyone sleep entirely alone - kids can sleep together or with parents. Or encourage the cat or dog to join you.
For heat, you'll have to stay outside most of the time, open windows at night and keep them closed during the day. Do your cooking in the early morning and at night, and eat cold things during the day. Don't do heavy exercise during the day, if you can avoid it, and keep a close eye on small children and elders, who are much more vulnerable to heat than most adults. Use cool water to cool people down.
2. Start a garden. It isn't too late to start one today in most cases. Build some raised beds, or sheet mulch (cover with newspaper and a lot of organic material - manure, grass clippings, non-weed seed yard waste, compost), and let it all decompose. Or plant some herbs and vegetables in pots. But whatever you do, start thinking ahead to your long term food security. Every meal and nutritious bit of produce you grow is something you don't have to buy. Many seed companies have fall sales - stock up on extra seeds for yourself and your neighborhood, just in case next year your food budget is stretched.
3. Store food. With rising food prices, it would be nuts not to. Buy local and organic when you can, but store bulk local grains, local honey, dried beans, and put up some other items. Food storage doesn't have to be costly - each week, alot $10 to food storage. The first week, you might buy 10lbs of organic, whole wheat pasta, or 20lbs of organic rice. The next, a 5lb box of salt and two bags of dried pinto beans. The following week a bottle of vitamins. As it gets cooler, and fall produce starts to come in, a cooler on your back porch will store bulk potatoes and onions that often can be purchased at very little. Buy a little extra of everything you eat, and practice cooking it. Remember, one of the consequences of hard times is family lose their homes and security. You may want this food not because there's none in stores, but because you have no money, and the food pantry is stretched to the limit, or you may want it because your sister in law and her two kids are sleeping in your living room after their house was foreclosed upon, or perhaps you'll want to be able to continue to give to charity, even when your resources are stretched by rising gas and food prices. Don't forget to put some water in old soda bottles and other heavy duty beverage containers, and store it in your freezer or add a little bleach and put it in a cool, dark place.
4. Get out of debt! I can't emphasize this too strongly - make some cut backs and start paying down your credit cards. Get rid of the cable, the dinners out, the Sunday drive, the hobby expenditures. Pay down consumer debt first, car loans next, then your mortgage. The more equity you have in your home, the less likely you are to lose it if you stop being able to pay the mortgage.
5. Get to know your neighbors. Talk to them. Make friends with them. Find out about them. Have an open house, a barbecue, a neighborhood party. Start a local community group, a home church, a local minyan. Get the kids together to play. Start thinking in terms of neighborhood solidarity - can I pick up some stuff for you at the farmer's market? Why don't you borrow my vacuum cleaner, instead of replacing yours? Can I feed your cats/help you out, etc... You need them and they need you. Start carpooling. Start a community garden. Get together to knit, or can or just talk. But start something.
6. Have a plan. That is, think about what you would do if your income was halved or prices doubled? What if someone lost their job? What about health insurance? What if the power was out for an extended period, or like millions of Britons today, you had no safe water supply? What if something happened when the kids were at school and parents at work - how would you get in touch with one another? Cell phones may not be working - do you have a meeting place? If you had to evacuate, do you have the basics - copies of id, enough gas to get somewhere safe, food and water for a few days, changes of clothes, basic medical care? Think about what is most possible in your area, and be prepared for it.
7. Get on your bike and start riding, on your feet and start walking. Most of us aren't used to getting around by human power anymore, and we need to be. Suburbia is often pretty feasible if you have a bike. A 5-10 mile bike ride is quite doable for most healthy people, and even many unhealthy ones can cover a few miles on an adult trike or recumbent - my father, overweight, with lung disease and severe arthritis and nearly 60 rides his every day. A five mile round trip walk should be doable for most of us. And most of us do have some resources within walking distance. It just takes practice and energy. Cheap bikes are widely available, although investing more money will often get you a more comfortable one.
8. Gradually start to replace powered items with human powered ones. Get a manual grain grinder for grinding flour for bread - fresh ground tastes better anyway. A push mower for the lawn. Some hand tools. A crank flashlight or two and a crank cell phone charger. You don't have to go crazy, but as things need replacing, used items come up or opportunity arises, make sure you can be comfortable.
9. Protect the vulnerable. Breastfeed your baby if at all possible, and don't wean early - disease proliferates where hunger or flooding or other problems come. If you run out of food, you'll make milk for a little while in a crisis. Keep the lives of babies and young children as stable and secure as possible, and watch their nutrition carefully. Prepare for older children in an unstable situation - buy clothes and shoes in larger sizes at yard sales, and help them understand what is happening. Be prepared to teach your kids at home for a while if necessary. Also be ready to take elderly people into your home, to check on neighbors. Stock extra medications, and have backup plans for caring for seniors and the disabled.
10. Support your local poverty support programs, and build new ones. Local food pantries and fuel assitance programs are stretched to the max. Show up at yours and help them find new sources of food - grow food for them, volunteer, raise funds. You may need them someday.
Now the neat thing about all of this is that if you do these things, you'll save some money in the long run, get more exercise, eat better, have better tasting food, a happier neighborhood, and a greater degree of personal security. Most of these preparations can be undertaken for very little money - and some are free. So get too it, folks - mock away, but protect yourselves.
Cheers,
Sharon
Monday, July 23, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 13 - Catch Some Rain
Right now, my garden is getting a lovely watering. We're fortunate to be enjoying a summer with a nice mix of rain and sun. I know many people all over the world right now are suffering through a hot, dry summer, and often, serious local drought. This is a real problem - the Southwestern Drought is essentially expected not to end in our lifetimes. Much of the best farmland in the world is now in drought conditions. We're deeply grateful that our land is pretty well situated for water. Still, we don't take it for granted. We mulch our gardens, pour our dishwashing liquid and cooled cooking water on the potted plants, use a composting toilet and otherwise focus a lot of energy on the conservation of water, simply because we don't like waste, and because the time may come when these practices will be necessary.
Which is why it is so urgent that, whenever possible, we keep collect water off our roofs. Water that hits asphalt or gravel represents a real management problem for towns and cities, causing flooding, and when it soaks into sewers, it is contaminated. It would be wiser to catch water as much as possible where it strikes the ground and make the best use we can of it - for irrigation, clothes washing, hair washing. I was horrified to learn that some American cities prohibit rainbarrels - personally, I think this is madness. I understand that dry areas depend on their runoff, but in many cases, such a large portion is lost or contaminated in heavy rainfall that allowing homeowners to capture a few hundred gallons would represent a signficant net benefit. And because industrial agriculture always uses more water than growing your own food, if people are capturing rain water for irrigation, that has even greater net benefits. We simply can't afford to let this resource go.
The simplest option here is a rainbarrel - any food grade plastic barrel will do, and there are cheap ones out there, or you can get something pretty and fancy that will make your homeowner's association happy. Hook it up to your gutters, and you are set to go. A few more and you've got more. You can put a couple on your barn, or your garage as well, or even your garden shed, so water things there.
Even better for us, is the cistern. This house came with an old one, but after several failed attempts to fix it, we're waiting to have the gentleman come and dig us another one. The beauty of the cistern is that it can collect vastly more water (5,000 gallons - our rainbarrels together can only collect 200), and because it is set in the ground below the frost line, won't freeze. The whole set up, including a hand pump for our kitchen sink costs about $1800 dollars - not cheap, but worth it for the security of non-electric, soft water (our well water is hard as nails and has sulfur and iron galore) that comes into the house without going out with a bucket. It cost only a little more than a manual pump on our drilled well.
Rainwater is great for irrigation, and some people even raise fish in their rain barrels. I can't help you much there, but I do know that I love the way my hair feels when it is washed with rainwater. I can't wait for the cistern to be finished!
Sharon
Which is why it is so urgent that, whenever possible, we keep collect water off our roofs. Water that hits asphalt or gravel represents a real management problem for towns and cities, causing flooding, and when it soaks into sewers, it is contaminated. It would be wiser to catch water as much as possible where it strikes the ground and make the best use we can of it - for irrigation, clothes washing, hair washing. I was horrified to learn that some American cities prohibit rainbarrels - personally, I think this is madness. I understand that dry areas depend on their runoff, but in many cases, such a large portion is lost or contaminated in heavy rainfall that allowing homeowners to capture a few hundred gallons would represent a signficant net benefit. And because industrial agriculture always uses more water than growing your own food, if people are capturing rain water for irrigation, that has even greater net benefits. We simply can't afford to let this resource go.
The simplest option here is a rainbarrel - any food grade plastic barrel will do, and there are cheap ones out there, or you can get something pretty and fancy that will make your homeowner's association happy. Hook it up to your gutters, and you are set to go. A few more and you've got more. You can put a couple on your barn, or your garage as well, or even your garden shed, so water things there.
Even better for us, is the cistern. This house came with an old one, but after several failed attempts to fix it, we're waiting to have the gentleman come and dig us another one. The beauty of the cistern is that it can collect vastly more water (5,000 gallons - our rainbarrels together can only collect 200), and because it is set in the ground below the frost line, won't freeze. The whole set up, including a hand pump for our kitchen sink costs about $1800 dollars - not cheap, but worth it for the security of non-electric, soft water (our well water is hard as nails and has sulfur and iron galore) that comes into the house without going out with a bucket. It cost only a little more than a manual pump on our drilled well.
Rainwater is great for irrigation, and some people even raise fish in their rain barrels. I can't help you much there, but I do know that I love the way my hair feels when it is washed with rainwater. I can't wait for the cistern to be finished!
Sharon
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Jack of All Trades, Mistress of None
Well, if the typing here gets really poor, my advance apologies. At our local
"Preservation of the Union 1865" celebration, friends of ours gave us a kitten they had need of a home for. The kitten finds my typing endlessly entertaining and is trying to eat my hands, which is a real speed reducer. We're still trying to find him a name - something Unionist and Civil War related seems appropriate. If only General Lafayette McLaws had been a northerner - "McLaws" really is a good cat name. Suggestions for relevant unionist (not necessarily military) figures are more than welcome.
The other night I was mulling over my need to acquire new skills. I want goats, and have to learn to milk them and trim hooves. The house needs some minor repairs that I could probably do myself with a little study. And I am trying, painfully, to become a good enough seamstress to actually make myself something I would be seen in public in. And I was struck by the sheer number of things I have to learn, and have learned to do, often in a quite half-assed way over the last few years.
This isn't wholly new territory to me. English Literature is one of those fields that steals a great deal from other sources. I once made a list - to study Early Modern Poetry I also studied Greek, Latin and French, took graduate courses in History, Philosophy, Economics, Art History, and Demographics, and picked up a fair amount of Sociology, Anthropology and Politics. And I came out of the process with a limited but functional ability to talk in each of those fields. Someone who really knew what they were doing would laugh at me, of course, but that was fine - what I had managed to achieve was the ability to synthesize.
And, of course, when I started writing about peak oil and environmental issues that meant more physics, geology, history, mathematics, biology, meterology and statistics. Again, no one would ever mistake me for an expert in any of the above fields, but I've gotten so that I mostly understand what real experts are talking about, and I can, again, synthesize it - I can bring together politics and physics, for example. And I don't mind being laughed at by the people who really know what they are talking about.
The funny thing is that almost everyone in the peak oil and climate change movements are operating outside their fields. Richard Heinberg, for example, studied politics and music, not depletion rates at school. Julian Darley used to write screenplays. Vandana Shiva studied physics before she became an environmental activist. James Kunstler is a journalist. Even people like Ken Deffeyes, who are experts in a particular area (petroleum geology) find themselves getting out of their fields and offering investment and political advice. It is the disease of new fields and new realities - everyone is stretching themselves out of their natural range. And in many cases, I think that's good. For all that deep expertise is valuable, there's also value in looking at things from an outside perspective.
Agriculture is the ultimately "jack of all trades" job - not only do you have to hold all the basic farm knowledge in your head, but there's mechanics (gotta fix the equipment when it breaks down), metal working (don't have that one yet), tree felling (I only do little ones, and I don't touch chainsaws), biology and chemistry (soil science, animal husbandry), botany (plants), dealing with what I'm producing (herbalism, fiber production, cooking, dyeing), and...you get the picture. Add to that the skill sets that go with frugality and dinner, and it is quite a range of things that I haven't even attempted to the ones I have. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming.
The good thing, however, lest one get overwhelmed, is this. In order to develop functional skills at something, you don't actually have to devote that much time or energy to it. You simply have to develop a very basic, functional knowledge. And once you've done that, you can improve upon your skills, or teach someone else so that they can do so. You don't have to be very good at these things.
For example, let's take knitting as a model. What's "good enough?" A good enough knitter knows a few basic stitches and techniques, and the rough outlines of garment constructure. He knows what tools he needs, and which one he doesn't, and he does it well enough to teach someone else how to knit. But the great thing for the person who doesn't like knitting that much, or hasn't very much time to do it, is that all he really has to do is be able to make a basic sweater, gloves or socks. It doesn't have to be a really pretty sweater, just keep someone warm without falling apart. Getting from 0 knitting knowledge to a basic sweater is a matter of months of spare-time work, weeks if you can take a class or get lessons from someone really knowledgeable. It doesn't take years. A couple of good books, and he's set for pretty much any purpose.
And let us say that our knitter likes knitting fine, but would rather cook. The good thing, is that he now has enough skill to teach the basics to his children or his spouse or his friends in his community. And with a good book, once the basics become muscle memory, his son can become an expert knitter, based on Daddy's teaching and self-teaching.
The same is true for almost any skill. I think people are often intimidated when they approach creating an even partly self-sufficient life by the sheer number of things they have to learn to do. Now it is true that if you live in comparative isolation, you have to do all those things to your own satisfaction - not necessarily well, but at least well enough to content you and not make your life more difficult. But if you are imagining a future of pulling together with other people, and those other people don't know it yet ;-), it is good to remember that the knowledge you need is actually pretty basic. You don't have to be a great talent at anything - just jack of all trades (or all the ones of use to you), and master of none.
Sharon
"Preservation of the Union 1865" celebration, friends of ours gave us a kitten they had need of a home for. The kitten finds my typing endlessly entertaining and is trying to eat my hands, which is a real speed reducer. We're still trying to find him a name - something Unionist and Civil War related seems appropriate. If only General Lafayette McLaws had been a northerner - "McLaws" really is a good cat name. Suggestions for relevant unionist (not necessarily military) figures are more than welcome.
The other night I was mulling over my need to acquire new skills. I want goats, and have to learn to milk them and trim hooves. The house needs some minor repairs that I could probably do myself with a little study. And I am trying, painfully, to become a good enough seamstress to actually make myself something I would be seen in public in. And I was struck by the sheer number of things I have to learn, and have learned to do, often in a quite half-assed way over the last few years.
This isn't wholly new territory to me. English Literature is one of those fields that steals a great deal from other sources. I once made a list - to study Early Modern Poetry I also studied Greek, Latin and French, took graduate courses in History, Philosophy, Economics, Art History, and Demographics, and picked up a fair amount of Sociology, Anthropology and Politics. And I came out of the process with a limited but functional ability to talk in each of those fields. Someone who really knew what they were doing would laugh at me, of course, but that was fine - what I had managed to achieve was the ability to synthesize.
And, of course, when I started writing about peak oil and environmental issues that meant more physics, geology, history, mathematics, biology, meterology and statistics. Again, no one would ever mistake me for an expert in any of the above fields, but I've gotten so that I mostly understand what real experts are talking about, and I can, again, synthesize it - I can bring together politics and physics, for example. And I don't mind being laughed at by the people who really know what they are talking about.
The funny thing is that almost everyone in the peak oil and climate change movements are operating outside their fields. Richard Heinberg, for example, studied politics and music, not depletion rates at school. Julian Darley used to write screenplays. Vandana Shiva studied physics before she became an environmental activist. James Kunstler is a journalist. Even people like Ken Deffeyes, who are experts in a particular area (petroleum geology) find themselves getting out of their fields and offering investment and political advice. It is the disease of new fields and new realities - everyone is stretching themselves out of their natural range. And in many cases, I think that's good. For all that deep expertise is valuable, there's also value in looking at things from an outside perspective.
Agriculture is the ultimately "jack of all trades" job - not only do you have to hold all the basic farm knowledge in your head, but there's mechanics (gotta fix the equipment when it breaks down), metal working (don't have that one yet), tree felling (I only do little ones, and I don't touch chainsaws), biology and chemistry (soil science, animal husbandry), botany (plants), dealing with what I'm producing (herbalism, fiber production, cooking, dyeing), and...you get the picture. Add to that the skill sets that go with frugality and dinner, and it is quite a range of things that I haven't even attempted to the ones I have. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming.
The good thing, however, lest one get overwhelmed, is this. In order to develop functional skills at something, you don't actually have to devote that much time or energy to it. You simply have to develop a very basic, functional knowledge. And once you've done that, you can improve upon your skills, or teach someone else so that they can do so. You don't have to be very good at these things.
For example, let's take knitting as a model. What's "good enough?" A good enough knitter knows a few basic stitches and techniques, and the rough outlines of garment constructure. He knows what tools he needs, and which one he doesn't, and he does it well enough to teach someone else how to knit. But the great thing for the person who doesn't like knitting that much, or hasn't very much time to do it, is that all he really has to do is be able to make a basic sweater, gloves or socks. It doesn't have to be a really pretty sweater, just keep someone warm without falling apart. Getting from 0 knitting knowledge to a basic sweater is a matter of months of spare-time work, weeks if you can take a class or get lessons from someone really knowledgeable. It doesn't take years. A couple of good books, and he's set for pretty much any purpose.
And let us say that our knitter likes knitting fine, but would rather cook. The good thing, is that he now has enough skill to teach the basics to his children or his spouse or his friends in his community. And with a good book, once the basics become muscle memory, his son can become an expert knitter, based on Daddy's teaching and self-teaching.
The same is true for almost any skill. I think people are often intimidated when they approach creating an even partly self-sufficient life by the sheer number of things they have to learn to do. Now it is true that if you live in comparative isolation, you have to do all those things to your own satisfaction - not necessarily well, but at least well enough to content you and not make your life more difficult. But if you are imagining a future of pulling together with other people, and those other people don't know it yet ;-), it is good to remember that the knowledge you need is actually pretty basic. You don't have to be a great talent at anything - just jack of all trades (or all the ones of use to you), and master of none.
Sharon
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Talking Population With the Old Men
Today is World Population Day, and again, the laments from my fellows on the ecological left are singing out in semi-unison "But no one is talking about population." I always smile when I hear this, because if you are a woman in the environmental movement with four kids, it does tend to seem as though we *are* talking about population, and not just on World Population Day. About 1/4 of my mail is about population - mostly about my personal contribution to it. And every time this subject comes up on the blog I get my ass toasted by all the flames ;-)
Fortunately, I'm a pale sort and the only way I can get decent color for a bathing suit is to get my heinie roasted now again, so it serves a purpose. Heck, let's do it again.
And frankly, I think it is really important that I talk about population - which is why I bring it up so much, heat or no (although I really wouldn't hate it if I had a little company among the similarly imperfect - I keep hoping for Rob Hopkins to jump in ;-). Because if those of us who have kids, even too many kids, don't participate in this discussion, the population debate will go on without us. Up to now, most of the loudest voices in this discussion have been men, mostly old men - Albert Bartlett, Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and, of course, the grand old man of the subject, Thomas Malthus. And I admire and respect these voices and think much of what they say is true - not all of it, but a good deal. But if all of us, who do speak from a different experience, especially (but not exclusively) those women whose bodies any policies will play out in don't talk, don't speak from our perspective, we're in big trouble.
So I write about this, knowing that my position is suspect, my limitations visible, and with the pitter patter of little ecological footprints running about, but also knowing that because of this, when I say "let's talk about population" at least a few people might just pause and think that we can have this conversation. That some of the people who think that a conversation about population is just going to be a long screed about how they or their religion or their gender or their politics is wrong might know that at least one voice isn't going there. Or at least they might feel like there's someone else there to take the heat.
At least, I hope that's what will happen. And I have the hope that people might think that if I came to the table, the table might seem less a place for two hostile sides to bang their heads against each other, but for voices from the ambiguous middle to start to find a ground to speak on. Perhaps I flatter myself. I want to see population on the agenda everywhere, and after I point out to the ZPG folks that I'm something of fraught advocate, I'm very firm on the fact that I will work with them to get the discussion to the table.
But if I bring this to the table, I'm also going to bring a perspective that begins from the premise that we have to respect and trust the people most affected -women. I think that not only because I am one, but because I'm truly aware of the limitations of statistics and science, and why this isn't just a conversation about demography. I write from the perspective of someone whose physical body has experienced almost everything that can happen to someone in their childbearing years. I've written the next paragraph about 50 times and deleted it, because frankly, this is more than I want people to know about me. But I'm going to include them anyway because I think there's some real urgency to knowing where we speak from. And I think my personal desire for privacy may be less important than that we talk honestly about this.
I've gotten pregnant by intent and by accident, wept with frustration when I wasn't pregnant and with panic when I was unexpectedly. I've gotten pregnant in a secure marriage and been pregnant by a man who told me he'd leave me if I had the baby. I've gotten pregnant using every form of birth control known to man, often in combination, including those that aren't supposed to have a meaningful margin of error. I've endured side effects from birth control and miserable pregnancies as well. I've miscarried multiple times, and wished desperately for the continuance of a pregnancy. I've had an abortion, been grateful for my freedom to do so, and also regretted beyond measure having had it. I've given birth to four beautiful, wonderful children. I've had health scares and nearly lost an infant, had a premature baby and one that wouldn't come out even more than 2 weeks late. I've been angry and ambivalent and sad, and wracked with joy and delight and love.
I've breastfed and struggled to breastfeed. I've had a disabled child and non-disabled ones. I am now, in my mid-30s, done (barring any other weird miracles of fertility) with childbearing, although we hope someday to adopt. And there are plenty of experiences out there, thank G-d, that I've never had. But within those limits, I have lived in my body a significant part of the material reality of our childbearing, our medical system, and motherhood. Now that's not all there is to say about population, but I flatter myself that that means that I've got something to say that the old men might not.
I'm a pretty blunt person, and writing the above was difficult for me. I can understand, then, why even people who admit we have to talk about population struggle to speak about it. And for women, this can be particularly difficult, because in the abstract conversations about bodies, we bang hard into our real bodies, and our real fears about what can be applied to them. When people speak of abortion, as a solution, I think about my own, about the physical pain and deep grief it caused me - about the idea that someone would have a right to order me to act surgically. When we talk about one child policies, I look at my autistic, disabled son and ask "If I had had only one child, what would be his hope of survival and success in a depleted world? Who would care for him when I am gone? Who would love him and ensure his survival?" When we talk about birth control, I think about getting pregnant while breastfeeding, using condoms and the pill - and yes, I know that's statistically unlikely. But I'm here as the voice of the statistically unlikely - the real woman into whose body devices must be inserted. When we talk about abstinence, I wonder what the price of the failure of abstinence will be - will others pay a price I didn't? I wonder whether other women will always have the power to say no freely.
And of course, there's the blurring of personal history. When I talk about my implication in the population issue, I am necessarily talking about my real, here, present children who I love. It is one thing to acknowledge moral failure, and another to imply in any sense that I regret my children (nothing could be further from the truth, obviously). I met a woman at the Community Solutions Conference who told me that she worked for years for various environmental organizations, and never talked about her six children - children born before most of those organizations were founded. I've said this before, but ultimately, a movement that wants people to feel ashamed of the children they do have is bound to fail. So too is one that forgets that population is not a subject that comes up in isolation - that people have children for complicated reasons, and that things like money and power and military policy and medical care are mixed into this mess - if we try to talk about population without talking about the world around it, we will fail to change anything.
Demographers historically talk about population in terms of the I=PAT formulation, invented by Paul Erlich, famous for the book _The Population Bomb_. I is total impact here, and it is the product of Population, times Affluence (consumption) and Technology (Technology here implies pollution, but it is interesting to me that this acknowledges that pollution and technology are so deeply intertwined). But feminist critics of the I=PAT formulation such as T. Patricia Hynes, in her book _Taking Population Out of the Equation_ have pointed out that the I=PAT formula leaves all actors out of the equation - it is simply passive. That means it conceals power relationships - for example, the way that western consumption influences patterns of reproduction in the third world. That is, the way our need for endless stuff creates an incentive to have more kids to move into the factories. It conceals the realities that the ability to avoid pregnancy is often about power, access to medicine and war - a woman who knows her children are going to be impressed into service in the military, for example, has only one path of resistance if she wishes to have her children live - to have many children.
Donnella Meadows, one of the authors of _The Limits of Growth_ writes about her own experiences of seeing Hynes and others complicate the I=PAT formula here: http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn575ipated. Meadows was initially resistant, but then says, she began to reconsider her equation when she began to think about how the disproportionate impact of things like the military and corporate power affect the equation,
"An equation was beginning to form in my head:
Impact equals Military plus Large Business plus Small Business plus Government plus Luxury Consumption plus Subsistence Consumption
Each of those term has its own P and A and T. Very messy. Probably some double counting and some terms left out. But no more right or wrong, really, than IPAT.
Use a different lens and you see different things, you ask different questions, you find different answers. What you see through any lens is in fact there, though it is never all that is there. It's important to remember, whatever lens you use, that it lets you see some things, but it prevents you from seeing others."
This is my experience as well - the way we phrase the discussion now is going to shape whether we are able to talk about population, and how, and whether we actually get anywhere. What we include and what exclude, how we think about religion, politics, war, justice, sex and everything else has to come with us to the table. That doesn't mean we can't narrow things down for the purpose of discussion - we'll have to. But how we narrow it, and who we bring to the table matters here. "Talking about Population" from environmentalists cannot be a code term for "Let's all agree that we shouldn't be having babies." I don't think it is for most people, but sometimes when I hear people lamenting that we can't talk about population, I think the problem may be the terms we're talking in.
Here are some things I think we have to talk about. If we're talking about voluntary limitations, do we mean really voluntary, or the kind of voluntary where you'll intimidate me if I don't comply? Can we offer financial and political incentives for people to choose fewer children without discriminating against minority groups who choose to pay the price? How do we deal with power disparities, like women who are victims of violence and the poor who may have limited control of their own fertility? Will we be improving the medical system so that someone's one child gets to live to a reasonable old age?
What will we do for the disabled? If I'd only had Eli, what assurance would there be that after my husband and I are gone, there will be someone to care for him? How about elderly parents? My husband and I have 7 parents between us and he's an only child. Will we form low-energy, low cost, human powered and humane ways to help us with this? What about women in India, who have to have 6 children in order to be certain one will live long enough to care for their parents in their old age. How will we make sure that a woman in India who has only one or two children does not starve to death when she gets old? Is it better to put our resources into discouraging her from having kids, or ensuring the ones who are born get to live?
What about war? Will the state be allowed to take my single child away and sacrifice him or her on the alter of resource wars? If someone voluntarily sacrifices their right to more children, must they also sacrifice those children's lives?
What about accidents? If we had a population policy, how would you treat someone who becomes pregnant by accident, or an abusive marriage, or by rape? Will we be requiring abortions? Pressuring girls into accepting birth control devices? Mandating sterilization? Offering it? Subsidizing it?
How will we empower women to control their own fertility? Will we grant universal health care? What do we tell women in poor nations who need children to grow food - go hungry for the good of the world? What will we do to prevent rape, to prevent domestic violence, to make sure women don't have to become prostitutes or sell themselves into marriage to eat?
How will we treat the religious, those who honestly believe that G-d requires something different from them? How will we bring religious communities respectfully into this discussion and listen to their voices? How will we bring pooor women to the table to speak as equals with the old men?
What will we teach our sons and daughters about sex, love and family in a world with less energy, less access to birth control and medical care for many? What kind of family structures will substitute for the work and emotional needs now made up by aunts and uncles and cousins, nephew and nieces? How will the voluntarily childless get access to family life, ensure security in their old age?
I don't claim we have to have perfect solutions in place before we have this conversation, but we cannot simply speak in isolation of "how do we get the population down" - this is a messy, cluttered question. As Meadows put it, the equation is imperfect, complicated, troubling - and that may be the only way we can talk about this. Nor do I expect to like the answers I get in many cases - and that too is real. The real test of how committed we are to preventing disaster will be how we act when confronted with unpleasant truths that hurt us - whether, in the blur of our hurt, we can look past our personal feelings to the consequences of others, whether we can recognize that we don't want to know or acknowledge all truths, but that we have to begin in honesty, even if in pain.
So I join my voice with those who say today, on World Population Day, we *must* talk about population. We have to begin now, and bring everyone to the table. We have to begin going gently to a policy that will stabilize the world's population. But to get there, we have to decide how to shape the lens and the conversation so that it opens up as much view as possible, and doesn't close it off.
This is going to be a hard conversation - as hard as the hardest we're going to have. It will hurt - it already does. But I think the only possible answer is for all of us to try and take the broadest possible view, with the greatest possible courage and integrity. I don't know if I can do that - this issue has tested my integrity before, but I'd like to try, and I'd like the rest of us to try to begin.
Shalom,
Sharon
Fortunately, I'm a pale sort and the only way I can get decent color for a bathing suit is to get my heinie roasted now again, so it serves a purpose. Heck, let's do it again.
And frankly, I think it is really important that I talk about population - which is why I bring it up so much, heat or no (although I really wouldn't hate it if I had a little company among the similarly imperfect - I keep hoping for Rob Hopkins to jump in ;-). Because if those of us who have kids, even too many kids, don't participate in this discussion, the population debate will go on without us. Up to now, most of the loudest voices in this discussion have been men, mostly old men - Albert Bartlett, Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and, of course, the grand old man of the subject, Thomas Malthus. And I admire and respect these voices and think much of what they say is true - not all of it, but a good deal. But if all of us, who do speak from a different experience, especially (but not exclusively) those women whose bodies any policies will play out in don't talk, don't speak from our perspective, we're in big trouble.
So I write about this, knowing that my position is suspect, my limitations visible, and with the pitter patter of little ecological footprints running about, but also knowing that because of this, when I say "let's talk about population" at least a few people might just pause and think that we can have this conversation. That some of the people who think that a conversation about population is just going to be a long screed about how they or their religion or their gender or their politics is wrong might know that at least one voice isn't going there. Or at least they might feel like there's someone else there to take the heat.
At least, I hope that's what will happen. And I have the hope that people might think that if I came to the table, the table might seem less a place for two hostile sides to bang their heads against each other, but for voices from the ambiguous middle to start to find a ground to speak on. Perhaps I flatter myself. I want to see population on the agenda everywhere, and after I point out to the ZPG folks that I'm something of fraught advocate, I'm very firm on the fact that I will work with them to get the discussion to the table.
But if I bring this to the table, I'm also going to bring a perspective that begins from the premise that we have to respect and trust the people most affected -women. I think that not only because I am one, but because I'm truly aware of the limitations of statistics and science, and why this isn't just a conversation about demography. I write from the perspective of someone whose physical body has experienced almost everything that can happen to someone in their childbearing years. I've written the next paragraph about 50 times and deleted it, because frankly, this is more than I want people to know about me. But I'm going to include them anyway because I think there's some real urgency to knowing where we speak from. And I think my personal desire for privacy may be less important than that we talk honestly about this.
I've gotten pregnant by intent and by accident, wept with frustration when I wasn't pregnant and with panic when I was unexpectedly. I've gotten pregnant in a secure marriage and been pregnant by a man who told me he'd leave me if I had the baby. I've gotten pregnant using every form of birth control known to man, often in combination, including those that aren't supposed to have a meaningful margin of error. I've endured side effects from birth control and miserable pregnancies as well. I've miscarried multiple times, and wished desperately for the continuance of a pregnancy. I've had an abortion, been grateful for my freedom to do so, and also regretted beyond measure having had it. I've given birth to four beautiful, wonderful children. I've had health scares and nearly lost an infant, had a premature baby and one that wouldn't come out even more than 2 weeks late. I've been angry and ambivalent and sad, and wracked with joy and delight and love.
I've breastfed and struggled to breastfeed. I've had a disabled child and non-disabled ones. I am now, in my mid-30s, done (barring any other weird miracles of fertility) with childbearing, although we hope someday to adopt. And there are plenty of experiences out there, thank G-d, that I've never had. But within those limits, I have lived in my body a significant part of the material reality of our childbearing, our medical system, and motherhood. Now that's not all there is to say about population, but I flatter myself that that means that I've got something to say that the old men might not.
I'm a pretty blunt person, and writing the above was difficult for me. I can understand, then, why even people who admit we have to talk about population struggle to speak about it. And for women, this can be particularly difficult, because in the abstract conversations about bodies, we bang hard into our real bodies, and our real fears about what can be applied to them. When people speak of abortion, as a solution, I think about my own, about the physical pain and deep grief it caused me - about the idea that someone would have a right to order me to act surgically. When we talk about one child policies, I look at my autistic, disabled son and ask "If I had had only one child, what would be his hope of survival and success in a depleted world? Who would care for him when I am gone? Who would love him and ensure his survival?" When we talk about birth control, I think about getting pregnant while breastfeeding, using condoms and the pill - and yes, I know that's statistically unlikely. But I'm here as the voice of the statistically unlikely - the real woman into whose body devices must be inserted. When we talk about abstinence, I wonder what the price of the failure of abstinence will be - will others pay a price I didn't? I wonder whether other women will always have the power to say no freely.
And of course, there's the blurring of personal history. When I talk about my implication in the population issue, I am necessarily talking about my real, here, present children who I love. It is one thing to acknowledge moral failure, and another to imply in any sense that I regret my children (nothing could be further from the truth, obviously). I met a woman at the Community Solutions Conference who told me that she worked for years for various environmental organizations, and never talked about her six children - children born before most of those organizations were founded. I've said this before, but ultimately, a movement that wants people to feel ashamed of the children they do have is bound to fail. So too is one that forgets that population is not a subject that comes up in isolation - that people have children for complicated reasons, and that things like money and power and military policy and medical care are mixed into this mess - if we try to talk about population without talking about the world around it, we will fail to change anything.
Demographers historically talk about population in terms of the I=PAT formulation, invented by Paul Erlich, famous for the book _The Population Bomb_. I is total impact here, and it is the product of Population, times Affluence (consumption) and Technology (Technology here implies pollution, but it is interesting to me that this acknowledges that pollution and technology are so deeply intertwined). But feminist critics of the I=PAT formulation such as T. Patricia Hynes, in her book _Taking Population Out of the Equation_ have pointed out that the I=PAT formula leaves all actors out of the equation - it is simply passive. That means it conceals power relationships - for example, the way that western consumption influences patterns of reproduction in the third world. That is, the way our need for endless stuff creates an incentive to have more kids to move into the factories. It conceals the realities that the ability to avoid pregnancy is often about power, access to medicine and war - a woman who knows her children are going to be impressed into service in the military, for example, has only one path of resistance if she wishes to have her children live - to have many children.
Donnella Meadows, one of the authors of _The Limits of Growth_ writes about her own experiences of seeing Hynes and others complicate the I=PAT formula here: http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn575ipated. Meadows was initially resistant, but then says, she began to reconsider her equation when she began to think about how the disproportionate impact of things like the military and corporate power affect the equation,
"An equation was beginning to form in my head:
Impact equals Military plus Large Business plus Small Business plus Government plus Luxury Consumption plus Subsistence Consumption
Each of those term has its own P and A and T. Very messy. Probably some double counting and some terms left out. But no more right or wrong, really, than IPAT.
Use a different lens and you see different things, you ask different questions, you find different answers. What you see through any lens is in fact there, though it is never all that is there. It's important to remember, whatever lens you use, that it lets you see some things, but it prevents you from seeing others."
This is my experience as well - the way we phrase the discussion now is going to shape whether we are able to talk about population, and how, and whether we actually get anywhere. What we include and what exclude, how we think about religion, politics, war, justice, sex and everything else has to come with us to the table. That doesn't mean we can't narrow things down for the purpose of discussion - we'll have to. But how we narrow it, and who we bring to the table matters here. "Talking about Population" from environmentalists cannot be a code term for "Let's all agree that we shouldn't be having babies." I don't think it is for most people, but sometimes when I hear people lamenting that we can't talk about population, I think the problem may be the terms we're talking in.
Here are some things I think we have to talk about. If we're talking about voluntary limitations, do we mean really voluntary, or the kind of voluntary where you'll intimidate me if I don't comply? Can we offer financial and political incentives for people to choose fewer children without discriminating against minority groups who choose to pay the price? How do we deal with power disparities, like women who are victims of violence and the poor who may have limited control of their own fertility? Will we be improving the medical system so that someone's one child gets to live to a reasonable old age?
What will we do for the disabled? If I'd only had Eli, what assurance would there be that after my husband and I are gone, there will be someone to care for him? How about elderly parents? My husband and I have 7 parents between us and he's an only child. Will we form low-energy, low cost, human powered and humane ways to help us with this? What about women in India, who have to have 6 children in order to be certain one will live long enough to care for their parents in their old age. How will we make sure that a woman in India who has only one or two children does not starve to death when she gets old? Is it better to put our resources into discouraging her from having kids, or ensuring the ones who are born get to live?
What about war? Will the state be allowed to take my single child away and sacrifice him or her on the alter of resource wars? If someone voluntarily sacrifices their right to more children, must they also sacrifice those children's lives?
What about accidents? If we had a population policy, how would you treat someone who becomes pregnant by accident, or an abusive marriage, or by rape? Will we be requiring abortions? Pressuring girls into accepting birth control devices? Mandating sterilization? Offering it? Subsidizing it?
How will we empower women to control their own fertility? Will we grant universal health care? What do we tell women in poor nations who need children to grow food - go hungry for the good of the world? What will we do to prevent rape, to prevent domestic violence, to make sure women don't have to become prostitutes or sell themselves into marriage to eat?
How will we treat the religious, those who honestly believe that G-d requires something different from them? How will we bring religious communities respectfully into this discussion and listen to their voices? How will we bring pooor women to the table to speak as equals with the old men?
What will we teach our sons and daughters about sex, love and family in a world with less energy, less access to birth control and medical care for many? What kind of family structures will substitute for the work and emotional needs now made up by aunts and uncles and cousins, nephew and nieces? How will the voluntarily childless get access to family life, ensure security in their old age?
I don't claim we have to have perfect solutions in place before we have this conversation, but we cannot simply speak in isolation of "how do we get the population down" - this is a messy, cluttered question. As Meadows put it, the equation is imperfect, complicated, troubling - and that may be the only way we can talk about this. Nor do I expect to like the answers I get in many cases - and that too is real. The real test of how committed we are to preventing disaster will be how we act when confronted with unpleasant truths that hurt us - whether, in the blur of our hurt, we can look past our personal feelings to the consequences of others, whether we can recognize that we don't want to know or acknowledge all truths, but that we have to begin in honesty, even if in pain.
So I join my voice with those who say today, on World Population Day, we *must* talk about population. We have to begin now, and bring everyone to the table. We have to begin going gently to a policy that will stabilize the world's population. But to get there, we have to decide how to shape the lens and the conversation so that it opens up as much view as possible, and doesn't close it off.
This is going to be a hard conversation - as hard as the hardest we're going to have. It will hurt - it already does. But I think the only possible answer is for all of us to try and take the broadest possible view, with the greatest possible courage and integrity. I don't know if I can do that - this issue has tested my integrity before, but I'd like to try, and I'd like the rest of us to try to begin.
Shalom,
Sharon
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Just in case you are wondering...
Why I haven't posted in a few days, I did, actually. There's a new post on the side bar "Barefoot, Bearded and In the Kitchen." For reasons that confuse me entirely, blogger posted it as though I had written it days ago, back when I started it. I don't see to be able to fix it, so you'll just have to look down a bit if you want new content ;-).
BTW, I hope I'm going to be meeting some of you folks in the fall - I'm off to the Community Solutions Conference in Yellow Springs Ohio again. I have no idea what I'm speaking on, but I get to hang out with the real famous people and pretend I'm one of them - and much more fun, chat with the regular folks ;-). Let me know if you are going to be there.
Sharon
BTW, I hope I'm going to be meeting some of you folks in the fall - I'm off to the Community Solutions Conference in Yellow Springs Ohio again. I have no idea what I'm speaking on, but I get to hang out with the real famous people and pretend I'm one of them - and much more fun, chat with the regular folks ;-). Let me know if you are going to be there.
Sharon
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Barefoot, Bearded and In the Kitchen: Feminism Post-Peak
I got an email from a reader named Chris who asked me whether all of my emphasis on producing food and meeting our needs at home wasn't antifeminist and pushing women back into the kitchen and out of the workforce, and thus, out of the public sphere. I've gotten this critique before, and I thought it was worth addressing. Chris kindly gave me permission to answer her question here.
There are three related questions here. First of all, is this work mostly going to devolve on women? Are we pushing *women* in particular out of the workforce?
The second is, is this anti-feminist, or bad? That is, are we disempowering women by moving them back into the kitchen, if more women than men end up back in the domestic sphere?
And the third is whether or not the domestic sphere and the public sphere are in conflict here - that is, they were in Victorian times - those who worked in the domestic world were also the disenfranchised. But is that inevitable?
Back in February I wrote a post about Sustainability and the "Mommy Wars" (here:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/home-economics-sustainability-and-mommy.html) in which I argued that honestly, isn't just women who should stay home, that by both preference and necessity, both men and women should consider moving as much of their work to home as possible - seeking to need less, work from home, start home businesses and cottage industries, and to generally integrate domestic and economic life. I argued that doing so is good for children, good for one's personal security and good for marriages, and that many of the things that get blamed on women working actually may be due to the absence of fathers for long hours. As you can imagine, the subject was fairly controversial. I feel very strongly that bringing as much as possible of our work into our local environments is essential - that both men and women need to spend more time at home - which may also be the workplace in many cases.
So I think we can safely say that my own vision of the future is not one in which the only people making yogurt and growing squash are female. In fact, I don't carry those assumptions with me. I managed to grow up without much in the way of gender role expectations at all. My own parents divorced early, and my father had joint custody of his three daughters when we were 7,6, and a baby. He washed clothes, cooked dinner (well), ironed, cleaned (badly) and did exactly the same stuff around his job my mother did around hers. Even before the divorce, my father did all the cooking, and claimed my mother had known how to cook only salad and tuna casserole. In my mother's household, because she's gay, two women did everything - cooked, built bookcases, hung wallpaper, gardened, went to work, did laundry, tended kids. My generation was probably less encumbered by gender expectations than any previous one, and I probably less than average.
My husband also grew up in a divorced household, mostly living with a single parent (his mother), and grew up doing a great deal of the domestic work himself, once he was old enough to be home when his mother wasn't. His father and step-mother also have a quite egalitarian marriage, so our own marriage came with few, if any, gender expectations.
So we both cook, we both clean, I do laundry (because I like it), he does floors (because it bugs him when they are dirty and I could care less), we both knit, we both sew (badly), we both work with wood (badly), we both change the oil. There are a few traditional divisions, mostly because of preferences (He drives, because I hate to, he fixes the lawnmower because I have, ummm...a generous figure and don't fit well underneath in some spots ;-), we also have some atypical things - he changes all the diapers when both of us are present (we made a deal when I was pregnant with #1 that if I was in charge of "input" (nursing) he'd take full responsibility for output (diapers) - I've *never* changed a diaper when he was around), I climb up on the roof and deal with gutters since he's afraid of heights and I'm not. Generally speaking, we have a pretty good balance. And not only do both of us believe in egalitarianism, but we are, unusually for people our age, the products of families that lived remarkably egalitarian lives for their era. This makes a huge difference in our assumptions.
All of which means that I'm always surprised when people assume that women are going to get stuck with all the scut work. But of course, I shouldn't be - the reality of most women's lives is that they work full time outside the home and come home to do a full day of domestic labor, childcare, senior care, etc... I tend to assume that most men are like my father and my husband, and do their full share willingly, on the assumption that it is their job. Unfortunately, that's not true. But I think the example of my family shows that to a large degree, if we want it to be true in the next generation, a large part of that is what we model.
That is, if women tolerate husbands who don't do diapers, if men tolerate wives who won't learn how to manage the finances - we're likely to see those same roles perpetuated. That doesn't mean that every single person needs to do everything equally well - but there are basic competences that everyone should demonstrate, barring a deep inequality in how the work is done. That is, if Dad works 14 hour days driving a long-haul truck so that Mom can stay home with the kids, it is perfectly reasonable to expect Mom to do 14 hours of work herself taking care of the kids and the yard and the domestic work. Work should be evenly divided - period. I've met men who work 50 hour weeks who come home and do all the farm work, while their spouse rest, and women who work 8 hours a day and come home to another 8 hours while their husband watches tv. And ultimately, the responsibility for fixing this problem - for themselves and in the next generation - lies in the participants.
Because household work generally devolves on women, it is no wonder many of them are notably unthrilled at the notion that they could be lucky enough to have to make all their kids' clothes too. And I don't blame them one bit for that. I admit, it is honestly hard for me to fathom a marriage in which labor falls so disproportionately on women, but that is often the reality. The majority of American women do more than 20 hours of household labor and childcare each week above and beyond their paid jobs. The majority of American men do 9 hours. That's a big difference.
So the odds are good that a call for a return to domestic life will fall heavily on women's shoulders, unless both women and men negotiate cultural changes to ensure otherwise. This is, of course, much of the project of feminism. But I think modern feminism has yet to acknowledge how much of its goals and structure were created by cheap energy, and a product of that peculiar, unique and historically unlikely to be repeated abundance. By this I mean that much of what was possible for the women's movement was made possible by cheap energy. For example, the movement of women into the workforce while they had young children was to a large degree as much about refrigeration, electric breast pumps and industrial formula as it was about equal representation in careers. This is hardly the only example of this.
Feminism has, I think, fallen into the economic trap of "externalizing" other costs -for example, while in principle we may care about the rights of poor women, many women who have taken the "go out and work" message are unconcerned about the realities of the poor women and men they employ to mow lawns, clean houses, tend children and care for seniors. The moral responsibility of these acts shouldn't fall only on women - the message that the Nanny's poverty is the sole responsibility of a woman who gets a job, and none of her husband's is nonsense. But there is a reality that when women moved out of the home they left no replacement, leaving the marketplace to provide poorly paid people with few benefits and few comforts to meet the needs both men and women left behind. To feminism's right and credit, feminism has taken up the cause of these women - but it has not always fully credited its impact in creating their situation.
Just as we have to stop externalizing the costs of oil, we have to stop externalizing the costs of the domestic sphere - because these costs are ours to bear. The failures of child nutrition, for example - Americans are documentably getting shorter and less healthy because there is no one there to cook dinner, and industrial agriculture has gained much of its power because we rely upon them to feed us these inadequate foods. Our fossil fuel usage has gone up steadily, in part because we're going places all the time - to work, to daycare, to preschool, to school and etc...
Overwhelmingly, the feminist message was that we should move the dull, rote jobs of domestic life out of the home and into the public economy - to daycare centers and cafeterias and other public utilities. Part of the failure of this project was the failure of government participation - when ordinary people were stuck putting their domestic world into the public economy on their own wages, they got what they could afford - not much. But part of the problem may have come from the notion that political power for women mostly derived from participation in the public sphere in an economic sense - that is, that everyone was best served by getting as many women and men out doing "important" jobs as possible.
There have always been multiple feminisms, so what I am speaking here is of the dominant discourse, which is necessarily watered down by, as Tom Lehrer said of folk songs, "being written by the people." But the dominant discourse of feminism has valued the professional over the private, the money-earning over the work of not needing money, and found political pwoer there. And by pushing both women and men further out into the capitalist economic sphere, and saying that power is to be found there, we've been sold an anti-democratic bill of goods - the notion that the marketplace will fix all of our problems if we all just go out and make enough money to buy solutions has, of course, eroded our democracy.
Someone has to go home, if we are to cease externalizing our costs and deal with the hard realities. In some cases, that may not be possible - the very poor who have to take what work they can, single parents who have no one with whom to share domestic work, etc... these people have few choices. But many of the people reading this blog are not among them - most are middle class or better working families, and many do have better choices. And someone has to go home and stay there, simply because it is manifestly the case that turning domestic work over to the industrial economy is destroying us.
It is worth noting here that one of the reason capitalist feminism succeeded so well while other feminist discourses were lost is that I doubt growth capitalists could have found a way to be happier if they'd commissioned a study. Over a few short decades, nearly every able bodied adult stopped doing work autonomously for themselves, stopped running the home economy (the word economy itself implies home management, not public life) and thus practicing things like frugality and getting along without industry, and started to create new businesses subcontracting out domestic work into industry. While feminism manifestly succeeded in creating more justice in some areas, in others, it simply managed to expand the creation of a new underclass, doing the unpleasant domestic labor we were all being "freed" from - the jobs we did at home, where no one told us what to do or how to do it.
Now I would strongly prefer that there be no distinction here between men and women -in my own marriage, for example, I do the majority of childcare and domestic work during the academic year, when Eric is teaching, and he does it during the summer when I am writing and farming. But this is not feasible for many families, and there are a number of factors, economic (men generally make more money than women), cultural (we have a prejudice against having men care for young children) and biological that are likely to lead to more women being at home than men, particularly younger women and women who choose to have children.
Historically speaking, women with young children who could not afford wet nurses did "women's work". A famous paper in anthropology by Judith Brown, "Note on the Division of Labor by Sex" observes that generally speaking, whether a lot of women do something in a society depends on its compatibility with childcare, whether the work met the criteria, which Brown defines as "...such activities have the following characteristics: they do not require rapt concentration...they are eaily interruptable and easily resumed once interrupted...they do not place the child in potential danger; and they do not require the participant to range very far from home." Making cloth and clothing, cooking, gardening, tending small animals, gathering wild foods... this was women's work to a large degree.
That is not to say that women didn't do other work. But generally speaking, traditional women's work was designed to accomodate the realities of having young children for a decade or so of a woman's productive adult life. No society could afford to lose women's productive labor during the period of childbearing and rearing young children, so the society emphasized that sort of work. Nor could any society afford to lose children to the illnesses and death that faced those who were weaned early. There are other sorts of labor that are also child friendly - many cottage businesses, or even keeping shop, if the shop contains child space are suitable. Indeed, many more jobs could be made child friendly if we wanted them to be, and feminists have for years fought and lost this battle.
In many ways, our present society is even more insistent that we cannot "afford" to lose the productive labor of women during pregnancy, breastfeeding and early childhood. Because of that, industrial substitutes like formula and heavy-duty electric breast pumps are created so that children can be left with other women, and women can return to work that cannot be interrupted easily. With science doing its best to ensure that the consequences to children are less evident and longer-term, we have come to believe that breast is best, but only a tiny bit better, and that best of all is a little breast feeding, lots of attaching yourself (on your break time) to a pump machine and the eventual transition to formula, rather than, g-d forbid, not feeding the growth economy.
Thus, women who stay home with their children are often castigated for being unproductive, or wasting their educations and training, or it is often implied that they are unusually wealthy, and doing so is a luxury that ordinary people cannot afford. And, in fact it is often a luxury. Staying home with your children usually implies a two parent, fairly stable family, a single provider who can produce both income and benefits, and other bits of good fortune. That said, however, it is working class families, more than wealthy ones that are most likely to have a stay at home parent, for both cultural and economic reasons. For example, a disproportionate number of homeschooling familes have stay-at home parents (for obvious reasons) - and yet the average homeschooling household income is under 30K. There are far more stay at home parents in my working class, rural area than there were in the affluent urban area I lived in for almost a decade.
Imagining a future in which more of us are poor and fewer of us can afford the $1500 dollars annually that feeding a baby with infant formula requires, or the electricity for breast pump and freezer, it seems not unlikely that many women will spend more of their lives doing labor that can be done with small children about. Even in a society with a strong one-child emphasis, this is likely to take up some years of a woman's life - most poorer societies practice extended breastfeeding, because the nutritional value of women's breastmilk cannot be foregone, and the added benefits to women's health, longevity and sibling prevention (which does not work for me in any sense ;-) are also important. The average age, worldwide, of weaning is 4. If school buses in our regionalized school systems cease running (and they already are in some places) because of rising transport costs, more of us will have to homeschool. While this job doesn't have to be done by women, it is contiguous with extended breastfeeding, and often is.
So for at least a little while in the lives of those women who have children, there will be a strong biological pressure towards "women's work." But that's hardly the end of the conversation. In one child society, where women are encouraged to put off childbearing until their late 20s or early 30s (there are significant demographic benefits to encouraging later childbearing, but any later than this is probably unlikely in a society that can't afford expensive and energy intensive infertility treatments), that means quite a few years of productive adulthood, 3-8 years (assuming one or two children) "out" and then she'd be free to go back in.
But, of course, it isn't so simple. Women are heavily penalized in the labor market for time taken out to care for children, and in a society without fast food restaurants to provide dinner, gardeners to mow the lawn, dry cleaners to clean the clothes, daycare providers to tend the children and nursing home aides to tend grandma (or in which all these things exist but most of us can no longer afford them). And since the burden of elder care has generally fallen on them (for reasons that have nothing to do with biological necessity), a woman who trains for a career until she is 30, leaves the workplace for 9 years to bear and nurse 2 children and then returns, who has parents who had the same approximate schedule, will, in her mid-to-late 40s in many cases find herself with elderly and increasingly frail parents who may also require her time. Men can do these jobs - but they won't unless we change our culture, and rapidly.
And the biggest barrier is cultural. Many men have resisted doing their full share, and women have held on to their responsibilities ("You don't do it right...it is easier to just do it myself") while feeling resentful. And if domestic work has to be done, and women are to be out of the workforce for some time, the logical thing would be to have them, when they return, trade positions with their spouse. But this tends not to work in a society that rewards consecutive experience, is particularly unsupportive of men who do childcare and domestic work, and generally pays men better than women anyway.
Barring some major cultural changes, I'd have to say that the answer to question #1 is that, yes, the reality is that any push to a lower energy society that doesn't envision a much more communal life, probably will mean women going disproportionately back to domestic life. While I strongly encourage egalitarianism, the forces that affect ordinary families mean that generally speaking, it is easier for women to leave the conventional economy than for men. We can and should work to change this, but it is unlikely to succeed before economic difficulty strikes.
So now we come to question two - is this a bad thing for women and their rights? On the surface of it, the answer would seem to be "yes." Certainly, fewer women would enter the highly trained professions, and most of those who entered them would either be older when they entered (ie, past their childbearing years), have an unusually egalitarian marriage, or have no plan to have children. Few households in a poorer society will be able to take out tens of thousands in student loans for law school, only to have women work for five years and then leave the workforce for a time.
Many of these things are true now. For example, highly placed women in the business world have children less than 50% of the time. When they do have them, they have fewer and later. Many of these women who wait until their late 30s or later are only able to have children after extended medical intervention, and would probably have none at all if infertility treatments were not available or were unaffordable.
The academic field I trained it was remarkable for the number of women involved - and yet in my department, of the women faculty, the vast majority had no children at all. Of the two female faculty members in my department who did have children, one had had hers before entering academia, another had her two children in her late 30s and early 40s. Despite the fact that English Literature was considerably more woman friendly than most other areas of academia, my observation was that comparatively few women had children, and that it was extremely difficult to accomodate the two jobs. This is also true of many other fields.
So what we would likely see is an exaggeration of current situations - professional women would be less common, and the old "career or kids but not both" scenario might rule. Or we might adapt, making it normal for women to train for a second career after their children are older. But the most likely scenario, because of economic and cultural pressures means that there would be fewer highly educated women, fewer women in professional jobs that require extended training, and, since most political figures are taken from professional jobs, potentially fewer women in politics. The women who were in these jobs are likely not to have children, and thus likely to lack the particular understanding of family issues that many mothers have.
So in that sense, this might be bad. But on the other hand, a poorer, less energy intensive society is likely to have some changes in male occupations as well. For example, unless we make colleges more universally available and free to most people, most men who would now have these jobs won't be becoming doctors, lawyers or academics either. The reality is that college and graduate school are feasible now only because we are rich, and people are willing to beggar themselves for decades taking out loans to get higher salaries in the long term. This system is already starting to break down, as books like _Generation Debt_ document - they are creating institutionalized economic inequities that can't be overcome by people who have taken out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and will spend most of their most productive years paying them off. A recent study shows that almost 35% of all young adults 35 and under are receiving financial aid from their parents. I'm sure some are lazy schlubs, but most of them are receiving it because there are tremendously institutionalized economic disparities being created by the cost of education.
This system can't continue, and it is unlikely to. And there are good reasons to want to see it gone. For example, as studies demonstrate, economic mobility is disappearing the US - those people who are likely to become our important women politicians after their years in law school? Generally speaking, they are rich folks, who were priveleged from birth, and thus "tracked" from early on for success, and for power. Yes, it is nice that some of the powerful have breasts but what we're not getting from this system is a great deal of real diversity of viewpoint. Most of our leaders are taken from a particular class and culture. And while education is generally a good signal of progressive policies in the US, the sheer crappiness of the education many people are mortgaging themselves for suggests that we could do better, cheaper - period.
A society in which fewer people go to college (or better yet, in which college is subsidized as it is in much of the world) is one in which more leaders are going to have to come from everyday people - including those who work from home, on a small scale - farmers, chatelaines, homeschoolers, owners of home businesses.
This was precisely what Thomas Jefferson argued for - that is, he felt that independent householders who could supply most of their subsistence needs at home were the best possible participants in a democratic society. So perhaps the problem is us - the perception that law school and business are the direct lead-ins to running the country is simply screwed up. We should be looking for leaders in people who have fed themselves, clothed themselves, cared for their own, done their own share of ordinary work. Changing that will require a major alteration of cultural priorities, but it does mean that women who are doing their work from home or whose primary work is domestic labor need not be disenfranchised - and that there are powerful cultural incentives to value both men and women who do not have expensive educations and don't drive to fancy offices. There is no reason to believe that taking more women out of the professions will return us in any short time to the notion that women should simply stay home and tend to their knitting. In fact, there's some reason to think that we might take our knitting (or our small engine repair, for that matter) with us into the halls of power better if we began looking for qualifications not to be found in a law degree.
I think there is some danger that #2 is true - that moving women out of the public sphere and back to the domestic could be a problem for our power in the world, but that's not insurmountable. And the reality is this - that our *hope* of taking back political power from corporations and from those who have claimed it lies mostly in our not needing those folks - that is, being able to meet our own needs. It is not merely rhetoric or condescension to say that "the hand that stirs the pot or rocks the cradle rules the world." This is likely literally true right now - we may have more women in the public sphere right now than before, but ordinary men and women are less powerful because of our externalizing of our needs than we could be if men and women were to take them back.
And this is a good portion of the answer to number three. Feminism should be proud of many things, but one of its great failures has been the prioritization of the public, capitalist, economic sphere over the domestic, private one. The reason we did this was an understandable thing - we let antifeminists define the terms of the discussion from early on. The question of women's basic rights was always phrased as a conflict between private and public, and many feminists (not all) took on this distinction as a cause - let us get women out into the world. The problem, however, is that "private" and "public" are not such clear dichotomies - the private sphere of the home and its labor can never be fully seperated from the public implications of that role. By encouraging women to enter the workforce, and to regard work under a boss in an industrial job as preferrable to working autonomously (not under a repressive spouse) at home meeting one's needs outside the domestic sphere, we also encouraged the demise of all private, domestic life - with real consequences in health, resource use and dehumanization.
Much of the environmental movement has been the realization that not only is "the personal the political" but vice versa - that is, much of our most important political work must operate on the personal level, that the private is the public. It may ultimately it matter less whether women get to be brain surgeons (which is important) than what we eat for dinner. It does matter who cooks it - there are compelling arguments for fairness and justice in this realm - but it does mean that someone has to be there to do the cooking. The things that most influence the state of our lives are domestic and "private" - but, of course, the private is the public here.
One of the most heartening things I see in the peak oil and climate change movement is a remarkable number of people stepping out of their traditional roles. I see women who have mostly worked on the sidelines feeling that they need to stand up for the future of their children. I see men who have never touched a pot talking about how they baked bread. The reality is that this conflict, unlike all prior wars, is being "fought" on a unified front - the "home front" - that is, instead of dividing up for war, or for capitalism, men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and lovers have every incentive to come together to make changes in world they most need security in - the private, the domestic, the literal home front.
Sharon
There are three related questions here. First of all, is this work mostly going to devolve on women? Are we pushing *women* in particular out of the workforce?
The second is, is this anti-feminist, or bad? That is, are we disempowering women by moving them back into the kitchen, if more women than men end up back in the domestic sphere?
And the third is whether or not the domestic sphere and the public sphere are in conflict here - that is, they were in Victorian times - those who worked in the domestic world were also the disenfranchised. But is that inevitable?
Back in February I wrote a post about Sustainability and the "Mommy Wars" (here:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/home-economics-sustainability-and-mommy.html) in which I argued that honestly, isn't just women who should stay home, that by both preference and necessity, both men and women should consider moving as much of their work to home as possible - seeking to need less, work from home, start home businesses and cottage industries, and to generally integrate domestic and economic life. I argued that doing so is good for children, good for one's personal security and good for marriages, and that many of the things that get blamed on women working actually may be due to the absence of fathers for long hours. As you can imagine, the subject was fairly controversial. I feel very strongly that bringing as much as possible of our work into our local environments is essential - that both men and women need to spend more time at home - which may also be the workplace in many cases.
So I think we can safely say that my own vision of the future is not one in which the only people making yogurt and growing squash are female. In fact, I don't carry those assumptions with me. I managed to grow up without much in the way of gender role expectations at all. My own parents divorced early, and my father had joint custody of his three daughters when we were 7,6, and a baby. He washed clothes, cooked dinner (well), ironed, cleaned (badly) and did exactly the same stuff around his job my mother did around hers. Even before the divorce, my father did all the cooking, and claimed my mother had known how to cook only salad and tuna casserole. In my mother's household, because she's gay, two women did everything - cooked, built bookcases, hung wallpaper, gardened, went to work, did laundry, tended kids. My generation was probably less encumbered by gender expectations than any previous one, and I probably less than average.
My husband also grew up in a divorced household, mostly living with a single parent (his mother), and grew up doing a great deal of the domestic work himself, once he was old enough to be home when his mother wasn't. His father and step-mother also have a quite egalitarian marriage, so our own marriage came with few, if any, gender expectations.
So we both cook, we both clean, I do laundry (because I like it), he does floors (because it bugs him when they are dirty and I could care less), we both knit, we both sew (badly), we both work with wood (badly), we both change the oil. There are a few traditional divisions, mostly because of preferences (He drives, because I hate to, he fixes the lawnmower because I have, ummm...a generous figure and don't fit well underneath in some spots ;-), we also have some atypical things - he changes all the diapers when both of us are present (we made a deal when I was pregnant with #1 that if I was in charge of "input" (nursing) he'd take full responsibility for output (diapers) - I've *never* changed a diaper when he was around), I climb up on the roof and deal with gutters since he's afraid of heights and I'm not. Generally speaking, we have a pretty good balance. And not only do both of us believe in egalitarianism, but we are, unusually for people our age, the products of families that lived remarkably egalitarian lives for their era. This makes a huge difference in our assumptions.
All of which means that I'm always surprised when people assume that women are going to get stuck with all the scut work. But of course, I shouldn't be - the reality of most women's lives is that they work full time outside the home and come home to do a full day of domestic labor, childcare, senior care, etc... I tend to assume that most men are like my father and my husband, and do their full share willingly, on the assumption that it is their job. Unfortunately, that's not true. But I think the example of my family shows that to a large degree, if we want it to be true in the next generation, a large part of that is what we model.
That is, if women tolerate husbands who don't do diapers, if men tolerate wives who won't learn how to manage the finances - we're likely to see those same roles perpetuated. That doesn't mean that every single person needs to do everything equally well - but there are basic competences that everyone should demonstrate, barring a deep inequality in how the work is done. That is, if Dad works 14 hour days driving a long-haul truck so that Mom can stay home with the kids, it is perfectly reasonable to expect Mom to do 14 hours of work herself taking care of the kids and the yard and the domestic work. Work should be evenly divided - period. I've met men who work 50 hour weeks who come home and do all the farm work, while their spouse rest, and women who work 8 hours a day and come home to another 8 hours while their husband watches tv. And ultimately, the responsibility for fixing this problem - for themselves and in the next generation - lies in the participants.
Because household work generally devolves on women, it is no wonder many of them are notably unthrilled at the notion that they could be lucky enough to have to make all their kids' clothes too. And I don't blame them one bit for that. I admit, it is honestly hard for me to fathom a marriage in which labor falls so disproportionately on women, but that is often the reality. The majority of American women do more than 20 hours of household labor and childcare each week above and beyond their paid jobs. The majority of American men do 9 hours. That's a big difference.
So the odds are good that a call for a return to domestic life will fall heavily on women's shoulders, unless both women and men negotiate cultural changes to ensure otherwise. This is, of course, much of the project of feminism. But I think modern feminism has yet to acknowledge how much of its goals and structure were created by cheap energy, and a product of that peculiar, unique and historically unlikely to be repeated abundance. By this I mean that much of what was possible for the women's movement was made possible by cheap energy. For example, the movement of women into the workforce while they had young children was to a large degree as much about refrigeration, electric breast pumps and industrial formula as it was about equal representation in careers. This is hardly the only example of this.
Feminism has, I think, fallen into the economic trap of "externalizing" other costs -for example, while in principle we may care about the rights of poor women, many women who have taken the "go out and work" message are unconcerned about the realities of the poor women and men they employ to mow lawns, clean houses, tend children and care for seniors. The moral responsibility of these acts shouldn't fall only on women - the message that the Nanny's poverty is the sole responsibility of a woman who gets a job, and none of her husband's is nonsense. But there is a reality that when women moved out of the home they left no replacement, leaving the marketplace to provide poorly paid people with few benefits and few comforts to meet the needs both men and women left behind. To feminism's right and credit, feminism has taken up the cause of these women - but it has not always fully credited its impact in creating their situation.
Just as we have to stop externalizing the costs of oil, we have to stop externalizing the costs of the domestic sphere - because these costs are ours to bear. The failures of child nutrition, for example - Americans are documentably getting shorter and less healthy because there is no one there to cook dinner, and industrial agriculture has gained much of its power because we rely upon them to feed us these inadequate foods. Our fossil fuel usage has gone up steadily, in part because we're going places all the time - to work, to daycare, to preschool, to school and etc...
Overwhelmingly, the feminist message was that we should move the dull, rote jobs of domestic life out of the home and into the public economy - to daycare centers and cafeterias and other public utilities. Part of the failure of this project was the failure of government participation - when ordinary people were stuck putting their domestic world into the public economy on their own wages, they got what they could afford - not much. But part of the problem may have come from the notion that political power for women mostly derived from participation in the public sphere in an economic sense - that is, that everyone was best served by getting as many women and men out doing "important" jobs as possible.
There have always been multiple feminisms, so what I am speaking here is of the dominant discourse, which is necessarily watered down by, as Tom Lehrer said of folk songs, "being written by the people." But the dominant discourse of feminism has valued the professional over the private, the money-earning over the work of not needing money, and found political pwoer there. And by pushing both women and men further out into the capitalist economic sphere, and saying that power is to be found there, we've been sold an anti-democratic bill of goods - the notion that the marketplace will fix all of our problems if we all just go out and make enough money to buy solutions has, of course, eroded our democracy.
Someone has to go home, if we are to cease externalizing our costs and deal with the hard realities. In some cases, that may not be possible - the very poor who have to take what work they can, single parents who have no one with whom to share domestic work, etc... these people have few choices. But many of the people reading this blog are not among them - most are middle class or better working families, and many do have better choices. And someone has to go home and stay there, simply because it is manifestly the case that turning domestic work over to the industrial economy is destroying us.
It is worth noting here that one of the reason capitalist feminism succeeded so well while other feminist discourses were lost is that I doubt growth capitalists could have found a way to be happier if they'd commissioned a study. Over a few short decades, nearly every able bodied adult stopped doing work autonomously for themselves, stopped running the home economy (the word economy itself implies home management, not public life) and thus practicing things like frugality and getting along without industry, and started to create new businesses subcontracting out domestic work into industry. While feminism manifestly succeeded in creating more justice in some areas, in others, it simply managed to expand the creation of a new underclass, doing the unpleasant domestic labor we were all being "freed" from - the jobs we did at home, where no one told us what to do or how to do it.
Now I would strongly prefer that there be no distinction here between men and women -in my own marriage, for example, I do the majority of childcare and domestic work during the academic year, when Eric is teaching, and he does it during the summer when I am writing and farming. But this is not feasible for many families, and there are a number of factors, economic (men generally make more money than women), cultural (we have a prejudice against having men care for young children) and biological that are likely to lead to more women being at home than men, particularly younger women and women who choose to have children.
Historically speaking, women with young children who could not afford wet nurses did "women's work". A famous paper in anthropology by Judith Brown, "Note on the Division of Labor by Sex" observes that generally speaking, whether a lot of women do something in a society depends on its compatibility with childcare, whether the work met the criteria, which Brown defines as "...such activities have the following characteristics: they do not require rapt concentration...they are eaily interruptable and easily resumed once interrupted...they do not place the child in potential danger; and they do not require the participant to range very far from home." Making cloth and clothing, cooking, gardening, tending small animals, gathering wild foods... this was women's work to a large degree.
That is not to say that women didn't do other work. But generally speaking, traditional women's work was designed to accomodate the realities of having young children for a decade or so of a woman's productive adult life. No society could afford to lose women's productive labor during the period of childbearing and rearing young children, so the society emphasized that sort of work. Nor could any society afford to lose children to the illnesses and death that faced those who were weaned early. There are other sorts of labor that are also child friendly - many cottage businesses, or even keeping shop, if the shop contains child space are suitable. Indeed, many more jobs could be made child friendly if we wanted them to be, and feminists have for years fought and lost this battle.
In many ways, our present society is even more insistent that we cannot "afford" to lose the productive labor of women during pregnancy, breastfeeding and early childhood. Because of that, industrial substitutes like formula and heavy-duty electric breast pumps are created so that children can be left with other women, and women can return to work that cannot be interrupted easily. With science doing its best to ensure that the consequences to children are less evident and longer-term, we have come to believe that breast is best, but only a tiny bit better, and that best of all is a little breast feeding, lots of attaching yourself (on your break time) to a pump machine and the eventual transition to formula, rather than, g-d forbid, not feeding the growth economy.
Thus, women who stay home with their children are often castigated for being unproductive, or wasting their educations and training, or it is often implied that they are unusually wealthy, and doing so is a luxury that ordinary people cannot afford. And, in fact it is often a luxury. Staying home with your children usually implies a two parent, fairly stable family, a single provider who can produce both income and benefits, and other bits of good fortune. That said, however, it is working class families, more than wealthy ones that are most likely to have a stay at home parent, for both cultural and economic reasons. For example, a disproportionate number of homeschooling familes have stay-at home parents (for obvious reasons) - and yet the average homeschooling household income is under 30K. There are far more stay at home parents in my working class, rural area than there were in the affluent urban area I lived in for almost a decade.
Imagining a future in which more of us are poor and fewer of us can afford the $1500 dollars annually that feeding a baby with infant formula requires, or the electricity for breast pump and freezer, it seems not unlikely that many women will spend more of their lives doing labor that can be done with small children about. Even in a society with a strong one-child emphasis, this is likely to take up some years of a woman's life - most poorer societies practice extended breastfeeding, because the nutritional value of women's breastmilk cannot be foregone, and the added benefits to women's health, longevity and sibling prevention (which does not work for me in any sense ;-) are also important. The average age, worldwide, of weaning is 4. If school buses in our regionalized school systems cease running (and they already are in some places) because of rising transport costs, more of us will have to homeschool. While this job doesn't have to be done by women, it is contiguous with extended breastfeeding, and often is.
So for at least a little while in the lives of those women who have children, there will be a strong biological pressure towards "women's work." But that's hardly the end of the conversation. In one child society, where women are encouraged to put off childbearing until their late 20s or early 30s (there are significant demographic benefits to encouraging later childbearing, but any later than this is probably unlikely in a society that can't afford expensive and energy intensive infertility treatments), that means quite a few years of productive adulthood, 3-8 years (assuming one or two children) "out" and then she'd be free to go back in.
But, of course, it isn't so simple. Women are heavily penalized in the labor market for time taken out to care for children, and in a society without fast food restaurants to provide dinner, gardeners to mow the lawn, dry cleaners to clean the clothes, daycare providers to tend the children and nursing home aides to tend grandma (or in which all these things exist but most of us can no longer afford them). And since the burden of elder care has generally fallen on them (for reasons that have nothing to do with biological necessity), a woman who trains for a career until she is 30, leaves the workplace for 9 years to bear and nurse 2 children and then returns, who has parents who had the same approximate schedule, will, in her mid-to-late 40s in many cases find herself with elderly and increasingly frail parents who may also require her time. Men can do these jobs - but they won't unless we change our culture, and rapidly.
And the biggest barrier is cultural. Many men have resisted doing their full share, and women have held on to their responsibilities ("You don't do it right...it is easier to just do it myself") while feeling resentful. And if domestic work has to be done, and women are to be out of the workforce for some time, the logical thing would be to have them, when they return, trade positions with their spouse. But this tends not to work in a society that rewards consecutive experience, is particularly unsupportive of men who do childcare and domestic work, and generally pays men better than women anyway.
Barring some major cultural changes, I'd have to say that the answer to question #1 is that, yes, the reality is that any push to a lower energy society that doesn't envision a much more communal life, probably will mean women going disproportionately back to domestic life. While I strongly encourage egalitarianism, the forces that affect ordinary families mean that generally speaking, it is easier for women to leave the conventional economy than for men. We can and should work to change this, but it is unlikely to succeed before economic difficulty strikes.
So now we come to question two - is this a bad thing for women and their rights? On the surface of it, the answer would seem to be "yes." Certainly, fewer women would enter the highly trained professions, and most of those who entered them would either be older when they entered (ie, past their childbearing years), have an unusually egalitarian marriage, or have no plan to have children. Few households in a poorer society will be able to take out tens of thousands in student loans for law school, only to have women work for five years and then leave the workforce for a time.
Many of these things are true now. For example, highly placed women in the business world have children less than 50% of the time. When they do have them, they have fewer and later. Many of these women who wait until their late 30s or later are only able to have children after extended medical intervention, and would probably have none at all if infertility treatments were not available or were unaffordable.
The academic field I trained it was remarkable for the number of women involved - and yet in my department, of the women faculty, the vast majority had no children at all. Of the two female faculty members in my department who did have children, one had had hers before entering academia, another had her two children in her late 30s and early 40s. Despite the fact that English Literature was considerably more woman friendly than most other areas of academia, my observation was that comparatively few women had children, and that it was extremely difficult to accomodate the two jobs. This is also true of many other fields.
So what we would likely see is an exaggeration of current situations - professional women would be less common, and the old "career or kids but not both" scenario might rule. Or we might adapt, making it normal for women to train for a second career after their children are older. But the most likely scenario, because of economic and cultural pressures means that there would be fewer highly educated women, fewer women in professional jobs that require extended training, and, since most political figures are taken from professional jobs, potentially fewer women in politics. The women who were in these jobs are likely not to have children, and thus likely to lack the particular understanding of family issues that many mothers have.
So in that sense, this might be bad. But on the other hand, a poorer, less energy intensive society is likely to have some changes in male occupations as well. For example, unless we make colleges more universally available and free to most people, most men who would now have these jobs won't be becoming doctors, lawyers or academics either. The reality is that college and graduate school are feasible now only because we are rich, and people are willing to beggar themselves for decades taking out loans to get higher salaries in the long term. This system is already starting to break down, as books like _Generation Debt_ document - they are creating institutionalized economic inequities that can't be overcome by people who have taken out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and will spend most of their most productive years paying them off. A recent study shows that almost 35% of all young adults 35 and under are receiving financial aid from their parents. I'm sure some are lazy schlubs, but most of them are receiving it because there are tremendously institutionalized economic disparities being created by the cost of education.
This system can't continue, and it is unlikely to. And there are good reasons to want to see it gone. For example, as studies demonstrate, economic mobility is disappearing the US - those people who are likely to become our important women politicians after their years in law school? Generally speaking, they are rich folks, who were priveleged from birth, and thus "tracked" from early on for success, and for power. Yes, it is nice that some of the powerful have breasts but what we're not getting from this system is a great deal of real diversity of viewpoint. Most of our leaders are taken from a particular class and culture. And while education is generally a good signal of progressive policies in the US, the sheer crappiness of the education many people are mortgaging themselves for suggests that we could do better, cheaper - period.
A society in which fewer people go to college (or better yet, in which college is subsidized as it is in much of the world) is one in which more leaders are going to have to come from everyday people - including those who work from home, on a small scale - farmers, chatelaines, homeschoolers, owners of home businesses.
This was precisely what Thomas Jefferson argued for - that is, he felt that independent householders who could supply most of their subsistence needs at home were the best possible participants in a democratic society. So perhaps the problem is us - the perception that law school and business are the direct lead-ins to running the country is simply screwed up. We should be looking for leaders in people who have fed themselves, clothed themselves, cared for their own, done their own share of ordinary work. Changing that will require a major alteration of cultural priorities, but it does mean that women who are doing their work from home or whose primary work is domestic labor need not be disenfranchised - and that there are powerful cultural incentives to value both men and women who do not have expensive educations and don't drive to fancy offices. There is no reason to believe that taking more women out of the professions will return us in any short time to the notion that women should simply stay home and tend to their knitting. In fact, there's some reason to think that we might take our knitting (or our small engine repair, for that matter) with us into the halls of power better if we began looking for qualifications not to be found in a law degree.
I think there is some danger that #2 is true - that moving women out of the public sphere and back to the domestic could be a problem for our power in the world, but that's not insurmountable. And the reality is this - that our *hope* of taking back political power from corporations and from those who have claimed it lies mostly in our not needing those folks - that is, being able to meet our own needs. It is not merely rhetoric or condescension to say that "the hand that stirs the pot or rocks the cradle rules the world." This is likely literally true right now - we may have more women in the public sphere right now than before, but ordinary men and women are less powerful because of our externalizing of our needs than we could be if men and women were to take them back.
And this is a good portion of the answer to number three. Feminism should be proud of many things, but one of its great failures has been the prioritization of the public, capitalist, economic sphere over the domestic, private one. The reason we did this was an understandable thing - we let antifeminists define the terms of the discussion from early on. The question of women's basic rights was always phrased as a conflict between private and public, and many feminists (not all) took on this distinction as a cause - let us get women out into the world. The problem, however, is that "private" and "public" are not such clear dichotomies - the private sphere of the home and its labor can never be fully seperated from the public implications of that role. By encouraging women to enter the workforce, and to regard work under a boss in an industrial job as preferrable to working autonomously (not under a repressive spouse) at home meeting one's needs outside the domestic sphere, we also encouraged the demise of all private, domestic life - with real consequences in health, resource use and dehumanization.
Much of the environmental movement has been the realization that not only is "the personal the political" but vice versa - that is, much of our most important political work must operate on the personal level, that the private is the public. It may ultimately it matter less whether women get to be brain surgeons (which is important) than what we eat for dinner. It does matter who cooks it - there are compelling arguments for fairness and justice in this realm - but it does mean that someone has to be there to do the cooking. The things that most influence the state of our lives are domestic and "private" - but, of course, the private is the public here.
One of the most heartening things I see in the peak oil and climate change movement is a remarkable number of people stepping out of their traditional roles. I see women who have mostly worked on the sidelines feeling that they need to stand up for the future of their children. I see men who have never touched a pot talking about how they baked bread. The reality is that this conflict, unlike all prior wars, is being "fought" on a unified front - the "home front" - that is, instead of dividing up for war, or for capitalism, men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and lovers have every incentive to come together to make changes in world they most need security in - the private, the domestic, the literal home front.
Sharon
Monday, July 16, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 12 - Get Your Kids Involved
In _Last Child in the Woods_, Richard Louv argues that American children are suffering from a lack of connection with the natural world. While it is an excellent book, on some level support for this contention can be justified by simply walking through most suburban neighborhoods. The children are mostly in enclosed spaces - playgrounds or ballfields being organized by parents and coaches in the best scenario, or in the house playing video games or watching tv. Very few are out in their ecosystem, even when the ecosystem is as processed as the suburban lawn.
So is it any wonder that most American children may have generalized fears about things like global warming, drought, dangerous storms...but they don't have either the educational background to understand what is going on, or the practical experience with nature, agriculture and the environment to understand their own connection with the earth. A few years ago, for example, a study came out that suggested the average American child can recognize only 13 species in their own little ecosystem. That is, walk out onto your lawn, and the average child would be hard pressed to tell you whether the tree by her window is an oak, locust or cedar, to recognize which of the driveway weeds she can safely pick (and even eat or make a whistle or daisy chain with) and which are poisonous, or even name the birds that come to her feeder, or identify whether a carrot comes from a tree or under the ground.
There was a time when children had relationships with the trees on their property - when they climbed them, swung on them, named them, talked to them, took up a hammer and nails and made precarious houses in their branches. And they knew something about them - perhaps the little girl might even have tapped the sugar maple in her yard, or collected acorns from the white oak. It is hard for all of us to grasp the stakes of global warming, for example, but a child who knows what a sugar maple is, has a relationship to one and a taste for syrup, can begin to understand the tragedy of "and there will be no more of these trees in our place again..." The more the child understands about ecology in general and about the biology of his or her specific, beautiful, particular place, the more stake he or she has in the future.
Contemporary education has failed in two ways. First, most of us were taught when the Battle of Hastings was, but not the slightest thing about the history of our agricultural system, other, perhaps, than the invention of the plow. We were taught to read poetry, but never to wonder what "Eglantine" Shakespeare mentioned actually looked or smelled like. We were taught the periodic table, but nothing about soil microbiology. That is, our education has prioritized, historically, the distant and abstract, rather than the local and concrete. We were not trained to think of ourselves as part of history, and biology and literature. And this means that we often have no way of connecting our abstract knowledge of distant places and histories with the concrete reality of our future. In many cases, we have no ability to use history to predict consequences, or to understand the connections say, between one fact (the fact that 50% of all reptiles are expected to go extinct) and another fact (that our food web depends on reptile species) and a third fact (that our local reptile species do this and this in our particular ecosystem).
We need to add an ecological and agricultural education to our children's lives. It would be nice in some ways if public schools would do this, but the reality is that we need this now, so we parents must do this. And for many parents, this means taking up ecological education ourselves in our adulthood - we have to ask "What is that tree?" "Why do the dandilions grow here but not the plantain?" "Where does my water come from?" "What does soil humus do to the atmospheric carbon." We need desperately to become literate in a host of areas we've never been familiar with, and teach our children as we learn.
And the other thing we need to do is get our children out onto the soil and teach them by doing, by touching, by growing, by *being* in the world. And that doesn't mean taking long trips to "visit" nature - the occasional visit to a national park is inspiring, but if you feel like you don't have any nature around you, make sure you get some where you are - plant some trees in a vacant lot, start a garden on your roof, call for setting aside land from development, build a community garden. Because your child will grow up with the relationship to nature that intersects their everyday life - no connection can be built on a yearly trip, and doing it much more often is the hypocrisy of destroying the environment to give your children a taste of it. Trust me, there will come a time when your kid will connect those dots - hypocrisy is the one things all teenagers have a magical detector for.
Which means that we have to find nature and a reason to preserve it in our man-made landscapes. We must, in some literal and metaphorical way open up the boundaries of the enclosures and let our children out into their own world. We cannot expect our children to be attached to a nature that is majestic, transcendent, and "over there somewhere." If they are to be invested in the preservation of their future, they must grasp that nature is them, it is their world, their lawn, their garden, their tree, their park, their food, their souls. And they must get to know it in concrete, direct and real ways - both knowing about it, and knowing it with hands and mouth and nose and body.
And, of course, our children need to be inculcated into our environmental practices. They need to see us valuing the environment over our convenience, not occasionally, but every day. Those brilliant hypocrisy-sniffers are again at issue -they need to see us doing things, but also understand that we are doing them from real commitment, and grasp the moral terms of that commitment. They need to learn how to do these things hand in hand with their parents - baking bread with us, and understanding why we aren't driving to the store, shopping in thrift shops with us, instead of at new, and understanding why buying used is better. They need to be wholly integrated not only into the natural world, but our relationship to it. The things we do to preserve the world are the things we do to preserve them, and the most important may be what we teach them. And they need to feel that what they do matters, not just in child ways, but has a real and material effect on the world.
This does not apply solely to parents. Aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, friends - children need adults in their lives who care about them, and who will teach what they have. The children who live around you may not get this from their parents - but they will remember all of their lives, the neighbor across the street who invites them to look in the worm bin and shows them the garden soil the worms create. They will take with them a little taste of the aunt who bakes pies with them, and lets them decide if blueberry-banana is a good flavor. They will someday, as a grandparent themselves, remember that grandpa named the trees, and do it for their own grandsons. If we do it soon, the trees will still be there to be named.
Sharon
So is it any wonder that most American children may have generalized fears about things like global warming, drought, dangerous storms...but they don't have either the educational background to understand what is going on, or the practical experience with nature, agriculture and the environment to understand their own connection with the earth. A few years ago, for example, a study came out that suggested the average American child can recognize only 13 species in their own little ecosystem. That is, walk out onto your lawn, and the average child would be hard pressed to tell you whether the tree by her window is an oak, locust or cedar, to recognize which of the driveway weeds she can safely pick (and even eat or make a whistle or daisy chain with) and which are poisonous, or even name the birds that come to her feeder, or identify whether a carrot comes from a tree or under the ground.
There was a time when children had relationships with the trees on their property - when they climbed them, swung on them, named them, talked to them, took up a hammer and nails and made precarious houses in their branches. And they knew something about them - perhaps the little girl might even have tapped the sugar maple in her yard, or collected acorns from the white oak. It is hard for all of us to grasp the stakes of global warming, for example, but a child who knows what a sugar maple is, has a relationship to one and a taste for syrup, can begin to understand the tragedy of "and there will be no more of these trees in our place again..." The more the child understands about ecology in general and about the biology of his or her specific, beautiful, particular place, the more stake he or she has in the future.
Contemporary education has failed in two ways. First, most of us were taught when the Battle of Hastings was, but not the slightest thing about the history of our agricultural system, other, perhaps, than the invention of the plow. We were taught to read poetry, but never to wonder what "Eglantine" Shakespeare mentioned actually looked or smelled like. We were taught the periodic table, but nothing about soil microbiology. That is, our education has prioritized, historically, the distant and abstract, rather than the local and concrete. We were not trained to think of ourselves as part of history, and biology and literature. And this means that we often have no way of connecting our abstract knowledge of distant places and histories with the concrete reality of our future. In many cases, we have no ability to use history to predict consequences, or to understand the connections say, between one fact (the fact that 50% of all reptiles are expected to go extinct) and another fact (that our food web depends on reptile species) and a third fact (that our local reptile species do this and this in our particular ecosystem).
We need to add an ecological and agricultural education to our children's lives. It would be nice in some ways if public schools would do this, but the reality is that we need this now, so we parents must do this. And for many parents, this means taking up ecological education ourselves in our adulthood - we have to ask "What is that tree?" "Why do the dandilions grow here but not the plantain?" "Where does my water come from?" "What does soil humus do to the atmospheric carbon." We need desperately to become literate in a host of areas we've never been familiar with, and teach our children as we learn.
And the other thing we need to do is get our children out onto the soil and teach them by doing, by touching, by growing, by *being* in the world. And that doesn't mean taking long trips to "visit" nature - the occasional visit to a national park is inspiring, but if you feel like you don't have any nature around you, make sure you get some where you are - plant some trees in a vacant lot, start a garden on your roof, call for setting aside land from development, build a community garden. Because your child will grow up with the relationship to nature that intersects their everyday life - no connection can be built on a yearly trip, and doing it much more often is the hypocrisy of destroying the environment to give your children a taste of it. Trust me, there will come a time when your kid will connect those dots - hypocrisy is the one things all teenagers have a magical detector for.
Which means that we have to find nature and a reason to preserve it in our man-made landscapes. We must, in some literal and metaphorical way open up the boundaries of the enclosures and let our children out into their own world. We cannot expect our children to be attached to a nature that is majestic, transcendent, and "over there somewhere." If they are to be invested in the preservation of their future, they must grasp that nature is them, it is their world, their lawn, their garden, their tree, their park, their food, their souls. And they must get to know it in concrete, direct and real ways - both knowing about it, and knowing it with hands and mouth and nose and body.
And, of course, our children need to be inculcated into our environmental practices. They need to see us valuing the environment over our convenience, not occasionally, but every day. Those brilliant hypocrisy-sniffers are again at issue -they need to see us doing things, but also understand that we are doing them from real commitment, and grasp the moral terms of that commitment. They need to learn how to do these things hand in hand with their parents - baking bread with us, and understanding why we aren't driving to the store, shopping in thrift shops with us, instead of at new, and understanding why buying used is better. They need to be wholly integrated not only into the natural world, but our relationship to it. The things we do to preserve the world are the things we do to preserve them, and the most important may be what we teach them. And they need to feel that what they do matters, not just in child ways, but has a real and material effect on the world.
This does not apply solely to parents. Aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, friends - children need adults in their lives who care about them, and who will teach what they have. The children who live around you may not get this from their parents - but they will remember all of their lives, the neighbor across the street who invites them to look in the worm bin and shows them the garden soil the worms create. They will take with them a little taste of the aunt who bakes pies with them, and lets them decide if blueberry-banana is a good flavor. They will someday, as a grandparent themselves, remember that grandpa named the trees, and do it for their own grandsons. If we do it soon, the trees will still be there to be named.
Sharon
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Low Energy Food Preservation
So you've grown the garden, and the quantities of tomatoes and zucchini are getting really embarassing. How do you preserve it, using the fewest possible fossil fuel inputs? What's the best way to keep your pantry full and your democracy alive (if you have no idea why I'm talking about democracy and pickled cabbage together, you might want to read my post on "Food Preservation and Democracy" here:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/05/food-preservation-and-democracy.html -they really do go together like locally produced hot dogs/tofu dogs and sauerkraut ;-)).
A lot of what I'm talking about here applies best to people with space for decent sized gardens or even small farms. But a good deal of this can apply to urbanites with no or small gardens. For example, even urbanites can forage for herbs and greens to eat and preserve. In many cities it is possible to keep rabbits or chickens for meat and eggs, and preserve them, and many cities have fruit trees on private or public property whose fruit goes unharvested. Simply asking may get you abundant citrus or peaches or apples. And, of course, everyone can go to local farms and farmer's markets, buy large quantities of food and put it up. If money is an issue, the best time of day to go is late in the afternoon, when farmers have a strong incentive not to haul everything home. Buy what they have and put it up.
I will also note that I am including a discussion of preserving meat here. I know many people have ethical or religious reasons not to eat some kinds of meat, or meat all. That's fine, but I'm not going to discuss vegetarianism in this post, and I'd ask that you refrain from bringing it up. If information about meat preservation doesn't apply to you, go on to the next item. I'll gladly discuss vegetarianism at another time, but this post is about the best and least energy intensive ways to produce all foods, whether any given reader eats them or not.
Before we get started, the odds are good that unless you are adding a major energy hog appliance (that is, you are going out and buying a big freezer), you will be reducing your fossil fuel dependence in total when you put up food, no matter how you do it. The food you grow or buy locally to put up has already used vastly less fossil fuels to produce it, and when you freeze things, you are saving yourself trips to the grocery store, which many of us do by car. So whatever choice you make will probably be better than not putting up food. But it still makes sense to cut fossil fuel whenever possible.
Generally speaking, when I talk about food preservation, people immediately think "canning" and "freezing." Those are the most familiar methods of extending the life of food in our garden. But they are also the most energy intensive choices. Both are also water intensive (electricity generation takes a lot of water, as does canning), canning is comparatively time intensive, and generally, they are more expensive than other options. So while I do both, my long term planning increasingly deemphasizes both of these. There are other options. Food can be salted down, preserved in sugar or alcohol, lactofermented (more on this shortly), root cellared (stored in a naturally cool place), dried or dehydrated, or preserved by keeping it alive in the garden or barnyard through season extension or "keeping it on the hoof". And while I do can and freeze some foods, I'm increasingly focusing on other methods because they are lower input, and often produce better results.
Freezing is probably the most common way we preserve food, and is generally the most energy intensive. In _Eating Fossil Fuels_, Dale Pfeiffer notes that if food is kept more than four months, freezing is usually more energy intensive than canning. But of course, this information is based on an average person, canning on average gas stove, compared to an average chest freezer. There are any number of factors that might change this equation some. If, for example, you have a very small freezer, and an electric stove, the length of time might change. Or, for example, if
you can do much of your canning on a wood stove you'd be using anyway to heat your house. But generally speaking, freezing is the most energy and emissions intensive methodology. And freezers have the added disadvantage, if you don't have one already, of putting more freon into the world.
On the other hand, if you have a freezer and are going to run it anyway, the most efficient way to run it is to keep it full all the time (I'm assuming you are using a newer chest freezer, which is vastly more efficient than an upright or much older model). All of which is an argument for freezing if you already have a freezer you are using. We do have a freezer, and since we're finally turning off the fridge this weekend (yay!), it will be our only method of refrigeration, keeping the ice packs for the coolers cool, and also we'll be keeping the freezer full. In our case, using the freezer for some foods makes sense for now. In the long term, however, our plan is to get rid of the freezer too.
The things that I think are best kept frozen are: Raw meats, apple cider, milk, butter, blanched brassica vegetables (broccoli especially), okra, pesto, zucchini some leftovers and peas. That really isn't a very long list, but given that we generally have our poultry for the year butchered all at once, the turkeys and chickens will take care of it. Eric put up about 10 quarts of broccoli yesterday. Even though other brassicas freeze well, we don't bother with it much because they almost all keep well by other methods. So at the end of the year, the freezer generally has some broccoli, some peas, some okra, our meats and a bunch of gallons of apple cider that we stick in to have over the course of the winter. Honestly, the more I look at this list, the more I wonder why we're keeping the freezer at all.
At this stage, we don't freeze much milk or butter. But it is worth noting that these products are usually produced using grain when they are eaten year 'round - that is, they are produced by feeding human food to cows. That's not evil, but if the goal is to make as much food available to human beings as possible, seasonal, grassfed milk from goats, sheep and cows might make more sense. This is the historical way of doing this - animals were allowed to dry up during the winter. Grassfed dairy could be produced here for 7 months of the year, more or less, and the rest of the time we'd be eating preserved (frozen or salted and kept cool) butter and cheese. And, if we were running a freezer, we might keep some milk frozen.
Other people freeze other vegetables, but generally speaking, I find that most of the typically frozen veggies do as well or better in other means of storage, or we simply don't like them frozen that well, so we eat them only in season. Chief in this latter category is green beans. I love green beans - fresh. I'll eat a few as dilly beans. But generally speaking, both canned and frozen are distinctly inferior to my mind. Which means that we enjoy green beans from July to October, and then just stop worrying about it, and eat other things. We feel asparagus is another such vegetable.
In fact, seasonal eating is helpful in putting all of this in perspective - that is, if you insist on eating the exact same things all year around, you can expect to find food preservation time and energy intensive. But if you are content to enjoy things in their season, your need to transfer, say, summer foods to winter is going to be reduced to luxury and pleasure. We eat our fair share of bread with blueberry jam in the winter as well, but it is helpful to recognize that things have their time, and that winter apple season, not blueberry. That means I don't have to worry about a year's worth of blueberries - just enough for our regular jam fixes and a few dehydrated for winter pancakes.
Canning is the next most energy intensive method, in part because it requires extended periods of boiling, and also because each canning requires new canning jar lids. Canning is also time intensive. Some of that time you don't have to be paying attention - for example, with practice I've found I can pressure can and do chores at the same time, as long as I stay in the same room. But much of the time you spend canning food, you have to be keeping an eye on it. The good thing is that much of one's canning can be done in intensive batches, or casually, a little each evening. One way to cut back on difficulty is to do some of your canning later in the season. Applesauce, for example, can be put up in the fall after you get the apples, or in the winter, as you sort through the stored apples and sauce the ones that are getting wrinkled. I often wait to do pickles until things have cooled down and the stove is welcome.
Generally speaking, using older style jars with reusable rubber rings is not recommended. I know some of you may do it, but botulism is nothing to play with, and I certainly wouldn't recommend canning anything other than high-acid (pickles, jams and jellies) foods. The same goes for reusing canning jar lids, or sealing jars with parrafin. Generally speaking, not a great idea, and if you had to do it, don't do it with anything that could support botulism spores.
There are two kinds of canning. Water bath canning is only for high acid foods - fruit juices, jams, jellies and some tomato products (generally with added lemon, vinegar or vitamin c tablets). Pressure canning is for everything else, and you need a pressure canner in good working order to do it safely. If you don't do it correctly, your family could get botulism, a deadly bacteria that thrives in anaerobic environments and is endemic in our soil. Don't mess with it. Get a copy of the _Ball Blue Book_ for canning, check out USDA regulations, and don't use older canning books - ever. I'm not trying to be discouraging, but there's a lot of misinformation about canning out there, and the price of screwing up can be deadly. Learn how to do it right.
Once you have, canning is generally a good method for longer term storage. It is less energy intensive than freezing, and while in the short term there's some loss of nutrients, by the time frozen food is six months old, it has lost more nutrients than canned. Canning is by far the best method of putting up jams and jellies, some pickled things, and is, I think a good way to store cooked meat items, like chicken broth and stew. Such food is convenient and tastes good. It does require an outlay for materials (a good, reliable pressure canner, new lids, water bath canning rack, a few other things), but is a vastly smaller investment than a freezer, for example, and I've acquired every single canning jar I own (800+) for free or less than 5 dollars for a big box of them. They are common fodder at freecycle, yard sales, estate sales, etc...
I don't can all that much food, and again, I could get along quite comfortably entirely without it. I make jams (strawberry, blueberry, black currant, raspberry), apple butter, pumpkin butter, and other sweets. I usually put up some grape juice (for sabbaths), and can some pickles. And, of course, tomatoes as sauce, salsa and canned tomatoes. And later in the cold weather, after we butcher, while the stoves are running anyway, I'll put up turkey and chicken. But everything but the water bathed, high acid jams, pickles and tomatoes could be preserved in other ways as well. For all that we tend to think that canning and freezing are essential to get through the winter, they really aren't - if they were, humanity wouldn't have survived for the last few thousand years before they were invented.
The method I like best is root cellaring. I don't actually put my food down cellar -our cellar is gross, damp and floods occasionally. Instead, I store food in a closet on our enclosed front porch and in our attached garage. I've also stored foods on the uninsulated porch itself in a cooler. But you can use any area that doesn't freeze but gets quite cold. There's a wonderful book by Scott and Nancy Bubel _Root Cellaring_ that covers the details. You can also build or dig an unattached root cellar, or build a small insulated above-ground space. All this does require a cold period, but if you have one, it is well worth a one-time investment creating a secure space for cool food storage. Attics will often work, so will existing basements - you can build a small seperate area which is insulated with board insulation and vented. If you do it yourself, it might not cost more than a few hundred dollars, and could provide you with thousands of dollars of food storage every year. Heck, a closet on an outside wall could be lined with board insulation and an outside air source added - instant root cellar!
We store more food this way than any other. We store potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, celeriac, apples (15 bushels a year), pears, quinces, cabbages, persimmons, salsify and more, and there are plenty of things you can store that we don't. These are the basis of our winter eating. It does take up space, but surprisingly little if kept well organized.
This is especially important because of the potatoes - potatoes grow everywhere. They can be grown on rocky or hilly or poor soil that won't grow anything else. One year, I threw an inch or two of compost down and dumped potatoes on my gravel driveway, covered them with straw and got respectable yields. You can also grow large quantities of potatoes in barrels. They are nutritionally dense, tasty, store well and much easier to grow and preserve than grain. They can be the basis of your diet. Sweet potatoes and some other roots (manioc, taro) can do the same. That makes it possible for ordinary people to grow an entire, healthy diet on a space the size of an average suburban lawn. Ecology Action has emphasized potatoes and sweet potatoes and found that really good gardeners on really good soil could feed themselves a fully balanced diet on 700-1000 square feet. The book _One Circle_ documents how.
IMHO, if you can do one thing, it would be grow and store potatoes and sweet potatoes. We would all prefer more variety in our diet (and at a minimum, make sure you grow multiple *varieties* of potatoes and sweet potatoes - not doing so caused the potato famine in Ireland), but potatoes are life sustaining in difficult times. There are places you can't root cellar and places you won't need to, but if you don't live in one of them, consider finding a place for cold storage of roots and other crops.
We also store some food in our house, with us. There are some foods - sweet potatoes, pumpkins, squash, onions and garlic that tolerate or prefer cool home temperatures - that is, they like the temperatures that conserving people have in their homes in cool weather - 50s to low 60s. So it is simple to store squash under the bed, stick the sweet potatoes in a spare closet, and hang the garlic up in your kitchen. These vegetables can and should keep us company.
Then there are the things we dehydrate. We have an electric dehydrator, and we dry some things in the sun outside. My husband is presently building a solar dehydrator so that we can dehydrate more of our food without using energy at all. Electric dehydrators are commonly available at yard sales (I've bought 2 and seen many more) and generally speaking use the equivalent of a 40 watt bulb's worth of energy. Mine takes about a day to dehydrate most items. So depending on how much you use it, this could be a big energy expenditure or a small one.
For those who live in dry climates, particularly in the west, it should be possible to simply lay the food outside on a screen, with a layer of cheesecloth covering it. For us in humid places, a solar dehydrator is a little more complicated. But there are many plans on the internet, and they work beautifully. I've also used my car as a dehydrator, and while there are some concerns about outgassing, I tend to think if you *sit* in your car, you have more to worry about than eating food dehydrated in a car with the windows left partly open. It works very well, although the entire vehicle smells like strawberries if you do those ;-). Your gas oven with a pilot light on will work quite well, as will a rack hung at a reasonable distance from a woodstove.
Dehydrated food keeps less of its essential nutrients than most other methods. Generally speaking, the most nutrients are retained when food is dried away from direct sunlight, at comparatively low temperatures - the lower the better. Thus, the best way to dry many quick-drying things is simply to hang them up in a well ventilated, airy place away from direct light. This works very well for herbs, greens, hot peppers, and even apple slices and green beans (called "leather britches" when they are dried this way. Take a needle and lace a string through the peppers, or just bunch the herbs and hang them. Once things are dry, no matter how pretty they look, however, store them in glass (great use for those old rubber ring canning jars and the jars with nicks) jars or other bugproof containers. I regularly find metal tins from flavored popcorn at yardsales - these work well.
We dry herbs, greens, tomatoes, sweet peppers (if you like sun dried tomatoes, dried sweet red peppers are even better), sweet corn (delicious!), almost all fruits, pumpkin and fruit "leather," garlic and hot peppers. We've also made dried meats before, like jerky, but since poultry doesn't work, local fish is mostly contaminated and we don't eat much red meat, it isn't a big thing for us.
We also dry some foods on the plant. In dry places, I'm told you can pull up the entire plant of "Principe Borghese" tomatoes and hang it over a fence and the tomatoes will dry on their own. That doesn't work here. But beans, peas, limas, favas, corn and grains will dry on the plant. I find that popcorn often needs a little more time drying inside, but generally speaking with peas and beans, all you have to do is leave some on the plant and harvest when the pods are dry and rattling.
Generally speaking, I tend to think that dried foods are among the tastiest, and dehydrating, like freezing, is quite quick - just cut up the food and ignore it until it is at the stage of dryness you want. Using solar energy, ambient air circulation or heat that you'd be creating anyway, it requires no additional fossil fuels. After root cellaring, drying food is a favorite.
But not quite as favorite as season extension/keeping animals on the hoof. Because, after all, in most of these cases, what we're seeking is the flavor of fresh growing things as closely approximated as possible. There are exceptions, of course - jams or sundried tomatoes, flavors we enjoy in their own right. But generally speaking, we don't freeze peppers to get the terrific flavor of frozen pepper - we're trying to get as close to fresh as possible. So the best strategy of all is, as much as possible, to extend your garden season so that you can have fresh, really local things when you want them.
I've written about fall gardening here, and that might be a place to start planning.
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/07/thinking-ahead-to-fall-garden.html. We find that with very basic season extension techniques - no greenhouse, artificial heat or anything like it - we can have fresh greens and salads as well as a few extras from the end of March to the end of December. But as Eliot Coleman's _Four Season Harvest_ demonstrates, the possibilities are much, much greater - you can have food 12 months of a year with minimal inputs in many climates.
Everyone, for example, can sprout seeds all winter long. Most of us can keep some fresh herbs alive. And if you have no garden, you might consider talking to local farmers or your CSA farmers, and telling them that you'd be glad to pay for local greens all winter long. Perhaps someone will start the project.
I don't freeze most cabbage-family vegetables because we can have them all year. Kale will overwinter in the garden with minimal protection - it often isn't easily available to us because of deep snow, but it is there all year round. The same is true of leeks, and some other greens like miner's lettuce and arugula. Brussels sprouts and cabbage will generally hold out until December here, and the brussels sprouts will last another month in cold storage if the plants are pulled up whole. Cabbage will last many months - often through the whole winter. Lettuces can be grown in a sunny window all winter long to provide some salads. So there's really no reason for the inferior taste of frozen cabbage or brussels sprouts.
Turnips and beets will sprout greens in cold storage, and these can be cut several times. I've never done it, but endives can be forced in winter. Leeks will overwinter here pretty reliably, as will parsnips and salsify. So if you are reasonably content to eat turnip greens, beet greens, kale, lettuce, spinach, arugula, asian greens, cabbage, sprouts, fresh herbs, brussels sprouts, and supplement these greens with root cellared vegetables, dried ones, and other methods I'll talk about, there's really no reason, even in cold snowy places like upstate NY, to *need* freezing or canning. You may want them - and that's fine. But they really aren't necessary for a delicious and diverse winter diet.
For those who choose to eat meat, keeping meat animals alive may or may not be a more efficient way of preserving their meat than canning or freezing. And no, this need not apply only to farmers. For example, a suburbanite or even many urbanites could easily keep several hutches of rabbits which would be fed mostly on food scraps, very small quantities of grain and "hay" and dried weeds from your yard cuttings (make sure you know something about animal nutrition).
Generally speaking, if you can produce an animal's winter food without too much in the way of fossil inputs, it may make more sense to simply care for the animal until you are ready to butcher it. The meat will be fresher, have greater nutritional value and will taste better. This technique is particularly useful if you eat meat mostly for festivals, and share with neighbors and community members. For example, in many nations at holidays, extended families will come together to butcher a sheep or goat and share it out.
Generally speaking, if you are feeding purchased food to an animal, you probably would be better off butchering and preserving some other way, rather than wasting food, especially grain, on an animal whose destiny is to be dinner. And generally speaking, this requires you be willing to do your own butchering, rather than sending animals away to be processed. Personally, I prefer to do my own when possible, because it is better for the animal and less traumatic for them, and this encourages us to butcher one animal at a time, only as needed. There's no better way, I think, to sort out your relationship to the meat you eat (if you do) than to be responsible for the animal's life and death. This isn't feasible for everyone, but more people could and perhaps should do it than do.
The other food preservation method I recommend is lactofermentation. The two forms of lactofermentation most Americans are familiar with are making sauerkraut and barrel pickles. If you've ever bought a pickle from a barrel or a refrigerator case, or *fresh* (not canned) sauerkraut, you've had a lactofermented food. But there are many other kinds, chief among them is kimchi, the Korean national food, to which I'm entirely addicted.
Lactofermented foods use a salt brine to encourage natural bacterial fermentation, and lactofermented foods are very good for you - unlike any other method of food preservation, some vegetables stored through lactofermentation are actually more nutritious than the original vegetable, because the fermentation makes additional nutrients available. For example, kimchi has levels of B vitamins that are twice as high as the chinese cabbage alone. The acid preserves the foods naturally, and they will last for many months kept in a cool place. You can can them, but I don't recommend it, because the hot water will kill all the bacteria and reduce the nutritional levels. Sauerkraut (which really tastes infinitely better homemade than anything you've ever eaten from a store) is very high in vitamin C - enough to prevent scurvy over long winters.
You need only pots and salt to do this, so it is very cheap, very low energy, very low time and very tasty. You can make many complicated and delicious flavors - for example, my great-grandmother made sauerkraut with sour cherries in it. When most people think of kimchi, they think fiery, but in fact there are hundreds of kimchis, some sweet, some spicy, some very sour. All the ones I have ever had are delicious. The average korean eats 200 *pounds* of kimchi a year.
Lactofermented foods also have the specific advantage that some of them produce natural, narrow spectrum antibiotics specific against ecoli, listerian and clostridium botulinum. That is - they protect you against food poisoning. With all the food contamination scares we've had recently, this is a non-trivial benefit. Fermented foods in general tend to have these - yogurt and miso as well, but sauekraut, brined pickles and kimchi have especially high levels of these natural antibiotics.
If you have a spot cool enough to keep potatoes, you can keep lactofermented foods. They will very gradually get sourer over time, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
There are still other methods of food preservation. For example, the preservation of fruit in alcohol (as liqueurs or as rumpot), the salting of fish and meat, preservation in fat, smoking, preservation of vegetables and fruits in layers of sugar and salt all have a long history. We've experimented a little with some of these, but the above are the major techniques we use. If you are interested in these other methods, the book _Keeping Food Fresh_ by the Gardeners and Farmers of Terra Vivante. None of their food preservation recipes include canning or freezing.
So what's the best way to preserve food? Well, the lowest energy techniques are generally root cellaring, season extension (especially in climates that require little or no protection), solar/ambient dehydrating, and lactofermentation. The fastest ways are generally root cellaring (overall winner), season extension, solar dehydrating and freezing. The most nutritious methods are generally lactofermentation, season extension and root cellaring, followed by freezing for short periods. Canning and freezing are generally speaking not best at much, and I'm personally working on reducing them in my life.
The best tasting way? Depends on the food. Below I've listed my personal preferences in order of preference, but you'll have to experiment and see what you like.
Happy Preserving!!
Apples: Root Cellaring, dehydrating, canned as sauce/apple butter
Apricots: dry, sauce (canned)
Asian greens: season extension, lactofermentation
Asparagus:fresh
Bananas: dried, frozen
Basil: frozen as pesto
Beans, dry: dried
Beans, Green: eaten fresh, pickled/lactofermented
Beets: Root cellared, pickled
Blueberries: jammed, dried
Brussels sprouts; season extension
Carrots: root cellared, season extension
Cabbage: root cellar, lactofermentation
Corn, sweet: dehydrated, canned, frozen
Corn, pop: dry
Corn, flour: dry
Citrus: Root cellared, salted (preserved lemons), sugared and dehydrated (orange slices), liqueurs, dried (peel), canned (juice)
Cranberries: jammed, sauce, frozen, dried
Eggs: Root Cellared, on hoof
Figs: dry
Garlic: root cellared, dried
Greens: season extension, lactofermentation
Grains:dry
Herbs: most dried, some salted
Lettuce: season extension
Meats: On hoof, canned, frozen, dried
Milk: fermented as cheese and yogurt, frozen, preserved as salted butter
Onions: Root Cellared
Pears: Root cellar, canned, dried
Peas, snap and snow: frozen
Peas, shell; dry, frozen
Peaches: dry, canned
Peppers, sweet: dried, frozen
Peppers, hot: dried, frozen
Plums: Jam, dry,
Potatoes: Root Cellared
Pumpkin: root cellared, dry (the USDA recommends against canning pumpkin or squash at home), seeds dried
Raspberries: sauce, jam
Squash: ibid
Strawberries: Dried (fabulous), jammed
Summer Squash: frozen
Tomatoes: Season extension, root cellared, dry, canned
Zucchini: dry, frozen, pickled
I've probably missed a few things, but here's some.
Sharon
A lot of what I'm talking about here applies best to people with space for decent sized gardens or even small farms. But a good deal of this can apply to urbanites with no or small gardens. For example, even urbanites can forage for herbs and greens to eat and preserve. In many cities it is possible to keep rabbits or chickens for meat and eggs, and preserve them, and many cities have fruit trees on private or public property whose fruit goes unharvested. Simply asking may get you abundant citrus or peaches or apples. And, of course, everyone can go to local farms and farmer's markets, buy large quantities of food and put it up. If money is an issue, the best time of day to go is late in the afternoon, when farmers have a strong incentive not to haul everything home. Buy what they have and put it up.
I will also note that I am including a discussion of preserving meat here. I know many people have ethical or religious reasons not to eat some kinds of meat, or meat all. That's fine, but I'm not going to discuss vegetarianism in this post, and I'd ask that you refrain from bringing it up. If information about meat preservation doesn't apply to you, go on to the next item. I'll gladly discuss vegetarianism at another time, but this post is about the best and least energy intensive ways to produce all foods, whether any given reader eats them or not.
Before we get started, the odds are good that unless you are adding a major energy hog appliance (that is, you are going out and buying a big freezer), you will be reducing your fossil fuel dependence in total when you put up food, no matter how you do it. The food you grow or buy locally to put up has already used vastly less fossil fuels to produce it, and when you freeze things, you are saving yourself trips to the grocery store, which many of us do by car. So whatever choice you make will probably be better than not putting up food. But it still makes sense to cut fossil fuel whenever possible.
Generally speaking, when I talk about food preservation, people immediately think "canning" and "freezing." Those are the most familiar methods of extending the life of food in our garden. But they are also the most energy intensive choices. Both are also water intensive (electricity generation takes a lot of water, as does canning), canning is comparatively time intensive, and generally, they are more expensive than other options. So while I do both, my long term planning increasingly deemphasizes both of these. There are other options. Food can be salted down, preserved in sugar or alcohol, lactofermented (more on this shortly), root cellared (stored in a naturally cool place), dried or dehydrated, or preserved by keeping it alive in the garden or barnyard through season extension or "keeping it on the hoof". And while I do can and freeze some foods, I'm increasingly focusing on other methods because they are lower input, and often produce better results.
Freezing is probably the most common way we preserve food, and is generally the most energy intensive. In _Eating Fossil Fuels_, Dale Pfeiffer notes that if food is kept more than four months, freezing is usually more energy intensive than canning. But of course, this information is based on an average person, canning on average gas stove, compared to an average chest freezer. There are any number of factors that might change this equation some. If, for example, you have a very small freezer, and an electric stove, the length of time might change. Or, for example, if
you can do much of your canning on a wood stove you'd be using anyway to heat your house. But generally speaking, freezing is the most energy and emissions intensive methodology. And freezers have the added disadvantage, if you don't have one already, of putting more freon into the world.
On the other hand, if you have a freezer and are going to run it anyway, the most efficient way to run it is to keep it full all the time (I'm assuming you are using a newer chest freezer, which is vastly more efficient than an upright or much older model). All of which is an argument for freezing if you already have a freezer you are using. We do have a freezer, and since we're finally turning off the fridge this weekend (yay!), it will be our only method of refrigeration, keeping the ice packs for the coolers cool, and also we'll be keeping the freezer full. In our case, using the freezer for some foods makes sense for now. In the long term, however, our plan is to get rid of the freezer too.
The things that I think are best kept frozen are: Raw meats, apple cider, milk, butter, blanched brassica vegetables (broccoli especially), okra, pesto, zucchini some leftovers and peas. That really isn't a very long list, but given that we generally have our poultry for the year butchered all at once, the turkeys and chickens will take care of it. Eric put up about 10 quarts of broccoli yesterday. Even though other brassicas freeze well, we don't bother with it much because they almost all keep well by other methods. So at the end of the year, the freezer generally has some broccoli, some peas, some okra, our meats and a bunch of gallons of apple cider that we stick in to have over the course of the winter. Honestly, the more I look at this list, the more I wonder why we're keeping the freezer at all.
At this stage, we don't freeze much milk or butter. But it is worth noting that these products are usually produced using grain when they are eaten year 'round - that is, they are produced by feeding human food to cows. That's not evil, but if the goal is to make as much food available to human beings as possible, seasonal, grassfed milk from goats, sheep and cows might make more sense. This is the historical way of doing this - animals were allowed to dry up during the winter. Grassfed dairy could be produced here for 7 months of the year, more or less, and the rest of the time we'd be eating preserved (frozen or salted and kept cool) butter and cheese. And, if we were running a freezer, we might keep some milk frozen.
Other people freeze other vegetables, but generally speaking, I find that most of the typically frozen veggies do as well or better in other means of storage, or we simply don't like them frozen that well, so we eat them only in season. Chief in this latter category is green beans. I love green beans - fresh. I'll eat a few as dilly beans. But generally speaking, both canned and frozen are distinctly inferior to my mind. Which means that we enjoy green beans from July to October, and then just stop worrying about it, and eat other things. We feel asparagus is another such vegetable.
In fact, seasonal eating is helpful in putting all of this in perspective - that is, if you insist on eating the exact same things all year around, you can expect to find food preservation time and energy intensive. But if you are content to enjoy things in their season, your need to transfer, say, summer foods to winter is going to be reduced to luxury and pleasure. We eat our fair share of bread with blueberry jam in the winter as well, but it is helpful to recognize that things have their time, and that winter apple season, not blueberry. That means I don't have to worry about a year's worth of blueberries - just enough for our regular jam fixes and a few dehydrated for winter pancakes.
Canning is the next most energy intensive method, in part because it requires extended periods of boiling, and also because each canning requires new canning jar lids. Canning is also time intensive. Some of that time you don't have to be paying attention - for example, with practice I've found I can pressure can and do chores at the same time, as long as I stay in the same room. But much of the time you spend canning food, you have to be keeping an eye on it. The good thing is that much of one's canning can be done in intensive batches, or casually, a little each evening. One way to cut back on difficulty is to do some of your canning later in the season. Applesauce, for example, can be put up in the fall after you get the apples, or in the winter, as you sort through the stored apples and sauce the ones that are getting wrinkled. I often wait to do pickles until things have cooled down and the stove is welcome.
Generally speaking, using older style jars with reusable rubber rings is not recommended. I know some of you may do it, but botulism is nothing to play with, and I certainly wouldn't recommend canning anything other than high-acid (pickles, jams and jellies) foods. The same goes for reusing canning jar lids, or sealing jars with parrafin. Generally speaking, not a great idea, and if you had to do it, don't do it with anything that could support botulism spores.
There are two kinds of canning. Water bath canning is only for high acid foods - fruit juices, jams, jellies and some tomato products (generally with added lemon, vinegar or vitamin c tablets). Pressure canning is for everything else, and you need a pressure canner in good working order to do it safely. If you don't do it correctly, your family could get botulism, a deadly bacteria that thrives in anaerobic environments and is endemic in our soil. Don't mess with it. Get a copy of the _Ball Blue Book_ for canning, check out USDA regulations, and don't use older canning books - ever. I'm not trying to be discouraging, but there's a lot of misinformation about canning out there, and the price of screwing up can be deadly. Learn how to do it right.
Once you have, canning is generally a good method for longer term storage. It is less energy intensive than freezing, and while in the short term there's some loss of nutrients, by the time frozen food is six months old, it has lost more nutrients than canned. Canning is by far the best method of putting up jams and jellies, some pickled things, and is, I think a good way to store cooked meat items, like chicken broth and stew. Such food is convenient and tastes good. It does require an outlay for materials (a good, reliable pressure canner, new lids, water bath canning rack, a few other things), but is a vastly smaller investment than a freezer, for example, and I've acquired every single canning jar I own (800+) for free or less than 5 dollars for a big box of them. They are common fodder at freecycle, yard sales, estate sales, etc...
I don't can all that much food, and again, I could get along quite comfortably entirely without it. I make jams (strawberry, blueberry, black currant, raspberry), apple butter, pumpkin butter, and other sweets. I usually put up some grape juice (for sabbaths), and can some pickles. And, of course, tomatoes as sauce, salsa and canned tomatoes. And later in the cold weather, after we butcher, while the stoves are running anyway, I'll put up turkey and chicken. But everything but the water bathed, high acid jams, pickles and tomatoes could be preserved in other ways as well. For all that we tend to think that canning and freezing are essential to get through the winter, they really aren't - if they were, humanity wouldn't have survived for the last few thousand years before they were invented.
The method I like best is root cellaring. I don't actually put my food down cellar -our cellar is gross, damp and floods occasionally. Instead, I store food in a closet on our enclosed front porch and in our attached garage. I've also stored foods on the uninsulated porch itself in a cooler. But you can use any area that doesn't freeze but gets quite cold. There's a wonderful book by Scott and Nancy Bubel _Root Cellaring_ that covers the details. You can also build or dig an unattached root cellar, or build a small insulated above-ground space. All this does require a cold period, but if you have one, it is well worth a one-time investment creating a secure space for cool food storage. Attics will often work, so will existing basements - you can build a small seperate area which is insulated with board insulation and vented. If you do it yourself, it might not cost more than a few hundred dollars, and could provide you with thousands of dollars of food storage every year. Heck, a closet on an outside wall could be lined with board insulation and an outside air source added - instant root cellar!
We store more food this way than any other. We store potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, celeriac, apples (15 bushels a year), pears, quinces, cabbages, persimmons, salsify and more, and there are plenty of things you can store that we don't. These are the basis of our winter eating. It does take up space, but surprisingly little if kept well organized.
This is especially important because of the potatoes - potatoes grow everywhere. They can be grown on rocky or hilly or poor soil that won't grow anything else. One year, I threw an inch or two of compost down and dumped potatoes on my gravel driveway, covered them with straw and got respectable yields. You can also grow large quantities of potatoes in barrels. They are nutritionally dense, tasty, store well and much easier to grow and preserve than grain. They can be the basis of your diet. Sweet potatoes and some other roots (manioc, taro) can do the same. That makes it possible for ordinary people to grow an entire, healthy diet on a space the size of an average suburban lawn. Ecology Action has emphasized potatoes and sweet potatoes and found that really good gardeners on really good soil could feed themselves a fully balanced diet on 700-1000 square feet. The book _One Circle_ documents how.
IMHO, if you can do one thing, it would be grow and store potatoes and sweet potatoes. We would all prefer more variety in our diet (and at a minimum, make sure you grow multiple *varieties* of potatoes and sweet potatoes - not doing so caused the potato famine in Ireland), but potatoes are life sustaining in difficult times. There are places you can't root cellar and places you won't need to, but if you don't live in one of them, consider finding a place for cold storage of roots and other crops.
We also store some food in our house, with us. There are some foods - sweet potatoes, pumpkins, squash, onions and garlic that tolerate or prefer cool home temperatures - that is, they like the temperatures that conserving people have in their homes in cool weather - 50s to low 60s. So it is simple to store squash under the bed, stick the sweet potatoes in a spare closet, and hang the garlic up in your kitchen. These vegetables can and should keep us company.
Then there are the things we dehydrate. We have an electric dehydrator, and we dry some things in the sun outside. My husband is presently building a solar dehydrator so that we can dehydrate more of our food without using energy at all. Electric dehydrators are commonly available at yard sales (I've bought 2 and seen many more) and generally speaking use the equivalent of a 40 watt bulb's worth of energy. Mine takes about a day to dehydrate most items. So depending on how much you use it, this could be a big energy expenditure or a small one.
For those who live in dry climates, particularly in the west, it should be possible to simply lay the food outside on a screen, with a layer of cheesecloth covering it. For us in humid places, a solar dehydrator is a little more complicated. But there are many plans on the internet, and they work beautifully. I've also used my car as a dehydrator, and while there are some concerns about outgassing, I tend to think if you *sit* in your car, you have more to worry about than eating food dehydrated in a car with the windows left partly open. It works very well, although the entire vehicle smells like strawberries if you do those ;-). Your gas oven with a pilot light on will work quite well, as will a rack hung at a reasonable distance from a woodstove.
Dehydrated food keeps less of its essential nutrients than most other methods. Generally speaking, the most nutrients are retained when food is dried away from direct sunlight, at comparatively low temperatures - the lower the better. Thus, the best way to dry many quick-drying things is simply to hang them up in a well ventilated, airy place away from direct light. This works very well for herbs, greens, hot peppers, and even apple slices and green beans (called "leather britches" when they are dried this way. Take a needle and lace a string through the peppers, or just bunch the herbs and hang them. Once things are dry, no matter how pretty they look, however, store them in glass (great use for those old rubber ring canning jars and the jars with nicks) jars or other bugproof containers. I regularly find metal tins from flavored popcorn at yardsales - these work well.
We dry herbs, greens, tomatoes, sweet peppers (if you like sun dried tomatoes, dried sweet red peppers are even better), sweet corn (delicious!), almost all fruits, pumpkin and fruit "leather," garlic and hot peppers. We've also made dried meats before, like jerky, but since poultry doesn't work, local fish is mostly contaminated and we don't eat much red meat, it isn't a big thing for us.
We also dry some foods on the plant. In dry places, I'm told you can pull up the entire plant of "Principe Borghese" tomatoes and hang it over a fence and the tomatoes will dry on their own. That doesn't work here. But beans, peas, limas, favas, corn and grains will dry on the plant. I find that popcorn often needs a little more time drying inside, but generally speaking with peas and beans, all you have to do is leave some on the plant and harvest when the pods are dry and rattling.
Generally speaking, I tend to think that dried foods are among the tastiest, and dehydrating, like freezing, is quite quick - just cut up the food and ignore it until it is at the stage of dryness you want. Using solar energy, ambient air circulation or heat that you'd be creating anyway, it requires no additional fossil fuels. After root cellaring, drying food is a favorite.
But not quite as favorite as season extension/keeping animals on the hoof. Because, after all, in most of these cases, what we're seeking is the flavor of fresh growing things as closely approximated as possible. There are exceptions, of course - jams or sundried tomatoes, flavors we enjoy in their own right. But generally speaking, we don't freeze peppers to get the terrific flavor of frozen pepper - we're trying to get as close to fresh as possible. So the best strategy of all is, as much as possible, to extend your garden season so that you can have fresh, really local things when you want them.
I've written about fall gardening here, and that might be a place to start planning.
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/07/thinking-ahead-to-fall-garden.html. We find that with very basic season extension techniques - no greenhouse, artificial heat or anything like it - we can have fresh greens and salads as well as a few extras from the end of March to the end of December. But as Eliot Coleman's _Four Season Harvest_ demonstrates, the possibilities are much, much greater - you can have food 12 months of a year with minimal inputs in many climates.
Everyone, for example, can sprout seeds all winter long. Most of us can keep some fresh herbs alive. And if you have no garden, you might consider talking to local farmers or your CSA farmers, and telling them that you'd be glad to pay for local greens all winter long. Perhaps someone will start the project.
I don't freeze most cabbage-family vegetables because we can have them all year. Kale will overwinter in the garden with minimal protection - it often isn't easily available to us because of deep snow, but it is there all year round. The same is true of leeks, and some other greens like miner's lettuce and arugula. Brussels sprouts and cabbage will generally hold out until December here, and the brussels sprouts will last another month in cold storage if the plants are pulled up whole. Cabbage will last many months - often through the whole winter. Lettuces can be grown in a sunny window all winter long to provide some salads. So there's really no reason for the inferior taste of frozen cabbage or brussels sprouts.
Turnips and beets will sprout greens in cold storage, and these can be cut several times. I've never done it, but endives can be forced in winter. Leeks will overwinter here pretty reliably, as will parsnips and salsify. So if you are reasonably content to eat turnip greens, beet greens, kale, lettuce, spinach, arugula, asian greens, cabbage, sprouts, fresh herbs, brussels sprouts, and supplement these greens with root cellared vegetables, dried ones, and other methods I'll talk about, there's really no reason, even in cold snowy places like upstate NY, to *need* freezing or canning. You may want them - and that's fine. But they really aren't necessary for a delicious and diverse winter diet.
For those who choose to eat meat, keeping meat animals alive may or may not be a more efficient way of preserving their meat than canning or freezing. And no, this need not apply only to farmers. For example, a suburbanite or even many urbanites could easily keep several hutches of rabbits which would be fed mostly on food scraps, very small quantities of grain and "hay" and dried weeds from your yard cuttings (make sure you know something about animal nutrition).
Generally speaking, if you can produce an animal's winter food without too much in the way of fossil inputs, it may make more sense to simply care for the animal until you are ready to butcher it. The meat will be fresher, have greater nutritional value and will taste better. This technique is particularly useful if you eat meat mostly for festivals, and share with neighbors and community members. For example, in many nations at holidays, extended families will come together to butcher a sheep or goat and share it out.
Generally speaking, if you are feeding purchased food to an animal, you probably would be better off butchering and preserving some other way, rather than wasting food, especially grain, on an animal whose destiny is to be dinner. And generally speaking, this requires you be willing to do your own butchering, rather than sending animals away to be processed. Personally, I prefer to do my own when possible, because it is better for the animal and less traumatic for them, and this encourages us to butcher one animal at a time, only as needed. There's no better way, I think, to sort out your relationship to the meat you eat (if you do) than to be responsible for the animal's life and death. This isn't feasible for everyone, but more people could and perhaps should do it than do.
The other food preservation method I recommend is lactofermentation. The two forms of lactofermentation most Americans are familiar with are making sauerkraut and barrel pickles. If you've ever bought a pickle from a barrel or a refrigerator case, or *fresh* (not canned) sauerkraut, you've had a lactofermented food. But there are many other kinds, chief among them is kimchi, the Korean national food, to which I'm entirely addicted.
Lactofermented foods use a salt brine to encourage natural bacterial fermentation, and lactofermented foods are very good for you - unlike any other method of food preservation, some vegetables stored through lactofermentation are actually more nutritious than the original vegetable, because the fermentation makes additional nutrients available. For example, kimchi has levels of B vitamins that are twice as high as the chinese cabbage alone. The acid preserves the foods naturally, and they will last for many months kept in a cool place. You can can them, but I don't recommend it, because the hot water will kill all the bacteria and reduce the nutritional levels. Sauerkraut (which really tastes infinitely better homemade than anything you've ever eaten from a store) is very high in vitamin C - enough to prevent scurvy over long winters.
You need only pots and salt to do this, so it is very cheap, very low energy, very low time and very tasty. You can make many complicated and delicious flavors - for example, my great-grandmother made sauerkraut with sour cherries in it. When most people think of kimchi, they think fiery, but in fact there are hundreds of kimchis, some sweet, some spicy, some very sour. All the ones I have ever had are delicious. The average korean eats 200 *pounds* of kimchi a year.
Lactofermented foods also have the specific advantage that some of them produce natural, narrow spectrum antibiotics specific against ecoli, listerian and clostridium botulinum. That is - they protect you against food poisoning. With all the food contamination scares we've had recently, this is a non-trivial benefit. Fermented foods in general tend to have these - yogurt and miso as well, but sauekraut, brined pickles and kimchi have especially high levels of these natural antibiotics.
If you have a spot cool enough to keep potatoes, you can keep lactofermented foods. They will very gradually get sourer over time, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
There are still other methods of food preservation. For example, the preservation of fruit in alcohol (as liqueurs or as rumpot), the salting of fish and meat, preservation in fat, smoking, preservation of vegetables and fruits in layers of sugar and salt all have a long history. We've experimented a little with some of these, but the above are the major techniques we use. If you are interested in these other methods, the book _Keeping Food Fresh_ by the Gardeners and Farmers of Terra Vivante. None of their food preservation recipes include canning or freezing.
So what's the best way to preserve food? Well, the lowest energy techniques are generally root cellaring, season extension (especially in climates that require little or no protection), solar/ambient dehydrating, and lactofermentation. The fastest ways are generally root cellaring (overall winner), season extension, solar dehydrating and freezing. The most nutritious methods are generally lactofermentation, season extension and root cellaring, followed by freezing for short periods. Canning and freezing are generally speaking not best at much, and I'm personally working on reducing them in my life.
The best tasting way? Depends on the food. Below I've listed my personal preferences in order of preference, but you'll have to experiment and see what you like.
Happy Preserving!!
Apples: Root Cellaring, dehydrating, canned as sauce/apple butter
Apricots: dry, sauce (canned)
Asian greens: season extension, lactofermentation
Asparagus:fresh
Bananas: dried, frozen
Basil: frozen as pesto
Beans, dry: dried
Beans, Green: eaten fresh, pickled/lactofermented
Beets: Root cellared, pickled
Blueberries: jammed, dried
Brussels sprouts; season extension
Carrots: root cellared, season extension
Cabbage: root cellar, lactofermentation
Corn, sweet: dehydrated, canned, frozen
Corn, pop: dry
Corn, flour: dry
Citrus: Root cellared, salted (preserved lemons), sugared and dehydrated (orange slices), liqueurs, dried (peel), canned (juice)
Cranberries: jammed, sauce, frozen, dried
Eggs: Root Cellared, on hoof
Figs: dry
Garlic: root cellared, dried
Greens: season extension, lactofermentation
Grains:dry
Herbs: most dried, some salted
Lettuce: season extension
Meats: On hoof, canned, frozen, dried
Milk: fermented as cheese and yogurt, frozen, preserved as salted butter
Onions: Root Cellared
Pears: Root cellar, canned, dried
Peas, snap and snow: frozen
Peas, shell; dry, frozen
Peaches: dry, canned
Peppers, sweet: dried, frozen
Peppers, hot: dried, frozen
Plums: Jam, dry,
Potatoes: Root Cellared
Pumpkin: root cellared, dry (the USDA recommends against canning pumpkin or squash at home), seeds dried
Raspberries: sauce, jam
Squash: ibid
Strawberries: Dried (fabulous), jammed
Summer Squash: frozen
Tomatoes: Season extension, root cellared, dry, canned
Zucchini: dry, frozen, pickled
I've probably missed a few things, but here's some.
Sharon
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
IEA Essentially Confirms Peak Oil
Earlier this year that General Accounting Office of Congress announced that a majority of the world's petroleum geologists believe we are at or very close to an oil peak. Today the Internation Energy Agency, probably the biggest and most influential international energy research body announced that peak oil will almost certainly happen by 2012, and that without Iraq's oil (how much you wanna bet that Iraq will be peacefully pumping oil anytime soon), the head of the IEA announced the world will be petroleum crisis by 2015. Some links are here at Energy Bulletin (the original report is paywalled) http://www.energybulletin.net/31865.html.
Essentially, they are predicting oil shortages within five years. And since production capacity decline is 2-3% per year in the field, but more like 5% in actuality (as more oil goes to actually getting the oil out of the ground and nations reserve more for themselves), we can expect some significant difficulties. The 1970s oil shocks, complete with gas lines, recession and people freezing to death in their houses came from a shortfall of about 5% total - whereas we're expecting, worldwide, a 3-5% reduction in capacity annually.
Shocking news - guess what, we're using up the last of the cheap oil right now! If peak oil is a new concept to you, do some research. An excellent beginning is Gail Tverberg's very clear material on peak oil, including the oil quiz : http://www.energybulletin.net/31847.html and her explanation of the limits of alternatives : http://www.energybulletin.net/28051.html. You might also look at Matthew Simmons' (George Bush's former Energy Czar and head of Simmons and Assoc. investment firm), who is presently predicting that refinery capacity shortages will cause gas lines this summer or next. http://www.energybulletin.net/31847.html
Peak oil is really no longer a debate - the question is when, and how do we respond. And even when doesn't matter as much as we think - as long as we still dreamed there was hope that it was 40 years from now, we had an excuse not to get to work. But the difference between peak oil in 2005, 2010 or 2015 is insufficient. The US Department of Energy's Hirsch Report analyzed that we needed a minimum of 20 years *before* the peak to make a comfortable transition.
Peak oil is here. It is a real part of the everyday discourse now, not a marginal position. And it is about to be a real, everyday part of our lives.
Sharon
Essentially, they are predicting oil shortages within five years. And since production capacity decline is 2-3% per year in the field, but more like 5% in actuality (as more oil goes to actually getting the oil out of the ground and nations reserve more for themselves), we can expect some significant difficulties. The 1970s oil shocks, complete with gas lines, recession and people freezing to death in their houses came from a shortfall of about 5% total - whereas we're expecting, worldwide, a 3-5% reduction in capacity annually.
Shocking news - guess what, we're using up the last of the cheap oil right now! If peak oil is a new concept to you, do some research. An excellent beginning is Gail Tverberg's very clear material on peak oil, including the oil quiz : http://www.energybulletin.net/31847.html and her explanation of the limits of alternatives : http://www.energybulletin.net/28051.html. You might also look at Matthew Simmons' (George Bush's former Energy Czar and head of Simmons and Assoc. investment firm), who is presently predicting that refinery capacity shortages will cause gas lines this summer or next. http://www.energybulletin.net/31847.html
Peak oil is really no longer a debate - the question is when, and how do we respond. And even when doesn't matter as much as we think - as long as we still dreamed there was hope that it was 40 years from now, we had an excuse not to get to work. But the difference between peak oil in 2005, 2010 or 2015 is insufficient. The US Department of Energy's Hirsch Report analyzed that we needed a minimum of 20 years *before* the peak to make a comfortable transition.
Peak oil is here. It is a real part of the everyday discourse now, not a marginal position. And it is about to be a real, everyday part of our lives.
Sharon
Monday, July 09, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 11 - Organize!
Ok, the minute they saw the title of this essay, all my friends and family started laughing their collective behinds off ;-). Because this is the one section in which I'm telling you folks to do as I say, not as I do. I'm not great at this in some respects (in others I am, actually). But it is also something I'm working on - hard. And I think it is worth my speaking from my own limitations here, because this really is that important. I honestly believe that the big thing that will decide whether I can live my life at 90% reduction or below is whether or not I can really get organized. If I can pull that off, I'll make it.
Let's start with the ways that organization can save you energy and money that I do do comparatively well. One of them is with food. The big chunks of one's food budget come in the number of trips made, the cooking and refrigeration energy you use, etc... And growing your own food requires considerable planning - a pizza I want to eat in the fall requires I start thinking about wheat last fall, tomatoes this winter and basil in may. Planning and organizing can make a huge difference in your consumption. Buying in bulk, and keeping quantities of your staples around, learning to eat seasonally and recording what works and what doesn't, consolidating your cooking so that you do all the baking in one shot for a few days, and can keep the oven off...this is planning.
Another thing I actually do pretty well is consolidating trips. We're down to driving 3 days per week at this point. It will go up to four in the fall, when my husband goes back to teaching (I'm working from home this summer), but we'll have it down to two by next week if I have anything to say about it. That means we need to schedule ahead on drive days, and accomodate drive days to scheduled things. On one trip to the pick-your-own fruit place, we might also stop at the pool to swim and eat a packed lunch, at the bulk store, and go visit friends. On our trip to synagogue we don't do commerce, but we'll spend as much time with friends and community as possible.
Ok, here's what I'm bad at - keeping the clutter from piling up. And this eats up a lot of my time, as I spend it cleaning up a mess that wouldn't be there if I were better organized. I have better uses for that time, and I suspect so do all of us. It also eats energy. Am I the only one who has gone out and bought something because they couldn't find a tool or thing we knew we had? The only person who has wasted gas on a last minute run out to the hardware store because I hadn't thought ahead to the next project? Wasted heat because I hadn't gotten around to digging through the boxes to find the insulating curtains - and the reason I hadn't is because the attic is such a mess? Stopped off for pizza instead of going home and getting dinner because of an errand that wasn't really necessary had I been better organized?
Record keeping is important too. How do you know how much impact that change in behavior has unless you track your prior usage and your current one? How do you know how long 50lbs of oatmeal will last you unless you track it? How do you know whether the chickens or the cell phone is worth the money and energy they cost unless you keep track? This is another one I'm not very good at, in part because I actually have a very good memory. For a long time, I could keep an awful lot in my head with only minimal losses ;-). Four kids worth of brain damage later, I need to write it down. I don't always. But I'm working on it.
Honestly, I truly think that the one thing that would make the biggest difference in my environmental impact is a greater degree of organization. As I said, I'm working on it.
Sharon
Let's start with the ways that organization can save you energy and money that I do do comparatively well. One of them is with food. The big chunks of one's food budget come in the number of trips made, the cooking and refrigeration energy you use, etc... And growing your own food requires considerable planning - a pizza I want to eat in the fall requires I start thinking about wheat last fall, tomatoes this winter and basil in may. Planning and organizing can make a huge difference in your consumption. Buying in bulk, and keeping quantities of your staples around, learning to eat seasonally and recording what works and what doesn't, consolidating your cooking so that you do all the baking in one shot for a few days, and can keep the oven off...this is planning.
Another thing I actually do pretty well is consolidating trips. We're down to driving 3 days per week at this point. It will go up to four in the fall, when my husband goes back to teaching (I'm working from home this summer), but we'll have it down to two by next week if I have anything to say about it. That means we need to schedule ahead on drive days, and accomodate drive days to scheduled things. On one trip to the pick-your-own fruit place, we might also stop at the pool to swim and eat a packed lunch, at the bulk store, and go visit friends. On our trip to synagogue we don't do commerce, but we'll spend as much time with friends and community as possible.
Ok, here's what I'm bad at - keeping the clutter from piling up. And this eats up a lot of my time, as I spend it cleaning up a mess that wouldn't be there if I were better organized. I have better uses for that time, and I suspect so do all of us. It also eats energy. Am I the only one who has gone out and bought something because they couldn't find a tool or thing we knew we had? The only person who has wasted gas on a last minute run out to the hardware store because I hadn't thought ahead to the next project? Wasted heat because I hadn't gotten around to digging through the boxes to find the insulating curtains - and the reason I hadn't is because the attic is such a mess? Stopped off for pizza instead of going home and getting dinner because of an errand that wasn't really necessary had I been better organized?
Record keeping is important too. How do you know how much impact that change in behavior has unless you track your prior usage and your current one? How do you know how long 50lbs of oatmeal will last you unless you track it? How do you know whether the chickens or the cell phone is worth the money and energy they cost unless you keep track? This is another one I'm not very good at, in part because I actually have a very good memory. For a long time, I could keep an awful lot in my head with only minimal losses ;-). Four kids worth of brain damage later, I need to write it down. I don't always. But I'm working on it.
Honestly, I truly think that the one thing that would make the biggest difference in my environmental impact is a greater degree of organization. As I said, I'm working on it.
Sharon
Pick Up Your Hat
Way back in college, I read a short story by Robert Heinlein that I've never been able to find again. In it, a bartender is standing at his bar, when two nuclear scientists come in. They are talking about the immanent danger of nuclear attack on the US, and the bartender gets scared. He asks them whether they really believe what they are saying, and then says something along the lines of "If you really believed that, you wouldn't be sitting here drinking, you'd get out of the target area right now." The scientists assure the bartender that everything is really that serious, and then list a host of reasons why they can't leave right now. The bartender, convinced, picks up his hat and walks out of the bar and city right then, leaving all his connections behind. And this being fiction, just as he gets outside the city limits, he starts to question his own instincts, and he tries to make a phone call (or something), only to see the mushroom cloud go up behind him.
Now life very rarely justifies our assumptions so rapidly, but I find this story interesting because it illustrates just how hard it is to live your life as though you believe bad things are going to happen to you. Even when we know they are likely, even when we see things forthcoming, it is awfully hard to pick up our hats and set aside one set of options to pursue another. Particularly when there's little cultural support for it - when the assumption that even basic preparedness makes you a wacko is so prevalent. The story struck me, long before I discovered peak oil or climate change, because I wondered how it is one knows that *now* is the time to pick up one's hat. I was struck, for example, by the dilemma of the Jews who left Germany - how do you know that the worst is really here? My husband's grandmother was on the kindertransport, that took German-Jewish children to England. She wasn't even 13, and her parents put her on a train with one suitcase and sent her off to a far away country to be raised by someone else. It saved her life. A cousin of hers, living in the same neighborhood in the ghetto stayed with her parents - they thought the risk of harm coming to her in England was greater than the risk of harm in Germany. That cousin died in the concentration camps, and Inge, Eric's grandmother, survived. How do you know it is time to risk so much?
Now if any of you read Matt Savinar over at http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html, you could argue that on nearly every measure, Matt's much more apocalyptic in his thinking than I am. He writes under the name "Juris Doctor of Doom" and he makes the argument that we should just follow the money trail - he says, "we're spending billions to fix problems we spend trillions creating." Matt forsees a real apocalyptic disaster, whereas I tend to talk a lot about what we can do to mitigate disaster, and I tend to think mostly in terms of poverty, rather than anything I'd call "apocalypse." In that sense, it would seem that Matt's a "doomer" and I'm not.
But it isn't that simple. If you read Matt's writings, you'll see he's currently on a hunt for the perfect place to live in the post peak world, at the very same time that he posts "we may only have 18 months left (this was a few months ago)." Right now, he's living in a place that he admits probably won't do very well. And Matt knows as well as I do that building community, and food systems, getting accepted in an area, and getting trees to fruiting and getting practiced in meeting many of your needs really takes time. I've been doing it for going on 7 years now, and I'm still hoping for more time. If you look at our words, Matt's got a far darker vision than I have. If you look at our actions, Matt's risking a whole lot more than I'm prepared to. I picked up my hat a long time ago. Matt's just now ready to pick up his.
I'm not picking on Matt Savinar, or anyone else. Heck, I don't know the future, and Matt may well be wiser than I am. Also, given that he doesn't have kids, is more mobile and has more money than I do, he's probably making the right choice for him. I mention this not because I think Matt doesn't believe what he says - I'm sure he does - but because all of us are hedging our bets to one degree or another, and also because even when you believe it, it can be damned hard to keep the link between hypothetical futures and reality alive in your head and your thinking.
Like everyone, I make my risk analyses based on my reality, and other people have to make theirs on their own. I judge based on my own assessments - do I believe the IPCC or Hansen? Do I believe CERA or Simmons and Assoc. on peak oil? Who do I choose to track? And what are my priorities. For me, protecting my kids is #1, and everything else is a distant second. But even that leads me to one set of solutions, not another. I could, for example, believe that what was needed was a ton of guns and total isolation, or that I would be best protecting my kids by converting to Christianity and fitting in in middle America, or by making a lot of money and protecting them by living in a gated community. And honestly, it is conceivable that any of those strategies might be right - and my "build community, grow food" theory might be entirely wrong, or I just might be unlucky. Like everyone, I'm playing the odds.
The post I wrote yesterday, arguing that people should start living now like they may have to in the long term for selfish reasons got some people quite concerned. They felt that I was either panicking or driving other people to panic. To a large degree that wasn't my intention, but I did intend to create a sense of urgency. I
do want people who read this to think seriously about whether they have a viable back up plan for a crisis that begins in the near future. Why? Not because I think the whole world is likely to collapse, but because I think any collapse will come in stages and segments. For a Katrina victim, it may already have happened. For me it might be tomorrow. For you, it might wait a decade. We don't know - we're playing the odds.
I do want people who read this to thrive in the future, and if you think I'm a wacko, so be it. I tend to think that after Katrina, in an inflationary economy, someone who says "store food, plan ahead, get ready now" might not look like the Unibomber, but I might not be much of a judge ;-).
I think I'd rather have you believe that I'm a nutcasethan believe that I always and only think "we can do it" and thus, don't encourage you to hedge your bets. And I genuinely do believe that we are fairly close to a situation in which many of us will be most concerned with just getting by, and the things that a lot of us might want or need to do to live comfortably with much less are going to be less and less available to us. I think we *can* change many things, and fairly quickly at that - but I'm not at all certain that we will - and I don't want to bet my life on what Brian called, in comments "the political will fairy." I sure as heck don't want you to bet your future on *my* vision of the political will fairy ;-).
Why do I think that we need to start picking up our hats right now, and making the changes that we're going to have to make anyway right now? Well, at this point it still looks like world oil production may have peaked over two years ago - OPEC simply doesn't seem to be able to increase production. Mexico is experiencing double digit declines, and will stop exporting oil altogether shortly. While some new production capacity is coming online, I think we're at the bumpy plateau. That means over the long term, oil prices keep going up forever - they may trend down again a few times, but when they level off, they'll be higher...and higher...and higher.
Natural gas prices have been rising slowly, but mostly because we've had a series of mild winters. One cold one, and we can expect much higher heating costs. Natural gas is set to peak in the next decade, the US has already had its peak and Canada is next. Coal is not far behind. Peaking means rising costs, increasing difficulty getting at it, and a lower return on investment - more and more energy gets eaten up just getting the oil or coal out of the ground. And we're seeing nations that are energy producers reserving more and more of what they do have for themselves - eventually, they stop exporting, and other nations have to make do with what they have. The US's oil reserves peaked more than 30 years ago, our gas almost a decade ago, and most likely our coal has peaked as well/
Energy isn't the only thing getting pricier. Food is too. First of all, the good food we're all supposed to be eating *does* cost more than industrial crap. But even the crap is going way up in price, mostly because of energy costs, but also because of drought (climate change induced in many cases), desertification and soil destruction, and falling yields in many places in the world. I don't think that trend is gong to change for quite a while - food prices will continue to rise because we're putting our food in our gas tanks, and because our food costs are dependent on cheap energy - which is over. That means that food you buy now and store is a good bet to be cheaper. And food you grow yourself is an even better one. Stores won't save you - but they can help a little.
Meanwhile, we're on the verge of some deep economic trouble, and a large number of people believe we're headed for a recession. A lot of them are fairly reputable people who ought to know - Greenspan, for example, has been manipulating the US economy for a long time, and he thinks it is likely we'll experience recession by year's end. Now recessions come and recessions go - but if no big boom of growth comes along to fix them, they don't go. And with less and less available cheap energy, and more and more time spent just fixing problems like climate change created environmental disasters, resource wars and energy shortages, we have less capital to adapt with. The Bank for International Settlements, the world's most significant financial body has warned we're in danger of another Great Depression - this is not their ordinary message, nor is it Greenspan's. That's bad news for us - and a long lasting recession during the period in which we're adapting to climate change and peak oil could mean that we really do mostly have what we've already got, that all our dreams of an orderly transition are over.
Add climate change to that. Yesterday, we learned that the drought in the Southwest is expected to last another century. Think about that. There are 60 *million* Americans there, plus another 60 million Mexicans in the affected area. How long can they stay there? Where will they go? Add to that the people on the Gulf coast and in South Florida - all of whom are vulnerable to the next big disaster we can't afford to stop or fix, and there are going to be a lot of migrants just in this nation alone in the next decade or so. That's going to change the economy, your local job market, and a whole host of things. BILLIONS of people are going to be refugees within their countries or from outside them by 2050 - and it won't all happen in 2049 - that means real people, real us, are going to start being affected today.
James Hansen and the other NASA scientists who argue that we don't have much time say that we only have a decade to fix this - a decade to make the "draconian" changes that would stop the worst sea rises. Let's say we do make good on all those measures - what will that be like? What will it be like when 300 million people have to slash their personal emissions to the bone? I'd tend to bet on some competition for resources, and lots of price rises - at the time that most of us can least afford them.
The thing is, things seem ok on many levels. We may believe that these are crises, but life is still going on. the kids are still in college, the money is still piling up in the 401K, the stock market is still hanging, and we all have a life going on. We're still caught between the life now and the life to come, and it can be damned hard to navigate that distinction. All of us have to figure out what we believe, and hedge our bets as best we can. But it is damned hard to know what to do. Do we pick up our hats, put our kids on the train, give up the present for the hypothetical future? How do we know that something won't pull off a miracle?
One of my commentors pointed out that my prior post created an urge to hoard, to preserve one's own, rather than think communally. Now I grasp that urge. My first reaction to peak oil, many, many years ago, was precisely the same. I had it again when I had my first child, and I have it again every time I worry about my kids. And I did pick up my hat. I blew off my Ph.d in order to start a small farm - I thought for a long time I could have it both ways, but it became increasingly clear that I couldn't, and so I gave up Shakespeare, which was sad in some ways. I closed some options off. We made some bets on what our kids will need - our money is more in land than in the stock market, so who knows what we'll have to do if nothing bad happens when the boys want to go to college. We can't have everything, and we've made our choices, and we have to live with them.
But we also can't choose all the way every time - so we hedge. We put money away for college, and we also put money back into the land. If I had to pick one, I'll tell the truth - I don't think the college dollars will be there in a decade. But I'm not willing to risk my kids entirely on my predictions. I quit my Ph.d, but in part because I love farming and writing, and I wanted to do those too - I didn't just dump it. I invest in community support, but I also have a stockpile of clothes for bigger kids, and educational books for children so that my kids can learn at home through the college level and so they have shoes to wear and don't have to dress in the ugly things I can sew if the worst happens. I don't believe I can stockpile my way out of anything really bad - but I also store food as a hedge, a way of dealing with extended family that might need extras, crop failures, my own mistakes.
We all know people who were prepared for Y2K, had nuclear bunkers, went back to the land because the end was at hand in the 1970s, have been expecting the last coming for decades. And it is tempting, because of those factors, to think that the system is strong enough to endure any crisis. And who knows, it may be. I'm not a prophet - I don't know the future. But look back a little. In the course of a lifetime, ask yourself if your grandparents, and great-grandparents ever endured a time of crisis during the course of their lifetimes. Again, we're not talking about Mad Max here - we're talking about poverty, war, economic disruption, having to leave a beloved place for a new one, epidemic, hunger, want. Now maybe none of your family has ever had those things, but looking back at my grandparents and great-grandparents, I see 2 world wars and a host of smaller ones. Hunger. Want. Poverty. Desperation. Dislocation. Refugeeism. Violence. Disease. Death. And thoes were the lucky ones, who survived to have kids and grandkids. The generations after World War II are among the first in human history to live their whole lives in peace, wealth and good fortune. Should we bet that we too will be so fortunate? And what's the price if we're wrong?
That last question is the real bugger, isn't it? And that's the one that I rest on, my own private version of the precautionary principle. That is, in trying to decide whether James Hansen or the IPCC is right, ultimately, I find that the price of believing in Hansen and being wrong is a lot lower than the price of believing the IPCC and being wrong in my choice. I think the evidence for Hansen's reading is probably better, but the cost in lives and the future of *not* making changes quickly is almost certainly greater than the admittedly high price of making them sooner. The same is true about personal preparedness. What if I don't do it? Sometimes the price is low and light. Sometimes it isn't.
Ultimately, what has to happen is that we find ways to be prepared, and to hedge our bets, without compromising many of our basic principles. This means that we prepare for a future that doesn't work out very well, while also trying to build a future in which it does. That's harder than choosing just one, but I think it is also necessary. That means we buy local, organic, sustainably grown bulk foods for our storage, and fill out those clothing bins with used goods, not new ones. It means we make the new purchases we do need judiciously - yes, perhaps, to the grain grinder, no to the fancy butter churn when a shaken jar will do as well.
I want everyone who reads this to make their own choices based on their own experience, their own reading of the data available to them, their own needs and personal circumstances and their own ability to change. My bet is that change will come soon to some of us, later to others, but that the changes I'm worried about are now essentially already in motion - that whatever happens, we're probably never going to be quite as comfortable or priveleged or lucky or ready as we are today. That sucks for all of us - others even more than me. I want time. But I don't think that I can live my life based on my own want for it - that's wish fulfillment fantasies. Ultimately, my life needs to find a balance between preparing for hard times and attempting to avoid them, between living now and being ready to live in the future. Everyone will choose a different balance. Everyone will make different bets. Everyone will read the future a little differently. And some of us will be wrong - quite possibly me. It is impossible to be prepared for everything, but it is not only possible but wise to prioritize and prepare for many outcomes.
In the end, my own analysis comes down to this. If I'm wrong about what's coming down the pike, what price did I pay? I never got to be a professor of English Literature. My kids may have to earn college scholarships, or we may have to mortgage our land. We may have missed out on some opportunities. But generally speaking, I have a life I love now, work I love now, a family that I wouldn't be able to enjoy as much if I were doing the full time academic life. I have an imperfect degree of security, but a vastly greater one than I could have had otherwise. In the net, the limitations of my choices are endurable. If I'd chosen otherwise, would I be able to say the same? I might love my work, but the risks to my kids future are unacceptable to me. Others would make a different choice, and I don't know if they are wrong - only time will tell.
If it were me, I'd at a minimum make a serious backup plan for what to do if your five or ten year plan fails. That is, I'd be ready now to live where you are, with what you have. And if you don't think staying where you are is possible, I think I'd risk relocating. But I'm not you, and I don't want you to do it because I say so - make your own decisions.
What I can say is this. If you see the evidence much the same way I do, if you really believe it, then it really is time to pick up your hat, or at least memorize the train schedule heading wherever you want to be.
Shalom,
Sharon
Now life very rarely justifies our assumptions so rapidly, but I find this story interesting because it illustrates just how hard it is to live your life as though you believe bad things are going to happen to you. Even when we know they are likely, even when we see things forthcoming, it is awfully hard to pick up our hats and set aside one set of options to pursue another. Particularly when there's little cultural support for it - when the assumption that even basic preparedness makes you a wacko is so prevalent. The story struck me, long before I discovered peak oil or climate change, because I wondered how it is one knows that *now* is the time to pick up one's hat. I was struck, for example, by the dilemma of the Jews who left Germany - how do you know that the worst is really here? My husband's grandmother was on the kindertransport, that took German-Jewish children to England. She wasn't even 13, and her parents put her on a train with one suitcase and sent her off to a far away country to be raised by someone else. It saved her life. A cousin of hers, living in the same neighborhood in the ghetto stayed with her parents - they thought the risk of harm coming to her in England was greater than the risk of harm in Germany. That cousin died in the concentration camps, and Inge, Eric's grandmother, survived. How do you know it is time to risk so much?
Now if any of you read Matt Savinar over at http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html, you could argue that on nearly every measure, Matt's much more apocalyptic in his thinking than I am. He writes under the name "Juris Doctor of Doom" and he makes the argument that we should just follow the money trail - he says, "we're spending billions to fix problems we spend trillions creating." Matt forsees a real apocalyptic disaster, whereas I tend to talk a lot about what we can do to mitigate disaster, and I tend to think mostly in terms of poverty, rather than anything I'd call "apocalypse." In that sense, it would seem that Matt's a "doomer" and I'm not.
But it isn't that simple. If you read Matt's writings, you'll see he's currently on a hunt for the perfect place to live in the post peak world, at the very same time that he posts "we may only have 18 months left (this was a few months ago)." Right now, he's living in a place that he admits probably won't do very well. And Matt knows as well as I do that building community, and food systems, getting accepted in an area, and getting trees to fruiting and getting practiced in meeting many of your needs really takes time. I've been doing it for going on 7 years now, and I'm still hoping for more time. If you look at our words, Matt's got a far darker vision than I have. If you look at our actions, Matt's risking a whole lot more than I'm prepared to. I picked up my hat a long time ago. Matt's just now ready to pick up his.
I'm not picking on Matt Savinar, or anyone else. Heck, I don't know the future, and Matt may well be wiser than I am. Also, given that he doesn't have kids, is more mobile and has more money than I do, he's probably making the right choice for him. I mention this not because I think Matt doesn't believe what he says - I'm sure he does - but because all of us are hedging our bets to one degree or another, and also because even when you believe it, it can be damned hard to keep the link between hypothetical futures and reality alive in your head and your thinking.
Like everyone, I make my risk analyses based on my reality, and other people have to make theirs on their own. I judge based on my own assessments - do I believe the IPCC or Hansen? Do I believe CERA or Simmons and Assoc. on peak oil? Who do I choose to track? And what are my priorities. For me, protecting my kids is #1, and everything else is a distant second. But even that leads me to one set of solutions, not another. I could, for example, believe that what was needed was a ton of guns and total isolation, or that I would be best protecting my kids by converting to Christianity and fitting in in middle America, or by making a lot of money and protecting them by living in a gated community. And honestly, it is conceivable that any of those strategies might be right - and my "build community, grow food" theory might be entirely wrong, or I just might be unlucky. Like everyone, I'm playing the odds.
The post I wrote yesterday, arguing that people should start living now like they may have to in the long term for selfish reasons got some people quite concerned. They felt that I was either panicking or driving other people to panic. To a large degree that wasn't my intention, but I did intend to create a sense of urgency. I
do want people who read this to think seriously about whether they have a viable back up plan for a crisis that begins in the near future. Why? Not because I think the whole world is likely to collapse, but because I think any collapse will come in stages and segments. For a Katrina victim, it may already have happened. For me it might be tomorrow. For you, it might wait a decade. We don't know - we're playing the odds.
I do want people who read this to thrive in the future, and if you think I'm a wacko, so be it. I tend to think that after Katrina, in an inflationary economy, someone who says "store food, plan ahead, get ready now" might not look like the Unibomber, but I might not be much of a judge ;-).
I think I'd rather have you believe that I'm a nutcasethan believe that I always and only think "we can do it" and thus, don't encourage you to hedge your bets. And I genuinely do believe that we are fairly close to a situation in which many of us will be most concerned with just getting by, and the things that a lot of us might want or need to do to live comfortably with much less are going to be less and less available to us. I think we *can* change many things, and fairly quickly at that - but I'm not at all certain that we will - and I don't want to bet my life on what Brian called, in comments "the political will fairy." I sure as heck don't want you to bet your future on *my* vision of the political will fairy ;-).
Why do I think that we need to start picking up our hats right now, and making the changes that we're going to have to make anyway right now? Well, at this point it still looks like world oil production may have peaked over two years ago - OPEC simply doesn't seem to be able to increase production. Mexico is experiencing double digit declines, and will stop exporting oil altogether shortly. While some new production capacity is coming online, I think we're at the bumpy plateau. That means over the long term, oil prices keep going up forever - they may trend down again a few times, but when they level off, they'll be higher...and higher...and higher.
Natural gas prices have been rising slowly, but mostly because we've had a series of mild winters. One cold one, and we can expect much higher heating costs. Natural gas is set to peak in the next decade, the US has already had its peak and Canada is next. Coal is not far behind. Peaking means rising costs, increasing difficulty getting at it, and a lower return on investment - more and more energy gets eaten up just getting the oil or coal out of the ground. And we're seeing nations that are energy producers reserving more and more of what they do have for themselves - eventually, they stop exporting, and other nations have to make do with what they have. The US's oil reserves peaked more than 30 years ago, our gas almost a decade ago, and most likely our coal has peaked as well/
Energy isn't the only thing getting pricier. Food is too. First of all, the good food we're all supposed to be eating *does* cost more than industrial crap. But even the crap is going way up in price, mostly because of energy costs, but also because of drought (climate change induced in many cases), desertification and soil destruction, and falling yields in many places in the world. I don't think that trend is gong to change for quite a while - food prices will continue to rise because we're putting our food in our gas tanks, and because our food costs are dependent on cheap energy - which is over. That means that food you buy now and store is a good bet to be cheaper. And food you grow yourself is an even better one. Stores won't save you - but they can help a little.
Meanwhile, we're on the verge of some deep economic trouble, and a large number of people believe we're headed for a recession. A lot of them are fairly reputable people who ought to know - Greenspan, for example, has been manipulating the US economy for a long time, and he thinks it is likely we'll experience recession by year's end. Now recessions come and recessions go - but if no big boom of growth comes along to fix them, they don't go. And with less and less available cheap energy, and more and more time spent just fixing problems like climate change created environmental disasters, resource wars and energy shortages, we have less capital to adapt with. The Bank for International Settlements, the world's most significant financial body has warned we're in danger of another Great Depression - this is not their ordinary message, nor is it Greenspan's. That's bad news for us - and a long lasting recession during the period in which we're adapting to climate change and peak oil could mean that we really do mostly have what we've already got, that all our dreams of an orderly transition are over.
Add climate change to that. Yesterday, we learned that the drought in the Southwest is expected to last another century. Think about that. There are 60 *million* Americans there, plus another 60 million Mexicans in the affected area. How long can they stay there? Where will they go? Add to that the people on the Gulf coast and in South Florida - all of whom are vulnerable to the next big disaster we can't afford to stop or fix, and there are going to be a lot of migrants just in this nation alone in the next decade or so. That's going to change the economy, your local job market, and a whole host of things. BILLIONS of people are going to be refugees within their countries or from outside them by 2050 - and it won't all happen in 2049 - that means real people, real us, are going to start being affected today.
James Hansen and the other NASA scientists who argue that we don't have much time say that we only have a decade to fix this - a decade to make the "draconian" changes that would stop the worst sea rises. Let's say we do make good on all those measures - what will that be like? What will it be like when 300 million people have to slash their personal emissions to the bone? I'd tend to bet on some competition for resources, and lots of price rises - at the time that most of us can least afford them.
The thing is, things seem ok on many levels. We may believe that these are crises, but life is still going on. the kids are still in college, the money is still piling up in the 401K, the stock market is still hanging, and we all have a life going on. We're still caught between the life now and the life to come, and it can be damned hard to navigate that distinction. All of us have to figure out what we believe, and hedge our bets as best we can. But it is damned hard to know what to do. Do we pick up our hats, put our kids on the train, give up the present for the hypothetical future? How do we know that something won't pull off a miracle?
One of my commentors pointed out that my prior post created an urge to hoard, to preserve one's own, rather than think communally. Now I grasp that urge. My first reaction to peak oil, many, many years ago, was precisely the same. I had it again when I had my first child, and I have it again every time I worry about my kids. And I did pick up my hat. I blew off my Ph.d in order to start a small farm - I thought for a long time I could have it both ways, but it became increasingly clear that I couldn't, and so I gave up Shakespeare, which was sad in some ways. I closed some options off. We made some bets on what our kids will need - our money is more in land than in the stock market, so who knows what we'll have to do if nothing bad happens when the boys want to go to college. We can't have everything, and we've made our choices, and we have to live with them.
But we also can't choose all the way every time - so we hedge. We put money away for college, and we also put money back into the land. If I had to pick one, I'll tell the truth - I don't think the college dollars will be there in a decade. But I'm not willing to risk my kids entirely on my predictions. I quit my Ph.d, but in part because I love farming and writing, and I wanted to do those too - I didn't just dump it. I invest in community support, but I also have a stockpile of clothes for bigger kids, and educational books for children so that my kids can learn at home through the college level and so they have shoes to wear and don't have to dress in the ugly things I can sew if the worst happens. I don't believe I can stockpile my way out of anything really bad - but I also store food as a hedge, a way of dealing with extended family that might need extras, crop failures, my own mistakes.
We all know people who were prepared for Y2K, had nuclear bunkers, went back to the land because the end was at hand in the 1970s, have been expecting the last coming for decades. And it is tempting, because of those factors, to think that the system is strong enough to endure any crisis. And who knows, it may be. I'm not a prophet - I don't know the future. But look back a little. In the course of a lifetime, ask yourself if your grandparents, and great-grandparents ever endured a time of crisis during the course of their lifetimes. Again, we're not talking about Mad Max here - we're talking about poverty, war, economic disruption, having to leave a beloved place for a new one, epidemic, hunger, want. Now maybe none of your family has ever had those things, but looking back at my grandparents and great-grandparents, I see 2 world wars and a host of smaller ones. Hunger. Want. Poverty. Desperation. Dislocation. Refugeeism. Violence. Disease. Death. And thoes were the lucky ones, who survived to have kids and grandkids. The generations after World War II are among the first in human history to live their whole lives in peace, wealth and good fortune. Should we bet that we too will be so fortunate? And what's the price if we're wrong?
That last question is the real bugger, isn't it? And that's the one that I rest on, my own private version of the precautionary principle. That is, in trying to decide whether James Hansen or the IPCC is right, ultimately, I find that the price of believing in Hansen and being wrong is a lot lower than the price of believing the IPCC and being wrong in my choice. I think the evidence for Hansen's reading is probably better, but the cost in lives and the future of *not* making changes quickly is almost certainly greater than the admittedly high price of making them sooner. The same is true about personal preparedness. What if I don't do it? Sometimes the price is low and light. Sometimes it isn't.
Ultimately, what has to happen is that we find ways to be prepared, and to hedge our bets, without compromising many of our basic principles. This means that we prepare for a future that doesn't work out very well, while also trying to build a future in which it does. That's harder than choosing just one, but I think it is also necessary. That means we buy local, organic, sustainably grown bulk foods for our storage, and fill out those clothing bins with used goods, not new ones. It means we make the new purchases we do need judiciously - yes, perhaps, to the grain grinder, no to the fancy butter churn when a shaken jar will do as well.
I want everyone who reads this to make their own choices based on their own experience, their own reading of the data available to them, their own needs and personal circumstances and their own ability to change. My bet is that change will come soon to some of us, later to others, but that the changes I'm worried about are now essentially already in motion - that whatever happens, we're probably never going to be quite as comfortable or priveleged or lucky or ready as we are today. That sucks for all of us - others even more than me. I want time. But I don't think that I can live my life based on my own want for it - that's wish fulfillment fantasies. Ultimately, my life needs to find a balance between preparing for hard times and attempting to avoid them, between living now and being ready to live in the future. Everyone will choose a different balance. Everyone will make different bets. Everyone will read the future a little differently. And some of us will be wrong - quite possibly me. It is impossible to be prepared for everything, but it is not only possible but wise to prioritize and prepare for many outcomes.
In the end, my own analysis comes down to this. If I'm wrong about what's coming down the pike, what price did I pay? I never got to be a professor of English Literature. My kids may have to earn college scholarships, or we may have to mortgage our land. We may have missed out on some opportunities. But generally speaking, I have a life I love now, work I love now, a family that I wouldn't be able to enjoy as much if I were doing the full time academic life. I have an imperfect degree of security, but a vastly greater one than I could have had otherwise. In the net, the limitations of my choices are endurable. If I'd chosen otherwise, would I be able to say the same? I might love my work, but the risks to my kids future are unacceptable to me. Others would make a different choice, and I don't know if they are wrong - only time will tell.
If it were me, I'd at a minimum make a serious backup plan for what to do if your five or ten year plan fails. That is, I'd be ready now to live where you are, with what you have. And if you don't think staying where you are is possible, I think I'd risk relocating. But I'm not you, and I don't want you to do it because I say so - make your own decisions.
What I can say is this. If you see the evidence much the same way I do, if you really believe it, then it really is time to pick up your hat, or at least memorize the train schedule heading wherever you want to be.
Shalom,
Sharon
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Al Gore Calls on Everyone To Riot for Austerity - and Why You Should Too.
Well, if you watched Live Earth (I didn't), you saw that a holographic Al Gore went where the Riot for Austerity had boldly gone before, calling for a 90% reduction in emissions across all areas, including personal household consumption : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6279518.stm
Not a big Al fan here, but I'm stil pleased that he's catching up to our dust ;-). This, my husband points out, is the really, really inconvenient truth - we have to make radical changes, and every minute we put it off makes it harder. If we'd started this 30 years ago, it would have been a cakewalk. Now it is more of a project - but I'm having fun.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the arctic ice is disappearing vastly faster than anyone has ever estimated before. Like almost all the information flowing in over the last few months, it simply demonstrates how very conservative the IPCC report is. http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2007/05/be_afraid_be_very_very_afraid_1.php?utm_source=mostemailed&utm_medium=link
Among the thing the IPCC report was wrong about was the rate of emissions rise (3 times greater than prior evidence had suggested), the race of ice melt in the Antarctic (2.5 times faster), the point at which soils will begin to release their carbon (now), when we'll see methane hydrates start being released from seas (probably now), and a whole host of other things.
Some of these are timing issues (the science is changing rapidly - I wrote a chapter on climate change for one of my books two months ago, and large chunks of it are now out of date), and some are based on the fact that this report was written by a big committee and edited by governments to say what they wanted to see. And the IPCC report was *still* scary. Now we know that the truth is significantly worse - and that really hard measures are necessary. As James Hrynyshyn points out, the ice melt in the arctic represents one of the famed tipping points - and not in 2100, when my grandkids are middle aged, but when I'm middle aged. We don't know what the impact of an early albedo shift will be - but is it a really good idea to find out? Odds are good we will - at this point, even if we stopped emitting carbon today, we'd probably still lose the arctic ice. The simple reality of the precautionary principle demands that we don't bet the lives of half of humanity on "well, it might not be that big a deal."
Of all the things the IPCC was wrong about, the big one is probably the most important. The big one is peak oil. The IPCC report, and most people in the world, believe we can fuel a new economy based on environmentally friendly, renewable energies as we shift over. The problem is, of course, that right now, and for the forseeable future, all those technologies, the economy as a whole and the infrastructure it requires depends on large quantities of cheap and readily available fossil fuels.
And it is peak oil that is likely to cause us our deepest problems - because peak oil is at its heart an economic problem. Without the cheap energy that fuels every aspect of our economy - from the food on our table to the amount of spare capital firms have to invest in renewable research, to local and national tax bases, to military policy - we're not going to be able to completely overhaul our system, unless we do it quickly - and probably not even then.
And most of us are not going to be able to make large scale *personal* changes unless we do them soon. Everyone in the world is now seeing their grocery budgets rise. For the 2 billion people worldwide who spend more than half of their annual income on food, the 30% rise in food prices is a true disaster. Much of this stems from ethanol production - but also from rises in the price of artificial fertilizer, fuel for your tractor, etc.. Millions of Americans and Australians are starting to experience "transportation poverty" - that is, getting to work eats up a huge portion of their budget. Such wild radicals as Alan Greenspan and the Chair of the National Board of Realtors have announced we are most likely headed towards a deep recession.
If even Al Gore (who could only bring himself to mention Compact Flourescents and turning down the thermostat in his movie) is calling for such a change, what's the incentive to be out in front with us over at the Riot? Well first of all, this is a great deal of fun. Second of all, we're a long way from persuading any national government to even propose the necessary changes. And third, since most estimates of time scale came in before we knew how fast ice was melting, desertification was proceeding and carbon emissions were rising. Now maybe the IPCC is right, but does anyone want to bet their lives, and the lives of their kids and grandkids on it?
Even if you can't bring yourself to make radical changes in your emissions as an investment in the future, I'd also argue that there are compelling selfish reasons for everyone who reads this to beginning making radical lifestyle changes - not just emissions cuts, but vast reductions in your dependence on fossil resources, and very, very soon. The biggest one is now is probably the best opportunity you'll have. And now is our chance to "Use What We Have"
There's a whole tv show out there, I'm told (don't have cable) called "Use what you have decorating" - the idea being that most people like their stuff, and that they could make their world beautiful by tastefully rearranging what they've already got. And we're about to come into contact with "use what you have peak oil/climate change adaptation" - the reality that we probably aren't going to rip apart and rebuild our whole world in a more environmentally friendly way. We probably aren't all going to get cool monorails and tax breaks for greening our homes. Technology isn't going to magically save us. Realistically, most of us are going to go into the hardest of hard times making do with what we've got, and what adaptations we can get in under the wire.
Now "Use What You Have" can be an ugly strategy or a lovely one. Obviously, if someone managed to make a tv show out of it, it can make pretty and elegant (may I take leave to digress and note that I'm pretty sure that pressboard furniture and hummel figurines can't be made beautiful - period ;-)?). And use what you have strategies for peak oil and climate change can be graceful and lovely. Quilts and blankets hung on underinsulated walls can keep you warm, and can look nice too. Carefully stapling bubblewrap into wood frames can make cheap, light translating insulation that last for many years. Homemade wool socks are toasty and fun to make. With practice and time and a few resources, you can develop the skill and grace to keep yourself warm and fed and still have a little comfort and even beauty.
Or, use what you have can be horrible. It can lead to lives spent scavenging through garbage dumps (not referring here to trash picking, but landfill scavenging, which millions of poor people in the third world do for a living - and pay a heavy price for in contamination and disease), burning your wood furniture to keep alive and selling off your possessions one by one to keep the wolf from the door. Both involve using what you already have. And to some degree, the difference between grace and garbage scavenging is sheer luck - knowing how to make socks won't save you from the worst if you are unfortunate. But some of it also derives from practice - from having the relevant skill set you can access, and also enough familiarity with the lifestyle not to panic when it is thrust fully upon you. And the familiarity is gained only by living it. The ability to make good choices when things get nasty - to know what is necessary and what isn't, comes only with practice. And that's why you should think hard about living now the way you may have to.
Right now, as a society, there's a good chance we're as rich as we'll ever be. The price of most tools necessary to live sustainably is probably as low as it will ever be - does anyone remember Y2K? It was something I pretty much ignored, but I've read about the shortages of woodstoves, bulk foods, and grain grinders. Back orders ran at several years at the peak of awareness. And let's be honest - the evidence for a Y2K crisis was nowhere near as compelling as the evidence for a peak oil/climate change 1-2 punch. What happens when 300 million Americans actually grasp what the future looks like? I'd bet on high prices for many adaptive technologies, at a minimum. Do you live in dangerous coastal area? How long before homeowners insurance companies refuse to insure anyone? How long before the value of your home drops, before awareness rises enough to make living in a low lying coastal area a major problem?
Even if fossil alternatives start making a big dent in things, those too will rise in price, because they are dependent on fossil energies at a hundred steps in the process of making each solar panel and windmill. The price of your electric bill, wherever it comes from is going up, along with the price of gas, food, and everything you purchase. How long before this starts to hurt your ability to do things like reinsulate, move to a different house, get that deeper well, get the heck out of the southwest... (Today we learned that the drought in the southwest may well last another *90* years. How many of the 60 million people in affected areas do you think will want to leave? How much will your house in Tucson sell for in a decade? http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3352465&page=1).
But more importantly, peak oil means that most of us are kidding ourselves if we're fantasizing that we can have a pleasant, gentle transition that means mostly just buying cool eco-friendly products, and driving our cool electric-car pod. Most of us are going to get a lot poorer, and probably fairly quickly - certainly over the next decade. The best case scenarios mean that fixing Global Warming will probably cost more than 2% of the GDP and require what James Hansen calls "draconian" measures. That's going to hurt us all. But the worst case scenarios for global warming alone involve 20% of the global GDP - a level of economic damage we've never seen before. And peak oil makes that harder, faster.
For the average person, who will probably lose a job, see the costs for basic things like food, energy and clothing rise dramatically, the future is going to be doing the best you can with what you've got. And that's where switching over to the 90% Reduction plan now, or something very like it right now will help you make the transition gently. Because the odds are good we aren't that far from some of us making it the hard way. Peak oil and climate change will hit each of us at different times - the day it strikes us is the day we lose *our* job, or the day it no longer makes sense to go to work at all, because the gas cost is so high. The day we have to choose between treating an infection and buying shoes for the kids. The day the thermostat inches off. The day they foreclose, or you realize you have to sell, even at a loss. The day the only choice is to use what you have then, and hope you can keep most of it.
It can be hard for those who haven't got any experience with real poverty to imagine that this could happen to them. Sometimes I think the reason so many people get fixated on Mad Max type-scenarios is because they are in some ways, less frightening (and what does that say about us) than the simple realities of grinding poverty - the ordinary human misery that people in the rich world have been granted a pass on for so long.
Living closer to Chinese peasants than American consumers gets you in practice for your reality. It allows you to figure out what you will need to adapt and prepare while you still have resources. Better buy that woodstove now, because in 2 years, if it is available at all, you may not have the money. Better learn to do the laundry without power, grow a garden, bike 10 miles to work now - because if you do them only when you have to, you'll be overwhelmed. Introducing one change at a time, using what we've already got, with support and aid is a lot less painful than the sudden, horrible realization that the old way of life is gone and it isn't coming back. And there's an art to it, and a craftsmanly quality that is exciting, engaging and fun - you are making beauty, if you are doing it right. You are creating a thing of clean lines and small inputs and artful reuse. There's grace there, even when we least intend it. Perhaps Grace with a capital too, if that's the sort of thing you believe in. Or at least a little mercy.
If you are interested in joining the Riot, the information is here:http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/riot-for-austerity-90-reduction-project-intro/
Sharon in upstate NY
Not a big Al fan here, but I'm stil pleased that he's catching up to our dust ;-). This, my husband points out, is the really, really inconvenient truth - we have to make radical changes, and every minute we put it off makes it harder. If we'd started this 30 years ago, it would have been a cakewalk. Now it is more of a project - but I'm having fun.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the arctic ice is disappearing vastly faster than anyone has ever estimated before. Like almost all the information flowing in over the last few months, it simply demonstrates how very conservative the IPCC report is. http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2007/05/be_afraid_be_very_very_afraid_1.php?utm_source=mostemailed&utm_medium=link
Among the thing the IPCC report was wrong about was the rate of emissions rise (3 times greater than prior evidence had suggested), the race of ice melt in the Antarctic (2.5 times faster), the point at which soils will begin to release their carbon (now), when we'll see methane hydrates start being released from seas (probably now), and a whole host of other things.
Some of these are timing issues (the science is changing rapidly - I wrote a chapter on climate change for one of my books two months ago, and large chunks of it are now out of date), and some are based on the fact that this report was written by a big committee and edited by governments to say what they wanted to see. And the IPCC report was *still* scary. Now we know that the truth is significantly worse - and that really hard measures are necessary. As James Hrynyshyn points out, the ice melt in the arctic represents one of the famed tipping points - and not in 2100, when my grandkids are middle aged, but when I'm middle aged. We don't know what the impact of an early albedo shift will be - but is it a really good idea to find out? Odds are good we will - at this point, even if we stopped emitting carbon today, we'd probably still lose the arctic ice. The simple reality of the precautionary principle demands that we don't bet the lives of half of humanity on "well, it might not be that big a deal."
Of all the things the IPCC was wrong about, the big one is probably the most important. The big one is peak oil. The IPCC report, and most people in the world, believe we can fuel a new economy based on environmentally friendly, renewable energies as we shift over. The problem is, of course, that right now, and for the forseeable future, all those technologies, the economy as a whole and the infrastructure it requires depends on large quantities of cheap and readily available fossil fuels.
And it is peak oil that is likely to cause us our deepest problems - because peak oil is at its heart an economic problem. Without the cheap energy that fuels every aspect of our economy - from the food on our table to the amount of spare capital firms have to invest in renewable research, to local and national tax bases, to military policy - we're not going to be able to completely overhaul our system, unless we do it quickly - and probably not even then.
And most of us are not going to be able to make large scale *personal* changes unless we do them soon. Everyone in the world is now seeing their grocery budgets rise. For the 2 billion people worldwide who spend more than half of their annual income on food, the 30% rise in food prices is a true disaster. Much of this stems from ethanol production - but also from rises in the price of artificial fertilizer, fuel for your tractor, etc.. Millions of Americans and Australians are starting to experience "transportation poverty" - that is, getting to work eats up a huge portion of their budget. Such wild radicals as Alan Greenspan and the Chair of the National Board of Realtors have announced we are most likely headed towards a deep recession.
If even Al Gore (who could only bring himself to mention Compact Flourescents and turning down the thermostat in his movie) is calling for such a change, what's the incentive to be out in front with us over at the Riot? Well first of all, this is a great deal of fun. Second of all, we're a long way from persuading any national government to even propose the necessary changes. And third, since most estimates of time scale came in before we knew how fast ice was melting, desertification was proceeding and carbon emissions were rising. Now maybe the IPCC is right, but does anyone want to bet their lives, and the lives of their kids and grandkids on it?
Even if you can't bring yourself to make radical changes in your emissions as an investment in the future, I'd also argue that there are compelling selfish reasons for everyone who reads this to beginning making radical lifestyle changes - not just emissions cuts, but vast reductions in your dependence on fossil resources, and very, very soon. The biggest one is now is probably the best opportunity you'll have. And now is our chance to "Use What We Have"
There's a whole tv show out there, I'm told (don't have cable) called "Use what you have decorating" - the idea being that most people like their stuff, and that they could make their world beautiful by tastefully rearranging what they've already got. And we're about to come into contact with "use what you have peak oil/climate change adaptation" - the reality that we probably aren't going to rip apart and rebuild our whole world in a more environmentally friendly way. We probably aren't all going to get cool monorails and tax breaks for greening our homes. Technology isn't going to magically save us. Realistically, most of us are going to go into the hardest of hard times making do with what we've got, and what adaptations we can get in under the wire.
Now "Use What You Have" can be an ugly strategy or a lovely one. Obviously, if someone managed to make a tv show out of it, it can make pretty and elegant (may I take leave to digress and note that I'm pretty sure that pressboard furniture and hummel figurines can't be made beautiful - period ;-)?). And use what you have strategies for peak oil and climate change can be graceful and lovely. Quilts and blankets hung on underinsulated walls can keep you warm, and can look nice too. Carefully stapling bubblewrap into wood frames can make cheap, light translating insulation that last for many years. Homemade wool socks are toasty and fun to make. With practice and time and a few resources, you can develop the skill and grace to keep yourself warm and fed and still have a little comfort and even beauty.
Or, use what you have can be horrible. It can lead to lives spent scavenging through garbage dumps (not referring here to trash picking, but landfill scavenging, which millions of poor people in the third world do for a living - and pay a heavy price for in contamination and disease), burning your wood furniture to keep alive and selling off your possessions one by one to keep the wolf from the door. Both involve using what you already have. And to some degree, the difference between grace and garbage scavenging is sheer luck - knowing how to make socks won't save you from the worst if you are unfortunate. But some of it also derives from practice - from having the relevant skill set you can access, and also enough familiarity with the lifestyle not to panic when it is thrust fully upon you. And the familiarity is gained only by living it. The ability to make good choices when things get nasty - to know what is necessary and what isn't, comes only with practice. And that's why you should think hard about living now the way you may have to.
Right now, as a society, there's a good chance we're as rich as we'll ever be. The price of most tools necessary to live sustainably is probably as low as it will ever be - does anyone remember Y2K? It was something I pretty much ignored, but I've read about the shortages of woodstoves, bulk foods, and grain grinders. Back orders ran at several years at the peak of awareness. And let's be honest - the evidence for a Y2K crisis was nowhere near as compelling as the evidence for a peak oil/climate change 1-2 punch. What happens when 300 million Americans actually grasp what the future looks like? I'd bet on high prices for many adaptive technologies, at a minimum. Do you live in dangerous coastal area? How long before homeowners insurance companies refuse to insure anyone? How long before the value of your home drops, before awareness rises enough to make living in a low lying coastal area a major problem?
Even if fossil alternatives start making a big dent in things, those too will rise in price, because they are dependent on fossil energies at a hundred steps in the process of making each solar panel and windmill. The price of your electric bill, wherever it comes from is going up, along with the price of gas, food, and everything you purchase. How long before this starts to hurt your ability to do things like reinsulate, move to a different house, get that deeper well, get the heck out of the southwest... (Today we learned that the drought in the southwest may well last another *90* years. How many of the 60 million people in affected areas do you think will want to leave? How much will your house in Tucson sell for in a decade? http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3352465&page=1).
But more importantly, peak oil means that most of us are kidding ourselves if we're fantasizing that we can have a pleasant, gentle transition that means mostly just buying cool eco-friendly products, and driving our cool electric-car pod. Most of us are going to get a lot poorer, and probably fairly quickly - certainly over the next decade. The best case scenarios mean that fixing Global Warming will probably cost more than 2% of the GDP and require what James Hansen calls "draconian" measures. That's going to hurt us all. But the worst case scenarios for global warming alone involve 20% of the global GDP - a level of economic damage we've never seen before. And peak oil makes that harder, faster.
For the average person, who will probably lose a job, see the costs for basic things like food, energy and clothing rise dramatically, the future is going to be doing the best you can with what you've got. And that's where switching over to the 90% Reduction plan now, or something very like it right now will help you make the transition gently. Because the odds are good we aren't that far from some of us making it the hard way. Peak oil and climate change will hit each of us at different times - the day it strikes us is the day we lose *our* job, or the day it no longer makes sense to go to work at all, because the gas cost is so high. The day we have to choose between treating an infection and buying shoes for the kids. The day the thermostat inches off. The day they foreclose, or you realize you have to sell, even at a loss. The day the only choice is to use what you have then, and hope you can keep most of it.
It can be hard for those who haven't got any experience with real poverty to imagine that this could happen to them. Sometimes I think the reason so many people get fixated on Mad Max type-scenarios is because they are in some ways, less frightening (and what does that say about us) than the simple realities of grinding poverty - the ordinary human misery that people in the rich world have been granted a pass on for so long.
Living closer to Chinese peasants than American consumers gets you in practice for your reality. It allows you to figure out what you will need to adapt and prepare while you still have resources. Better buy that woodstove now, because in 2 years, if it is available at all, you may not have the money. Better learn to do the laundry without power, grow a garden, bike 10 miles to work now - because if you do them only when you have to, you'll be overwhelmed. Introducing one change at a time, using what we've already got, with support and aid is a lot less painful than the sudden, horrible realization that the old way of life is gone and it isn't coming back. And there's an art to it, and a craftsmanly quality that is exciting, engaging and fun - you are making beauty, if you are doing it right. You are creating a thing of clean lines and small inputs and artful reuse. There's grace there, even when we least intend it. Perhaps Grace with a capital too, if that's the sort of thing you believe in. Or at least a little mercy.
If you are interested in joining the Riot, the information is here:http://simplereduce.wordpress.com/riot-for-austerity-90-reduction-project-intro/
Sharon in upstate NY
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Notes from Ozymandias
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
On that cheery note, I pass along a few links about sand, erosion, drought, water and agriculture.
Here is a fascinating article on the impact of soil loss on whole civilizations:
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=38343 (Thanks to Roel for most of the links)
"Michael Grunwald reports in the Washington Post that nearly half of the children under five in Lesotho are stunted physically. "Many," he says, "are too weak to walk to school.
Whether the land is in northern Syria, Lesotho, or elsewhere, the health of the people living on it cannot be separated from the health of the land itself. A large share of the world's 852 million hungry people live on land with soils worn thin by erosion."
America, btw, is losing 2 *MILLION* acres of arable land every single year to erosion and soil salinization. Studies have shown that conventionally grown produce declines in nutritional value steadily as we erode soil, so the food we're eating isn't as good as the food previous generations once ate. No wonder we eat so much of it ;-P.
Here's one about famine facing the rich world. The economist in question has just written a book on this subject, in which she notes things like the fact that the price of staples like bread and milk are rising more than twice as fast as the inflation rate (which conveniently leaves out the prices of housing, food and energy - all of which makes perfect sense, of course, since that's what, maybe 2% of your income? They do calculate the prices of basic staples like new cars, however... how helpful ;-P).
"A Welsh economist has given an apocalyptic warning that Wales and the rich West face a potentially catastrophic famine, as energy reserves run out."
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/farming/farming/tm_headline=empty-plates-tomorrow&method=full&objectid=19394384&siteid=50082-name_page.html
Much of the US is in drought conditions this year. Here's a look: http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html
Note how many of these areas are major agricultural regions of the US. West Virginia just declared a state of emergency, and the plains states have been called "worse than the dustbowl."
In Europe, it is so hot that "lemons are cooking on trees" on Italy. North Africa is expected to lose 2/3 of its grain crop this year. http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKL2777360720070627
And the UN announced that global stability is likely to be affected by expanding drought. Duh! http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L2722410.htm. I'm sure we'll be told that they mostly hate us because we're free, not because we have water. Although we shouldn't count on the water.
The UN also warned that climate change - including famine, desertification and drought will displace 1 billion people by 2050. http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=61594
Right now, worldwide, there are 35 million refugees of various sorts - but refugeeism is going to be a huge growth industry. Maybe we can use it to fuel our economy ;-P - we need a new growth industry. I recall someone saying that every ton of carbon we release, the family in question should have to take in a Bangladeshi person. Will we be taking responsibility for the refugees we've made, or will we do what the the US did to Jews when the Nazis were willing to drive them out, rather than kill them, if only someone would take them? Will we close our borders and pretend this has nothing to do with us, while people die by the millions - or billions?
America has been making refugees faster than anyone else - until we went into Iraq and Afghanistan the numbers were falling. But, after all, we're number 1.
"The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which marked World Refugee Day on
Wednesday, June 20, says the global political climate for refugees has already become harsher.
“They used to be welcomed as people fleeing persecution, but this has been changing – certainly
since 9/11, but even before then,” said William Splinder, a UNJCR spokesman in Geneva.
“Growing xenophobia, intolerance, political manipulation by populist politicians who mix up the
issues – the whole debate on asylum and migration has been confused,” he said.
As Lyon pointed out, people fleeing threats at home and those seeking a better life could be in the
same group washing up on a Spanish beach,” but Spindler said it is vital to keep the distinction
between them to provide effective protection to those who need it.
“Whatever their motives, migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and as human beings,” he
added. “We have seen people in the Mediterranean in boats or hanging onto fishing nets for days,
while states discuss who should rescue them.”
As Lyon pointed out, “Before sectarian violence exploded in Iraq last year, global refugee numbers
had been shrinking. The Taliban’s overthrow in Afghanistan, along with peace deals in trouble spots
like Congo, Liberia, Angola and southern Sudan had allowed million to return home.”"
Finally, NoImpactman has a good article about the environmental implications of bottled water. In the comments, one poster wisely suggested ways for cities and towns to start treating local water as a real commons, a public right - by adding more public water fountains. I added to that an idea that has been a passion of mine for a long time - add manual pump (or windmill or solar direct pumped) wells in public spaces. That way, if the power goes out or some major crisis ensues, none of us will have to watch our loved ones die from dehydration or drinking contaminated water, while we wait for relief that isn't coming - or not soon. I strongly encourage people to try and get non-grid powered wells and pumps going in their public parks, schools, etc... Water should be a commons and a right.
Here's the link:http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/my-ultra-cool-1.html
Oh, and last and probably least, if you are interested, my interview on _The Reality Report_ is up on Global Public Media, here: http://globalpublicmedia.com/sharon_astyk_on_the_reality_report
Sharon
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
On that cheery note, I pass along a few links about sand, erosion, drought, water and agriculture.
Here is a fascinating article on the impact of soil loss on whole civilizations:
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=38343 (Thanks to Roel for most of the links)
"Michael Grunwald reports in the Washington Post that nearly half of the children under five in Lesotho are stunted physically. "Many," he says, "are too weak to walk to school.
Whether the land is in northern Syria, Lesotho, or elsewhere, the health of the people living on it cannot be separated from the health of the land itself. A large share of the world's 852 million hungry people live on land with soils worn thin by erosion."
America, btw, is losing 2 *MILLION* acres of arable land every single year to erosion and soil salinization. Studies have shown that conventionally grown produce declines in nutritional value steadily as we erode soil, so the food we're eating isn't as good as the food previous generations once ate. No wonder we eat so much of it ;-P.
Here's one about famine facing the rich world. The economist in question has just written a book on this subject, in which she notes things like the fact that the price of staples like bread and milk are rising more than twice as fast as the inflation rate (which conveniently leaves out the prices of housing, food and energy - all of which makes perfect sense, of course, since that's what, maybe 2% of your income? They do calculate the prices of basic staples like new cars, however... how helpful ;-P).
"A Welsh economist has given an apocalyptic warning that Wales and the rich West face a potentially catastrophic famine, as energy reserves run out."
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/farming/farming/tm_headline=empty-plates-tomorrow&method=full&objectid=19394384&siteid=50082-name_page.html
Much of the US is in drought conditions this year. Here's a look: http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html
Note how many of these areas are major agricultural regions of the US. West Virginia just declared a state of emergency, and the plains states have been called "worse than the dustbowl."
In Europe, it is so hot that "lemons are cooking on trees" on Italy. North Africa is expected to lose 2/3 of its grain crop this year. http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKL2777360720070627
And the UN announced that global stability is likely to be affected by expanding drought. Duh! http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L2722410.htm. I'm sure we'll be told that they mostly hate us because we're free, not because we have water. Although we shouldn't count on the water.
The UN also warned that climate change - including famine, desertification and drought will displace 1 billion people by 2050. http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=61594
Right now, worldwide, there are 35 million refugees of various sorts - but refugeeism is going to be a huge growth industry. Maybe we can use it to fuel our economy ;-P - we need a new growth industry. I recall someone saying that every ton of carbon we release, the family in question should have to take in a Bangladeshi person. Will we be taking responsibility for the refugees we've made, or will we do what the the US did to Jews when the Nazis were willing to drive them out, rather than kill them, if only someone would take them? Will we close our borders and pretend this has nothing to do with us, while people die by the millions - or billions?
America has been making refugees faster than anyone else - until we went into Iraq and Afghanistan the numbers were falling. But, after all, we're number 1.
"The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which marked World Refugee Day on
Wednesday, June 20, says the global political climate for refugees has already become harsher.
“They used to be welcomed as people fleeing persecution, but this has been changing – certainly
since 9/11, but even before then,” said William Splinder, a UNJCR spokesman in Geneva.
“Growing xenophobia, intolerance, political manipulation by populist politicians who mix up the
issues – the whole debate on asylum and migration has been confused,” he said.
As Lyon pointed out, people fleeing threats at home and those seeking a better life could be in the
same group washing up on a Spanish beach,” but Spindler said it is vital to keep the distinction
between them to provide effective protection to those who need it.
“Whatever their motives, migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and as human beings,” he
added. “We have seen people in the Mediterranean in boats or hanging onto fishing nets for days,
while states discuss who should rescue them.”
As Lyon pointed out, “Before sectarian violence exploded in Iraq last year, global refugee numbers
had been shrinking. The Taliban’s overthrow in Afghanistan, along with peace deals in trouble spots
like Congo, Liberia, Angola and southern Sudan had allowed million to return home.”"
Finally, NoImpactman has a good article about the environmental implications of bottled water. In the comments, one poster wisely suggested ways for cities and towns to start treating local water as a real commons, a public right - by adding more public water fountains. I added to that an idea that has been a passion of mine for a long time - add manual pump (or windmill or solar direct pumped) wells in public spaces. That way, if the power goes out or some major crisis ensues, none of us will have to watch our loved ones die from dehydration or drinking contaminated water, while we wait for relief that isn't coming - or not soon. I strongly encourage people to try and get non-grid powered wells and pumps going in their public parks, schools, etc... Water should be a commons and a right.
Here's the link:http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/my-ultra-cool-1.html
Oh, and last and probably least, if you are interested, my interview on _The Reality Report_ is up on Global Public Media, here: http://globalpublicmedia.com/sharon_astyk_on_the_reality_report
Sharon
Thinking Ahead to the Fall Garden
On June 30th, my summer garden is finished and I start thinking of fall. Or rather, on June 30, I stop planting the summer garden. Where I live, the last frost date is fairly late in May (22nd this year), and it often isn't reliably warm at night, the way things like peppers, eggplant, melons and okra like it, until the middle of June. Which means that while I start planting in late March or early April, I'm usually still cramming extra hot peppers and heat loving flowers into beds until the very last day June. And on July 1, I turn to beginning the fall garden beds, and planning for an extended harvest.
So far, climate change seems to be making the northeast (or at least my part of it), much more like the Pacific Northwest. Winters are milder and warmer (Over the last 5 years, I've managed to winter over kale completely uncovered 4 years out of 5, leeks 3 out of five and spinach twice, which is really quite remarkable in a place whose traditional lows run around -25 degrees), and all year 'round is rainier. While we've had some warm periods in the summer, the wetness seems to mean that overall, our summer temperatures are pretty tolerable. Because of the heavy rains of spring, even slightly warmer spring temperatures don't mean I can plant much earlier in the year. Butit does mean long falls, later first hard frosts and long seasons of being able to pick frost hardy greens. In past years, most of my garden has been finished by the end of November or beginning of December, but this year I was picking garden greens well into January.
Which means, if you think about it, that the fall gardening season is as long as the summer one. But comparatively few people grow fall gardens - at most when you drive around you'll see a few brussels sprouts plants. Most people in my region, even the most dedicated gardeners, are relying on the grocery stores or their own home preservation for several months when they could be eating fresh food grown in their own gardens.
Another reason to think about a fall garden is that frankly, fall gardening is much nicer than summer gardening. The disease and bug problems often seem to just go away. The weather is crisp and pleasant. If you have to put something up, the fire on the woodstove or the heat of the dehydrator is welcome, rather than annoying. And, if you were busy or away back when it was time to get your tomatoes planted, you can still go ahead and plant an autumn garden.
So what goes in a fall garden? There are really two categories of things. The first are traditional summer crops that aren't frost hardy, but have a nice short season, and can be planted in high summer for harvest close to the first frost. For example, this would include bush green beans, very short season determinate tomatoes (assuming you started them ahead), cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes, day neutral onions (some onions require light of specific lengths to bulb up, and they won't in the fall, although you can eat them as scallions). This might also include peppers and eggplant that you plant in pots (although again, you'd have to have started them back in May if you live where I do), and bring inside for their final fruiting in a sunny window.
The second are crops that are frost hardy - that is, things that will take a light or heavy frost and just keep on going. This category includes most of the brassica plants (kale, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts), most root vegetables (carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets), peas and fava beans (not other kinds of beans), and many greens - spinach, lettuce, arugula, mustards, mizuna, most asian greens.
The issue in the fall, at least here, is not so much heat, as light. Most of the crops in the paragraph above will endure quite cold temperatures - eventually they'll succumb, but they can hold out for a long time. But there isn't enough light here after mid to late September to get plants to grow much. People who live south of me will have more luck, but around here, only spinach can be planted as late as September and still fully mature. So in order to have winter crops, we need to get them through most of their major growth in high summer, while the light is potent.
In some places, and some years, this presents a serious problem. Because most of the frost hardy crops don't really like hot weather. They tend to bolt (go to seed) prematurely, or they simply don't flourish. I find that it makes the most sense to start most of the ones that take a while to mature (peas, favas, cabbage, etc...) indoors. The roots generally can take our heat, and so can things like broccoli. But spending a week or two in the cool of our house makes a big difference in long term survival rates, I find. If your house tends to be really hot, a shady outdoor spot might be better.
So most of those things are started indoors in early July, for transplanting as space becomes available. Parsnips and brussels sprouts are particularly long season crops, and those I generally started back in late spring. But I still will probably plant a few more of an early brussels and parsnip.
This year, I have two beds available now - a crop of summer greens planted in May is now done with, and another bed was never planted - a local wren decided to make her home among the thistles, and we had to let her babies fledge before we could do anything. So (after some extensive weeding in the latter case), as soon as I get around to it, I can start planting pickling cukes, green beans, cabbage, carrots, beets, kohlrabi and broccoli for fall. I'll wait on greens and other delicates until the end of the month. Other beds will come available when I harvest our garlic towards the middle of this month, when the first crop of fava beans finishes up, and at the end of the first crop of sweet corn. I'll probably pull up some zucchini plants as well by August - we need the extra early on when they first start producing, but by mid-August, they are just an embarrassment of riches.
The other crop I'll be planting as beds open up are green manures. These do more to enrich my soil than any other amendment. When one of the garlic beds opens up in July, it will go into buckwheat. Not only will the buckwheat make a superb green manure, but until I scythe it down, we'll eat the leaves in salads - they are delicious. If I get lazy and forget to scythe it, like I did last year, it is a tasty grain source.
Later in the season, I may plant sweet clover or winter rye, which will hold the soil together all winter. I can also plant grains for overwintering - rye, of course, and winter wheat. If I plant them in mid-september, I can sometimes even cut them back lightly, feed the wheat grass to the chickens, and still have them make a crop in the summer.
The key to fall gardening is experimentation - ask other local gardeners when they plant things for autumn. It has taken a good bit of practice to come up with fairly optimal (and I'm still working on it) sowing times for many of the fall crops - cool enough to keep them alive through summer, early enough that there's still some light left.
I can also use season extension techniques, like cold frames and heavy mulch to extend the life of things. An easy way to make a cold frame is to put an old window (no lead paint!) on top of a few bales of straw and plant into it. There are more complicated options as well, and nicer looking ones, but that will do. The nice thing is after a year or so, the straw will decompose and with some amendments make a nice basis for a raised bed.
I do some of this, and am hoping to add a hoophouse, but I'm increasingly impressed by how hardy many plants are on their own, needing nothing more than a bit of mulch on the coldest days to overwinter nicely. Specific varieties are particularly hardy - Blue de Solaize leek, for example, seems to overwinter nicely, Marvel of Four Seasons Lettuce and the Oak Leaf and Deer Tongue lettuces do nicely here, as does "Winter Giant Spinach" and several kales "Winterbor," "Red Russian," and "Dinosaur." Some people are working on breeding winter hardy vegetables - Fedco offers seed for "ice-bred arugula" and a variety of collards designed to stand the whole winter.
Eliot Coleman's book _The Four Season Harvest_ is *the* book on Northern season extension. Those of you who live in different climates will have to look around for your own. Many of you grow a lot of your food in the winter already there. For those who have thought their climate was simply too cold for autumn planting, you might consider experimenting with the fall catalogs that some places, like Territorial Seeds, offer.
I would also add that if you looked at the list of food that can be grown in fall above, and thought "Oh, I don't like all those greens" - try it. Cold weather turns the starches in many of those vegetables to sugars, and they have a sweetness and depth of flavor that is hard to imagine if you've been getting your vegetables from the supermarket. Cabbage we ate in December last year was the sweetest thing I can imagine eating. Eliot Coleman calls his winter carrots "candy carrots" because they are so sweet. Unless you've had brussels sprouts picked hours ago and eaten after a good hard frost, you don't really know what they taste like. And that's another reason to garden in fall - because if you don't, you are missing out on real pleasures.
I would strongly recommend that everyone south of zone 2 seriously consider planting food for fall and winter in their gardens. As much as I love the hearty things I root cellar and the food I put up for winter, there is nothing like crisp greens and fresh salads when the weather outside is frightful. It can be hard, in the heat of summer, to start planning for the days of cold and winter, but that's the truth of this lifestyle - you live in the moment - but the moment is eternally, inevitably, cyclical.
Sharon
So far, climate change seems to be making the northeast (or at least my part of it), much more like the Pacific Northwest. Winters are milder and warmer (Over the last 5 years, I've managed to winter over kale completely uncovered 4 years out of 5, leeks 3 out of five and spinach twice, which is really quite remarkable in a place whose traditional lows run around -25 degrees), and all year 'round is rainier. While we've had some warm periods in the summer, the wetness seems to mean that overall, our summer temperatures are pretty tolerable. Because of the heavy rains of spring, even slightly warmer spring temperatures don't mean I can plant much earlier in the year. Butit does mean long falls, later first hard frosts and long seasons of being able to pick frost hardy greens. In past years, most of my garden has been finished by the end of November or beginning of December, but this year I was picking garden greens well into January.
Which means, if you think about it, that the fall gardening season is as long as the summer one. But comparatively few people grow fall gardens - at most when you drive around you'll see a few brussels sprouts plants. Most people in my region, even the most dedicated gardeners, are relying on the grocery stores or their own home preservation for several months when they could be eating fresh food grown in their own gardens.
Another reason to think about a fall garden is that frankly, fall gardening is much nicer than summer gardening. The disease and bug problems often seem to just go away. The weather is crisp and pleasant. If you have to put something up, the fire on the woodstove or the heat of the dehydrator is welcome, rather than annoying. And, if you were busy or away back when it was time to get your tomatoes planted, you can still go ahead and plant an autumn garden.
So what goes in a fall garden? There are really two categories of things. The first are traditional summer crops that aren't frost hardy, but have a nice short season, and can be planted in high summer for harvest close to the first frost. For example, this would include bush green beans, very short season determinate tomatoes (assuming you started them ahead), cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes, day neutral onions (some onions require light of specific lengths to bulb up, and they won't in the fall, although you can eat them as scallions). This might also include peppers and eggplant that you plant in pots (although again, you'd have to have started them back in May if you live where I do), and bring inside for their final fruiting in a sunny window.
The second are crops that are frost hardy - that is, things that will take a light or heavy frost and just keep on going. This category includes most of the brassica plants (kale, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts), most root vegetables (carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets), peas and fava beans (not other kinds of beans), and many greens - spinach, lettuce, arugula, mustards, mizuna, most asian greens.
The issue in the fall, at least here, is not so much heat, as light. Most of the crops in the paragraph above will endure quite cold temperatures - eventually they'll succumb, but they can hold out for a long time. But there isn't enough light here after mid to late September to get plants to grow much. People who live south of me will have more luck, but around here, only spinach can be planted as late as September and still fully mature. So in order to have winter crops, we need to get them through most of their major growth in high summer, while the light is potent.
In some places, and some years, this presents a serious problem. Because most of the frost hardy crops don't really like hot weather. They tend to bolt (go to seed) prematurely, or they simply don't flourish. I find that it makes the most sense to start most of the ones that take a while to mature (peas, favas, cabbage, etc...) indoors. The roots generally can take our heat, and so can things like broccoli. But spending a week or two in the cool of our house makes a big difference in long term survival rates, I find. If your house tends to be really hot, a shady outdoor spot might be better.
So most of those things are started indoors in early July, for transplanting as space becomes available. Parsnips and brussels sprouts are particularly long season crops, and those I generally started back in late spring. But I still will probably plant a few more of an early brussels and parsnip.
This year, I have two beds available now - a crop of summer greens planted in May is now done with, and another bed was never planted - a local wren decided to make her home among the thistles, and we had to let her babies fledge before we could do anything. So (after some extensive weeding in the latter case), as soon as I get around to it, I can start planting pickling cukes, green beans, cabbage, carrots, beets, kohlrabi and broccoli for fall. I'll wait on greens and other delicates until the end of the month. Other beds will come available when I harvest our garlic towards the middle of this month, when the first crop of fava beans finishes up, and at the end of the first crop of sweet corn. I'll probably pull up some zucchini plants as well by August - we need the extra early on when they first start producing, but by mid-August, they are just an embarrassment of riches.
The other crop I'll be planting as beds open up are green manures. These do more to enrich my soil than any other amendment. When one of the garlic beds opens up in July, it will go into buckwheat. Not only will the buckwheat make a superb green manure, but until I scythe it down, we'll eat the leaves in salads - they are delicious. If I get lazy and forget to scythe it, like I did last year, it is a tasty grain source.
Later in the season, I may plant sweet clover or winter rye, which will hold the soil together all winter. I can also plant grains for overwintering - rye, of course, and winter wheat. If I plant them in mid-september, I can sometimes even cut them back lightly, feed the wheat grass to the chickens, and still have them make a crop in the summer.
The key to fall gardening is experimentation - ask other local gardeners when they plant things for autumn. It has taken a good bit of practice to come up with fairly optimal (and I'm still working on it) sowing times for many of the fall crops - cool enough to keep them alive through summer, early enough that there's still some light left.
I can also use season extension techniques, like cold frames and heavy mulch to extend the life of things. An easy way to make a cold frame is to put an old window (no lead paint!) on top of a few bales of straw and plant into it. There are more complicated options as well, and nicer looking ones, but that will do. The nice thing is after a year or so, the straw will decompose and with some amendments make a nice basis for a raised bed.
I do some of this, and am hoping to add a hoophouse, but I'm increasingly impressed by how hardy many plants are on their own, needing nothing more than a bit of mulch on the coldest days to overwinter nicely. Specific varieties are particularly hardy - Blue de Solaize leek, for example, seems to overwinter nicely, Marvel of Four Seasons Lettuce and the Oak Leaf and Deer Tongue lettuces do nicely here, as does "Winter Giant Spinach" and several kales "Winterbor," "Red Russian," and "Dinosaur." Some people are working on breeding winter hardy vegetables - Fedco offers seed for "ice-bred arugula" and a variety of collards designed to stand the whole winter.
Eliot Coleman's book _The Four Season Harvest_ is *the* book on Northern season extension. Those of you who live in different climates will have to look around for your own. Many of you grow a lot of your food in the winter already there. For those who have thought their climate was simply too cold for autumn planting, you might consider experimenting with the fall catalogs that some places, like Territorial Seeds, offer.
I would also add that if you looked at the list of food that can be grown in fall above, and thought "Oh, I don't like all those greens" - try it. Cold weather turns the starches in many of those vegetables to sugars, and they have a sweetness and depth of flavor that is hard to imagine if you've been getting your vegetables from the supermarket. Cabbage we ate in December last year was the sweetest thing I can imagine eating. Eliot Coleman calls his winter carrots "candy carrots" because they are so sweet. Unless you've had brussels sprouts picked hours ago and eaten after a good hard frost, you don't really know what they taste like. And that's another reason to garden in fall - because if you don't, you are missing out on real pleasures.
I would strongly recommend that everyone south of zone 2 seriously consider planting food for fall and winter in their gardens. As much as I love the hearty things I root cellar and the food I put up for winter, there is nothing like crisp greens and fresh salads when the weather outside is frightful. It can be hard, in the heat of summer, to start planning for the days of cold and winter, but that's the truth of this lifestyle - you live in the moment - but the moment is eternally, inevitably, cyclical.
Sharon
Monday, July 02, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 10 - Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, Do Without
The famous quote about frugality "Use it up, Wear it Out, Make it do, or Do Without" applies very well to reducing one's emissions and dependence on fossil fuels. Everything we buy has an embodied energy cost - that is, the energy to make it contributes to global warming. It also has personal energy costs - more of our hard earned dollars means more time spent at work, or more stress over our credit card bills. Frugality and environmentalism don't have a 100 percent overlap, but often, doing the frugal thing is also doing the environmentally sound thing. Everytime we buy new, we say to that manufacturer "Make one more." One more is often too many.
So how do we do this? First, we use things up - we extract every single last drop out of something. That means we scrape the pan thoroughly, so that we don't end up throwing away food. It means we use our thumbs to get the last bit of egg out of the shell - do that with six eggs and you've got the equivalent of another. Take those scraps of ratty old tshirts and make a quilt, or handkerchiefs to substitute for tissues, or cloth tp to substitute for paper, or whatever. Take the time to really get all the use we can out of things. That includes pleasure, time and love - that is, if we get all the pleasure we can from our simple lives, we won't always need more. If we make good use of all our time - rest and work - we won't be running all the time. If we make full use of the love and support of others, we might look up one day and have a community to rely on.
Wear it out. That means making things last as long as possible. That means darning our socks, mending our jeans, reheeling our shoes instead of just chucking them and getting a new pair. The longer we can extend the lifespan of our things, the less we'll need to buy. And with that in mind, it is often wisest to buy things that really last, and also things that have potential for long term reuse or repair. That means wood furniture, not plastic, metal tools, good quality clothing. It isn't always frugal just because it is cheap - we need to start thinking about the whole lifespan of a object from where and how it was made to what we will do when it breaks or is worn out. A wooden bowl that your grandchildren will use is a better investment than 10 plastic bowls that won't last a decade. A wool sweater that can be felted down to fill a quilt at the end of its life as a sweater is a better investment than an acrylic one. Remember the story about the man who had an overcoat - when it wore out, he made a jacket. When the jacket wore out he made a vest. When the vest wore out he made a scarf. When the scarf wore out he made a handkerchief. When the handkercheif wore out, he made a button. And when the button was finally lost, he told the story. There's almost always a little more wear in things.
Make it do. This requires imagination - what substitutes can we find? How can we use something we have, instead of something new? What can I make? What can I do? It requires living life artfully and imaginatively - much more so than saying "oh, I need a new dish drainer - off to the store." We ask children to make do all the time, or at least we used to. Don't have a train set? Use your imagination. Carve one? Make one out of a cardboard box? Pretend? We need to take the same advice we used to give children, and start finding ways to make do with what we have. Most of us have houses full of stuff. Our sense that we need just one more object to make it complete is probably wrong. Oh, there are exceptions - particularly if you've been living a fossil fueled life, and now need to power down. But most of the time, if we just imagined, we could make do with what we have.
Do without. I live in a 3500+ square foot farmhouse filled with books, tools, kids, toys, etc... I've met people who live in 200 square foot huts filled with themselves and a few tools and pots. Many of those people considered themselves happy, fortunate and blessed - so if you can be blessed with 200 square feet, what is the rest doing for me? If you and I can't do without, who can? Before you buy something, ask yourself - can everyone have one? That is, if everyone had one, would it be good for the world? Did my grandmother or grandfather have one? Did they need one? If not, why do I need one? Sometimes you will need it. But surprisingly often you don't.
We all need food, water, shelter, love, education, joy, clothing, some simple tools, good work to do, comfort, support, peace, security, art, imagination. More than half of these you can't buy at any price, in fact having too much can prevent you from enjoying them fully. The rest can be met 90% of the time in our present society with something used, or with less than you thought. They can be met by making things or finding things or reusing things. Doing without isn't impoverishment - it is life as art.
Shalom,
Sharon
So how do we do this? First, we use things up - we extract every single last drop out of something. That means we scrape the pan thoroughly, so that we don't end up throwing away food. It means we use our thumbs to get the last bit of egg out of the shell - do that with six eggs and you've got the equivalent of another. Take those scraps of ratty old tshirts and make a quilt, or handkerchiefs to substitute for tissues, or cloth tp to substitute for paper, or whatever. Take the time to really get all the use we can out of things. That includes pleasure, time and love - that is, if we get all the pleasure we can from our simple lives, we won't always need more. If we make good use of all our time - rest and work - we won't be running all the time. If we make full use of the love and support of others, we might look up one day and have a community to rely on.
Wear it out. That means making things last as long as possible. That means darning our socks, mending our jeans, reheeling our shoes instead of just chucking them and getting a new pair. The longer we can extend the lifespan of our things, the less we'll need to buy. And with that in mind, it is often wisest to buy things that really last, and also things that have potential for long term reuse or repair. That means wood furniture, not plastic, metal tools, good quality clothing. It isn't always frugal just because it is cheap - we need to start thinking about the whole lifespan of a object from where and how it was made to what we will do when it breaks or is worn out. A wooden bowl that your grandchildren will use is a better investment than 10 plastic bowls that won't last a decade. A wool sweater that can be felted down to fill a quilt at the end of its life as a sweater is a better investment than an acrylic one. Remember the story about the man who had an overcoat - when it wore out, he made a jacket. When the jacket wore out he made a vest. When the vest wore out he made a scarf. When the scarf wore out he made a handkerchief. When the handkercheif wore out, he made a button. And when the button was finally lost, he told the story. There's almost always a little more wear in things.
Make it do. This requires imagination - what substitutes can we find? How can we use something we have, instead of something new? What can I make? What can I do? It requires living life artfully and imaginatively - much more so than saying "oh, I need a new dish drainer - off to the store." We ask children to make do all the time, or at least we used to. Don't have a train set? Use your imagination. Carve one? Make one out of a cardboard box? Pretend? We need to take the same advice we used to give children, and start finding ways to make do with what we have. Most of us have houses full of stuff. Our sense that we need just one more object to make it complete is probably wrong. Oh, there are exceptions - particularly if you've been living a fossil fueled life, and now need to power down. But most of the time, if we just imagined, we could make do with what we have.
Do without. I live in a 3500+ square foot farmhouse filled with books, tools, kids, toys, etc... I've met people who live in 200 square foot huts filled with themselves and a few tools and pots. Many of those people considered themselves happy, fortunate and blessed - so if you can be blessed with 200 square feet, what is the rest doing for me? If you and I can't do without, who can? Before you buy something, ask yourself - can everyone have one? That is, if everyone had one, would it be good for the world? Did my grandmother or grandfather have one? Did they need one? If not, why do I need one? Sometimes you will need it. But surprisingly often you don't.
We all need food, water, shelter, love, education, joy, clothing, some simple tools, good work to do, comfort, support, peace, security, art, imagination. More than half of these you can't buy at any price, in fact having too much can prevent you from enjoying them fully. The rest can be met 90% of the time in our present society with something used, or with less than you thought. They can be met by making things or finding things or reusing things. Doing without isn't impoverishment - it is life as art.
Shalom,
Sharon
Sunday, July 01, 2007
The First Month of Rioting for Austerity
Was, umm...not very dramatic. Our baselines are pretty low, so right now we're picking a little at a time at reductions. I wish I could write about how we did something really simple that cut our usage dramatically, but nothing so far ;-). I think the big step will be the fridge turn off. Which I meant to have done already, but haven't quite, simply because we're still using up all the bits of condiments in the fridge. I can't quite bring myself to throw away good food, even though this is stupid ;-). But I think we'll do the big turn off at the end of this week, finally.
Our electrical assessment will have to wait until the monthy bill comes in - I expect a fairly dramatic drop, because March was artificially high. We were brooding out turkey poults, and we had frost periodically until May 22. We've been more diligent about turning off the computer, and I'm trying hard to have 3 days a week (only succeeded once so far) in which I don't connect at all. We're also trying to wean our son to a smaller nightlight with an LED. We've been using our solar cooker and other cooking energy savers as well, so hopefully this will work out as a large net savings.
One thing we're considering later in the project is simply going entirely without grid power - not with solar, but simply converting our life over to electrical free for good. We're debating.
Gas - our approximate monthly allotment is 20 gallons per month for the household. We used 34, including the trip back and forth to NYC my husband took with the boys. Which is significantly over, but getting better. My oldest son's whole annual allotment (and perhaps more) will be used by his busing to the school for kids with autism he attends. I'm hoping we'll come in under his allotment - it will depend on the size of the bus they assign, and the number of other special needs kids going his way. We don't really have any control over this, and I doubt our family will have enough extra gas to cover his full allotment if, for example, the school district does something insane and puts Eli with only 1 other kid on a 12 passenger school bus. So this may be our failure point. Over the summer, the big reasons for driving are synagogue and swimming. But we want to save up gas for the fall, when DH has to commute to work.
I'd love to get rid of the van we have, which is comparatively low mileage, but fits all 6 of us. I hate having two cars. Heck, I hate having one car. They are never on the road at the same time - ever - we inherited the little car from Eric's grandmother and we use it for commuting and anything we don't all do together - the van is driven only 1x per week or so, or occasionally on long car trips. So I'm looking for a higher-mileage 30+ vehicle that could fit six passengers, 3 in car or booster seats. Oh, and it can't cost too much, but has to be reasonably reliable. If anyone has any wisdom, I'll gladly accept it. We'd dump both of the other cars in favor of that such a magic vehicle.
I got the information about the trike with kid seat Colin Beavan is using over at Noimpactman, and I'm looking into that - Eli doesn't have the developmental skills to ride a bike safely in traffic, and no one else is big enough or a good enough rider to be able to cover the multiple hilly miles between us and anything else. We've looked into rickshaws, but too pricey as yet. We have yet to figure out how to transport four kids with pedal power. Which is too bad - we'd love to. Horse and buggy would be the other option, but I don't know that I have the horse skills or the time to really acquire serious driving ability - enough to feel really safe with my kids in the buggy. I used to ride, but I've never driven. Any good advice on this front?
Heating - not been a problem here ;-). We don't usually turn the heat on until late October. And unfortunately, one of the two beautiful birches that shades our house is moribund, and has to come down. The upside is that the wood will be nice. But we want to replace it with a similar, but less disease prone tree - anyone know something that provides light, dappled shade, isn't too prone to disease and is pretty to look at? I was thinking locust, perhaps, or maybe Chinese Chestnut.
Food - we were already very nearly at the 90% reduction, and as the garden and local produce gets better, we're pretty comfortably there. I wish I could come up with a good substitute for cheerios, but that's about it. Oh, and a cheaper organic juice source for popsicle making. We're really enjoying the very beginnings of the real "summer" things - the first green beans and zucchini. No tomatoes yet, but forthcoming.
Garbage - the debacle in which my shop shelving collapsed and crushed a whole bunch of glass jars of pickles into sacks of grains and beans pretty much killed my garbage quota this month. We were way over - I didn't even other calculating how much. We have been working to minimize our garbage, but that kind of killed it.
Consumer goods - I was doing so well until I bumped up against Simon's homeschool materials at the end of this month. Most of it is a good investment - amortized over the 2 kids following him, we'll get 3 years of usage out of every curriculum year. And we were able to mix and match, which was good - at 5 1/2 he's ready for most of the 2nd grade materials, but not quite all. And I simply couldn't find everything we needed used. So I spent more than my @80 per month allotment on that - we bought a total of 140 dollars in used goods (most of that was DH's banjo), which at a 10% allotment was 14 dollars, but then spent $105 dollars on Simon's second grade school materials, new. I'll probably spend another bit this month on Jewish materials, which simply aren't readily available used.
Water: We're averaging 10-11 gallons per person, just above optimal. I think I can get that down pretty well once we move the other toilet to composting, which will happen as soon our friend who is building new ones for us gets it finished. The cistern *should finally* go in in July, and we'll have more flexibility then, particularly because of our abundant rainfall.
The big learning curve on this has been not that it is so terrifically hard, but how many little places there were for us left to make cuts.
The other cultural thing that has been interesting is the level of negotiation. I describe this project a lot, and the immediate reaction tends to be an attempt at negotiation - "Well, but I couldn't do that because I have to..." I think a lot of people just don't realize that science doesn't negotiate - that is, they don't seem to grasp that while you can dispute the grounds for doing this, if you conceed that we have to do what it takes, you can't bargain on the what it takes. It is a painful realization to recognize that every day we wait to make these changes raises the bar - it makes it less and less possible. I've had two people say to me "well, once it gets to 100%, we won't have to do it anyway." They were joking, but that scares me - the idea that if we just make the disaster irrevocable we don't have to take responsibility...that's scary. But then there are the people who do get it, and want a role in changing things. That's reassuring.
BTW, I'm going to be interviewed live (GACK!) on the Reality Report on Global Public Media by Jason Bradford tomorrow from 12-1 EST. There's a call in portion at the end, so feel free to participate. Live streaming is here:
http://www.kzyx.org/pages/listen_now.html and the phone number is 707-456-9991. I'll be talking about sustainable agriculture and 100 Million farmers.
Cheers,
Sharon
Our electrical assessment will have to wait until the monthy bill comes in - I expect a fairly dramatic drop, because March was artificially high. We were brooding out turkey poults, and we had frost periodically until May 22. We've been more diligent about turning off the computer, and I'm trying hard to have 3 days a week (only succeeded once so far) in which I don't connect at all. We're also trying to wean our son to a smaller nightlight with an LED. We've been using our solar cooker and other cooking energy savers as well, so hopefully this will work out as a large net savings.
One thing we're considering later in the project is simply going entirely without grid power - not with solar, but simply converting our life over to electrical free for good. We're debating.
Gas - our approximate monthly allotment is 20 gallons per month for the household. We used 34, including the trip back and forth to NYC my husband took with the boys. Which is significantly over, but getting better. My oldest son's whole annual allotment (and perhaps more) will be used by his busing to the school for kids with autism he attends. I'm hoping we'll come in under his allotment - it will depend on the size of the bus they assign, and the number of other special needs kids going his way. We don't really have any control over this, and I doubt our family will have enough extra gas to cover his full allotment if, for example, the school district does something insane and puts Eli with only 1 other kid on a 12 passenger school bus. So this may be our failure point. Over the summer, the big reasons for driving are synagogue and swimming. But we want to save up gas for the fall, when DH has to commute to work.
I'd love to get rid of the van we have, which is comparatively low mileage, but fits all 6 of us. I hate having two cars. Heck, I hate having one car. They are never on the road at the same time - ever - we inherited the little car from Eric's grandmother and we use it for commuting and anything we don't all do together - the van is driven only 1x per week or so, or occasionally on long car trips. So I'm looking for a higher-mileage 30+ vehicle that could fit six passengers, 3 in car or booster seats. Oh, and it can't cost too much, but has to be reasonably reliable. If anyone has any wisdom, I'll gladly accept it. We'd dump both of the other cars in favor of that such a magic vehicle.
I got the information about the trike with kid seat Colin Beavan is using over at Noimpactman, and I'm looking into that - Eli doesn't have the developmental skills to ride a bike safely in traffic, and no one else is big enough or a good enough rider to be able to cover the multiple hilly miles between us and anything else. We've looked into rickshaws, but too pricey as yet. We have yet to figure out how to transport four kids with pedal power. Which is too bad - we'd love to. Horse and buggy would be the other option, but I don't know that I have the horse skills or the time to really acquire serious driving ability - enough to feel really safe with my kids in the buggy. I used to ride, but I've never driven. Any good advice on this front?
Heating - not been a problem here ;-). We don't usually turn the heat on until late October. And unfortunately, one of the two beautiful birches that shades our house is moribund, and has to come down. The upside is that the wood will be nice. But we want to replace it with a similar, but less disease prone tree - anyone know something that provides light, dappled shade, isn't too prone to disease and is pretty to look at? I was thinking locust, perhaps, or maybe Chinese Chestnut.
Food - we were already very nearly at the 90% reduction, and as the garden and local produce gets better, we're pretty comfortably there. I wish I could come up with a good substitute for cheerios, but that's about it. Oh, and a cheaper organic juice source for popsicle making. We're really enjoying the very beginnings of the real "summer" things - the first green beans and zucchini. No tomatoes yet, but forthcoming.
Garbage - the debacle in which my shop shelving collapsed and crushed a whole bunch of glass jars of pickles into sacks of grains and beans pretty much killed my garbage quota this month. We were way over - I didn't even other calculating how much. We have been working to minimize our garbage, but that kind of killed it.
Consumer goods - I was doing so well until I bumped up against Simon's homeschool materials at the end of this month. Most of it is a good investment - amortized over the 2 kids following him, we'll get 3 years of usage out of every curriculum year. And we were able to mix and match, which was good - at 5 1/2 he's ready for most of the 2nd grade materials, but not quite all. And I simply couldn't find everything we needed used. So I spent more than my @80 per month allotment on that - we bought a total of 140 dollars in used goods (most of that was DH's banjo), which at a 10% allotment was 14 dollars, but then spent $105 dollars on Simon's second grade school materials, new. I'll probably spend another bit this month on Jewish materials, which simply aren't readily available used.
Water: We're averaging 10-11 gallons per person, just above optimal. I think I can get that down pretty well once we move the other toilet to composting, which will happen as soon our friend who is building new ones for us gets it finished. The cistern *should finally* go in in July, and we'll have more flexibility then, particularly because of our abundant rainfall.
The big learning curve on this has been not that it is so terrifically hard, but how many little places there were for us left to make cuts.
The other cultural thing that has been interesting is the level of negotiation. I describe this project a lot, and the immediate reaction tends to be an attempt at negotiation - "Well, but I couldn't do that because I have to..." I think a lot of people just don't realize that science doesn't negotiate - that is, they don't seem to grasp that while you can dispute the grounds for doing this, if you conceed that we have to do what it takes, you can't bargain on the what it takes. It is a painful realization to recognize that every day we wait to make these changes raises the bar - it makes it less and less possible. I've had two people say to me "well, once it gets to 100%, we won't have to do it anyway." They were joking, but that scares me - the idea that if we just make the disaster irrevocable we don't have to take responsibility...that's scary. But then there are the people who do get it, and want a role in changing things. That's reassuring.
BTW, I'm going to be interviewed live (GACK!) on the Reality Report on Global Public Media by Jason Bradford tomorrow from 12-1 EST. There's a call in portion at the end, so feel free to participate. Live streaming is here:
http://www.kzyx.org/pages/listen_now.html and the phone number is 707-456-9991. I'll be talking about sustainable agriculture and 100 Million farmers.
Cheers,
Sharon
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