Technology Addicts
I really liked Dale's essay a great deal. I admit, I've had exactly the same thought about the bees and cell phones - I think it is a compelling example of just how addicted to our comforts we are, because I think Dale is right that few of us would have voluntarily given up our cell phones simply to keep our food supply coming. Our "have to" is too close and "food" is simply too abstract in this society.
That may be the single reason that we most need to begin growing food. Not because we might starve (although that seems a serious and compelling rationale to me), but because unless we reconnect our brains and bodies with natural cycles like the food cycle, we'll never be able to recognize our collective technological death drive for what it is. And yes, I know that writing this on the computer is a great irony - and one I have to start dealing with. Here's my essay on that:
The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged, Either
Ned Ludd kinda had a point, no?
Sharon
Friday, August 31, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Right, Schmight, Left, Schmeft
I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Richard Heinberg's new book, _Peak Everything_ recently, and I found it to be typical Heinberg - engaging, wise, scrupulously balanced. It comes out this month, I believe, and it is well worth a read.
My personal favorite thing about it, however, was not the writing or the subject matter, but the subtitle, which (on my copy), included the phrase "Transitioning gracefully from the Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty." I admit, I was struck by the sheer aptness of the phrase "era of modesty" to what we're coming to. Now I gather that in the process of revision, the subtitle was changed to something else, but I keep thinking about the term he coined, both because it is great piece of phrasing, but also because it manages in three words to invoke a great transition in political and social thinking. It should be no surprise that Heinberg is ahead of the curve again, of course, but I am impressed by the way the very title invoked not just an era of more modest usage, but also social, sexual and cultural modesty, subjects that, if they are discussed at all, tend to be thought of as discussions to be had on the "right" rather than throughout the political spectrum. With that one word, "modesty" Heinberg manages to invoke a confluence of left and right. I admit, I'm impressed, and sorry the term doesn't appear on the actual book (I wonder if Heinberg will let me steal it for mine ;-)).
Now the peak oil movement has been called the "liberal left behind" movement - the apocalypse of the left. Of course, it is no such thing, and never has been. Former Bush energy czar Matthew Simmons is no leftist radical, Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett never dated Abbie Hoffman and the US Army is not, as far as I know, handing out "Free Mumia" buttons with its rifles. And yet all are among the first to recognize the immanence of peak oil. While it is true we've got our share of aging hippies, we're also flush with survivalists, Petroleum geologists, investment bankers and other bastions of the right and center. And this is all to the good - the end of cheap oil is not a political fact, it is a simple, practical reality. The same is true within the climate change movement - we are all moving rapidly to the recognition that no matter what your political position, the hard, scientific truths about sea level rise, aquifer depletion and drought really don't care whether you prefer Bill O'Reilly, Thom Hartmann or Stephen Colbert.
But it is insufficient to say that these issues cross party lines, because what they actually do is destroy party and political lines, and the divisions we've carefully worked out to decide who is "left" and who is "right." Now it is worth noting that these have always been artificial distinctions for most real people. I've been very kindly called "a voice of the left" and I take some pride in that designation - I value the history of leftism, including my own family's history, going back to the early twentieth century union movement and through my parents. But "left" has never been more than a shorthand for my positions on some issues - and had we drawn the circles other ways, I might have spoken, at times for other constituencies, even, perhaps, for some segments of the much dreaded "other side." All of which is simply proof, that, while it isn't true that we're all exactly the same under the skin, neither designation is sufficient to describe most people's political and ethical thinking. Most of us are political hybrids.
Where, for example, did one put the leftist nun putting her life on the line for economic reform in Latin America - and equally passionate about ending abortion? Where does my passionately pro-drug legalization, harsher sentencing police officer neighbor go? How about the gun-toting, anti-tax radical environmentalist I know? The disabled neighborhood activist who opposes abortion and euthanasia because she sees it as the genocide of the disabled? My neighbor who believes that his sons have an absolute obligation to defend their country - and that their government has an absolute obligation to stop the war? My pro-public education, feminist, Orthodox friends who believe that modest women cover their hair - on the protest lines? My conservative, fundamentalist neighbors who believe that Jesus demands devout Christians hold no private property and resist corporate power? Where would you put me? Feminist, pro-social justice, anti-growth capitalist - and yes, pro-private property (in some senses), pro-modesty, pro-personal responsiblity farmgirl who used to help her father make bullets? The reality is that most people are more complicated than our current designations will describe.
The last decade or so has blurred things further. Which party again is the big government, tax and spend one? Which party is the party of genocide, the Dems who killed half a million children in Iraq with the embargo or the Republicans who killed half a million civilians in Iraq with the war? Now it is the left who is screaming in horror about the dangers of big government (and some of the right is screaming along with them). Where were the feminist voices of anger about sexual harrassment so evident during the Clarence Thomas hearings when the democratic president was in the hot seat? The conventional political lines are shifting.
And at the same time that this shift is happening, those of us who forsee the coming crisis have to make major internal political shifts as well. For example, in _The Upside of Down_, Tomas Homer-Dixon observes that to deal with all of the coming crises, we'd have enact,
"...a global society that I've come to call 'Holland times ten," with vastly more sophisticated, pervasive and expensive rules and regulatory institutions than anything the Dutch live with today. Do we really want such a future for ourselves and our children?"
Homer-Dixon, not exactly a right winger, recognizes the simple reality that a vastly more repressive beaurocracy might actually be worse than the collapse. He observes, following Joseph Tainter, that institutions created to deal with crisis invariably stick forever, leaving us laden with ever more oppressive layers of government. What is remarkable about Homer-Dixon's book is that it, like Heinberg's title, shakes off conventional left/right thinking and simply allows the data to lead him to a conclusion that is neither. I'm not sure I agree with Homer-Dixon, but I find him a particularly creative example of the ways in which these problems shake up our traditional assumptions.
The same could be said of Rod Dreher's book, _Crunchy Cons_. Dreher too is motivated by the honest recognition that the current realities, including peak oil (which he describes) and the environmental crisis have changed things. He tries very hard to slip all the good stuff under the rubric of conservativism, for example, arguing that traditional social welfare programs that support families are conservative. I'm not convinced he succeeds, but he does one of the most remarkable analyses I've imagined, and his work has real power among conservatives who haven't fitted into the exact mold around them. I know many of these people, and I believe that generally speaking, Dreher is one of the first people to seriously reconsider, in a popular and accessible way, how to reconfigure politics to deal with the future.
What is disappointing in Dreher, of course, is his longstanding allegience to the politics of balkanization. That is, instead of seeking a middle ground, he wants to shove environmentalist, agrarian conservatives into Republicanism. Personally, I think he'd be better off abandoning that territory and seeking a new one. The reality is that for most of the people who work in these issues, left and right stop becoming fully explicatory categories. Heinberg himself writes about the problem of doing so in _Powerdown_ where he discusses his preference for anarchism and minimal government, while arguing simultaneously that no societal powerdown can occur without a large, invasive government structure. And that it cannot succeed without that large structure eventually voluntarily handing out power to smaller, localized units of power. This represents a remarkably hybridized vision of government - personally, I don't necessarily believe it to be right, but again Heinberg has allowed the realities of the system to override his personal political preferences and at least to imagine how we might enact the changes required.
Like Homer-Dixon's rejection of large government structures and Dreher's rejection of unfettered capitalism, Richard Heinberg's call for modesty, at least to me, raises some fascinating questions. One of the most fascinating is why it is that the word "modesty" so powerfully invokes sexual modesty, almost overriding the notion of modest desires, expectations and practices outside the realm of sexuality. I admit, my personal theory about why we have abandoned all other senses of modesty along with traditional sexual modesty is this - modesty of all kinds is, to a large degree, about choosing not to be looked at. Both sexual modesty and economic modesty reject the external gaze of others, saying "don't focus on me." Historically speaking, many of the rules of sexual modesty have been applied to women, with the assumption that the burden of rejecting the gaze must lie upon women, because it is their sexuality that draws the eye. Feminism rightly rejected the idea that men should not be required to limit and control their own gazes and desires. But it also rejected the notion that there should be limits on the power of the gaze - popular feminism focused on the notion of the powerful female "I" at the center. But a world of people walking around trying to draw gazes and be powerful creates a superficial culture, intent on "self-expression" in a visual sense - the house, the clothing, the car, the membership. That there might be power in not being at the center of the gaze itself, that modesty might also carry power was overlooked.
This is because feminism's rejection of the origins of modesty also happened to coincide with the largest capitalist expansion in history. Feminism was as successful as it was, precisely because it served the goals of capitalism (I've written about this in more detail before here: ) And growth capitalism is, far more than feminism, about the rejection of the notion of modesty. That is, if all of us are not constantly calling out "look at me" there is no market for designer clothing, fancy decorations to make our house an expression of our "self," fancy cars to express our wealth.
In a culture that rejects modesty of all kinds, that demands the gaze rest upon us, that validates the notion that the "I" is at the center of the "eye" all the time, markets flourish. In a culture that values modesty of all sorts - that rejects the gaze, the notion that the self is at the center of everything, there is no place for endless growth. Thus, the notion that the culture of modesty was bad, because it derived from the sexual repression of women was wrong - what was bad was the notion that women were "drawing" male gazes, and thus had to regulate their bodies, rather than expecting men to regulate themselves. But the actual assumptions of both sexual modesty (as it applies to both men and women), and economic and cultural modesty is simpler. It is "My worth is not in what is visible. I am one among others, I am not the center of everything." We threw the baby out with the bathwater. It is true that one can read "don't make me the center of things" as "I am powerless" or as a form of silencing. But it is also true that modesty can represent that power of self-deferral, the placement of others before the self. Undoubtably, one can have too much of that. Equally indubitably, in western society, we don't have too much of that sort of self-abnegation - far from it.
At the risk of alienating people on both the left and the right who read this blog, and ending up with absolutely no readers at all, I'm going to observe that none of the problems we are facing can be fixed from the right or the left, or even through discussion of things in those terms. And speaking to the left, to which I have a longer and deeper alliegence, there are things that we really ought to reconsider. Here are some of the places where I think leftists might want to look to the right to find, if not common ground, some useful tools.
1. I believe passionately in the importance of personal responsibility, and of fair accounting for one's choices. I do not mean by this that one's situation is wholly a product of one's personal choices, and thus tough patooties if you were born poor. What I mean is that each of us needs to take greater responsibility for our present, societal circumstances than we do. I often hear people lamenting the power of corporations - as though that power does not derive from our dependency and willingness to give them cash. Walmart isn't powerful because they are an evil corporation - they are powerful because they have great stinking wads of money and those wads came from you and me. Stop buying their crap and guess what - Walmart won't be powerful. I also hear many voices call for public policy solutions, when what they really mean is that they want the government to take care of peak oil and climate change for them, without being personally inconvenienced. Again, this is a failure of personal responsiblity, because if we tell governments that what we want is solutions without personal sacrifice, we will get only inadequate solutions, that will fail us and the next generation.
I believe that everyone has a degree of personal responsibility, and that the level of responsibility is increased by every advantage given to you. Were you born into a family that loved you? Guess what - you got a present, or a gift from G-d, and you owe a little more than someone who was beaten daily or neglected. Did you get a decent education? There's another level of responsibility - if you were either lucky enough to get a good education at good schools with teachers who cared about you, or you were born smart enough to be an autodidact and compensate for the inadequacies of what was given to you, bow down to diety or thank your lucky stars, and get your ass in gear because you owe a little more than those who didn't. And so it goes.
Full scale, straight out, honest accounting of responsibility is important. That means that yes, people are responsible for what they do and do not do, the choices they make. And those who shape the choices other people can make, or don't shoulder a greater degree of responsibility in privelege are also responsible.
One of my professors, when I was complaining about some terrible personal situation I was enduring, once pointed out to me that most of the great deeds of human history were performed by people who were having really bad days and extenuating personal situations. That's not to say no one ever has an excuse for anything, but the more excuses we make for ourselves, the more we say "well, I deserve just a little extra because..." (and who doesn't), the less likely we are to have any extra for the quiet people who have learned to expect nothing and who truly need our hand up.
Ultimately, we need to be held responsible for our choices. The Peter Parker system should apply here - with great power, should come great responsibility. The better off you are, the more you need to take full responsibility for your actions - to stop asking for tax breaks and accomodations. But this goes all the way down.
2. I sure as heck don't expect the government to save me in a crisis. Ok, I'm going to tell the truth. I don't understand why it is that people in Florida don't have any bottled water or boards for their windows, and are standing in line for it the day before the hurricane. For cripes sake, you live in Florida! The same is true with people who are unprepared for blackouts during winter storms in up near me, or earth quakes in CA. I'll grant you, one of the better uses for government is to get the helicopters up and make sure people don't die of typhus after the disaster, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Look, we all watched the footage of Hurricane Katrina, and it confirmed what everyone on the right has been saying for generations - our present government isn't going to save our asses in a crisis. Now there are good and useful reasons to want to try and get what government does better than anyone else done right by them, and I'm all for that. Agitate for change - yes. Because there are always going to be people who can't protect themselves and situations we can't prepare for.
But ultimately a certain degree of self-sufficiency is merely common sense. Now there are people who may not be able to afford extra food or blankets, or a way out of a dying city - and we need to help those people. But it would be really helpful if you aren't one of those people, if you aren't elderly or disabled or desperately poor, if you'd get your act together and be prepared to meet your own damned needs for most predictable situations, so that you won't clog the system.
3. I don't want to see power centralized any more than strictly necessary anymore. Ok, let's be honest - this used to be the big old left/right debate - social welfare or not, big government or little government. It is no longer a right left issue. The current administration has a bigger government than the last one, with more debt and beaurocracy, and now the dems are calling for restraint. No one has a monopoly on this one.
And let's be honest, whether you hate the Clintons or the Bushes (or both equally), every single one of us can see exactly why we want to decentralize power, and exactly why we should be getting rid of political dynasties and the system that locates private armies and our own right to justice in the hands of any one person.
In fact, both peak oil and climate change require, absolutely mandate a reduction of scale of government - just as conservatives have been calling for. Yes, we also need to expand some central projects - but the general movement has to be towards local sovreignty and local power and resources being kept in the communities.
4. We're going to have to develop better family relationships and a strong focus on family units, and ASAP. I'm not talking about getting into people's bedrooms here, I'm talking about getting people to take care of aging parents, disabled family members, to stop whining about "what about *myyyyyy needs* and to start thinking a bit more of other people. Those of us who had ordinarily fucked up families (as opposed to transcendently so) are going to have to start getting along again, and recognize that biological and chosen family are going to be much more important in our lives for a long, long time. And we're going to start having to value and honor the work of caring for others - instead of acting like helping grandma to the bathroom or breastfeeding your kid is a pain in the ass to be shoved off on other people, we have to start realizing that this *is* the point - the reason we're here. To be of use. To do good work. To care for others.
We're also going to have to parent better, and stop telling our kids how special and perfect and wonderful they are, and tell them to get their asses out from in front of the tv and get to work helping out. Instead of telling Jimmy and Jenny that the best thing they can do is to get good SAT scores and go to Tae Kwon Do, tell them the truth - that you want them to grow up to be good and righteous people, who care about others, are hard workers, honorable and generous.
5. If you harbor any lingering prejudices about blue collar work with your hands, get over them now. It is not, in any sense of the word, more noble to be a tax lawyer than a plumber, and it doesn't mean you are smarter. If you call the middle of the country "flyover states" cut it out now - you won't be flying much of anywhere anyway, and they grow your dinner. They might get pissed off and stop growing it.
The reality is that most comparatively well off, well educated people have been doing things that aren't very useful and are soon going to stop being done. Most of the people we have been told we are smarter then are actually doing good and useful work - feeding people dinner, keeping houses running, building things, making things, growing food. It is likely that we have been so firmly told we are smarter simply because it was a good way to avoid pointing out that we are, as my husband likes to put it, "the surplus population."
And if you think all religous people are the same, and religion is the cause of all problems, and religious people are idiots - ok with me, but shut up about it. As we're less and less able to control our future, more and more people are going to be praying in their foxholes, maybe even you. Get over it, and stop feeling superior.
And if you reject religion, don't want to see it flourish, but aren't working to provide community support, care for the sick and dying, festivals of celebration and release, and a way to think about why the world is so screwed up, expect to fail. Don't blame it on religion - blame it on the fact that you aren't very good and doing the things that religion does very well for many of us.
6. We're going to have to start talking about sex differently, and say a hard word for many of us to swallow - "Don't." I'm not talking about today's rather ineffective forms of abstinence education - I'm talking about the unpleasant reality that poverty means less health care, which means more STDs, less access to reliable birth control, more teenage pregnancy, more complications, more AIDS. I'm going to be blunt - unless we completely change our government's attitudes on these subjects, we're going to enter into a society where the ability to mitigate the dangers of sex are radically reduced - a society which for many resembles the pre-pill society.
Ignoring the moral issues, let's be practical. Birth control is expensive - a really reliable set up requires a woman to have regular medical check ups and access to pricey medicines. Condoms are expensive to your average poor teenager. Heck, they are expensive for my budget. Abortion is really expensive. A truly reliable system for young people requires a form of birth control for the woman and a condom for the man - pricey, and hard to come by if you don't live near a drugstore - which thousands of us don't.
Now the ideal for some people might be to use government to make all these things available and free, and to place no restrictions on sexual practices, age at onset, etc... But the reality is that our present system is as much a product of cheap energy as everything else - if we don't want to rely on a universal system to keep our actual kids from getting pregnant or diseases, we have no choice but to change the way we think about sexuality. If we want to ensure that AIDS in the US doesn't come to mirror AIDS in Africa, we need to be very careful about what we teach our children about sex.
We have become a society in which personal restraint is unimaginable, and abstinence education will always fail as long as a small minority is struggling against a society that calls every form of sexual restraint repression. But we need to think and talk about this - even though most of us who grew up in the age of birth control aren't exactly the poster-children for such restraint. But we can't afford to have our kids get pregnant earlier and earlier, to have outbreaks of diseases we can't afford to treat, to create an expanding underclass of children born to other children. So we're going to have utter the words "no" "don't" "wait." And we need to talk about how we can get there - talk to the people who were there all along.
7. We need a new sense of personal freedom, one in which limits in the form of things like honor, self-discipline, modesty, courtesy, and public order are perceived not as acts of repression, but as structure in which culture can bloom. The notion that there are things we should not and ought not do is likely to be a painful one to those who spent their youth practicing iconclasm and smashing idols. The notion that we should follow our bliss, support our own self-esteem and do what feels best to us has to be replaced with the notion that we should regulate our desires, limit our choices and do what is best for the community.
Our culture has grown to reject hypocrisy as the ultimate sin. Hypocrisy in the popular (rather than the moral) sense, of course, is defined as doing things that you don't believe in/expressing feeling you don't have for the sake of the community. But, of course, communities run on just such self-restraint, and in tighter knit, more strongly bound communities, how you feel about things may not matter that much all the time. It may be that what you do, how you treat others, and how you regulate your own feelings and intentions is more important to your own survival and success than the following of one's bliss.
In my religion, we believe that feeling follows form. Instead of the Christian (and popular secular) notion that what is in your heart will lead you, instead we believe that you do the right thing, and that practice in doing the right thing will lead you to be able to feel the right way doing it. That is, when your failing mother needs help, you care for her because it is the right thing to do, to honor your parents, and in doing so, you open up the possibility that you will do it purely from love. But unless you do the work itself, you have few opportunities to change your feelings and develop that sense of love. I personally believe that a shift from relying on how you feel to what you do is necessary to success on the community level.
Again, capitalism has enthusiastically supported the notion that we should follow our hearts all the time - just as it has rejected modesty of ambition, of lifestyle, of desire. Because if you believe that your feelings are authentic, immutable, and natural - that is, that you feel the way you do about X for some fundamental reason of self, then there is no reason to limit one's desires. But if you believe that one's desires are shaped by your actions, if you believe that, for example, you might come to feel love (I do not claim this is inevitable, by the way, merely possible. Nor do I claim that everyone should love their mothers - not all mothers are even possibly lovable), where there was none before, if you were to care for your mother, spend time with her, know her better by virtue of helping her, you open up the possibility that our instinctive feelings are not necessarily our most reliable guide.
There are more, but now that I've traumatized everyone on the left, eliminated all readership and gotten my book contract revoked ;-), I'll stop for the moment.
Now does this mean I've gone right on everything? Nope. I still believe that sex is one of those things that is none of my business, I'm still pro choice, pro-reallocation of wealth and regulation of markets and rabidly environmentalist. But perhaps, just perhaps, we can disagree on these issues and agree on others. Perhaps we can put a few of them to the side, and get together some of the time, fight tomorrow and talk today. And perhaps, just perhaps, we can find a way to talk from less fixed positions than right, left and center. And I'm going to email Richard Heinberg and tell him how much I liked his original subtitle ;-).
Shalom,
Sharon
My personal favorite thing about it, however, was not the writing or the subject matter, but the subtitle, which (on my copy), included the phrase "Transitioning gracefully from the Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty." I admit, I was struck by the sheer aptness of the phrase "era of modesty" to what we're coming to. Now I gather that in the process of revision, the subtitle was changed to something else, but I keep thinking about the term he coined, both because it is great piece of phrasing, but also because it manages in three words to invoke a great transition in political and social thinking. It should be no surprise that Heinberg is ahead of the curve again, of course, but I am impressed by the way the very title invoked not just an era of more modest usage, but also social, sexual and cultural modesty, subjects that, if they are discussed at all, tend to be thought of as discussions to be had on the "right" rather than throughout the political spectrum. With that one word, "modesty" Heinberg manages to invoke a confluence of left and right. I admit, I'm impressed, and sorry the term doesn't appear on the actual book (I wonder if Heinberg will let me steal it for mine ;-)).
Now the peak oil movement has been called the "liberal left behind" movement - the apocalypse of the left. Of course, it is no such thing, and never has been. Former Bush energy czar Matthew Simmons is no leftist radical, Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett never dated Abbie Hoffman and the US Army is not, as far as I know, handing out "Free Mumia" buttons with its rifles. And yet all are among the first to recognize the immanence of peak oil. While it is true we've got our share of aging hippies, we're also flush with survivalists, Petroleum geologists, investment bankers and other bastions of the right and center. And this is all to the good - the end of cheap oil is not a political fact, it is a simple, practical reality. The same is true within the climate change movement - we are all moving rapidly to the recognition that no matter what your political position, the hard, scientific truths about sea level rise, aquifer depletion and drought really don't care whether you prefer Bill O'Reilly, Thom Hartmann or Stephen Colbert.
But it is insufficient to say that these issues cross party lines, because what they actually do is destroy party and political lines, and the divisions we've carefully worked out to decide who is "left" and who is "right." Now it is worth noting that these have always been artificial distinctions for most real people. I've been very kindly called "a voice of the left" and I take some pride in that designation - I value the history of leftism, including my own family's history, going back to the early twentieth century union movement and through my parents. But "left" has never been more than a shorthand for my positions on some issues - and had we drawn the circles other ways, I might have spoken, at times for other constituencies, even, perhaps, for some segments of the much dreaded "other side." All of which is simply proof, that, while it isn't true that we're all exactly the same under the skin, neither designation is sufficient to describe most people's political and ethical thinking. Most of us are political hybrids.
Where, for example, did one put the leftist nun putting her life on the line for economic reform in Latin America - and equally passionate about ending abortion? Where does my passionately pro-drug legalization, harsher sentencing police officer neighbor go? How about the gun-toting, anti-tax radical environmentalist I know? The disabled neighborhood activist who opposes abortion and euthanasia because she sees it as the genocide of the disabled? My neighbor who believes that his sons have an absolute obligation to defend their country - and that their government has an absolute obligation to stop the war? My pro-public education, feminist, Orthodox friends who believe that modest women cover their hair - on the protest lines? My conservative, fundamentalist neighbors who believe that Jesus demands devout Christians hold no private property and resist corporate power? Where would you put me? Feminist, pro-social justice, anti-growth capitalist - and yes, pro-private property (in some senses), pro-modesty, pro-personal responsiblity farmgirl who used to help her father make bullets? The reality is that most people are more complicated than our current designations will describe.
The last decade or so has blurred things further. Which party again is the big government, tax and spend one? Which party is the party of genocide, the Dems who killed half a million children in Iraq with the embargo or the Republicans who killed half a million civilians in Iraq with the war? Now it is the left who is screaming in horror about the dangers of big government (and some of the right is screaming along with them). Where were the feminist voices of anger about sexual harrassment so evident during the Clarence Thomas hearings when the democratic president was in the hot seat? The conventional political lines are shifting.
And at the same time that this shift is happening, those of us who forsee the coming crisis have to make major internal political shifts as well. For example, in _The Upside of Down_, Tomas Homer-Dixon observes that to deal with all of the coming crises, we'd have enact,
"...a global society that I've come to call 'Holland times ten," with vastly more sophisticated, pervasive and expensive rules and regulatory institutions than anything the Dutch live with today. Do we really want such a future for ourselves and our children?"
Homer-Dixon, not exactly a right winger, recognizes the simple reality that a vastly more repressive beaurocracy might actually be worse than the collapse. He observes, following Joseph Tainter, that institutions created to deal with crisis invariably stick forever, leaving us laden with ever more oppressive layers of government. What is remarkable about Homer-Dixon's book is that it, like Heinberg's title, shakes off conventional left/right thinking and simply allows the data to lead him to a conclusion that is neither. I'm not sure I agree with Homer-Dixon, but I find him a particularly creative example of the ways in which these problems shake up our traditional assumptions.
The same could be said of Rod Dreher's book, _Crunchy Cons_. Dreher too is motivated by the honest recognition that the current realities, including peak oil (which he describes) and the environmental crisis have changed things. He tries very hard to slip all the good stuff under the rubric of conservativism, for example, arguing that traditional social welfare programs that support families are conservative. I'm not convinced he succeeds, but he does one of the most remarkable analyses I've imagined, and his work has real power among conservatives who haven't fitted into the exact mold around them. I know many of these people, and I believe that generally speaking, Dreher is one of the first people to seriously reconsider, in a popular and accessible way, how to reconfigure politics to deal with the future.
What is disappointing in Dreher, of course, is his longstanding allegience to the politics of balkanization. That is, instead of seeking a middle ground, he wants to shove environmentalist, agrarian conservatives into Republicanism. Personally, I think he'd be better off abandoning that territory and seeking a new one. The reality is that for most of the people who work in these issues, left and right stop becoming fully explicatory categories. Heinberg himself writes about the problem of doing so in _Powerdown_ where he discusses his preference for anarchism and minimal government, while arguing simultaneously that no societal powerdown can occur without a large, invasive government structure. And that it cannot succeed without that large structure eventually voluntarily handing out power to smaller, localized units of power. This represents a remarkably hybridized vision of government - personally, I don't necessarily believe it to be right, but again Heinberg has allowed the realities of the system to override his personal political preferences and at least to imagine how we might enact the changes required.
Like Homer-Dixon's rejection of large government structures and Dreher's rejection of unfettered capitalism, Richard Heinberg's call for modesty, at least to me, raises some fascinating questions. One of the most fascinating is why it is that the word "modesty" so powerfully invokes sexual modesty, almost overriding the notion of modest desires, expectations and practices outside the realm of sexuality. I admit, my personal theory about why we have abandoned all other senses of modesty along with traditional sexual modesty is this - modesty of all kinds is, to a large degree, about choosing not to be looked at. Both sexual modesty and economic modesty reject the external gaze of others, saying "don't focus on me." Historically speaking, many of the rules of sexual modesty have been applied to women, with the assumption that the burden of rejecting the gaze must lie upon women, because it is their sexuality that draws the eye. Feminism rightly rejected the idea that men should not be required to limit and control their own gazes and desires. But it also rejected the notion that there should be limits on the power of the gaze - popular feminism focused on the notion of the powerful female "I" at the center. But a world of people walking around trying to draw gazes and be powerful creates a superficial culture, intent on "self-expression" in a visual sense - the house, the clothing, the car, the membership. That there might be power in not being at the center of the gaze itself, that modesty might also carry power was overlooked.
This is because feminism's rejection of the origins of modesty also happened to coincide with the largest capitalist expansion in history. Feminism was as successful as it was, precisely because it served the goals of capitalism (I've written about this in more detail before here: ) And growth capitalism is, far more than feminism, about the rejection of the notion of modesty. That is, if all of us are not constantly calling out "look at me" there is no market for designer clothing, fancy decorations to make our house an expression of our "self," fancy cars to express our wealth.
In a culture that rejects modesty of all kinds, that demands the gaze rest upon us, that validates the notion that the "I" is at the center of the "eye" all the time, markets flourish. In a culture that values modesty of all sorts - that rejects the gaze, the notion that the self is at the center of everything, there is no place for endless growth. Thus, the notion that the culture of modesty was bad, because it derived from the sexual repression of women was wrong - what was bad was the notion that women were "drawing" male gazes, and thus had to regulate their bodies, rather than expecting men to regulate themselves. But the actual assumptions of both sexual modesty (as it applies to both men and women), and economic and cultural modesty is simpler. It is "My worth is not in what is visible. I am one among others, I am not the center of everything." We threw the baby out with the bathwater. It is true that one can read "don't make me the center of things" as "I am powerless" or as a form of silencing. But it is also true that modesty can represent that power of self-deferral, the placement of others before the self. Undoubtably, one can have too much of that. Equally indubitably, in western society, we don't have too much of that sort of self-abnegation - far from it.
At the risk of alienating people on both the left and the right who read this blog, and ending up with absolutely no readers at all, I'm going to observe that none of the problems we are facing can be fixed from the right or the left, or even through discussion of things in those terms. And speaking to the left, to which I have a longer and deeper alliegence, there are things that we really ought to reconsider. Here are some of the places where I think leftists might want to look to the right to find, if not common ground, some useful tools.
1. I believe passionately in the importance of personal responsibility, and of fair accounting for one's choices. I do not mean by this that one's situation is wholly a product of one's personal choices, and thus tough patooties if you were born poor. What I mean is that each of us needs to take greater responsibility for our present, societal circumstances than we do. I often hear people lamenting the power of corporations - as though that power does not derive from our dependency and willingness to give them cash. Walmart isn't powerful because they are an evil corporation - they are powerful because they have great stinking wads of money and those wads came from you and me. Stop buying their crap and guess what - Walmart won't be powerful. I also hear many voices call for public policy solutions, when what they really mean is that they want the government to take care of peak oil and climate change for them, without being personally inconvenienced. Again, this is a failure of personal responsiblity, because if we tell governments that what we want is solutions without personal sacrifice, we will get only inadequate solutions, that will fail us and the next generation.
I believe that everyone has a degree of personal responsibility, and that the level of responsibility is increased by every advantage given to you. Were you born into a family that loved you? Guess what - you got a present, or a gift from G-d, and you owe a little more than someone who was beaten daily or neglected. Did you get a decent education? There's another level of responsibility - if you were either lucky enough to get a good education at good schools with teachers who cared about you, or you were born smart enough to be an autodidact and compensate for the inadequacies of what was given to you, bow down to diety or thank your lucky stars, and get your ass in gear because you owe a little more than those who didn't. And so it goes.
Full scale, straight out, honest accounting of responsibility is important. That means that yes, people are responsible for what they do and do not do, the choices they make. And those who shape the choices other people can make, or don't shoulder a greater degree of responsibility in privelege are also responsible.
One of my professors, when I was complaining about some terrible personal situation I was enduring, once pointed out to me that most of the great deeds of human history were performed by people who were having really bad days and extenuating personal situations. That's not to say no one ever has an excuse for anything, but the more excuses we make for ourselves, the more we say "well, I deserve just a little extra because..." (and who doesn't), the less likely we are to have any extra for the quiet people who have learned to expect nothing and who truly need our hand up.
Ultimately, we need to be held responsible for our choices. The Peter Parker system should apply here - with great power, should come great responsibility. The better off you are, the more you need to take full responsibility for your actions - to stop asking for tax breaks and accomodations. But this goes all the way down.
2. I sure as heck don't expect the government to save me in a crisis. Ok, I'm going to tell the truth. I don't understand why it is that people in Florida don't have any bottled water or boards for their windows, and are standing in line for it the day before the hurricane. For cripes sake, you live in Florida! The same is true with people who are unprepared for blackouts during winter storms in up near me, or earth quakes in CA. I'll grant you, one of the better uses for government is to get the helicopters up and make sure people don't die of typhus after the disaster, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Look, we all watched the footage of Hurricane Katrina, and it confirmed what everyone on the right has been saying for generations - our present government isn't going to save our asses in a crisis. Now there are good and useful reasons to want to try and get what government does better than anyone else done right by them, and I'm all for that. Agitate for change - yes. Because there are always going to be people who can't protect themselves and situations we can't prepare for.
But ultimately a certain degree of self-sufficiency is merely common sense. Now there are people who may not be able to afford extra food or blankets, or a way out of a dying city - and we need to help those people. But it would be really helpful if you aren't one of those people, if you aren't elderly or disabled or desperately poor, if you'd get your act together and be prepared to meet your own damned needs for most predictable situations, so that you won't clog the system.
3. I don't want to see power centralized any more than strictly necessary anymore. Ok, let's be honest - this used to be the big old left/right debate - social welfare or not, big government or little government. It is no longer a right left issue. The current administration has a bigger government than the last one, with more debt and beaurocracy, and now the dems are calling for restraint. No one has a monopoly on this one.
And let's be honest, whether you hate the Clintons or the Bushes (or both equally), every single one of us can see exactly why we want to decentralize power, and exactly why we should be getting rid of political dynasties and the system that locates private armies and our own right to justice in the hands of any one person.
In fact, both peak oil and climate change require, absolutely mandate a reduction of scale of government - just as conservatives have been calling for. Yes, we also need to expand some central projects - but the general movement has to be towards local sovreignty and local power and resources being kept in the communities.
4. We're going to have to develop better family relationships and a strong focus on family units, and ASAP. I'm not talking about getting into people's bedrooms here, I'm talking about getting people to take care of aging parents, disabled family members, to stop whining about "what about *myyyyyy needs* and to start thinking a bit more of other people. Those of us who had ordinarily fucked up families (as opposed to transcendently so) are going to have to start getting along again, and recognize that biological and chosen family are going to be much more important in our lives for a long, long time. And we're going to start having to value and honor the work of caring for others - instead of acting like helping grandma to the bathroom or breastfeeding your kid is a pain in the ass to be shoved off on other people, we have to start realizing that this *is* the point - the reason we're here. To be of use. To do good work. To care for others.
We're also going to have to parent better, and stop telling our kids how special and perfect and wonderful they are, and tell them to get their asses out from in front of the tv and get to work helping out. Instead of telling Jimmy and Jenny that the best thing they can do is to get good SAT scores and go to Tae Kwon Do, tell them the truth - that you want them to grow up to be good and righteous people, who care about others, are hard workers, honorable and generous.
5. If you harbor any lingering prejudices about blue collar work with your hands, get over them now. It is not, in any sense of the word, more noble to be a tax lawyer than a plumber, and it doesn't mean you are smarter. If you call the middle of the country "flyover states" cut it out now - you won't be flying much of anywhere anyway, and they grow your dinner. They might get pissed off and stop growing it.
The reality is that most comparatively well off, well educated people have been doing things that aren't very useful and are soon going to stop being done. Most of the people we have been told we are smarter then are actually doing good and useful work - feeding people dinner, keeping houses running, building things, making things, growing food. It is likely that we have been so firmly told we are smarter simply because it was a good way to avoid pointing out that we are, as my husband likes to put it, "the surplus population."
And if you think all religous people are the same, and religion is the cause of all problems, and religious people are idiots - ok with me, but shut up about it. As we're less and less able to control our future, more and more people are going to be praying in their foxholes, maybe even you. Get over it, and stop feeling superior.
And if you reject religion, don't want to see it flourish, but aren't working to provide community support, care for the sick and dying, festivals of celebration and release, and a way to think about why the world is so screwed up, expect to fail. Don't blame it on religion - blame it on the fact that you aren't very good and doing the things that religion does very well for many of us.
6. We're going to have to start talking about sex differently, and say a hard word for many of us to swallow - "Don't." I'm not talking about today's rather ineffective forms of abstinence education - I'm talking about the unpleasant reality that poverty means less health care, which means more STDs, less access to reliable birth control, more teenage pregnancy, more complications, more AIDS. I'm going to be blunt - unless we completely change our government's attitudes on these subjects, we're going to enter into a society where the ability to mitigate the dangers of sex are radically reduced - a society which for many resembles the pre-pill society.
Ignoring the moral issues, let's be practical. Birth control is expensive - a really reliable set up requires a woman to have regular medical check ups and access to pricey medicines. Condoms are expensive to your average poor teenager. Heck, they are expensive for my budget. Abortion is really expensive. A truly reliable system for young people requires a form of birth control for the woman and a condom for the man - pricey, and hard to come by if you don't live near a drugstore - which thousands of us don't.
Now the ideal for some people might be to use government to make all these things available and free, and to place no restrictions on sexual practices, age at onset, etc... But the reality is that our present system is as much a product of cheap energy as everything else - if we don't want to rely on a universal system to keep our actual kids from getting pregnant or diseases, we have no choice but to change the way we think about sexuality. If we want to ensure that AIDS in the US doesn't come to mirror AIDS in Africa, we need to be very careful about what we teach our children about sex.
We have become a society in which personal restraint is unimaginable, and abstinence education will always fail as long as a small minority is struggling against a society that calls every form of sexual restraint repression. But we need to think and talk about this - even though most of us who grew up in the age of birth control aren't exactly the poster-children for such restraint. But we can't afford to have our kids get pregnant earlier and earlier, to have outbreaks of diseases we can't afford to treat, to create an expanding underclass of children born to other children. So we're going to have utter the words "no" "don't" "wait." And we need to talk about how we can get there - talk to the people who were there all along.
7. We need a new sense of personal freedom, one in which limits in the form of things like honor, self-discipline, modesty, courtesy, and public order are perceived not as acts of repression, but as structure in which culture can bloom. The notion that there are things we should not and ought not do is likely to be a painful one to those who spent their youth practicing iconclasm and smashing idols. The notion that we should follow our bliss, support our own self-esteem and do what feels best to us has to be replaced with the notion that we should regulate our desires, limit our choices and do what is best for the community.
Our culture has grown to reject hypocrisy as the ultimate sin. Hypocrisy in the popular (rather than the moral) sense, of course, is defined as doing things that you don't believe in/expressing feeling you don't have for the sake of the community. But, of course, communities run on just such self-restraint, and in tighter knit, more strongly bound communities, how you feel about things may not matter that much all the time. It may be that what you do, how you treat others, and how you regulate your own feelings and intentions is more important to your own survival and success than the following of one's bliss.
In my religion, we believe that feeling follows form. Instead of the Christian (and popular secular) notion that what is in your heart will lead you, instead we believe that you do the right thing, and that practice in doing the right thing will lead you to be able to feel the right way doing it. That is, when your failing mother needs help, you care for her because it is the right thing to do, to honor your parents, and in doing so, you open up the possibility that you will do it purely from love. But unless you do the work itself, you have few opportunities to change your feelings and develop that sense of love. I personally believe that a shift from relying on how you feel to what you do is necessary to success on the community level.
Again, capitalism has enthusiastically supported the notion that we should follow our hearts all the time - just as it has rejected modesty of ambition, of lifestyle, of desire. Because if you believe that your feelings are authentic, immutable, and natural - that is, that you feel the way you do about X for some fundamental reason of self, then there is no reason to limit one's desires. But if you believe that one's desires are shaped by your actions, if you believe that, for example, you might come to feel love (I do not claim this is inevitable, by the way, merely possible. Nor do I claim that everyone should love their mothers - not all mothers are even possibly lovable), where there was none before, if you were to care for your mother, spend time with her, know her better by virtue of helping her, you open up the possibility that our instinctive feelings are not necessarily our most reliable guide.
There are more, but now that I've traumatized everyone on the left, eliminated all readership and gotten my book contract revoked ;-), I'll stop for the moment.
Now does this mean I've gone right on everything? Nope. I still believe that sex is one of those things that is none of my business, I'm still pro choice, pro-reallocation of wealth and regulation of markets and rabidly environmentalist. But perhaps, just perhaps, we can disagree on these issues and agree on others. Perhaps we can put a few of them to the side, and get together some of the time, fight tomorrow and talk today. And perhaps, just perhaps, we can find a way to talk from less fixed positions than right, left and center. And I'm going to email Richard Heinberg and tell him how much I liked his original subtitle ;-).
Shalom,
Sharon
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Diversify, Diversify, Diversify
One of the great tragedies of the current environmental crisis is the present and potential loss of about 50% of everything, including everything we never knew existed and now never will. Most of the estimates of the impact of human behavior on the world suggest that over the next century, human beings will destroy about 50% of the life on earth. That is, more than 50% of all frog and fish species. Almost 50% of all plant species. Tens of millions of insect species. All those large mammals we purport to care about.
These may be the last years of the Polar Bear, the Great Apes, the Elephants, and those, of course, are the poster children for extinction. But we will probably miss as much or more, in our own way, the native British bumblebee, the spearfish, or the dozens of South American tree frogs. Some of these creatures we will not grieve because we will never have known they existed. Others we will miss, but we won't be able to identify what we miss - we'll miss the beauty of the wild animals gone extinct, but our children will remember them only as story creatures, the dinosaurs of their days. What name will we put on "the quality of loss that one generation feels for something that seems imaginary to another?" I'm sure some language has a word for this, but ours, as yet, does not. Or perhaps we'll miss them when we suddenly need them. We'll miss the wild plant that might have provided the only cure for a newly developing epidemic. We'll miss the landrace species of potatoes that would have prevented worldwide crop loss from a new disease. We'll miss the old breed of cows that would have allowed the current Jerseys and Holsteins to live through a new infectious disease. We'll long for the seeds of the past, the wild plant that would have meant enough vitamin A in our diets and sight for our grandchild. We'll miss the species that would have provided for another species that would have enabled the pollinators to survive and provide us with fruit. Novelists will coin words and create a poetics of the loss of things we never really knew we had, and thus, did not value.
The reality is that we don't fully grasp how much we depend on other species - for example, some species support as many as 200 other species by pollinating the right plants, providing food for others, etc... We don't grasp how vulnerable we are to a worldwide plague, or blight, as our crop varieties get narrower and narrower. We don't fully grasp how vulnerable *we* are to the loss of our ecosystem. Because, if we understood it, we'd have to stop - even if the price of stopping were high. How much easier to ride gaily towards extinction - whose extinction, we shall not know until we know.
It may be too late for some species - the black rhino, for example, has already probably fallen below the number required for long term survival. But before we keen our song of mourning, perhaps each of us should ask whether we've done everything we possibly can to ensure the survival of our own share of the world's diversity. Because, after all, all of us have a little bit of control over the world around us - maybe just a very small amount, perhaps enough to save one breed of plant, one meter of wild space, one single species. But, as they say in my own faith, he who has saved a single life, it is as if he has saved the whole world. Now that was spoken of human lives, but it may be that some portion of the whole world depends on your personal commitment to diversity.
First, there are seeds. Even if you only grow in windowboxes, or a tiny garden plot, you can save some varieties of seed. And if you take up a variety of seed that isn't one of the most common (you can get many of them by joining Seed Savers Exchange at www.seedsaver.org, or join a local seed saver's group) ones, you may well be preserving a food plant that would otherwise go extinct. The best estimates suggest that over the last 200 years, between 50 and 80% of the known domesticated varieties of common vegetables were lost, including their precious genetic material, and their adaptation to local coniditions. The potato, the pea, the squash you grow in your garden may be the last in the whole world, and the seeds you save the only ones that can keep it going, or perhaps you will adapt a new variety to the conditions you and others most need.
Because, of course, seed saving and plant breeding are the same process in some cases. The farmer who selects her best plants, best adapted to her soils and conditions, is creating genetic material slightly different from the material that you started with. Your "Hopi Blue Jade" corn, grown in your own soils, in your own climate for a few years will be appreciably, notably and genetically different than the Hopi Blue Jade someone across the country or the world has adapted to their place. It may have resistance to different diseases, a greater cold or heat tolerance, an ability to adapt to particular types of soil.
We breed seeds when we consciously select and choose our best, as well as when we set out to create something new. Each act of seed saving is an act of creation, of selection, the transformation of something that is continually, eternally becoming, a selection shaded by time and climate and soil and water, but also human intention, wisdom and commitment to the future.
One of the most important things we can do, then, is preserve old varieties and also breed new ones, whether by formal plant breeding or by wise selection of plants to save seed from. The best books on these subjects are Suzanne Ashworth's _Seed to Seed_ and Carol Deppe's wonderful book _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_. Even if you've never imagined yourself as a plant breeder, Deppe's book is well worth a read for a deeper understanding of plant genetics and selection.
The more we grow out old and uncommon, forgotten and lost varieties, the greater the degree of genetic variation we preserve. There are seed banks, of course, to preserve them, but the best way to keep seeds alive is to grow them, eat their products and plant them again.
We also should grow as great a variety of crops and as many kinds of each crop as we can. Some of us in very small gardens will not be able to grow a large variety of anything, but those of us with space should hedge our bets, growing more than one kind of each thing whenever possible. There will be some accidental genetic crossing, but that isn't necessarily bad - while we want to preserve old varieties, reasonable care can allow us to grow multiples. And the simple fact is that if we ever have to rely on the products of our garden for our food, we are safest with a wide variety of plants and animals in our lives.
So, for example, it is easy to grow many varieties of beans and peas without worrying about crossing. Tomatoes can be spaced apart a small amount. Even that difficult cross-pollinator corn can be grown by time sequencing in many climates - two or three sequential crops can be grown and the seed saved.
The reason for this is twofold - to keep as many varieties as possible alive, but also to keep your garden going, and your belly full, even if you have an attack of pests or diseases, flood or drought. You may not live in a tepary bean climate, but that unusually dry year, it might be the only one that produces well. My Purple Peruvian potatoes never fail me, no matter what the weather, even if I prefer Green Mountain as a staple.
Besides growing multiple varieties within a species, growing a range of crops makes a huge difference. I'm fond of the phrase "belt and braces" - that is, as much duplication of purpose as humanly possible. Redundancy is your protection. So besides your potatoes and wheat, add some Amaranth, Corn and Buckwheat. Besides your apples, try Medlars or Mulberries. Add groundnuts and jerusalem artichokes to go with your peanuts and sweet potatoes.
And don't just get fixated on food - a good garden needs wild places, to increase diversity as well. Even a tiny yard can have a patch of multi-purpose attractive insectiary plants - dill and cilantro gone to seed, along with bee balm, echinacea and hyssop and some tall grass or wildflowers to provide a place for ground nesting birds and wild pollinators to live. Or perhaps you can leave that dead tree standing to provide nests, or some brush piled up near your compost to make a home for birds.
Instead of having your local park mowed every other day at great expense and with great exhaust, perhaps consider campaigning to let the grass grow longer, to plant a meadow or simply leave some areas wild. Perhaps you can get your city to let you turn a vacant lot into a wildlife garden or bird sanctuary, a seed saver's garden or orchard. Perhaps you can convince them not to build that access road that takes out so much wildlife, to preserve those wetlands, to keep what diversity is left going. But don't forget the overarching issue - we've lost so many environmental battles by focusing on the animal we want to preserve, not the larger issue of human impacts. Wearing your Wildlife Federation t-shirt while driving to the mall and home to your McMansion is missing the point.
What about animals? Oddly, I sometimes hear the argument that domesticated animals don't "count" in the diversity game. And if we had to choose between domesticated animals and wildlife, we probably should choose the wildlife. But most of the endangered and landrace species of domestic animal are the answer to the terrible environmental impact of today's industrial livestock breeds. The Icelandic sheep, bred to winter on four bales of hay and the fat on her back, and still bear a healthy lamb in Iceland's difficult winters is a far better answer to our desire for good protein than either infinite fields of GMO soybeans or feedlot cows. Pasture is generally the most diverse ecosystem on a farm, with more wildlife than cultivated fields that get run over by heavy equipment. Animals that can primarily or solely grass, and are adapted to climates where it is difficult to raise crops or till soil are the logical things to raise on prairie lands that turn to desert when they are tilled or on hilly, rocky, cold wet ground like the northeast. We can produce much needed food, fiber and manure on soils, while still leaving them open to use by as much wildlife as possible.
The reality is that the preservation of genetic diversity is one of the most important and urgent projects we have. We need as many species, wild and tame, of as many plants and animals as possible. The more we cultivate them, preserve them, save their seed, spread them around, even guerilla plant them into uncovered soil, the better the chance that we and our children will have a world to grow up in.
As you are designing your land use, as you are working within your neighborhoods and community, remember the watchwords - diversify, diversify, diversify. It is as if you have saved the whole world.
Sharon
These may be the last years of the Polar Bear, the Great Apes, the Elephants, and those, of course, are the poster children for extinction. But we will probably miss as much or more, in our own way, the native British bumblebee, the spearfish, or the dozens of South American tree frogs. Some of these creatures we will not grieve because we will never have known they existed. Others we will miss, but we won't be able to identify what we miss - we'll miss the beauty of the wild animals gone extinct, but our children will remember them only as story creatures, the dinosaurs of their days. What name will we put on "the quality of loss that one generation feels for something that seems imaginary to another?" I'm sure some language has a word for this, but ours, as yet, does not. Or perhaps we'll miss them when we suddenly need them. We'll miss the wild plant that might have provided the only cure for a newly developing epidemic. We'll miss the landrace species of potatoes that would have prevented worldwide crop loss from a new disease. We'll miss the old breed of cows that would have allowed the current Jerseys and Holsteins to live through a new infectious disease. We'll long for the seeds of the past, the wild plant that would have meant enough vitamin A in our diets and sight for our grandchild. We'll miss the species that would have provided for another species that would have enabled the pollinators to survive and provide us with fruit. Novelists will coin words and create a poetics of the loss of things we never really knew we had, and thus, did not value.
The reality is that we don't fully grasp how much we depend on other species - for example, some species support as many as 200 other species by pollinating the right plants, providing food for others, etc... We don't grasp how vulnerable we are to a worldwide plague, or blight, as our crop varieties get narrower and narrower. We don't fully grasp how vulnerable *we* are to the loss of our ecosystem. Because, if we understood it, we'd have to stop - even if the price of stopping were high. How much easier to ride gaily towards extinction - whose extinction, we shall not know until we know.
It may be too late for some species - the black rhino, for example, has already probably fallen below the number required for long term survival. But before we keen our song of mourning, perhaps each of us should ask whether we've done everything we possibly can to ensure the survival of our own share of the world's diversity. Because, after all, all of us have a little bit of control over the world around us - maybe just a very small amount, perhaps enough to save one breed of plant, one meter of wild space, one single species. But, as they say in my own faith, he who has saved a single life, it is as if he has saved the whole world. Now that was spoken of human lives, but it may be that some portion of the whole world depends on your personal commitment to diversity.
First, there are seeds. Even if you only grow in windowboxes, or a tiny garden plot, you can save some varieties of seed. And if you take up a variety of seed that isn't one of the most common (you can get many of them by joining Seed Savers Exchange at www.seedsaver.org, or join a local seed saver's group) ones, you may well be preserving a food plant that would otherwise go extinct. The best estimates suggest that over the last 200 years, between 50 and 80% of the known domesticated varieties of common vegetables were lost, including their precious genetic material, and their adaptation to local coniditions. The potato, the pea, the squash you grow in your garden may be the last in the whole world, and the seeds you save the only ones that can keep it going, or perhaps you will adapt a new variety to the conditions you and others most need.
Because, of course, seed saving and plant breeding are the same process in some cases. The farmer who selects her best plants, best adapted to her soils and conditions, is creating genetic material slightly different from the material that you started with. Your "Hopi Blue Jade" corn, grown in your own soils, in your own climate for a few years will be appreciably, notably and genetically different than the Hopi Blue Jade someone across the country or the world has adapted to their place. It may have resistance to different diseases, a greater cold or heat tolerance, an ability to adapt to particular types of soil.
We breed seeds when we consciously select and choose our best, as well as when we set out to create something new. Each act of seed saving is an act of creation, of selection, the transformation of something that is continually, eternally becoming, a selection shaded by time and climate and soil and water, but also human intention, wisdom and commitment to the future.
One of the most important things we can do, then, is preserve old varieties and also breed new ones, whether by formal plant breeding or by wise selection of plants to save seed from. The best books on these subjects are Suzanne Ashworth's _Seed to Seed_ and Carol Deppe's wonderful book _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_. Even if you've never imagined yourself as a plant breeder, Deppe's book is well worth a read for a deeper understanding of plant genetics and selection.
The more we grow out old and uncommon, forgotten and lost varieties, the greater the degree of genetic variation we preserve. There are seed banks, of course, to preserve them, but the best way to keep seeds alive is to grow them, eat their products and plant them again.
We also should grow as great a variety of crops and as many kinds of each crop as we can. Some of us in very small gardens will not be able to grow a large variety of anything, but those of us with space should hedge our bets, growing more than one kind of each thing whenever possible. There will be some accidental genetic crossing, but that isn't necessarily bad - while we want to preserve old varieties, reasonable care can allow us to grow multiples. And the simple fact is that if we ever have to rely on the products of our garden for our food, we are safest with a wide variety of plants and animals in our lives.
So, for example, it is easy to grow many varieties of beans and peas without worrying about crossing. Tomatoes can be spaced apart a small amount. Even that difficult cross-pollinator corn can be grown by time sequencing in many climates - two or three sequential crops can be grown and the seed saved.
The reason for this is twofold - to keep as many varieties as possible alive, but also to keep your garden going, and your belly full, even if you have an attack of pests or diseases, flood or drought. You may not live in a tepary bean climate, but that unusually dry year, it might be the only one that produces well. My Purple Peruvian potatoes never fail me, no matter what the weather, even if I prefer Green Mountain as a staple.
Besides growing multiple varieties within a species, growing a range of crops makes a huge difference. I'm fond of the phrase "belt and braces" - that is, as much duplication of purpose as humanly possible. Redundancy is your protection. So besides your potatoes and wheat, add some Amaranth, Corn and Buckwheat. Besides your apples, try Medlars or Mulberries. Add groundnuts and jerusalem artichokes to go with your peanuts and sweet potatoes.
And don't just get fixated on food - a good garden needs wild places, to increase diversity as well. Even a tiny yard can have a patch of multi-purpose attractive insectiary plants - dill and cilantro gone to seed, along with bee balm, echinacea and hyssop and some tall grass or wildflowers to provide a place for ground nesting birds and wild pollinators to live. Or perhaps you can leave that dead tree standing to provide nests, or some brush piled up near your compost to make a home for birds.
Instead of having your local park mowed every other day at great expense and with great exhaust, perhaps consider campaigning to let the grass grow longer, to plant a meadow or simply leave some areas wild. Perhaps you can get your city to let you turn a vacant lot into a wildlife garden or bird sanctuary, a seed saver's garden or orchard. Perhaps you can convince them not to build that access road that takes out so much wildlife, to preserve those wetlands, to keep what diversity is left going. But don't forget the overarching issue - we've lost so many environmental battles by focusing on the animal we want to preserve, not the larger issue of human impacts. Wearing your Wildlife Federation t-shirt while driving to the mall and home to your McMansion is missing the point.
What about animals? Oddly, I sometimes hear the argument that domesticated animals don't "count" in the diversity game. And if we had to choose between domesticated animals and wildlife, we probably should choose the wildlife. But most of the endangered and landrace species of domestic animal are the answer to the terrible environmental impact of today's industrial livestock breeds. The Icelandic sheep, bred to winter on four bales of hay and the fat on her back, and still bear a healthy lamb in Iceland's difficult winters is a far better answer to our desire for good protein than either infinite fields of GMO soybeans or feedlot cows. Pasture is generally the most diverse ecosystem on a farm, with more wildlife than cultivated fields that get run over by heavy equipment. Animals that can primarily or solely grass, and are adapted to climates where it is difficult to raise crops or till soil are the logical things to raise on prairie lands that turn to desert when they are tilled or on hilly, rocky, cold wet ground like the northeast. We can produce much needed food, fiber and manure on soils, while still leaving them open to use by as much wildlife as possible.
The reality is that the preservation of genetic diversity is one of the most important and urgent projects we have. We need as many species, wild and tame, of as many plants and animals as possible. The more we cultivate them, preserve them, save their seed, spread them around, even guerilla plant them into uncovered soil, the better the chance that we and our children will have a world to grow up in.
As you are designing your land use, as you are working within your neighborhoods and community, remember the watchwords - diversify, diversify, diversify. It is as if you have saved the whole world.
Sharon
Sunday, August 26, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 18 - Get On A Bike
Will you all forgive me for the indelicacy of pointing out that the first time I got back on a bike after a while, I noticed that, umm, my butt is no longer as umm, refined, as it once was, and that skinny little bike seats are a literal pain in the tuchus? Will you promise not to laugh too hard at the fact that sometimes I *walk* my bike up the giant hill that I live on (I was once way too cool to ever walk a bike)? And when I say that bike shorts will never come near these thighs, may I hear an "Amen."?
All of which is not an argument for staying off your bike. What I am saying is that if I can do it, most of you can too. You do not have to be in shape (biking is actually easier on your body that walking), or look cool in spandex, and they make bike seats and are comfy for those of us who have, ummm...back. In fact, there's a bike for everyone, even the imperfect.
Now why should you get a bike? Well, first of all, it is without question the most fun way to travel. There's something about speeding along on a bike that immediately returns you to childhood. Now I don't recommend you return so far that you, like my husband, try riding down a street no-hands, with your eyes closed (hit a parked car) or like me, tried popping a really big curb (knocked out two teeth, needed complicated dental surgery). The great thing about being a grownup on a bike is that (probably) you aren't an idiot anymore. It is a taste of childhood without the necessity of doing regular stupid things ;-).
It is also the most efficient way to travel, bar none. A human being on a bike uses their energy more efficiently than a walker, a driver, someone on a train. It is good for your health, good for the environment, and a good bike is infinitely cheaper than a car. Most people's cars will set them back 3K this year in taxes, maintenence and repairs, not to mention the gas, which is more. I've bought good bikes for $20, and got them in good road condition for another $20, but optimally, you might want to pay a bit more. Even if you buy a really nice bike, you are way ahead.
Now if you haven't been on a bike in 5 years, 10 years, 30 years, you will remember how to ride, but it isn't quite like getting back to being a teenager. As I say, a comfy seat is good, and you might want a bit more stability than you did as a kid. If you have a bad back, you will want a good seat, or perhaps a recumbent. And it takes some time to get your body up to long bike commutes. But the reality is that many of us may not have anything in easy walking distance, but do have shopping, a job, public transportation or family in biking distance. And every trip you don't need a car for saves you money.
For older folks, the disabled and those hauling heavy loads up mountains, electric assist, or even fully electrified bikes are available. For people worried about falling and stability, there are three wheeled trikes, and some of them come with child seats behind them. My family is looking into adult trikes with two double seats. I recently heard someone describe a bike with wheelchair attachment in which an able bodied person could convey his wheelchair bound spouse around. There are trailers for small children, and tandem and side hitch arrangements for kids who can do some but not all of their own biking. Bikes are a technology whose limit is still being plumbed, and there really is a bike for almost everyone.
We're working on teaching the kids to ride. We're hoping eventually Eli, who doesn't have traffic safety skills will be able to be tandem hitched to Eric or me, and pedal along while we handle the driving. Eventually, I envision a family of four teenage boys, my husband, with their poky mother trailing behind yelling "wait up!" It is a nice image.
Like everything, if you've gotten out of the habit, you start slow, and work your way up. My goal is to run local errands entirely by bike. Given that we live fairly far away from nearly everything, that's a bit difficult, but we're working on it. I'm not quite there yet -we're still figuring out if we can afford to build double trikes so that when we have to or want to take the kids with us, we can all go by bike. But the reality is that pedal power is the way to go, both to save money and the planet. Oh, and it is good for me, and my slowly shrinking behind as well ;-).
Cheers,
Sharon
All of which is not an argument for staying off your bike. What I am saying is that if I can do it, most of you can too. You do not have to be in shape (biking is actually easier on your body that walking), or look cool in spandex, and they make bike seats and are comfy for those of us who have, ummm...back. In fact, there's a bike for everyone, even the imperfect.
Now why should you get a bike? Well, first of all, it is without question the most fun way to travel. There's something about speeding along on a bike that immediately returns you to childhood. Now I don't recommend you return so far that you, like my husband, try riding down a street no-hands, with your eyes closed (hit a parked car) or like me, tried popping a really big curb (knocked out two teeth, needed complicated dental surgery). The great thing about being a grownup on a bike is that (probably) you aren't an idiot anymore. It is a taste of childhood without the necessity of doing regular stupid things ;-).
It is also the most efficient way to travel, bar none. A human being on a bike uses their energy more efficiently than a walker, a driver, someone on a train. It is good for your health, good for the environment, and a good bike is infinitely cheaper than a car. Most people's cars will set them back 3K this year in taxes, maintenence and repairs, not to mention the gas, which is more. I've bought good bikes for $20, and got them in good road condition for another $20, but optimally, you might want to pay a bit more. Even if you buy a really nice bike, you are way ahead.
Now if you haven't been on a bike in 5 years, 10 years, 30 years, you will remember how to ride, but it isn't quite like getting back to being a teenager. As I say, a comfy seat is good, and you might want a bit more stability than you did as a kid. If you have a bad back, you will want a good seat, or perhaps a recumbent. And it takes some time to get your body up to long bike commutes. But the reality is that many of us may not have anything in easy walking distance, but do have shopping, a job, public transportation or family in biking distance. And every trip you don't need a car for saves you money.
For older folks, the disabled and those hauling heavy loads up mountains, electric assist, or even fully electrified bikes are available. For people worried about falling and stability, there are three wheeled trikes, and some of them come with child seats behind them. My family is looking into adult trikes with two double seats. I recently heard someone describe a bike with wheelchair attachment in which an able bodied person could convey his wheelchair bound spouse around. There are trailers for small children, and tandem and side hitch arrangements for kids who can do some but not all of their own biking. Bikes are a technology whose limit is still being plumbed, and there really is a bike for almost everyone.
We're working on teaching the kids to ride. We're hoping eventually Eli, who doesn't have traffic safety skills will be able to be tandem hitched to Eric or me, and pedal along while we handle the driving. Eventually, I envision a family of four teenage boys, my husband, with their poky mother trailing behind yelling "wait up!" It is a nice image.
Like everything, if you've gotten out of the habit, you start slow, and work your way up. My goal is to run local errands entirely by bike. Given that we live fairly far away from nearly everything, that's a bit difficult, but we're working on it. I'm not quite there yet -we're still figuring out if we can afford to build double trikes so that when we have to or want to take the kids with us, we can all go by bike. But the reality is that pedal power is the way to go, both to save money and the planet. Oh, and it is good for me, and my slowly shrinking behind as well ;-).
Cheers,
Sharon
My One And Only Stock Market Advice Post
I learned to drive very late - I was 29 years old. After decades of urban living, I'd never needed a car, so I didn't learn until we'd moved out to the country. I've never liked driving, mostly because it struck me just how bizarre the whole thing is. When I was finally behind the wheel, I realized "wow, big metal things driving towards each other at 60 miles per hour just seems like a bad idea." And, of course, it is a bad idea for thousands and thousands of people who die or are maimed by cars every year. Nor is it good for the huge percentage of the population killed by pollution (40%), much of which is created or enabled by cars at some point.
But most of the time we get into our cars and we get there alive. That still seems very odd to me - because even though I've done it a thousand times, driving still seems crazily risky to me. It turns out that people are a lot more competent than my gut would expect, and that there's a lot more resilience in the driving system than one might expect. There isn't as much as the most enthusiastic advocates of the open road would like you to believe - in fact, driving is really dangerous, far more dangerous than almost any other ordinary activity. But neither is it as scary as it looked to me when I first got into a car.
Now I regularly get emails and posts requesting that I give my opinion on the state of the stock market, whether to liquidate your 401K, how and whether to plan for college and a host of other financial advice I'm totally unqualified to give. I generally ignore these questions, not because they aren't real and legitimate, but because I honestly don't know how to answer. I can tell someone what I do, or what I've read, but I feel even less qualified to advise here than usual. My basic take on the stock market is the same as my basic take on driving - it seems crazy to me that everything would work as well as it does, so I'm probably not the person to expound enthusiastically about the possibilities of any particular investment.
And part of the reason for this is that I don't quite understand why the free market system works even to the extent it does. That is, I understand why economists say it works, but any close look will point out that the claims economists make about rational choices and market resilience don't tell even half the story. For example, during the five years as housing prices have risen, I've been assuming that people would stop buying houses that cost half a million dollars for a suburban ranch on a postage stamp lot, rather than continue to do so. I'd assumed that lenders would stop loaning huge amounts of money for houses that couldn't possibly have the value they were appraised at, with almost no downpayment or relationship to the person's salary. And I assumed people would pause at taking out loans they could never hope to repay. I was wrong on all counts - and yet, I think my wrongness wasn't based on a failure to understand economics, but on a lingering hope/belief that we could never possibly be this stupid and irrational.
I was completely and utterly wrong - I've been waiting for the housing bubble to pop for several years now, and it hasn't, mostly because millions of people are saying the equivalent of "I do believe in fairies, I do, I do..." over and over again, in total opposition to the evidence against the fairy tale they are being told - that is, that their houses could ever in any long term, empirical sense have the value they are ascribing to them. What economists describe as "confidence" really turns out to be pretty much a collective exercise in wish fulfillment. And it can tolerate a few people opening their eyes and recognizing that this is a fairy tale, but at a certain point, boom, it all comes crashing down. When? Who knows - maybe right now, maybe in five years. I don't know, and I don't claim to. The case for "now" is looking more and more compelling to me, but the magic of denial is more resiliant than I would have ever credited.
The only reason I could possibly ever make any comments at all about the markets is that if you were to ask me, a Wall Street analyst and a Baboon to predict, beyond the level of common sense advice, what the market will do, we'd all have about an equal chance of being right. It turns out that almost all human beings suck and anticipation. Personally, given the choice between a market analyst who believes that growth can go on forever, and me, who doesn't understand how we got this far without exploding, I'd let the baboon pick.
Now my personal financial strategy is pretty simple. No debt, except mortgage debt, and get rid of that as fast as humanly possible. We save some money, save some for the kids college/setting up house funds, and the rest goes back into the farm in the form of new roofs, barn repairs, goat fencing, perennials, warm boots, down comforters, rechargeable batters, etc... I don't have a lot of gold or silver (a bit, mostly inherited), we have no major investments, and we tend to trust that our savings plus our willingness to work will get us through most crises. Honestly, I don't expect to retire - I think it unlikely that social security will be there for me, and so my basic hope for the long term is that I'll be able to adapt and make a little money growing food or medicinals, or teaching or writing, and that we'll get along with what savings we've got - assuming we have any by the time that comes. I might be crazy, and I'm probably missing a dozen opportunities, but given the present degree of market volatility, I'm a lot more relaxed this way.
The other reason I don't invest is that I believe that the origin of our economic problem is growth capitalism - that is, the debt based money system that requires that our economy grow always faster and consume more and more resources. If we don't change that, we'll never be able to live within the bounds of nature. But that means I want to participate as little as possible - to pay and receive as little interest as possible. What I make I'd like to be the profit of my own hands, and my own labor, not a system I deplore. The interest I want to live on is my own fair share of the natural resources of the world - the dirt I live on, the food I grow on it, the energy I produce from it. I'm not there yet, but seeking out a significant return in interest seems contrary to the basic principles I hold.
Now I'm not perfect, and my savings accounts do pay a little interest. I don't keep my money under my mattress, and I am no saint. But generally speaking, I stay out of the money game to the extent I can. It means I don't have as much, and I don't have as big a cushion as I might, and that's a price I'm prepared to pay right now. I tend to think that we were richer after the last crash, when our wealth came from *saving* not investing.
I'm going to be blunt - I don't think money we've invested will be there making you richer in the long term. Oh, some of us will stay rich, and some of us will get rich - I'd tend to bet that if you put your cash in oil wildcatting, electric cars for the very rich, tobacco, alcohol and prescription sedatives, you'll be able to weather all sorts of hard times, at least for a while. Video games and escapism will probably be big in bad times as well. But I don't necessarily want my money used for those purposes. I tend to think that if you deplore things, but still give them your money to play with, you have a small ethical problem.
And Lois McMaster Bujold's wonderful line "all true wealth is biological" resonates in my head. She was speaking of children, but this is more widely true - ultimately, our wealth is based on the natural capital we keep drawing down. My personal path to wealth is to enrich my own soils, to improve my own pastures, to plant more trees, and husband my land better, and then live off the natural divedends it provides, reinvesting for the future. I believe that this enriches the society as a whole, and my self and my family - it creates a wealth that will be reaped for generations, and, I hope, onto the future. If it doesn't serve me and mine, at least it will serve the world. I don't mean to romanticize it - my tax collector and the bulk food lady still mostly take cash. But at some point, our wealth depends on the preservation of what we have, not expansion and the concommitant destruction.
Most of us want wealth for the security it brings - the knowledge we could handle a health care crisis or a job loss, the ability to retire. And these are real and good things, and I'm drawn by the siren song of more and more for me and mine so that I need never be afraid again. But when would that be? A single cancer diagnosis will wipe out the savings of anyone but the richest. A pension fund scandal and a stock market crash, and many folks will be back to the traditional plan B of retirement - relying on help from my kids. No savings can endure a long term of unemployment. Few people's retirement savings are enough to keep them in assisted living their whole senior years - if you live too long, you are back to family again. As a single, and private person, one never achieve enough security to keep me safe - and what I do in the process of my accumulation often impoverishes others, denying them a measure of security as well.
Part of what I do is try and find other definitions of security - security is soil that can grow food, and family to rely on (and also family who will in turn, rely upon me), security is good work and a plan for continuing to work as my body grows older. Security is not needing much and having a strong community and a tradition of sharing that may return to me if I need it. Security is (and this is a difficult one for me) recognizing that I will some day die, and leave the world I love, and that nothing I do to be "secure" will spare me that inevitability. Security is supporting collective, public measures that improve everyone's security, rather than simply privatizing the meeting of my own needs.
The other part of this is recognizing that "security" is a construct, an attempt to master the world and have dominion over something I never made and cannot fully control. The notion that I can escape risk by being rich is part of the problem - because a world in which rich people preserve their own lives and well being first and foremost is one in which we cannot be generous enough to achieve equality, or fairness, or equal access to things like food and health care.
So here is my stock market advice - I have no idea what you should invest in. I don't know what you should do with your 401K. It depends on where you are and what you are planning. I don't know what the future holds or what anyone should do with their money. Except this.
I think all of us who have a little to spare should give more of it away. I think all of us should invest in natural resources, and take our divedends in soil fertility. I tend to think that buying the things you will really need in the long term is, if you can, wiser than waiting, and figuring out what you don't need is wiser still. Some of us won't be able to get much ahead, but a little stored food, a tool, educational materials for your children, shoes, a flashlight might provide a little security and a measure of comfort. But I would also remember that the flashlight will break, the tool handle will crack, the food will get eaten. The shoes will wear and the child will outgrow the materials. Real wealth is the ability to make a new tool handle, to sing in the darkness, to grow tomorrow's meal. It is the ability to fix the shoes and run around without them when the weather permits. It is the ability to learn from whatever situation you encounter, and to teach your children what you have learned yourself.
Now all of that sounds very nice, of course, but we still all have to pay the bills. And that's absolutely true. I don't want to get all fuzzy here about money, particularly since I have enough to eat and health insurance, and many people do not. I'm young and healthy and can work, and I know this looks very different from the other side. And, much as I admire her, I'm no Peace Pilgrim, walking with only the clothes on my back. It scares me to think of reducing my own security, of my children becoming vulnerable to an accident, to imagine that the cost of sharing things more equally in the world might be a closer acquaintace with death. But what choice do we have? If you read my blog for any reason other than to argue with me, you probably know that the days of your 401K, your investments returning enough to live on are probably numbered. I'm sure you can find a way to preserve some of that wealth for a poorer future. But that doesn't resolve the basic problem - that what you can do for yourself, your children won't be able to do, and your neighbor may not have enough to do, and that despite your best planning, we're all of us teetering on the edge of real personal insecurity.
What I do think I want to invest in, if we ever have the spare cash, is my neighbors. I'd love to see my neighbors start their own businesses manufacturing things that now come only from far away, or see young couples able to get farmland and start producing food. I don't know what, if anything, it would ever return to me. Maybe all the hoes I can ever use (the two I have were both bought at least 40 years old and seem set to go another couple of decades, so that isn't many) or a few peppers in season. Or maybe just better neighbors and more local security. I've been mulling over ways that my neighbors and I might do this - ways we might, as many immigrant communities have, invest in one another, providing interest free, or minimal interest capital loans to get started producing what we need.
For those with enough wealth to be investing in the stock market (I do not refer here to those who have minimal control over things like state pensions), I would recommend investing as much as possible locally. Many of the things you are "investing" have historically been the territory of philanthropy, but I think we all know better. This is called "covering your own ass" in a world where poverty is likely to be our norms. So I'd invest, say, in local free clinics, food pantries and poverty support programs. If you want a modest, but real return, try investing in reasonably price rental properties, making it possible for blue-collar people to live in your town and pay their rent and still have food. Invest in small scale manufacturers and combine with friends to form scholarship funds to send young people to colleges and help them learn useful things. Invest, that is, in the possibility of a real future, and your own place in it. I can't ensure that the returns will be anything impressive. On the other hand, neither can anyone else.
Look, I don't have any answers here. I know you want to retire, I understand that you need to provide for the future. Me too. All of us are tied into the economic system in ways that we can't quite extricate from, and all of us are standing, one foot in, one foot out, waiting to see what happens. All I can tell you is this. Here is what I am doing. Don't listen to my advice. And if you have to pick, take the baboon - I hear he's got a system.
Cheers,
Sharon
Back Home
Hi Folks -
New posts coming, I promise. In the meantime, I'm catching up on a whole host of things. Here's a link to an old one to tide you over. This was one of the most fun posts I've ever written. At the time I wrote it, I was a knitting novice and a new sock knitter. But I still think it is important - the reality is that socks are the one thing you'll always need more of. And even if it doesn't become an emergency, homemade socks are way nicer than boughten.
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2005/02/great-sock-rant-of-05.html
Cheers,
Sharon
New posts coming, I promise. In the meantime, I'm catching up on a whole host of things. Here's a link to an old one to tide you over. This was one of the most fun posts I've ever written. At the time I wrote it, I was a knitting novice and a new sock knitter. But I still think it is important - the reality is that socks are the one thing you'll always need more of. And even if it doesn't become an emergency, homemade socks are way nicer than boughten.
http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2005/02/great-sock-rant-of-05.html
Cheers,
Sharon
Monday, August 20, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 17 - Toys R Not US
It was a parable, but I didn't listen. My neighbor and her husband gave her two boys a big Thomas the Tank Engine train set for Christmas. It had miles of track, a lot of trains, trees, buildings, bridges, you name it - and it had its own table to set the track up on, and a drawer to store it in. This was no small piece of furniture, either. Bigger than a coffee table, it was a substantial thing. And on Christmas morning, a half hour after providing everything a train-obsessed child could ever want, my neighbor came into see that her children had taken the trains away from the track, and were running them along the living room floor, and up over the "mountains" of the couch pillows. The track, the buildings, the bridges were all left behind as the two boys happily raced two small wooden trains around the room.
I should have listened. But a year later, when Grandma wanted to get my children a big gift for Chanukah, she proposed a train set, complete with table. My husband and I were excited - we had forgotten the lesson above. They could set up whole villages, we thought! It would be welcoming, exciting for any child who comes to visit. The kids would spend hours playing with it! And they did, for a little while. But half the time, they were racing the trains over the floors, or making up stories about the trains crossing bridges - not the premade wooden bridges that came with the set, but blocks. It turned out that the person who spent the most time playing with the trains, setting them up and arranging them "just so" was my husband. The kids didn't care about just so - they just wanted to play train. The box it came in, the table, the track and the accessories make clutter in my house. And what my kids really wanted - four little two inch wooden trains - could have provided the same amount of pleasure for 1/100th the waste. With a little practice, Daddy could have made them.
The thing was, the people who wanted the toys were us. Oh, the kids envied their neighbors the train set and loved to play with it when we went over there. But their wanting was innocent - they weren't supposed to notice that the neighbor kids only played with the trains when the guests were excited about them. And, of course, the trains themselves were the more wonderful and fascinating for living at someone else's house. It was Daddy and Mommy and Grandma and Grandpa who wanted the children to have the trains. We had a fantasy of what pleasure the trains would give. We had a dream of providing them with something wonderful. And how often is that true about the toys we give our kids and grandkids, nieces and nephews? How often is it that we want to give them, more than the children themselves really want the toys?
If you are like a lot of parents, the last few weeks you've been going through your kids' toyboxes and either throwing things out or heaving a sigh of relief when you find that you don't have any lead contaminated toys. If you haven't done it, or kept track of all the increasing number of recalls, here are some places to check;
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml07/07257.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/14/fyi/main3166371.shtml
We got off easy - we don't own any of the relevant toys. But, of course, that doesn't mean there are no lead contaminated older toys in our house. And while we've already purged pthalates, we know that they aren't the only endocrine disrupting plastics out there. http://www.nypirg.org/consumer/2002/phthalates.html. For those of us who want our kids to grow up healthy and safe, this is troubling stuff.
Now a lot of people are made at Chinese toy manufacturers. How, we ask in outrage, could they do this to our kids. May I suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, such anger is misplaced. Here's the thing. All of the relevant toys were cheap plastic crap, manufactured in a developing country, with lax standards on environmental, child and worker safety. They were being manufactured in a comparatively unregulated economy by people making tiny wages, often in poor working conditions on a contract given to the lowest bidder. The average action figure that retails for 10.99 was actually cost far less than a dollar to produce. And every single parent and grandparent who bought one *KNEW THIS* or could have if they stopped to think for 2 seconds about where the toys came from. We either didn't bother to think, or we trusted that other people, far away and with no incentive would care more about our kids than we care about theirs.
I'm not blaming anyone here - I'm as guilty as anyone of this. I buy my toys at yard sales, but it was just luck that got us off the hook. But that's the reality - we buy cheap toys without thinking about it. And because we think our kids need a million toys, we need them to be cheap. That way everyone who knows them can afford
to buy them a ton of stuff for Christmas, their birthdays, and whenever Grandpa comes to visit. They can have gift bags at every birthday party, a toy in every Happy Meal, a bunch of cheap crap for every occasion. And they can have toyboxes full, closets full, houses that look like stores full of things.
Meanwhile, the people who make the toys often didn't have many growing up. And for all the lead paint on Elmo's face is dangerous for our kids, it is worse for them. They are the ones who work 12 hours a day with lead paint - many of them young women at the beginning of their reproductive years. Cheap toys aren't just bad for our kids, they are bad all around. The factories emit greenhouse gasses that warm the planet, and use up limited supplies of petroleum for what - for a toy that will be broken in a matter of days or hours because the toy itself is made of cheap materials and the child has so many toys she cannot fully understand the need to preserve them.
What's the solution? Fewer toys. Many fewer, and better ones. Toys made of natural materials, that are demonstrably nontoxic. Toys you make yourself, or toys your children make. Toys made from non-dangerous recycled things. But most of all, fewer of them. Not fifty dolls, but four. Not 100 stuffed animals, but 10, or 5 or 2. A set of blocks. Some scarves and old clothes for dress up. Pots and pans and empty cans and boxes for playing store. A blackboard and chalk. Some crayons and the backs of paper. A few balls. A bat. A glove. A few games. Lots of books. Perhaps one big thing - a dollhouse or a battle cruiser or some trains and track. Legos. But not everything under the sun, not even if it is educational. Nothing with batteries, as little made of plastic as possible. Nothing cheap - we have to pay the people who make them enough to live on and have a powerful incentive to keep our kids safe. Better fewer toys then more cheap ones. And greater generosity on our part, so that those who can't afford to pay well for toys can still have some good ones, that won't poison them or deplete their future.
I have a doll that my grandmother bought when I was a little girl. It was my favorite through my whole childhood, so much so that "Big One" went through 3 cloth bodies, each one replaced when they wore out by mother or grandmother. My youngest sister loved her too - by the time she got her the doll was bald, with only a fuzz of her remaining hair, and had permanent gouges in her cheeks. My sister loved the doll for her childhood. After she was done with it, my mother cleaned it up, replaced her body again and dressed the doll in the dress I wore home from the hospital when I was born. For a decade and more, she sat on shelf in my closet, until, one day, I brought her down and showed her to my youngest son. To him, she is "baby" and he holds her as he nurses to sleep each night. And she accompanies him to his bed each night. I suspect that I will have to replace "Baby's" body again - and I wouldn't be surprised if someday, my son sits over a needle the thread and does so for one of his children.
And if we're honest about our motivations for giving our children toys, I think we'll find that this is what we're seeking - the child inside us who loved a particular toy, or a few particular toys, and felt powerfully about them. We give our kids toys because we want them to have that magical and imaginary space in their lives with a toy that feels real to them. So we give and give and hope that the next one will be the one. But the reality is that it is more likely that we will create magical experiences for our children and grandchildren if they have fewer toys, rather than more. If they have more incentive to imagine and thus don't have a toy to fill every imaginary gap. If they receive things that last and last and outlast their own youth, and are still there to look at fondly as they grow up.
Sharon
I should have listened. But a year later, when Grandma wanted to get my children a big gift for Chanukah, she proposed a train set, complete with table. My husband and I were excited - we had forgotten the lesson above. They could set up whole villages, we thought! It would be welcoming, exciting for any child who comes to visit. The kids would spend hours playing with it! And they did, for a little while. But half the time, they were racing the trains over the floors, or making up stories about the trains crossing bridges - not the premade wooden bridges that came with the set, but blocks. It turned out that the person who spent the most time playing with the trains, setting them up and arranging them "just so" was my husband. The kids didn't care about just so - they just wanted to play train. The box it came in, the table, the track and the accessories make clutter in my house. And what my kids really wanted - four little two inch wooden trains - could have provided the same amount of pleasure for 1/100th the waste. With a little practice, Daddy could have made them.
The thing was, the people who wanted the toys were us. Oh, the kids envied their neighbors the train set and loved to play with it when we went over there. But their wanting was innocent - they weren't supposed to notice that the neighbor kids only played with the trains when the guests were excited about them. And, of course, the trains themselves were the more wonderful and fascinating for living at someone else's house. It was Daddy and Mommy and Grandma and Grandpa who wanted the children to have the trains. We had a fantasy of what pleasure the trains would give. We had a dream of providing them with something wonderful. And how often is that true about the toys we give our kids and grandkids, nieces and nephews? How often is it that we want to give them, more than the children themselves really want the toys?
If you are like a lot of parents, the last few weeks you've been going through your kids' toyboxes and either throwing things out or heaving a sigh of relief when you find that you don't have any lead contaminated toys. If you haven't done it, or kept track of all the increasing number of recalls, here are some places to check;
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml07/07257.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/14/fyi/main3166371.shtml
We got off easy - we don't own any of the relevant toys. But, of course, that doesn't mean there are no lead contaminated older toys in our house. And while we've already purged pthalates, we know that they aren't the only endocrine disrupting plastics out there. http://www.nypirg.org/consumer/2002/phthalates.html. For those of us who want our kids to grow up healthy and safe, this is troubling stuff.
Now a lot of people are made at Chinese toy manufacturers. How, we ask in outrage, could they do this to our kids. May I suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, such anger is misplaced. Here's the thing. All of the relevant toys were cheap plastic crap, manufactured in a developing country, with lax standards on environmental, child and worker safety. They were being manufactured in a comparatively unregulated economy by people making tiny wages, often in poor working conditions on a contract given to the lowest bidder. The average action figure that retails for 10.99 was actually cost far less than a dollar to produce. And every single parent and grandparent who bought one *KNEW THIS* or could have if they stopped to think for 2 seconds about where the toys came from. We either didn't bother to think, or we trusted that other people, far away and with no incentive would care more about our kids than we care about theirs.
I'm not blaming anyone here - I'm as guilty as anyone of this. I buy my toys at yard sales, but it was just luck that got us off the hook. But that's the reality - we buy cheap toys without thinking about it. And because we think our kids need a million toys, we need them to be cheap. That way everyone who knows them can afford
to buy them a ton of stuff for Christmas, their birthdays, and whenever Grandpa comes to visit. They can have gift bags at every birthday party, a toy in every Happy Meal, a bunch of cheap crap for every occasion. And they can have toyboxes full, closets full, houses that look like stores full of things.
Meanwhile, the people who make the toys often didn't have many growing up. And for all the lead paint on Elmo's face is dangerous for our kids, it is worse for them. They are the ones who work 12 hours a day with lead paint - many of them young women at the beginning of their reproductive years. Cheap toys aren't just bad for our kids, they are bad all around. The factories emit greenhouse gasses that warm the planet, and use up limited supplies of petroleum for what - for a toy that will be broken in a matter of days or hours because the toy itself is made of cheap materials and the child has so many toys she cannot fully understand the need to preserve them.
What's the solution? Fewer toys. Many fewer, and better ones. Toys made of natural materials, that are demonstrably nontoxic. Toys you make yourself, or toys your children make. Toys made from non-dangerous recycled things. But most of all, fewer of them. Not fifty dolls, but four. Not 100 stuffed animals, but 10, or 5 or 2. A set of blocks. Some scarves and old clothes for dress up. Pots and pans and empty cans and boxes for playing store. A blackboard and chalk. Some crayons and the backs of paper. A few balls. A bat. A glove. A few games. Lots of books. Perhaps one big thing - a dollhouse or a battle cruiser or some trains and track. Legos. But not everything under the sun, not even if it is educational. Nothing with batteries, as little made of plastic as possible. Nothing cheap - we have to pay the people who make them enough to live on and have a powerful incentive to keep our kids safe. Better fewer toys then more cheap ones. And greater generosity on our part, so that those who can't afford to pay well for toys can still have some good ones, that won't poison them or deplete their future.
I have a doll that my grandmother bought when I was a little girl. It was my favorite through my whole childhood, so much so that "Big One" went through 3 cloth bodies, each one replaced when they wore out by mother or grandmother. My youngest sister loved her too - by the time she got her the doll was bald, with only a fuzz of her remaining hair, and had permanent gouges in her cheeks. My sister loved the doll for her childhood. After she was done with it, my mother cleaned it up, replaced her body again and dressed the doll in the dress I wore home from the hospital when I was born. For a decade and more, she sat on shelf in my closet, until, one day, I brought her down and showed her to my youngest son. To him, she is "baby" and he holds her as he nurses to sleep each night. And she accompanies him to his bed each night. I suspect that I will have to replace "Baby's" body again - and I wouldn't be surprised if someday, my son sits over a needle the thread and does so for one of his children.
And if we're honest about our motivations for giving our children toys, I think we'll find that this is what we're seeking - the child inside us who loved a particular toy, or a few particular toys, and felt powerfully about them. We give our kids toys because we want them to have that magical and imaginary space in their lives with a toy that feels real to them. So we give and give and hope that the next one will be the one. But the reality is that it is more likely that we will create magical experiences for our children and grandchildren if they have fewer toys, rather than more. If they have more incentive to imagine and thus don't have a toy to fill every imaginary gap. If they receive things that last and last and outlast their own youth, and are still there to look at fondly as they grow up.
Sharon
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The Brother in Law on Your Couch Vision of the Apocalypse
Note: I'd been meaning to write about consolidating housing for a while, and BoysMom gave me the push I needed. Thanks for getting me moving. I've divided this into two sections - the first is about getting the idea of living together going, about organizing and planning for it. The second will be about the actual, day to day realities of living with other people.
Ok, it isn't the apocalypse, but whenever I point out to people that to a large degree hard times means consolidating housing, living with family and friends and taking in refugees you happen to be related to (by biology or friendship), I get a great deal of resistance. I suspect some of us are better prepared to deal with purple-haired mutants invading our neighborhoods than we are prepared to deal with the basic reality that hard times often look like your brother in law, his kids and spouse sleeping on your living room couch for three years. And I get the frequent impression many of us would rather face the mutants, given the choice.
The coming decades bring with them a whole host of reasons why the old system of everyone in their vast houses, isolated from one another, will probably not be able to continue. The first reason is simple demographics. The aging baby boomers will increasingly require help getting along, and the cost of that care will increasingly be shifted onto a smaller working population, particularly since most boomers have comparatively little saved for retirement (The average personal savings was just over $10,000 as of 2004). Most of their wealth is in housing at this stage, and that wealth could easily evaporate entirely during the course of a recession.
Meanwhile the cost of providing elder support will quickly overwhelm existing structures. The annual cost of alzheimers care alone for the baby boomers will consume 98% of Medicare's entire present annual budget, according to this month's Harper's Index. That leaves virtually no money for anything else. While we will certainly expand the amount we pay into the system, it is also true that Medicare will probably get stingier and more limited over time, the nursing homes they will pay for will be worse, the resources fewer. Assisted living is generally purchased with one's house - again, a very unstable resource, and people who live longer than their resources are evicted from assisted living, either into nursing homes or onto families. The simple reality is that more and more of us will be taking in our parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles - or we will be passing their care and needs off onto increasingly strained and inadequate resources. I know many of us find our relatives annoying, or unlikeable (and yes, I know some people genuinely have reasons not to be able to be around their families), but you'd have to dislike a family member quite a lot to voluntarily pass them off to a bad nursing home - I worked in nursing homes for years, and know just how bad that could be.
The next factor would be climate change. For almost half a milion people, Hurricane Katrina was an experience in shared housing, among other things, and we can expect similar disasters to increase in frequency. The simple reality is that as more and more disasters wrought by climate change occur, and more and more people are dislocated, they will seek out family and friends to provide either transitional or permanent housing. As Thomas Homer-Dixon put it in _The Upside of Down_, "this won't be the last time we walk out of our cities." And, of course, in just this decade we've seen people walking out of NYC twice (Sept. 11 and the 2004 blackout), attempting to walk out of New Orleans and being turned back by their own military pointing guns at them (Hurricane Katrina), and we will see it again...and probably again and again. Where will the denizens of Las Vegas go as the water dries up (a recent article suggests that this could be within this decade)? Or the residents of Miami, as their fresh water is replaced by sea water? Where will the victims of the next disaster go? Or rather, let us not say "they" - let us say "we." Because while all of us are not equally vulnerable, any one of us is a potential victim of flood and fire, hurricane and tornado, earthquake and tsunami. We will go to our family, to our friends - and that is as it should be. And those of us who are the hosts and those of us who are the victims will share the common problem of living together in a society of people increasingly unaccustomed to doing so.
Next there's economic crisis and peak oil. I speak of these two together because it is virtually impossible to seperate out their effects. As energy prices rise, the economic consequences will increase, and as economic consequences expand, energy availability becomes smaller. The simplest reality is that we are presently on the verge of a recession - I daily get an inbox full of news about financial matters, and while at first it was cutting edge sources who were predicting recession (them and Greenspan), now almost everyone is doing so. Whether this is a short term problem or the beginning of a hole we can't dig ourselves out of, I don't claim to know, but there is no question that the consequences of both mean greater poverty, more foreclosures, more choices between paying the rent and buying food for the kids, more trouble finding the money to get to work from far away, more need for Grandma or brother to do daycare, because you can't afford the sitter, more houses that require not just two income earners to pay the mortgage but three.
As energy prices rise and availability falls, some housing will be simply untenable - if you are too far away for resources, if you bought expensive, energy inefficient housing at the peak of the market, if you can no longer heat or cool your house, you may need to leave it. I've written before about how to keep your house here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-keep-your-house.html. But if you can't, and can't buy a replacement house, the next step is to share housing with someone. As interest rates rise, more and more people will lose their houses entirely, and while the government may again provide us with Hoovervilles, most people will prefer to live with friends and family. And less and less able to make ends meet, the unnatural subdivisions that are our lives will consolidate again, and living with your aunt and cousin will be, if difficult, better than the alternatives.
The forces driving us out of our houses and into consolidation are about to become powerful, but we've also been driven by powerful forces encouraging us *not* to live together. I think this is a really important point. It is important to remember how deeply our own sense of privacy, like everything else about is is shaped not in isolation by our inner selves, but by outside forces - particularly the marketplace, and the social mores it creates. That is, one of the reasons for the housing boom is that we've been consistently told we need bigger houses, more space, and that we shouldn't live together. American culture is unusually solitary, with a heavy emphasis on individualism, privacy and not sharing things - and it is no accident that these tend to be characteristics that the growth economy encourages. If we don't share much, we need more things. If we believe it would be an intolerable burden upon our privacy to share space with a family member, we will buy or rent seperate housing. The only way the present housing boom, which some economists estimate may have resulted in the manufacture of more than 750,000 more homes than the market will support could work was with a combination of population growth, but also cultural pressure to move into ever bigger houses, in ever smaller family units.
I am not saying your relatives and friends aren't awful and annoying and impossible to live with (some of mine are - but I'm certain that none of the awful ones are the relatives who read this blog ;-). I'm not saying that need for privacy isn't real. But the reality is that to some degree our terrifically acute need for isolation from one another is neither natural or personal, but culturally created by our economy and the needs of our marketplace. Some of us won't be able to live with our parents or siblings, for real and serious reasons. But they can live with friends, or more distant family. There are few, if any of us, who cannot accomodate others when the need arises.
Pat Murphy over at The Community Solution observes that over a 50 year period, we went from averaging 250 square feet per person to almost 800. And we also grew our housing stock per person. Where a family might once have moved in with parents to save money, rented longer or taken in a lodger, now they live in seperate, privately mortgaged homes from comparatively early on. Elders who might have moved in with a sister or friend after widowing now have their own seperate homes. The number of families with second homes also rose dramatically - now comfort was a giant home where Mom and Dad each had their own office, plus their shared bedroom, the kids each had their own bedroom, hypothetical guests also had their own space, and everyone had their own bathrooms. And, if living together in spaces where you need never see one another was too stressful, you could get away from it (them) all at a beach house.
I've written before about the tremendous economic costs of moving all if the services traditional provided by family resources out of the home and into the marketplace here:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/11/husbanding-resources.html. I think it is important to remember the collective individual price we pay for our solitary habits. Now this is the money that fueled the boom, of course, but it is also money that you are not saving for retirement, putting towards your credit card bill, or simply not needing to earn. Instead of families sharing resources, everyone strugggles to pay for all their own needs in the marketplace. I've written before about the personal economic costs, but I'd also like to point out that this has psychological costs as well - we begin to naturalize isolation from one another, and the possibility of crossing those boundaries and sharing space becomes unthinkable, terrifying.
Rule #1 - Plan, plan, plan, especially for those who can anticipate a need for help.
We spent several *years* negotiating things with Eric's grandparents, settling details, building an addition. We could have done things more quickly, but the time was well used in helping them adapt to the transition (transitions are tough for all of us, but especially children, the elderly and the sick), and our one regret was that we didn't discuss it with them sooner, since before the precipitating event that caused us to broach the subject with them, my husband and I had talked for some years about what we would do when they could no longer live on their own.
If you have elderly or disabled family members, or if you are an older or disabled person, start talking now with your family about what the long term future might look like. If someone is likely to come to live with you (or you with them), my personal opinion is that it is vastly easier to make the change if you do it before a crisis comes. I'm not saying that healthy 50 year olds should give up independence, just that the worst time to do this (and it is only going to get worse with rising energy costs and less transport available) is when someone is in the hospital after a fall, after the sudden death of a spouse, etc... It is terrifically hard for people to give up their privacy or face the reality that they can't manage on their own, but I believe that it is always better to do this before you really can't manage - that a crisis relocation is bound to be difficult for everyone. And if you can't move in together in advance of the crisis, at least make long term plans, negotiate intentions and rules. Knowing what is going to happen can be tremendously comforting - and not just for the elderly, disabled and vulnerable. Helping kids realize "If we can't live here because Daddy lost his job, we could always live with Aunti Lucy and Uncle David" can be a big relief for anxieties they can't fully express.
Opening this subject can be particularly difficult for the person who may require care - outside of societies where the expectation still exists that you will care for your elderly family members, it is very hard to initiate this discussion. Which is another reason why you might consider consolidating housing while you are still in good health - because instead of saying "Ok, will you take care of me" you can offer something in exchange - help with the mortgage and the grandchildren, a chance for your sister to take a trip while you care for the dogs, etc... Everyone on earth can contribute something to a household, no matter how elderly, ill or disabled - Eric's grandmother could rock a baby like nobody's business, even when she couldn't chase a toddler. Eric's grandfather was at the end of his life, but he could and did still tell stories to my sons that were infinitely valuable to us. Figure out what you have to offer, and offer it. Even if you aren't prepared to move in together yet, you might begin to arrange your life to suit such a set up - moving nearer family, or buying a house that could readily be adapted to sharing.
And this need not be a traditional "young people with older people" arrangement - two older widows might move in together, or siblings might consolidate housing to provide mutual support. A disabled woman might bring in a roommate with another complementary disability, or an able bodied college student who can help out in exchange for reduced rent. An older widower with a house on some land might bestow the property and housing after his death on a younger couple who want to farm the land, and will allow him to stay in his house. But I would argue that the best thing you can do is think in advance about what your choices are.
I strongly recommend intergenerational living even for people who don't *have* to do it - I think it tends to combine the best of several possible worlds for everyone. Wealth is heavily concentrated in our society among people in their forties and above, while vigor and energy, hardly limited to younger people, tend to be abundant among people in their 20s and 30s. I think the lives of children are enormously enriched by growing up with older people in their lives. Right now, there are millions of seniors who are wondering what they will do, and whose dream is to live comfortably in their own homes. There are also millions of young people who long for a little land - a small farm or even a good sized suburban yard, and a chance to get ahead. These two groups have every reason to combine their interests and their futures. I recognize that this potentially comes with some difficulties as well, and there is potential for abuse on both sides, but the rewards are so great that I'd hope that others would consider it.
My personal feeling is that the best way to start discussions about these issues is to be upfront and honest. We have been accustomed to a society in which older people are expected to deal with their aging themselves until a crisis point is reached. This system will no longer work (it didn't work that well to begin with), and adapting will have challenges. The best way to go into this is for everyone to benefit in some way - to recognize that this is not simply an experience of burden for one, and extra work for another, but part of a natural cycle of relationships that the younger person will then enact later themselves.
Rule #2 - Even when you can't anticipate, plan, plan, plan!
Rule #4 - Think hard about who you are planning for, and prepare accordingly.
To some degree, you may not know. A sudden crisis might leave an old college roommate on your doorstep, when you thought he was in Punjab. But most of us can guess who is likely to need us. Those who are aging or medically fragile. The family members who live closest to the edge financially. The family and friends who live close to coasts, natural disaster prone areas, or in regions already in crisis. The family who don't have a lot of other supports. People in densely populated, resources stressed urban areas. People near potential military and terrorist targets.
Now let me be clear - everyone is at risk of something, as far as I know. If you live near the Pacific Coast, you've got tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes, in the southwest, drought and hurricanes at the Gulf. Gulf Coast, we all know about. West Central - drought, flood and blizzards. Southeast, heatwaves, drought, hurricanes, ice storms, floods. Midwest earthquakes (the biggest earthquake in US history was centered around Missouri), tornadoes, floods and blizzards. Northeast blizzards, ice storms, floods and Godzilla getting lose from New York ;-). Plus, there are potential human created disasters everywhere. No one gets off free, although Akron is probably less likely to be a terrorist target than Washington DC, and Caribou Maine is comparatively low on Volcanoes.
I'm going to guess that many of us can expect more people than we think if there's a large scale disaster. It is common for us to say "Oh, My mother, my brother and his wife, and my aunt and cousin." But remember, these people also have family *they* can't leave behind. Your brother's wife has an aging mother, and a divorced sister with three kids. She can no more leave them behind in a disaster than you could leave your sister - and if they don't have any better options, they'll be coming to you. After all, you are * family * And realistically, most of us will probably be the only ones in our own families who are prepared. Everyone knows this. So even if your second cousin only sees you at weddings and funerals, he may be thinking of you as his contingency plan. And heck, if this cousin has a well stocked place in a comparatively safe area, you might be thinking of him.
In a large scale, long term crisis, you may have to limit who you can take in. In the short term, we can all endure a few nights crammed on the floor together. And frankly, if the stakes are high enough and you care enough about the people involved, you can live that way a very long time. But if there are other alternatives, you may at some point have to say no to people. Think hard about this one. Think hard about what the price they'll pay is, and what the stakes are for you. In novels, you always can tell when the food is going to run out - that is, you can sit there and do the math and say 'nope, sorry, we can't take care of you." But in real life, the situation isn't always static - if you give your last crust to a hungry child, you might starve your own. Or there might be a little more for your kids tomorrow, and you might save a life. The world isn't black and white, and neither is real life. My personal preference is generally to err on the side of offering care and protection to as many people as possible.
Now I often hear people who have been preparing for peak oil for a while say that they won't take anyone in, because, after all, they told their families and they didn't bother preparing themselves. For most people, I think that is, to be blunt, simple posturing. That is, you may say now, "Uncle George and Aunt Lydia and my college roommate Steve will pay for laughing at me about peak oil." But unless you are a much tougher person than most people are, when Uncle George and Aunt Lydia, Steve, his wife Ki, and his daughter need a place at 2 am, you'll be opening the door up wide. Because sometimes things are more important than being petty. And even if you don't think you can feed them forever, you may also be able to provide a period of rest, a temporary solution, while you begin to think ahead. So I'd lose the "nobody but the wife and me" bullhockey right away, and start planning.
Rule #5 - Shop Now
Now not everyone will be able to do this, and we haven't yet, but my basic feeling is that the ideal situation for most people would be enough stored food for double the numbers in your family for two years. Now don't panic when you hear that - you may think I'm nuts, that having six months worth of basic foods for your family even now seems beyond you. And I understand that. Remember, I'm not there yet either. Food for 12 for 2 years is a A LOT of food, and storing and managing that much food is work. It also costs money to accumulate it. We do it by buying a little extra every time we go to the coop or bulk store. 25 lbs of black beans or 50 of whole wheat really don't cost that much, and are well worth it for the security they provide. During the fall, we buy extra potatoes and onions and grow extra as well, and store them. We can give them to the food pantry if we don't use them - in fact, one of the most important reasons we store food is that it allows us to be generous, to give away to charity even when things are tight for us. And for those of us who may have to rely on others, it can either delay the time of consolidation of housing by cutting down on our need to buy food after a job loss or other crisis, or at least it can allow us to arrive with something in hand.
At a minimum, I would plan on six months worth of food for your family, and a lot of practice making meals out of that food. The sudden arrival of five or ten hungry, desperate and now poor family members will make the wisdom of having a large supply of basic staples around.
If you haven't begun thinking about food storage at all, I'd start with Alan Hagan's _Prudent Food Storage FAQ_, one of the very best resources on this. Alan comments here, and has done an amazing job on this http://www.survival-center.com/foodfaq/. My own personal minimum list of foods to store is this. The above assumes that you are buying most of your food at a grocery store or coop, in small quantities. There are plans that use fewer items, and plans that use more and different ones, but this is my own personal suggestion. You don't need all of these things, and you should adapt to your own family's preferences, but if I had to store only a few items, but didn't have to go for absolute minimums, I'd choose these.
Whole Wheat
White Rice
Whole corn
Pinto Beans
Black Soybeans
Canned Pumpkin (1 can per person, per week)
Canned Tunafish (enough for 1 can per person per week)
Powdered Milk
peanut butter
Honey
Alfalfa seeds for sprouting
Multivitamins
Canned mustard greens
Dried Cranberries
canned tomatoes
Olive oil
cider vinegar (unpasteurized)
iodized salt (very important!)
From this very basic mix of foods, you can make quite a few tasty meals. Beans and rice, with a salad of sprouts and dried cranberries. You could make bread (sourdough), and add a little tenderness and nutrition with canned pumpkin, and have that for breakfast. Or have it for lunch in a peanut butter and honey sandwich. With a few spices, you could make a great chili with two beans and tomatoes, and serve it with cornbread and mustard greens. You can make pasta and serve it with tomato sauce and olive oil, or make a cold rice salad with rice, greens, cold cooked beans, sprouts, olive oil and vinegar. You get the point. In fact, I actually think it is better, whenever possible, to store local foods - what is grown near you, but if you had to work only with a few supermarket options, these would be my choices.
Mostly, the rule is store what you eat, and eat what you store. That means learning to eat and use basic food that can be stored dry, dehydrated or canned - cooking from staples like grains, beans, etc... If you don't eat this way, you should - here are some cookbook suggestions for how to learn: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/09/some-of-my-favorite-cookbooks-for-low.html
I do store two things that I don't usually eat. The first is canned shortening. The reason I do this is that it lasts forever and is cheap. The reason I don't eat it is that transfats are unbelievably awful for you. My feeling is that shortening is a survival food only - but other oils are good for a much shorter time. The other thing I store is infant formula. Every couple of years I buy a 1 year supply of the cheapest possible generic infant formula. I do this because I've seen and heard of too many cases where in a crisis, either a mother was seperated from her infant, or died, or lost her milk or something, and formula is one of those things that can't be had for love or money in an emergency. I'm a breastfeeding Mom myself, and I don't have a baby who requires either formula or breastmilk, but I store infant formula just in case - so that no woman I know should ever be desperate for something to feed her infant. The best option, obviously, would be wet nursing. But if that's not possible, an emergency supply is better than nothing. A few months before the formula expires, I donate the whole shebang to the local food pantry (which is usually pathetically grateful, because they desperately need formula), and buy another year's supply. I consider it a hedge against a certain evil.
Beyond food, I pick up extra bedding whenever I can, especially blankets at yard sales. Living in upstate NY, and recognizing that if times were hard, we might not be able to provide much heat, storing extra blankets just makes sense. I also have bought a few older futons, in good condition. They can be folded up and stored in a closet to be used if necessary for extra beds. My (crazy-huge) house can currently sleep 10 additional people (beyond us) on beds, plus we have two cribs. But when I was a kid, and my mother ran a daycare, she made up pallets for napping children to sleep on out of old carpet remnents, and so I save these, on the theory that children and younger adults could eventually be kicked onto the carpet, so to speak, if things got really tight.
I believe strongly in having enough dishes, but then again, I love to have people over and cook for a crowd. You can obviously eat in shifts, but yard sales are again a great source of some cheap dishes to stick in a box somewhere. Same with silverwear. A couple of spare sweatshirts and sweatpants in different sizes, if you can afford them, will give people who never had a chance to get anything out of their homes something to wear. Extra soap, toothbrushes and toilet paper will be useful as well. If there are children in your extended family, but none in your home, you might also at yard sales pick up a few ten cent children's books and toys to put in the same box - it will be much easier for traumatized, exhausted children to do something other than dismember your house and scream if you have a few appropriate things for them - some blocks, a ball, a copy of Harry Potter...whatever.
In terms of medical supplies, first of all, get a good first aid book and read it now. One of the most important things you can do is know when you need a doctor. But if the emergency rooms are closed, or flooded with patients (or water), or you can't get there, you need to be able to take care of an emergency yourself. Learn CPR, including infant and child, and learn how to tend basic injuries and get along without making things worse. Keep a stack of bandages, peroxide or alchohol, painkillers, and other basics in your house.
Also be ready to leave the house in an emergency. Have a "bug out bag" with light food (dehydrated food, ramen, food bars), a couple of blankets, some water, a change of clothes, baby supplies for babies, basic hygeine items, a few toys and books for older kids, an emergency medical kit and some basic tools (pocket knife, waterproof matches, rope), flashlight (either with extra batteries or a hand charged one), phone numbers, contact information, cell phone and manual phone charger, maps of your area and anywhere you might be going, and photocopies of id and important documents. Mine personally includes a disk of important pictures of my kids.
You should have one bag for each person, and that includes kids. Even if they only carry a few of their most precious things, they can participate in putting the bag together, and you can practice getting out of the house and grabbing it in an emergency. Store extra blankets, water, and a larger first aid kit in your car. Keep stabilized extra gas in your garage so that you can get where you need to go even if the pumps aren't running. Just in case leaving an area by car is infeasible, you might also wish to have bicycles to help you get out of an area quickly. This might be particularly important for urban dwellers - many cities, such as Manhattan, have no realistic evacuation plan. The reality is that it is simply impossible to get that many people out of a small space in less than four days. So a bicycle gives you a real advantage if you need to travel quickly and over long distance, but can't rely on public transport or a car being available or usable.
Even if these supplies are never of any use to you, they can always be resold at yard sales, donated to charity or made use of yourself over time. Given that we are in an inflationary cycle, things you buy now will likely serve you better than waiting, so if you can, plan ahead.
Rule #6 - Get your head in order.
Now that we're through the logistics of physical prep, there's mental prep. One of the first things we all need to do is take a few deep breaths and relax our preconceived notions about what this will be like. Some of us may be anticipating family members moving in with a great deal of enthusiasm, but others with considerably less. But whatever we're thinking (and obviously a positive attitude is preferrable to a bad one), we should try and let some of our expectations go, and face things as they come.
The reality is that if we're the hosts, the people coming to live with us may be coming enthusiastically, or miserably. They may be arriving after lots of planning and fun negotiations, or after incredible trauma and horror. They may drive us crazy because they are like that, or because they are depressed, suffering from illnesses or post-traumatic stress disorder. They may feel like failures because they lost their house or couldn't keep their family safe, or they may feel like this is the change they need. And this may turn out to be terrible, or it might be much better than any of us ever expected. And if we're the guests, we may be coming feeling terrible, ashamed. Or we may be hoping for a better future, but unsure of our place with new rules, new family, new arrangements. We won't know until it happens.
For me, the most important things to remember (and I didn't always remember them when Eric's grandparents were alive - something I regret) is that the people whose home you are, or who are home to you (home is the place, when you go there, they have to take you in) are the people who share, for all their imperfections, ties that matter, that are worthy of honor and respect. No matter how maddening they are, no matter how frustrated you are, no matter how difficult moving in together is, no matter how close the quarters or stressful the situation, these people are your tribe. It is in some ways easy not to love and appreciate the people who are always there, especially when you sometimes wish they would be elsewhere, but it is also worth noting that the world is not full of people who will share their homes with you, add water to the soup so your husband can eat, rock your child through a nightmare to let you sleep, give you the coat from their backs and the bread from their table, and say, in a thousand words and gestures, "you are one of us."
The more we can go into this possibility with the recognition that it is fraught, it is difficult, and it is *possible* the better off we'll be. By all means let us joke and compare notes about this awful relative and that one. But remember, the jokes are just jokes - they are part of being a family (biological and non) - but at the root, underneath the joke, there is a good deal more. Don't forget what's at the root.
I will write much more about this subject, the daily realities of living together in a future post, whenever I get to it (not this week - I'm out of town). I have much more to say about privacy, and accomodation, and practical ways we might get along.
Cheers,
Sharon
Ok, it isn't the apocalypse, but whenever I point out to people that to a large degree hard times means consolidating housing, living with family and friends and taking in refugees you happen to be related to (by biology or friendship), I get a great deal of resistance. I suspect some of us are better prepared to deal with purple-haired mutants invading our neighborhoods than we are prepared to deal with the basic reality that hard times often look like your brother in law, his kids and spouse sleeping on your living room couch for three years. And I get the frequent impression many of us would rather face the mutants, given the choice.
The coming decades bring with them a whole host of reasons why the old system of everyone in their vast houses, isolated from one another, will probably not be able to continue. The first reason is simple demographics. The aging baby boomers will increasingly require help getting along, and the cost of that care will increasingly be shifted onto a smaller working population, particularly since most boomers have comparatively little saved for retirement (The average personal savings was just over $10,000 as of 2004). Most of their wealth is in housing at this stage, and that wealth could easily evaporate entirely during the course of a recession.
Meanwhile the cost of providing elder support will quickly overwhelm existing structures. The annual cost of alzheimers care alone for the baby boomers will consume 98% of Medicare's entire present annual budget, according to this month's Harper's Index. That leaves virtually no money for anything else. While we will certainly expand the amount we pay into the system, it is also true that Medicare will probably get stingier and more limited over time, the nursing homes they will pay for will be worse, the resources fewer. Assisted living is generally purchased with one's house - again, a very unstable resource, and people who live longer than their resources are evicted from assisted living, either into nursing homes or onto families. The simple reality is that more and more of us will be taking in our parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles - or we will be passing their care and needs off onto increasingly strained and inadequate resources. I know many of us find our relatives annoying, or unlikeable (and yes, I know some people genuinely have reasons not to be able to be around their families), but you'd have to dislike a family member quite a lot to voluntarily pass them off to a bad nursing home - I worked in nursing homes for years, and know just how bad that could be.
The next factor would be climate change. For almost half a milion people, Hurricane Katrina was an experience in shared housing, among other things, and we can expect similar disasters to increase in frequency. The simple reality is that as more and more disasters wrought by climate change occur, and more and more people are dislocated, they will seek out family and friends to provide either transitional or permanent housing. As Thomas Homer-Dixon put it in _The Upside of Down_, "this won't be the last time we walk out of our cities." And, of course, in just this decade we've seen people walking out of NYC twice (Sept. 11 and the 2004 blackout), attempting to walk out of New Orleans and being turned back by their own military pointing guns at them (Hurricane Katrina), and we will see it again...and probably again and again. Where will the denizens of Las Vegas go as the water dries up (a recent article suggests that this could be within this decade)? Or the residents of Miami, as their fresh water is replaced by sea water? Where will the victims of the next disaster go? Or rather, let us not say "they" - let us say "we." Because while all of us are not equally vulnerable, any one of us is a potential victim of flood and fire, hurricane and tornado, earthquake and tsunami. We will go to our family, to our friends - and that is as it should be. And those of us who are the hosts and those of us who are the victims will share the common problem of living together in a society of people increasingly unaccustomed to doing so.
Next there's economic crisis and peak oil. I speak of these two together because it is virtually impossible to seperate out their effects. As energy prices rise, the economic consequences will increase, and as economic consequences expand, energy availability becomes smaller. The simplest reality is that we are presently on the verge of a recession - I daily get an inbox full of news about financial matters, and while at first it was cutting edge sources who were predicting recession (them and Greenspan), now almost everyone is doing so. Whether this is a short term problem or the beginning of a hole we can't dig ourselves out of, I don't claim to know, but there is no question that the consequences of both mean greater poverty, more foreclosures, more choices between paying the rent and buying food for the kids, more trouble finding the money to get to work from far away, more need for Grandma or brother to do daycare, because you can't afford the sitter, more houses that require not just two income earners to pay the mortgage but three.
As energy prices rise and availability falls, some housing will be simply untenable - if you are too far away for resources, if you bought expensive, energy inefficient housing at the peak of the market, if you can no longer heat or cool your house, you may need to leave it. I've written before about how to keep your house here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-keep-your-house.html. But if you can't, and can't buy a replacement house, the next step is to share housing with someone. As interest rates rise, more and more people will lose their houses entirely, and while the government may again provide us with Hoovervilles, most people will prefer to live with friends and family. And less and less able to make ends meet, the unnatural subdivisions that are our lives will consolidate again, and living with your aunt and cousin will be, if difficult, better than the alternatives.
The forces driving us out of our houses and into consolidation are about to become powerful, but we've also been driven by powerful forces encouraging us *not* to live together. I think this is a really important point. It is important to remember how deeply our own sense of privacy, like everything else about is is shaped not in isolation by our inner selves, but by outside forces - particularly the marketplace, and the social mores it creates. That is, one of the reasons for the housing boom is that we've been consistently told we need bigger houses, more space, and that we shouldn't live together. American culture is unusually solitary, with a heavy emphasis on individualism, privacy and not sharing things - and it is no accident that these tend to be characteristics that the growth economy encourages. If we don't share much, we need more things. If we believe it would be an intolerable burden upon our privacy to share space with a family member, we will buy or rent seperate housing. The only way the present housing boom, which some economists estimate may have resulted in the manufacture of more than 750,000 more homes than the market will support could work was with a combination of population growth, but also cultural pressure to move into ever bigger houses, in ever smaller family units.
I am not saying your relatives and friends aren't awful and annoying and impossible to live with (some of mine are - but I'm certain that none of the awful ones are the relatives who read this blog ;-). I'm not saying that need for privacy isn't real. But the reality is that to some degree our terrifically acute need for isolation from one another is neither natural or personal, but culturally created by our economy and the needs of our marketplace. Some of us won't be able to live with our parents or siblings, for real and serious reasons. But they can live with friends, or more distant family. There are few, if any of us, who cannot accomodate others when the need arises.
Pat Murphy over at The Community Solution observes that over a 50 year period, we went from averaging 250 square feet per person to almost 800. And we also grew our housing stock per person. Where a family might once have moved in with parents to save money, rented longer or taken in a lodger, now they live in seperate, privately mortgaged homes from comparatively early on. Elders who might have moved in with a sister or friend after widowing now have their own seperate homes. The number of families with second homes also rose dramatically - now comfort was a giant home where Mom and Dad each had their own office, plus their shared bedroom, the kids each had their own bedroom, hypothetical guests also had their own space, and everyone had their own bathrooms. And, if living together in spaces where you need never see one another was too stressful, you could get away from it (them) all at a beach house.
I've written before about the tremendous economic costs of moving all if the services traditional provided by family resources out of the home and into the marketplace here:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/11/husbanding-resources.html. I think it is important to remember the collective individual price we pay for our solitary habits. Now this is the money that fueled the boom, of course, but it is also money that you are not saving for retirement, putting towards your credit card bill, or simply not needing to earn. Instead of families sharing resources, everyone strugggles to pay for all their own needs in the marketplace. I've written before about the personal economic costs, but I'd also like to point out that this has psychological costs as well - we begin to naturalize isolation from one another, and the possibility of crossing those boundaries and sharing space becomes unthinkable, terrifying.
We saw this when my husband and I bought this house with my husband's grandparents. The responses of Eric's grandparents and their friends of their own age, accustomed to such family consolidation was uniformly positive. But the reaction of many of our family members and our parent's generation was naked horror that we would do such a thing. We were too newly married, we were told, it would take away time we needed for our children, we would find it too hard, we would have to give up all our privacy. When I mentioned this disparity, I was told by several people "well, of course, *they'd* like the arrangement" - implying that all the benefits of the arrangement fell on the side of Eric's grandparents. But that simply wasn't true - we benefitted in a whole host of ways, from the financial (they helped us buy the farm) to the practical (I could run out and leave the baby with Grandma for a few minutes) to the emotional (I had supportive, loving company at home during the day, my children had an intensely loving relationship with their beloved great-grandparents).
Now I don't mean to suggest it was always idyllic (it wasn't, and some times it was damned hard, such as during the periods right before and after their deaths), and I freely acknowledge that grandparents are often easier than parents and siblings, and long-planned and prepared for arrangements are easier than those suddenly thrust upon us. But I like to think that there are some strategies we might use to make this easier, and that for most of us, it won't be as bad as we thought. If I can prevent a single axe murder, fratricide or poisoning within our extended families, I will consider my time on this essay well spent ;-). So here are my rules for advance planning for living with family - biological or chosen.Rule #1 - Plan, plan, plan, especially for those who can anticipate a need for help.
We spent several *years* negotiating things with Eric's grandparents, settling details, building an addition. We could have done things more quickly, but the time was well used in helping them adapt to the transition (transitions are tough for all of us, but especially children, the elderly and the sick), and our one regret was that we didn't discuss it with them sooner, since before the precipitating event that caused us to broach the subject with them, my husband and I had talked for some years about what we would do when they could no longer live on their own.
If you have elderly or disabled family members, or if you are an older or disabled person, start talking now with your family about what the long term future might look like. If someone is likely to come to live with you (or you with them), my personal opinion is that it is vastly easier to make the change if you do it before a crisis comes. I'm not saying that healthy 50 year olds should give up independence, just that the worst time to do this (and it is only going to get worse with rising energy costs and less transport available) is when someone is in the hospital after a fall, after the sudden death of a spouse, etc... It is terrifically hard for people to give up their privacy or face the reality that they can't manage on their own, but I believe that it is always better to do this before you really can't manage - that a crisis relocation is bound to be difficult for everyone. And if you can't move in together in advance of the crisis, at least make long term plans, negotiate intentions and rules. Knowing what is going to happen can be tremendously comforting - and not just for the elderly, disabled and vulnerable. Helping kids realize "If we can't live here because Daddy lost his job, we could always live with Aunti Lucy and Uncle David" can be a big relief for anxieties they can't fully express.
Opening this subject can be particularly difficult for the person who may require care - outside of societies where the expectation still exists that you will care for your elderly family members, it is very hard to initiate this discussion. Which is another reason why you might consider consolidating housing while you are still in good health - because instead of saying "Ok, will you take care of me" you can offer something in exchange - help with the mortgage and the grandchildren, a chance for your sister to take a trip while you care for the dogs, etc... Everyone on earth can contribute something to a household, no matter how elderly, ill or disabled - Eric's grandmother could rock a baby like nobody's business, even when she couldn't chase a toddler. Eric's grandfather was at the end of his life, but he could and did still tell stories to my sons that were infinitely valuable to us. Figure out what you have to offer, and offer it. Even if you aren't prepared to move in together yet, you might begin to arrange your life to suit such a set up - moving nearer family, or buying a house that could readily be adapted to sharing.
And this need not be a traditional "young people with older people" arrangement - two older widows might move in together, or siblings might consolidate housing to provide mutual support. A disabled woman might bring in a roommate with another complementary disability, or an able bodied college student who can help out in exchange for reduced rent. An older widower with a house on some land might bestow the property and housing after his death on a younger couple who want to farm the land, and will allow him to stay in his house. But I would argue that the best thing you can do is think in advance about what your choices are.
I strongly recommend intergenerational living even for people who don't *have* to do it - I think it tends to combine the best of several possible worlds for everyone. Wealth is heavily concentrated in our society among people in their forties and above, while vigor and energy, hardly limited to younger people, tend to be abundant among people in their 20s and 30s. I think the lives of children are enormously enriched by growing up with older people in their lives. Right now, there are millions of seniors who are wondering what they will do, and whose dream is to live comfortably in their own homes. There are also millions of young people who long for a little land - a small farm or even a good sized suburban yard, and a chance to get ahead. These two groups have every reason to combine their interests and their futures. I recognize that this potentially comes with some difficulties as well, and there is potential for abuse on both sides, but the rewards are so great that I'd hope that others would consider it.
My personal feeling is that the best way to start discussions about these issues is to be upfront and honest. We have been accustomed to a society in which older people are expected to deal with their aging themselves until a crisis point is reached. This system will no longer work (it didn't work that well to begin with), and adapting will have challenges. The best way to go into this is for everyone to benefit in some way - to recognize that this is not simply an experience of burden for one, and extra work for another, but part of a natural cycle of relationships that the younger person will then enact later themselves.
Rule #2 - Even when you can't anticipate, plan, plan, plan!
While some of our consolidations can be anticipated, there are plenty of reasons why people who expect consolidation might not be able to make changes now, and reasons why many, probably most of our housing arrangements will be brought on suddenly. Whether a private crisis like a job loss, fire or foreclosure causes our problems or whether whole regions are on the move, many of us should anticipate family coming to us suddenly, unpredictably, and we should anticipate the same for ourselves. In some cases, people might only have minutes to get out, or they may arrive having endured terrible trauma, ill, injured or otherwise in bad shape. But there are still ways we can prepare to deal with all this.
Each of us should plan in two ways. First, we should imagine the situation with ourselves as refugees of some crisis and requiring the help of family. The second is that we should imagine ourselves as hosts, and prepare for an influx. If we've been preparing for peak oil and climate change, many of us may be more likely to end up as the hosts, but it is really important to remember that all sorts of things can happen, and, as Robert Burns said, "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." If things can gang aft agley, they will ;-)
So start looking around you and imagining scenarios. Start thinking - what would you need if a large number of family members arrived suddenly on your doorstep? Or where would you go if a forest fire or a chemical leak required you to leave your house in minutes? Do you know where vital personal documents are? Do you have bug-out bags - that is a backpack or other kit full of basic items - toothbrush, change of clothes, food, water, a supply of needed medications and maps so that if it takes a day or more to get where you are going you'll be ok? Do you have stored, stabilized gasoline, enough to get you there without stops - remember, during both Hurricane Katrina and Rita, gas was largely unavailable. Do you have enough food to feed family in a crisis? Basic medical supplies so that you can treat minor problems like muscle injuries, mild dehydration, etc... at home if emergency rooms are overflowing? Are you set up for babies, young children, pregnant women, the elderly, disabled or medically fragile?
Think about the people you know. Who could you go to? There are some people who we all know would welcome us without question, but if there are questions, perhaps it would be wise to ask them ahead of time. Begin with "In the event of a natural disaster, would it be ok if Mom and I came here?" Find out whether you can bring your pets or livestock. If not, what will you do with/for them? Think about who might see your home as a potential refuge, and what issues might they have. Can you bring this up with them, perhaps in a non-threatening way, by saying "since Hurricane Katrina, I've been thinking it might be useful to have a plan for an emergency..." The more you think ahead on these issues, the better off you will be.
One of the few virtues of the events of the last few years is that all of us have seen a concrete example of what can happen. The uses of things like stored food and emergency transportation plans are no longer the province of survivalists. All of us need to make these preparations and plans.
Rule #3 - Issue invitations and write it down
One thing I've done is write a letter (which I have yet to mail - this essay is a good kick in the pants) to people I love and care for, inviting them to come here if they ever need to, and offering them information I think they might need. This would include back road and highway directions (remember, if there is a large scale evacuation, main routes are likely to be packed), suggestions for what to bring and what not to, how to handle pets and additional family and friends (remember, the people you love best also have other people they love best and may not want to leave behind), and a *gentle* explanation of what kind of situation they might find ("...we may have up to X number of additional people, so you can expect to...") and any really important rules. Personally, I do not think that this letter is the time to articulate your expectations of other people, for several reasons. First of all, you don't know what circumstances people will arrive in, and second of all, if they really need you, you don't want family and friends to be reluctant to come to you. The idea is to have your sister in law come to you before the children are suffering from malnutrition, not after. Yes, at some point, you'll have to iterate some rules. But you might as well wait until they are here - if your BIL arrives with a broken leg and your 92 year old mother, your rules about how many hours a day everyone has to work to eat might not apply right away anyhow. Be flexible!
The same questions you are answering in the letter should be answered by you for anywhere you might go. How would you get there in an emergency? What would you bring? What would you do with pets or livestock? What kind of facilities might you find? Assuming that you didn't have to leave in a rush, with only the things in your bug out bag, what might be useful to bring? You might want to designate one or two possible central family members as not only meeting locations, but people to collect messages - remember, after the hurricanes, how long people struggled to find one another.
Crises don't always occur when we're all at home together. Make plans now for how you would gather together - who would get the children at school, or stay behind to pack things up? If you were evacuated suddenly, where would you go? Who would you meet? How might you connect? If things get suddenly dangerous, you should have a plan, for example, for gathering children from school or spouses from jobs, who gets who and where you meet up in the end. Have backup communications plans - cell phones might not work, the internet connection might be down. Leaving message with a centrally located family member, or even one out of the country might make sense.
Rule #4 - Think hard about who you are planning for, and prepare accordingly.
To some degree, you may not know. A sudden crisis might leave an old college roommate on your doorstep, when you thought he was in Punjab. But most of us can guess who is likely to need us. Those who are aging or medically fragile. The family members who live closest to the edge financially. The family and friends who live close to coasts, natural disaster prone areas, or in regions already in crisis. The family who don't have a lot of other supports. People in densely populated, resources stressed urban areas. People near potential military and terrorist targets.
Now let me be clear - everyone is at risk of something, as far as I know. If you live near the Pacific Coast, you've got tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes, in the southwest, drought and hurricanes at the Gulf. Gulf Coast, we all know about. West Central - drought, flood and blizzards. Southeast, heatwaves, drought, hurricanes, ice storms, floods. Midwest earthquakes (the biggest earthquake in US history was centered around Missouri), tornadoes, floods and blizzards. Northeast blizzards, ice storms, floods and Godzilla getting lose from New York ;-). Plus, there are potential human created disasters everywhere. No one gets off free, although Akron is probably less likely to be a terrorist target than Washington DC, and Caribou Maine is comparatively low on Volcanoes.
I'm going to guess that many of us can expect more people than we think if there's a large scale disaster. It is common for us to say "Oh, My mother, my brother and his wife, and my aunt and cousin." But remember, these people also have family *they* can't leave behind. Your brother's wife has an aging mother, and a divorced sister with three kids. She can no more leave them behind in a disaster than you could leave your sister - and if they don't have any better options, they'll be coming to you. After all, you are * family * And realistically, most of us will probably be the only ones in our own families who are prepared. Everyone knows this. So even if your second cousin only sees you at weddings and funerals, he may be thinking of you as his contingency plan. And heck, if this cousin has a well stocked place in a comparatively safe area, you might be thinking of him.
In a large scale, long term crisis, you may have to limit who you can take in. In the short term, we can all endure a few nights crammed on the floor together. And frankly, if the stakes are high enough and you care enough about the people involved, you can live that way a very long time. But if there are other alternatives, you may at some point have to say no to people. Think hard about this one. Think hard about what the price they'll pay is, and what the stakes are for you. In novels, you always can tell when the food is going to run out - that is, you can sit there and do the math and say 'nope, sorry, we can't take care of you." But in real life, the situation isn't always static - if you give your last crust to a hungry child, you might starve your own. Or there might be a little more for your kids tomorrow, and you might save a life. The world isn't black and white, and neither is real life. My personal preference is generally to err on the side of offering care and protection to as many people as possible.
Now I often hear people who have been preparing for peak oil for a while say that they won't take anyone in, because, after all, they told their families and they didn't bother preparing themselves. For most people, I think that is, to be blunt, simple posturing. That is, you may say now, "Uncle George and Aunt Lydia and my college roommate Steve will pay for laughing at me about peak oil." But unless you are a much tougher person than most people are, when Uncle George and Aunt Lydia, Steve, his wife Ki, and his daughter need a place at 2 am, you'll be opening the door up wide. Because sometimes things are more important than being petty. And even if you don't think you can feed them forever, you may also be able to provide a period of rest, a temporary solution, while you begin to think ahead. So I'd lose the "nobody but the wife and me" bullhockey right away, and start planning.
Rule #5 - Shop Now
Now not everyone will be able to do this, and we haven't yet, but my basic feeling is that the ideal situation for most people would be enough stored food for double the numbers in your family for two years. Now don't panic when you hear that - you may think I'm nuts, that having six months worth of basic foods for your family even now seems beyond you. And I understand that. Remember, I'm not there yet either. Food for 12 for 2 years is a A LOT of food, and storing and managing that much food is work. It also costs money to accumulate it. We do it by buying a little extra every time we go to the coop or bulk store. 25 lbs of black beans or 50 of whole wheat really don't cost that much, and are well worth it for the security they provide. During the fall, we buy extra potatoes and onions and grow extra as well, and store them. We can give them to the food pantry if we don't use them - in fact, one of the most important reasons we store food is that it allows us to be generous, to give away to charity even when things are tight for us. And for those of us who may have to rely on others, it can either delay the time of consolidation of housing by cutting down on our need to buy food after a job loss or other crisis, or at least it can allow us to arrive with something in hand.
At a minimum, I would plan on six months worth of food for your family, and a lot of practice making meals out of that food. The sudden arrival of five or ten hungry, desperate and now poor family members will make the wisdom of having a large supply of basic staples around.
If you haven't begun thinking about food storage at all, I'd start with Alan Hagan's _Prudent Food Storage FAQ_, one of the very best resources on this. Alan comments here, and has done an amazing job on this http://www.survival-center.com/foodfaq/. My own personal minimum list of foods to store is this. The above assumes that you are buying most of your food at a grocery store or coop, in small quantities. There are plans that use fewer items, and plans that use more and different ones, but this is my own personal suggestion. You don't need all of these things, and you should adapt to your own family's preferences, but if I had to store only a few items, but didn't have to go for absolute minimums, I'd choose these.
Whole Wheat
White Rice
Whole corn
Pinto Beans
Black Soybeans
Canned Pumpkin (1 can per person, per week)
Canned Tunafish (enough for 1 can per person per week)
Powdered Milk
peanut butter
Honey
Alfalfa seeds for sprouting
Multivitamins
Canned mustard greens
Dried Cranberries
canned tomatoes
Olive oil
cider vinegar (unpasteurized)
iodized salt (very important!)
From this very basic mix of foods, you can make quite a few tasty meals. Beans and rice, with a salad of sprouts and dried cranberries. You could make bread (sourdough), and add a little tenderness and nutrition with canned pumpkin, and have that for breakfast. Or have it for lunch in a peanut butter and honey sandwich. With a few spices, you could make a great chili with two beans and tomatoes, and serve it with cornbread and mustard greens. You can make pasta and serve it with tomato sauce and olive oil, or make a cold rice salad with rice, greens, cold cooked beans, sprouts, olive oil and vinegar. You get the point. In fact, I actually think it is better, whenever possible, to store local foods - what is grown near you, but if you had to work only with a few supermarket options, these would be my choices.
Mostly, the rule is store what you eat, and eat what you store. That means learning to eat and use basic food that can be stored dry, dehydrated or canned - cooking from staples like grains, beans, etc... If you don't eat this way, you should - here are some cookbook suggestions for how to learn: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/09/some-of-my-favorite-cookbooks-for-low.html
I do store two things that I don't usually eat. The first is canned shortening. The reason I do this is that it lasts forever and is cheap. The reason I don't eat it is that transfats are unbelievably awful for you. My feeling is that shortening is a survival food only - but other oils are good for a much shorter time. The other thing I store is infant formula. Every couple of years I buy a 1 year supply of the cheapest possible generic infant formula. I do this because I've seen and heard of too many cases where in a crisis, either a mother was seperated from her infant, or died, or lost her milk or something, and formula is one of those things that can't be had for love or money in an emergency. I'm a breastfeeding Mom myself, and I don't have a baby who requires either formula or breastmilk, but I store infant formula just in case - so that no woman I know should ever be desperate for something to feed her infant. The best option, obviously, would be wet nursing. But if that's not possible, an emergency supply is better than nothing. A few months before the formula expires, I donate the whole shebang to the local food pantry (which is usually pathetically grateful, because they desperately need formula), and buy another year's supply. I consider it a hedge against a certain evil.
Beyond food, I pick up extra bedding whenever I can, especially blankets at yard sales. Living in upstate NY, and recognizing that if times were hard, we might not be able to provide much heat, storing extra blankets just makes sense. I also have bought a few older futons, in good condition. They can be folded up and stored in a closet to be used if necessary for extra beds. My (crazy-huge) house can currently sleep 10 additional people (beyond us) on beds, plus we have two cribs. But when I was a kid, and my mother ran a daycare, she made up pallets for napping children to sleep on out of old carpet remnents, and so I save these, on the theory that children and younger adults could eventually be kicked onto the carpet, so to speak, if things got really tight.
I believe strongly in having enough dishes, but then again, I love to have people over and cook for a crowd. You can obviously eat in shifts, but yard sales are again a great source of some cheap dishes to stick in a box somewhere. Same with silverwear. A couple of spare sweatshirts and sweatpants in different sizes, if you can afford them, will give people who never had a chance to get anything out of their homes something to wear. Extra soap, toothbrushes and toilet paper will be useful as well. If there are children in your extended family, but none in your home, you might also at yard sales pick up a few ten cent children's books and toys to put in the same box - it will be much easier for traumatized, exhausted children to do something other than dismember your house and scream if you have a few appropriate things for them - some blocks, a ball, a copy of Harry Potter...whatever.
In terms of medical supplies, first of all, get a good first aid book and read it now. One of the most important things you can do is know when you need a doctor. But if the emergency rooms are closed, or flooded with patients (or water), or you can't get there, you need to be able to take care of an emergency yourself. Learn CPR, including infant and child, and learn how to tend basic injuries and get along without making things worse. Keep a stack of bandages, peroxide or alchohol, painkillers, and other basics in your house.
Also be ready to leave the house in an emergency. Have a "bug out bag" with light food (dehydrated food, ramen, food bars), a couple of blankets, some water, a change of clothes, baby supplies for babies, basic hygeine items, a few toys and books for older kids, an emergency medical kit and some basic tools (pocket knife, waterproof matches, rope), flashlight (either with extra batteries or a hand charged one), phone numbers, contact information, cell phone and manual phone charger, maps of your area and anywhere you might be going, and photocopies of id and important documents. Mine personally includes a disk of important pictures of my kids.
You should have one bag for each person, and that includes kids. Even if they only carry a few of their most precious things, they can participate in putting the bag together, and you can practice getting out of the house and grabbing it in an emergency. Store extra blankets, water, and a larger first aid kit in your car. Keep stabilized extra gas in your garage so that you can get where you need to go even if the pumps aren't running. Just in case leaving an area by car is infeasible, you might also wish to have bicycles to help you get out of an area quickly. This might be particularly important for urban dwellers - many cities, such as Manhattan, have no realistic evacuation plan. The reality is that it is simply impossible to get that many people out of a small space in less than four days. So a bicycle gives you a real advantage if you need to travel quickly and over long distance, but can't rely on public transport or a car being available or usable.
Even if these supplies are never of any use to you, they can always be resold at yard sales, donated to charity or made use of yourself over time. Given that we are in an inflationary cycle, things you buy now will likely serve you better than waiting, so if you can, plan ahead.
Rule #6 - Get your head in order.
Now that we're through the logistics of physical prep, there's mental prep. One of the first things we all need to do is take a few deep breaths and relax our preconceived notions about what this will be like. Some of us may be anticipating family members moving in with a great deal of enthusiasm, but others with considerably less. But whatever we're thinking (and obviously a positive attitude is preferrable to a bad one), we should try and let some of our expectations go, and face things as they come.
The reality is that if we're the hosts, the people coming to live with us may be coming enthusiastically, or miserably. They may be arriving after lots of planning and fun negotiations, or after incredible trauma and horror. They may drive us crazy because they are like that, or because they are depressed, suffering from illnesses or post-traumatic stress disorder. They may feel like failures because they lost their house or couldn't keep their family safe, or they may feel like this is the change they need. And this may turn out to be terrible, or it might be much better than any of us ever expected. And if we're the guests, we may be coming feeling terrible, ashamed. Or we may be hoping for a better future, but unsure of our place with new rules, new family, new arrangements. We won't know until it happens.
For me, the most important things to remember (and I didn't always remember them when Eric's grandparents were alive - something I regret) is that the people whose home you are, or who are home to you (home is the place, when you go there, they have to take you in) are the people who share, for all their imperfections, ties that matter, that are worthy of honor and respect. No matter how maddening they are, no matter how frustrated you are, no matter how difficult moving in together is, no matter how close the quarters or stressful the situation, these people are your tribe. It is in some ways easy not to love and appreciate the people who are always there, especially when you sometimes wish they would be elsewhere, but it is also worth noting that the world is not full of people who will share their homes with you, add water to the soup so your husband can eat, rock your child through a nightmare to let you sleep, give you the coat from their backs and the bread from their table, and say, in a thousand words and gestures, "you are one of us."
The more we can go into this possibility with the recognition that it is fraught, it is difficult, and it is *possible* the better off we'll be. By all means let us joke and compare notes about this awful relative and that one. But remember, the jokes are just jokes - they are part of being a family (biological and non) - but at the root, underneath the joke, there is a good deal more. Don't forget what's at the root.
I will write much more about this subject, the daily realities of living together in a future post, whenever I get to it (not this week - I'm out of town). I have much more to say about privacy, and accomodation, and practical ways we might get along.
Cheers,
Sharon
Friday, August 17, 2007
Update and a Couple of Shameless Plugs
I've been slowing down on the posts lately, as work on the book picks up and the harvest season enters full swing. DH returns to work in a week and a half, and that will mean a bit less time still for the blog. And for most of next week I'll be out of town. All of which means that the pickins will be slim around here. I'm still trying to get that post on moving in with family together before I go, though, and who knows, maybe inspiration will strike.
In the meantime, I'm going to be shameless in several ways. The first way that I'm going to be shameless is that instead of writing new posts for y'all, when I start getting embarassed that the blog is so empty, I'm going to link to an old post that you might not have seen that I liked. We'll make it sound good - we'll call it recycling. My apologies to those who've seen it before.
The second shameless plug is for the Community Solutions Conference in Yellow Springs Ohio, at which I'll be speaking. I had an amazing time and learned a lot last year, and I'm looking forward to my trip this year (by amtrak, carpool and mule ;-). One of the best things about it was that I met the most amazing people last year. I'm hoping that I get to meet a few of the people who read this blog when I'm there this year. Here's the link to the conference: http://www.communitysolution.org/conference.html
Final shameless plug - if you check out the website, you'll see the title of my first book listed under my name. _Depletion and Abundance_ (I'm still looking for a better title - I'll take suggestions!) will be coming out next fall from New Society. Its focus is on helping families adapt to peak oil, climate change and the coming economic crisis, and it provides a blueprint for how to do things like adapt existing homes to living with little energy, feed yourself and start local economies. The second book, _A Nation of Farmers_ co-written with the amazing Aaron Newton, describes how we might get "theah from heah" (as they say where I'm from) - away from an industrial food system, to a sustainable one that could feed the world in the coming hard times. That one will come out in the Spring of 2009, also from New Society Publishing.
I admit, I'm pretty excited to actually get to put the forthcoming books up with my name as a real, grownup (sorta) author!
Anyway, here's my first bit of recycling - and I promise, new posts soon. But here's one you might not have seen recently, describing how people might adapt an existing suburban house to hard times: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/11/self-sufficiency-plan-for-suburban.html.
Cheers, and thanks for putting up with this!
Sharon
In the meantime, I'm going to be shameless in several ways. The first way that I'm going to be shameless is that instead of writing new posts for y'all, when I start getting embarassed that the blog is so empty, I'm going to link to an old post that you might not have seen that I liked. We'll make it sound good - we'll call it recycling. My apologies to those who've seen it before.
The second shameless plug is for the Community Solutions Conference in Yellow Springs Ohio, at which I'll be speaking. I had an amazing time and learned a lot last year, and I'm looking forward to my trip this year (by amtrak, carpool and mule ;-). One of the best things about it was that I met the most amazing people last year. I'm hoping that I get to meet a few of the people who read this blog when I'm there this year. Here's the link to the conference: http://www.communitysolution.org/conference.html
Final shameless plug - if you check out the website, you'll see the title of my first book listed under my name. _Depletion and Abundance_ (I'm still looking for a better title - I'll take suggestions!) will be coming out next fall from New Society. Its focus is on helping families adapt to peak oil, climate change and the coming economic crisis, and it provides a blueprint for how to do things like adapt existing homes to living with little energy, feed yourself and start local economies. The second book, _A Nation of Farmers_ co-written with the amazing Aaron Newton, describes how we might get "theah from heah" (as they say where I'm from) - away from an industrial food system, to a sustainable one that could feed the world in the coming hard times. That one will come out in the Spring of 2009, also from New Society Publishing.
I admit, I'm pretty excited to actually get to put the forthcoming books up with my name as a real, grownup (sorta) author!
Anyway, here's my first bit of recycling - and I promise, new posts soon. But here's one you might not have seen recently, describing how people might adapt an existing suburban house to hard times: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/11/self-sufficiency-plan-for-suburban.html.
Cheers, and thanks for putting up with this!
Sharon
I Wish I Had Her Gifts...
If you are Rioting for Austerity (or if you aren't but are interested in what we do), or if you are interested in conservation, you should check out the lovely, lovely images that Miranda, my partner in Riot has created. She's planning on producing 365 of them, and they visually encapsulate the changes we need to make. Like everything Miranda does, it is graceful, beautiful and elegant. Can you tell I want to be her when I grow up?
http://green365.wordpress.com/
I particularly love the laundry hanging image.
Sharon in upstate NY
http://green365.wordpress.com/
I particularly love the laundry hanging image.
Sharon in upstate NY
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 16 - Cut Your Laundry Energy
Let us start with the clotheline. If you don't have one, get one. If you live in a subdivision that doesn't permit them, hang one in your attic, porch or use a drying rack inside, or do a little agitating and get the rules changed, but lose the dryer. I had a friend from Indonesia who said that of all the funny things she'd learned about Americans, the idea that we used machines to dry our clothes, which the air and the sun did for free was absolutely the weirdest. She couldn't get over the idea that we were that crazy. And she has a point. The average dryer costs most families $80 per year. That's a lot of money for something free. And the greenhouse gas emissions are signficant.
Now I don't find hanging laundry to be a hardship at all. I can get a load up on the line in 4 minutes, the laundry smells better, and while I'm doing it, the kids can help, I can watch the birds in the trees - frankly, I find it to be one of the most pleasant chores I do. Now it is true that things are softer when they come out of the dryer - and some things, like towels, can end up on the crunchy side if you have hard water. A little vinegar in the rinse, and hanging on windy days helps. But the thing that helps the most is simply getting used to it - it won't take very long before you'll stop expecting everything to be soft. And everything smells better on the line, and many things come off the line nicely crisp - oxford shirts, sheets and tablecloths are much nicer off the line. If you are really having trouble with the transition, you can throw your already 90% dry clothes in the dryer for a few minutes to soften up, but it is much easier just to get used to it.
In the winter, you can freeze-dry clothes outside (they come out softer), or hang them up inside on an indoor clothesline or drying rack. I often just throw them over the shower curtain rack as well, but I'm a notorious slob, so you probably shouldn't emulate me, or should at least hide the clothes when company comes over.
The next thing to lose is the dry cleaner. Conventional dry cleaning uses incredibly toxic solvents to clean your clothes, which are neither good for you or the environment. It is also extremely energy intensive. Treehugger has a good analysis of the issues here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/ask_treehugger.php. If you have an environmentally friendly dry cleaner near you, by all means use it. If you don't, avoid "dry clean only" clothing like the plague. If you must wear it, do so as infrequently as possible and go as long as humanly possible between dry cleanings - air and spot clean instead. But if you don't have to wear an expensive suit every day, choose clothing that doesn't need dry cleaning. Most natural fibers (preferrable in many cases to petroleum based) can be hand washed - cashmere and wool, for example.
I don't think chemical fabric softeners are a good idea for anyone - dryer sheets and chemical fabric softeners contain a host of chemicals - here's a list of some of the chemicals and their potential consequences. http://www.ourlittleplace.com/fabric.html. Just do without them. And you'll want the lowest impact detergents, with the least packaging you can get. At a minimum, buy bulk powdered laundry degtergent in cardboard, use as little as you can and still get the clothes clean, and recycle the packaging. But if you can afford it and have access to them, there are a host of non-toxic, environmentally friendly detergents out there, or if you make soap, you can make your own laundry soap and know that the ingredients are quite friendly. Traditional washing soda, available at some stores is also very low impact. Borax is considerably better than bleach on your whites, and is available at my grocery store.
The next thing you can do is reduce the sheer amount of laundry you need to wash. Towels and sheets can be washed less often. Clothing can be reworn, perhaps aired if it doesn't smell fresh, and washing avoided. Don't just toss things in the hamper - make sure they really need cleaning. Put out of season clothes away in places that get decent air circulation if possible, to avoid a need for rewashing. And spot-treat stains to avoid multiple washes.
Toilet training makes a huge reduction in parent's laundry - I'm not exactly the poster child for getting your kid trained early - my oldest disabled child is not yet trained, my second was nearly four, and #3 just trained at 3 1/2. But the sooner you do this, the sooner the cloth diapers go away, and that's quite an incentive. Obviously, you can't make a kid toilet train, but if you can do it, it is worth devoting some time to.
I have done all my laundry in cold water since I was a kid, and my clothes come out fine. I find it requires a little more attention to stains since my water here is very, very hard, but there is really no need to do laundry in hot water. We wash diapers in cold as well, and have had no problems with rashes or diseases. Hanging them in the sun makes an excellent natural antibacterial.
And then, there's hand and non-electric washing. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing - you can, for example, hand wash a sink full of underwear and socks in a couple of minutes, and thus perhaps delay your need for a machine load. Or you might consider hand washing everything. For one person, hand washing everything but towels, sheets and jeans would be entirely feasible - I know, I did it for years, simply because I couldn't afford the quarters for the machines. I reserved the trip to the washer to once a month. And when I finally had a washing machine, I was struck by how much more often I was using it.
There are a whole host of ways to do laundry without electricity. Lehmans sells a very small pressure washer, great for a small household or a few diapers. It costs less than $70. Or you could spend a ton and get the James Handwasher, wringer and rinse tubs. Or you could use a free plastic bucket from the grocery store and a plunger, or simply soak things a long time and rub them together with your hands. Or you could do what Colin Beavan and his family do - grape stomp your laundry in your tub. http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/a_grape_stomper.html
My personal fave is the bucket and plunger method, but honestly, I went years using a bathroom sink, some water and a little detergent, and life went along just fine. I admit, I like my washing machine, but it is good to know I can get along without it.
Sharon
Now I don't find hanging laundry to be a hardship at all. I can get a load up on the line in 4 minutes, the laundry smells better, and while I'm doing it, the kids can help, I can watch the birds in the trees - frankly, I find it to be one of the most pleasant chores I do. Now it is true that things are softer when they come out of the dryer - and some things, like towels, can end up on the crunchy side if you have hard water. A little vinegar in the rinse, and hanging on windy days helps. But the thing that helps the most is simply getting used to it - it won't take very long before you'll stop expecting everything to be soft. And everything smells better on the line, and many things come off the line nicely crisp - oxford shirts, sheets and tablecloths are much nicer off the line. If you are really having trouble with the transition, you can throw your already 90% dry clothes in the dryer for a few minutes to soften up, but it is much easier just to get used to it.
In the winter, you can freeze-dry clothes outside (they come out softer), or hang them up inside on an indoor clothesline or drying rack. I often just throw them over the shower curtain rack as well, but I'm a notorious slob, so you probably shouldn't emulate me, or should at least hide the clothes when company comes over.
The next thing to lose is the dry cleaner. Conventional dry cleaning uses incredibly toxic solvents to clean your clothes, which are neither good for you or the environment. It is also extremely energy intensive. Treehugger has a good analysis of the issues here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/ask_treehugger.php. If you have an environmentally friendly dry cleaner near you, by all means use it. If you don't, avoid "dry clean only" clothing like the plague. If you must wear it, do so as infrequently as possible and go as long as humanly possible between dry cleanings - air and spot clean instead. But if you don't have to wear an expensive suit every day, choose clothing that doesn't need dry cleaning. Most natural fibers (preferrable in many cases to petroleum based) can be hand washed - cashmere and wool, for example.
I don't think chemical fabric softeners are a good idea for anyone - dryer sheets and chemical fabric softeners contain a host of chemicals - here's a list of some of the chemicals and their potential consequences. http://www.ourlittleplace.com/fabric.html. Just do without them. And you'll want the lowest impact detergents, with the least packaging you can get. At a minimum, buy bulk powdered laundry degtergent in cardboard, use as little as you can and still get the clothes clean, and recycle the packaging. But if you can afford it and have access to them, there are a host of non-toxic, environmentally friendly detergents out there, or if you make soap, you can make your own laundry soap and know that the ingredients are quite friendly. Traditional washing soda, available at some stores is also very low impact. Borax is considerably better than bleach on your whites, and is available at my grocery store.
The next thing you can do is reduce the sheer amount of laundry you need to wash. Towels and sheets can be washed less often. Clothing can be reworn, perhaps aired if it doesn't smell fresh, and washing avoided. Don't just toss things in the hamper - make sure they really need cleaning. Put out of season clothes away in places that get decent air circulation if possible, to avoid a need for rewashing. And spot-treat stains to avoid multiple washes.
Toilet training makes a huge reduction in parent's laundry - I'm not exactly the poster child for getting your kid trained early - my oldest disabled child is not yet trained, my second was nearly four, and #3 just trained at 3 1/2. But the sooner you do this, the sooner the cloth diapers go away, and that's quite an incentive. Obviously, you can't make a kid toilet train, but if you can do it, it is worth devoting some time to.
I have done all my laundry in cold water since I was a kid, and my clothes come out fine. I find it requires a little more attention to stains since my water here is very, very hard, but there is really no need to do laundry in hot water. We wash diapers in cold as well, and have had no problems with rashes or diseases. Hanging them in the sun makes an excellent natural antibacterial.
And then, there's hand and non-electric washing. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing - you can, for example, hand wash a sink full of underwear and socks in a couple of minutes, and thus perhaps delay your need for a machine load. Or you might consider hand washing everything. For one person, hand washing everything but towels, sheets and jeans would be entirely feasible - I know, I did it for years, simply because I couldn't afford the quarters for the machines. I reserved the trip to the washer to once a month. And when I finally had a washing machine, I was struck by how much more often I was using it.
There are a whole host of ways to do laundry without electricity. Lehmans sells a very small pressure washer, great for a small household or a few diapers. It costs less than $70. Or you could spend a ton and get the James Handwasher, wringer and rinse tubs. Or you could use a free plastic bucket from the grocery store and a plunger, or simply soak things a long time and rub them together with your hands. Or you could do what Colin Beavan and his family do - grape stomp your laundry in your tub. http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/a_grape_stomper.html
My personal fave is the bucket and plunger method, but honestly, I went years using a bathroom sink, some water and a little detergent, and life went along just fine. I admit, I like my washing machine, but it is good to know I can get along without it.
Sharon
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Here's What Peak Oil Actually Looks Like
Roel sent me this excellent article http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/peak+oil-renewable+energy-shortages/490 by Chris Nelder, who offers up one of the first comprehensive overviews of how peak oil, with its permanent rise in energy prices, is affecting the third world. In short, as has been reported several times in the past on this blog - it has effectively reduced or eliminated their ability to provide oil for basic needs.
"But the actual feeling of peak oil didn't really hit me until this week, as I perused a page on Jim Kingsdale's excellent Energy Investment Strategies site, listing countries that are currently experiencing serious fuel shortages and grid blackouts.
Here in the first world, we still have the luxury of armchair theorizing about peak oil, and paying a bit more for gasoline, but the third world is actually feeling the pain of peak oil today. Rising oil prices are acting as a regressive worldwide tax, pricing poorer countries right out of the market.
Since their experience must to some extent herald ours as peak sets in, let's see how peak oil feels to those who are undergoing it firsthand."
I think many Americans who have never visited the third world really have no idea how dependent the infrastructure of even very poor people is on energy - that is, many people envision poor nations as existing without meaningful energy infrastructure, and in some rural areas, this is true. But most of the poor people in the world live in cities right now, and even rural places depend on outside infrastructure for things like roads, vaccinations, birth control and water pumping.
The disruption of energy supplies and infrastructure makes already poor people poorer. In places like Bangladesh, that use their electricity in, among other things, hundreds of pumping stations to keep back flooding, this magnifies the effects of climate change. Estimates suggest that right now, 30% of the country is underwater, or has been in the last week.
Thousands of basic needs are going unmet because the price of energy is simply too high for poor nations to compete with the rich ones. And the price of this is measured in lives. If you don't yet see the evidence for peak oil, you aren't looking in the right places.
If there was any major doubt about the change in the order of things, the IEA's announcement today that the Middle East is in immanent danger of becoming a net fuel oil importer ought to shake us. Stop and think about how bizarre notion is - the location of the largest known oil resources on earth, 3/4 of all proven reserves is going to need to import gas. http://www.bi-me.com/main.php?id=12371&t=1&c=33&cg=4. Now some of this is a refinery shortage, but ask yourself this - with the middle east developing strong incentives to keep more and more of their oil at home, what does that mean for us?
Nelder's larger point, that peak oil is really only up for discussion in the rich world is central here. I would argue, however, that it is really only up for discussion in the richer *parts* of the rich world. For millions of Americans living near or below the poverty line, who may never have heard the term "peak oil," things are steadily getting worse. Food prices are rising, and are predicted to rise still further over the winter. If Goldman Sachs and others are right, we'll see $100 dollar a barrel oil pricing this winter, so it is little wonder that poverty abatement programs are overwhelmed with need for food supplementation, and fuel assistance programs are reporting overwhelming advance applications. Food pantries are reporting that two income families are more and more in need: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/08/12/Northpinellas/Food_banks_see_more_n.shtml
And, of course, if you are poor in the US you know that you too will pay with your life, probably well before the rich guy near you. US lifespans fell again against the rest of the world:
http://health.yahoo.com/news/178301, including against poorer nations that spend half of what we do or less on medical care. The news is worse if you focus in on specific areas - for example, residents of inner city Detroit have lifespans shorter than those in 26 poor nations:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9105953.
The simple facts are these. Americans are prone to believe that poverty is the fault of the poor - and thus, to assume that inequity is largely a personal matter. Which means that as millions of Americans fall just a little further behind, as they lose their houses, declare bankruptcy, see their power shut off or their region's services disappear they will blame ...not the system, but themselves.
We have historically rationed things by price. Right now we are rationing energy by price in the third world and in our own country. Our problem to growing demand - the cheerily named "demand destruction." But demand destruction works two ways - in encourages the rich and reasonably comfortable to conserve a little. But it simply destroys the poor - it takes those who have no fat in their budgets, no room for accomodation, and while the rest of us are considering whether we should turn down the a/c a little, it kills people. It shuts down water treatment (which has killed millions in Iraq, mostly children), it interrupts medical treatments and disrupts roads so that needed supplies can't be transported. It disrupts society - if no one knows when or if the water will ever run again, it is very hard to decide what to do, where to go, how to move.
Demand destruction of the most ruthless type is coming our way. If you aren't poor enough to see it yet, be grateful, give a little more to your local poverty abatement programs, and wait a little bit. Our time will come too, unless we change our form of rationing.
Sharon
"But the actual feeling of peak oil didn't really hit me until this week, as I perused a page on Jim Kingsdale's excellent Energy Investment Strategies site, listing countries that are currently experiencing serious fuel shortages and grid blackouts.
Here in the first world, we still have the luxury of armchair theorizing about peak oil, and paying a bit more for gasoline, but the third world is actually feeling the pain of peak oil today. Rising oil prices are acting as a regressive worldwide tax, pricing poorer countries right out of the market.
Since their experience must to some extent herald ours as peak sets in, let's see how peak oil feels to those who are undergoing it firsthand."
I think many Americans who have never visited the third world really have no idea how dependent the infrastructure of even very poor people is on energy - that is, many people envision poor nations as existing without meaningful energy infrastructure, and in some rural areas, this is true. But most of the poor people in the world live in cities right now, and even rural places depend on outside infrastructure for things like roads, vaccinations, birth control and water pumping.
The disruption of energy supplies and infrastructure makes already poor people poorer. In places like Bangladesh, that use their electricity in, among other things, hundreds of pumping stations to keep back flooding, this magnifies the effects of climate change. Estimates suggest that right now, 30% of the country is underwater, or has been in the last week.
Thousands of basic needs are going unmet because the price of energy is simply too high for poor nations to compete with the rich ones. And the price of this is measured in lives. If you don't yet see the evidence for peak oil, you aren't looking in the right places.
If there was any major doubt about the change in the order of things, the IEA's announcement today that the Middle East is in immanent danger of becoming a net fuel oil importer ought to shake us. Stop and think about how bizarre notion is - the location of the largest known oil resources on earth, 3/4 of all proven reserves is going to need to import gas. http://www.bi-me.com/main.php?id=12371&t=1&c=33&cg=4. Now some of this is a refinery shortage, but ask yourself this - with the middle east developing strong incentives to keep more and more of their oil at home, what does that mean for us?
Nelder's larger point, that peak oil is really only up for discussion in the rich world is central here. I would argue, however, that it is really only up for discussion in the richer *parts* of the rich world. For millions of Americans living near or below the poverty line, who may never have heard the term "peak oil," things are steadily getting worse. Food prices are rising, and are predicted to rise still further over the winter. If Goldman Sachs and others are right, we'll see $100 dollar a barrel oil pricing this winter, so it is little wonder that poverty abatement programs are overwhelmed with need for food supplementation, and fuel assistance programs are reporting overwhelming advance applications. Food pantries are reporting that two income families are more and more in need: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/08/12/Northpinellas/Food_banks_see_more_n.shtml
And, of course, if you are poor in the US you know that you too will pay with your life, probably well before the rich guy near you. US lifespans fell again against the rest of the world:
http://health.yahoo.com/news/178301, including against poorer nations that spend half of what we do or less on medical care. The news is worse if you focus in on specific areas - for example, residents of inner city Detroit have lifespans shorter than those in 26 poor nations:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9105953.
The simple facts are these. Americans are prone to believe that poverty is the fault of the poor - and thus, to assume that inequity is largely a personal matter. Which means that as millions of Americans fall just a little further behind, as they lose their houses, declare bankruptcy, see their power shut off or their region's services disappear they will blame ...not the system, but themselves.
We have historically rationed things by price. Right now we are rationing energy by price in the third world and in our own country. Our problem to growing demand - the cheerily named "demand destruction." But demand destruction works two ways - in encourages the rich and reasonably comfortable to conserve a little. But it simply destroys the poor - it takes those who have no fat in their budgets, no room for accomodation, and while the rest of us are considering whether we should turn down the a/c a little, it kills people. It shuts down water treatment (which has killed millions in Iraq, mostly children), it interrupts medical treatments and disrupts roads so that needed supplies can't be transported. It disrupts society - if no one knows when or if the water will ever run again, it is very hard to decide what to do, where to go, how to move.
Demand destruction of the most ruthless type is coming our way. If you aren't poor enough to see it yet, be grateful, give a little more to your local poverty abatement programs, and wait a little bit. Our time will come too, unless we change our form of rationing.
Sharon
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Getting Over the Final Frontier - Part I
Ok, enough of girlie subjects like breeding and feeding, on to something with heft, with manly seriousness. I refer, of course, to space, and whether or not we'll be resolving our present crises by simply leaving earth's wrecked shell and heading off to another, virgin planet.
I run into the notion that space is and must be our destiny fairly often, and I think even people who don't think about it much in a conscious way have come to believe in the back of their heads that we have a future out in space. So much of our cultural vision of the future looks something like "Star Trek" that our relationship to space underlies a great deal of our imagined future. I thought it would be worth doing some writing and thinking on this subject, and I've divided it into two posts. The first is about the practicalities - are we going into space? And if we are, is that the answer to any or all of our present problems? The second post is about the meta-issues raised by our thinking about space. That is, how does what we have been taught to think about our future alter our present and the solutions to our present crises?
Since on this subject I'm talking out my ass even more than usual, I've imported an expert. Since this blog's budget for outside experts is nil, I'm more than fortunate in being married to this one. I can pay him off by washing his share of the dishes. Thus, I introduce my husband, Eric. Despite the obvious lapse in scientific judgement that led to his marrying me, he's fairly well qualified to comment here. Eric has a BA in Physics from MIT, a Ph.d in Astrophysics from Harvard, he's worked for NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope has taken pictures based on his research. He's presently a Professor at SUNY Albany, where he teaches, among other things, one of the University's most popular and heavily enrolled course, "The History of Space Exploration." He gets credit on this blog mostly for being a great father and being tolerant enough to put up with me, but he's really, really smart too ;-). The opinions here are mine, and so the errors, but Eric is responsible for all the good, useful facts.
This post will deal with the purely practical issues of going into space in a depleted world. And the first question that we have to ask is "is it possible, technologically speaking, for us to go into space on any large scale." Despite President Bush's 2005 call for a manned mission to Mars, despite the Russian announcement that they hope to move heavy industry into space by 2012, there are some real and serious reasons to be dubious about whether we can ever get off the planet (floating around in orbit for a couple of weeks is not really "off the planet" in any meaningful sense) and equal reasons to ask, even if we can, if that's where we should be placing our limited energies and resources.
It is important to understand here where we actually are in this process. At the moment, private industry is mostly concentrating on commercial space tourism - that is, short, suborbital trips that would allow very rich people to see the earth from space and say they've been there. Neither private industry nor government space programs seem immanently inclined to start the process of moving people into space as workers, colonists or even on long distance manned missions. Essentially, other than the refinement of existing space technologies for reusable shuttles and space stations, no major changes in our relationship to space have occurred since the moon landing almost 40 years ago. So why does this even matter? Can't we just fix our attention elsewhere and let things happen or not?
I think the answer is "no" for several reasons. The first is, how often has any peak oil activist, discussing the limits and problems of any given renewable technology as substitute for oil and gas run into the line "If we can put a man on the moon....?" Even people who don't think much about space at all have come to accept the rationale that pretty much anything is technically possible, if we just put our minds and wallets to it. This sense of space-as-proof-of- technological-achievement has given us a cornucopian vision (as has the history of the Manhattan project, which is a similar instance of "put in a coin and get the technology you want").
I think we have to think hard about the limitations of space if we want to point out that putting a man on the moon was one instance of technological success - but there are many more examples of technological limitation that didn't go our way. One of them, I would argue, seems to be space itself. That is, we put a man on the moon, but real limitations have prevented us from going much further.
The other reason is that there are a large number of people who either consciously or unconsciously believe that space is the human destiny - that whatever short term limitations we are encountering, ultimately, we are "meant" to go into space. This generally comes along with a view of history as manifest destiny - we came, we saw, we conquered one frontier, then the next, then the next, and now left with the ummm "final" one, we have to go to space. This is progress, and anything else would be tantimount to returning to the trees and throwing feces at each other. I'll talk about this vision of progress in my second post.
The other viewpoint, based on better reasoning, is that we have to get into space because humanity won't survive otherwise. Either the speaker believes we've destroyed the planet already and that our only hope of a future is to leave and colonize other worlds, or they are concerned about the real possibility of a meteor crash wiping out humanity. Because we are now aware of such problems, it is our duty, these speakers postulate, to prevent such a happening. Isaac Asimov famously summed up this viewpoint by saying "the earth is simply too fragile a basket for humanity to place all its eggs in."
I'd argue that that last notion is part of our problem, of course. It is hard to quantify how much of our sense that humanity has an "out" we can hold responsible for our trashing of the planet - probably not that much. But millions of people believe on some level that our future looks like a Star Trek episode, out colonizing new worlds in between life on our comfy aluminum tin cans. In fact, we're creating a world that valorizes and prioritizes the artificial in many ways, while it pretends to weep for nature. We mourn, of course, that the wild is gone, but increasingly we spend very little time in nature, and far more in our own little artificial environments. The doors don't whoosh open when we walk towards them, but when you spend your life in airconditioning, shooting pretend klingons on your playstation, how different is it, really? What would happen if we envisioned our future as one fully integrated with our environment? What would happen if we fully had it in our head that every future generation would depend on what we do now in this place we'll probably always live in?
So here are the questions. Can we colonize space? Should we colonize space? What would it get us? Who would go? What would be the outcomes? Part one is here now, part two will be forthcoming when I get to it.
There are considerably more caveats to the first question than most people know. For example, most space colonization postulations imagine us starting out on the moon - if you read science fiction at all, you've read a thousand such stories about our lunar bases. The reason we imagine using the moon as a base is because it is tremendously energy and fuel intensive to launch things up into space from Earth's atmosphere, but quite easy to launch things into space from the low gravity, atmosphereless moon. Thus, it is the logical place to build and repair space ships, locate heavy industry, and start out on any plan for a space based program of colonization. You've probably read a dozen novels that imagine we have a lunar base. My personal favorite such novel is Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_. But we're unlikely to build a Moon colony (or a la Heinlein, a space based Guantanamo) as in the fiction novels, because in every one I've read, the Moon has water on it, in the form of ice, there for the mining.
But the reality is that the more scientists study the moon, the more likely it seems that there is no water - period. Thus far, we've never yet come up with a substitute for water - not for drinking, not for industrial use, bathing, etc... Now the space program has led to many systems for recycling water, but it is hardly a closed system. Water that is drunk by people and excreted as sweat and urine are not wholly reclaimable, so there's a solid, steady net loss. We cannot as yet extract ammonia from urine efficiently. The Russians on Mir, whose water reclamation technologies are more advanced than our own, were ultimately able to reclaim about 50% of the water used on the station - and it is worth noting that they used very, very little water. Most industrial processes require huge quantities of water - and that water is also often non-recyclable, lost in manufacture.
Now there is a lot of oxygen tied up in rocks on the moon, and some proposals have argued that we could simply liberate it, combined it was hydrogen and make water (remember H2O). But the problem is that the moon doesn't have much hydrogen, and virtually none that is accessible. Which means that all our plans for moon bases involve use obtaining hydrogen on earth (generally extracted by energy intensive water electrolysis, now mostly run by coal plants), putting it onto space ships (hydrogen is light, but not massless, and there are chronic leakage problems), shooting it up into through our atmosphere and onto the moon, where we will then extract oxygen from rocks (also energy intensive), and combine it with hydrogen so that the lucky folks up there get to drink and bathe once a month or so (you stink in space - in a whole host of ways).
Now energy might not be a big problem on the moon if our expectations are correct - what the moon does have in abundance is Helium 3, not present on the earth in large quantities, and H3 makes a great little reactor and offers real power potential. There are several prototypes out there - so making the energy to extract oxygen from rocks, and the energy for manufacturing might not be a problem. But H3 power wouldn't help us get all that hydrogen off the earth. And consider the potential problem of people being dependent upon outside sources for something as basic as water - we're already people dying from water shortages. Where will the denizens of the moon line up for their water? What happens if infrastructure for something so basic fails?
Hydrogen isn't the only thing we'd have to bring up to the moon. If we were to make use of the moon on any scale, we'd have to bring up all the organic materials or hydroponic solutions that we planned to produce food with - or the food itself. Now astronauts subsist on dehydrated dinners, and cool stuff like Tang, but any kind of long term plan involves growing food. And there's no carbon on the moon at all to begin farming with. Every ounce of organic material required for growing food would have to be transported up, either directly, or in the form of food and water for colonists so that they could use their own effluents in soils. That's a lot of heavy stuff going back and forth, until a critical mass is achieved that would allow food production - if the water problem can be solved.
Now add to that that at first, a vast number of components and raw materials will also have to be transported up, first to build a decent sized habitat and industrial complex. So we're shooting hydrogen, plus all the raw materials and the people up into space to do this work. That means a lot of shuttle launches, no? Now the space shuttle hardly ever goes up right now - when it does, it is big news. In fact, half the time, the launches get delayed, windows missed (you can't reach every point is space every day). We'd be increasing space shots by a factor of thousands. What would the consequences of that be to the planet down here? Well the cost of putting a large scale, self-sustaining space colony on the moon is estimated at several trillion dollars. But besides money, there's the environmental costs. How will we make all this hydrogen? Typically now, hydrogen is seperated by coal burning electrical power - hardly good for the environment.
Perhaps we could build more nuclear plants - want one next door to you? But nuclear power is quite carbon intensive as well - fossil fuels are required at every stage of the process of nuclear fueling (here's my favorite illustration of that point: http://www.peakoil.org.au/nuclear.co2.htm). It is certainly less carbon intensive than coal or natural gas, but the larger question is "can we afford to warm the planet at all in order to go out into space?"
Even if it were feasible to provide that much hydrogen, it would represent a poor investment, a significant warming of the planet. There are other consequences. Every American Space Shuttle launch represents an emission of greenhouse gasses, as well as the dispersal of toxic rocket fuel across the globe. Toxic residues of rocket fuel have been found in salad greens, breast milk and water all over the globe. Perchlorate causes thyroid damage, which can lead to brain damage and lowered IQs in infants born to pregnant mothers who consume greens and drink perchlorate contaminated water. To be fair, perchlorate is not only produced by the space industry - most of it is military use. But that would change in a large scale space program.
Exactly what the global warming consequences of building a moon base or orbital space station on any scale would be is extremely debatable. Space tourism advocate Steven Fawkes asserts that the total impact of a single, short term suborbital flight would be 3 tonnes per flight per passenger, but Fawkes declines to include calculations in his estimate, which certainly makes me suspicious. And space tourism is, in fact, considerably different than the lifeting of industrial materials from earth to space. I have not yet located a single study on the global warming impact of space travel, but space travel is now energy and cost intensive in the extreme. Even with scalable transformation over time, there is little question that the manufacture, transportation, and lifting of everything needed to build a space colony would represent a significant impact on the evironment - that is, we'd be choosing to warm the planet further in the interest of someday getting off of it. Using an estimate based on dollars invested, and the American space program as a model, the figures for carbon intensiveness are far higher.
Add to that the reality that we can only do so many massive industrial build outs at one time and we will have choose - do we focus on space, or on mitigating the damage we're doing to the environment? On adapting to a low oil infrastructure or trying to get to Mars? Those are real choices - I am increasingly dubious that we'll be able to do even many of the adaptations we'd most like to accomplish. Space represents a potential boondoggle we can't afford.
What would the human costs be? Right now, being an astronaut is pretty much the most dangerous job on earth. If you include all the astronauts who didn't quite make it into space (as in the Challenger astronauts), between the US and Russia, about 460 people have gone into space. The known death rate for astronauts is about 5% that is out of 100,000 astronauts, you could expect 5,000 of them to die. And the death rate for space ground crews is also quite high - more than 70 ground crew have died - that we know of. Neither Russia nor China fully reports its ground casualties and there are persistent rumors of more deaths in the early part of the Russian space program than reported.
Right now, when astronauts are sent up only rarely, after hundreds of people double check everything and launches are delayed for bird, being an astronaut is more dangerous than being a logger, police officer, high altitude mountaineer or elephant trainer - several times more. You are more likely to die in space then by soldiering in Iraq right now, today. We could only imagine that death rate rising if we were to colonize space - most true fronteir colonist populations have had death rates between 1/4 and 2/3. That means, the odds are good that when going into space becomes an ordinary business, with regular old business short cuts and bottom lines driving everything, significant chunks of the people sent there will die.
Historically speaking, we've resolved the problem of all the people who die when we conquer frontiers by sending out people we consider expendable. Prisoners, people who look different than us and who own the land we want, religious and cultural minorities, recent immigrants - those are the people we send off to die on frontiers, because we grant ourselves the privelege of not caring. There is little doubt that if we go to space, it will require of us a considerable sacrifice of human life. Who will do the dying this time? Where will we extract the populations that we're prepared to sacrifice, and what incentives will they be given?
Now what about going to Mars instead of to the moon? Mars does have water, so maybe we should start there. There are certainly scientists who make this argument, including Robert Zubrin, the main proponent of the "Mars Direct" mission plan. He argues we've had the technology to make a manned trip to Mars for at least a decade. George W. Bush, in his 2005 State of the Union address called for us to move immediately towards Mars, a call that was promptly ignored.
The big problem of Mars is the fairly recent discovery that solar radiation is a much bigger factor than expected. Eugene Parker, the scientist most famous for the discovery of solar wind, estimates that during a 7 month space flight to Mars, 1/3 of all of an astronaut's DNA would be damaged or destroyed by exposure to solar radiation. We don't know precisely what that would mean in physical terms, but it isn't good.
The first issues is the real and serious question of whether astronauts headed for Mars would be dead before they reached the planet, or before they could come home. It is by no means self-evident that there would be any survivors of a trip to Mars. Even if we could make it there, and do it often enough to begin colonizing, would we ever want such a colony to be self-reproducing? Could it be? The annual radiation exposure would be between 10 and 20 rems, whereas our normal yearly exposure is .03 rems - there's little doubt that the lives of astronaut's children would be nasty, brutish and short.
What about shielding? After all, the Enterprise had shields, right? Here we bump up against the big technological problem. Up until now, we've protected people from radiation with mass - lots, and lots and lots of it. Water, concrete, lead - big heavy things that keep the radiation from reaching us. Things far to big to boost off the planet. Or we'd have to use ultra-powerful magnetic fields, which we can't do and which represent a cure worse than the disease - exposure to intense magnetic fields causes X in human beings. Or, we'd need a whole new technology.
And that's where the question of "we put a man on the moon so we can do anything" comes into this. Because scientists are genuinely stumped on this one. We really don't know if it is possible for us to leave the immediate area of our planet. And colonization of either Mars or the Moon means exposure to considerable quantities of radiation as well. Unless we were to create wholly underground habitats (and this is potentially quite problematic in itself), colonists on the moon or mars or in orbital colonies would be prone to cancers, mutations and other genetic damage.
It may just be that the radiation problem is insurmountable for us. Or that we might be able to fix it on a very small scale, using very expensive, energy intensive technologies that a warming planet and depleting fossil fuel supply wouldn't permit to be expanded on any scale.
Add to that the problem that we really have no evidence whatsever that we can create a long term, self sustaining artificial environment. The Biosphere 2 experiments, conducted in the 1990s were supposed to prove that we could - and we couldn't. The biosphere participants rapidly began to run short of food, suffer nutritional deficits for lack of trace minerals and even run short of oxygen. Scientists were forced to bring in additional gasses. Any biosphere we build in space won't have the option of importing additional ingredients - it takes a minimum of 8 months to get to Mars. So if we suddenly discover that there's an oxygen shortage, anyone on Mars is on their own for nearly a year.
We are increasingly learning what we don't understand about our own environment, and we simply don't seem to have the ability to reproduce the necessary degree of complexity. For example, the Biosphere 2 project lost oxygen through reactions with the concrete necessary to create the dome they lived in. The gas leakage rate alone would have to be dramatically improved in order to create livable conditions, and that would have to be done under ground, mostly far from the sun, if colonist DNA was to be protected. Adding new gases would be far more complex than simply letting in outside air as was done in the Biosphere project.
The reality is that the odds are increasingly great that all of our eggs really are in one basket. It turns out that getting to the moon was comparatively easy - getting into space on any scale is vastly harder. And doing it is likely to have real environmental consequence to the 99.999% of us who stay on earth - that is, we can choose to warm the planet and make the only habitable place we know of less habitable in the quest to create an artificial environment.
The simple, demographic reality is that even if everything went right, even if we could create distant colonies and insure their security and self-sufficiency, of the billions of people on the planet, only a tiny fraction would ever go into space. Most of us would stay here - and be left with the consequences of our quest for space - a warmer planet, a less secure environment, and a viewpoint focused on the distance, rather than the immediate. Is it worth the price? Space colonies would likely begin with thousands of people, and then become self-reproducing. Even if millions were to leave the earth, they'd be replaced almost immediately at the present birthrate. There's no sense in which space colonization is a solution to most people's problem of having a livable world.
But what about the danger of an asteroid strike, about the danger of our having destroyed our own planet, and having our only hope in space? Well, first of all, let us dispense with the notion that things are hopeless. And we risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by saying "the earth is trashed, let's trash it some more and pin our hopes on space." The odds are simply vastly better that human beings can live where they are adapted than in space, where they are not adapted.
And as we've seen, even if we could live in space, the odds are quite good that space colonies would be permanently or at least for a very long time, dependent on earth for basic things like hydrogen for water, or thousands of other possible things we might not be able to find on the moon or mars. That is, if we went into space, we'd need to preserve the earth more, not less, at least for a very, very long time. And since the process of getting there may cause more harm then we can tolerate, that means that we'd be damaging our chances in space by further damaging our chances on earth.
But what about meteors? Asteroids? Kligons? The reality is that periodically, large objects do strike the earth. Most of them are burned up in the atmosphere, but we all know that asteroids are dangerous to dinosaurs and other living things. And it is truly possible that something could be coming our way sooner or late. In fact, there's a tiny but non-trivial chance that one is on its way right now, and we simply don't know it is there. We aren't actually devoting many resources to avoiding such a collision today - for example, there are fewer than 1 dozen people in the entire world whose job it is to look for earth crossing asteroids. We have discovered significantly fewer than 1% of all such objects. In fact, depending on their orbit and issues of reflectivity, such an object could be only days or weeks away from us when we discovered it was about to strike the earth. Fortunately, this is not very likely.
In the worst case scenario, a truly huge such object could obliterate all life on earth. Most prior strikes have merely squashed anything under them, thrown up huge quantities of dust and gas and made life pretty horrible. And it might. It happens every 65 million years or so - at least as far as we know. Because 65 million years ago a 10 km across asteroid struck the earth, causing the Cretaceous period extinctions - about 60% of all plant and animal life died in the ensuing period of darkness and destruction. We're due - sometime in the next few million years. Likelihood of something on the order of the Cretaceous period suggests an average of 50-100 million years. So anytime now ;-).
But the simple fact is that if we found out one was coming today, we couldn't do anything about it. We'd be toast. The strategies for avoiding a collision involve parking a massive (much bigger than anything we have in any stage of development) space ship in orbit and hoping that they would shift the asteroid gravitationally. Or we could try to nuke it, but there's an equal shot that that would make things worse, sending two pieces into the earth.
On the other hand, on any given day, the likelihood of this is pretty damned small - we could have 50 or 100 million years before the next strike. Do we keep our entire, earth warming technological society alive on the vague hope that we would be able to avoid human extinction? Perhaps that would be a useful strategy if right now our resources were directed at that end. But there's no evidence that keeping up a high tech society will lead to be able to protect ourselves from a major asteroid strike - that is, right now, we have a highly technological society, and we aren't even looking for them, much less developing such technologies.
Generally speaking, I think this particular strain of thought derives mostly from a sense that we can control everything in the world. And that's simply untrue. All of our space hopes on some level derive from the idea that we as human beings can make anything we need - we can create faux-natural environments, terraform inhospitable places, protect ourselves from every single possible exigency. But the reality is this - if we protect ourselves from meteor's we'd still have massive volcanoes that could cause the same level of extinction, and we'd still have global warming, which combined with the impact of our society is presently causing the extinction of half of all species.
In trying to insulate ourselves from every consequence, in creating an increasingly secure, artificial environment for the rich people in the world, we've condemned countless millions to death from the consequences. We've made ourselves capable of rendering our own planet uninhabitable. That is, we're far more a danger to ourselves than any asteroid. Focusing on preventing the statistically unlikely scary thing out there keeps us from noticing the truth, that as Walt Kelly's Pogo famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
I don't claim to know whether it is possible for us to go into space. It is possible that over time we might surmount the technical obstacles. I do know it isn't a solution in any sense of the term. My husband speaks about how it is increasingly difficult for him to teach the history of space exploration to students who have dreams of space for themselves, who grew up with the hope of a future "out there somewhere" and the notion that progress involves going outward. He tries gently to point out the obstacles, and he spends the last days of each class focused on the earth, pointing out to his students that "Earth is a planet too, and we know very little about it, in fact." But he's fighting a quixotic battle - too much of our culture has focused on the final frontier as the only next place to go. And unless we offer children something else to dream about - a future here, we risk becoming stuck in a cultural paradigm that prevents us from seeing our own world as the real final frontier.
Sharon
I run into the notion that space is and must be our destiny fairly often, and I think even people who don't think about it much in a conscious way have come to believe in the back of their heads that we have a future out in space. So much of our cultural vision of the future looks something like "Star Trek" that our relationship to space underlies a great deal of our imagined future. I thought it would be worth doing some writing and thinking on this subject, and I've divided it into two posts. The first is about the practicalities - are we going into space? And if we are, is that the answer to any or all of our present problems? The second post is about the meta-issues raised by our thinking about space. That is, how does what we have been taught to think about our future alter our present and the solutions to our present crises?
Since on this subject I'm talking out my ass even more than usual, I've imported an expert. Since this blog's budget for outside experts is nil, I'm more than fortunate in being married to this one. I can pay him off by washing his share of the dishes. Thus, I introduce my husband, Eric. Despite the obvious lapse in scientific judgement that led to his marrying me, he's fairly well qualified to comment here. Eric has a BA in Physics from MIT, a Ph.d in Astrophysics from Harvard, he's worked for NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope has taken pictures based on his research. He's presently a Professor at SUNY Albany, where he teaches, among other things, one of the University's most popular and heavily enrolled course, "The History of Space Exploration." He gets credit on this blog mostly for being a great father and being tolerant enough to put up with me, but he's really, really smart too ;-). The opinions here are mine, and so the errors, but Eric is responsible for all the good, useful facts.
This post will deal with the purely practical issues of going into space in a depleted world. And the first question that we have to ask is "is it possible, technologically speaking, for us to go into space on any large scale." Despite President Bush's 2005 call for a manned mission to Mars, despite the Russian announcement that they hope to move heavy industry into space by 2012, there are some real and serious reasons to be dubious about whether we can ever get off the planet (floating around in orbit for a couple of weeks is not really "off the planet" in any meaningful sense) and equal reasons to ask, even if we can, if that's where we should be placing our limited energies and resources.
It is important to understand here where we actually are in this process. At the moment, private industry is mostly concentrating on commercial space tourism - that is, short, suborbital trips that would allow very rich people to see the earth from space and say they've been there. Neither private industry nor government space programs seem immanently inclined to start the process of moving people into space as workers, colonists or even on long distance manned missions. Essentially, other than the refinement of existing space technologies for reusable shuttles and space stations, no major changes in our relationship to space have occurred since the moon landing almost 40 years ago. So why does this even matter? Can't we just fix our attention elsewhere and let things happen or not?
I think the answer is "no" for several reasons. The first is, how often has any peak oil activist, discussing the limits and problems of any given renewable technology as substitute for oil and gas run into the line "If we can put a man on the moon....?" Even people who don't think much about space at all have come to accept the rationale that pretty much anything is technically possible, if we just put our minds and wallets to it. This sense of space-as-proof-of- technological-achievement has given us a cornucopian vision (as has the history of the Manhattan project, which is a similar instance of "put in a coin and get the technology you want").
I think we have to think hard about the limitations of space if we want to point out that putting a man on the moon was one instance of technological success - but there are many more examples of technological limitation that didn't go our way. One of them, I would argue, seems to be space itself. That is, we put a man on the moon, but real limitations have prevented us from going much further.
The other reason is that there are a large number of people who either consciously or unconsciously believe that space is the human destiny - that whatever short term limitations we are encountering, ultimately, we are "meant" to go into space. This generally comes along with a view of history as manifest destiny - we came, we saw, we conquered one frontier, then the next, then the next, and now left with the ummm "final" one, we have to go to space. This is progress, and anything else would be tantimount to returning to the trees and throwing feces at each other. I'll talk about this vision of progress in my second post.
The other viewpoint, based on better reasoning, is that we have to get into space because humanity won't survive otherwise. Either the speaker believes we've destroyed the planet already and that our only hope of a future is to leave and colonize other worlds, or they are concerned about the real possibility of a meteor crash wiping out humanity. Because we are now aware of such problems, it is our duty, these speakers postulate, to prevent such a happening. Isaac Asimov famously summed up this viewpoint by saying "the earth is simply too fragile a basket for humanity to place all its eggs in."
I'd argue that that last notion is part of our problem, of course. It is hard to quantify how much of our sense that humanity has an "out" we can hold responsible for our trashing of the planet - probably not that much. But millions of people believe on some level that our future looks like a Star Trek episode, out colonizing new worlds in between life on our comfy aluminum tin cans. In fact, we're creating a world that valorizes and prioritizes the artificial in many ways, while it pretends to weep for nature. We mourn, of course, that the wild is gone, but increasingly we spend very little time in nature, and far more in our own little artificial environments. The doors don't whoosh open when we walk towards them, but when you spend your life in airconditioning, shooting pretend klingons on your playstation, how different is it, really? What would happen if we envisioned our future as one fully integrated with our environment? What would happen if we fully had it in our head that every future generation would depend on what we do now in this place we'll probably always live in?
So here are the questions. Can we colonize space? Should we colonize space? What would it get us? Who would go? What would be the outcomes? Part one is here now, part two will be forthcoming when I get to it.
There are considerably more caveats to the first question than most people know. For example, most space colonization postulations imagine us starting out on the moon - if you read science fiction at all, you've read a thousand such stories about our lunar bases. The reason we imagine using the moon as a base is because it is tremendously energy and fuel intensive to launch things up into space from Earth's atmosphere, but quite easy to launch things into space from the low gravity, atmosphereless moon. Thus, it is the logical place to build and repair space ships, locate heavy industry, and start out on any plan for a space based program of colonization. You've probably read a dozen novels that imagine we have a lunar base. My personal favorite such novel is Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_. But we're unlikely to build a Moon colony (or a la Heinlein, a space based Guantanamo) as in the fiction novels, because in every one I've read, the Moon has water on it, in the form of ice, there for the mining.
But the reality is that the more scientists study the moon, the more likely it seems that there is no water - period. Thus far, we've never yet come up with a substitute for water - not for drinking, not for industrial use, bathing, etc... Now the space program has led to many systems for recycling water, but it is hardly a closed system. Water that is drunk by people and excreted as sweat and urine are not wholly reclaimable, so there's a solid, steady net loss. We cannot as yet extract ammonia from urine efficiently. The Russians on Mir, whose water reclamation technologies are more advanced than our own, were ultimately able to reclaim about 50% of the water used on the station - and it is worth noting that they used very, very little water. Most industrial processes require huge quantities of water - and that water is also often non-recyclable, lost in manufacture.
Now there is a lot of oxygen tied up in rocks on the moon, and some proposals have argued that we could simply liberate it, combined it was hydrogen and make water (remember H2O). But the problem is that the moon doesn't have much hydrogen, and virtually none that is accessible. Which means that all our plans for moon bases involve use obtaining hydrogen on earth (generally extracted by energy intensive water electrolysis, now mostly run by coal plants), putting it onto space ships (hydrogen is light, but not massless, and there are chronic leakage problems), shooting it up into through our atmosphere and onto the moon, where we will then extract oxygen from rocks (also energy intensive), and combine it with hydrogen so that the lucky folks up there get to drink and bathe once a month or so (you stink in space - in a whole host of ways).
Now energy might not be a big problem on the moon if our expectations are correct - what the moon does have in abundance is Helium 3, not present on the earth in large quantities, and H3 makes a great little reactor and offers real power potential. There are several prototypes out there - so making the energy to extract oxygen from rocks, and the energy for manufacturing might not be a problem. But H3 power wouldn't help us get all that hydrogen off the earth. And consider the potential problem of people being dependent upon outside sources for something as basic as water - we're already people dying from water shortages. Where will the denizens of the moon line up for their water? What happens if infrastructure for something so basic fails?
Hydrogen isn't the only thing we'd have to bring up to the moon. If we were to make use of the moon on any scale, we'd have to bring up all the organic materials or hydroponic solutions that we planned to produce food with - or the food itself. Now astronauts subsist on dehydrated dinners, and cool stuff like Tang, but any kind of long term plan involves growing food. And there's no carbon on the moon at all to begin farming with. Every ounce of organic material required for growing food would have to be transported up, either directly, or in the form of food and water for colonists so that they could use their own effluents in soils. That's a lot of heavy stuff going back and forth, until a critical mass is achieved that would allow food production - if the water problem can be solved.
Now add to that that at first, a vast number of components and raw materials will also have to be transported up, first to build a decent sized habitat and industrial complex. So we're shooting hydrogen, plus all the raw materials and the people up into space to do this work. That means a lot of shuttle launches, no? Now the space shuttle hardly ever goes up right now - when it does, it is big news. In fact, half the time, the launches get delayed, windows missed (you can't reach every point is space every day). We'd be increasing space shots by a factor of thousands. What would the consequences of that be to the planet down here? Well the cost of putting a large scale, self-sustaining space colony on the moon is estimated at several trillion dollars. But besides money, there's the environmental costs. How will we make all this hydrogen? Typically now, hydrogen is seperated by coal burning electrical power - hardly good for the environment.
Perhaps we could build more nuclear plants - want one next door to you? But nuclear power is quite carbon intensive as well - fossil fuels are required at every stage of the process of nuclear fueling (here's my favorite illustration of that point: http://www.peakoil.org.au/nuclear.co2.htm). It is certainly less carbon intensive than coal or natural gas, but the larger question is "can we afford to warm the planet at all in order to go out into space?"
Even if it were feasible to provide that much hydrogen, it would represent a poor investment, a significant warming of the planet. There are other consequences. Every American Space Shuttle launch represents an emission of greenhouse gasses, as well as the dispersal of toxic rocket fuel across the globe. Toxic residues of rocket fuel have been found in salad greens, breast milk and water all over the globe. Perchlorate causes thyroid damage, which can lead to brain damage and lowered IQs in infants born to pregnant mothers who consume greens and drink perchlorate contaminated water. To be fair, perchlorate is not only produced by the space industry - most of it is military use. But that would change in a large scale space program.
Exactly what the global warming consequences of building a moon base or orbital space station on any scale would be is extremely debatable. Space tourism advocate Steven Fawkes asserts that the total impact of a single, short term suborbital flight would be 3 tonnes per flight per passenger, but Fawkes declines to include calculations in his estimate, which certainly makes me suspicious. And space tourism is, in fact, considerably different than the lifeting of industrial materials from earth to space. I have not yet located a single study on the global warming impact of space travel, but space travel is now energy and cost intensive in the extreme. Even with scalable transformation over time, there is little question that the manufacture, transportation, and lifting of everything needed to build a space colony would represent a significant impact on the evironment - that is, we'd be choosing to warm the planet further in the interest of someday getting off of it. Using an estimate based on dollars invested, and the American space program as a model, the figures for carbon intensiveness are far higher.
Add to that the reality that we can only do so many massive industrial build outs at one time and we will have choose - do we focus on space, or on mitigating the damage we're doing to the environment? On adapting to a low oil infrastructure or trying to get to Mars? Those are real choices - I am increasingly dubious that we'll be able to do even many of the adaptations we'd most like to accomplish. Space represents a potential boondoggle we can't afford.
What would the human costs be? Right now, being an astronaut is pretty much the most dangerous job on earth. If you include all the astronauts who didn't quite make it into space (as in the Challenger astronauts), between the US and Russia, about 460 people have gone into space. The known death rate for astronauts is about 5% that is out of 100,000 astronauts, you could expect 5,000 of them to die. And the death rate for space ground crews is also quite high - more than 70 ground crew have died - that we know of. Neither Russia nor China fully reports its ground casualties and there are persistent rumors of more deaths in the early part of the Russian space program than reported.
Right now, when astronauts are sent up only rarely, after hundreds of people double check everything and launches are delayed for bird, being an astronaut is more dangerous than being a logger, police officer, high altitude mountaineer or elephant trainer - several times more. You are more likely to die in space then by soldiering in Iraq right now, today. We could only imagine that death rate rising if we were to colonize space - most true fronteir colonist populations have had death rates between 1/4 and 2/3. That means, the odds are good that when going into space becomes an ordinary business, with regular old business short cuts and bottom lines driving everything, significant chunks of the people sent there will die.
Historically speaking, we've resolved the problem of all the people who die when we conquer frontiers by sending out people we consider expendable. Prisoners, people who look different than us and who own the land we want, religious and cultural minorities, recent immigrants - those are the people we send off to die on frontiers, because we grant ourselves the privelege of not caring. There is little doubt that if we go to space, it will require of us a considerable sacrifice of human life. Who will do the dying this time? Where will we extract the populations that we're prepared to sacrifice, and what incentives will they be given?
Now what about going to Mars instead of to the moon? Mars does have water, so maybe we should start there. There are certainly scientists who make this argument, including Robert Zubrin, the main proponent of the "Mars Direct" mission plan. He argues we've had the technology to make a manned trip to Mars for at least a decade. George W. Bush, in his 2005 State of the Union address called for us to move immediately towards Mars, a call that was promptly ignored.
The big problem of Mars is the fairly recent discovery that solar radiation is a much bigger factor than expected. Eugene Parker, the scientist most famous for the discovery of solar wind, estimates that during a 7 month space flight to Mars, 1/3 of all of an astronaut's DNA would be damaged or destroyed by exposure to solar radiation. We don't know precisely what that would mean in physical terms, but it isn't good.
The first issues is the real and serious question of whether astronauts headed for Mars would be dead before they reached the planet, or before they could come home. It is by no means self-evident that there would be any survivors of a trip to Mars. Even if we could make it there, and do it often enough to begin colonizing, would we ever want such a colony to be self-reproducing? Could it be? The annual radiation exposure would be between 10 and 20 rems, whereas our normal yearly exposure is .03 rems - there's little doubt that the lives of astronaut's children would be nasty, brutish and short.
What about shielding? After all, the Enterprise had shields, right? Here we bump up against the big technological problem. Up until now, we've protected people from radiation with mass - lots, and lots and lots of it. Water, concrete, lead - big heavy things that keep the radiation from reaching us. Things far to big to boost off the planet. Or we'd have to use ultra-powerful magnetic fields, which we can't do and which represent a cure worse than the disease - exposure to intense magnetic fields causes X in human beings. Or, we'd need a whole new technology.
And that's where the question of "we put a man on the moon so we can do anything" comes into this. Because scientists are genuinely stumped on this one. We really don't know if it is possible for us to leave the immediate area of our planet. And colonization of either Mars or the Moon means exposure to considerable quantities of radiation as well. Unless we were to create wholly underground habitats (and this is potentially quite problematic in itself), colonists on the moon or mars or in orbital colonies would be prone to cancers, mutations and other genetic damage.
It may just be that the radiation problem is insurmountable for us. Or that we might be able to fix it on a very small scale, using very expensive, energy intensive technologies that a warming planet and depleting fossil fuel supply wouldn't permit to be expanded on any scale.
Add to that the problem that we really have no evidence whatsever that we can create a long term, self sustaining artificial environment. The Biosphere 2 experiments, conducted in the 1990s were supposed to prove that we could - and we couldn't. The biosphere participants rapidly began to run short of food, suffer nutritional deficits for lack of trace minerals and even run short of oxygen. Scientists were forced to bring in additional gasses. Any biosphere we build in space won't have the option of importing additional ingredients - it takes a minimum of 8 months to get to Mars. So if we suddenly discover that there's an oxygen shortage, anyone on Mars is on their own for nearly a year.
We are increasingly learning what we don't understand about our own environment, and we simply don't seem to have the ability to reproduce the necessary degree of complexity. For example, the Biosphere 2 project lost oxygen through reactions with the concrete necessary to create the dome they lived in. The gas leakage rate alone would have to be dramatically improved in order to create livable conditions, and that would have to be done under ground, mostly far from the sun, if colonist DNA was to be protected. Adding new gases would be far more complex than simply letting in outside air as was done in the Biosphere project.
The reality is that the odds are increasingly great that all of our eggs really are in one basket. It turns out that getting to the moon was comparatively easy - getting into space on any scale is vastly harder. And doing it is likely to have real environmental consequence to the 99.999% of us who stay on earth - that is, we can choose to warm the planet and make the only habitable place we know of less habitable in the quest to create an artificial environment.
The simple, demographic reality is that even if everything went right, even if we could create distant colonies and insure their security and self-sufficiency, of the billions of people on the planet, only a tiny fraction would ever go into space. Most of us would stay here - and be left with the consequences of our quest for space - a warmer planet, a less secure environment, and a viewpoint focused on the distance, rather than the immediate. Is it worth the price? Space colonies would likely begin with thousands of people, and then become self-reproducing. Even if millions were to leave the earth, they'd be replaced almost immediately at the present birthrate. There's no sense in which space colonization is a solution to most people's problem of having a livable world.
But what about the danger of an asteroid strike, about the danger of our having destroyed our own planet, and having our only hope in space? Well, first of all, let us dispense with the notion that things are hopeless. And we risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by saying "the earth is trashed, let's trash it some more and pin our hopes on space." The odds are simply vastly better that human beings can live where they are adapted than in space, where they are not adapted.
And as we've seen, even if we could live in space, the odds are quite good that space colonies would be permanently or at least for a very long time, dependent on earth for basic things like hydrogen for water, or thousands of other possible things we might not be able to find on the moon or mars. That is, if we went into space, we'd need to preserve the earth more, not less, at least for a very, very long time. And since the process of getting there may cause more harm then we can tolerate, that means that we'd be damaging our chances in space by further damaging our chances on earth.
But what about meteors? Asteroids? Kligons? The reality is that periodically, large objects do strike the earth. Most of them are burned up in the atmosphere, but we all know that asteroids are dangerous to dinosaurs and other living things. And it is truly possible that something could be coming our way sooner or late. In fact, there's a tiny but non-trivial chance that one is on its way right now, and we simply don't know it is there. We aren't actually devoting many resources to avoiding such a collision today - for example, there are fewer than 1 dozen people in the entire world whose job it is to look for earth crossing asteroids. We have discovered significantly fewer than 1% of all such objects. In fact, depending on their orbit and issues of reflectivity, such an object could be only days or weeks away from us when we discovered it was about to strike the earth. Fortunately, this is not very likely.
In the worst case scenario, a truly huge such object could obliterate all life on earth. Most prior strikes have merely squashed anything under them, thrown up huge quantities of dust and gas and made life pretty horrible. And it might. It happens every 65 million years or so - at least as far as we know. Because 65 million years ago a 10 km across asteroid struck the earth, causing the Cretaceous period extinctions - about 60% of all plant and animal life died in the ensuing period of darkness and destruction. We're due - sometime in the next few million years. Likelihood of something on the order of the Cretaceous period suggests an average of 50-100 million years. So anytime now ;-).
But the simple fact is that if we found out one was coming today, we couldn't do anything about it. We'd be toast. The strategies for avoiding a collision involve parking a massive (much bigger than anything we have in any stage of development) space ship in orbit and hoping that they would shift the asteroid gravitationally. Or we could try to nuke it, but there's an equal shot that that would make things worse, sending two pieces into the earth.
On the other hand, on any given day, the likelihood of this is pretty damned small - we could have 50 or 100 million years before the next strike. Do we keep our entire, earth warming technological society alive on the vague hope that we would be able to avoid human extinction? Perhaps that would be a useful strategy if right now our resources were directed at that end. But there's no evidence that keeping up a high tech society will lead to be able to protect ourselves from a major asteroid strike - that is, right now, we have a highly technological society, and we aren't even looking for them, much less developing such technologies.
Generally speaking, I think this particular strain of thought derives mostly from a sense that we can control everything in the world. And that's simply untrue. All of our space hopes on some level derive from the idea that we as human beings can make anything we need - we can create faux-natural environments, terraform inhospitable places, protect ourselves from every single possible exigency. But the reality is this - if we protect ourselves from meteor's we'd still have massive volcanoes that could cause the same level of extinction, and we'd still have global warming, which combined with the impact of our society is presently causing the extinction of half of all species.
In trying to insulate ourselves from every consequence, in creating an increasingly secure, artificial environment for the rich people in the world, we've condemned countless millions to death from the consequences. We've made ourselves capable of rendering our own planet uninhabitable. That is, we're far more a danger to ourselves than any asteroid. Focusing on preventing the statistically unlikely scary thing out there keeps us from noticing the truth, that as Walt Kelly's Pogo famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
I don't claim to know whether it is possible for us to go into space. It is possible that over time we might surmount the technical obstacles. I do know it isn't a solution in any sense of the term. My husband speaks about how it is increasingly difficult for him to teach the history of space exploration to students who have dreams of space for themselves, who grew up with the hope of a future "out there somewhere" and the notion that progress involves going outward. He tries gently to point out the obstacles, and he spends the last days of each class focused on the earth, pointing out to his students that "Earth is a planet too, and we know very little about it, in fact." But he's fighting a quixotic battle - too much of our culture has focused on the final frontier as the only next place to go. And unless we offer children something else to dream about - a future here, we risk becoming stuck in a cultural paradigm that prevents us from seeing our own world as the real final frontier.
Sharon
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Eat Local - REAL LOCAL
The 100 mile diet and its local diet cousins have had a powerful impact on our thinking about food. The word "local" now has true currency in the food world, and thousands of farms have new customers. The 100 mile diet was a terrific beginning. Now we need to start taking the next step towards local *cuisines* not just diets. I've written a bit about how to modify our current local diets here, about the "bullseye diet" that helps refine one's foodshed still further, but today I want to talk about what living local would really mean.
A recent study shows that food miles are simply more complicated than we thought. For example, a recent study done at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that food miles don't tell the whole story when comparing food's impact. Lamb imported from NZ to Britain often emitted less total carbon because supplemental feeding wasn't necessary in NZ, as it was in Britain. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/03/nrgreen03.xml&page=1
Now this seems like bad news for the local food movement, but it isn't really. Instead, it should be a wakeup call to us that duplicating the classic, homogenized western diet isn't really the goal of local eating. Right now, we're still thinking in terms of growing tomatoes everywhere, and that's fine to an extent. But every food region in the world has foods that are particularly adapted to or indigenous to their region, and these are the foods on which local cuisines are based. Think about it - remnents of local diets still exist as local specialities. When you go to Emilia-Romagna you eat different foods than when you go to Tuscany. When you go to Boston, you eat fish, not bananas. You can get a loaf of bread on Bali, but the real food is based on rice. We cannot build a local food movement based entirely on the notion that you grow salad greens everywhere.
Well the reason these remarkable, flavorful, amazing local diets and specialties evolved as they did is simple - not all foods are available everywhere. So most societies developed a local cuisine based on what grew best and most sustainably where they were. And if we are to eat locally again in a real and practical sense, that will mean eating a truly localized, specialized diet. Now that sounds scary to us - we've gotten accustomed to eating what we want, when we want. This sounds as though it would be a vast reduction in diversity. But, the reality is that our current diets aren't very diverse. 90% of the western diet is made up of just 14 species of plant and animal that we eat over and over again. And corn is at the root of almost 70% of our food - as animal feed, processed into corn syrup and integrated into our meals at every step.
In fact, most of us eat fairly narrow diets now, despite our perception of diversity. A truly local diet wouldn't give us less diversity in any meaningful sense. Nor would it make us less happy - most people *love* their staple cuisines. The average Italian woman isn't aching to give up her pasta, the Mexican woman her tortillas, the Frenchman his bread or the Vietnamese man his rice. In fact, it doesn't feel like a meal without them. Despite the values of fusion cuisines, to a large degree, all of the great foods of history come out of specific places, with specific soils and specific foods. Just as the discipline of the sonnet or the dance position enable us to be free in other ways, the limitations of local are the beginning of food as art, as culture, as uniquely ours.
Right now, for the most part, our 100 mile diets look a lot like everyone else's 100 mile diets. Farmers are mostly growing the same crops, during the same seasons that everyone else does. And this was fine as a beginning, but we can't base either a true local cuisine or a low energy, low carbon society on diets that aren't local to their soils, their climate, their agriculture. The first step is getting to know your region. The reality is that while there's no need to eliminate things that require some extra effort, the basis of our diet is and will be things that grow well where we are.
For example, I live in the cold, hilly, rocky, rainy, snowy northeast (at least until climate change turns it into something else). My land gets more than 50 inches of rain per year, and has fewer than 10 days over 90 degrees most years. Even in the hottest weather, most nights are in the 60s, and we often fall into the 40s even in high summer. Hills are steep, and often can't grow vegetables or grains without significant terracing. The growing season runs from April to October, although in my specific location, it is often too wet to plant before late April. The soils have heavy leaching of nutrients, are fairly acidic and generally need lots of organic matter, especially on the clay. There are better soils in the valleys and river plateaus nearby that are suited to other plants, including naturally high-lime soils good for growing things like alfalfa.
So what would my local diet look like? It would probably be low in heat loving plants that go dormant when night temperatures fall below 50, like hot peppers, okra and eggplant. It isn't that I can't grow them - I can and I do - but they wouldn't be staples of my diet, except to the extent that they can be easily preserved. Plants that need hotbeds or starting indoors would be less likely to be major crops than those that could be direct seeded, particularly in a lower energy society when artificial lights and heat were less available. So while I would grow tomatoes, I would probably prioritize short season varieties, and things like currant tomatoes which reliably self-sow.
I probably would grow plants that tolerate some acidity, like corn and potatoes, more than those that need a very neutral soil, although wood ash is added to the soil. Small grains simply don't do as well here, although my neighbors in the Schoharie Valley, which was the breadbasket of the American Revolution, could grow wheat. Amaranth grows marvelously here, and would be a good supplement, and oats tolerate wet conditions and leached soil better than wheat does, so I might grow them as a supplemental crop. Buckwheat does well in our summers.
Because I have a lot of land too hilly to till, it would make the most sense to graze animals on it, and eat the animals or drink their milk. Because the land tends to be wet, I'd like a breed that tolerates wet conditions well, and because it gets very cold, one that is thrifty on pasture and winters well with little grain. Romney, Icelandic, Soay or other sheep might well fit the bill, as would Scottish Highland or Dexter cattle. Milk would be a good summer crop - cows that can produce enough milk on grass alone make sense here because ample rain means that our pasture rarely goes dormant. If I didn't keep kosher, I might raise pigs in my woods, to eat the acorns.
Soybeans do acceptably here, but New England bred bean varieties like Jacob's Cattle and Maine Yellow Eye do better still. Favas do well as well, and I think garbanzos might be expandable. Peas do very well indeed. But beans like limas, black beans and pintos are simply high effort crops to grow on a field scale.
For oils, butter would probably make the most sense, although we're experimenting with oilseed pumpkins and sunflowers do quite well here. We can certainly grow mustard in the summers, and mustardseed oil is quite delicious.
We can grow leafy greens easily all summer - we don't have problems with bolting here. The same is true for cole crops and almost all roots. And we need roots because they store so well over the winter. Onions are particularly well suited to the sulfuric soils we have - they grow well, store well, and add a lot of flavor to our food, as does the garlic.
Herbs that do well here include coriander/cilantro, dill, basil, mints, fennel, cumin, chives, sage and many others. These might be primary flavoring agents. I could look back to traditional local flavorings like wintergreen berries and rosewater. Sour, lemony sumac could replace lemons for both vitamin c and flavor, as could apple cider vinegars. Wild thyme and other herbs could be integrated more fully into pastures to give local milks, butters and cheeses indigenous flavors.
Apples, hazelnuts, black walnuts, hickory nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, quinces, plums, pears, raspberries, strawberries, and many indigenous fruits of cold climates like lingonberries and sea buckthorn would probably become the primary fruits, along with many others. Wild mushrooms, wild greens and other wild foods would be daily additions.
There are minor crops that would almost certainly add to the variety of our diets. Jerusalem artichokes and groundnuts, grown together might provide a staple starch-protein combination. A full exploration of what can and should grow here might help us evolve a more complex and exciting diet.
What would it look like? What would I eat? What would tourists who visited come home raving about? Perhaps they'd come in summer, when my diet was a lot like everyone's. A smaller portion of my garden might be in tomatoes and peppers and more in beets and greens, but generally speaking, they would enjoy my local summer foods. We might have an omlet filled with asparagus, local goat cheese and sauteed in butter. Come fall, they obvious things - pumpkins, squash and roots would dominate the diet, and there would be considerably more meat, because it would simply make sense to butcher animals at fall festivals, rather than feed them over the winter. Milk would disappear, and be replaced by cheese.
In the fall we might drink cider, eat a stew of root vegetables and dried beans in broth, and a side of broccoli with cheese sauce.
In the winter, there would be few eggs (not enough light), and no milk, but an ample supply of potatoes, buckwheat for pancakes, cheese, some meat, and all the pleasures of cold weather and hearty stews and soups. It would not be difficult to keep some greens going over the winter as well. Winter would be a time for parties and celebrations. Cider would be hard and the beer would be ready.
Spring would come with its foods as well - the burst of eggs and wild greens, fresh new milk and and the remnents of winter. Now is the time for mashed potato cakes with dandilion greens, for rhubarb-apple sauce with the last stored apples and the first rhubarb, and the first spears of asparagus.
What's missing? Olive oil, meat in spring and summer, large quantities of bread and wheat. Some flavors have been replaced - my hummus might be made with fava beans, there's rosewater instead of vanilla in my pudding, a heavier use of indigenous herbs, the slight change of taste from different oils and different ingredients. Textures and smells, undertones and topnotes - all are specific, local. Over time, they will become transcendent.
The study mentioned above compared the same varieties of sheep, using the same practices of management in different places. Perhaps the British need to eat less lamb, or perhaps they need to raise it differently. Perhaps different breeds, like the landraces that evolved over centuries are more appropriate. But a truly local diet must eventually emerge from a low energy society, and there's no reason for us to fear it - we should, in fact, embrace the beginnings of our local cuisines.
Sharon
A recent study shows that food miles are simply more complicated than we thought. For example, a recent study done at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that food miles don't tell the whole story when comparing food's impact. Lamb imported from NZ to Britain often emitted less total carbon because supplemental feeding wasn't necessary in NZ, as it was in Britain. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/03/nrgreen03.xml&page=1
Now this seems like bad news for the local food movement, but it isn't really. Instead, it should be a wakeup call to us that duplicating the classic, homogenized western diet isn't really the goal of local eating. Right now, we're still thinking in terms of growing tomatoes everywhere, and that's fine to an extent. But every food region in the world has foods that are particularly adapted to or indigenous to their region, and these are the foods on which local cuisines are based. Think about it - remnents of local diets still exist as local specialities. When you go to Emilia-Romagna you eat different foods than when you go to Tuscany. When you go to Boston, you eat fish, not bananas. You can get a loaf of bread on Bali, but the real food is based on rice. We cannot build a local food movement based entirely on the notion that you grow salad greens everywhere.
Well the reason these remarkable, flavorful, amazing local diets and specialties evolved as they did is simple - not all foods are available everywhere. So most societies developed a local cuisine based on what grew best and most sustainably where they were. And if we are to eat locally again in a real and practical sense, that will mean eating a truly localized, specialized diet. Now that sounds scary to us - we've gotten accustomed to eating what we want, when we want. This sounds as though it would be a vast reduction in diversity. But, the reality is that our current diets aren't very diverse. 90% of the western diet is made up of just 14 species of plant and animal that we eat over and over again. And corn is at the root of almost 70% of our food - as animal feed, processed into corn syrup and integrated into our meals at every step.
In fact, most of us eat fairly narrow diets now, despite our perception of diversity. A truly local diet wouldn't give us less diversity in any meaningful sense. Nor would it make us less happy - most people *love* their staple cuisines. The average Italian woman isn't aching to give up her pasta, the Mexican woman her tortillas, the Frenchman his bread or the Vietnamese man his rice. In fact, it doesn't feel like a meal without them. Despite the values of fusion cuisines, to a large degree, all of the great foods of history come out of specific places, with specific soils and specific foods. Just as the discipline of the sonnet or the dance position enable us to be free in other ways, the limitations of local are the beginning of food as art, as culture, as uniquely ours.
Right now, for the most part, our 100 mile diets look a lot like everyone else's 100 mile diets. Farmers are mostly growing the same crops, during the same seasons that everyone else does. And this was fine as a beginning, but we can't base either a true local cuisine or a low energy, low carbon society on diets that aren't local to their soils, their climate, their agriculture. The first step is getting to know your region. The reality is that while there's no need to eliminate things that require some extra effort, the basis of our diet is and will be things that grow well where we are.
For example, I live in the cold, hilly, rocky, rainy, snowy northeast (at least until climate change turns it into something else). My land gets more than 50 inches of rain per year, and has fewer than 10 days over 90 degrees most years. Even in the hottest weather, most nights are in the 60s, and we often fall into the 40s even in high summer. Hills are steep, and often can't grow vegetables or grains without significant terracing. The growing season runs from April to October, although in my specific location, it is often too wet to plant before late April. The soils have heavy leaching of nutrients, are fairly acidic and generally need lots of organic matter, especially on the clay. There are better soils in the valleys and river plateaus nearby that are suited to other plants, including naturally high-lime soils good for growing things like alfalfa.
So what would my local diet look like? It would probably be low in heat loving plants that go dormant when night temperatures fall below 50, like hot peppers, okra and eggplant. It isn't that I can't grow them - I can and I do - but they wouldn't be staples of my diet, except to the extent that they can be easily preserved. Plants that need hotbeds or starting indoors would be less likely to be major crops than those that could be direct seeded, particularly in a lower energy society when artificial lights and heat were less available. So while I would grow tomatoes, I would probably prioritize short season varieties, and things like currant tomatoes which reliably self-sow.
I probably would grow plants that tolerate some acidity, like corn and potatoes, more than those that need a very neutral soil, although wood ash is added to the soil. Small grains simply don't do as well here, although my neighbors in the Schoharie Valley, which was the breadbasket of the American Revolution, could grow wheat. Amaranth grows marvelously here, and would be a good supplement, and oats tolerate wet conditions and leached soil better than wheat does, so I might grow them as a supplemental crop. Buckwheat does well in our summers.
Because I have a lot of land too hilly to till, it would make the most sense to graze animals on it, and eat the animals or drink their milk. Because the land tends to be wet, I'd like a breed that tolerates wet conditions well, and because it gets very cold, one that is thrifty on pasture and winters well with little grain. Romney, Icelandic, Soay or other sheep might well fit the bill, as would Scottish Highland or Dexter cattle. Milk would be a good summer crop - cows that can produce enough milk on grass alone make sense here because ample rain means that our pasture rarely goes dormant. If I didn't keep kosher, I might raise pigs in my woods, to eat the acorns.
Soybeans do acceptably here, but New England bred bean varieties like Jacob's Cattle and Maine Yellow Eye do better still. Favas do well as well, and I think garbanzos might be expandable. Peas do very well indeed. But beans like limas, black beans and pintos are simply high effort crops to grow on a field scale.
For oils, butter would probably make the most sense, although we're experimenting with oilseed pumpkins and sunflowers do quite well here. We can certainly grow mustard in the summers, and mustardseed oil is quite delicious.
We can grow leafy greens easily all summer - we don't have problems with bolting here. The same is true for cole crops and almost all roots. And we need roots because they store so well over the winter. Onions are particularly well suited to the sulfuric soils we have - they grow well, store well, and add a lot of flavor to our food, as does the garlic.
Herbs that do well here include coriander/cilantro, dill, basil, mints, fennel, cumin, chives, sage and many others. These might be primary flavoring agents. I could look back to traditional local flavorings like wintergreen berries and rosewater. Sour, lemony sumac could replace lemons for both vitamin c and flavor, as could apple cider vinegars. Wild thyme and other herbs could be integrated more fully into pastures to give local milks, butters and cheeses indigenous flavors.
Apples, hazelnuts, black walnuts, hickory nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, quinces, plums, pears, raspberries, strawberries, and many indigenous fruits of cold climates like lingonberries and sea buckthorn would probably become the primary fruits, along with many others. Wild mushrooms, wild greens and other wild foods would be daily additions.
There are minor crops that would almost certainly add to the variety of our diets. Jerusalem artichokes and groundnuts, grown together might provide a staple starch-protein combination. A full exploration of what can and should grow here might help us evolve a more complex and exciting diet.
What would it look like? What would I eat? What would tourists who visited come home raving about? Perhaps they'd come in summer, when my diet was a lot like everyone's. A smaller portion of my garden might be in tomatoes and peppers and more in beets and greens, but generally speaking, they would enjoy my local summer foods. We might have an omlet filled with asparagus, local goat cheese and sauteed in butter. Come fall, they obvious things - pumpkins, squash and roots would dominate the diet, and there would be considerably more meat, because it would simply make sense to butcher animals at fall festivals, rather than feed them over the winter. Milk would disappear, and be replaced by cheese.
In the fall we might drink cider, eat a stew of root vegetables and dried beans in broth, and a side of broccoli with cheese sauce.
In the winter, there would be few eggs (not enough light), and no milk, but an ample supply of potatoes, buckwheat for pancakes, cheese, some meat, and all the pleasures of cold weather and hearty stews and soups. It would not be difficult to keep some greens going over the winter as well. Winter would be a time for parties and celebrations. Cider would be hard and the beer would be ready.
Spring would come with its foods as well - the burst of eggs and wild greens, fresh new milk and and the remnents of winter. Now is the time for mashed potato cakes with dandilion greens, for rhubarb-apple sauce with the last stored apples and the first rhubarb, and the first spears of asparagus.
What's missing? Olive oil, meat in spring and summer, large quantities of bread and wheat. Some flavors have been replaced - my hummus might be made with fava beans, there's rosewater instead of vanilla in my pudding, a heavier use of indigenous herbs, the slight change of taste from different oils and different ingredients. Textures and smells, undertones and topnotes - all are specific, local. Over time, they will become transcendent.
The study mentioned above compared the same varieties of sheep, using the same practices of management in different places. Perhaps the British need to eat less lamb, or perhaps they need to raise it differently. Perhaps different breeds, like the landraces that evolved over centuries are more appropriate. But a truly local diet must eventually emerge from a low energy society, and there's no reason for us to fear it - we should, in fact, embrace the beginnings of our local cuisines.
Sharon
Monday, August 06, 2007
52 Weeks Down - Week 15 - Get Out of Debt
If you watched the news at all the last week, you can probably see the writing on the wall, financially speaking. Things are, to say the least, not going well in the financial markets. So you probably realize that this is good advice in at least one respect. But I bet some of you have no idea what debt has to do with energy usage. Why would I be advising you to get out of debt to save energy?
The fact is, that energy usage is heavily correlated with wealth. The more money we have, the more money we are likely to spend, and the more energy we use. It is true that wealth can buy you some fancy things like a Prius or solar panels, but generally speaking, rich people tend to use so many resources that any savings from their cars or solar panels are lost.
Now consumer debt in our society functions to expand our income - if you carry 8K in credit card debt, effectively, you are living as though your salary is significantly more than it is. If you start paying off your debt and living within your means, generally speaking, your energy usage will fall, because you'll be buying less. Now this is one of those things that has some exceptions, but not as many as we think.
The stuff we buy costs us energy - we have to house it, repair it, we use the electricity to run it and the gas to make it go. So the more stuff we have and we buy, the more energy we use. And the root issue is how much we spend on that stuff.
But there's more. Most of us work an average of 2 1/2 months per year for servicing the intereest we have on our mortgages, credit cards and car loans. Think about that - you are working your job for *months* every year just to pay the interest on your debt. The average American has a mortgage, car loan, and almost 10K in credit card debt. Think how much more relaxed the pace of your life would be without that pressure to put in overtime, or get a higher paying job. How many commutes could we cut?
And when you pay that interest, the company takes that money and reinvests it in all sorts of things, some of them perhaps environmentally sound, most of them not. You are passing off your money to credit card companies for them to make use of. Do you really think they are better stewards of your money than you would be?
Paying off your debt makes sense in lots of ways. The bankruptcy laws that were enacted a couple of years ago now make default or bankruptcy much, much more punitive. The financial markets are struggling, and the rest of the economy is teetering. So to preserve your personal security, it makes sense to pay those debts down. But it also reduces the energy you need and the energy you use.
Sharon
The fact is, that energy usage is heavily correlated with wealth. The more money we have, the more money we are likely to spend, and the more energy we use. It is true that wealth can buy you some fancy things like a Prius or solar panels, but generally speaking, rich people tend to use so many resources that any savings from their cars or solar panels are lost.
Now consumer debt in our society functions to expand our income - if you carry 8K in credit card debt, effectively, you are living as though your salary is significantly more than it is. If you start paying off your debt and living within your means, generally speaking, your energy usage will fall, because you'll be buying less. Now this is one of those things that has some exceptions, but not as many as we think.
The stuff we buy costs us energy - we have to house it, repair it, we use the electricity to run it and the gas to make it go. So the more stuff we have and we buy, the more energy we use. And the root issue is how much we spend on that stuff.
But there's more. Most of us work an average of 2 1/2 months per year for servicing the intereest we have on our mortgages, credit cards and car loans. Think about that - you are working your job for *months* every year just to pay the interest on your debt. The average American has a mortgage, car loan, and almost 10K in credit card debt. Think how much more relaxed the pace of your life would be without that pressure to put in overtime, or get a higher paying job. How many commutes could we cut?
And when you pay that interest, the company takes that money and reinvests it in all sorts of things, some of them perhaps environmentally sound, most of them not. You are passing off your money to credit card companies for them to make use of. Do you really think they are better stewards of your money than you would be?
Paying off your debt makes sense in lots of ways. The bankruptcy laws that were enacted a couple of years ago now make default or bankruptcy much, much more punitive. The financial markets are struggling, and the rest of the economy is teetering. So to preserve your personal security, it makes sense to pay those debts down. But it also reduces the energy you need and the energy you use.
Sharon
Figuring Out Real Impacts
I'm going to bet many of you have seen this article, which came out today. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece
It will probably get major media airplay, simply because the media loves this sort of thing. And quite a few people will take the message to heart - oh, I don't have to stop driving or using plastic bags. Now there are some real virtues to doing counter-intuitive energy analyses, and I think this study has some (limited) merit. But let's take a closer look at it and its claims before we get all excited.
Goodall argues that walking to stores creates more carbon than driving there. The comparison he bases this on is this:
"The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”
Now what's wrong with this comparison? Well, among other things it is assuming that we get all our walking calories from the worst possible source for the environment - industrial beef production. The idea is that whenever I get up on my feet, I'm doing it powered by feedlot cows. But even the most relentless Atkinsite occasionally eats a salad, and most of us who care about the environment grasp that eating industrially produced meat is not ok.
So what happens if you power that with 180 calories of salad you grew organically in your yard? Or with 180 calories of beans and grains grown sustainably? With your CSA share? With grassfed lamb grown on land unsuitable for tillage? I haven't done that math, but the numbers would be considerably lower. The application of common sense to statistics can be surprisingly useful.
Chris Goodall seems to have taken the road of media attention but little nuance - that is, his goal is get attention for his book, not to offer real and useful information for people. By presenting this as an artificial dualism, you give people the impression that they might as well just go on doing what they were doing. But pointing out that both reducing industrial food consumption and reducing driving are necessary doesn't get as much publicity.
Let's also take a look at some of the other issues with this analysis. It looks to me from the study like Goodall is queering his data, by drawing a very small circle around the gasoline, and a big one around the cow. For example, Goodall seems to be considering only the energy impact of burning the gas - not of extraction, refining (actually refining is one of the largest chunks), transport, etc... But he's considering the whole impact of the cow, from the methane it emits when farting to its slaughter energy. One of the simple truths about EROEI calculations is that the only meaningful way to make them is to compare apples to apples - either compare whole life impacts of both subjects, or partial ones, but to make equal, fair comparisons. Goodall is cheating here for the purposes of making a point.
He's also using an assumption that troubles me. Now I respect vegetarians, and vegetarianism, although I'm not one. But when we talk about animal produced methane as though it is the same as our fossil fuel based carbon emissions, we're missing the point. All animals produce methane when they burp or fart - cows, people, apes, polar bears... some more than others. And it is absolutely true that feeding cows grain produces more methane than feeding them grass. There's no question that we absolutely need to stop industrial livestock production. But saying that "animals" are a major global warming problem is a way of distancing ourselves from our real responsibility. The world should be full of animal life farting and burping away - that's how it is meant to be. Before there were cows on the western plains, there were buffalo. Before there were 6 billion humans, there were a whole lot more polar bears and elephants and other animals busily making methane. The planet can handle the total methane emissions of every form of life but ours - that's because human beings are the problem. When we pass the problem off onto the animals - oh, the problem is cows, not us, we miss the point.
Now for all that I disagree with Goodall's analysis, his larger point about our diets - that we need to start at the most basic acts in our lives, is the right one. Food production has a tremendous impact on the environment, and it isn't just food miles that matter - what you eat, how it is grown, where it is grown, how long it takes to get there, how it is stored in the meantime and who grows it are all important factors. But Goodall again misses the point. He says,
"The ideal diet would consist of cereals and pulses. “This is a route which virtually nobody, apart from a vegan, is going to follow,” Mr Goodall said. But there are other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. “Don’t buy anything from the supermarket,” Mr Goodall said, “or anything that’s travelled too far."
He's right about the last part, but not about the ideal diet. The ideal diet would be the food we can grow sustainably ourselves *supplemented* with organically grown, local cereals and pulses. But as usual, Goodall has a rather low opinion of human beings - no one but vegans will do it, he says, and it doesn't even occur to him that we could vary that diet simply by producing things sustainably and locally *on our own.* Goodall, like a lot of environmentalists, buys into the notion that we won't change. At the extreme end of this is James Lovelock's claim that in fact, essentially human beings should be living stacked in cities in tiny spaces playing video games in a Matrix-like existence, simply because that's how we have the lowest possible impact. Lovelock thinks that the best thing we human beings can do is keep the hell away from nature and food production.
But you don't have to believe the world is all sweetness and light to recognize that the curmudgeon's vision of environmentalism is not going to inspire anyone to action. And the notion that is impossible to get people to do this ignores the fact that "people" - you and me and thousands of others are doing it already. And unless you believe that somehow we're exceptional - different than everyone else - then we have to acknowledge the possibility that if we can do it, so can others. In fact you might get considerably more others to consider major dietary changes if you offered them something other than lentils - as long as they could grow it at home. The fact that it isn't what you eat, but what goes into what you eat that matters is the real truth here.
There are some other problems worth noting in this essay, and I point them out because people believe this stuff. The loss of our ability to reason worth a damn may be the thing that destroys us. The quantity of bullshit, half truths and poor reasoning here is pretty astounding - I won't be sending in my subscription dollars anytime soon. They say:
— Traditional nappies are as bad as disposables, a study by the Environment Agency found. While throwaway nappies make up 0.1 per cent of landfill waste, the cloth variety are a waste of energy, clean water and detergent
Ok, we've all seen this study referenced before. The problem is, first of all, the originators of the study were makers of disposable diapers, so they had every incentive to draw their circles conveniently. And what they compared was cloth diapers that were washed repeatedly in multiple hot water cycles, the way diaper service companies do it, with disposable diapers. But wash your diapers in cold water, or even one warm wash, and cloth comes out wildly ahead.
But also look carefully at the comparison made here - 0.1 percent of landfill waste vs. energy, water and detergent. We're not actually comparing the energy used to *make* the diapers, get the oil out of the ground, run the electricity on the equipment. Nor is there any evidence that impact of that plastic on methane production in landfills has been included. Disposable diapers are particularly nasty in that regard because they include plastic and organic material (poop) together - thus creating the perfect environment for methane production.
— Paper bags cause more global warming than plastic. They need much more space to store so require extra energy to transport them from manufacturers to shops
On the other hand, plastics hang around disrupting your endocrine system when they break up (but not down) into your soil and water. And we could note that both are a stupid idea - carry a cloth bag.
— Diesel trains in rural Britain are more polluting than 4x4 vehicles. Douglas Alexander, when Transport Secretary, said: “If ten or fewer people travel in a Sprinter [train], it would be less environmentally damaging to give them each a Land Rover Freelander and tell them to drive”
When was the last time you were on a train with fewer than 10 people in it? Of course giant trains are less efficient if they only have a couple of passengers than a car. The point is that ou can put several hundred people on them. This is just a big old "duh."
To be fair, however, Pat Muphy over at Community Solutions has found that if you include the energy costs of laying rail and building the system, even electric trains are less efficient than simply only going places in cars when the cars are full - that is, if the average 5 passenger car had five people in it, instead of 1.6, and we made our trips only when the cars were full, we would create far less of an impact than passenger rail. The Community Solutions "Smart Jitney" program creates a public transportation system using existing cars - now that makes sense, and can be applied anywhere. Check it out at www.communitysolution.org
— Burning wood for fuel is better for the environment than recycling it, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs discovered
I can't find this study anywhere. But it would be useful to ask what their definition of "recycling" is - is it really true that my using old boards in a chicken tractor makes more carbon than burning it? I don't think so. I imagine that if what you are talking about is reducing wood to sawdust and making it into pressboard, that's certainly true. But let's assume we could use some common sense, and reuse wood in its extant form.
-Someone who installs a “green” lightbulb undoes a year’s worth of energy-saving by buying two bags of imported veg, as so much carbon is wasted flying the food to Britain
This is one of those dumb either/or constructions designed to make you think that you have to choose. Yes, you should cut the imported bags of veggies *and* use environmentally friendly lightbulbs. But the idea that you cancel out one impact is just silly - if you do both wasteful things, and then stop one, but not the other, you have manifestly used less oil. In trying to point out the impact of our food system, let's not convince people that the only project is dietary change.
-Trees, regarded as shields against global warming because they absorb carbon, were found by German scientists to be major producers of methane, a much more harmful greenhouse gas
Now this one is true, but it is misleading in the same way that the emphasis on cows is. We're not undergoing radical climate change because we have too many trees, folks. Again, the problem is human produced environmental impact. And when you talk about trees and airline tickets as though they are equally bad, you give people a really screwed up sense of the truth.
What is true is that planting trees isn't a magic bullet - we should do it because it helps with soil erosion, improves air quality, provides shade, etc... But we can't "offset" our carbon emissions by planting trees. There's simply no real substitute for not making the emissions in the first place - period.
— Organic dairy cows are worse for the climate. They produce less milk so their methane emissions per litre are higher
There's some real truth in this one - even without the nitrous oxide produced in the fertilizer, grainfed dairy is a fairly energy intensive process. The reality is that if we are to continue to drink milk as a population, the most sustainable option would be grassfed, seasonal dairy. That is, you would graze cows only during the periods where there is lush, grazable land, and produce their milk mostly or entirely without human food (grain). That would mean different cow breeds, different practices and us all drinking a lot less milk.
Honestly, eating grassfed local beef is probably better for the environment than drinking milk, unless you raise it yourself or get it very, very locally from an organic dairy that raises their own grains. It seems counterintuitive, but if you think in terms of the most sustainable ways to raise animals (on grass no one else can eat, on land that is too rocky, hilly or otherwise unsuited for grain or vegetable production), the best animal products to eat would be grassfed and hayfed lamb, goat and beef. That's the exact opposite of the heirarchy that most semi-veg or veg folks have - first you give up red meat, then poultry, then eggs and milk. But in fact, probably the best use of resources would be grazing animals on land in grass anyway (lawns, parks, hilly land, crop protection land), then eggs and chicken raised on your own food scraps, and then a distant third, eggs and milk raised organically on grain.
But in this list there's a great deal more that is misleading than that is helpful. The myths that I think we need to undo are quite different. Here are the Great, Green Myths that I'm most concerned with.
1. That it is either/or. That is, that we have to make choices like "eat less meat" or "drive less." We have to do both - period.
2. That we can meaningfully offset our impact, and go on with life as usual. The reality is that right now, our emissions levels are so high that any offsetting we do has to compensate for past emissions. The only way to avoid catastrophic consequences are to stop emitting - and soon.
3. That the bad guys are plants and animals, not us. That this can somehow be passed off on cows or trees or polar bears, and thus, our own responsibility is diminished.
4. That we don't need good information - that is, that we can't honestly compare apples to apples. The simple truth is that if you can't be bothered to draw your circles and make your comparisons fairly, you should get out of the game. Just wanting attention isn't enough of an excuse.
5. That the solution is really anywhere other than "don't do it, stop, change." Most of us are still hanging on to the notion that the solution doesn't involve real change. Time to get over it, folks.
Shalom,
Sharon
It will probably get major media airplay, simply because the media loves this sort of thing. And quite a few people will take the message to heart - oh, I don't have to stop driving or using plastic bags. Now there are some real virtues to doing counter-intuitive energy analyses, and I think this study has some (limited) merit. But let's take a closer look at it and its claims before we get all excited.
Goodall argues that walking to stores creates more carbon than driving there. The comparison he bases this on is this:
"The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”
Now what's wrong with this comparison? Well, among other things it is assuming that we get all our walking calories from the worst possible source for the environment - industrial beef production. The idea is that whenever I get up on my feet, I'm doing it powered by feedlot cows. But even the most relentless Atkinsite occasionally eats a salad, and most of us who care about the environment grasp that eating industrially produced meat is not ok.
So what happens if you power that with 180 calories of salad you grew organically in your yard? Or with 180 calories of beans and grains grown sustainably? With your CSA share? With grassfed lamb grown on land unsuitable for tillage? I haven't done that math, but the numbers would be considerably lower. The application of common sense to statistics can be surprisingly useful.
Chris Goodall seems to have taken the road of media attention but little nuance - that is, his goal is get attention for his book, not to offer real and useful information for people. By presenting this as an artificial dualism, you give people the impression that they might as well just go on doing what they were doing. But pointing out that both reducing industrial food consumption and reducing driving are necessary doesn't get as much publicity.
Let's also take a look at some of the other issues with this analysis. It looks to me from the study like Goodall is queering his data, by drawing a very small circle around the gasoline, and a big one around the cow. For example, Goodall seems to be considering only the energy impact of burning the gas - not of extraction, refining (actually refining is one of the largest chunks), transport, etc... But he's considering the whole impact of the cow, from the methane it emits when farting to its slaughter energy. One of the simple truths about EROEI calculations is that the only meaningful way to make them is to compare apples to apples - either compare whole life impacts of both subjects, or partial ones, but to make equal, fair comparisons. Goodall is cheating here for the purposes of making a point.
He's also using an assumption that troubles me. Now I respect vegetarians, and vegetarianism, although I'm not one. But when we talk about animal produced methane as though it is the same as our fossil fuel based carbon emissions, we're missing the point. All animals produce methane when they burp or fart - cows, people, apes, polar bears... some more than others. And it is absolutely true that feeding cows grain produces more methane than feeding them grass. There's no question that we absolutely need to stop industrial livestock production. But saying that "animals" are a major global warming problem is a way of distancing ourselves from our real responsibility. The world should be full of animal life farting and burping away - that's how it is meant to be. Before there were cows on the western plains, there were buffalo. Before there were 6 billion humans, there were a whole lot more polar bears and elephants and other animals busily making methane. The planet can handle the total methane emissions of every form of life but ours - that's because human beings are the problem. When we pass the problem off onto the animals - oh, the problem is cows, not us, we miss the point.
Now for all that I disagree with Goodall's analysis, his larger point about our diets - that we need to start at the most basic acts in our lives, is the right one. Food production has a tremendous impact on the environment, and it isn't just food miles that matter - what you eat, how it is grown, where it is grown, how long it takes to get there, how it is stored in the meantime and who grows it are all important factors. But Goodall again misses the point. He says,
"The ideal diet would consist of cereals and pulses. “This is a route which virtually nobody, apart from a vegan, is going to follow,” Mr Goodall said. But there are other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. “Don’t buy anything from the supermarket,” Mr Goodall said, “or anything that’s travelled too far."
He's right about the last part, but not about the ideal diet. The ideal diet would be the food we can grow sustainably ourselves *supplemented* with organically grown, local cereals and pulses. But as usual, Goodall has a rather low opinion of human beings - no one but vegans will do it, he says, and it doesn't even occur to him that we could vary that diet simply by producing things sustainably and locally *on our own.* Goodall, like a lot of environmentalists, buys into the notion that we won't change. At the extreme end of this is James Lovelock's claim that in fact, essentially human beings should be living stacked in cities in tiny spaces playing video games in a Matrix-like existence, simply because that's how we have the lowest possible impact. Lovelock thinks that the best thing we human beings can do is keep the hell away from nature and food production.
But you don't have to believe the world is all sweetness and light to recognize that the curmudgeon's vision of environmentalism is not going to inspire anyone to action. And the notion that is impossible to get people to do this ignores the fact that "people" - you and me and thousands of others are doing it already. And unless you believe that somehow we're exceptional - different than everyone else - then we have to acknowledge the possibility that if we can do it, so can others. In fact you might get considerably more others to consider major dietary changes if you offered them something other than lentils - as long as they could grow it at home. The fact that it isn't what you eat, but what goes into what you eat that matters is the real truth here.
There are some other problems worth noting in this essay, and I point them out because people believe this stuff. The loss of our ability to reason worth a damn may be the thing that destroys us. The quantity of bullshit, half truths and poor reasoning here is pretty astounding - I won't be sending in my subscription dollars anytime soon. They say:
— Traditional nappies are as bad as disposables, a study by the Environment Agency found. While throwaway nappies make up 0.1 per cent of landfill waste, the cloth variety are a waste of energy, clean water and detergent
Ok, we've all seen this study referenced before. The problem is, first of all, the originators of the study were makers of disposable diapers, so they had every incentive to draw their circles conveniently. And what they compared was cloth diapers that were washed repeatedly in multiple hot water cycles, the way diaper service companies do it, with disposable diapers. But wash your diapers in cold water, or even one warm wash, and cloth comes out wildly ahead.
But also look carefully at the comparison made here - 0.1 percent of landfill waste vs. energy, water and detergent. We're not actually comparing the energy used to *make* the diapers, get the oil out of the ground, run the electricity on the equipment. Nor is there any evidence that impact of that plastic on methane production in landfills has been included. Disposable diapers are particularly nasty in that regard because they include plastic and organic material (poop) together - thus creating the perfect environment for methane production.
— Paper bags cause more global warming than plastic. They need much more space to store so require extra energy to transport them from manufacturers to shops
On the other hand, plastics hang around disrupting your endocrine system when they break up (but not down) into your soil and water. And we could note that both are a stupid idea - carry a cloth bag.
— Diesel trains in rural Britain are more polluting than 4x4 vehicles. Douglas Alexander, when Transport Secretary, said: “If ten or fewer people travel in a Sprinter [train], it would be less environmentally damaging to give them each a Land Rover Freelander and tell them to drive”
When was the last time you were on a train with fewer than 10 people in it? Of course giant trains are less efficient if they only have a couple of passengers than a car. The point is that ou can put several hundred people on them. This is just a big old "duh."
To be fair, however, Pat Muphy over at Community Solutions has found that if you include the energy costs of laying rail and building the system, even electric trains are less efficient than simply only going places in cars when the cars are full - that is, if the average 5 passenger car had five people in it, instead of 1.6, and we made our trips only when the cars were full, we would create far less of an impact than passenger rail. The Community Solutions "Smart Jitney" program creates a public transportation system using existing cars - now that makes sense, and can be applied anywhere. Check it out at www.communitysolution.org
— Burning wood for fuel is better for the environment than recycling it, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs discovered
I can't find this study anywhere. But it would be useful to ask what their definition of "recycling" is - is it really true that my using old boards in a chicken tractor makes more carbon than burning it? I don't think so. I imagine that if what you are talking about is reducing wood to sawdust and making it into pressboard, that's certainly true. But let's assume we could use some common sense, and reuse wood in its extant form.
-Someone who installs a “green” lightbulb undoes a year’s worth of energy-saving by buying two bags of imported veg, as so much carbon is wasted flying the food to Britain
This is one of those dumb either/or constructions designed to make you think that you have to choose. Yes, you should cut the imported bags of veggies *and* use environmentally friendly lightbulbs. But the idea that you cancel out one impact is just silly - if you do both wasteful things, and then stop one, but not the other, you have manifestly used less oil. In trying to point out the impact of our food system, let's not convince people that the only project is dietary change.
-Trees, regarded as shields against global warming because they absorb carbon, were found by German scientists to be major producers of methane, a much more harmful greenhouse gas
Now this one is true, but it is misleading in the same way that the emphasis on cows is. We're not undergoing radical climate change because we have too many trees, folks. Again, the problem is human produced environmental impact. And when you talk about trees and airline tickets as though they are equally bad, you give people a really screwed up sense of the truth.
What is true is that planting trees isn't a magic bullet - we should do it because it helps with soil erosion, improves air quality, provides shade, etc... But we can't "offset" our carbon emissions by planting trees. There's simply no real substitute for not making the emissions in the first place - period.
— Organic dairy cows are worse for the climate. They produce less milk so their methane emissions per litre are higher
There's some real truth in this one - even without the nitrous oxide produced in the fertilizer, grainfed dairy is a fairly energy intensive process. The reality is that if we are to continue to drink milk as a population, the most sustainable option would be grassfed, seasonal dairy. That is, you would graze cows only during the periods where there is lush, grazable land, and produce their milk mostly or entirely without human food (grain). That would mean different cow breeds, different practices and us all drinking a lot less milk.
Honestly, eating grassfed local beef is probably better for the environment than drinking milk, unless you raise it yourself or get it very, very locally from an organic dairy that raises their own grains. It seems counterintuitive, but if you think in terms of the most sustainable ways to raise animals (on grass no one else can eat, on land that is too rocky, hilly or otherwise unsuited for grain or vegetable production), the best animal products to eat would be grassfed and hayfed lamb, goat and beef. That's the exact opposite of the heirarchy that most semi-veg or veg folks have - first you give up red meat, then poultry, then eggs and milk. But in fact, probably the best use of resources would be grazing animals on land in grass anyway (lawns, parks, hilly land, crop protection land), then eggs and chicken raised on your own food scraps, and then a distant third, eggs and milk raised organically on grain.
But in this list there's a great deal more that is misleading than that is helpful. The myths that I think we need to undo are quite different. Here are the Great, Green Myths that I'm most concerned with.
1. That it is either/or. That is, that we have to make choices like "eat less meat" or "drive less." We have to do both - period.
2. That we can meaningfully offset our impact, and go on with life as usual. The reality is that right now, our emissions levels are so high that any offsetting we do has to compensate for past emissions. The only way to avoid catastrophic consequences are to stop emitting - and soon.
3. That the bad guys are plants and animals, not us. That this can somehow be passed off on cows or trees or polar bears, and thus, our own responsibility is diminished.
4. That we don't need good information - that is, that we can't honestly compare apples to apples. The simple truth is that if you can't be bothered to draw your circles and make your comparisons fairly, you should get out of the game. Just wanting attention isn't enough of an excuse.
5. That the solution is really anywhere other than "don't do it, stop, change." Most of us are still hanging on to the notion that the solution doesn't involve real change. Time to get over it, folks.
Shalom,
Sharon
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
How To Explain Peak Oil To Anyone
It has occurred to me that there must be a simple way of explaining peak oil to everyone - but most solutions have concentrated on creating a *single* simple method of explaining peak oil, when what is needed is a highly specialized approach, designed to help people grasp the issue in the most basic terms imaginable. Being a helpful sort, I have undertaken to provide those explanations. Thus, all you need to do is evaluate the person you are explaining things too, and from there, insert the proper explanation. BTW, just in case you can't figure this out, this is intended to be funny and is bound to offend someone, probably everyone. Deal.
-If the Person is a lot like: Homer Simpson
The way to explain it is: "Beer comes from oil. You use oil to run tractor to grow barley. You use oil to run fermenting equipment. You use oil to ship beer to liquor store. You use gas, made from oil, to drive drunk to the store to get beer. No oil means no more beer - ever."
The solution you offer is: "More beer good. Beer comes from oil. Must. Save. Beer."
-If the Person is a lot like: An Uber-Soccer Mom
The way to explain it is: "Yes, I heard how awful it was that the coach criticized your Christina - I agree, that he was completely out of line to hurt her self esteem like that. Speaking of self-esteem, did you know I've lost 11lbs on the 100-mile diet? I feel great, and I fit into some clothes I haven't worn since Jared was born. All that fresh produce and unprocessed food has been so wonderful - Mike says I look younger too, and it seems to improve my skin. And Jennifer is a lot less hyperactive since we've been biking everywhere. And Lisa is writing her college application essay on the impact of our environmental lifestyle changes. My friend Rita who is a guidance counselor told me that this will really help differentiate her from all the soccer players and school newspaper writers for the people at Yale. Green is the new black, you know."
The solution you offer is: That you will be thinner, happier, sexier and your kids will be smarter if you do this stuff. Oh, and btw, it saves energy too.
-If the person is a lot like: Rush Limbaugh
The way to explain it is: "Evil people in China and India are burning up all of America's oil. Those selfish bastards are trying to compete with us just so that they can have running water, and the democrats in congress won't let us nuke them like we really should. They are trying to prove that Americans can't compete without a lot of energy. We need to prove that we're better than they are, with or without oil, because God loves America best. With Jesus to help us conserve, we don't have to have oil."
The solution you offer is: Conservation is Patriotic, and a good way to stick it to people in other countries.
-If the person is a lot like: Paris Hilton
The way to explain it is: "Without oil to manufacture tv sets, run "Entertainment Tonight" and power all that tv, no one will watch what you do. No one will care if you have sex on the internet, go to jail or kill Brittney Spears with your bare hands while mud wrestling on reality tv. Yes, you'll probably still be rich enough to buy oil, but all the good hotels will be having brownouts, and everyone will be so busy trying to get alone that they won't care about you. Oh, and if they get a chance, you servants will probably kill and eat your little rat-dog."
The solution you offer: "Think how much attention Angelina Jolie got by adopting all those poor kids. Maybe you should take some of your money and adopt a whole town in Bangladesh and go carbon negative. You could have a series on almost any network but Fox about making your home environmentally sound and helping poor people get access to renewable energy."
-If the person is a lot like: Grandpa Simpson
The way to explain it is: "You know, back in the old days we didn't have all this newfangled technology crap. We just did good, hard work, and knew the value of a dollar. Back then we didn't need tv, or cell phones or cars. We didn't sit around downloading music from that there internet, we had real music, in real speakeasies, and we danced for hours. And that porno-graphy on that there filthy computer - in our day we had to do real work to see naked women, carve real peep holes through rock-hard chestnut boards. These kids today are too fat and spoiled to dance, and they wouldn't know what to do with a hoe or a horse or a jackknife if it bit them in the ass. We need legislation to get them off the streets and back onto the farms!
What to suggest: National service programs, Chain gangs and Victory Gardens
If the Person is an Aging Hippie:
What to say is: "You were right about everything. Absolutely everything. Growing your own food. Renewable energy. The economy. Drugs. How sexy greying ponytails are. Not trusting old people...oh...wait..." Well, almost everything.
What to suggest: Stop looking so smug.
-If the person is a lot like: An Economist
The way to explain the problem is this: "Ok, just for a moment, let me ask you to suspend your belief for just a moment. Imagine that unicorns and faeries roam the forests, that the sun goes around the earth and that the US has a meaningful third party. Ok, now imagine that it is just possible that we can't actually substitute grain for gasoline, or benzene for water. And further imagine that people dying is bad, even if it seems like it is good for the economy.
What to suggest: Give up now.
-If the Person is: Your Dubious Spouse
What to say: "I'm doing this because I love you and I want us to have a positive future. Preparing for a low energy future will definitely bring us closer together and make our marriage stronger, happier and sexier. I can't think of anything more romantic than discussing our feelings, the current depletion rate and the latest apocalyptic novel while canning okra in the 90 degree heat. And I think you are never more beautiful than when you are putting up rainwater cachement.
What to suggest: A literal roll in the hay. Move the scythe first.
-If the person is a lot like: The President of the United States
What to say is: Ask Dick. He'll explain it to you.
What to suggest: Immediate impeachment with a heavy, blunt instrument.
-If the Person is a lot like: Homer Simpson
The way to explain it is: "Beer comes from oil. You use oil to run tractor to grow barley. You use oil to run fermenting equipment. You use oil to ship beer to liquor store. You use gas, made from oil, to drive drunk to the store to get beer. No oil means no more beer - ever."
The solution you offer is: "More beer good. Beer comes from oil. Must. Save. Beer."
-If the Person is a lot like: An Uber-Soccer Mom
The way to explain it is: "Yes, I heard how awful it was that the coach criticized your Christina - I agree, that he was completely out of line to hurt her self esteem like that. Speaking of self-esteem, did you know I've lost 11lbs on the 100-mile diet? I feel great, and I fit into some clothes I haven't worn since Jared was born. All that fresh produce and unprocessed food has been so wonderful - Mike says I look younger too, and it seems to improve my skin. And Jennifer is a lot less hyperactive since we've been biking everywhere. And Lisa is writing her college application essay on the impact of our environmental lifestyle changes. My friend Rita who is a guidance counselor told me that this will really help differentiate her from all the soccer players and school newspaper writers for the people at Yale. Green is the new black, you know."
The solution you offer is: That you will be thinner, happier, sexier and your kids will be smarter if you do this stuff. Oh, and btw, it saves energy too.
-If the person is a lot like: Rush Limbaugh
The way to explain it is: "Evil people in China and India are burning up all of America's oil. Those selfish bastards are trying to compete with us just so that they can have running water, and the democrats in congress won't let us nuke them like we really should. They are trying to prove that Americans can't compete without a lot of energy. We need to prove that we're better than they are, with or without oil, because God loves America best. With Jesus to help us conserve, we don't have to have oil."
The solution you offer is: Conservation is Patriotic, and a good way to stick it to people in other countries.
-If the person is a lot like: Paris Hilton
The way to explain it is: "Without oil to manufacture tv sets, run "Entertainment Tonight" and power all that tv, no one will watch what you do. No one will care if you have sex on the internet, go to jail or kill Brittney Spears with your bare hands while mud wrestling on reality tv. Yes, you'll probably still be rich enough to buy oil, but all the good hotels will be having brownouts, and everyone will be so busy trying to get alone that they won't care about you. Oh, and if they get a chance, you servants will probably kill and eat your little rat-dog."
The solution you offer: "Think how much attention Angelina Jolie got by adopting all those poor kids. Maybe you should take some of your money and adopt a whole town in Bangladesh and go carbon negative. You could have a series on almost any network but Fox about making your home environmentally sound and helping poor people get access to renewable energy."
-If the person is a lot like: Grandpa Simpson
The way to explain it is: "You know, back in the old days we didn't have all this newfangled technology crap. We just did good, hard work, and knew the value of a dollar. Back then we didn't need tv, or cell phones or cars. We didn't sit around downloading music from that there internet, we had real music, in real speakeasies, and we danced for hours. And that porno-graphy on that there filthy computer - in our day we had to do real work to see naked women, carve real peep holes through rock-hard chestnut boards. These kids today are too fat and spoiled to dance, and they wouldn't know what to do with a hoe or a horse or a jackknife if it bit them in the ass. We need legislation to get them off the streets and back onto the farms!
What to suggest: National service programs, Chain gangs and Victory Gardens
If the Person is an Aging Hippie:
What to say is: "You were right about everything. Absolutely everything. Growing your own food. Renewable energy. The economy. Drugs. How sexy greying ponytails are. Not trusting old people...oh...wait..." Well, almost everything.
What to suggest: Stop looking so smug.
-If the person is a lot like: An Economist
The way to explain the problem is this: "Ok, just for a moment, let me ask you to suspend your belief for just a moment. Imagine that unicorns and faeries roam the forests, that the sun goes around the earth and that the US has a meaningful third party. Ok, now imagine that it is just possible that we can't actually substitute grain for gasoline, or benzene for water. And further imagine that people dying is bad, even if it seems like it is good for the economy.
What to suggest: Give up now.
-If the Person is: Your Dubious Spouse
What to say: "I'm doing this because I love you and I want us to have a positive future. Preparing for a low energy future will definitely bring us closer together and make our marriage stronger, happier and sexier. I can't think of anything more romantic than discussing our feelings, the current depletion rate and the latest apocalyptic novel while canning okra in the 90 degree heat. And I think you are never more beautiful than when you are putting up rainwater cachement.
What to suggest: A literal roll in the hay. Move the scythe first.
-If the person is a lot like: The President of the United States
What to say is: Ask Dick. He'll explain it to you.
What to suggest: Immediate impeachment with a heavy, blunt instrument.
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