Casaubon's Book

Just a Reminder

2008-03-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

That I'm no longer posting here, and you should definitely update any links and RSS feeds to www.sharonastyk.com.

Cheers,

Sharon

If You Are Looking For Me...

2008-02-24T07:37:00.000-08:00

You won't find me or my writings here any more. They are over at my new site, www.sharonastyk.com. See you there!!

Sharon

Updates

2008-02-19T09:28:00.000-08:00

A couple of notes for y'all:

1. There are still four spaces left in the online food storage class. The in-person one (much less in depth than this) was a lot of fun - I really enjoyed it, and can't wait to get into more detail about food storage. That class concentrated almost entirely on bulk purchasing and dry grains, but I'm looking forward to getting into preserving your own and a host of other things. So if you were hoping to join, but presuming the class was full up, please send me an email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com.

I'll also be putting up preliminary materials for those following along online next week. I'm looking forward to the blog conversations we'll have about this.

2. So only a short time after I premiered my latest blog, I'm shutting it down - and this one too!

But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop blogging (give up my rantings - never!). After I premiered Depletion-Abundance, an online friend of mine, Deb, kindly emailed me to say that she thought the site sucked ;-).

Note: Edited to say Deb didn't actually say it sucked. She said she thought it was kind of underwhelming. I don't want to give anyoen the impression Deb was rude - but it sounded funnier this way ;-).

But she had a cure for this - she offered to help me set up a brand new website that would cover blog, books, and other materials. She wouldn't even take my firstborn son in return - so I hope she'll take my profuse public thanks!

So Deb has designed a gorgeous new site for me, and kicked my behind into taking it seriously. She's been working like a dog on it, and I'll be premiering the site sometime next week. All the material from here will be available there (link coming), including the older archived posts from both sites. Plus there will be new material.

In the meantime, there probably won't be many new blog posts in the next few days, as we transfer stuff over. Bear with us - it should be a short term problem.I'll put up an announcement when the time comes, but I just wanted you to know that it is in the offing.

Cheers,

Sharon

Everyone Talks About their Period, but Nobody Does Anything About It...

2008-02-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

...Except Crunchy Chicken. One of the things I like best about Crunchy's writing is her straightforward bluntness on bodily issues. In fact, she rather puts me to shame - I was once famous for that sort of thing. When I was doing AIDS education, I used to do a "15 ways to put a condom on a banana (or a partner)" demo that managed to embarass almost everyone. But since I've become a staid peak oil and climate change writer, I've hardly even mentioned bodily fluids or the orifices from which they flow. This is a pity, and must change.

Well, Crunchy has done me one much better - she's not only talking about menstruation, she's making change in the world. Millions of young African women miss school because they have no menstrual supplies. Commercial makers of disposables are supplying some of them - and getting a lot of advertising credit for it, but the pads are then burnt, and the free supplies are a temporary measure, designed to create a market for disposable products many poor women and girls can ill afford. Crunchy has started a non-profit, working with aid agencies, to get women to sew or donate reusable pads to these women - and asked me if I'd help. Not only do I want to help, but I can't say enough how much admire Crunchy's passion - and her speed. It was less than a week before she had a project up and going.

So I strongly recommend that all of my readers read Crunchy's posts on this matter:http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/02/last-monday-i-posted-about-how-i-was.html and http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/02/using-your-sewing-skills-for-good.html and visit her new website here: http://www.goods4girls.org/ and make a donation, either of your time or money. I will be.

You will also soon be able to donate through this site, but as you all know, I'm a techno-moron, and the addition of something as complex as a donation button to my blog is way, way beyond my skills. So I'm relying on a kind friend to help me.

And, as long as we're talking bodily fluids here, may I also recommend that everyone think seriously about their own, as well as the menstrual needs of the world's poor. Disposable menstrual products bite - they aren't as pleasant or comfortable as the reusable ones, they cost tons more, and they add to landfill waste and used ones produce methane, an greenhouse gas with many times the warming power of carbon. While teenage girls may not yet be ready to carry around used pads (although it is perfectly possible to do so very discreetly), all us grownup women have no excuse.

You have a whole host of choices here - long lasting, very comfortable cups like the Keeper and the Diva Cup (I have a diva):http://www.gladrags.com/category/menstrual-cups, and various cloth pads that can be made: Note, the ppatterns Crunchy is using work well for ourselves too: http://www.goods4girls.org/2008/02/sewing-patterns.html or bought: http://www.moonpads.com/ or some other site - my own come from gladrags, and I've been very happy with them:http://www.gladrags.com/ but She Who Must Be Crunched has a list here:http://www.goods4girls.org/2008/02/how-to-donate.html.

While you are doing good in Africa, if you aren't using reusable menstrual supplies, do good here, for us and the entire planet, and switch over.

And men, I don't want to hear any whinging about this post. In fact, unless you are gay or celibate and never interact with women under 60, you should be reading this with some interest. Perhaps you have a daughter, a friend, a sister, or a wife who might be interested in this information. There are lots of women out there who might be nervous about doing this because they've been taught that menstruation is dirty or bad. It helps to have a husband or friend who deals matter of factly with your period, and who (if the relationship is intimate enough to allow for this) is gently encouraging (without pressure) to make the conversion.

And please, folks, donate to Crunchy's project. It is such a little thing - and a huge thing - women's education is enormously important for their political and social status, their reproductive future (education is tightly correlated with birthrates) and their economic and environmental security. It would be easy to underestimate how important this is. Fortunately, Crunchy hasn't!

And next on the bodily fluids parade: the reusable condom, its engineering and the future of sperm (which isn't actually a joke - I've written about this: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/09/hey-engineers.html)

Cheers,

Sharon

Seize the Day - Threshold Moments and the Hope for Change

2008-02-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

It is common to respond to plans for radical change by stating that it is impossible to get this or that change enacted. This, of course, is manifestly wrong. We have only to look at historical events to see that it is perfectly possible, for both good and ill, to radically change circumstances in a host of ways that looked completely impossible not very long before.

The question is, how does that happen? And is it possible to imagine that we could, in fact, change things, and for example, bring about a relocalized economy, or 100 million farmers? Is that even feasible? More importantly, could it possibly happen before it has to? That is, we all know that we'd be a lot more secure if the transition to a sustainable agriculture happened a little before we were all out of food. Is that within the realm of possibility? I think so, but it requires a change in our perspective.

Now generally speaking, radical change is enacted one of two ways. The first is by revolution of one sort or another – a violent (not always warlike, but always violent), and deeply disruptive overthrow of what has gone before. In a very short time – the casting off of what has always seemed inviolable – slavery, colonialism, the divine of kings – transforms the landscape.

The problem with revolutions is that the costs are extremely high. Even a non-violent revolution means that large chunks of the existing population in power are simply cast out, and often come back to haunt you (think Cuba’s wealthy landowners, for example). Revolutions are vastly destructive, and anyone who simply isn’t ready, either adapts, or is overrun.

The other option is culture change – the gradual transition of a society from old values to new ones. It starts as a small movement, growing gradually, until ideas permeate the culture. Most of those who resist are given the chance to acclimate, and eventually come to accept, if not like, the dominant culture view. Eventually, cultural norms make it impossible even for those who espoused previous views to acknowledge them or to express them – think, for example, of the American Civil Rights movement. While racism was once a cultural norm in the US, now if you ask around, there are only about 4 people in the US who will admit to ever having expressed racist views.

The difficulty with this method is that it is far too slow for our present purposes – the major advances of the Civil Rights movement, for example, came over a period of 20 years. We simply don’t have 20 years of marching and gradually changing cultural norms.

Now it is necessarily the case that every movement contains elements of both of these – that is, the Civil Rights movement did include revolutionaries, and revolutions often begin with demonstrations. It is impossible for me to describe historical courses in any detail in a five page essay – but most such changes are dominated, either by a moment of overthrow, or by the lack of that moment.

Are those our only choices? That is, are our only options taking up arms, or marching and singing? Both might work or they might not – we may well be able to transition our culture, given enough time or enough will and anger – to a society that can adapt to the new environmental norms. But we do not have multiple decades to make such a transition. James Hansen, for example, notes that most of our environmental changes will have to come rapidly over the next decade. And because almost all our changes take some major lead time, that means that the period we have to change attitudes is very short.

As for revolution, it is simply too destructive, even were it not a bad idea for a host of other reasons. The human costs of radical, sudden transformation are resistance – lots of it. And lots of resistance means either the failure of overall goals or repressive responses that destroy what is created from the inside out.

So are there any other choices between the complete rupture of prior experience and the gradual transition to a new way of thinking? I think there is another option, but it depends upon being prepared to take hold of a moment, and claim it as your own.

The third choice is something I’m calling (for lack of a better term) “threshold moments” – those points at which history intervenes, and something that was unimaginable the day before becomes entirely possible. At those moments, it is possible to make a larger step forward than could previously have been imagined – people are poised for radical change.

Now such moments occur in two ways. The first is when events demand a particular change – for example, as in Cuba when the cutoff of oil supplies demanded a rapid fire deindustrialization of agriculture and the transition to a new economy. In this case, cause and effect are direct – that is, the systemic response to food shortages is the institutionalization of a new system. The bombing of Pearl Harbor leads to a military response and US participation in the World War. While it can never be said that there is no other response possible, the response is the logical, successful addressing of a problem

But there is another kind of threshold moment, one in which we perceive we are at a transitional moment, and at which it is possible to imagine a number of possible responses – where what matters is that the populace is poised for response – and multiple possible successful responses are possible. Here is the moment at which it is possible to advance a new agenda – and possible to override other public agendas by laying claim to that moment and advancing one’s agenda as a logical response.

The obvious example here is 9/11. If you are not American, I think it is hard to understand how desperately Americans were casting around after 9/11 for some way to make their own response match up to the radical change in their world that they experienced. And there is nothing logically contiguous with the event about, say, invading Iraq or going shopping – that is, what was most notable about 9/11 was that people were willing to make massive changes, had they been asked. They were not asked – and no one made a strong attempt to wrest the narrative of 9/11 away from the government – individuals resisted the story we were being told, but there was not a fully formed attempt, say to recast our response to 9/11 in terms of oil and energy, and to use it as a major call for renewable growth. Some attempts were made, but there weren’t enough people working together.

Such threshold moments come around fairly often in history, and are likely to come more often as we enter what has been called “interesting times.” In the last decade, we’ve had large-scale threshold moment, 9/11, and a smaller one in which some significant cultural changes might have been enacted, Hurricane Katrina.

Does that sound strange and unlikely? I think it is true that had Americans been told after 9/11, “We want you to go out and grow a victory garden and cut back on energy usage” the response would have been tremendous – it would absolutely have been possible to harness the anger and pain and frustration of those moments, and a people who desperately wanted something to do. Even after Katrina, it would have been possible for a concerted narrative that ran the pictures from the superdome over and over again saying “And if you never want this to happen again, you must…” Katrina would not have been nearly as effective as 9/11, but a great deal of change could have been made with it, regardless. And making use of the momentum of such events could have enabled us to be that much further along in the adaptation process before a moment comes at which a particular response is truly necessary.

Naomi Klein notes that this is precisely the claim of Milton Friedman’s “Shock Doctrine” which says that at a moment of crisis, you can sweep away the old and transform things utterly. Up until now, such a system has been mostly used for ill, for market reforms that are utterly destructive to our public life. But since such events will be used, it only makes sense for us to use them for good.

Moreover, as Klein points out, the Shock Doctrine’s essential message, overthrowing the past, is destructive to the ordinary people who are victims of a crisis. That is, those who live through such threshold moments in history and are directly affected by them want to cling to what they have of the past, to restore what they have lost. The Shock Doctrine model destroys, rather than reclaims the past.

Here, sustainability advocates have an enormous advantage in being able to claim the narrative from those who want to overthrow the past. Because ultimately, our propositions are always tied to the past, to previous successful responses to hard times and disaster. We are tying our propositions to what people dreamed of in suburbia, the small slice of personal eden that never was, and saying you can have that thing you once sought, as part of the promise of restoration. Those who claim that we are merely advocating a return to the past are missing the point – it is never possible to go back, but it is feasible to anchor the future in the past, to offer a narrative in which we do not have to give up what we value, but can retain it, and take it with us into a new and radically different world.

To do this, we will have to prepare and watch for the next such threshold moment. The peak oil and climate change movements were simply not organized enough 7 years ago at 9/11, and we mishandled Hurricane Katrina – there were plenty of individual attempts to tie it into climate change, but there was no unified attempt to create a single narrative account of Katrina.
If we are to imagine Relocalization and steady state economics taking over, if it is possible (and I do not say that it is, merely that we cannot fail to try), we must be absolutely prepared for the next threshold moment, and to explain how it is (and it will be, we won’t have to lie) about the oil, about the climate, and how it demands a particular response, not blowing up another country far away, but a change in us.

I have no idea when that moment will come, and neither does anyone else. It could happen tonight, and have us wake up in a changed world. Or it could leave us hanging for years, and the next such threshold we cross could be the transition into a real disaster, one in which our options are limited. But regardless, since it is always possible to fuck things up worse than necessary, sustainability advocates of every kind must be prepared to take one story and echo it back across media and blogs, to tell it and tell it, and teach others to demand a particular kind of response.

One of the things about this that is important is to remember that this doesn’t work in a linear way. That is, the process involves going along making small changes, and adding a few new recruits and tiny incremental alterations for a good long time. At first it seems like you aren’t making any progress at all – that the change is so vast that the little moves can’t get you there. But it is important to remember that you are doing the advance work for something that is likely to alter, not with a gradual building, but in a moment. That is, we’re doing what we can now, so that when the right time comes, we can do vastly more.

Kurt Cobb observed at Community Solutions that the best example of this narrative claiming is the 9/11 Truth Movement – regardless of what you think of their claims, they have been enormously effective in changing the official story about what 9/11 was. There are more of us – Paul Hawken has called the sustainability movement the largest movement on the planet, and that may well be true. There are tens of millions of people all over the world who care about this. And we have to be able to tell the story, the true story, of how climate change and peak oil have created a disaster to which we must now respond.

In the meantime, we grow our victory gardens and build our movement and educate our neighbors and plan and wait. It won’t be too long in coming. And then it will be time – to pass the word, and make our move – to try and take control of the narrative and say “This is what is needed as a response, to make us better.” And everything we do in the meantime, everything we start, every working model we create, every program we start, every change we make in our homes and neighborhoods, gets us that much more ready to seize the day.

Sharon

Thank God I'm a Country Girl! (With Apologies to John Denver)

2008-02-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

This was not what I was supposed to be writing today, but all I can say is that my brain is a strange, strange place sometimes. Had the radio on, caught this song, and couldn't get it out of my head (it isn't like I'm even a John Denver fan, but stranger things have happened) until this came out.

If you don't know the tune, the song is available through Itunes ;-).

Thank God I’m a Country Girl! (With apologies to John Denver)

Well, I was born right here, in these suburbs
Its where I catch my rain and where I grow my herbs
Walk the kids to school, and cross at the curbs
Thank God I'm a Country Girl!

With my husband and kids we’re ridin’ on our bikes
To the farmer’s market, y’know its quite a hike
Littlest one even does it on his trike!
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

Well, I got me a fine life, got a green plan
I’m cookin’ homegrown in my cast iron pan
I can't do it all but I'm doing what I can!
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

I live in an apartment on the fourteenth floor
But you can see I’m green when you open up my door
Never owned no car so my feet get kinda’ sore
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

Well a simple kind of life never did me no harm
My community garden is my own tiny farm
Thrift shop clothes have their own kinda charm
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

Well, I got me a fine life, I got a green plan
I’m cookin’ homegrown in my cast iron pan
I can't do it all but I'm doing what I can
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

Its 33 miles to the supermarket
But I’ve no need for goin’, took the car and parked it.
Huntin’ my own and the deer ain’t remarked it
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

We gone organic when I was just a bride
Now I’m a grandma and we’re riding with the tide
Hard times a’comin’ but folks are on our side
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

Well, I got me a fine life, I got a green plan
Cookin’ up homegrown in a cast iron pan
I can't do it all, but I'm doing what I can!
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

We’re just folks who remember what we’re after
We’re not seeking riches, we’re really chasin’ laughter
Those that think we’re crazy, we know they’re daft-er
Thank God I’m a Country Girl!

Country’s not just a place, it is a state of mind
There’s earth under the feet of folks of every kind
The country and the future they belong to me and mine.
THANK GOD I’M A COUNTRY GIRL!

Sharon, who will be keeping her day job ;-)

Online Food Storage Class Info

2008-02-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

Ok, folks, I'm putting together the online food storage class that there was so much interest in. I thought I'd offer it in four weeks, over the month of March.

There will be four components, and this class will go considerably beyond the talk I'm giving on Saturday, so you don't need to feel bad if you live too far away to attend ;-).

-A weekly blog post, with discussion on my regular blogs. This will be open to everyone. I'll also post some recipes from the weekly "how to eat it" section on my blog.

- A set of follow along readings. The list of readings for each week (not required for participation but helpful) will also be available on my blog to anyone who wants to participate.

- A group for registered participants to discuss food storage issues. I'll be around to answer questions and facilitate discussion. This will also include recipes, additional materials, and suggestions.

-Help setting up an individualized food storage program based on your family, concerns and conditions.

The course will be divided into four week long sections.

Week 1: March 6 and 7: The Basics: Why store food? What kinds? How much? Where to Put it? How long to keep it? How to eat it? How to ensure a nutritious, balanced, good tasting food supply?

Week 2: March 13 and 14: Buying in bulk, finding sustainable sources, cooking with grains and legumes, adapting your diet to "store what you eat, eat what you store," accoutrements (buckets, grain grinders, etc...), spices and seasonings, food storage on a budget.

Week 3: March 20 and 21: Food storage local - how to base your food storage on homegrown and local sources. Long term food preservation strategies, storing seeds, meat, milk and vegetables, staple produce as a grain substitute. How to eat seasonally from food storage.

Week 4: March 27 and 28: Special Circumstances, special diets, medical issues, appetite fatigue, infants and children. Community food storage ideas, and getting the idea of storing food out in your own community. Setting up your own plan and implementing it gradually.

The classes will be offered on Tuesdays and Wednesdays during March. That is, new posts will go up on Tuesday mornings on my blogs, and new discussion topics and materials on the class discussion group. I'll be available to comment, offer help, answer questions and help set up plans during Tuesday and Wednesday each week - that way, no one has to be there at a specific time. On Thursday evenings, I'll post the next week's reading materials.

The cost for the class will $125 for the course, and for this first time, will be limited to 25 participants, so that everyone gets a fair share of my time. It is free to follow along on the blogs, but since this will represent a large investment of my time, and I hope to be able to offer participants help getting started and setting up their own goals, I do need to cover my costs. I don't want to exclude anyone, however, so if you need a sliding scale, email me and we'll talk. My goal is to make this as accessible to as many people as possible.

If you are interested in registering, email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com, and I'll follow up with you this week, confirming registrations and sending more details. Please bear with me as I get this organized - I wasn't expecting quite the enthusiastic response I got to my initial query, so I'm still pulling things together by the seat of my pants ;-).

Making the Riot Easy

2008-02-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

Kiashu has a terrific post over at Green With a Gun about what a 1 tonne carbon lifestyle looks like. For those who have been terrified by the calculations of the Riot for Austerity, Kyle gives you a mental picture of what a fair share life actually looks like. I was very impressed by this, and the level of detail involved. http://greenwithagun.blogspot.com/2008/02/one-tonne-carbon-lifestyle.html.

I think one of the hardest things about making changes is having a sense of what it would look like.

I particularly liked this point:

"But I can't because...

"In the developed West, the average person can do this. For every person who is 100km from work and won't cycle, there'll be another one who is just 3km from work and can walk, not even having those public transport emissions. Some will need more meat because they're menstruating or recovering from surgery, but others will be vegan. Some won't have any yard at all to garden in, or even a balcony for container plants, but others will have relatives living in the country who'll be delighted for them to plant trees in some disused paddock. Individuals may be able have less emissions in one area but more in another, walking to work but eating more meat, using less electricity but buying more books, and so on and so forth. So this represents an average. Just because you find one area difficult doesn't mean you have to forget the other areas.

Doing these emissions-reducing things, living the one-tonne-carbon lifestyle, is not something everyone can do, because we don't have the public transport or renewable energy generation capacity. It's a bit like becoming rich - anyone can do it, but not everyone can do it. The difference between this lifestyle and becoming rich is that as we put in the public transport and renewable energy infrastructure, everyone will be able to live like this, whereas it'll never be the case that everyone can be rich. As the public transport becomes used more, and more people sign up for wind energy and so on, the infrastructure will be built. This is why even though the lifestyle suggested here you could live tomorrow, in the Goal Emissions article I allowed a decade for everyone to change to this lifestyle. That also allows ten years while you say, "but I can't because..."

And a lot of us can do a lot of this sooner, rather than later. We live out in the country, and my husband can't bike to work in the winter, but he can carpool, and I can stay home altogether, and share my emissions with him. My oldest son has to be bussed to a school for kids with disabilities, but his brothers can be homeschooled, and share their fair share of emissions with their big brother. We can all change our diets to a degree. We can all do some of this now, and a little more each day.

Nice one, Kiashu!

Sharon

It is Time For a New Victory Garden Movement

2008-02-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

There is little question that it is time for us to create a new Victory Garden movement. That's one of the central premises of Aaron's and my book, and I don't think there are very many people who understand what we're facing who would deny that this is true.

In fact, there are quite a number of people in the Community Garden movement, and the blogging community who have supported the creation of a new Victory Garden movement. Some people doing this work include Bob Waldrop, whose call to action on local food systems has drawn considerable attention here (among other places):http://depletion-abundance.blogspot.com/2008/02/bob-waldrop.html , Foodshed Planet's site has inspired others, http://www.victorygardendrive.blogspot.com/ and the group Revive the Victory Garden, who have called for 2 million new gardens to combat climate change in 2008: http://www.revivevictorygarden.org/, and there are literally too many others for me to list. But the movement is nascent, still beginning, and seems to need a little midwifing to get things moving along.

The reality is that interest in really, really local food is growing, and so is interest in food production, as food prices skyrocket and quality falls. And the best news is that this is a case where grassroots action not only can work, but it is the only thing that ever has worked - that is, in the US during both World Wars, in Cuba, in Russia - gardens for food security began and grew under the aegis of ordinary people acting to improve their world. While we can enable it from above, the creation of a victory garden movement is a person to person, blog to blog, neighbor to neighbor project.

Why do it? A host of reasons, personal and political.

Victory Gardens Mean:

-Better Food - Fresher, better tasting, straight off the plant food money literally cannot buy!

- Better Health - More nutrition in just picked vegetables, grown without chemicals, while getting the kind of exercise many of us pay the gym for! Safety from industrial food contamination and toxic imports.

-Food Security - Food in your pots as prices get higher, supplies that can't be disrupted by energy shortages, greater regional self-sufficiency. Millions of new gardeners can make sure that Americans don't have to wait for distant food supplies to be trucked in - weeks after they are needed. Every gardener makes your region more secure.

-Higher Quality of Life - A more beautiful environment, stronger community, a better environment.

-More Money in your Pocket, More Time for What Matters - If you don't need as much money for food, or to work as many hours to pay the grocery bills, you can use that money or take that time for what you really care about.

- The Chance to Serve Others and Create a More Just Society - Your Victory Garden can be a strike against hunger and poverty - you can have food to donate, and the ability to teach others to fish, and thus, eat for a lifetime.

- Reduce Corporate Power and Improve Democracy - We cannot simultaneously deplore the power corporations have in our society and depend on them to supply our most basic necessities. If we stop giving our hard earned money to the corporations who undermine our democracy, they will be less powerful!

-Protect Against Climate Change - Humus rich soils, full of organic matter can sequester tons of carbon, quite literally - and grow the best vegetables. We reduce our carbon emissions when we don't have to drive to the store or buy fossil fuel grown food.

-Reduce our Energy Dependence - Fossil fuels are used in agriculture, both industrial and industrial organic at every step, from the fertilizer in teh ground to the refrigerated truck to plastic bag they come in. We can eliminated fossil fuels from almost every step when we grow our own.

-Create Peace - We are at war for oil - reducing our fossil fuel dependency through Victory Gardens gives us hope for Peace in our time.

-Hope for the Future - In a changing world, the ability to grow food, to share and enjoy it, and to live in a healthy world full of beautiful gardens may be the best legacy we can our children and grandchildren.

Ok, so we agree that we need Victory Gardens. How do we bring all the participants in this movement together, and create a real and national Victory Garden movement? How do we bring together professional farmers, with Victory Farms and city Gardeners, schools and community resources, and backyard advocates? How do we get Victory Gardening onto the national agenda? How do we teach millions of people how to grow, cook and eat their own, and why?

One part, of course, is the person to person work we're doing now. The next step is to create a large-scale Victory Garden umbrella organization guided by people in every part of the Victory Garden movement - chefs and cooks helping people learn to eat, teachers helping children get involved, churches, corporations and community groups all putting gardens on public and private greenspaces, local "garden farmer markets" where very small scale producers can exchange or sell their extra in their neighborhoods, climate change and energy activists working on this simple way to cut our energy usage and reduce atmospheric carbon. That is, we need a movement - a real, serious movement. And we can do this.

And to get those new gardens and gardeners started. And for that, we need your help. We'll be asking for more specific help as we go along, but getting started, we'd love all of you who blog to put out the Victory Garden idea, even if you usually write about other things. If you can, start a Victory Garden blog, and post a link in comments - I'll put links up on this site and my other one. And make the effort - reach out to one neighbor, at least, and help them get started gardening. Share seeds. Talk to your community, your synagogue, mosque, church, neighbors, school about gardening. Take a risk - for greater security later. Plant a front-yard garden, centered around a "V" for Victory (cabbages look great like this, particularly mixed with nasturtiums or calendula, but use your imagination). Be courageous - we need this Victory!

Sharon

Where to Live?

2008-02-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

This is by far the most commonly asked question I receive. I'm going to answer it in two parts, first, broad regional issues, and next I'll do the city/suburbs/country question. Or rather I'm not going to answer it at all - that is, I don't think that there's only one good answer to this question, so I'm not going to try and provide them, so much as offer some things to think about.

First let us dispense with the obvious. I assume you know that the north is cold, the south is warm and that this is mostly a matter of personal preference. That is, you can live quite well on little or no energy in the very cold north, or the very hot south. You might not like it, but it will not kill most people. Every time I say this, someone argues that heat and cold do kill. This is true - they just don't have to, for the most part.

Yes, there are a few medical conditions that make you especially sensitive to one or the other. And yes, you can die from both heat and cold. But even without powered heating, people are designed to tolerate a lot of cold - if they weren't, we'd never have survived until the invention of central heating. If you dress warmly, bundle up when sleeping, wear a hat, layer, sleep with another human or a dog, and move around during the day, you can live with no supplemental heat. You probably won't like it very much, but you will do fine. It is worth noting that the Lapp people routinely slept out in -50 temperatures in tents heated only by our body heat – if they can do that, we make a four-poster bed and layer up and do the same at night. During the day, just keep moving. People who freeze to death in their homes are generally elderly or children and don’t know how to respond to growing hypothermia – they may even feel warm and take off their clothes. The best cure for this is being together, and adults watching over the very vulnerable, and making sure they get enough calories and are protected from the worst of the cold.

The same is true of heat. Yes, people die of heat stroke - but mostly they are elderly or disabled people who are alone, muddled by the heat's affect on their bodies, who lack the ability to do simple things like put their feet in a bucket of water or hydrate adequately. As in the cases in California recently, most of the people who die of heat stroke or cold, die because they are isolated, not because of the weather per se. Have close communal ties and a system of support for those without family, especially those with medical conditions, infants and the elderly, and understand the basics of physiology and treating the early stages of hypothermia or heat exhaustion, and such deaths could be greatly reduced or eliminated.

All of which means that temperature in and of itself is largely a matter of personal preference. My personal preference is that I will gladly live with minimal (I sleep already in a room heated only by the ambient heat of a distant woodstove, as do my children) heat all winter than live in a place with 90+ degree temperatures all summer long.

This is a matter of taste - I hate the heat and like the cold. This is one of those pick your poison issues - snow, ice and cold or heat. You should be aware that all regions will get warmer gradually, so be prepared to live with not just what it is now but what it will be in a few decades. In the meantime, if you like neither extreme, there are some options there, too - the Pacific Northwest and the southern Appalachians, for example.

Then there's the matter of neighbor prejudice. This you can get in bulk at various websites and in various books, so I'll try and keep it to a minimum here. The idea that right thinking people don't want to live near conservative Christians, that scary Asian pirates will depopulate the Pacific Northwest, that Latinos will rule the Southwest with an iron hand, and that inner cities will be filled with "them" rioting and shooting all assume a. we are not whatever "them" we're worrying about and b. that this is going to be the defining feature of the future. I don't swear it isn't true, but I also think the whole thing is probably rather overstated.

There are some people who probably will have good reason not to pick certain regions - but there will be many people who find those regions compelling precisely because of a scary-to-others immigrant population or religious culture. Since I know there are various “thems” of all sorts among my readers, I’m going to suggest that instead, you find communities that you feel secure in – gay readers may not prefer to live in the conservative Christian south, but they might be happy among the terrifying them of flannel shirt wearing lesbian Vermont farmers, while an African Methodist reader might find the whole idea of Vermont horrifying. Pick your poison.

Having grown up in New England, personally I think reserve, protestant work ethic and a tendency to wear winter hats with shorts and sandals is completely fine, but that is a matter of taste. My ancestors tend to be among those who heard the message "Go West Young Man" and rather thought, "Ayuh, it may be cold, and the land grows better rocks than corn, but clam chowder and not sitting on my behind on a wagon for six months look pretty good to me." Thus, I am no Westerner, either. But again, let us not mistake these things for knowledge, or truth, or anything but custom, comfort and habit. I'm all for indulging personal preferences - I think mostly people should live their lives where they are comfortable, where their community is supportive and where the climate suits them.

So what should you care about when choosing a place to live? Here's my own personal list of the most important factors:

- A PLACE TO STAY, to pass down and that you believe will be good for you and your family for the long term. The coming changes may well involve a great shift in how we regard natural resources like land and water. We are moving from a society that has invested enormous economic value in things far removed from the origins of their production, to a society that is probably going to be hyper-aware that wealth = natural resources. In a society where food is scarcer, water is short and resources are stretched to their limits, land and the resources on it, along with the capacity to do things like grow food and wood, are likely to be intensely valuable.

In many societies, ordinary people have been sustained by their access to the land and their long term ties to that land. Generally speaking, ordinarily poor people cannot buy much, if any land - instead, they inherit it - families steward land and pass it down from generation to generation. We do not do this in the rich world very much, but I think we may go back to it. While for a short while we may become a mobile society, with many refugees relocating, over the long term we may become more fixed, more bound by our investment in a place and the community ties we depend on.

So the first factor I personally take into account is a place to stay. This is not a perfect solution, of course - no one can know the whole future, and migration is always possible. But unless we stop and stay, we will not be able to feed ourselves from our land, and we will never become truly native to anywhere, with a native awareness and love for a place. So I would recommend an area that you have reason to believe will continue to be a good place to live not just next year, but in 50 and 100 years. This is difficult, given the impact of climate change - projections are uncertain. But generally speaking, if the map shows that your home will be under water in 25 years, you might want to consider moving before the rush devalues your home. Take a good and serious look at the long term.

WATER, and lots of it. I can't stress this one enough. Anything less than 20cm of rainfall a year is impossible to farm without extensive irrigation - don't bet on having the power to do this. Personally, if you think there's any chance at all that, due to pump failure, aquifer depletion, drought or competition from others that you might need to rely primarily on rainfall, I wouldn't take less than 20 inches of rain per year, evenly distributed. That is, if you have a dry season, where it doesn't rain for months on end, be absolutely sure you can fill your tanks sufficiently to get through.

Now I know there are people who worry about water less than I do. I have a friend doing remarkable things with dry land tree agriculture in Israel, and she, among others, has great hopes. I, however, have my doubts. The reality is that most very dry places have never supported large populations. Moreover, in such places, the foodshed is extremely large - Gary Nabhan, author of Coming Home to Eat required a local diet of 250 miles, rather than 100, simply because of limited availability. While some people will undoubtedly do very well in the dry plains, deserts or other low rainfall areas, the question becomes what kind of population the area will be able to support.

I personally would be very reluctant to live in much of the dryer parts of the American Southwest, parts of Australia and the driest parts of the Plains of Canada and America, unless I had full legal rights to reliable sources of water. Riparian water rights, as practiced in the Western US make water issues more contentious, and I would want to be absolutely sure that I could draw water from my source for a long, long time.

In addition, look for comparatively clean water. This is increasingly difficult to find all over the US - there is almost no drinkable groundwater, or freshwater that I'd like to take a lot of fish out of these days. We've contaminated our most basic resource beyond compare. Make sure that you get water tests from any well you might consider using, understand the basic pollutants in your area, and have a good idea what and who you are downstream from, and I would recommend that everyone have a high quality water filter, ideally gravity fed, like the British Berkefield or Katahdin filters. Even if you have to eat beans, dandelions and rice for a month to afford it, I'd consider this a worthwhile investment for anyone who has any spare cash at all.

At a minimum, unless your house has a spring as pure as ivory, I would never permit children or women who are or might become pregnant to drink unfiltered water from any source that has not been thoroughly and carefully evaluated. We cannot afford to damage future generations, and if we are to have fewer children in the future, their lives and health will be all the more precious.

NOT SITTING ON TOP OF MAJOR ENERGY RESOURCES. The next few decades are going present reasons to try and extract the last drops out of old oil wells, coal out of areas previously deemed too populated or dangerous to touch, etc... I do not want to be on top or very near any major energy source - natural gas, uranium, coal or oil. The toxic, environmentally disruptive nature of extraction of all sorts means that my own basic goals of reasonable security, minimal medical interventions, food self-reliance, can be utterly destroyed by one nearby mountaintop removal or uranium extraction. These projects contaminate water tables and streams, generate toxic air, noise and water pollution and generally make life miserable for the people around them. They are the price of our insatiable desire for energy.

So if the words "old coal mine" or "natural gas well" appear anywhere on your proposed property or near it, run like heck, unless you own every single mineral right and are sure that there is no other way to get at them (that no one can dig the coal from the next property over). Frankly, I don't even want to be the same region as most such enterprises – they don’t just pollute the immediate area, but air and water for miles around. The Supreme Court's recent removal of restrictions on eminent domain means that I would be very, very cautious even if I did own all the rights to minerals on my land. I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that my New England ancestors were probably right - the best land out there may be the land that nobody really wants too badly.

LOCAL FOOD SECURITY in a place where you can eat a diet you like, and where the region can mostly feed itself. I think we will find as we live and eat more locally that our diets change - sometimes dramatically. Most people who live regionally eat a few staple foods every single day. They have other special foods, but if we live regionally, we will eat regionally, as most human beings have through most of history, our cuisine will become localized as well. This is not a bad thing – people travel all over the world to experience local cuisines and their specialties.

When you are picking a spot, you probably should pick a place where you like the food, since food is a factor in quality of life. If you are "from" tortillas, and chilies, the potatoes, baked beans and fish of the Northeast may not be all that appealing to you. You can cook almost anything almost anywhere, with variations, but your kids will, to some degree, end up adapting to the culture and you will have to make do with what grows.You also should probably think hard about where your food is coming from. That doesn't mean that we all absolutely have to live in regions that can be self-supporting, but it is a matter of rational bet-hedging.

If you live in the I-95 corridor of the US, say in New York City, your 100 mile diet will run into the hundred mile diets of the heavily populated suburbs of Westchester, Long Island, Northern New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. You'll also run into the 100 mile foodsheds of Albany, Stamford, New Haven, Hartford, Newark, Trenton, etc...Etc... - all large cities with large populations. That is, there is simply no meaningful way that these regions can be fully food self-sufficient - their food is going to have to come from less populated areas.Now this in itself doesn't mean that everyone has to leave these areas - but you do need to have a local system for food, water and energy that can be sustained in the long term - it isn't enough just to say "oh, great, we'll get our food from nearby” – make sure you know that it is possible. You want to choose places that have a land around them, and the potential to produce a great deal of food.

NEAR THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE - the times that are coming are going to make us depend on one another more than we have. If there are people in the world who have your back, who love you, who you care about, be near them. Transportation is getting expensive, and all of us are going to need all the help we can get. This factor, in the end, may trump everything else.

A corollary of this would be “near people you like” – that is, if we are indeed entering into a less energy intensive and more localized world, your life is going to be shaped by your neighbors and immediate community. So pick a place where you feel comfortable – not necessarily where everyone is like you, but where it seems like community might be created.

Ok, next time, should you chuck it all and move to the country? Live in the city where the public transport is good?

Sharon

Shameless Self-Promotion

2008-02-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

I was thrilled to see the idea of 50-100 million farmers percolating down into the mainstream in this article:

http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/columns/4720535.html//

"Without some miraculous new energy source, muscle power could soon again be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels for growing food. Blunt economic pragmatism seems set to out-shout nostalgia in the call to put more farmers on the land.

Just how many more farmers would it take to cure farming's fossil fuel habit? Lots, according to farmer and writer Sharon Astyk and "Oil Depletion Protocol" author Richard Heinberg, both leading activists for facing up to life after world oil production peaks.

They estimate that without cheap fossil fuels, we would need 50 million new farmers. That's one farmer for every two households in theUnited States, 25 times more than there are now.

This isn't a move-to-the-boonies-or-starve ultimatum. In fact, many people are ideally positioned to become farmers right where they are-- it's the silver lining to suburban sprawl."

It isn't just the idea of millions of new farmers, either - in the past few weeks I've been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and an AP reporter about life changes due to climate change and peak oil. Although this is still a part of a "weird" subculture, that's the first step to ideas being accepted - getting them out there at all.

Meanwhile, as long as I'm engaged in shameless self-promotion, I'll be giving a free class on the basics of food storage at 3pm on Saturday February 16, at my friend Joy Heckman's bulk foods shop, The Olde Corner Store, 133 Factory, Gallupville, NY 12073. I'll include materials on what a month or year's food supply looks like, how to find local, sustainably produced sources, how to store it, how to cook with storable foods, etc... Everyone is welcome!

BTW, I'm considering offering this class online at some point, if there's interest, so let me know if you think that would be worthwhile.

Cheers,

Sharon

Garden Dreaming

2008-02-07T13:14:00.001-08:00

Whole family is down sick, so the several longer essays I've been working on are on the back burner while I wash sheets and tend cranky little people. My own retreat when things are in crisis is to the perfect spring garden of my imagination - especially valuable after several days of pouring rain (and our roof needs replacing) and then a giant ice storm.

My roof may leak, the children whine and I'm not feeling so hot myself, but in my head, it is spring, and I'm sitting on a mulched pathway, transplanting delicate baby seedlings into the garden bed. In my imagination it is warm, and sunny, and smells of earth and herbs.

And I get to fantasize about new things - what will the wolfberries taste like fresh? How much skirret do I want? And of course, my garden will be plenty - no running out of strawberry jam in January next year, this year's strawberries will burst off the vine and into the jars all by themselves.

And, of course, there seed catalogs to "help" me envision it. Lush, perfect plants in world without weeds in color saturated photos - of coures my herb garden will look just like that, with the orange calendulas, the purple sage and the chive blossoms harmonizing.

It won't be like that, not quite, although it will be wonderful, but a girl can dream. What are you dreaming about?

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 36 - Change Your Aspirations

2008-02-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

Can we take it as a given that the earth can't support 8 billion middle class people who want cars and air conditioning? If we can't, then you might look at Jeff Vail's latest post on Jevon's paradox and the new Tata Nano here:www.jeffvail.net , but I'm not sure it really needs to be articulated. There are some techno-optimists out there who think that energy and money are the only things that we need to all be rich, but the truth is that all economic output is polluting, and all economic output draws down natural resources to one degree or another. You can refine the degree, but growth eats it up.

So starting from that position, we have, as I see it, three choices. The first is to repress the aspirations of those who wish to join us in the middle class. There are two problems with this. The first is that we can't - our economic power days are over, and we can't control the growth of other economies. In fact, right now, other economies largely control us. The second being that even if we could, this would be both wrong and politically unpalatable. That is, growth capitalism has long told everyone that they can be rich, and thus allowed a majority of the populace to believe, however falsely, that opportunity simply hadn't knocked for the vast number of poor people. That is, economics erases intentionality and a whole host of truths, and tells us that we're doing our very best to make poor people richer. A change over to a dynamic in which we had to openly admit that we want to exploit the poor and make them poorer so that we can get richer would be politically difficult - ignoring, of course, the moral issue. This also makes for all sorts of good excuses for people to blow things up.

The second choice, and the one that we presently seem set on, is the creation of a different middle class, from the wealth of the old middle class. That is, we can gradually (or not very gradually) impoverish the old rich, and replace them with new rich from what was the poorer world. Several studies have suggested that in fact much of China's growth has come at the expense of America's working class. This has the advantage of greater equity, but isn't very much fun for the former rich (us) and comes with political consequences, and probably military ones as well, since the former rich still hold on to a lot of big guns.

The third choice is this - we come up with a new set of aspirations. That is, we find something compelling to hope and dream about that everyone in the world pretty much can have. And we teach our children to aspire to that goal, and offer it up to the world as we have offered the dream of affluence, and hope to G-d it takes hold.

What could that be? I know a very elderly woman whose daughter told me that her mother had once told her that what she hoped would be said about her on her death was "She never said anything unkind to anyone, and she welcomed everyone who came to her door." And it made me think about what the aspirations of prior generations have been. It isn't that our eulogies are sufficient to address this, but they provide a way of getting at the essence of what we want to accomplish.

That is, it was common for prior generations to be content that they had never taken a handout, put money in the bank each year, and tithed some of their income. Or to take pride in having worked every day of their lives, to have earned and received respect, to have been able to do business on their handshake and sense of honor, to have always had food on the table for their children and clothes on their back, and to grow to be good men and women.

To an extent, these past ambitions may be overstated - the romanticization of the past is always a danger. But we all know people, mostly much older people, for whom these really sufficient goals. Our own goals are often much more ambitious, and thus much harder to balance. And I suspect most of our aspirations are harder to achieve - that is, we much less often achieve them than if we'd aspired to smaller things.

There was an obituary here of an older man a few years ago. It read, "He never missed a milking or a (Quaker) meeting in 60 years. He never borrowed money, but lent or gave what he had. He died in the house and the bed he was born in, tended by his children, who loved him, and received, we believe, by his God." Aspiration indeed.

Sharon

Without Slaves:Jeffersonian Agrarianism and the Question of Slavery

2008-02-03T09:43:00.000-08:00

Writing a book called _A Nation of Farmers_ and arguing for Jeffersonian democracy brings you, sooner or later, bang hard up against the question of slavery. And it is not possible to address that question either by eliding the problem of slavery, as many of Jefferson's advocates do, or by claiming, as many anti-agrarians do, that Jefferson's slave holding makes the whole question of agrarian society so irrevocably tainted that it cannot be useful to us any longer. That is, Aaron's and my opinion is that the only answer we can come up with is to go towards this vexed question full steam ahead.

Jefferson made quite a number of statements arguing that independent farmers were the best candidates for democracy. He claimed in "Notes on the State of Virginia," "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of god, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. " Speaking slightly less effusively, he went on to say in a 1785 letter to John Jay, "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, & they are tied to their country & wedded to its liberty & interests by the most lasting bands."

His opposition to Alexander Hamilton's plan to create large state supported financial institutions and move towards industrialization represents one of the great philosophical battles at the founding of our nation. Henry Cabot Lodge famously called it the founding debate of our society. And it would be easy for agrarians to see Hamilton, and Hamiltonianism as the bad guy - that is, Hamilton supported the notion of concentrating wealth in the hands of an elite, and moving the nation towards trade and manufacturing.

But the undercurrent of their debate, less popularly considered, was slavery. Hamilton was an abolitionist who regularly attended New York Abolition Society meetings. He believed that manufacturing was the only alternative to an agrarian slave society - wage labor, he felt, would end slavery. Jefferson, of course, was a plantation owner and slave holder. That he was ambivalent about slavery and at times worked for its overturn does not erase that at times, he also supported it, and he had no desire, to see, as Hamilton did, African-Americans working alongside white people in independent agriculture or factories. Jefferson imagined that freed slaves would be sent to Africa or Haiti, rather than they would grow independently alongside white people.

Roger Kennedy, in his Book _Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause_ argues that in fact, Jefferson's agrarianism struggled with two conflicting impulses, and ultimately operated to reinforce slavery in our society. Jefferson's agrarianism, he argues, wasn't quite what it seemed to be. While independent, largely self-sufficient farmers with good educations and a great deal of civic engagement were a norm in the North, the South was largely divided between white, wealthy plantation owners, and small backwoods farmers, mostly illiterate, who Jefferson regarded with a great deal of distaste. When Jefferson claimed, for example, "Ours are the only farmers who have read Homer" he was not, in fact, referring to the Southern Scots-Irish self-sufficient farmers of his region, but to Northern farmers (who had a 100% literacy rate in the Colonial period by some accounts, higher than it would ever be again), or plantation owners.

Kennedy makes a compelling case that Jefferson's vision of agrarianism, which included the slave plantations, enabled westward expansion, and the subjugation of the Native population - he does a fascinating analysis of the rate at which plantation owners destroyed their soils, almost three times the rate of non-slave holding southern farmers and five times the rate of Northern farmers, and argues that Jefferson's rhetoric, and the Louisiana Purchase, were predicated on a notion of ever expanding slavery, and the depletion of the soil.

This is a compelling critique, and to Kennedy's enormous credit, it is a nuanced critique. He does not claim that Jefferson cynically manipulated the plantation owner vote, so much as argue that Jefferson both believed in the notion of independent farmers and was unable to bring about the society he imagined.

Here, I think, is the beginnings, not of a rehabilitation of Jefferson, but of a way of thinking about agrarianism and slavery. Because it would be foolish to argue, as Thom Hartmann does in his book _What Would Jefferson Do?_, that Jefferson figures largely as a helpless opponent to slavery. Hartmann, whose arguments are otherwise well taken seems to belong to the category of Jeffersonian advocates who rehabilitate him by only looking at the anti-slavery writings. But to do so is to ignore the fact that Jefferson's legacy to us was more than just his principled objections - it was his practices.

That is, to find a way towards Jeffersonianism, we must not erase slavery, but face it. One of Hartmann's own arguments, however, directs us usefully to the urgent larger question. That is, Hartmann argues that instead of eliminating slavery, the US merely moved it elsewhere. I think Hartmann is wrong to use this argument to defend Jefferson. He says,

"Yet how many of us would willingly free our slaves? I'm typing these words on a computer containing many parts made in countries where laborers are held with less freedom and in conditions worse than those of Jefferson's slaves." Hartmann has a point, but also recognizes that this is a rationalization - Jefferson did more than simply hold slaves, he enabled slavery on a large, public scale. This argument does not work as a defense of Jefferson.

But it does give us a useful direction to point our own analysis at - that is, if we are to imagine, as Hamilton did, as many anti-agrarians have since, that the debate between industrialization and agrarianism can come down to the question of slavery, we need to ask, how good has industrial society been at freeing its slaves. That is, do we have fewer slaves right now than we did in an agrarian society? How many slaves are there in the world today?

When you add up the numbers, the results are surprising. At present, according to the UN, the world has 27 million literal slaves - that is, people who are presently held as slaves, owned as objects, and treated like them. Add to that 218 million child laborers, which UNICEF documents are almost always forced laborers. Then add 100 million adult women prostitutes (the child prostitutes are included in the previous number) who according to the UN committees on human trafficking can be said to lack control over their lives, bodies and earnings, and the minimum of 400 million poor workers who live in conditions of effective slavery, either in debt to the company store or given a choice between starvation and working in unsafe, dangerous conditions for virtually no money, and we end up with between half and 2/3 of a billion people on this planet in slavery, or effective slavery. That means that one out of every 10 to 13 people on the earth is enslaved or as near as to make no difference.

This figure is almost certainly too low, however - these are estimates, and low estimates in many cases. For example, at least 300 million women worldwide engage in prositution of one sort or another throughout the world, and it stretches the imagination to conceive that the 200 million that the UN does not consider to be effectively enslaved are all fully willing participants who simply chose prostitution as their career. Nor does this figure include involuntary military conscripts all over the globe, many of whom (including a substantial number of children), are used for forced labor or cannon fodder in conflicts all over the world. In _The Age of Extremes_ Eric Hobsbawn estimates that there are more than 200 million involuntary conscripts at any given time, worldwide.

The child labor figures are hotly disputed - for example, the International Textile, Garment and Leather Worker's Union estimates that 250 million children, more than half under the age of 14, are at work in clothing and textile manufacture alone (Naomi Klein, _No Logo_). Since these constitute only about half of the UNICEF figures, that would raise the estimate up dramatically, towards one billion people in slavery, at least 1/3 of them children. Far more than half are female - because women are often poorer than men, less well educated and more likely to be encumbered by children, they are diproportionately likely to end up in sweatshops, domestic service, or in the sex trade from lack of other options.

Some may protest that those adults who are not literally enslaved shouldn't be included here. For example, adult sweatshop workers. I'll conceed that their conditions aren't quite the same as slavery. But res ipsa loquitor - that is, the thing speaks for itself. This is testimony taken from a single sneaker plant (producing Nikes and Adidas in 1998 in El Salvador,

"...12 hour days in hot, unventilated conditions. Workers are given backless wooden benches from which to work. Cushions are not allowed. Supervision is brutal, with constant verbal abuse aganist those who do not keep up the required pace, physical violence and sexual harassment. Permission is required to drink water or use the batrhoom. The drinking water is not purified and comes from the cistern into which the toilet empties. No toilet paper is available and the toilets are filthy. Male supervisors come into the women's toilets regularly to harass the women back to work. Talking is not allowed. Workers leaving the plant are subject to humiliating body searches. Workers are expected to work when they are sick. One or two days pay is deducted for any visit to the clinic. Women are made to undergo monthly pregnancy tests which they have to pay for themselves. Pregnant workers are fired instantly. In some plants superivisors give depo-provera contraceptive injections to women who are told they are getting anti-tetanus jabs." ("Labour" by Mark O'Brien in _Anti-Capitalism_ ed. Bircham, Charlton)

Both effective and literal slaves have little control of their own lives. They are subject, in the literal sense of the word, to the whims of their masters. They experience physical violence, control of the full range of their lives including sexual activity. They are subject to degradation and told that they deserve their conditions. They are not free to leave or to stop their work, and often do their work under the terror their families will be harmed, or that their children will starve to death.

As historian Kenneth Stampp, writing of American slavery points out, "the predominant and overpowering emotion...in the majority of slaves was neither love nor hate, but fear." (Stampp, _The Peculiar Institution_). Those who live in constant fear of their bosses or masters are always slaves.

And who are they enslaved to? Well, directly speaking, they are enslaved to pimps, factory owners, industrial farmers, large companies, mining corporations, private entrepreneurs, local warlords, private slaveholders in countries that largely turn a blind eye to this sort of thing (including our own - there have been a number of high profile liberations of effectively enslaved immigrants in domestic service, garment factories and agriculture in the US, and that's almost certainly only the tip of the iceberg).

But, of course, the economy moves up the chain - who motivates these slave owners to enslave people? Sometimes human beings are the only thing there is left to traffic in. Sometimes slaves merely serve the evils of their immediate society. For example, the nation of Mauritius outlawed slavery only last year.

But often, their work and its proceeds moves up the economic food chain, and the people who profit are us.. That is, the appetites of people rich enough to travel around the world seeking out prostitutes (there are many of these trips advertised in the US and other rich nations for business people and men who can't have sex with children as easily here), the appetites of people who want cheap coffee and bananas, the appetites of people who want cheap t shirts, diamonds, energy and oriental rugs.

That is, most of the work we enslave people to do is work that the rich world directly or indirectly benefits from. Our cheap bananas come from the Ecuadorian plantation where whole families, including children, are so indebted to the "company store" that they can never hope to do anything else. And you and I eat their bananas. We wear the fancy sneakers, put the diamonds on our fingers, burn the Nigerian oil in our cars, decorate our homes with the labor of small children. We do not benefit from every slave, and responsibility exists all down the line, but it is also true that the economic function of slavery is to make masters rich.

Still, we might overall say we're doing pretty well with abolitionism, if we compare ourselves to the past. After all, the best guess is that maybe 1 in 10 people are enslaved, but in Ancient Athens, it was almost 1-1, and in the American south, in most plantation regions, slaves outnumbered free white people by between 2-1 and 10-1.But if you look at the society as a whole, Ancient Greece at the height of its slaveholding was about 4 free people to every slave and the US in 1850 had about 2.5 million slaves and just over 23 million people (Meltzer, _Slavery: A World History_. That is, in 1850, America as a whole had about the same percentage of slaves that we have right now worldwide.

If we recall that much of Northern Industrialism profited from slavery, turning cotton into cloth in the mills of Massachusetts, for example, the percentages are surprisingly similar. That is, the basis of rich society rests, roughly speaking, on the backs of about the same number of slaves that 19th century American wealth did. We're doing better than ancient Greece, but that's not saying much. We've not so much abolished slavery as offshored it, as Hartmann rightly observes.

So one answer to the question of whether agrarianism is irretrievably bound up in slavery would be to say yes - but no more so than industrialism. Both are slave societies. In one, we see our slaves, in another, we hide them, so that we can feel righteous, and not be confronted with their suffering.

Looked at in this like Jeffersonian agrarianism is no better - and no worse - than industrialism, which of course, depends on colonialism and enslaved labor. So the question becomes, how would we get out of slavery altogether, in either system - that is, which system can best be adapted to be truly slave free?

There's one kind of slavery we haven't included, but probably should, our energy slaves.
These slaves aren't people, of course, although they too come with a moral freight that we might want to consider, as millions of our slaves in the poor world, besides their horrible lives, now are in increased danger of death because of our warming the planet.

Equally importantly, fossil fuels have enabled most rich world denizens to live their lives as though they have slaves - not just far away slaves making their clothing and growing their coffee, but in the house slaves to do things like wash their dishes, carry them places they want to go, and cook their food. I'm not sure if James Kunstler coined the term "energy slaves" but it is a useful way of thinking about our lives now - that denizens of the rich world are living like slaveowners of prior days, dependent on fossil fuels and a good bit of globalized distance to seperate us from the ugly name.

It is certainly true that we shouldn't look on energy slaves with the same degree of horror we look on human slavery. But it is also the case that we might look on a lifestyle that requires human slaves and the equivalent amount of non-renewable energy with the same repugnance one might look at the lives of southern plantation owners. Because when the non-renewable energy runs out, we'll have created a generation of people who lack the essential skills, the physical fitness and the mindset to do their own work. The future of people trained only to be masters is not bright - either they remain rich, and do evil by enslaving more people to compensate for their diminishing resources (think what we're doing to the Iraqi people to get their oil), or they do quite badly indeed when they first have to pick up the work they have so long avoided.

Because, of course, the work that isn't easily mechanized, the work we can no longer afford to fuel - the manufacture of clothing is notoriously part of this - is still done by people. If we estimate, as Kunstler does in _The Long Emergency_ that the average rich world denizen uses fossil energy as the equivalent of 40 or more human laborers, and then add in the 1 in 10 actual slaves, it turns out that the world is actually using a much higher percentage of human labor or human equivalent labor without actually paying the real price for it - that is, without paying a fair and living wage, or the full, unexternalized costs of our fossil fueled "slaves." It also means that we have more slaves than anyone in history, broadly construed.

Now there's an obvious connection between slavery and fossil fuels, and a number of wise people have pointed out that it is no accident that the abolitionist movements of the 19th century arose at precisel y the same time as industrialization - just as machinery began to reduce the sheer numbers of bodies required to make and do things, it became possible in many senses to really imagine a society without slaves. The dualism we Americans all learned about in high school, the industrial north vs. the slave owning, agricultural south only tells part of the story.

Which brings me, of course, to the real question. Is it possible for human beings to imagine a society in which no one is enslaved to anyone else and we also don't burn fossil fuels? In which human beings cannot be commodified? Is it possible to imagine a low-input world in which there are no slaves? To some degree, of course, we can build renewable energies that allow us (and in an ideal world, more of the world's populace) to retain some of our energy slaves. But the larger issue of abolitionism must take center stage as we do this - that is, it is not enough to say "when we have all the power we need, we'll free our slaves" because, of course, that day never comes. The only choice is the choice of abolitionism itself, to acknowledge that it will cost us something to give up such a profoundly immoral structure, and that we will do it anyway, because it is right.

Last year at the Community Solutions Conference, someone asked me about the dangers of going back to a slave society in the absence of fossil fuels, and the question has haunted me since. I said then that we were still a slave society, and that we had to undo both evils - both fix the broken infrastructure in a society that can't imagine life without infinite cheap energy and also eliminate our slaves. But my answer has struck me as woefully insufficient ever since. How, after all, do we disengage from slavery? How do we face a future with less energy that doesn't lead to a permanent, huge, underclass of people, on whom a few people's wealth depends entirely? Because in that situation, the rich must always fear the poor, and have every incentive to reduce them to slavery.

Neither capitalism (which institutionalizes the disparities that encourage slavery and depends on reducing the value of human labor and resources, ideally to nil) nor communism (which outright controls humans and their labor) can provide us with an economic model. Fortunately, these are hardly our only choices. But it should remind us that the traditional dichotomy between these two "poles" and discourse in which there is nothing between or beyond Marx and Smith is a false one, designed to distract us with only a few choices. That both our "choices" lead to the enslavement of peoples should, I think, be sufficient to dismiss them.

Gandhi's Swaraj or "self-rule" movement offers one piece of the puzzle for a life without slavery. The notion that self-rule contained elements of political, economic and social theory meant that the system did not compartmentalize labor in ways that enabled slavery. It is a difficult system, because it places enormous faith in the independent good will of individuals, for, as Gandhi put it, "In such a state (where swaraj is achieved) everyone is his own ruler. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to his neighbour" - and yet, all deeply democractic systems depend on precisely that faith, that trust that ordinary people can and should hold in their hands the most essential details of our lives. It is Utopian, of course, but in the best sense. As Gandhi himself said, "It may be taunted with the retort that this is all Utopian and, therefore not worth a single thought... Let India live for the true picture, though never realizable in its completeness. We must have a proper picture of what we want before we can have something approaching it"

The idea that democracy can be separated out from the way we earn our livings or treat our soils is false, and Jefferson was right articulating this. The idea that we can also seperate out our agrarian ideology from its history of racism and slavery is also false - we cannot erase the inconvenient parts of our history, or minimize them. But what we can do is create our own sort of Swaraj, and take the complex legacy of our agrarianism, and make it into something else.

How might this come about? Well, a nation made up not of plantation owners, but of true small farmers might be able to do so. A distributist model, a la Chesterton, in which most of the land is held by very small farmers, is a potential beginning. And in fact, we have already done much of the inconvenient work of chopping up land and putting small houses on it - we call it suburbia, and most suburban lots come with a piece of land, perhaps not quite sufficient to sustain a family, but often enough to render them independent of a host of created needs, and able, because of that independence, to make their choices based not on their fears and dependencies on corporate entities, but from a dispassionate consideration of what is best for the society as a whole. Small suburban farmers cannot need slaves - their land is too small to require them. Intensive agricultural techniques mean that small lots can come close to supporting a family, or do so entire. It isn't necessary to take seriously the distributist's focus on biological family units here - we can create these "family" structures in other ways, and imagine cooperative ownerships that work in concert with distributism.

The question, of course, is how larger agriculture will be enacted. Reallocation of fossil fuels means that we are unlikely to require literal slaves to produce our food for a long time, during which our job is to create such a loathing for notion of holding either immediate or distant slaves that we would no more consider it than we would consider eating human flesh.

As for the rest - the simple fact is that industrial agriculture depends on our willingness to buy its products. The ethanol boom depends on our willingness and dependence on gas. Industrial corporate farms depend on our willingness to buy their products. Stuart Staniford has recently demonstrated that industrial agriculture will remain profitable under the current model long into the future, and that it is likely to starve millions or even billions of people in the biofuels rush. All of which is best answered that markets alone are only as powerful as the people who accept their parameters. Industrial agriculture could remain powerful - unless we do not allow it to be. And then, the question becomes only what should take its place.

Sharon

Adapting Our Farms and Gardens to Climate Change

2008-02-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

When I worry about climate change, I often think first about human consequences. But the line between human losses and nature’s losses is pretty fine – literally a tree falling in the forest question. That is, if the sugar maples that turn my region into a blaze of red, the hemlocks that overshadow my creek disappear, who loses me or natures? The only answer is “yes.”
My own guess is this – if it is not already too late to avoid many of the worst effects of climate change, it shortly will be, and if we do not act quickly, our losses will grow each year. I see no signs of quick action. I hope for them, of course, and work for them, but there comes a point at which we all need to turn to the problem of mitigation.

If climate change is happening, if we will see our gardens move south steadily, that brings us a host of challenges. The first is that we will need to find ways to feed ourselves in our new climates. For some, this may not be difficult. For others, moving into a hotter, desert like world, it may be very, very painful.

But the land we husband can do more than simply feed us – it can soften the blows of climate change, help bring new and valuable species into regions just becoming able to support them, or on the contrary, help breed and adapt new varieties of old residents of our areas, so that they not lost to us. They can provide wildlife habitat for new and old species, and even microclimates, in which things being chased to extinction can survive. To an extent, we can even hold back raging floods and deserts with our hands.

Does that sound too extreme? It is, nonetheless, true. That is, one of the most remarkable examples of what small scale husbandry can do is shown by Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which has planted more than 30 million trees in Kenya, a nation deforested by a combination of colonialism and poor management. As deserts encroached, Maathai demonstrated the only way to keep them back was to create oases of trees, producing food, drawing up water, cooling people and making areas livable. The trees were planted, almost all by poor women, most of them desperately poor, who carry water to their trees each day by hand, because they know that the way to fight the desert is trees. My friend Kate worked for a while with the Green Belt Activists, and she said that in Kenya, trees are powerful – they free up labor for women who no longer have to walk miles for firewood, and provide food and security. But most of all, the trees create life – it is possible to live in a place shaded and lush with green, in a way it is not for most of us in the desert.

How many of us live in places where topsoil washes away, where rising temperatures are reducing water? We need a worldwide Green Belt movement, bringing suitable, food and wood producing trees to the driest and hottest places. That is the beginning of our gardens – the planting of the trees that will make them possible, that carry water from the deepest places, repair and hold soil, and create places we can live.

We will have to choose our trees carefully, especially in the hottest and driest places, but we must plant them – and if necessary, carry water the way the women of Kenya do. One tree that more of us ought to consider is Moringa, a naturalized shrubby tree that has several highly drought tolerant strains, but will grow as a die-back perennial as far north as Atlanta. The leaves are enormously nutritious, a single tablespoon of dried moringa containing 100 % of the Vitamin A, 14% of the protein, 40% of the calcium and 23% of the iron needed by a small child. The fresh leaves are rich in Vitamin C as well. The seeds make a high quality cooking oil, and the pods can be cooked and eaten like green beans.

Water is likely to be a huge issue all over the world. One of the things we can do to deal with this crisis is grow our own – although that requires irrigation water, Gary Nabhan of Native Seed/Search, in his book _Coming Home to Eat_ documents that generally speaking, homegrown produce, even in drought regions, uses up less water than produce trucked in from distant places. In many cases, the sheer cost of refrigerating produce means that it uses more water even within the dry region than it does if you grow your own. We must see water shifted to home agriculture when possible. But we also must minimize water use wherever possible, choosing annual and perennial food crops that can handle heat and drought, and growing them in appropriate ways, using greywater, rainwater, and water-thrifty growing techniques.

As we choose our perennial species, we must make decisions. Do we push our zonal limits, moving north plants from southern places that are newly able to survive here? This can be important work, enabling us to replace species as they are lost, and also providing food and habitat for birds and wildlife that move northwards faster than trees and plants can. It does come with some risks – new species can naturalize more swiftly and aggressively than we would like them to.

But human beings have perturbed the climate and transformed the world unwittingly, making mistake after mistake in our rearrangement of nature. We cannot wash our hands of the work and say “it is too complex for me – best not mess with it” – we’ve already messed with it, now our project is to use every power we have – mind, imagination, passion, strong backs – to do the imperfect best we can to shape our future. We will undoubtedly make wrong choices and do harm – but better we try as wisely as we can to fix what is broken than we go on choosing without thought or care.

And so we begin to push our limits. I have recently added the hardiest of the hardy bamboos to my yard, and we shall see whether it becomes a pest, or if it even survives. But the sheer usefulness of bamboo makes me think that the choice is worth the risk. And if it does not survive this time, perhaps in a year or two, it will. Although I hold little hope of it attracting pandas, it may yet serve other purposes for our native wildlife. My Maypop survived its first winter here – as far as I know, it is the only maypop in my region of rural upstate New York. But perhaps, if it survives and fruits, someday the seeds will grow in someone else’s garden, and on again.

You see wild teasel growing all over the place here – its spiny heads are unmistakable. It is hard to imagine that this pesky weed was once a major crop in my area – used to brush down the nap of woven cloth in the cloth mills of Lowell, MA, farmers once grew acres of teasel – now it is a wild thing, unloved, untended. And it shows just how quickly crops can change – what will New Yorkers grow, for example, when olive oil is too expensive to import from California and Italy? My own guess is oilseed pumpkins that once filled fields in Germany. I plant them now, not because I think the days of oil pressing pumpkin seeds are coming quickly, but so that I will have seeds to share – and for their delicious pumpkin seeds.

We can also to a degree stem the tide of loss of beloved species. In my region, the two trees I first mentioned, the glorious Sugar Maple and the cooling hemlock, are both projected to disappear from my region this century. In the desert southwest, the pinion pines are disappearing, and one report suggests that someday, Redwood national forest will have no redwoods in it.

But although species are lost, they rarely disappear entirely. Despite the depredations of Dutch elm disease, in my region you sometimes see that beautiful vase like shape in the middle of an old field, a tree that lived even though the rest did not. The American chestnut, that two centuries ago filled half the eastern forests, is gone – but there are a few left that grow up from stumps and even produce the occasional nut before dying back. It is these hardy, partially resistant specimens that offer hope to plant breeders that we might bring back the Chestnuts and the Elms.

But that work isn’t the work of professional plant breeders alone. All of us who own even a tiny postage stamp of a yard can get to know our trees, watch them and the ones around them. Perhaps your maples or pinion pines will show signs of withstanding warmer temperatures, or resistance to new diseases moving northwards. Perhaps if in the autumn, you take a garden bed and plant some seeds, you will give birth to the next generation of familiar plants.
Backyard plant breeding sounds hard, but it is as simple as this – when an annual or perennial crop is grown in your place, a host of information and slight adaptations are created to your conditions. The children of this plant will have a taste of those adaptations in their blood – study after study has found that the plant children of first generation transplants uniformly do better adapt more easily to a climate. That is, if you grow a heat loving squash like “Seminole” in your borderline too cool climate, and mature only one fruit, the next year the seeds of that fruit will be better able to handle your cool soil and nights, and perhaps you will get two, or three, and the next generation still better.

This works with both annual and perennial crops – seed saving is not just a way to save money or preserve genetic diversity, but a way of increasing yields, and often, increasing the nutritional value of a crop, for as plants respond to stress, they lose nutrients. A plant adapted to your region, soil, climate will have more energy to create beautiful, healthy, nutritious edible parts.
Soil saving can mitigate the harm of climate change – rich soils, high in organic matter, over time can store as much carbon as a similarly sized forest, and pasture animals as well. If we were to transform the millions of acres of lawn to high humus pasture, or rich garden soil, we could soften the blow of climate change a great deal. The process of cover cropping, adding manures and nurturing a piece of land may not just help us adapt – it may limit the amount of adaptation we have to do.

What about wildlife? We are destroying our species so thoroughly – a third or more by mid-century that we must give them a hand. Whether we manage 10 acres or a 20 x 20 yard, we can plant diverse species, and protect endangered wild plants at the margins of our gardens. We can work to attract wildlife, and to meet its needs for food, water, shelter, places to reproduce. We can watch for new species, and changes in habit, and strive to adapt to them.
One garden among a row of postage stamp lawns seems like it can do nothing to stem the loss of wildlife, but you’d be surprised. Thousands of insect and animal species can live in a single yard, and hundreds more may visit on their way somewhere else. Your milkweed may be the difference between monarchs next year, your wild places the one that the bumblebees rely upon. And moreover, your influence doesn’t lie only on the ground, but on what you start in your neighborhood – the neighbor you persuade to leave a little space for the bumblebee.

Farmers might consider bringing back their hedgerows, even using British style “laid” hedges as livestock fencing. In those hedgerows we can provide habitat, animal feed, and also wood and food for ourselves. Mixing traditional regional species with those who might adapt, we can create integrated plant colonies, or Permaculture style “guilds” that may adaptively work together, enabling the plants as whole to do better than any isolated specimen.

In some places, the robins never leave at all for the winter, but here they still do, and every year I record the first time they return. This year it was January 27th, the first time I have ever seen them here in January. The first year it was mid-February. They lay earlier, too, and the ones that return each year to the nest in the old chicken house on our property sometimes lose their babies to cold. Last year, I started going out in the evening, once the parents were on their nests, and simply shutting the door to the chicken house, rising early in the morning and opening it. Last year, the first batch of babies survived.

It might be wisest to have our gardens do a little of each thing – bring in some new crops and push our regional limits, particularly when such crops might fill a void, such as pumpkin seeds in a vegetable fat poor region, or leguminous trees that can be interplanted with annual crops to feed the soil and respire moisture into the air. But also, we can protect and preserve what we have, watering a little, if we have it to spare, to enable the old crops to hang on a little longer, to find the ones that might survive.

As my own home gets warmer and wetter, it is a challenge to figure out what my new norms are. It is warming in the spring, but I’m not planting any earlier most years, because the rains are so heavy that it isn’t possible. In anticipation of a time when I might truly need the food I can produce in April here, I am building some beds, with gravel at their base, designed to dry out even in the wet times. With a little protection, I hope that fresh greens and perhaps rhubarb will produce soon enough to bring the spring season home a little earlier, and to stretch the winter food reserves.

The changes in the spring flooding season also mean that it is more important than ever to keep topsoil from eroding and the banks of my creek stemmed with trees. My own security from flooding depends on not losing soil, and on keeping my ground intact. Near the ocean, this may mean finding salt tolerant marsh and reed plants to hold back soil, or in heavy wet soils, finding root crops, like cattails, that can take the place of less wet tolerant foods in our diets.

n hot, dry places, the whole system of agriculture may have to change to a Permaculture/vegeculture model. That is, field scale cultivation may not be possible as things get dryer and hotter – in many drought stricken parts of Kenya, the only places to grow gardens are under the shade of leafy oases. That means returning to traditional African models of agriculture, that integrated small, intermittent patches of root crops with perennial tree and vine crops (more on this here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/09/vegeculture-further-rethinking-how-we.html). When Europeans came to Africa, at first they could not understand how Africans fed themselves from their tiny gardens, but soon they realized that they cultivated the forest.

We too will probably have to cultivate our forests, and change the shape of our food cultures and food production. That is, climate change won’t just change our gardens, but our diets as well. It may be necessary to give up the hope of summer salads in hotter places, and accept that summer is a time for other foods, or to give more priority to cool weather cultivation for staple crops.

Here, our growing seasons seems to lengthen on the autumn end – 3 out of the six falls I’ve spent here, we’ve had a frost more than 10 days after our traditional frost date. My neighbors with a hoophouse had fresh tomatoes and peppers until Thanksgiving last year. So I need to plant better fall gardens, and wait longer before taking out winter stores – if I can be growing crops into early December, I should be.

There is no single process of adaptation – every region will have to deal with its own projections, and the specific ecology of a place and time. And as quickly as we determine what we should do, we will probably have to change it again – for climate change moves forward, whether we like it or not. But the preservation, sustenance and recreation of a piece of land is good work, and necessary work. The starting point is beginning to look hard at the realities of the problem, and anticipate what our landscapes may look like, and what it might need and enable.

Sharon

Economic Self-Stimulus: Ideas for One Last Financial Orgasm

2008-02-01T11:15:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like we're all going to get a check in the mail, as part of the "economic self-stimulus, please masturbate the economy into some state of excitement so we can pretend the fundamentals aren't as frigid as Condoleeza Rice"plan.

http://home.peoplepc.com/psp/newsstory.asp%20cat=TopStories&id=20080201/47a2a750_3ca6_15526200802011968915813

And since the government, instead, of say, paying down its ridiculous debt or investing in something we might need, like renewable energy, is sending it to you, in the assumption that as usual, we'll blow it all on porn and beer. But that might not be entirely wise, and I feel honor bound, as your Friendly Neighborhood Apocalyptic Dominatrix to offer some helpful suggestions about what to do with the money.

For those of you who live in other countries, where their governments, when on the verge of financial collapse, don't send you checks and accellerate the proces, while spraying imperialist goo all over the rest of the world, all we can do is pity you. And wish desperately we could move to your country. How do you say "I am not personally responsible for my country's economic or foreign policy in Finnish again?"

Now I would dare say that things are, fiscally speaking, going to hell in a handbasket - I don't claim to be an expert. My friend Roel is, though and the blog he shares with a couple of similarly knowledgeable sorts http://www.theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/ is an excellent place to go for all the crappy financial news.

Now it may be that this particular economic crisis will pass a la kidney stone, and we'll go on to later climate and peak oil crises, but it is also not impossible that this is the beginning of those crises.We are being handed the cash for one more climactic shopping trip - and here I am with my black boots, riding crop and firm demeanor proposing, that just perhaps, you might want to think about this as the last big burst before a very, very, long dry spell. So here are some suggestions to spend your money.

1. Forestall foreclosure. Pay the mortgage, and then use what strategies you have to keep your house: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-keep-your-house.html. Or, better yet, if you are already teetering on the cusp of foreclosure, consider getting in touch with these people: http://www.youwalkaway.com/index.html. They don't seem to charge much - you could come out of this with enough cash to put a downpayment on a rental. If you are secure in your home, perhaps invest in some extra fold-away futons, warm blankets and spare towels so that when your family and friends who aren't so secure lose their homes, you can all live together comfortably: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/08/brother-in-law-on-your-couch-vision-of.html

2. Send it to Haiti - here's why: http://depletion-abundance.blogspot.com/2008/01/i-often-say-that-worst-excesses-of-rich.html My own favorite Haitian relief charity is the Mennonite Central Comittee - they've sponsored a number of programs that I know some of the players in, and they are generally a really good charity.Here's information about their Haitian programs: http://mcc.org/haiti/Heifer International and Doctors Without Borders are also excellent Charities that work in Haiti

3. Buy livestock. Seriously, food prices are rising rapidly. Your annual organic milk costs could probably be covered if you had a cow or a couple of really teeny, super cute Nigerian Dwarf goats. Same with your eggs for chickens. Here's Edson's essay about what he's thinking of doing with his economic stimulus:http://greenbluebrown.blogspot.com/2008/01/when-are-you-gonna-blog-about-cow.html

Poultry are excellent starter livestock, and many people can have them even in cities. Heck, I've heard of people keeping them in apartments. If you are dreaming of poultry try here, and buy something in danger of going extinct: http://www.sandhillpreservation.com/

4. Say goodbye to wealth and the growth economy by indulging in its very worst excesses. I shouldn't suggest this, of course, but the reality is that who am I to criticize if your dream is to go into hard times with painted toenails and botox injections, or the knowledge that you actually have been to see spring training. So take your 800 bucks and go drink 100 year old champagne, or buy that original live recording of the Led Zepplin studio sessions. Go for it. Just remember, you can't eat commemorative plates.

5. Get your teeth fixed. Seriously, dentistry is one of the big worries, and millions of Americans can't afford it now. It is a fairly energy intensive process: http://transitionculture.org/2007/07/24/peak-oil-and-dentistry-the-final-taboo This might be a good time to get everyone a checkup, or that root canal you've been needing.

6. Endow your local peak oil group. If you don't desperately need your tax refund, and perhaps that's true of some of your fellow peakists, get together and put the money into your local peak group. Money buys power and influence in our society, and also enables you to do common good projects. Consider asking everyone who can to put half their refund into a collective good account, designed, for example, to make micro-emergency loans in the community, or to fund solar panels for the local clinic.

7. Get together with others and buy a farm - remember, "farm" doesn't mean "1000 acres in Iowa" - consider a foreclosed upon rural property, for example, with 5 - 20 acres. There are a few of them out my way, and I'm willing to bet there are some where you are. The reality is that rising food prices are pushing land prices way up - we're starting to see what Aaron calls the "tertiary effects" of our energy crisis here:

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/buying_and_selling/article3283083.ece

Note the reasoning here - high grain prices look likely to persuade farmers to actually *sell* their land, and get out of farming, so that people can "invest" in land. Hmmm - we might need people who know how to farm sitting on dirt even more than expected.

8. Buy a musical instrument. Have you always wanted to learn the violin? Do you play a nice saxophone, but don't have one? Even in hard times, there are reasons to celebrate, and music makes celebrations. If the economy tanks and you are out of work, a. subway busking becomes a more economically viable choice (although pianos are tough for that) and b. you'll have time to practice, or to bug the kids into it. My husband adores the Lark in the Morning catalog www.larkinthemorning.com for a source for every conceivable instrument.

9. Hookers. Lots of hookers. Or one really expensive one. Now where would a farming Mom like me find a hook...er someone willing to raise my beds? I'd never heard it called that, but perhaps I was unimaginative. Either way, I knew that Crunchy Chicken could be counted on to help me with all my pay to play needs, over here: http://www.crunchychicken.blogspot.com/. Now it isn't clear to me that Crunchy actually can schedule his arrival at the homes of my heterosexual female and gay male readers, but she's an enterprising sort, so you never know. For my lesbian and male readers, I'm afraid you'll just have to do your own bargaining - Matt Savinar isn't yet offering these services on his site www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net - any day now, though,
I'm sure ;-).

10. Food. 700-1200 bucks will buy a lot of stored grains and beans. And you can be virtually certain that the food you buy today will appreciate in value, probably much faster than your investments. http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10252015 (the link is useful for the graph, not the stupid boosterism). What today buys hundreds of pounds may buy only half of that. If possible, buy direct from farmers, ideally local farmers. If you can't find what you need, try www.waltonfeed.com. If you don't need food for your own storage, consider donating some of it to your local food pantry. There are already a lot of hungry people out there.

11. Give it to people who will fight the biofuels boom. http://www.foodfirst.org/ is one possibility.

12. Be ready in case the lights go out. In a period of increasing economic stress, utility bills can be tough to pay - even more so as the price of electricity rises. The example of South Africa: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3576#more is not quite what we're facing, but there are reasonable causes to be concerned about having enough electric power to go around, including increasing droughts, which put stress on coal and nuclear generators.

In addition, as times get tighter, sometimes we have to make hard choices - the electric bill or food? Let's be clear - the electric bill should always be the first to go. As I've argued before, it isn't necessarily grid problems that cause the power to go out:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/it-isnt-gridcrash-that-makes-lights-go.html .

So it would be wise to figure out ways to make do without electricity. That means an investment in solar powered battery chargers, rechargeable batteries, a woodstove in cold places, solar lanterns, a hand washer... Check out www.lehmans.com for the best in non-electric supplies.

13. Make your yard feed you. Invest in perennial plants like jerusalem artichokes and groundnuts, buy blueberries or gooseberry bushes, buy a good sized stock of seeds (great prices at www.fedcoseeds.com among other places) and regular or sweet potatoes, a couple of sacks of greensand, rock phosphate and anything else you might need. Put in drip irrigation, dig a pond, or add dryland plants if you anticipate drought. Fence if necessary. Vary your seed order, try something new. Buy in larger quantities - you can always donate extras to a local community garden.

14. Dig a hole and bury the money in the ground. Seriously, that's starting to look safer than many banks.

15. Clean up good. Those of us who are in those "married until we die or kill each other" relationships don't always seem to understand the plight of the single person. But who wants to go into an unending economic depression alone, with no one to fight with about the money you don't have? So if you are looking for love, now is the time to join that singles website, get a really good picture of yourself taken, or maybe get a decent haircut. Take a day off work without pay, and really work on that personal ad - remember, "Angry, anxious SWF terrified to go into apocalypse alone" is probably not the best start. Put a good face on things. And if you are married, try and stay that way for the following reasons: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/12-reasons-to-stay-married-after-peak.html

16. Superinsulate. This is likely to be a pricey project, but you could get a start. Check out the information here: about how to get started. http://www.affordablecomfort.org/ Whether your home is hot or cold, this will save you money in the longer term.

17. Invest in a really good bike. A lot of the bikes that are lying around aren't meant to be ridden long distances, for years at a time with minimal maintenence. I'm no expert on this issue, and won't try to advise you - instead, find a good bike shop and talk to people there. I personally covet one of these:http://clevercycles.com/store/?c=web2.67 and they have fascinating collection of family bikes at the same site.

18. Buy yarn. It has many uses - if you have enough, you can insulate an entire room with it. Not to mention that we're all going to need to make socks: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2005/02/great-sock-rant-of-05.html. Here's more about why knitting is an essential skill in hard times: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/09/knitting-for-apocalypse.html But you don't really need all these justifications, because the simple truth is that if you buy yarn, then you have yarn. What's not to like?

19. Pay down your debt. If you have old loans, consumer debt, etc... pay it down now. The US bankruptcy laws are moving rapidly towards eternal debt slavery, and that's not a role any of us want to play. As cool and shiny as the gizmos may look, pay down your debt if you can.

20. Make sure you have water. You can't grow food, wash, or live without it. Make sure you have a reliable source of water in the future. That could mean a well with a manual pump, or a cistern, a rainbarrel set up, a spring, solar direct pumping, or a public resource - perhaps a pump in a park or at the local school that can supply the community when the power is out.

21. Do your Christmas/Chanukah/birthday shopping now. Does this one sound weird, coming from anti-consumerist me? For all that a lot of us may deplore the crazy consumerism of the holidays, the "no gifts" idea is an easy one to take when you have everything you need, and live in a rich society. Gift exchange is tied into every culture, not just including, but especially poor ones. The ability to be generous to one another is part and parcel of being human. So maybe now is a good time to think ahead about what it would be like to be poor, if you haven't been, and how simple gifts might come in handy. Think useful things - a new shirt, a pair of boots, a pocket knife, a book, a special toy, a bottle of wine. Or perhaps think in terms of your ability to make something - beautiful soaps, or special traditional baked goods, a wooden toy or the above mentioned socks. Remember, gifts are going to look different in a poorer society. Don't forget to add a few things to donate - more kids will be missing Christmas next year, I suspect, and perhaps a few special trade goods that will be especially welcome among people who have done you kindnesses

22. Donate it to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. I know, I know, I hate him too, but think about what a gesture of charity this will be - have we ever had a president who needed a library more. Think what good the atlases and the beginning readers will do for him. But more importantly, think about what's going to be in those presidential papers, that sooner or later will be released (more realistically, donate your money to the people suing to get his executive order overturned). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/opinion/28sun4.html War crimes trials, anyone? You could also give it to someone whose name you think would look better on a library - and how hard is that?

23. Build your own library. Heck, you can even call it a "presidential" library, and name it after one of the more obscure 19th century presidents. I mean who really knows whether James Knox Polk's library is in your house or not? I'd believe it. Meanwhile, if you don't live in easy walking distance of a really high quality library, build your own. A lot of us focus on gardening and sustainability books, and I certainly value that stuff - my own recommendations are here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/12/best-books-about-nearly-everything-part.html and http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/12/best-books-about-nearly-everything-part_18.html, but don't stop there. Think about how valuable history books will be, as we remake our society. What about a good supply of children's books, and educational materials in case you need to homeschool your kids or grandkids during periods of disruption. And everyone may want to settle down some evening and just not think about what's happening in their world, to escape with either a trashy novel or a great one, and be swept away into another place and time. The reality is that we sell books awfully cheaply - and they may not always be so cheap.

24. A stock of things you don't really want to have to try making. Whenever we talk about stockpiling, someone notes that it is possible to make just about anything at home. Needles? Can be carved out of bone. Necessary drugs? All you need is a small home chemistry lab? Shoes? First, chase down and kill a deer... Diva cup? Just go down to the ocean and snorkel around until you get a sponge...

All of which is entirely true. And the odds are not that these things are going away anytime soon (which someone else always mentions in these discussions) so much as there might be either supply constraints or other things you need to spend your money on. It is nice to know these things can be produced at home, and if it got dire enough, some of us probably would. But, sometimes you just don't wanna make it yourself. There are some conveniences that are kind of nice- and as long as someone is sending us a check...

So if you don't want to face a world without enough duct tape, menstrual supplies, wood screws or sneakers, throw a few spares in a box somewhere. When entering this category, think particularly about quality of life issues (here, again, I mention shoes), the components to fix things that you'd like to keep around that might break (my neighbor is facing our current ice storm without her woodstove for lack of a replacement catalytic converter) and things you use a lot.

25. The mind altering substances of your choice. I, of course, would be irresponsible if I advocated drunkeness, and doing something illegal if I advocated drug use. So, of course, I would never, ever do such a thing. But there's something about my nation, as it teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, giving cash to consumers to go shopping that makes me feel as though the proper response, between laughter and weeping, is probably a lost weekend, a moment of drunken, drugged out debauchery that won't actually meet any needs, improve our lives, or do anything good at all - but somehow seems to answer the state we've entered. Being a breastfeeding Mom of four, the chance of me doing so are the proverbial snowball's, but it does have its appeal. At the very least, perhaps you'd like to stock up on your preferred mind-altering substance, to help get you through the next moment of national idiocy. In fact, some seeds, or a still might not be a bad idea. Strengthens the informal economy, y'know.

Sharon

Haitians Eat Dirt, Cars Eat Corn

2008-01-30T12:52:00.000-08:00

I often say that the worst excesses of the rich world are actually less ethical problems than grammatical problems. I say this for effect, of course, because they are deeply ethical problems. But a part of the difficulty is our articulation of the difficulty. Consider this story, about Haitian people who cannot afford even the most basic staple foods are literally eating dirt:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080130/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/haiti_eating_dirt;_ylt=At.SCYedMcllZmKLaFqaJqBw24cA

"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth."

And,

"I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me."

Now this simple fact is that the rich world is doing this to this woman. Our society, and the people in it. There is no doubt about it - the rise in food prices is closely tied to biofuels, used by rich people to feed corn and soybeans to their cars, rather than to people, and by meat consumption.

It is also true that virtually no one in the rich world, as we struggle to deal with our own political and personal strategies, chooses to phrase this relationship in a grammatically correct way. That is, we say things like "I have to go do this thing or that thing - I have to commute long distances, because that's where my job is, or I have to go bring my kids to visit their grandkids, or I have to go get a dress for the wedding." And all of these facts are absolutely true as far as it goes - that is, often our society doesn't give us a lot of choices.

But what we never say is "I have to commute to my job, so those people in Haiti have to eat dirt" or "I have to make sure my kids spend time with their grandparents, so some Bangladeshi farmers have to drown." That is, we leave out the second clause in our sentences. And that's because we couldn't live with ourselves if we articulated the whole of our statements.

Now whenever I say these things, I royally piss people off, because they don't want to hear this. No one wants to think that they are responsible for harm to others. We don't intend it, we don't want to be, we want badly for us just to be able to go about the basics of our own lives without doing harm to others. We want this so badly that we change the structure of our sentences so that we don't even have to think about the full consequences of our actions.

On the same point, no one much likes the conclusion that we may already have pushed the climate and other natural resources so far that we may not have a lot of good options for fixing it - we may have to live a very, very different kind of lifestyle. We dislike it so badly that we're willing to do all kinds of twisting and turning to avoid teh conclusion that we may not be able to have most of the things we want.

I've spent a lot of time coming to these conclusions, and they no longer freak me out - too much. But that's not the same thing as saying I like them. That is, I've gotten pretty good at reducing my emissions, and using less energy, but what I really want is for the projected reality to be just about the level that makes me comfortable - that is, I want us to be able to do a renewable build out that has enough energy and is used in particular ways so that I can do my happy little low energy thing and feel good about it. That is, I want pretty much what everyone else wants - I want to go along living my life without worrying about whether I'm doing harm, or I have to push myself to a scary, different place. And I want that really, really badly.

I really have to watch myself, because I find myself doing what most of us do - twisting the facts around to support the conclusions I personally feel like I can live with. But the truth is, that's not what the evidence says. That is, the climate writers who say "oh, if we just do this massive infrastructure project..." are wrong - most of those massive infrastructure projects can't possibly be supported while stabilizing the climate - most of them will push us over the top. And it isn't just that biofuels are a bad idea - it is the idea that we're all going to get to have personal transport is a bad idea. But, of course, we want it to be true. We want there to be a way out - most of us don't demand that it would be easy, just bearable. And if it isn't, if the news is really bad, we respond to it by getting angry at the person who is saying it, or saying, "Oh, well, it is hopeless."

But it isn't hopeless. It is just that what we have to do is enormously hard and painful. And that's maybe not fair. And we have every right to be angry and frustrated - just as long as we don't allow ourselves to forget, however much we would want to, that other people are eating dirt. That is, our anger and frustration is legitimate, but as hard as this is on us, we cannot ask other people to pay a far higher price. Period.

All it takes to know that is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of that woman in Haiti. Imagine you haven't had any food in three days, you've never had enough food, that all you and your child will have eat today is a cookie made of shortening and dirt. And ask yourself, is what I am being asked to do so very hard? Is it so hard that I can ask that woman to bear a little more of my burden? I do not diminish the challenges of finding a way, but this woman in Haiti is the beginnings of a vast, vast and evil tragedy created by us. Just as the farmer in Bangladesh who said, as his farm and only sources of food were washed away under him, "I have been told this problem is caused by electricity, but I swear, I have never had even a single lightbulb."

The burden of these problems will be borne anyway. There is no longer time to imagine that someone will not suffer. The question is whether we will take up our share of the suffering, and find a way to change the things we "have to" do, so that others, who might, if we bothered to ask, say that they "have to" eat and "have to" live get a chance to do those things.

We need to stop the biofuels boom, and working on that means working at every level - we need to tell political candidates what we care about, and speak and write, and also drive less, and not buy ethanol. We need to stop climate change at every level - that means voting and running for election ourselves, or writing, or calling or marching - and also cutting our own emissions.

Because otherwise, we become cannibals. We are feeding other people's lives to our cars, devouring the world's poor. And it doesn't stop there - as we warm the planet and draw down biological resources, we are eating our own children. It must stop.

The article notes that the price of the good dirt is going up. Now there's a metaphor - when we reduce the world's poor to eating dirt, and eat the next generation's topsoil, what will be left?

Sharon

The Cure is Worse Than the Disease: Can We Afford a Build Out?

2008-01-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

I'm sure people are getting sick of me responding to Stuart Staniford all the time - "Does she read anything else?!?" you all must be thinking, but if you'll bear with me one more time, the reason I do it is because even when Staniford annoys me, he's usually a little bit right, or at least pointing in an interesting direction. In this case, Staniford has offered me a tool to try and analyze something that I've intuitively suspected was true for a long time. In Staniford's latest post, he tries to come up with a unified energy plan for how to fix the world's environmental problems. My own take on the post is that his postulates, including unending growth as the earth is depleted, simply don't hold up. But that's not what interests me.

What I've been wondering for a while is whether, in fact, we actually can build out renewable energies and create other large scale industrial solutions, without tipping the planet over into a climate disaster. That is, one of the questions that has been bugging is this - do those who postulate our going on based on a massive build out of our infrastructure risk destroying more than they create? Is, in fact, relocalization the only remaining viable option?

Now I'm biased in favor of relocalizing, as we all know. That is, my bias stems from the sense that I believe for a host of moral as well as empirical reasons, that relocalization would improve our society. But it is hard for me to determine whether my bias is a chicken or an egg thing - that is, I have long believed, without doing the math carefully, that the odds were good that another layer of complexity and build out is not feasible and would be destructive. That is, I believe relocalization is a good thing, but part of the reason I believe it is because I believe it may be the only choice that prevents a climate disaster.

These are, I think, important questions to ask. Joseph Tainter, in _The Collapse of Complex Societies_ observes that collapses come precisely because we keep layering on new, more complex, more energy and resource intensive solutions to the problems that our old solutions created. At some point, the sheer weight overturns the edifice, and things come tumbling dow. Staniford's post, with its proposition of a global energy grid - or really any other worldwide techno-fix, is a heavy weight of complexity. If it worked, if it actually reduced emissions and gave us nearly unlimited, cheap energy that could be equally distributed, that would be great. The problem, of course, is that that's unlikely, and ahistorical. That is, most of the problems we have now are *caused* by our technological solutions to other problems - and the problems we're creating are generally worse than the things they were fixing. Trying to forsee whether any solution is actually going to create a greater problem than it fixes is, I think a basic necessity to avoid making more of the same mistakes.

Now to figure this out, we need some kind of metric, and Staniford has thoughtfully provided me with one in his article http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3540#more. Most importantly, he's provided me with useful parameters - a model for a global transition off of fossil fuels, the cost of doing so, and the time frame. While I personally find the likelihood of global solar grid very, very tiny, this is a useful set of parameters for the purposes of this discussion. We will imagine things go just as Staniford describes in his highly optimized scenario - although it is worth noting that
Staniford's scenario is probably most valuable because it isn't totally out of scale with other proposed scenarios, including world wide nuclear, or Monbiot's retrofit described in _Heat_ to which he does not seem to give a monetary cost figure.

First the time frame - Staniford imagines that a global renewable grid could be online by 2025. The nature of a global grid means that renewables and nuclear grow reasonably quickly, but most of the major gains are seen at the end of the project in the 2020s as the project comes online. Now I grew up around the Big Dig in Boston, which came in years and billions over budget, so I admit to some skepticism on this point, as well as on the technical feasibility, the economics, the political will and just about every other point, but again, for the sake of argument, we'll put the global solar electric grid online 2025, and able to meet all our energy needs worldwide.

Next, Staniford helpfully provides a cost. He estimates 400 trillion dollars. Again, I restrain my skepticism on the economy required to make this possible and the likelihood that the cost would come in so low, and accept his terms. This cost estimate makes it possible to figure out the carbon implications of such a project. Professor Charles Hall, of Syracuse University calculates that every dollar spent produces about 1/2 lb of carbon. Now this is an older study, and the Union of Concerned Scientists has actually estimated this higher, saying that a dollar produces more carbon than that, but in the interest of giving Staniford the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to choose the more conservative figure. Which means that Staniford's project is going to produce 100 billon tonnes of carbon over a bit under years. I think if anything, I'm estimating low - remember, this is an average, consolidating numbers of low carbon activities like spending a dollar on a book and high emission ones. The process of building a global grid, including the mining of materials, placement of underground lines, etc... is likely to run on the high side of the emissions spectrum, but again, we'll give Staniford the benefit of the doubt. So 100 billion tons over 17 years - oh, let's call it 20 and imagine that Staniford manages to completely absorb the last couple of years of production energy into his solar grid before it is finalized. Again, let's make it easy for Staniford.

That means an average production of 5 billion tonnes of carbon per year. That's on top of (at first at least, this will ge a little more complicated shortly) the 8 billion tons of carbon we are expected to emit this year. So this project will nearly double worldwide emissions, until the grid comes online. And while we'll see some benefits initially, the nature of a worldwide grid is that most of the power gets tranmitted to far away places, and to make it work on a world scale, the whole project has to be up and running. You could imagine this working a number of ways, with local regions connected first, so we'll need to figure out a way to amortize the rising value of renewables over time, but I think it is reasonable to say that most of the reduction in carbon production will happen at the very end of the project.

Staniford imagines that until 2015, fossil fuel use will remain more or less flat. That is, growth in renewables and economic troubles will keep us from producing any more fossil fuels than we do now. Now Staniford knows this is inadequate to deal with global warming, but presumably believes that getting to a world in which we have all the energy we want with no carbon is worth it.

I'm actually going to back up and reduce Staniford's parameters here, and argue that we cut 25% of worldwide emissions - the maximum I think any of us can imagine happening while maintaining an economy that could support the capital needs of such a mammoth project. Again, one of the parameters is that we have to assume this is feasible, that economic constraints, war, etc... are not factors.But again, I'm going to give Staniford an additional 25% of leeway, claiming that we cut our emissions back to 6 billion tons of carbon each year. *And* I'm going to give him a 25% across the board cut in emissions for the amortized benefit of the big renewable system as it comes online - that is, I'm going to say that over the years between 2015 and 2025, the growing solar grid is able to take on 1/4 of the total emissions produced by the world right now, before it gets them all. This is not quite accurate - a better model would be a percentage growth, but when I set that, it comes out to roughly the same thing. And I'm going to buy Staniford's assumption that when the grid comes on, we'll have all the energy we want, and won't use fossil fuels for anything or make any more greenhouse gasses, other than the occasional animal fart ;-). Again, that's ridiculous, but we'll accept the claim, because I want to show how problematic this is even under the best of scenarios.

So until 2015, we produce 6 billion tons of carbon ourselves per year, and another 5 billion building out the new system - that is, we nearly double our emissions. And from 2015 to 2025, when all our emissions magically disappear in the new system, we produce 5 billion in new infrastructure production and 4 billion, because the new system is picking up a significant percentage. So from now to 2015, we average 11 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, and until 2025, we average 9 billion. After that, human emissions magically disappear, and the atmosphere begins to right itself. How does that correspond with the science about what we need to do.

After all, we talk a lot about critical numbers - 50% or 80% of emissions by 2050 or some other date. What does the science suggest? Well, some of the most cutting edge science suggests that we need to make cuts of more than 90% *within this decade* - that is, James Hansen, for example, suggests a 90% cut within 10 years, and argues that our increasing knowledge of climate sensitivity requires us to keep emissions at the carbon equivalent level of 350ppm - that is, a level we passed somewhere in the 1980s. The present carbon equivalent levels are at 469, according to the latest IPCC report. That is, we're already way past our limits, and we have to make dramatic cuts to get back within them as fast as possible. But although this is my own view, and seems to be reinforced by data coming in about sea level rise and arctic melt, perhaps we're being unfair to Staniford.

That said, however, the speed at which we do this is undoubtably an important element of our calculations. For example, the British Meteorological Office estimates that by 2030, the earth's ability to absorb carbon will drop by 1/3. Right now, the biosphere can absorb about 4 billion tons of carbon and caronb equivalents annually. By 2030, the warming planet and feedback loops will drop this to 2.7 billion, and the drop continues as long as the world warms, the ocean acidifies, etc... So the longer we wait to make dramatic carbon reductions, the greater those reductions would have to be. A recent study in _Geophysical Research Letters_ showed that in fact, even with a 90% reduction by 2050, the 2 degree threshold was broken - the only scenario in which the tipping point was not reached was with a 100% reduction in industrial emissions. (Andrew J. Weaver et al, 6th October 2007. "Long term climate implications of 2050 emission reduction targets." Geophysical Research Letters).

So what's a more conservative approach? Well, the IPCC is fairly conservative, perhaps even absurdly so. So let's take their figures, even though the 2007 IPCC report has been shown repeatedly to have badly underestimated the severity of global warming - for example, the arctic ice melt is 70 years ahead of its estimates. But let's use the IPCC numbers, in the interest of accomodating Staniford, despite the growing consensus (including the self-assessment of IPCC members) that the IPCC figures are too conservative: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2719627.ece.

A recent IPCC table http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdfshow different temperatures linked to different emissions levels. It shows that avoiding the critical 2 degree threshold (which actually is by no means a certain avoidance of disaster) requires us to limit total emissions by 2030 to 15% of 2000 levels. With a growing population, that means a 93% cut for the US, an 85% cut for Europe, etc... But in a footnote to the same paragraph, the IPCC notes that it has not taken into account the reduced ability of the planet to absorb carbon as the planet warms, or any of the feedback cycles mentioned above. So this is very likely too low a number. One paper recently argued that 18% of all warming at present is attributable to feedback loops, and that that number is rising rapidly. But what does that mean in tons of carbon?

Regardless, in Staniford's scenario, we finally hit targets for cuts around the early 2020s, having put an addition 100 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, while making fairly significant inroads (again, inroads I postulate, Staniford does not) into carbon emissions in general.

Is that enough to fix the planet? As Fred Pearce notes in _With Speed and Violence_, the critical point in billions of tons of atmospheric carbon seems to be about 935 billion tons, equaivalent to 450 ppm. That means 55 billion tons of carbon are left to us. We put 8 billion into the atmosphere each year, and 40% is now absorbed, although that number is declining annually. But with the growth created by a massive build out, we reach that number well before 2020 - pushing us past the 2 degree threshold, and holding us there long enough for it to be really scary.

So here we have a puzzle - what happens if you raise global emissions levels radically with the goal of eventually essentially eliminating them - that is, can we do that - do a massive build out and then let the earth heal itself? Do we have time for just one more carbon binge?This is a hard question to answer, but the odds are excellent that the answer is no. For example, Australian scientist Wenju Cai estimates that if we stopped making emissions right now, it would take 600 years to get the planet back to where it once was. http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44719/story.htm.

Once the feedback loop cycle gets ahold of us (and it is not clear that it hasn't already), we can't stop it simply by reducing emissions. Because the warming we do now is something we'll pay the price for for centuries, we have to be more careful, sooner.

But the returns are so great, some would argue! Even if we push past 2 degrees, into a tipping point, we'll still get no carbon emissions in the future and all the free energy we want. We can fix all the problems then, or at least mitigate them, keep economic growth going steadily. Wouldn't that be worth it?

Well, it depends on what price you are willing to pay. Here are the consequences we're dealing with. In the Sahel, food production will drop by half by 2020, while population doubles. Rice production, the staple grain of 2/3 of the world begins to fall as temperatures rise, reaching a 40% decline by the middle of the century, as population rises to 9 billion. That means half the population ends up under water stress: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900967_pf.html, and the amount of irrigated farmland (which presently produces almost 1/3 of the world's grain) that can no longer be irrigated is likely drop from 17% to 2%, according to Monbiot's _Heat_.

The Stern review estimates half a billion permanent refugees, including residents of major US coastal cities. But UN estimates have suggested that up to 1.5 billion refugees could be an outcome. And, of course, a whole host of wars. The present conflict in the Sudan is already connnected to climate change - a whole host of additional wars are a likely consequence. All of this has an enormous effect, not only on the misery level of the world, but on its economic activity.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the costs of climate change estimates that the total cost of unchecked global warming to be greater than the combined costs of all 20th century wars and the Great Depression combined, a literally unprecedented economic burden. How much of that would be mitigated by a late-term reduction in emissions is not clear, however, all evidence is that the climate is more, rather than less sensitive than we expect. It is not possible to know what the consequences would be, but the science suggests "mostly bad."

So would it be worth it? All the energy we want, but war, drought, thirst, hunger, refugeeism, and the destruction of much of the world (I have not included the loss of biodiversity or anything related to it, although that has costs, and many of them for us), all to get the energy we want, so we can keep lifestyles roughly the same in the west.

\But what are our choices? Well, this option would probably be better than any business as usual scenario, in which we face peak oil by converting to coal. So if we postulate, as people often do (Monbiot does this too) that the only choices are "blow the limits" or "do nothing" - that radical change in our way of life is impossible, that people will "never" agree to lower their standard of living, this probably looks comparatively good.

But, of course, assertions about what the populace will tolerate are always offered in the absence of the real choices. That is, it is very unlikely that our general populace will ever choose voluntary self-limitation instead of, say, going on happily as usual. But if Staniford can imagine that he gets to be emporer of the world, we can also imagine a group of political leaders who are compelled by the evidence and by grassroots people pointing out their lies, to offer up the real choices - that is either we cut emissions radically and fast, or we accept that we lose Miami and most of the Southwest, the one to sea level rises and the other to drought, that we can expect to spend an endless depression, because we will have to spend an increasing quantity of our GDP to mitigate costs. That is, people can be asked to choose between real options, not hypotheticals.And that is when relocalization rears its head again.

Here is where carbon rationing leads us back to a mixed local and agrarian society, more or less inevitably. Because everyone trying to live in this society, as we have it, without a massive energy build out is in for hell. On the other hand, a smaller scale, heavily adapted society with lower energy requirements, and a number of cultural returns, including "rituals of non-consumption" described by historian Timothy Breen, small scale agricultural, more meaningful work and stronger social ties does offer something in return.

In order for relocalization to be feasible, we would have to also imagine that it could meet some basic requirements. That is, it would have to provide a decent standard of living, feed the population, and alot energy to high value things like health care and education. Those are big parameters, but ones that I think relocalization can meet, without destroying the planet. Againm the case for relocalization, when we play out all the implications, must be better than the case for any other model. Fortunately, this does not seem to be hard.

Now it is perhaps unfair of me to not do a similar calculation of the energy costs of relocalization. This is a difficult exercise, because it is a highly fungible exercise. That is, a relocalized, low energy strategy for dealing with the cold can be the reinsulation of a whole house in a cosmetically pleasing way, complete with new windows and passive solar energy, at extremely high cost, or it can be the moving of a woodstove into one room of a cold house, the practice of hauling water from outside rather than using indoor pipes which would then freeze, and everyone dressing warmly and hanging out by the stove. That said, however, I'll attempt to do so in a later post - and to demonstrate that we could still feed, clothe and shelter the population. I'll also at some point try and figure out what amount of energy we probably can produce from renewables without causing a disaster - because relocalization does not necessarily mean us all going back to living in mud huts, as we know.

More soon,

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 34 - Vote Your Conscience - And Tell Everyone Why!

2008-01-29T07:19:00.001-08:00

My formal apologies to readers in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa etc... for running this column on the late side for you. I used to live on the NH/MA border, and my assumption is that anyone who gets to vote early has to work hard not to be a tremendously educated voter - the candidates basically stand in your yard yelling at you until you agree ;-). But as most of the nation heads to the polls for super-Tuesday, it is worth thinking a little about voting.

I know a lot of discontented people who feel crappy and powerless, disheartened and angry at a system that regularly disempowers them and seems to be heading towards fascism. And I know a lot of people who accept the "participate by not participating" notion. But unfortunately, not voting doesn't operate like boycotting commercial products - that is, there's no evidence at all that I can find that not participating makes us more powerful. And while it is absolutely reasonable to be angry about our crappy choices, that doesn't mean that we can say "oh, I don't want to vote for the lesser of two evils" - we have only to look at the last eight years to know that the difference between "kind of evil" and "Gets drunk regularly with Satan" is pretty huge.

Your vote won't make a legitimate third or fourth party in the US. It won't get you a candidate who will enact radical environmental changes, in likelihood - although it will certainly get you something better than what we have unless you vote for Romney or Guiliani ;-). If you live in my state and vote democrat, already sold to Hillary Clinton, your chance of getting, say, Oprah elected in a write in campaign are ridiculously low.

But there is something you can do if you vote that makes an enormous difference. Tell people how you make your choice and what issues matter most to you. I got polled last week, and when I told the pollster that my first concern wasn't even on her list - it was climate change and energy policy she said, "Oh, I've started getting that. I think they may even make that a choice on the next poll." And the impact *there* is potentially greater than we think. Take a look at this post of Greenpa's:http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/11/iceberg-moves-again-and.html discussing the changes in public perception of global warming issues. Obviously, they are slow and too slow - but they are coming. And the hope of the next president, whoever he or she is, doing anything about it depend on the perception that we care, that we're willing to do what's necessary.

If you have a candidate you care about, that's a great reason to vote - I hope you do. If you don't have one you care about, vote for the lesser of two evils. And if you are struggling somehow to figure out what that is, vote anyway, and hang around after and get polled, or talk to the news people. Answer the phone when those polling places call. Write it on your blog - you can still say "the process sucks" while saying "and I'm trying to make a difference anyway."

Recently someone argued with me that none of the little things we do make a very big difference. That is, someone hanging their laundry or composting their scraps is just a tiny drop in a very big bucket. For some of us (some of us live in swing states), voting is like composting, a little drop in the bucket - but the net effect of each drop, and moving others to understand what we are doing, is filling the bucket, however slowly.

Happy voting!

Sharon

Is it Really Tough to Be a Guy in Hard Times? - Speculations on the Biology of Limits

2008-01-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

As I wrote in my latest post over at http://www.depletion-abundance.com/, I've been thinking about the likelihood of collapse lately. And one of the things that struck me is that nearly all the source material I've ever looked at on what a crisis looks like suggests that it is really, really tough to be a man in a changing society, particularly a middle aged man - in fact, that it is so tough that sometimes they die of it, or very nearly.

For example in the recent essay "Survival in Times of Uncertainty: Growing Up in Russia in the 1990s" http://www.sott.net/articles/show/147683-Survival-in-Times-of-Uncertainty-Growing-Up-in-Russia-in-the-1990s, the author observes,

"Personal survival and the survival of the family depended on a right mix of flexibility, on one hand, and staying true to oneself on theother. The more invested people were in their job-related identitiesand past achievements, the worse it was for them. In general, women fared better than men. The elderly were in trouble. When it came to the world view adjustment, the middle-age men were hit hardest; too many were paralyzed with all the changes and were content to sit around in their cold and empty engineering or accounting offices, drinking tea or stronger drinks and swearing at the government. Oftentimes it was their wives who buckled down and traveled the railroad with the striped coffers in hand."

Dmitry Orlov makes much the same point in his essay "Post Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century," observing that women did better than men, and middle aged, career oriented men worst of all. The high rates of alcoholism and mortality are mentioned in both cases, with Russian men still averaging a lifespan 12 years shorter than Russian women.

This is a theme that shows up around other areas. A while back, Rob Hopkins had a very widely discussed post, "Is Peak Oil Pessimism A Generation of Men Coming To Realize How Useless They Are?"http://transitionculture.org/2006/12/04/is-peak-oil-pessimism-a-generation-of-men-coming-to-realise-how-useless-they-are/ in it, Hopkins argued that some of the doomerism in the peak oil movement (and its male dominated character) is based on the sheer shock men face when they realize that their whole lives have been focused on things that may not be there in the longer term. This post was widely discussed in the community, and seemed to touch a nerve.

In Jeane Westin's book _Making Do: How Women Survived the '30s_, she notes that a recurring theme in her interviews was the husband who just couldn't handle the job loss and loss of his role as provider. Women, she argues, seem to do better. One woman, "Pauline" notes: "My husband was ready to roll over and die, but the kids still had to eat, and so I didn't have the choice."

The final quote I'll offer on this theme comes from Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen's _The Subsistence Perspective_. In it, Mies talks about going to speak at a conference where she was the token woman. In response to an MIT scientist's claim that we are all doomed to ecological collapse, Mies notes that the same predictions were made at the end of the Roman empire, and that her father used to grow potatoes on the old Roman road that fell apart at that "end of the world." She goes on to speak of a strain of apocalyptic thought she observes, particularly in scientists (and mostly but not exclusively male ones) who, at the end of their careers, begin to fear for the state of society. They are, she says,

"...those prominent male scientists who, at the end of their lives, are horrified when they look at themselves and their works, and when they realise that the God to whom they have devoted tehir whole life - scientific progress - is a Moloch who eats his children. Some of these men then convert from a Saul to a Paul. But they rarely give up the whole megalomania of the project of modern science. If they can't solve humanity's problems by almight science and technology then at aleast the catastrophe has to be total and all-encompassing. Note even a single blade of grass is allowed to grow on the ruins of their deeds." (Mies, 25-26)

Obviously, there are limits to the utility of any generalization on gender, and I'm covering territory already discussed. Nor am I claiming in any sense that either this will be easy on women or that all men are like those described by Mies. What I'm interested in (perhaps because I'm married to a man rapidly approaching middle age and care very much about other ones) is why a changing society should be so very difficult for men to adapt to. Is this as true now as it was in the Soviet Union, the 30s, and as Rob Hopkins implies it is now?

Or perhaps it might be better to ask the question another way - what makes it easier for women? My own personal theory is this - women are better able to adapt in large part because we have fewer choices about this. This is a deeply essentialist argument, but I'm not sure that makes it less true. That is, even among the most career minded women I know, there's the simple biological reality of our reproductive system to remind us how powerless we are. As my friend George Franklin once observes, "there's nothing fair about pregnancy and childbirth" and that's true - but even among women who don't have children, there is, I think a constant awareness of the possibility of getting pregnant. Perhaps the celibate and post-menopausal childless are free of such anxieties, and thus can establish strong professional identities without ambiguity, but I couldn't find enough of a sample size among my acquaintance to establish such a fact.

The truth is that it is a big old wrench to spend your youth training and establishing yourself in a career, allow it shape your identity and your place in your society, only to have that completely overturned. The thing is, most of the women I know who have children have already been through that giant wrench - and most of those who don't and are young enough to still be fertile know they could be.

Rob Hopkins ties the difficulty of the transition to the lack of skills that contemporary men have - but contemporary women are in the same boat. Does that mean we're going to be as lost as the Soviet men? Is Rob right, is this change going to be hardest on young to middle aged guys? I love a whole bunch of them, and I don't want to see them die young, like Russian men have.

Most of my female (and a few of my male) peers are a lot like me - overeducated, middle class, married, partnered with kids or were when they got knocked up (with a few single mothers by choice thrown in) and aren't now, and elaborately trained for some professional career. And most of those with kids (and a good number without) aren't doing what they thought they'd be doing in their 20s. In fact, it is something of a joke among us - we call it the mid-30s "What do I want to be when the children grow up" crisis.

I've changed the names to protect the innocent, but there's Miriam, who managed to keep her career as an engineer through her second child, only to quit when a colleague kept sexually harassing her while she was pumping breastmilk. Now she teaches math at a public school and has "teacher's hours," while her partner Shannon, who didn't give birth gets the engineering promotion. Or there's Mela, who was in Medical School until she accidentally got pregnant by her boyfriend. She's going to go back when her daughter is in kindergarten...unless she has another baby, since she's worried that otherwise, she will be entering what she calls the "amnio years" of reduced fertility by the time she can take time out to have another child - and she thinks that might matter more to her than the career. Samantha doesn't have kids yet - but she wants them, and she just gave up her high powered academic career that required her to live in another state from her husband and see him only two weekends a month. Amy used to be an IT professional, and now she works part time from home, after a lengthy struggle with various bad childcare providers - her younger son goes to school this year, and she's thinking about going back, but not sure how her years out of the workplace will function, and doesn't know what to do about summers. Binjan quit her job as a research chemist after her first child was born - she couldn't do the work with toxic substances she'd been doing, and the only option open to her was effectively a demotion. She's taken a much lower-level job, well below her qualifications, that allows her to work near home. Laura and Paul agreed that she'd stay home while she was breastfeeding, and then he'd take his turn afterwards, but now that her child is weaned, she's not getting offers that match his - she notes that her fellow physicists treat time off to bear and raise a kid kind of like she'd skipped out to go to a bowling convention. Kate did her Ph.d, her post-doc, put up with sexual harrassment, an advisor her treated her pregnancy as a personal betrayal and finally gave up when her boss told her that she'd be expected to work 10 hour days for six straight months while she was nursing an infant. Now she edits academic papers from home. Carly has a farm now and teaches online courses at night while her husband Jack, who she met as the two new hires in their academic dapartment, still goes off to commute. They tried keeping Carly at work, but when their daughter Jenna announced to Grandma, "Mommy is my Mommy at bedtime and Lisa (the daycare provider) is my Mommy all the other times" Carly gave it up. She calls it wimpiness - but points out that as long as there aren't many male daycare providers, Daddy's never going to have to deal with a "day Daddy."

Now there are men in this paradigm to - the one wonderful social change of my generation is that the guys aren't sticking the women with all the responsibilities. But no matter how principled you are about sharing equally, society doesn't make that easy. That is, every man in the families above would be willing to consider it being him who took the time off, or made the change - but when the babies are little, he can't nurse them. He's not the one who spends a couple of months puking and another couple waddling. If someone is going to take time off, it just makes sense for it to be the one with the boobs a lot of the time.

In our own case, I was always more ambitious than Eric was. In fact, our early deal was that Eric, who was more flexible, would follow the banner of my academic career, since I cared much more about success than he did. But then his jobs paid more, and gave better benefits, and reproduction and nursing took up a lot of time, and without really planning it, I became yet another woman, wondering what I was going to be when I grew up (turns out a writer ;-)). It may yet turn out that we shift things around - but we're a long, long way from my making enough to support the household, and we'd need universal healthcare or for writers to start getting insurance. Not going to happen soon.

I do know men who have take the burden - Jim works 4 days a week, six hours a day supporting Karen's high powered, tenure track job, and raising their 3 adopted daughters - but Karen readily admits that she didn't have to take maternity leave. Raj quit altogether, and takes care of his two boys and his sister-in-law's daughter while his wife, Jasu pushes her limits as an urban reporter. Mick and Linnie did the switch - she stayed home for three years and two babies, and the moment she weaned the second, Mick quit his job as an editor and started doing a bit of work in the evenings, while caring for the boys. But these cases are exceptional, a growing number of families where the men are both willing and able to shift their identities and the jobs and culture and able to support women in this.

That is, my own observation is that women who have kids pretty much have no choice but to get over the notion that their careers are their identity in a way that many men don't have to. We've already gone through a radical transformation - the transformation between the identity we were prepared to have and the identity that we actually got. More men have done this in my generation than in the past, but I still think that this happens less frequently to men than women.

I also think that the men I know who have taken a bigger part in parenting and the transition than their fathers and grandfathers did are probably better prepared for a shift - I live among committed, passionate fathers, who do an awful lot of their childcare and domestic work, often on top of physically, intellectually or otherwise strenuous jobs. That is, I don't know a lot of men who haven't had to shift their identities in some deep way from "Consultant" to "Consultant/Daddy." My hope is that that means the 30 something men I hang out with will handle the shift in their identities better than their fathers would have. But there's still something different, I think, in what most of them seem to experience in fatherhood - that is, fatherhood adds a dimension, but in many cases, doesn't subtract anything.

Women I know, in contrast, have already slammed hard into the wall of limitations - or they've watched their mothers, sisters, girlfriends in the world around them do it. We've confronted the reality that all the technology in the world can only change our biology so much - the minute we have sex, we come crashing up against the danger of pregnancy, and *everything* changing. I've never met a woman, no matter how reliable her birth control, who hasn't had a pregnancy scare or three, a moment when she realizes how *not* in control of her life she could be. For those who actually do get pregnant, do have children, even those who keep the same jobs and work through the experience, there are subtle changes in career culture in many cases. If there aren't, it is usually because a husband bears those burdens - or because they can afford lots and lots of paid help. For those who were the primary nurturers (and that goes with a strong commitment to nursing in many cases - I know women who went back to work at 6 weeks and pumped until a child was 18 months, but I know more women who couldn't pull that off, and if they had the means, often preferred to nurse, even if it cost the income and career, rather than formula feed - poor women generally just have no choice but to move to formula if their bodies won't handle pumping, or their workplace doesn't support it), often they describe the first few months or year of motherhood as a loss, or a drowning, a massive shock. It isn't that they don't love parenthood - they do. But the change in who you are is such a vast shock that it is hard to negotiate it smoothly.

I wonder if the shift in identity that women face in adulthood is something like what men face in a changing economy and society. That is, we came bang up against the reality of limits early on, and for all that we live in a society that encourages us to pretend there are no biological differences between women and men, even young girls know that isn't true - that there really is only so much a commitment to egalitarianism can do to balance the reality of biological limits. I know my decision to have a child at 27, rather than waiting until I had my Ph.d and tenure (as I was advised by a number of people) was shaped by having watched my mother's friends who waited into their middle 30s or even 40s, and their experience of infertility. Even as a teenager, I knew that the notion that I had all the choices was false/

The truth is that while technology can do some things, it can't carry a baby for you, and motherhood has at its roots for most women (there are high tech exceptions on both ends) a purely biological sex at one end, a whole lot of squatting and pushing at the other. I wonder, then, if the idea that there are biological limits, or that our identity must shift in response to changing situations, aren't ones that many women have already had no choice but to confront?

What does this mean for men? My own feeling is that men of my own generation are going to have, in general, advantages over the middle aged men of the Soviet 1990s, or the men of the 1930s - our culture's shifts to more common ground may turn out to be a survival strategy for men. That is, even if they've never done it, most men of my acquaintance have at least some level of preparedness to shift roles, and have had to connect with biological limits in their wives' bodies, perhaps not as directly as the wives, but nonetheless. They may love their work, they may be good at it, but most men I know have a level of flexibility that I think will serve them well. Across class, race, religion and cultural lines, they've been forced to change their own roles in the public world simply by having children or wanting them - because they know that the women in their lives aren't going to be able to do it alone. I can't imagine any father I know rolling over when his kids needed to be fed - if he was no longer making the money to do so, he'd be out there growing the food.

Still, I also think that it may be important for men now to start putting a foot in the informal economy, to start finding identity in their families or their off book work, or in anything than the career they trained for. As Hopkins observes, they don't necessarily have the skill set for a low energy future, and that part is scary, and less scary if you begin to acquire one. It may be the integration of skill set and flexibility that makes them capable of handling the change.

When we got married, I was 26, Eric was 28. I told him that after we'd been married for 75 years, we could renegotiate the deal, and if he wanted to consider seeing other people, we'd talk about it then. But I made him swear to give me 75 years. I think of my role in pestering him into learning new skills and planning for a future on our land as an investment in that deal - if he hits the wall of limits, I want to be there to be reassuring, to be behind him saying, "Look, you may not be an astrophysicist any more, but you are still a star gazer with a bit of dirt, a loving family and a damned fine ass. So you will not be moping around waiting for the world to start up again, or dropping dead of a coronary and leaving me alone with all these children. Have a hoe - you still have 65 years of undifferentiated hell until you are rid of me." I recommend this approach to all the man loving women and men in my audience ;-).

Sharon

Changes or "Just What the World Needed, Another Blog!"

2008-01-26T14:00:00.001-08:00

For a while now I've been putting off dealing with a couple of competing issues. The first one is the fact that as this blog has progressed from "Sharon, ranting vaguely to empty space" to "Sharon, ranting vaguely to a bunch of people too kind to tell her to shut up," there has been more than little dissatisfaction voiced with my blog, particularly the title.

That is, when I speak, and people have to introduce me, they can't pronounce it. When they send links, they can't spell it. And perhaps the most common single email query I get is "who the hell is Casaubon?!" The next most common is "What the hell does George Eliot have to do with Peak Oil."

And it is hard to spell. It is hard to pronounce, and as much as, in my role as a former English teacher, I feel like I should tell everyone that they have read _Middlemarch_ it isn't my favorite novel either - if I'm going to bug people to go read novels, I'll pick one that's considerably more fun.

You see, Casaubon is the old man who Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Middlemarch, marries because she wants to do something important. Casaubon is writing a great book, a book that will reveal universal truths, that he calls "The Key to All Mythologies," and she imagines that she will be part of a work of genius. Unfortunately, Casaubon turns out to be a complete fool, and his project is a work of ego.

Now my old Professor, John Burt, used to say that his young female students want to be Dorothea Brooke, and his male ones want to be Stephen Daedalus. Frankly, I always thought Dorothea was a twit, and would much rather be Stephen Daedalus myself. But what I always worried about becoming was old Casaubon - allowing my ego, and what I want to be true, to alter my thinking a bit too much. Thus, the name "Casaubon's Book" was a reminder about my own tendency towards hubris. Essentially, I named it this so to remind myself not to be too big a fool.

If you've been paying attention, the name hasn't checked me that much - I still have a bit too much hubris, and I'm still working my way through a host of thoughts on how all the pieces of our societal crisis - ecological, psychological, economic, democratic - go together. But I like to think that maybe I'm a little less arrogant for the reminder.

Several people, with my new professional interests at heart, however, have gently suggested that a different title would be in order. And one person I pay a lot of attention to has suggested it not so gently "Sharon, that title sucks - change it" was about the size of it.

At the same time, a bunch of other changes have been occurring. One is that writing two books in 14 months and running a CSA is not something I can do - not and do all the other things I'd like to accomplish with it. Time is at a premium, and right at the moment, writing is taking up a lot of it - as are kids, food preservation, homeschooling, speaking engagements, and all the new agricultural projects we're taking up. Something had to give, and reluctantly, we're letting the CSA go. Instead, we're working on subsistence agriculture, more pasture farming, farmer's market sales, and hoping to turn the farm into a site for teaching subsistence gardening and other related skills. We have an enormous old house, and it has occurred to us that maybe what might make sense is to use some of that space to help others adapt.

Because of that, I'm also working on finding some other sources of income. Like all of us, I'm stuck in an economy growing unstable, a bit worried about the spousal job that provides most of our family's income and benefits, and I'm under some pressure to spend more time on remunerative activities, other than the purely fun stuff, like blogging. I am faced with a choice - cut back on the blog and spend the time doing things people pay me for, or make money on the blog.

But the thing is, I'm not thrilled with my choices. You see, one of the things I like about this blog is that it has been ad free, commercial free, technorati free - heck, I don't even have a hit counter, which frees me from worrying about my traffic. This blog, for me, has been about good conversations with interesting people. I want to keep that - and my reminder not to get too presumptuous. And since I am compromising with something I'm at best ambivalent about (most advertising), I want people who would rather read my stuff without ads to have the option.

So I've started another blog www.depletion-abundance.blogspot.com. This one will have almost all of the same content as Casaubon's book, along with more links, cool stuff, my speaking engagements, maybe even pictures (if I ever learn how to put them up) and perhaps even a hit counter (ibid). It will also have (fairly subtle) ads at the bottom, will accept direct sponsorship, and will have a store offering books and other useful things. It will also have a couple of posts a month that don't appear here (Casaubon's book will have at least one post appear here exclusively each month as well).

For people who don't want ads or book sales, you can read almost the same stuff right here, in perpetuity. If you aren't bothered, or want to buy books on sustainability, energy issue and other recommendations from me, or think that the new colors, the news feed and the links are worth putting up with it, check out my new site. I'll also be making some updates to this one, but since I'm the original techno-moron (think your elderly great-aunt who asks you to come program her remote control for her), be patient with me. You don't want to know how long it took, or how much help it required to get www.depletion-abundance.blogspot.com up and running - really.

Anyway, that's the news here. New blog. Same rants. New day.

Cheers,

Sharon

How Big is a Farm? Who is a Farmer?

2008-01-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

Well, the game of post-riposte is winding down over at TOD, 400+ comments, etc... on my response to Stuart Staniford (his original essay linked at the top of mine or in my last post) http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3541#more, complete with Staniford's response to me, and back again.... Fun and all, but back to work. Although if you'd like a nice, short post on the subject, check out Dmitry Orlov's comments on the subject:http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-fallacy-of-reversibility.html

One of the problems in this discussion is the question of "how big is a farm?" That is, when we talk about "farmers" who are we actually talking about? What's "agriculture", and what's "gardening?" Where does "homesteading" "smallholding" "horticulture" and "subsistence farming" fall in the mess? BoysMom was helpful enough to ask about that in comments, and I thought it had been long enough since I covered this topic that it would be worth discussing it here. Is part of the problem of discussing "relocalization" that our definitions of "farmer" vary so widely that we're talking past each other?

Personally, I have a strong opinion on this subject (gee, could you have guessed?) I think (and yes, all the real farmers yell at me, and I don't entirely blame them), that "farmer" should be the umbrella term for remunerative food production. That is, I think you are a farmer if you grow food for sale, for barter or as a large portion of your own personal economy - that is, I think we call them "subsistence farmers" for a reason. If farming either provides a significant part of your income.

My criteria for this is simple - we don't live in isolation - the word "farmer" should mean something across national and cultural boundaries. That is, a "farmer" in India, and a "farmer" in Canada should be able to recognize one another as fellow creatures with a shared profession, and art. As we are speaking now, the word "farmer" as it is used in the rich world erases the vast majority of world farmers out of the language, and that shouldn't be acceptable to us. As important, it gives us a mistaken sense of what agriculture actually is- even what agriculture was. In the 1940s, a large amount of victory garden literature spoke of "garden farms" - that is, home gardens that operated, like farms, to both supply the subsistence needs of the family and to serve the large public interest by freeing up food to be sent overseas.

That is, it isn't that long even in North American history that a "farmer" has been a guy with a thousand acres. And in the rest of the world, it may never work that way:

http://www.ifpri.org/events/seminars/2005/smallfarms/sfproc/Appendix_InformationBrief.pdf.

As you'll note from the first paragraph, even the experts have a hard time with the naming problem - and so they just call them "farmers." (My computer does not permit me to use PDFs, and for some reason I can't copy text from the html format, so I'm afraid you'll just have to look back). That is, the World Bank and the UN FAO have essentially deemed as farmers anyone who calls themselves a farmer, sells food, or subsists primarily on their own food. The distinction they make is "small farmer" vs. "large farmer" - but all of them are farmers.

Right now, the majority of the world's farms are small farms. The average farm size in Africa and Asia is 1.6 hectares (for those who are accustomed to acreage measurements, a hectare is about 2.5 acres - thus, the average farm size in Africa and Asia would be a bit under 4 acres). This means that there are a whole lot of farms much smaller than 4 acres. 95% of all farms in many parts of the former Soviet Unions are under 1 hectare, and that they provide the majority of all agricultural production, a total of 52% of all food eaten in the region.

The US, as of the last Ag Census, contained 66,ooo+ small farms under 2 hectares. Which just goes to support Kiashu's well taken point here:
http://greenwithagun.blogspot.com/2008/01/relocalisation.html, that about half of the world's food already comes from small farms. Add to that Helena Norberg-Hodge's observation that *2 Billion* people live almost entirely on subsistence agriculture that is low input and largely organic (because they can't afford not to be), and we can see that agricultural norms are simply different than what we Americans and Canadians think of.

The claim that large farmer are essential to produce grain turns out also to be false - in India, 40% of all food grains are produced by small farmers in parcels under 2 hectares, and not totally dissimilar data is found in other developing nations. It may well be more efficient to produce grain in more centralized areas, by some definitions (the distinction here between efficiency of land and efficiency of labor would apply in some cases), but for those who immediately leap to the conclusion that we'd never have any grain if we didn't have big farms, this is a useful observation.

But aren't all small farmers poor? In a 2004 analysis for the _Handbook of Agricultural Economics_, Eastwood, Lipton and Newell observe that in developing nations, small farmers tend to be disproportionately taxed, while in developed nations, they tend not to receive the benefits of agricultural subsidies. That is, small farmers tend to get the worst of both worlds, with both poor and rich nations tending to disadvantage them economically. That's not to say that the economic disadvantages of agriculture as we do it now (which apply to most North American and European farmers except during ethanol booms) don't make farming a difficult choice - but it does suggest that just as agricultural policy has driven farmers in the US out of business for decades, agricultural policy is also working in many cases to impoverish farmers in the poor world. FAO agriculture economists Binswanger, Deinenger and Feder, for example, conclude that generally speaking larger farms in the poor world are dramatically less efficient than smaller, family farms, but that policies favor them so strongly as to elide much of this difference. That is, in both the rich and the poor world, we work very hard to keep our small farmers poor. It is interesting to try and imagine what a systematic set of agricultural policies that supported small scale, diversified agriculture would do to the present equation of poverty and size.

Interestingly, it seems that in both south Asia and the former Soviet Union, the trend that economic development generally creates towards larger farms seems not to be the case - that is, the Handbook of Agricultural Economics cited above notes that as of 2004, neither Russia nor south Asia seems to be following the pattern of getting bigger as they get richer. In Russia, the authors speculate, it may be because of the powerful impact of the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, where consumers now associate small farms with food security. In Asia and parts of Latin America (Brazil and Argentina have steadily increased farm size, while smaller nations have declined, implying that averages are not as much to the point here as the articulation of two seperate trends), where farm sizes actually seem to have declined in the later part of the 20th century.

So what should we take from all this data? First, that small farms are normal, and that the majority of the world's farmers are small farmers of less than 5 acres. That is, it is hard to claim that someone farming a comparatively small piece of land is not a farmer, if they constitute a majority - in fact, perhaps it would be more accurate to call many large scale farmers (as some prefer) "agribusinessmen" and leave the term farmer to the majority. In addition, in many, many nations there are substantial numbers of farms that are pretty much the same size as a suburban lot. The people who farm them are farmers. The average Bangladeshi farms half a hectare. In Barbados, the average piece of land is 1.6 hectares. In China, 0.67 hectares, in India 1.34 hectares. Lebanon 1.2, Japan, 1.2, Egypt 0.95. And of course, averages mean that many, many of these farms are quite a bit tinier.

So it must be that farming isn't about land size. Even in the US this can be true - in her glorious book _The Earth Knows My Name:Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America_, Patricia Klindienst notes that there is no clear boundary between those who call themselves "farmers" and those who call themselves "gardeners" - some of the gardens are bigger than the farms, in fact. That is, even in America, there are thousands of small farms, being worked by thousands of small farmers, and size doesn't seem to be the defining factor.

So perhaps what matters is what you are doing on your land, not how big it is. How should we narrow this one down - the tax purposes model is, I think, insufficient to offer us an overarching definition that crosses borders from the rich world to the poor (I once read that in at least one US state, one way to be a farm for tax purposes is to own a cow - period, and in that state (which one I've forgotten) there are a number of people keeping cows in their garages, buying their hay, and accepting a tax write off, but this may be purely anecdotal).

One obvious way to distinguish between farmers and gardeners would be by economic remuneration - that is, if you sell farm products, you are a farmer. But this model effectively removes from the language the millions, perhaps even billions of subsistence farmers who sell little or nothing off their land. These people live their lives as farmers, with all the benefits and disadvantages that applies - we cannot erase them from the language. In most cases, they are taxed in their countries as farmers.

Such subsistence farmers exist in the rich world as well - there are not a huge number of subsistence farmers these days, but they do exist, and I know a few. They grow their own food, cut their own wood, hunt, and work off the farm or sell enough to pay the land taxes. One of my neighbors, Paul, is a subsistence farmer, living from his half acre garden, two deer a year, a couple of wild turkeys and enough work as a substitute teacher to pay for taxes and beer. He jokes that he works as a teacher 5 days a month, and grows and hunts food the other 25, but when the government asks him what he does, he's a teacher!

We cannot say that having a non-agricultural job is a criteria for ceasing to call someone a farmer either - according to the USDA, 71% of all US farmers of all sizes have either an off season, or off farm income, or a household member who provides an off farm income. In _Ending Hunger In Our Lifetime_ ed Runge, Senauer et al notes that this is true of many poor world farmers as well - not quite 80% also do seasonal or off farm work, or have a household member who does so. The numbers are oddly similar. In fact, Peter Rosset in _Food is Different_ tracks the ways that farmers subsidize consumers and their own agricultural practices, and notes that in general, farmers subsidize cheap food more than governments do - that is, because farming is not merely a job but a culture and a way of life, farmers will do almost anything to keep their land - including sending family members off the land to allow those who farm to growing corn or rice or beans at low prices. See:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-keep-farming-until-money-runs-out.html

A farmer is not someone who never does any work off the farm, then. She is not someone (btw, "he" is a "she" - the majority of the world's farmers are women - and many poor nations have long traditions of agriculture and land ownership in women's hands) who owns a lot of land, or necessarily sells much or any food in the market place.

So what does distinguish farmers from gardeners? Not much. Perhaps we should think about the distinction linguistically. "Gardener" derives from a the french, and means "an enclosed space" - that is, its linguistic focus is on limitations. A "garden" linguistically speaking, is seperated from the space around it by cultivation.

"Farm" and "farmer" on the other hand come from the same root as "to form" and imply creation. The oldest English forms of the word, going back to Beowulf and the Domesday book, also meant "a banquet or feast" - that is, farms and farmers are linguistically tied to bountifulness, to eating, to abudance and plenty, and also to the power of creation - by implication to the power that created "terra firma" - that is, the linguistic implication is that farming is acting in G-d's image, creating plenty.

My own take, is that as valuable as the word "gardener" is, the kind of agriculture we're trying to create is more appropriately described as "farming" than as gardening - that is, a truly sustainable agriculture happens not in boundaries, but across them. Is a permaculture garden a bounded space, or do its lines blur into the trees and wildlands around it? Is an agriculture designed to create mixed use pasture for wildlife and farmed animals about its fences, or about what can pass through them? Is a family living in part on what they grow and what they forage and harvest from untended spaces in their town or city tending a garden, or farming their community? It isn't that gardening isn't a good word, it is that I think farming is a better one.

All of the other terms offer some kind of subset of the above. It isn't that I have any objection to someone calling themselves a smallholder, a gardener, a homesteader or an edible landscaper, it is merely that there exists an umbrella term that serves, not just because it is accurate, but because it describes so well what we must become.

Sharon

Crunchy Chicken Made Me Spit Tea All Over My Monitor This Morning...

2008-01-25T07:24:00.000-08:00

Go to Crunchy's site www.crunchychicken.blogspot.com. Scroll down on the sidebar to peak oil. You'll see it.

Sharon

What I Was Doing When I Wasn't Writing This Blog

2008-01-23T04:33:00.000-08:00

Something of a dearth of posts this week so far. So let's see... first I was goofing off with college friends, and then I was reading Stuart Staniford's latest impressive analysis, where he takes a shot across the bow of relocalization and the idea that local agriculture is going to feed us here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3481#more. Then I was writing a 15 page rebuttal that will appear today or tomorrow on The Oil Drum. And then I was required to play 4 consecutive games of chess with chess obsessed Simon, talk to my visiting mother, put various children to bed and deal with my own sleep deprivation. Today is DH's day to put his work life in order, and I'll be tending little people, hanging laundry, making food and reading _Owl Babies_ 150 times or so.

All of which is a long way of saying I've been neglecting the blog for other things. If you are dying for some stuff to read, I'm sure Staniford's piece, plus the 400ish comments over at TOD will keep you entertained! I'll be back for real tomorrow.

Sharon

The Home Front: Let's End the Individual vs. Political Action Debate

2008-01-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

Over at Colin's NoImpactMan site, there's been an interesting spate of posts on the value of individual action vs. political action: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/a-little-more-o.html, http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/a-little-more-o.html, (there more on his site). I think Colin's attempt to assert the value of both is important, but I admit, I don't think this is quite the right way to frame this debate. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this issue lately, because I wrote a whole chapter of _Depletion and Abundance_ about it - mostly about how whenever we enter a time of real crisis, those distinctions disappear - that is, everything we do - what we eat and how we work, how we travel and how we fight - all those things operate in the service of larger societal goals. So I had to ask myself - why is it that it matters whether we waste food and energy during time of war, and not the rest of the time?

But of course, that's the wrong question - it isn't that war or other crisis makes what we do in our kitchens matter as much as what we do in the voting booth, a the protest or in public service - it is that in the heightened awareness of crisis we recognize something that is always true - that the line between "individual" and "public" is very, very fine. It is true there are things done in the dark of night in our own rooms that have no political context whatsoever (at least according to most folks on the left - there are other ways of thinking about it out there), but most of our individual choices involve public, political engagement. The distinction between "individual" and "political" is largely artificial, a remnant of the cultural legacy of older ideas about public and private. Thus, if I make a donation to a political candidate, that's a "political" act. And if I go shopping at a store, and the store uses some of the money I give them to make a donation to a political candidate, that's "individual" - but not because one has political implications and the other does not, but because those are the categories we are accustomed to sorting things into. Virtually all human acts both involve "individual" choice and "political" context.

"Individual" acts are generally quite collective in any given society - and especially so in a media-driven consumer culture. What may look to our habits like private choice is driven by a whole host of public resources, energies and moneys, often with strong political interests - the shape of our economy is a political concern. Thus, for example, our "individual" food choices over the last fifty years have been shaped by "private" corporations operating in public through media, subsidized by public policy. The fact that 'Coke or Pepsi" is a choice, that it is deemed a meaningful one, and that "clean water" isn't one is all in play when we go make our "individual" choice between sodas that taste like highly sugared battery acid.

Any discussions of "individual vs. political" choices ultimately must include gender. Think about how many of the "individual" choices so often demeaned by some environmentalists (among them Monbiot, Schellenberger, Romm, etc...) who say they can't make a difference were traditionally "women's work" - from things that are tied to shopping or not shopping(and since women make or influence 90% of all purchases, including traditionally male-associated things like tools and cars, this remains fairly accurate), cooking rather than buying fast food, domestic life (turning off lights and down heat, gardening), frugality and "making do" etc... It isn't that men don't do these things - they absolutely do - but they are associated culturally with women. And the public realm, and political action, is both dominated by men and associated with them, going back to the 19th century and before. And that absolutely shapes our diminution of their value.

Historically, the distinction between "public" and "private" is strongly gendered - women, and most of the acts above, are associated with the private. In the most extreme versions of this, women had no public existence at all separate from father or husband legally speaking in many cultures. In the 19th century, when the mythos of "the angel in the house" had its maximum currency, it was common to say that women's names should appear in the newspaper 3 times - at birth, marriage and death - that is, that women should have no public or civil existence. Of course, even in the most repressive Victorian times this rule was as much disobeyed as obeyed, but the legacy of the thought that it created lives with us.

Over the last 50 years, since the end of World War II, we have had the greatest movement in history out of the private, domestic "sphere" and into the "public" realm. And it is no accident that this move has coincided with wild growth in the US and other rich world nation's energy consumption. The workforce nearly doubled, creating use for twice as many cars, twice as many jobs. Women, no longer cooking and cleaning hired out for those jobs - expending money and energy creating new low wage work for the poor, who also stopped cooking for their kids as the cost of living rose. Now that women had their own money, the bought stuff.

Do not mistake me - I am a feminist and I do not hold women any more responsible for the environmental destruction our new wealth created than men - there were many feminist voices that advocated not the outsourcing of domestic labor to corporations and poorer, non white people, but shared labor in the home. However, I find the demeaning of women's traditional work, and by implication the women who did it then and the women and men (mostly poor and non-white) who often do it for us now, offensive and destructive.

What I am claiming is this - that the women's movement as it happened, was seized upon by the growth capitalist economy, and perverted into something ecologically destructive. In fact, this is more about feminism's lack of power to overcome the dominant culture than its alliance with it. But the history of personal energy use cannot be separated from the history of feminism, it stands as material proof of the claim that individual actions when taken within a society are enormously powerful *and* the sheer destructiveness of moving 60% of all women into the workforce (without a simultaneous reduction in male workers) was in part a function of the artificial public/private; individual/political distinction. That is, the things that we call "individual" and imagine don't much matter, are the remnants of a culture that demeans "women's work" even after most women stopped doing that work.

By this last point, I mean to say that the habit of concealing "private" acts under the notion that they are individual and thus without political context, which growth capitalism does anytime war or other crisis doesn't intercede, is part of the reason we permitted this enormous destruction. Our habits of thinking led us to demean "women's work" as low impact, low importance things that couldn't possibly matter. Maria Mies in _The Subsistence Perspective_ calls this the "housewifization" of women's labor - that is, it is systematically removed, by capitalism, to a "private" and invisible sphere, no longer measured or considered to contribute to the economy as a whole. Such labor is described as drudgery, mindless, numbing (which is just how Betty Friedan described it, for example), unskilled, lower class. This simultaneously presents women who can avoid it a powerful cultural incentive to go do important "public" work, and also essentially erases those "individual acts" from the culture. We come to assume that anything that is so demeaned, dismissed, unmeasured, undervalued, done by people held in contempt by the society as whole couldn't possibly be powerful enough, say, to influence the whole climate or to drive us to an energy peak sooner than expected.

It is not that I deny the influence of larger issues, or the need for political actions in their purest form. Nor am I claiming that women's roles are the origin or whole cause of climate change and peak oil - far from it. What I am arguing instead is that our emphasis on this distinction is not based on any inherently meaningful division, and that our habit of dividing actions into individual and political ones is more destructive than it is productive. We cling to it not because it illuminates some useful truth, but because it is habit leftover from another world, encouraged by precisely the forces that got us into this trouble to begin with.

Instead of wasting time on this artificial distinction, we need to begin recognizing the sheer political and social power of choices we've deemed "individual" and also think about how this distinction has led even many activists to misunderstand power relationships, and how to make an impact. For example, a recent survey of "Green" consumers suggest that many people focus on relatively minor impact actions (cloth bags for example), but drive and fly more than people who do not identify with environmental causes. Such a study is obviously biased by class issues, and yet, the "green consumer" movement already shows deep problems, as people are unable to distinguish between meaningful actions and relatively meaningless ones. An integrated understanding of our actions would, for example, prevent many people hopefully from, for example, publicly supporting new farm policies while sending cash donations to ConAg, Kelloggs and Altria who oppose them, in the form of supermarket groceries.

Moreover, it would spare environmentalists a sparring point, a distracting debate that sets us at each other, trying to undermine each other's proposed solutions, as well as saving us all time. Not to mention, that as more and more men and women take up the demeaned category of domestic, "housewifized" labor out of necessity and desire, it might shake some of the cultural negativity from that work. If we stop sneering at cooking and gardening as just another "individual" choice, utterly separate from our "political" work (which we have to do too), we might make a real dent in all of the parts of the equation.

It is always a lie to say that "individual" choices don't matter, but it is especially a lie to say that during a time of crisis, and we are in one now. In wartime, there are two fronts - the war front and the home front, and both are essential to success. The soldiers cannot fight without sufficient food and other resources, the families cannot continue to grow and cook food, to conserve and live without the soldier's protection (ok, let's just pretend that we're talking about some of the less moronic wars, just for rhetorical purposes ;-). In this conflict, there is no far away enemy - as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." And there is no divided front - no need to separate husbands and wives, parents and children, loved ones from one another - in fact, we can't afford a two front war when facing the twin difficulties of climate change and peak oil - we need everybody working together on the Home Front.

Nor can we afford to stick to outdated debates about whether "individual" or "political" action are required. Virtually all acts are political, in the sense of collective. Yes, if you hide the fact that you are hanging your laundry in your basement, there is no political context. But if you hang your laundry out in front of your house (or talk about your basement drying rack), you are saying to your neighbors, and those who pass by "this is not ugly or shameful, this is important." The next step is talking to the neighbors, a political act - that, by the way is the next step in politics too - talking. The step after that is the zoning commission and then perhaps a seat on the zoning board. But there is no point at which this is a purely individual act. Nor is there a purely political one - we all know by now that how you get to the protest sends a message as surely as your being there.

What we need is not separate spheres, but INTEGRITY - that is, the *integration* of the multiple parts of our lives. It is, of course, more difficult than advertising that one kind of work is meaningful and the rest isn't, but it is also more effective, more moral, and more likely to lead to success on the new Home Front.

Sharon

Making the Case for Self-Sacrifice

2008-01-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

HERE DEAD WE LIE

Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
-A E Housman

Let me begin by noting that most of what I’ve done to live more sustainably has been enormously pleasurable, not that stressful, and has generally led to a happier, more relaxed, healthier, better quality of life. I think it is fair to say that most people who make major cuts in their energy usage find such quality of life benefits as more time together, more exercise, better, healthier food and fewer toxics in their lives to be enormously positive.

But it would be complete and utter bullshit for me to suggest that cutting back our energy usage by the percentage necessary is always painless, convenient, comfortable. Sometimes it is inconvenient, and occasionally it sucks. Sometimes it means being hot or cold, or not eating what you want to eat, it means turning down things you’d like to do, or not going places you’d like to go. It means missing family instead of travelling a lot, doing more things by hand even when you don’t want to, getting on that bike or out to take the bus on the cold, wet day. That is, sometimes it means real and meaningful sacrifice. And being an early adapter to the necessities of global warming and peak oil means that you don’t even have the comfort of everyone else being stuck with the same strictures.

I say this because I think It is intellectually dishonest to speak only of the positives of the lifestyle changes we’re engaged in. And I say this because I’m an ordinarily selfish person who sometimes just doesn’t wanna do it, and I know others feel this way. But I also mention this because I think that if we’re ever going to achieve a critical mass (which we may not – but we have to try) to people committed to remediating the problems we face, we’re going to need a whole host of persuasive techniques.

That is, we’re going to have to tell all the truths – persuade people with visions of better lives and also scare them with the reality of the cost. And we’re going to have to find a way to sell self-sacrifice – because minimizing the cost will make people feel we’re lying to them. We have to convince people that the price is worth the prize.

That last one has been a hard nut to crack - a lot of people feel we should never mention sacrifice, or ever give anyone the impression that they will have to do anything hard, or given anything up. But there is no possible way that we can make the necessary environmental cuts without sacrifice - 90% or more over 10 years is a big deal, and some of it will hurt - period.
There are thousands of people who really don't want to hear that part - they think that if we just elect the right leader or we just do the right thing we can make everything easy and place all the burden magically on someone else. But we can't. 90% means 90% across the board. That doesn't mean that it can't be made better and easier, but it does mean that this will cost us.

How do we make that idea palatable? Personally, I think denying the need for self-sacrifice is a huge mistake, and so is apologizing for it, or minimizing it. I think the absolute opposite strategy is called for - we have to make it a challenge, an honor, a gift to do this. That is, of course, how we have gotten people to make sacrifices and endure hardship before - whether giving their lives in wartime or climbing big mountains - we've emphasized how exciting the challenge is, and how lucky they are to participate, how doing so makes them exceptional and heroic. The more we tell people that sacrifices won't be required, the more we make them nervous about the very idea. I think we should be telling people that they shoud feel privileged and honored to make this sacrifice. Does that sound totally nuts? Bear with me for a moment.

During most of human history, we’ve had a policy of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children. War is the most compelling example – in wartime, the policy and diplomatic failures of old men and women are visited on their children and grandchildren, who put their bodies in front of bullets to protect a “way of life” or simply the lives of those too old, too young or too wealthy to make similar sacrifices. Young men and women die for us (and for stupid false causes, but for today we will speak of actual necessities) – to keep us secure. Sometimes this is even genuinely necessary. But every single time, the children pay for the sins of their fathers and mothers, often to the tune that this is a noble sacrifice, an honor to serve their nation. Dulce et decorum est.

And this isn’t limited to soldiers – children are the victims of every war, failure of social policy, and inequity we create. Children constitute the largest single group of poor people in the world. Many wars have child civilian mortality rates that vastly exceed the number of soldiers who suffer and die. During America’s embargo on Iraq, up to half a million children died. Children pay the price for our limitations in every conceivable way – they go hungry, they die of preventable diseases, they are cold, they suffer in utter disproportion. We always make our children pay the price.

Global warming and peak oil represent just one more passing of the buck. There are plenty of victims of climate change already all over the world – from the 60,000 that the World Health Organization reports die of climate change related disease every year to the victims of hurricanes and floods everywhere. But the real victims will come among those who are children today as they grow up (or don't), and their children. Those are the vast majority of the 1.5 billion people who may be made refugees by 2050, the 3 billion who will lack adequate drinking water, the 1 billion potential deaths from climate change by mid-century. Some of them will be far away children, the ones we say we care about – but don’t always.

And some of them will be our own children and grandchildren - those of the people reading this on computers mostly in the rich world. It is impossible that such vast disasters could fail to harm even the most carefully protected children of the Global North – they too will suffer natural disaster after natural disaster. They too may be made refugees, run out of safe drinking water, know hunger, cold, heat and loss. Some of them too may die from this. And if this does not shake most of us down to our cores, that’s only because we’re kidding ourselves.

The reality is that the climate is changing here too. We depend on fossil fuels too. And we’ve already proved we’re willing to send young men and women off to die in pointless resource wars – in a decade, when my boys are of age, they may come for my sons, for your daughters, in the name of the latest great, tragic war. They are coming now for other people’s beloved sons and daughters.

But as terrible as climate change and peak oil are, they also represent an enormous opportunity – for us to change the pattern of placing the burden of our failures on our children. They represent a chance for we parents and grandparents to bear the worst of the burden ourselves, to take it off the backs of those who love, and carry it on our own shoulders. It is in our power to soften the blow, to minimize the harm. It is in our power to do what parents are supposed to do for their children – shield them from harm.

We tell them we love them. We tell ourselves we’d do anything to protect them. Well, time to put our money where our mouths are. Because if we were to rapidly (over the next 5-10 years) cut back emissions by 90% and more, we could actually prevent the worst depredations of climate change. We could put energy aside for future generations so that they could have necessities like antibiotics and heat and light – not perhaps as much as we’ve had, but some.

I do not claim that doing so will always be easy or pleasant. Some of it truly will be enjoyable, will make us happier. Some things will improve our lives. And some things will be hard and painful. There will be real losses, real personal suffering and inconvenience. It will hurt us to do with less. It will sometimes be cold, sometimes be sad. It will often be damned hard work, an enormous challenge for us. We will lose things we loved and give up pleasures we’ll miss. It will involve real self-sacrifice.

But that sacrifice is an honor, a privilege that every parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or any person who loves a child or cares for future generations should take up with gratitude that it has been given to us to spare our beloved children some suffering, that this time, the fathers and mothers can take responsibility for their own sins. We have been granted a rare gift – the hope of taking responsibility for our actions, and the actions of our own parents and grandparents. Instead of passing the buck, it can stop here, with us.

We do hard things all the time for far lower stakes - we run marathons to see if we can. We climb moutains to prove something to ourselves. We fast for religious convictions, we push ourselves to the limits to meet a deadline or to win a competition. Now we have the chance to push ourselves to our limits for the thing that we say we care about more than anything else - the lives of our children. How can we do less for them than we do for a medal?

And if we succeed, we will spare not only the lives and futures of the next generation and those that follow, but we will also spare ourselves. Because as hard as it must be for a young man, barely 18, to pick up his gun and march away to die in a war, it is equally hard for a father to watch him march away. As difficult as it will be for our grown children to watch their own sons and daughters weep because they are always hungry, it will be as bad for their grandparents who know that in their lives, they threw away enough food to have fed those children. As hard as it is to make sacrifices ourselves, if we truly love our children, it will be harder to watch them have no choice but to make worse ones.

I will not pretend that I always like giving up air travel, or getting up in a cold house in the winter. I will not pretend that sometimes I don’t want to go somewhere, and can’t, or don’t feel like I miss out on pleasures I once had. I will say that generally speaking, the net gains are far greater than the losses, but I cannot claim that I never feel my losses. I won’t claim that sometimes I wish that prior generations to my own had taken up the burden (and yes, I know some of them tried, and I honor them for that) when it was lighter, when we could have made fewer sacrifices, when it would have been easier. All of those emotions are real, and I do not deny them - I merely suggest that they can exist and still be overridden by our deep commitment to preserving the future at any cost.

But if previous generations passed the buck, it is our right, our gift, our obligation, our privilege, our responsibility, our honor to do better, to stop the buck here, now. It is a gift to be able to spare future generations the price of our folly- a gift beyond price. We should be grateful.

Sharon

The Climate Bad News - and How to be a Hero

2008-01-16T07:44:00.000-08:00

Well, more data on climate - all of it rotten. First, here's the thing I couldn't give you yesterday on 2007 warming trends - look carefully at the graphs.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080114_GISTEMP.pdf

And second, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is showing much more melting than had been anticipated. Yet again, the data is becoming outdated as fast as it comes in - not by new projections, but by new, concrete reality. That should be worrisome.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/13/AR2008011302753_pf.html

"Rignot said the tonnage of yearly ice loss in Antarctica is approaching that of Greenland, where ice sheets are known to be melting rapidly in some parts and where ancient glaciers have been in retreat. He said the change in Antarctica could become considerably more dramatic because the continent's western shelf, an expanse of ice and snow roughly the size of Texas, is largely below sea level and has broad and flat expanses of ice that could move quickly. Much of Greenland's ice flows through relatively narrow valleys in mountainous terrain, which slows its motion.

The new finding comes days after the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the group's next report should look at the "frightening" possibility that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could melt rapidly at the same time.

"Both Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are huge bodies of ice and snow, which are sitting on land," said Rajendra Pachauri, chief of the IPCC, the United Nations' scientific advisory group. "If, through a process of melting, they collapse and are submerged in the sea, then we really are talking about sea-level rises of several meters." (A meter is about a yard.) Last year, the IPCC tentatively estimated that sea levels would rise by eight inches to two feet by the end of the century, assuming no melting in West Antarctica."

Finally, I liked this essay a lot. The "Bystander Effect" is a real phenomenon - and it is hard to say "I'm the best person to act" - but it is also necessary. Perfect understanding is not required, commitment is.

http://www.truthandprogress.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=696

"So, on the train, the boy was loudly identifying this as a true emergency, his mother physically demonstrating the urgency of the matter. Still everyone sat there, mouths open. Half of them had cell phones clipped on their belts, but not one of them was dialing 911. No one was running to get the conductor. Remember this fact; although we feel safer in a crowd, that's actually where humans are most incapacitated. The bigger the crowd, the stronger the effect.

In some of the later Bystander-Effect experiments, the subjects have blood pressure cuffs on and what they say is recorded. Their pulse races, their blood pressure rises. They mutter, 'shit,' and 'holy hell.' From their reactions it's clear they recognize what's happening as an emergency and feel great urgency about it. Still, they stand there, frozen.
•
Right now everyone understands something truly horrible is happening to the planet's climate. The heat waves and forest fires, the floods and droughts. But there's six billion of us now.

Quite the Bystander Effect. So we stay in our seats filling out forms, working dutifully, trying to ignore the smoke swirling thicker around us. We mutter under our breath, our hearts race, while we wonder why no one else is doing anything.
•

With the people on the train watching the woman convulse, each of them glanced around and believed everyone else must be sitting still for a good reason. Perhaps the others had some inside knowledge, that this was a movie being filmed or a scam being tried or that the kid was just playing some sort of mean joke.

Each person also thought, if this were real, then surely with 40 other people here, there should be someone who knew how to deal with seizures. There must be someone competent, with professional training and a medical vocabulary. Each person assumed, 'I should be the last person to help. I don't know dinky about seizures.'

Thinking this way, a whole group of adults will passively watch a child screaming for someone to help his mother.

And thinking this way is also how we can bustle about our normal lives, feeling increasingly uneasy about the shifting climate, but assuming it couldn't be as bad as it seems because surely then everyone would be marching in the street about it. And if it were real, then there must be someone better than us at getting others to demonstrate against it. We don't know dinky about activism."

I think it is easy to get hung up on endless debates about whether personal action or political action are more important, etc...etc... Such debates are pointless - the two are deeply interconnected. Few of our personal choices don't reverbate in the public world - our shopping is voting with our dollars. Our voting is shaped by our personal experiences. I don't know many people who follow this news who aren't simultaneously working publically and privately. What we need is integration of both spheres.

But more than that, we need to shake off the sense of paralysis that says that the right people are coming along to fix this in time. The right people are the ones who are here now.

Sharon

The Church Model for Environmental Groups

2008-01-15T10:40:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago, I had an argument with another peak oil writer about what level political action on peak oil and climate change should proceed. I suggested that perhaps the municipal level was thinking too large - that what we need are neighborhood groups, he argued in favor of city levels. Now I'm not at all sure that this is an either/or issue - I suspect we need both. But the discussion was useful for helping me clarify some thoughts I've had about what might be needed to move the "peak oil" and "climate change" groups from their present role - as thinly spread "special interest" groups and towards becoming a larger, and more powerful network.

The fact is, historically speaking many large scale social changes have worked best on a neighbor to neighbor, very intimate scale, either instead of or in conjunction with larger scale practices. For example, food and gas rationing during WWII were being flouted until neighborhood pledge groups were started, and block captains became responsible for helping people adhere to new policies. The same programs were used to manage civil defense and volunteer labor groups. The reality is that top down management is very difficult without some micro-level programs to work with - which is why in times of war, women's groups, and other social and cultural institutions were always among the first groups mobilized.

Please understand, I begin this with no implied critiques of any of the response groups out there - on the contrary, I admire what all these groups have accomplished, and believe their work to be of the utmost importance. But there are several limitations to such in-person programs - first of all, unless you live in a population center, they are thin on the ground. The nearest such groups to me are 15-30 miles - an awfully long drive for someone committed to cutting emissions.

And such groups suffer from the same problems almost all political/special interest groups do - small membership and heavy burdens on the few people willing to do the work. If, in fact, we're in the process of sliding off the plateau, as the data suggests, we are going to need to get more people involved, and quickly. Moreover, these groups reinforce the notion that community is something you mostly create with "like minded" people who agree with you about peak oil and the Bush administration. But there's simply no chance that most of us are going to spend the coming decades working primarily with people who live 15 miles from us - we are going to have to get local - real local. That is not to say that I don't see the real and practical value of spending time with people who already "get it," or of devoting some time and energy to exchanging ideas about approaches with others in person, but our primary work must be local - perhaps on the municipal level, but if we're really returning to a foot economy, probably even more so at the neighborhood level.

So I began to consider what would be required to start neighborhood groups that might engage people within our existing communities, and enable those communities to start preparing for climate change and peak oil. And instead of looking at leftist community groups, I started by asking myself what the most successful social organizations are in my area - successful at attracting membership, but also successful at getting members to do their share of the work.

So far, peak oil and climate change groups have focused on the other people who have figured out what is going on. But right now, in the early stages of the crisis, there are simply too few people who have put all the pieces together. With another decade to prepare and teach, such an approach might work. With only a short time, the odds are against it. Compare this to churches or synagogues or mosques, who invite in nearly everyone in a given community, opening their doors as widely as they can.

If we are to have success we are going to have to use a different model, one that I call “the church model” – I say this not to be alienating to those who are not religious, but in recognition that religious communities have been far more successful at building community structures than any secular organization, and that if we are to create overarching community organizations that sustain us in hard times, and enable us to manage our communities in the face of crisis, we’re going to have to use a successful model.

The “church model” has three factors that are very different from groups like the Relocalization and similar groups I’m familiar with. They are:

1. Low Barriers to Entry
2. They have something to offer immediately
3. They have a plan and a routine for dealing with crises

The first factor is enormously important if we are to move beyond regional groups to the local level. Right now environmental groups tend to have a fairly high entry barrier – that is, you have to be fully aware of climate change or peak oil, and aware enough to consider working on these issues a high priority. Given that the majority of the country still considers these problems secondary to others, that’s fairly unusual. It is unlikely that in a crisis involving energy shortages, we’ll have the gas to drive the distances between usch groups. This means that we need to engage not a few aware people half an hour from us, but our neighbors.

How do we do that? We lower the barriers to entry. Instead of having “peak oil” or groups for the climate change aware, we have “neighborhood coops” or “community preparedness” groups. Robert Waldrop, founder of the Oklahoma City Food Coop, observes that he doesn’t talk much about “peak oil” with the people he works with – instead, he talks about how good local food tastes, and about how hard it is to make ends meet. The name doesn’t matter (except in the sense that a cool one would be helpful - suggestions?) – the common ground does.

We also have to lower political barriers - the truth is that environmentalism is associated with the American left. But the left has been too powerless too long to bring about massive social change in most regions. The nation is too politically divided for that. Thus, for these groups to thrive, they must avoid political purity tests - it doesn't matter whether your neighbor hates Bush or loves him. What matters is that the two of you have common ground in other areas. I don't deny this can be tough - but it is necessary. In some regions, the political idea of environmentalism will be a positive advertisement - in other places, the emphasis will have to be on personal security, autonomy, conserving what we have, saving money. We will need to be culturally flexible to create such a network.

The second and perhaps most important thing that such groups have to do is offer members an immediate reason to work together. There are some of us, who will do thankless work for long periods with no reward, but most of us join groups for selfish reasons – we want to find community, we want support, friendship, a platform for our ideas. We may also care about the larger world, but we get some gratification from being together and doing the work. Churches do this well – when people join a church, eventually they are asked to do their share of the work, to donate money and volunteer, but initially, they are offered something – friendship, a pleasurable worship experience, a meal, religious education for their kids. We need our groups to provide something now, not just hypothetical help in the future.

This is even truer because we are now in the early stages of a crisis, and many of the people who join with us may be undergoing personal difficulties and troubles. It is not feasible to have a “climate change” group that has no support or solutions for the victims of climate change now, for example. That doesn’t mean we have to be able to fix everything, or that we have to immediately have the funds for major investments, but we do have to be able to offer emotional support, a lift for someone out of gas, a casserole for a neighbor dealing with illness. We need to start where we are again. We also need plans for the longer term, but we have to start small, with the ordinary work of human exchange – I think too often, our community building efforts have ignored the importance of these small things.

Finally, such groups need to begin creating a plan for the longer term. How will people in your neighborhood get water? Who has space in their yard to grow food? How will you check in on the elderly and disabled? Where will the kids go to school if the buses stop running? Your first steps should take you towards your next ones – today, a carpool to get neighbors to the grocery store, tomorrow a bulk buying club and a Victory garden group to make fewer shopping trips necessary.

Right now there are municipalities dealing with some of these questions - the Transition Towns initiative, spearheaded by Rob Hopkins is a particularly inspiring example. But we need to have a model available for those who cannot get their towns on board, and we will need neighborhood groups to make door to door and ground level social change - that is, the issue is not "municipal vs. neighborhood" - the two enable one another. Particularly when we are talking about basic issues - where to get food, how to conserve water, how to care for seniors - policy level programming can't work without direct, grassroots, person to person networks. That is, it is possible to imagine a town instituting food rationing policies, but not possible for those to be adhered to without lots of practical help in cooking, obtaining supplies, protecting the interests of the powerless, etc...

I am, of course, ignoring the thing that churches and other religious organizations offer that peak oil and climate change groups probably can't offer - the link to G-d, or to G-d in oneself (depending on your faith). I am not claiming that such groups can take the place of churches, or that they can achieve what religious communities are often able to achieve. And yet, there has been a consistent tendency in many religious communities around the US to move towards faith-lite - religion with a strong emphasis on fixing your personal problems, rather than on submission to a larger belief (I'm making no judgement about which is better here). That is, to some degree, it seems that there are a lot of people seeking comfort and the chance to dance in a circle, rather than a deep relationship with G-d. Perhaps that community, or those who have a deep relationship with G-d and time for another community, might be engaged, as well as the secular and concerned.

It is worth a shot.

Sharon

All the News...

2008-01-15T07:15:00.000-08:00

Here are some stories you may have missed. The first one was particularly interesting - Eric was listening to NPR last evening when he heard another version of the following story on "Marketplace" - only to be followed by a comment roughly along the lines of "If you weren't worried about our infrastructure, you should be."

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8U5TMDG1.htm

"President Hugo Chavez ordered a halt to Venezuela's asphalt exports, which go largely to the U.S., to improve his country's roads.

"In the biggest U.S. cities, there are highways completely paved with our asphalt," said Chavez, whose nation remains the fourth-largest oil supplier to the U.S.

"Why do we have to export asphalt if the highways of Venezuela don't work?" he said on his Sunday television program. "If we didn't have resources, I'd understand, but we do."

Venezuela produces 27,000 barrels of asphalt a day, exporting about 63 percent, or 17,000 barrels, Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said."

In the context of the study that came out this past summer http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117867434198996732.html?mod=googlenews_wsj , which reported it would cost 1.6 trillion dollars simply to bring existing bridges, roads and sewer lines up to code, this is an interesting bit of data - first of all, it suggests that the export land model that Jeffrey Brown has so carefully established for oil will probably apply to other systems - foods (some more evidence here: http://www.bbj.hu/main/news_34793_russia+raises+grain+export+duties+to+40%25.html - another good reason to store food), fertilizers, trace minerals, other materials. That is, we are likely to see more and more nations retaining natural resources for their own use rather than exporting them.

It is also an example of why I think it is unlikely that we will have very many massive public works mitigation projects - resources will end up used to mitigate crises, rather than on larger investments as things get tougher.

The plus of this, of course, is that shortages of asphalt would only be a good thing for the death of car culture. I wish I believed that rising asphalt prices would create incentives to invest in rail and public transport, but I think we'll need stronger incentives than that.

Next comes two NY Times financial articles that I think are important for two reasons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/business/14spend.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&sq=consumer%20spending&scp=1

The first suggests that we may be seeing the beginnings of a real decline in consumer spending, in part due to heating and gas prices.

"American Express and the Consumer Federation of America say that consumers are buying just as many gallons as ever, but paying more for them, and that has forced cutbacks in other purchases. Gasoline prices usually drop after the summer driving season, but this year they shot up, from $2.85 a gallon on average in September to $3.07 in December and $3.15 in the first week of January.

A similar trend is evident in the cost of natural gas, electricity and home heating oil. “We built these big houses in the suburbs, which need a lot of energy to stay warm and a car to go shopping,” said Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation. “And we can’t change that quickly.”

Combined with the following, the two constitute a troubling pattern:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/business/12charts.html?ref=business

"The Federal Reserve reported this week that the amount of revolving consumer credit that is outstanding hit $937.5 billion in November, seasonally adjusted, up 7.4 percent from a year earlier.

The annual growth rate has now been over 7 percent for three months running, the first such stretch since 2001, when a recession was driving up borrowing by hard-pressed consumers."

What is happening is that consumers are spending more of their money on heat, gas and food, and far less on retail - and they still can't pay for it - that is, people aren't just cutting back on consumer spending to meet their growing food and energy costs, they are going into further (deeper) debt, while also cutting back. This is not a good sign for anyone.

Stuart Staniford has done it yet again, this time doing an analysis of how much mitigation subsistence farming can be expected to have on the biofuels created food problems. The analysis is interesting, perhaps not complete, but the beginning. I think Staniford is most acute when he observes that larger farmers may be able to mitigate their circumstances, but the billions of very small farmers who also have to buy some foods are in big trouble. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3495.

Also a note - 2007 officially ties with 1998 for the warmest year on record. I can't link to Hansen's GISS report, because Adobe Acrobat makes my computer go insane, but a quick google will take you to the full report. Cheery.

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 33 - Do It In the Road and Scare the Mules

2008-01-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

No, no, I'm not talking about *that* . This week's project is to do a little more to let others know about what changes you are making and why.

A lot of what all of us struggle with is looking "weird" and drawing uncomfortable attention to ourselves. In the privacy of our own homes, it might be easy to do something unconventional, but sooner or later someone comes over and asks "why are you doing *that* - and the part of us that really does care what people think (and most of us have that part to some degree or another) starts squirming. We all grew up being told that being normal was important. Heck, my Grandma actually used to say "They can do what they want as long as they don't do it in the road and scare the mules." She was lying of course - few people on earth have ever been as interested in what people did in the privacy of their homes ;-). But now's the time to scare a few mules.

But here's the thing - the only way we'll stop feeling weird for not flushing every time, or hanging our laundry or living with a cube fridge or using cloth menstrual pads is if other people join the club, or at least start thinking of this as within the normal range of behavior. And that means that people have to know that other people are doing these things.

Which is why this week's project isn't so much an energy cut but an advertising campaign. Take the time this week to do something to tell/show others about the changes in your life - and why you've made them.

What should you do? Start a blog with a cool theme "52 weeks of funky clothesline pictures" or whatever. Talk to your friends, neighbors and family - bring it up by saying "you know, heating oil prices have been really high, and our family has found..." or "Here's our latest project..."

Give a talk at your community center, church, synagogue, mosque, temple, school or senior center about lower energy living. Emphasize the monetary savings, the better food, the better health. I give you permission to take anything you want from this blog to help people get th idea.

Give someone the gift of a new idea - I can't be the only one who has had a complete "duh" moment or two when it comes to finding solutions to energy problems. I once asked how I should handle the lint problem without a dryer, only to have someone tell me the completely obvious fact that if I seperated lights and darks, I wouldn't have little white fuzzies on my navy shirt. Duh - but sometimes you need someone to open your eyes. So be that person - if someone says they can't by local because it isn't nearby, suggest that you carpool, or pick a few things up for them or that they find a CSA that delivers. If someone is telling you that they'd use their clothesline except that jeans are too stiff, point out that you could start by drying them on the line and then throw them in the dryer for 5 minutes to soften.

If you are a shy sort, it is difficult to be the one who speaks up, who draws attention to themselves. But every time you do this, it'll be easier next time, and easier on the next people in the line. Refusing to feel weird begins, in part, by accepting that this is the new normal - the way that we are going forward. We're not weird, we're cutting edge. Let other people know you know this.

Cheers,

Sharon

Greenpa and his Outhouse are Kicking My Behind...

2008-01-13T13:57:00.001-08:00

...Over at Crunchy Chicken's "who is the craziest, most out-there environmental blogger." Greenpa is way, way out ahead, with almost everyone mentioning his three holer. Quick, Eric, get a shovel - we have to dig an outhouse!!! Peer pressure, peer pressure!

http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/01/those-crazy-environmentalist-nut-jobs.html

Cheers (and Thanks Crunchy!!!),

Sharon

But Honey, the Crazy Woman on the Blog Made Me Do It!

2008-01-12T07:39:00.001-08:00

The moment I realized that I was a bad influence was when my co-author Aaron reported that his wife Jennifer had, during some dispute over environmental practice, suggested that Aaron should "Just go live in a cave with Sharon." Or maybe it was when I was sharing a ride from the train to the Community Solutions Conference with Matt Mayer, who told me that his wife had thought him nuts when he came home with bushels of apples, but that he showed her my writings on the subject - and then she thought *I* was crazy. Or maybe it was when I got this email from Leah,

I just want you to know how much I love your blog. You've totally changed my life - we've started gardening, storing food and staying home more. Ican't say "we" love your blog, though - after I asked if we could turn off the fridge hubby actually asked me, as a Christmas present to him, "to stop listening to that crazy-environment woman with all the weird ideas." I got him a hand drill instead, though. And we just turned off the fridge"

May I officially apologize to Leah's hubby? To Jennifer, to Wifey and all the other spouses who feel like I'm an evil influence on their husbands and wives? You see, you have a point. And not only do you have a point, but my husband kind of agrees with you. In fact, the only consolation I can offer you all is this - just be glad you aren't married to me!

Every so often I list off all the radical changes in our lives since Eric and I have been together. He's not a guy who likes change, and I enjoy asking him "So, if you knew that 12 years later you'd be living on a farm with four kids, and trying to get your energy usage down to the same as your average Cuban while shovelling manure and growing your own food, would you have married me?" My husband's answer generally comes out like this "Not only no, but -obscenity deleted- No!!!!!"

That's not to say he isn't happy now - he is (yes, I know, I would say that, but really). But the sum total of all those changes sounds so overwhelming - even now that we've done them. And living with someone who has "cool" ideas about how to use less and do more for a living is a severe trial on the kind of guy who, left to himself, was perfectly content to think about peak oil and climate change as an abstract problem that "someone" should do "something" about. Marrying a woman who thinks that "someone" always means her, and "something" means inconveniencing him is, well...tiring. Occasionally even just a weensy bit annoying .

I'm lucky - my husband is an incredibly good sport, and secretly (ok, maybe not so secretly) likes being dragged along by his nutcase wife. In fact, just last night he admitted he didn't totally hate the idea of transforming our farm into a place where we could run sustainability classes. There wasn't even any eye rolling involved - but it is still early days yet.

So I'm perfectly able to imagine the expressions on the faces of various husbands and wives when their beloveds approach them with an excited grin and a printout with my name on it. More than one person has mentioned that their helpmeets have suggested that the words "Sharon says" might be uttered less often - like once every decade or so. Again, my sympathies. All I can say is that when I seem an unbearable burden, again, remember how fortunate you are not to have to live with me. (Note, I realize that I recently suggested that some people on the internet *should* come live with me, and this pretty much means that no one will ever want to. Pity - I'm really not that...oh, wait, yes I am ;-))

The thing is, I'm pretty comfortable in the role of wacko-environmental Svengali. It isn't easy running against the mainstream in our society, much less against a spouse, who, committed as they are to the environment, doesn't necessarily think that the desire to be clean, warm and eat in a restaurant once in a while is so ridiculous. Everyone needs someone to take the blame when their spouse gets frustrated. Heck, anyone who has been married realizes that part of the secret to a happy marriage is deny, deny and blame others .

So why not blame me? After all, I'm conveniently far away, and available only through the internet, whereas the actual spouse who is suggesting that you should eat only what is available locally in Saskatchewan all winter is right there. If I can prevent a single divorce, night spent in the car or intra-marital knifing, I'm glad to do my part.

Besides, this is the first time in my whole life that I've ever gotten to be a bad influence. How cool is that? You mean I'm now, at 35, the kind of person spouses don't want their husband or wife hanging around with? If only I could have figured out how to be that cool at 15!

Sharon

Why Is this Apocalypse Different than All Other Apocalypses: Making the Case for Peak Oil and Climate Change Now

2008-01-10T06:43:00.000-08:00

A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don’t necessarily agree on this subject, or they don’t see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they are struggling to grasp the implications. So sometimes, we need to back up, and make the case for something that is always new to some people. The truth is that if my writing is to be anything other than preaching to the converted, we have to answer the skeptics.

That’s why I was so delighted when I got an email from Frazzlehead who asked me why this particular energy crisis was different than the one of the 1970s. She observed that she’d been reading 1970s back to the land texts, and finding the exact same narrative in them – that we’re running out of oil, that soon the economy will crash and we’ll need to go back to farming. Why, she asked, is it right this time?

“I look at the date it was written and think, see? They’ve been saying this for ages – and it hasn’t happened. Still, something in my gut tells me that it’s different this time, that this isn’t just a robot waving it’s silly arms saying “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Danger!” … that something really is wrong and things will change dramatically.
What I can’t quite put my finger on is the evidence for *this* time being the *real* time.
Is the Boy just crying wolf again? Or is there really a wolf?
Can you help me see why *this time* it is for real?”

This is an extremely important question – the fact is, ever since the beginning of the 20th century, when we recognized we really can have “World” wars, since the advent of the military capacity to destroy the lives of billions, since we recognized our impact on the earth, we’ve been afraid we’d destroy it. How do we know that this time, we really are?

And of course, this is a good question for climate change as well. Because, there’s a small grain of truth in the oft-repeated claim that in the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting an ice age – only a small one but still. The fact is, many people remember these predictions of the end of everything, and remember Y2K as well, and then think “the evidence is against those who say things are going to change.” This is a reasonable critique, and one that requires a good answer – or a series of them. That is, it isn’t enough to say “Well, this time we’re right.”

The reason we want multiple answers here is that there are several questions. The first one is this “What are the differences between the scientific and technical cases for peak oil now, and climate change now, vs. then.” But that’s only part of the answer. Because most of us aren’t climate scientists or petroleum geologists, and we’re not going to read every single bit of information on this subject, so to some degree, we have to rely on our own analysis. We can weigh the credibility of the technical analyses to one degree or another, but we also need grounds for distinguishing between those analyses.

The ideal grounds would be that we completely understand everything the scientists are saying, but since that’s not true, we need another set of analytic tools.

So the next question we have to answer is this – what present day evidence do we have for each case? How can I see this with my own eyes? And how do the various available accounts I’m being offered match up with both the scientific evidence and the evidence of my eyes? That is, both the “disasters are coming” and the “it’ll never happen” crowds are telling stories – they are giving an account of the past and the future. Picking the right story depends on our being able to match up evidence with the narrative being provided to us.

And while those two data points are convincing, they aren’t everything we need to know to make a decision – we also need to ask ourselves how to apply an imperfect case for something. That is, assuming that very few things about the future can be known with absolute certainty, we need to know what the case for action is – that is, how should we use the information above? What tools of analysis will get us the best results?

I’m going to go through these questions, one at a time, to the best of my ability. Because the subject is such a long one, this will appear in two parts.

First, the technical analysis:

First of all, what was the evidence for 1970s style depletion analyses? I’m going to admit here that I am somewhat handicapped on this question by having been born during the 1970s oil crisis – that is, I have no direct experience of the data that was coming in during that period – I was busy analyzing the comparative merits of growing up to be a garbage collector (cool truck) or a vet (cool puppies and kittens), and thus not paying much (any) attention to petroleum geology.

I’ve done no real research into the accounts coming in during that period, either. So I honestly can’t personally tell you how good the 1970s accounts actually were. That is, I haven’t seen them. I’ve seen the same accounts Frazzlehead has, popular narratives in which we were “running out of oil” but not any scholarly accounts that make that same claim. This is not to say that there weren’t any, just that I’m unfamiliar with them.

In fact, peak oil theory doesn’t make the claim that “we’re running out of oil” either, except in the sense that whenever you make any use of a non-renewable resource, you are reducing the amount that’s left and contributing to the larger process of “running out.” The peak of oil production occurs at the moment that we have used ½ of the oil in the ground. No peak oil scholar that I’ve ever seen has suggested that we are in immanent danger of having the world run out, but rather that demand (how much oil we’d like to burn) will exceed supply (the amount we can get out of the ground). Some consequences under the current systm of this difference between demand and supply would be higher prices, spot shortages, poor people being priced out of the market altogether, and gradually more and more people being priced out or having their usage dramatically reduced. But that’s not the same as actually running out.

It is safe to say that if people in the 1970s were claiming that we were in immanent danger of running out, they were really, really deeply mistaken – and that that mistake can’t be chalked up to improvements in science. But I suspect that most scholars weren’t saying that – instead, they were saying something more complicated and nuanced, and, as is often the case, complicated, nuanced ideas got dumbed down to something less accurate but more exciting sounding.

To get some evidence of this, let’s look at _The Limits to Growth_ which was perhaps the single most famous text that said we were “running out of oil” in the 1970s. But, of course, that’s not what it said at all. I’m going to quote here Richard Heinberg’s analysis of TLTG, because I think he covers all the salient points:

“Several economists have attempted to debunk the conclusions presented in LTG. For example, in _Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse_, Ronald Bailey wrote that “In 1972 The Limits to Growth predicted that at exponential growth rates, the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993.” _Facts Not Fears: A Parents Guide to Teaching Kids about the Environment_ by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw repeated part of this list and pointed out that “The world did not run out of gold by 1981, or zinc by 1990, or petroleum by 1992, as the book predicted.”

However, these were not predictions contained in the book. The reference for these claim is Table 4…The table lists three sets of numbers: a static reserve index (how long known reserves would last at 1972 rates of consumption); an exponential reserve index (how long known reserves would last at an exponentially increasing rate of consumption); and an expontential index calculated using five times the known reserves (that is, assuming substantial new discoveries of the resources in question). Criticisms of LTG focused only on the second, ‘exponential reserve’ set of numbers which was the most pessimistic, even though the authors clearly stated that this did not constitute a prediction, but merely a statistical extrapolation.” (Powerdown, 93-94)

That is, critiques of _The Limits To Growth_ were made out of context. The authors knew that it was very, very unlikely that we would have massive growth of consumption without any new discoveries, and weren’t proposing that would happen – they were providing context for their larger conclusion that we are at risk of overshoot.

In fact, _The Limits To Growth_ was probably fairly accurate in their overall claims, as the updates have demonstrated.
It is important to note that TLTG made the claim, to the extent it claimed things, rather than observed them, that collapse was likely to come not in the 1970s, but at the very end of the 20th or beginning of the 21st century.

That is, they claimed that *overshoot* - the point at which we were exceeding the capacity of the earth to sustain us would happen earlier than that – and in fact, there’s compelling evidence they were right. But they never claimed that the crisis point would be reached at the same moment we reached overshoot – instead, they suggested otherwise. This is an important distinction. That is, TLTG emphasized how urgent it was that we begin to make policy and practical changes that would abate the crisis in the 1970s – that was the time to respond. But those policy changes were designed to avoid an outcome that would occur decades later – and they are occurring decades later as predicted.

Richard Heinberg has actually claimed that he hasn’t been able to find a single example of any peer reviewed paper predicting we were actually going to run out of oil in the 1970s – and yet, many people “knew” that this was the case. I don’t know if that fact is still true – even if there are some, that doesn’t mean they were right. But there certainly aren’t a large number of them.

What was true in the 1970s, is that *American* oil prediction hit its peak. In 1970, American production peaked, just as M.King Hubbard said it would. At the time, nearly everyone denied that Hubbard was right – after all, we’d just produced more oil than we ever had before – why would we expect shortfalls? Well, the reality is that that’s just how it works – the peak is the point at which you produce more than you ever have – or ever will again. So America actually was experiencing serious oil shortfalls, and because of the OPEC embargo, was unable to meet demand.

Looking through my collection of older back-to-the-land accounts, I see several of them claim that we can’t depend on foreign oil. And that may be at the root of our belief that we thought we were running out in the 1970s – we believed that America would largely have to rely on its own oil supplies, which were patently inadequate to meet even 1970s demand. In that sense, we were “running out of oil” because we had ample evidence that we might not always be able to buy it, and our supply was inadequate. That politics changed, and the bottom dropped out of the oil price, giving OPEC incentives to keep our supply coming was a great result – but if the embargo had continued, we might genuinely have been “running out” that is, supplies of oil aren’t just absolute, but the ones you have access to.

That’s an important point on peak oil – because access has as much effect as absolute reserves. So, for example, an oil crisis could arise because of our inability to increase imports, or because of structural failures in refining capacity that cause shortages before the absolute peak, or because of geopolitical issues. On the one hand, peak oil is a very simple idea. On the other, if you interpret the term to mean “the point at which supply can no longer meet demand” it gets very complicated. For example, many poor nations can no longer afford to import oil at all, and are suffering because of that. For them, peak oil is already a reality.

In fact, the 1970s oil shocks offer a useful kind of support for the claims of peak oil in the present. The oil shocks were fundamentally political in nature, but they also offer proof of the fact that a. there are peaks, and b. such peaks are inherently disruptive. The reduction in available oil in the US after its peak left us in a tough spot, politically speaking, and vulnerable to supply constraints caused by outside forces. Several peak oil scholars have correlated regional peaks with periods of societal disruption – that is, when we experience substantial declines in resource access, it causes major problems.

The same argument can be made about the frequently quoted claim that in the 1970s, scientists were predicting an ice age, and now they are predicting catastrophic warming. In fact, in the 1970s, there was some discussion of the possibility of a new ice age, for several reasons. The first is that in the 1970s, particulate emissions, that is, pollution, was so severe that it caused a considerable cooling of the planet. So it seemed possible that we were entering a cooling cycle.

We were also statistically at the end of a period of climate stability, and the possibility that there might be an ice age was discussed. But even Richard Lindzen, one of the formest Global Warming skeptics, has admitted that this was never more than the equivalent of scientists batting an idea around. That is, there never was any strong scientific consensus that we were entering into a period of global cooling *and* most research on this subject was speaking only of natural cycles.

For example, perhaps the most famous article on this subject appeared in Science in 1976, and included the phrase “in the absence of human perturbation of the climate.” That is, the prediction that global cooling would occur was *explicitly* made with the caveat that if we mess with the climate this probably won’t happen. But, as usual, the nuance was removed, and what we get is the idea that we once were really sure we were going to have global cooling.

It is also very important to note that scientists *also* were predicting Global Warming well before the 1970s. A Swedish chemist named Arrhenius discovered and predicted global warming at the turn of the last century, documenting that it was already underway. Charles Keeling was doing work on Global Warming in the 1950s and 60s, and continued to do this work until his death in 2005. In 1979, as Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 report was being compiled, anthropogenic global warming was cited as one of the most serious problems of the century. So it would be more accurate to say that in the 1970s, there was considerable debate over whether warming or cooling would be the primary concern, and by the end of that decade, there was a growing consensus that global warming was far more likely.

In both cases, one of the most important bits of evidence is the degree of scientific consensus – that is, the sheer number of scholars and researchers that agree that they are seeing evidence of something. Since these scientists will generally come at this issue from different directions – one person studying ice melt in the arctic, another sea level rises, one petroleum geologist studying future projections, another talking about the history of discovery. So while hardly infalliable, scientific consensus matters.

And in both cases, we can claim that there is an enormous difference between scientific consensus now and scientific consensus then. For example, consensus on global warming is overwhelming. The oft-stated claim that there are no peer-reviewed scholarly articles that cast real doubt on the anthropogenic (human caused) nature of climate change is probably not quite true, but there are very few of them - a handful at best, mostly in minor journals, and compared to 10,000 and more such articles in peer reviewed scholarly journals that take the other position. There are a few real scholars (and a bunch of paid shills for the energy industry) who sincerely believe that climate change is not anthropogenic (there’s no one who doesn’t believe the climate is changing, btw), but the reality is that there are tiny, dissenting minorities on every scholarly community. It is still possible, for example, to find a few doctors who don’t believe cigarettes cause cancer. It is still possible to find some historians who don’t think the Holocaust ever happened. But these are few, and they don’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority believe otherwise, and, more importantly, that the overwhelming majority of the evidence supports anthropogenic global warming.

In regards to peak oil, the scientific consensus is actually harder to figure out. Every once in a while I run into someone who is a peak oil believer and a global warming skeptic, which I find quite funny. That is, the scientific evidence for global warming is so much greater than for peak oil (which in no means implies that both are not true, merely that there is less certainty and less research in regards to peak oil) that it seems odd to me that one could evaluate the evidence for the less certain one, agree with it, and then dismiss the evidence for the other.

But saying that there’s more controversy in the study of peak oil that climate change is not to say that there is no scientific consensus on peak oil. In 2007, the General Accounting Office of the US Congress released a report that argued that a majority of relevant scholars and oil experts now believe that a peak has already happened or is immanent. There are still significant dissenting viewpoints – notably Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), but both are showing chinks in their armor as oil prices rise and as we get several years away from what seems to be our production peak, in 2005. The IEA, for example, this year admitted they anticipate supply constraints into the 2040s – which is effectively an acknowledgement of peak oil, since virtually no serious assessments put the peak that late – the US Geological Survey, for example, puts the world peak at 2023.

The truth is that it is very hard to predict an oil peak, except in hindsight. At the 2006 ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) conference, I heard peak oil researchers give dates that ranged from 2012 or later to 2005 – so even the experts who do believe in peak oil are uncertain. Because there is no reliable reserve data on total available oil, we can only look at the history of our discoveries (that is, discoveries peaked in the 1960s – since then we’ve been finding a dramatically decreasing amount of new oil each year, despite all the people who hype each new discovery as the answer), how much of the globe has been mapped for oil (the vast majority) and estimate likelihoods. And also, we can do the math showing current rates of decline (most of the major producers are declining significantly), and look at how much oil we’d need to find in order to put off the problem. The answer is “a hell of a lot” – that is, as Matthew Simmons put it, even if we found a massive oil field, as big as the North Sea, for example, it would only delay the whole world’s oil peak by a matter of months.

The next question would be how well the predictions, model and data match up with what we’re actually seeing right now. For example, in regards to peak oil, while we don’t know whether or not the Saudi giant oil fields have actually peaked, we can look and see what is actually happening in the world. Some Saudi authorities claim that the peak is a long way out, others that it is very near (many oil company executives now openly admit peak oil). But right now, oil prices are at very nearly the world record. When prices are extremely high (and they have been for several years now), generally speaking the laws of economics would suggest that people have the incentive to make as much money as they can, by producing as much of this high priced stuff as possible. In fact, however, the Saudis have made “voluntary” cuts now several years in a row. It is possible that OPEC and the House of Saud has said, “We’re rich enough – we simply don’t want any more money.” But how likely is that? More credible is the idea that they cannot increase production due to physical constraints.

The fact is that overall, world oil production is either stagnating or falling in most areas. Explaining this fact requires a credible reasoning. Market forces certainly aren’t driving the decline – anyone with oil has an incentive to sell it now. In some cases, there are technical problems with extraction, or other limits that can explain this, but these explanations are insufficient to describe the overarching trend. On the other hand, peak oil theory explains it in two ways. The first is that actual output has plateued or is beginning to decline. The second is that if we know that, more nations will withhold some of their oil for the longer term, both for their own use, and to sell later on. If we have plenty of oil, it would be crazy of producers not to take advantage of record high prices. If we don’t, we can assume that in fact, high prices will continue, and even rise higher. Peak oil theory fits the facts.

The same is true with climate change theory. For example, climate change dissenters often argue that the sun is sending more heat our way. But if that were true, we’d be seeing more warming in the upper atmosphere as well as closer to the earth. But in fact, the opposite is true – the upper atmosphere is cooler. Since the sun’s rays have to go through the upper atmosphere to get to the earth, that’s not consistent. But if the earth itself is trapping carbon and increasing heat, it would make sense that we would find the upper atmosphere cooler than the lower.

The correlation of manmade C02 levels with planetary warming is another place we can see the evidence of global warming. The ice reductions in the arctic, and the thinning of the edges of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are another.

That is not to say that there is no inconsistency in climate systems – we are talking about a large, enormously complex system, being modeled by thousands of researchers. It is not an easy thing to figure out, and not every bit of data is going to be perfect. But the overwhelming reality is that the story here fits the data extremely well – the account of anthropogenic global warming fits what we are seeing – if anything, we have tended to underestimate our impact.

We can also see the evidence of our own eyes in both cases - we can see the rise in food prices, gas prices, the warming of our regions, the changes in planting zones and snowfall, the increased frequence of drought. These are not sufficient evidence - any one year, any one locality can be explained. But there is no doubt that billions of people around the world are seeing these things, and that our vision is a small piece of the picture.

Going back, for a moment, to _The Limits to Growth_, one of the things that appears a lot in later modeling, in, for example, the 30 Year Update of TLTG, is that feedback loops and intersections are a bigger problem than any individual problem. And for those people wondering whether these problems are really as bad as they think they are, this is probably the most important thing to know – in the 1970s, we were worried about individual problems – a shortage of oil, for example, or about pollution, or a coming ice age. Right now, the biggest concern we have is of the intersection of inter-related problems. That is, the problem is not our ability to respond to one problem, but our ability to respond to multiple, overwhelming simultaneous crises.

_The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update_ found that almost all its “business as usual” scenarios led to collapse , *EVEN IF* the sheer quantities of resources available were *DOUBLED* over what we have any evidence at all for – that is, even if we had enough energy to go along, pollution built and cancer rates skyrocketed, while soil erosion rose to make food production fail to keep pace with population growth. That is, these scenarios don’t depend on a shortage or crisis in any single place – they operate as a system of feedback loops influencing one another. As the authors put it,

A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope." (TLG30, 223)

In the 1970s, environmental activists were responding to the very first warning signs of depletion and climate change. Many of them interpreted scientific warnings on these points to mean that we were facing an immediate, definite crisis down to the particulars. But that’s not what they were being told. Instead, people were being warned about the longer term consequences of their actions in no uncertain terms. And in fact, our ability to cope managed to push these issues off, in many cases for decades, but again, as we put our limits further off, we drew our resources down further. Soon, the bill comes due.

Now this is all a fairly compelling case, but it isn’t all the truth that ever was, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. That is, there is absolutely no point in exaggerating scientific evidence to pretend we know everything with perfect, utter certainty. So my next post will be about the question of how we use this data – that is, if we think the odds are strongly in favor of something, but we don’t have perfect certainty, how do we know what to do? There are logical tools for that, and my next post on this subject will discuss them.

Three Billion Dead: The Future of Biofuels and the Future of Resistance

2008-01-08T07:55:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be asking all of you to do some hard work today - this is not going to be a short post, or an easy one, particularly if you read the referenced piece and the hundred or more relevant comments. We all have limited time and energy, and I'm not necessarily famous for my brevity, so I understand if this looks overwhelming to you, but I'd like people to try and get through it, because this is damned important.

The one time I saw Stuart Staniford speak, at ASPO Boston in the fall of 2006, he ended his analysis of oil peak data with something along the lines of "Peak Oil isn't the end of the world, folks." I'd tend to guess he may actually have changed his mind on this one. He's a guy who tends to be conservative in his estimates, and, as far as I can tell (I don't know him at all) someone who doesn't believe things until he's figured them out to his satisfaction. Since he's a brilliant data analyst, to his satisfaction is quite a high standard. But becuase he's not someone who leaps to conclusions, I tend to trust Staniford's thinking. That is, when he gets worried, I worry. When he says, as he does here, that he was "floored" - I sit up and pay attention. And in fact, I was too.

This is a very long, difficult and important piece, on the impact of biofuels on the food supply, world hunger and the future. I've been arguing intuitively from the perspective of someone whose interest is not in data analysis, that peak oil's first and deepest effects will appear in world hunger, but Staniford has pushed it further. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431#more. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing when you can, but his conclusion is this:

Here the value for the lower-income 2/3 of the world's population is about +0.7. What this means is that a 10% reduction in income has about the same effect on food consumption as a 10% increase in food prices. This suggests that we can use the global income distribution (shown above) to roughly estimate the impact of a doubling or quadrupling of food prices. We noted earlier that according to the UN about 800 million people are unable to meet minimal dietary energy requirements. That is 12% of the world population. On the income distribution (one graph back), the 12% mark corresponds to $1020/year in income (shown as the lowermost green dot). By looking at the $2040 level (36% of the global population - second green dot up), and the $4080 level (61% of the global population - third green dot up), we can estimate that a doubling in food prices over 2000 levels might bring 30% or so of the global population below the level of minimal dietary energy requirements, and a quadrupling of food prices over 2000 levels might bring 60% or so of the global population into that situation.

These estimates should be regarded as quite uncertain. Still, it seems hard to make a case that food price increases will cause a cessation of biofuel profitability before a significant fraction of the global population is in serious trouble. The poor will not be able to bid up food prices by factors of two and four and keep eating. In contrast, the quadrupling of global oil prices, and tripling of US gasoline prices, over the last five years has had very minimal impact on driving behavior by the middle classes.

The core problem is that gasoline price elasticity in the US is about -0.05, versus the -0.7 price elasticity for food consumption by poor consumers. This makes clear who is going to win the bidding war for food versus biofuels in a free market.

And

I wouldn't claim to be very knowledgeable on this, but I struggle to imagine how someone who wasn't meeting minimum dietary guidelines already can continue to exist on half as much food, or a quarter as much food, as food prices come into equilibrium with the current oil price level, or perhaps double again should oil prices double again. I would imagine that if you are hungry all the time you would already be devoting most of the skills and resources available to you to the problem of eating, and you would have limited ability to increase that in the face of large increases of food prices

For those of my readers who don't spend a lot of time reading scholarly papers, let me translate a little bit. What Staniford is saying is that there will be strong economic incentives to continue biofuels growth at the expense of the world's poor, and that mass starvation could occur quite rapidly, even as he states early on in the paper, as soon as 5 years from now and under existing policies. That is, if we don't act now, we may "accidentally" starve billions of people in our quest for oil substitutes. Staniford says,

"I will use a mixture of existing data,[..] to demonstrate that there are reasonably plausible scenarios for biofuel production growth to cause mass starvation of the global poor, and that this could happen fairly quickly - quite possibly within five years, and certainly well within the life of the existing policy regimes."

Even the most jaundiced viewer of the rush to biofuels, (including myself) has probably underestimated the dangers of biofuel growth without external constraints. My own analysis was that some significant percentage of the population might starve - I admit, I didn't guess half. Here's my own work on what an ethical model of biofuel production would look like: http://www.energybulletin.net/24169.html

If this is true, how do we apply those constraints? That is, if we don't think it is morally acceptable to feed our cars at the expense of other people's children, how do we get that message across?

This, of course, is the central question of just food distribution. While practical data on yields and output of various organic and polyculture practices provides ample evidence that we can continue to produce similar, even increasing quantities of food for some time, the question of distribution offers a constraint that is deeply difficult to overcome. That is, there seems to be little doubt that we can produce enough food to create a stable decline - that is, to feed the population until it stabilizes and falls via voluntary self-limitation. But that does mean that we would have little human food to convert to meat or biofuels, and we would have to not only have more equitable distribution, but a cultural passion for justice and equal distribution.

I know people who believe that latter is utterly impossible to achieve. We are not like that, we are told. We are too selfish. We will not change until we have to.

And perhaps that's even true, but perhaps there are multiple versions of "have to" - that is, the idea that we won't do anything until it is absolutely necessary implicitly sets a real bar for what constitutes absolute necessity. One of the places we tend to set that bar is at our compassion for others as a collective people. That is, we tend to believe that things that affect us personally might move us to action, but things that mostly affect others will not.

There is no doubt that a massive move to biofuels will affect us - is affecting us now. Rising food prices are hurting Americans who have to pay for gas and food and mortgage, and have little flexibility in both. But there is also, as Staniford notes, little doubt that the biggest victims will be the poor of the world, people far away who we do not know. What would make it possible for us to care so much about them that we are willing to change our lives in profound and difficult ways to preserve their lives? Is that entirely unthinkable.

I think to many of us, it is. That is, we look at the way we live now, and do not see or recognize a part of ourselves that cares so deeply about distant others.

Which is why I think the following information is so important - we once did care that much, and not so very long ago.

As Amy Bentley documents in _Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity_, there was a time, about 60 years ago, when Americans were prepared to endure food rationing and hardship in order to keep other people alive. No, I'm not talking about World War II, but about the last time in our history that a signficant percentage of the world faced death from famine.

At the end of World War II, in 1945, the US was thriving, but up to 1/4 of the rest of the world's population was facing hunger. Whole economies had been destroyed by the war, and a subsequent drought dramatically reduced crop yields. In 1945, food production world wide was 12% below pre-war levels, and the 1946 harvest was similarly affected.

Europe's harvest levels were 25% below normal. Mexico was in the grips of massive inflation, with tortilla prices out of reach of many - more than half of all Mexicans were spending 90% of their income on food. In Korea, the whole year's food donation supply was consumed by June. Rations in Japan were at 520 calories per per person, per day, vastly below the 2800 calorie norms. 500 million people faced death by starvation. Only a few nations, most notably America, were in any position at all to export grains for relief.

Meanwhile, the US was newly released from wartime rationing, and food consumption rose to 3300 calories per day on average. People celebrated unlimited meats, sugars and fats that they'd been denied during the war. And Americans were preoccupied with the return of family and the recreation of American society - they did not care very much about the starving masses, if they even knew they existed.

In the winter of 1946, Harry Truman made a radio address on the world situation asking Americans to help conserve food in order to earmark 16 percent of the total US harvest for food relief. Among his policies were included the prohibition of wheat use in alcohol production and strict limitations on feeding grains to livestock. He also asked Americans to voluntarily restrict their food consumption, to free up more food to be sent for relief.

What is remarkable is that when Americans turned their attention to the subject, they showed willingness to endure even stronger restrictions than the voluntary ones that Truman and his Aid czar, Herbert Hoover, proposed. 70% of Americans indicated their willingness to endure shortages of meat, butter, sugar, gas and other goods to give food to the hungry in Europe.

Herbert Hoover gave the following speech, after travelling to famine struck regions:

"I have seen with my own eyes the grimmest spectre of famine in all the history of the world. Of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the one named War has gone, at least for a while. But Famine, Pestilence and Death are still charging over the earth...Hunger hangs over the homes of 800 million people - over one-third of the people on the earth. "

Americans were further moved by this - and by the recognition that much of the world viewed them as gluttonous and selfish. Millions of Americans recognized that critics who claimed that America could only meet its commitments to provide food aid with rationing demanded its reinstitution, in face of the powerful opposition of Hoover and the Famine Emergency Committee. Americans wanted to see rationing instituted to ensure fairness, as they reduced their consumption.

In 1944, in the heart of World War II, 85% of all Americans believed that rationing should be retained after the war to prevent hunger and shortages. In March, 1946, 59 percent of the American public was willing to reinstitute full scale rationing to be able to relieve hunger in other nations. After Truman spoke eloquently about the world's suffering, the numbers rose to 70%.

Women's consumer groups spoke out in favor of national rationing. The OPA consumer Advisor Committee, made up of many well known and powerful women castigated Truman for not reinstating rationing, saying,

"The first step is immediately to withdraw large quantities of these foods from the domestic market for shipment abroad...Simultaneously measures must be taken to so allocate the domestic supply so that all the people will be able to get their share at home...Voluntary rationing is patently inadequate..."

More than 700 women's groups signed a letter demanding the reinstatement of rationing. 300 presidents of women's colleges did the same. It is worth noting that women took a leading role here - they they consistently demonstrated greater support for the reinstitution of rationing than men. Since the burden of food rationing fell more heavily on women, this is important - the people who would to give up the most were the most anxious to help

Perhaps the most astounding statistic was that almost 1/3 of the American public acknowledged a willingness to reinstitute rationing *to save the starving Japanese* - that is, despite national fury at those who bombed Pearl Harbor, at the most demonized enemy we may ever have had, fully 1/3 of the American population was willing to give up food to save the lives of their enemies.

In fact, voluntary rationing didn't work very well - America failed to make its food commitments, and people did starve. When America finally did meet its goals, it was because of a growing security threat from starving people in Russia. But that doesn't change the fact that Americans effectively begged their government to help them help others. That is, what matters most in this statistic is this - we not so very long ago believed that we would do a great deal in order to help others.

Does this stand as conclusive proof that we won't starve half the world? Absolutely not. And of course there are real and practical differences between the people who lived during World War II and ourselves. And yet, those differences are not so very vast that they might not be overcome, that we too might stand up, and perhaps do so with greater success, and demand that the need of others to be fed exceed the rights of the internal combustion engine.

Sharon

52 Weeks Down - Week 32 - Acclimate Gradually

2008-01-07T06:50:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I annoyed some people by suggesting that people might turn their heatingthermostats back to 55F. Now it is worth noting that I used this as an example, not an absolute truth - I'm not at all inclined to embark on a campaign for a mandatory single temperature. A number of people mentioned that it was completely impossible to imagine living at that temperature, while others announced that this was normal for them. So what's the difference between them?

Some of it is probably physiology, and the place your body grew up in. Some people run warm, some run cold, some have enough extra fat to keep warm, some have little personal insulation. Some of us grew up in cold places, others in warm. As we get older, we often feel the cold more, and some people have health problems that make them less tolerant than others of the cold weather. But a large portion of this is probably acclimation. That is, they've gradually accustomed their bodies to lower temperatures, and now those temperatures feel comfortable to them.

And I think acclimation is relevant not just to winter heating, but to a host of other things. Hot weather tolerance, for example, is physiologically a matter of acclimation - your body develops more capacity to sweat and cool itself as it is exposed to more heat. So, for example, someone who spends a lot of their time in air conditioning will feel the heat quite literally more than someone who spends less.

The fact is, my heat didn't go directly to 55 degrees - first, we didn't put our heat on until November, and while days stayed up in the 40s and sun warmed the house much higher, nights got cold even then. So we got used to cool temperatures indoors gradually - as the season grew cooler, we did too. At first, cold nights in the 40s felt like they were freezing, since our bodies were so accustomed to summer warmth. Now, after several months of night temperatures regularly in the teens, a 40 degree night like last night feels very pleasant, and we wander outdoors with just a sweater on. I think most people in both cold and warm climates can identify - in the fall, a day in the 40s feels cold and crisp. By springtime, going outside on a day that hits 45 feels like a luxury, and we start shedding clothes - that is, we've acclimated. The same is true of heat - if your daytime temperatures are over 100 regularly, you find an 85 degree day refreshing. On the other hand, in my climate, which rarely breaks 90, 85 is awfully warm and sticky.

We also try and spend a lot of time outside. We go out to haul wood, to feed the animals, to play in the snow, to take walks. A house that feels chilly at 55 when you've spent the whole day inside, suddenly feels toasty warm after a walk out in the 20 degree day. Because we heat with wood, we also have warm spots in our house - further away from the woodstove, we are colder. If we need a few minutes to warm up in front of the stove, that's a pleasure. If we have to sit and work for a while, often we try and do it there - in fact this kind of heating brings the family together.

We use other techniques to acclimate - we find the places where we lose heat and retain it, wearing hats sometimes even indoors, wool socks on cold feet and multiple layers that we can take off when we're up and moving around, and cuddle into when we're sitting. We use psychological techniques as well - when everyone around you lives in a 70F home, 55 seems shockingly cold. When you think that through most of human history, people's homes were heated by fires - and not that many of them, we have to realize that most people went through their lives acclimated to much colder temperatures than we have now. If they did, most of us can. There are those who really do need that place in front of the stove, or the space heater in the room they work in - infants, for example cannot regulate their body temperatures until they hit 10lbs. Some ill and disabled people cannot manage lower temperatures. But this is an argument often for spot heating - for making people comfortable where they must be most of the time, rather than for spreading heat inefficiently over a whole home.

But acclimation applies to more than heating and cooling - it applies to the whole process of becoming environmentally aware. Like our family at the beginning of the cool season, at first change feel like a shock to the system. Just as a cold day in September may feel bitter, intolerable, the first time you tell someone you aren't buying supermarket food, or you won't drive long distances, it may seem overwhelming, as though you could never get comfortable in this new way of existing. But time passes, you keep practicing, you keep doing it, and suddenly, you realize you are comfortable. The new food seems delicious, the new habit of taking public transportation starts to have unexpected joys.

It is well outside my range of interest to tell people exactly what temperature they should be living at. But most of us know that our first reaction to trying something isn't necessarily representative of the experience we will have over the long term. The process of acclimation can be hard sometimes - but the result is a new normal, coming to be content at a lower state, and that's worth a considerable effort, at least to me.

Sharon

Scenes from the Growing Food Crisis: On Finding My Work

2008-01-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

Regular readers will probably have noticed the quiet here this last week. That's because the last five days were spent in intensive work with my co-author, Aaron Newton, on our book _A Nation of Farmers_. This is our only chance to be in the same room before the book is completed this spring, so we felt obligated to spend every moment focusing on how we as a society are to keep ensuring that we all eat.

Not only were we driven by limited time together, but by the rising pressure of food insecurity that is playing out all over the world. Here are just a few of the news stories that have come across my desk in the last week or so. Individually and collectively they point to a real, deep, and serious food crisis.

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1227-fao.html

'As world food prices continue to surge, 37 countries are facing critical food crises due to conflict and disasters, according to a report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
FAO's global food price index rose 40 percent this year to the highest level on record. Food costs in the world's poorest countries — including Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, and 20 African countries — rose 25 percent to $107 billion.

"Urgent and new steps are needed to prevent the negative impacts of rising food prices from further escalating and to quickly boost crop production in the most affected countries," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf in a press conference last week at FAO's Rome headquarters.

"Without support for poor farmers and their families in the hardest-hit countries, they will not be able to cope. Assisting poor vulnerable households in rural areas in the short term and enabling them to produce more food would be an efficient tool to protect them against hunger and undernourishment." '

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1951495520071219

"Asian nations, many at risk from climate change, must invest more in urban and indoor farming to help feed the hundreds of millions of people in their growing cities, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Wednesday"

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=213343

"A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a74e1668-ac42-11dc-82f0-0000779fd2ac.html

Global food prices will come under further pressure today as benchmark prices for cereals at much higher levels come into operation, making it almost inevitable that a second wave of food price inflation will hit the world's leading economies.

In Chicago wheat and rice prices for delivery in March 2008 have jumped to an all-time record, soyabean prices are at a 34-year high and corn prices at an 11-year peak.

Knock-on price rises are set to hit consumers in coming months, raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate the slowdown in their economies. Knock-on price rises are set to hit consumers in coming months, raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate the slowdown in their economies."

And

"The US Department of Agriculture has predicted that global corn stocks will fall to a 33-year low of just 7.5 weeks of consumption, while global wheat stocks will plunge to their lowest level in at least 47 years at 9.3 weeks."

Just as I once wrote that over the last year I have shifted my rhetoric on peak oil and climate change from talking about what may be to speaking of what is, it is now time for all of us to stop speaking of hypotheticals when we are thinking about famine. We are not now short of food - fair and just systems of distribution could still avert the worst outcomes. But those are not the systems we have in place.

So the question becomes, both for Aaron and I in our book, and for our society as a whole, how do we change that? How do we change our food systems so that what we eat and what we grow keeps justice in mind? How do we put new systems in place that maximize food production and minimize inputs? How do we do this quickly, but with minimal destruction?

Those are incredibly hard questions to answer in many ways. And while we have some ideas and solutions for some of those questions and a host of others, we don't claim to know everything. A lot of times, we feel like we don't know anything at all. Which is why I will be writing a lot about food over the coming months here, throwing ideas out to my readers for comment and critique, thinking the questions through with your help.

I wonder sometimes if it is crazy for the two of us to take up the most basic questions of our society, to act as though we know enough to find a solution for such a vast problem. My training is in Shakespeare, poetry, language, history. Aaron's is in landscape architecture and journalism. Shouldn't this job be being done by someone more famous, more important, better trained, more knowledgeable? And, of course, it is being done by some people who fit those descriptions.

But when I feel least certain that we can do the things that are needed, when I most see myself as inadequate to the task, I'm reminded of four quotations that I'd like all my readers to look at, and think a little on. The thing is, I suspect a lot of us are in the same boat - we spent our lives preparing for a different world and life than the one we're faced with. And now we know this stuff about peak oil and climate change and the world, and we have to do something. But how can we? How can *WE* do something, when we're not trained, or prepared, or ready? When we're not activists or leaders by nature? When we have fears and doubts and weaknesses?

There's so very much work that needs to be done that it can get overwhelming. How do we narrow things down? None of us can do it all, so how do we know what to do, when to step up? How do we put ourselves forward into places we weren't fully prepared to go, into roles we aren't wholly ready for?

The first three are very short, the third, longer:

"We are what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

I have loved Kurt Vonnegut's writing since I was a teenager, but this quotation particularly has always struck me. When I became a peak oil writer, instead of a weird chick with a crazy blog (which, let us note, is a process, not a moment, and still has not happened in many circles ), and people started listening to me, I didn't see any difference in me that would make anyone take me seriously. I still don't. I still don't know everything I need to. I still make stupid mistakes. I'm still not perfectly trained for this work. I'm faking it. But maybe all of us are faking it a little. Maybe the line between real and pretend isn't that thick, and if I go about pretending, not that I have all the answers, but that I am doing this work and learning on the job, and that's sufficient, maybe that will be enough.

"She did not cry, 'I cannot, I am not worthy,'
Nor 'I have not the strength.'
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illuminated her." - Denise Levertov

I came across this poem in the same place I found the following one, in one of Annie Lamott's wonderful, funny books. Levertov is talking about Mary, mother of Jesus, and Annie Lamott quotes this poem, and then follows it with the line "This is so, so not me." Well, it isn't me either. I'm not real holy here, and not much of a Mariologist. But I like very much the notion that consent can illuminate us. I think sometimes simply consenting to do the work may be the big transition - we go along thinking hard about ourselves as one sort of person, doing one sort of thing, and suddenly, we have to find a new way to understand ourselves.

Sometimes we know what we want to do, but often, the work finds us. This was how it was for me - like many of us, maybe most of us, here I was growing my family's food and writing about that, and about a few other things. It was a hobby at most, I, like millions of other people, was putting down my thoughts on a particular passion of mine on the internet. And when it came time to sit down and figure out (only a couple of years ago) what I would do when the kids got a little bigger, "Writer" wasn't even on the list. "Peak Oil Writer" wasn't a job, as far as I knew. So to say I didn't plan to embark on the career I'm on doesn't even begin to describe it - I didn't know this career existed. I had read people like Heinberg, Darley, Kunstler - but the idea that they too wandered into their work by confronting an idea and coming to see it as theirs never occurred to me.

Two years later, I'm a peak oil writer (as well as a host of other things), doing this job I didn't know existed. The work found me. And I would bet that some of you are have been found by some of this work. I hope you will take it up.

"...one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people." - Annie Lamott

Could this possibly be true? That is, could it be true that we some how, trusting our intuitions and our guts, know what our proper work is, what we can contribute to the world? None of us can do everything we need to in the world. Trying to do so will drive us mad. But all of us can find a piece of the project, a limited part of what desperately needs to be done, can trust the part of us that says "this is my proper work in the world" and pick that up and go on with it.

I don't know what your work is - heck, I didn't know what mine was. Maybe your job is to start a small, local seed company that will serve your area, or to help families in need in your spare time. Maybe your work is to spread the word about climate change to your friends and family, or to write position papers for a Senator. Maybe your work is a very small piece of everything - to tend this patch of ground, to care for these particular people who need you. Maybe your work is much larger - to transmit this idea or make this policy change. Maybe your work will change over time - maybe right now you are head down in a medical crisis, or new fatherhood or school and your work is to get yourself to a place where you can take on a little more later - and then you'll find what else there is. Or maybe you are moving from one kind of work to another to match your interests or your needs. Some of us will have a single immutable project, others a host of them, or a shifting pattern of pies we put our fingers in.

But, I would argue, all of us are the right people for some work. All of us have the obligation to show up, to the extent of our abilities, to stretch ourselves a little, to take on a piece of this, and maybe just a little more than we can possibly achieve.

Finally, a long quote that I may have used before here, but that I repeat because I believe it is so important.

I discovered in my earlier research on international conflict resolution that however intractable an intersocietal conflict may be, there are always people working on the solution. Pick the direst time in the Middle East conflict, for example, and you can find someone hidden away in a basement drawing up maps for the water and sewer lines, the lines that will connect the two societies and that must be built when peace is reached, as inconceivable as that tis at the time. Someone else is sketching the constitution for the new country, the one that is also inconceivable at the time. And someone else is outlining the terms of trade for the as yet unproduced goods that will traverse the two societies' border....Surrounded by intense conflict, hatred and violence, these people appear the fool, idealists who do not know or can not accept the reality of their societies' situation. If they really knew that situation, others would say, they would be 'realists;' they would concentrated their efforts on hard bargaining, economic incentives and military force. But, in practice, when a threshold is passed, when leaders shake hands or a jailed dissident is freed or families from the two sides join together, everyone casts about for new ways to organize. - Thomas Princen

I came to this by accident. I was interested, and I noticed "I don't think anyone has ever written about this" and "I wonder if this might be helpful." And it turned, oddly enough, into part of a career. But even if it hadn't, it would still have been my right work. The moment I noticed that no one was doing something that needed doing, I had begun the process of entry into the great project of ameliorating and regenerating. Because the answer to "this needs doing" is almost always "Great, why don't you get started." I didn't know where getting started would take me. Sometimes I still wonder if I'm the right person, often consent does not illuminate me, sometimes I'd just as soon do something else. But the truth is this - the work must be done by someone, and why not me?

And why not you? Perhaps food isn't your thing, but water systems, or energy policy, or conflict resolution or green education is. Perhaps food is your thing, and you don't have the slightest idea what to do - do you buy a farm, do you join a CSA, start a community garden, begin a coop?

I can't tell you. I can only tell you this. The work is out there, and it is as much as all of us can do. And the right people are the ones, illuminated by consent, who take on a project, and a vision of the future, claim it as their own, and go forward, in all our limitations.

If you feel inadequate to the job, welcome to the club! If you feel you don't know enough, have enough strength or courage or skill, I'm glad to meet you - we're in the same boat. If you think that this is a job for someone with authority, I'm going to tell you my secret. The week before I was a farmer, I was a grad student with a seed and some dirt I had no idea what to do with. The day before I was a peak oil writer I was a Mom with grubby children and dirty dishes and a blog. The transition from inadequacy to authority is only this - one more day of trying, one more experiment, one person who knows even less than you do, the willingness to try, at least, to help them, and the illumination of consent.

I wish you all good work.

Sharon

Doctor, It Hurts When I Do This....

2008-01-03T11:45:00.000-08:00

Motherhood, I'm convinced, has unfit me for understanding politics. Dealing with small children has clearly given me the mistaken impression that simple, accessible solutions are better than complicated ones, and that it is possible to avoid many ill consequences simply with the application of common sense. This will clearly never do.

Small children have no common sense at all, something that most of them will grow out of, unless they run for office. So when my five and three year olds come to me sobbing, because they've conceived an elaborate game involving huring a small, hard ball at the stairs and catching it (some of the time) , as it races back at their faces...except on the cruel and inexplicable (not more than one time out of two) occasions in which it whacks them in the eye...and tell me that it *hurts* when the ball hits them in the eye, and how could anyone have predicted that this might happen, Mommy understands.

In fact, she's got a solution - they could...gasp!...stop throwing the ball at the stairs. The children are stunned, and appalled at the ridiculousness of this solution. Throwing the ball at the stairs is fun!! Why on earth would Mommy ever think that the problem is inherent in the activity, rather than that one, mean ball that swung back and whacked Isaiah in the eye...? What horrible spoilsports Mommies are, they tell me, and, properly united in their contempt for my solution, go off to malign me for not letting them do anything fun.

The reason mothers don't actually eat their young (tempting thought it occasionally is) is that we know their brains simply haven't developed enough yet to apply things like reason and common sense. They simply lack maturity. And most of the time, they are so cute that it is hard to mind too much. Most world leaders, on the other hand, are not cute, but seem to suffer from an intellectually stunting medical condition that one would think would unfit them to lead anything larger than a small goat.

Politics, seen through the lens of motherhood, looks remarkably stupid. So, for example, the hardly surprising news that Saddam Hussein would have taken a big wad of cash and gone into exile http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484162 seems merely another depressing bit of evidence that the world is run by idiots. Duh - you mean the mass murdering tyrant (let me clarify - I refer to Saddam, here, not *our* mass murdering tyrant) would rather have taken a billion dollars and gone to parties in Paris than been hunted down in a filthy hole, tried and killed by a vastly superior military force? Shocking, really shocking. You mean we didn't have to spend a ton of China's...er...our money blowing up Iraq to bring "democracy"? Next you'll be telling me that some Washington insider, like Alan Greenspan has admitted this had something to do with oil!?!

I'm not much more impressed by the discussions of how to get the carbon out the atmosphere. For example this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484162. Let's see...it might take CO2 out of the atmosphere...or it might flood the atmosphere with additional CO2 now locked up in the ocean, potentially rushing us towards an environmental tipping point. Certainly, up until now, we've done so very well playing with technological solutions whose long term effects we simply don't understand...let's just go with another one and see what happens.

Why is it when I read about solutions to climate change that I feel like I'm listening to my children explain why the problem isn't throwing the ball, its the mean old ball's habit of misbehaving - and we could just persuade it to stop. The solution to climate change is this - stop burning the damned stuff. Not easy, especially if you really like the games you've been playing. But it is the answer.

But then, what do Mommies know?

Shalom,

Sharon

You Heard It Here First...Sadly

2007-12-28T08:14:00.000-08:00

Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

Guess what - I'm starting to wonder whether I do have magic powers to predict the future (yeah, like common sense ;-)) - this blog, which has been going on for months about the notion that we have to cut emissions faster and harder than anyone has acknowledge turns out to have beaten even James Hansen and Bill McKibben to the punch. Why is it, I wonder, that my predictions are only right about things that suck?

"It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month). The last time the Earth warmed two or three degrees Celsius -- which is what 450 parts per million implies -- sea levels rose by tens of meters, something that would shake the foundations of the human enterprise should it happen again.

And we're already past 350. Does that mean we're doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.

That "just," of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we've ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life.

Maybe too huge. The problems of global equity alone may be too much -- the Chinese aren't going to stop burning coal unless we give them some other way to pull people out of poverty. And we simply may have waited too long.

But at least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know."

McKibben is being cheery about the bad news, so I will be to. We've been given a huge and perhaps exciting challenge - how to entirely stop producing more industrial carbon emissions. And believe it or not, I've got a few ideas (doesn't she always you say, rolling your eyes ;-)).

Or rather, they are the same ideas. It turns out that Monbiot was far too conservative - he was trying to keep things at 450. This is going to require a fast and serious drop in our fossil energy use down to near 0. The fast part means we're going to have to prioritize - think hard about where we want to put our very limited carbon emissions. Building more renewables, keeping medical care and food supplies coming, enabling an educated populace - that's where they need to go, and that's where they should go.

I've been working on trying to create a model of life of some sort for a few years - not a perfect life. If I were perfect I would have had 1.5 kids, started before I was 30 and would be pedalling everywhere. But a model of an imperfect life in transition, making do with what I've got, the best I can. When I try and think about what my role in this is, it comes down to that - I'm an ordinary person, ordinarily selfish and cranky and lazy, greedy and flawed. So what I can do with my imperfect life, from my imperfect start, in my imperfect home with my limited funds and energies I believe others can do - or they will do it some other way and tell me, and I can tell others, so that there's one more model out there. It isn't a perfect solution, and maybe there's other work to be done that I should be doing. But maybe this is mine.

After we reallocate, our personal use is going to have to be done by our limited supply of renewables (that means we all get a little bit of energy to use) and our hands and feet, some animals and a complete change in our way of life. There is no model I've ever seen that enables us to do a very rapid (under a decade) build out of renewables, and keep the global economy going as is. We're simply entering uncharted territory. If we become serious about this, everything is going to change.

And everything will remain the same - we'll still be the people we are. We'll still care about the things we care about most - the people we love, keeping people healthy, cared for and fed, giving our kids a decent education, having good and honorable work to do. We'll do different work, different play, live different lives, but we'll still be us, and the things we always say we really care about - those will still be the things we can have.

We can do this. We have to, but more, we can.

Sharon

Here Be Dragons: Predictions for 2008

2007-12-27T16:59:00.000-08:00

Ok, last year I made some (quite tongue in cheek) bets, and it is interesting to me to see how they stood up - you can see them here:

History and the New Year

Generally speaking, my predictions (which weren't exactly going way out on a limb or anything) were pretty much right, except for Israel and Syria - it was Iran, not Venezuela, and the interest rate hikes were met by later cuts, but overall, I called it - more or less. I promise, this surprises me more than anyone. And I suspect that "the year of hanging on by our fingertips" wasn't a bad way to describe the last year.

My intuition is that in 2008, we'll no longer be able quite to hang on. I'm going to call 2008 "The Year of Dragons" - that is, the year we get off of all the maps we've had and enter uncharted territory. once upon a time, the parts of the maps that were unknown bore the sign "Here be Dragons" - I think this is the year we'll begin getting to know the dragons on the other side of our understanding.

So here are my predictions - and again, let me reiterate that the thing that I hope makes me marginally credible is this - I do not believe that every single idea I pull out of my ass...er head is the absolute truth. And if I don't, you certainly shouldn't.

But here goes.

1. This year, the words peak oil will go mainstream, but this mainstreaming will not be matched by a subtle or nuanced understanding of what the words mean. That is, peak oil will be used for political purposes, and not necessarily ones anyone will approve of.

2. By the end of the year, there will begin to be runs on preparedness equipment and food storage, a la Y2K.

3. The NeoCons will not go gently into that good night - there will be at least one serious surprise for us. G-d willing, it won't involve the word "nukuler" or any of its cognates.

4. Hillary will not win the 2008 election. Neither, despite all the people who keep sending me emails saying he will, will Ron Paul.

5. The economy will tank. Yup, I'm really going out on a limb here.

6. Many of us will find we are being taken more seriously than we ever expected. We will still be taken less seriously than any celebrity divorce, however.

7. We'll see food riots in more nations and hunger will increase. The idea of Victory Gardens won't seem so crazy anymore.

8. The biofuels craze will begin to be thought the better of - not in time to prevent the above.

9. We will see at least one more image of desperate people, walking out of their city becuase there's no other alternative. And a lot of images of foreclosures.

10. TEOTWAKI, if it ever happens, will be delayed long enough for my book to be released this fall and to make back at least the advance, so my publisher won't have any reason to try and sue me ;-).

Ok, that last is more of a prayer than a prediction - the bad thing about writing books for a publisher that deals a lot with peak oil and climate change is that the words "if everything doesn't go to hell in a handbasket" are actually included in the legal documents (ok, I'm joking).

Those are my bets, folks. We'll reconvene in late December of next year to make fun of me and my predictions. In the meantime, a happy, safe, healthy and hopeful New Year to all!

Shalom,

Sharon

Hallowing the Descent

2007-12-26T10:07:00.000-08:00

"One might say with the Buddhists, that this is an important form of "mindfulness" and try and cultivate the inner posture in which such consciousness can be relatively sustained. Consulting the dictionary I find that for the word "hallowing" the following definitions are offered: 'make holy or set apart for holy use, consecrate; to respect greatly; venerate." It was a new and most encouraging idea to me - that one's diminishments could be "made holy," "consecrated," "respected greatly," even "venerated."

I saw that the first step for me in learning to "hallow" the progressive diminishments in store for me was deep-going acceptance. But the acceptance would have to be positive, not a negative one, if it were to be a real hallowing. I must learn to do something creative with it."

Quaker writer John Yungblut writes this in "On Hallowing One's Diminishments," using the ways of thinking he found to deal with his Parkinson's disease to provide a new way "into" times of personal and collective hardship. I'm indebted to my friend MEA for sending me Yungblut's pamphlet, and introducing this idea of the hallowing of loss to me, which has been in my thoughts a great deal lately.

There is no question in my mind, or in the minds of many thinkers, that we cannot go on from here the way we have been. That is, whether global warming, peak oil, world water supplies or financial crisis becomes the tipping point, things cannot continue the way they are. At the moment, most people do not know this yet - they believe fervently that if they just carry a cloth bag and vote for higher CAFE standards, the world will more or less go on for them as it has. They believe this, in large part, because they want to believe it. But that has to change.

My own takes is that if to convince people that their lives have to change dramatically, it will require a mix of different approaches - we will have to show the consequences of not doing so, show the rewards of doing it, provide social and cultural support, tell people that making changes is patriotic, cool, sexy and fun, also warn people about pain and suffering, and tell them that they are sacrificing for a cause - that is, we're going to need all the tools in our boxes. And one that I hadn't considered is Yungblut's fascinating notion of "Hallowing the Diminishment." It is a tool, I think that for some people - those who are religiously or spiritually inclined, may be quite powerful, and thus, it deserves a wider audience. It would be deeply false for us to argue that such a change will come with no hardships - so how do we help people accept these hardships, and move on? Here, I find Yungblut most useful.

What does it mean to consecrate or venerate your own losses? Yungblut does not lay them out this way, but there seems to be three strategies involved here. The first is the notion of treating your losses and suffering as companions to whom you are obligated to feel a friendly spirit towards. He notes that if your diminishments are not tormentors, it is easier to have a sense of humor about them, to seperate yourself from your sufferings.

The second point Yungblut raises is that each diminishment comes with gifts - the physical limitations that come with aging also bring with them "the reconversion from earning a living to cultural activity" - that is, there is time to talk to others, to think, to devote to the outside world as we retire and age. The definition of success changes - instead of focusing on work and outer definitions, success becomes children grown well to adulthood, the love of family, warmheartedness, kindness. Yungblut reminds us to look for the gifts in our losses.

Finally, Yungblut notes that we can view our losses as leading us gently towards our adaptation to the ultimate diminishment - death. That is, we can come to recognize that sometimes, the point is not whether we can alter events, but how we face them. We can find meaning, even when we cannot change things, in our ability to shape the meaning of things - to do right, even when the right thing is not enough, to face even very hard times with courage and honor, even though it won't make the hard times go away to do so.

What would this mean going into peak oil and climate change? How might we begin to "hallow" our descent. The first thought would be to recognize our companions entering into the future - name them, "peak energy" "Climate change" and "Depletion" and call them what they are - our future, and our companions for the long haul. Because once we acknowledge them, we might be able to get to know them, to get over our deepest fears that if we look too closely at the future we will not be able to bear it, and recognize and go on from there. Perhaps if we saw them as our companions in the future, we might be able to get over our own sense of personal punishment - the belief, for example, that our suffering is particular, and deeply important. That is, we might be able to recognize that turning the heat down to 55 is not an unjust cruelty, but simply what is asked of us, our share of the burden. Perhaps we might even develop a sense of humor about it.

The idea of venerating these companions does not mean we accept that they are good - peak oil, climate change and depletion are undoubtably evils for the world. But they are less fearsome when we understand them fully, and less fearsome still when we recognize that this is the world as *WE* have made it - this is the consequences, not of some unjust suffering inflicted upon us, but on the world we chose. There is a generation of people coming who did not choose this, and our children and grandchildren will have the right to be angry that they have to suffer. But we who are adults now must meet our descent as our choice, and our responsibility to ameliorate as best we can.

Finding the benefits will not be hard. There are enormous benefits, as well as losses, in the diminishing of industrial society. We can gain time with one another, stronger families, cultural wealth, more nutritious food, more exercise, peace and beauty, less stress, and a future for our children and our planet. These things are of great value, and we need to start recognizing their value immediately. There is a great deal of talk in the culture about "what really matters" - at the same time that we all have less and less of what we claim really matters. Pointing out that most of the virtues of a less industrialized, lower energy society are the things that we say we want most is going to be essential.

We must, however, do this in the context of recognizing real losses - that is, what I like about Yungblut's analysis is that it does not attempt to erase those losses. There are things that will get better for some of us, and things we will lose. We shouldn't lie about this, and pretend that all will be happy, easy and cool. The truth is that this will hurt us - and finding beauty and peace and better things in the midst of self-sacrifice is our only hope. Our choices are whether to lie, or not to lie - and I tend to think that the true message is far more powerful than the false one.

Finally, Yungblut's analysis reminds us that we cannot change everything. We must do all we can to prepare, to make things better, to ameliorate the suffering of others. And there's an excellent chance that what we do will be insufficient. But just as it matters how we enter death and leave life - whether on our feet or our knees, with courage or with cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, it matters how we act now *EVEN IF WE CANNOT CHANGE THE OUTCOME.* I am not claiming we shouldn't complain - and neither is Yungblut. I am not saying we should be perfect, without anger or fear or cowardice - we cannot. But we should understand that what we accomplish is one thing, and what we attempt is another. Our reach must exceed our grasp here - anything else would be a diminishment of ourselves and the meaning of our lives. We must try and do the impossible.

I doubt there is a single person out there reading this who does not fervently wish that we had addressed peak oil and climate change 30 years ago and that we really could go on the way we have been. But we're past that - the change in our world is as inevitable as death. We now only have the choice of facing the change - and how we face it. But the difference between embracing our future and changing our thinking to place the long term, the future of future generations at the center of ourselves, or running in fear and denial, is a difference beyond speaking.

Yungblut and I do not share our vision of what death is, and I'm sure there are many people reading this from other faiths and no faith at all. But the notion that we can make even our hardships into moments of creativity, honor, consecration, I think has value regardless of your faith. The truth is, we have power in two realms - the first is what we do. The second is in the meaning we apply to what we do - the way we face the world, the stories we tell ourselves. We must claim power in both realms - that is we must not only act to avert tragedy, but we must ensure that we have, to the extent we are able, made everything we can out of the meaning of our choices.

A long, long time ago, I wrote an undergraduate dissertation arguing that for the poet John Milton, this is the limitation of God - that is, in "Paradise Lost" God is omnipotent - except in the realm of meaning. God can make things happen - but God cannot choose their meaning. I think, for those of us who believe in some God or Gods, this is what human beings are for - the creation of meaning. And for those who believe in no God at all (and trust me, I'm not ranking these choices), we are the only people who can make things mean anything at all. If we want the legacy of our diminishment to be something other than that we, in greed and selfishness, did not understand and made our choices from no meaning at all, we must find a way to hallow, or at least apply meaning, to our descent.

Indeed, the Torah commentator Rashi suggests that the human capacity for meaning creation is tremendously powerful, perhaps more powerful than the ability to act, for he says in his gloss on the story of creation,

There was no vegetation on the earth when creation was completed on the sixth day, before man was created. Even though God had commanded “Let the earth sprout vegetation” on the third day, it had not emerged, but remained just at the rim of the soil, until the sixth day. Why? Because God had not sent rain. Why not? Because “there was no man to til the soil and so there was no one to realize the goodness of the rains. But when man arrived and realized that they are a necessity for the world, he prayed for them, and they fell, and the trees and vegetation grew.”

That is, the rain came because we knew we needed it, we saw the emptiness of the world, and we made it necessary. It may be that we need to make peace with our companions, find our blessings and understand that how we face the future may matter as much as what the future is, in order to bring about the rain that will make the future bloom.

Sharon

The Future of the Quik 'N Easy Meal

2007-12-26T08:47:00.002-08:00

“Eating is an agricultural act.” – Wendell Berry

Because I don’t celebrate Christmas, I had nothing important to do the other day. Because my husband and kids were headed out to a local social event with other Jewish families with kids, and because our van, the only vehicle we own that can get all six of us from place to place is in the shop, I had no choice but to stay home. So I thought I’d cook – specifically, I thought I’d try out three “fast, easy, healthy, local” recipes that were sent to me from a green website that shall remain nameless because I’m not trying to give them a hard time – I appreciate what they are trying to do.

Why? Because my job now is to think about food. That is no hardship – regular readers of this blog will know that the question of how we will go on eating is my great passion. So much so that I’m now working on book #2, co-authored with Aaron Newton, titled _A Nation of Farmers_ and coming out from New Society in spring ’09. The subject of the book is all of the agricultural acts we will need to undertake to survive and thrive in the coming decades – and on how reclaiming food – growing it and cooking it – might preserve or maybe remake our democracy. The title is drawn from Thomas Jefferson’s claim that it was a nation of independent farmers who were best able to create and sustain democracy, because personal independence made it possible for us to make moral and just choices.

My only trouble with my title is that it places so much emphasis on the growing of food, and thus distracts us from something even more central. A lot of people have talked and written about how urgent it is that we change our agriculture, that we move away from the tremendously destructive system and start maximizing production per acre, while reducing the damage of a fossil fueled agriculture which includes global warming (nitrous oxide from industrial fertilizers, methane from industrial livestock production, loss of carbon storage ability in the soil and high carbon levels from energy used in agriculture, shipping, transport, etc… are among the problems), soil and aquifer depletion and a host of other difficulties. I am one of the people writing about these things, and I believe all of us are right to put part of our focus here. But few of us have focused, except in the most superficial terms, on food, cooking and diet as the means to save the world.
And yet I do not think it is overstating things to say that how we grow food will always be secondary to how we cook and eat. If we are to survive the coming crisis, a surprising amount of it will depend on our ability to adapt our diet – and that will depend on our ability to cook and eat differently.

I suspect too many people it seems a small thing to talk about cooking, self-evident that when different things are in the stores or our gardens, we will eat differently. But I think further consideration will show that it doesn’t work that way. Consider the dual problem of hunger and malnutrition in the US. Overwhelmingly, these are problems of poverty, as you would suspect. But also, these are overwhelmingly cooking problems. That is, a number of people have shown that it is perfectly possible to eat nutritiously and cheaply – for example, that a whole grain, vegetarian, even organic and local diet is possible on a food stamps budget. No one in their right mind would rather see their kids go hungry than eat this way. So why is hunger so endemic in the US? Part of it is lack of time – single mothers and their children are among the most likely people to be hungry in the US, and they have little time to cook. Often, as someone noted on this blog recently, older siblings prepare food for younger children, and about all they can handle are boxed mac and cheese. Some of it is dietary preference.

But some of the problem is simply not knowing how to cook cheap foods. For example, my local food pantry observed that flour is one of the last things to leave their shelves – because few of their patrons know how to make their own bread or baked goods. When dried beans are given out, they must come with instructions, and often people don’t seem to follow them.

A large portion of the American poor *DO NOT KNOW HOW* to cook, and because of this, they *GO HUNGRY*. That is, anyone who thinks that when we have different foods available we’ll all just eat them isn’t paying attention to the evidence of their own eyes – in fact, so few of us have cooking skills, particularly skills of the necessary sort, that would allow us to adapt easily to dietary changes. No doubt some of us will – particularly those who are most literate and have the most time to adapt. But the truth is in front of us – people who don’t know how to cook don’t find it easy to learn, even when the stakes are terrifically high.

This brings me back to these recipes. I wanted to test them out because I thought it might be useful to look at the comparatively small class of Americans who do still cook from scratch regularly, and see how applicable what they’ve been learning is to the future. So I took three recipes I’ve recently received from the nameless website – roasted vegetable enchiladas, whole wheat cornbread and apple-cranberry crisp. All were advertised as quick, easy, seasonal and local, a meal to be prepared in 45 minutes or less (I think – I’m not clear on whether the timing was supposed to be cumulative). And I decided to prepare them completely from scratch, using little or no powered equipment, substituting whatever was missing in my home.
Now to be fair, this isn’t really much of a test. Because I store food, I have an extremely well stocked kitchen and all the equipment needed for low power cooking. That is, even if I couldn’t get to the store, or buy much food, it would be a good while before I ran out of ingredients. Still, I thought it useful to describe my experience.

It also isn’t a test because I cook this way every day. I live nearly 20 miles from the nearest grocery store, and in my rural hamlet there are two places that do take out – both make pizza, neither delivers, and my husband and I cook better than either one. We produce 3 meals a day for our family, usually 7 days a week (we do eat out sometimes, but try to keep it to a minimum), and if we run out of something, we don’t go to the store, we make do. But even in my relatively isolated area, I don’t know a lot of people who cook, who cook like I do, like I suspect we may have to. I suspect a disproportionate number of my readers are serious cooks, who do eat and cook as I do - but it can be hard to remember how very unusual that is in our society.

The enchiladas began with roasted vegetables. They called for roasting peppers and tomatoes, neither of which are in season here now, but that was easy, I just left them out. So took sweet potatoes, onions, potatoes and carrots (called for) and added parsnips and turnips (not), tossed them with olive oil and some chili powder and threw them in the wood cookstove. Easy – I could have made these in the sun oven on a warm day, but we haven’t had one of those for a while. The next part was the dried beans, which I’d soaked over night (I’ve left that time out, plus the time getting the woodstove up and hot, plus the time spent splitting wood for kindling), which I put on the stove to boil. The recipe called for canned refried beans, but that’s not the sort of thing I keep around. If I hadn't had oil, I could have roasted the vegetables with water in the pan - I wonder what percentage of the population would know that?

Meanwhile, I set about making the cornbread. I took dried corn and put it in the grinder and ground it by hand. Then I ground the wheat for flour, mixed them together, added water, honey, butter and ooops…out of baking powder. Ok, I’ve got baking soda and somewhere, buried in the back of the kitchen is cream of tartar. It took about 10 minutes to find it, but I finally did, and was enormously relieved I didn’t have to figure out sourdough cornbread or wait until summer for grapes from which I can precipitate cream of tartar… Ok, mix it up, throw it in to the oven – nope, the 475 temp that I have it at for the veggies will not do. So we wait 10 minutes with the oven door open to get it down enough to bake bread. Ah well, probably won’t rise well in the oven, but it will still taste good.

Meanwhile, I’m making tortillas for the enchiladas out of purchased masa (yeah, to be fair, I should grow my own, but I don’t). I don’t have a tortilla press, so they come out a little thicker than I like, and I burn one, but not bad. This is time consuming, however, and I wonder how many people consider tortillas “quick and easy” – but I don’t know anyone making local tortillas. My guess is that the recipe authors exempted some parts from their "local" and "quick" distinctions.

Ok, the apple crisp. Plenty of apples galore, but no dried cranberries. I do have dried blueberries and some dried cherries – which to pick? Well, there are more blueberries, so those. I cut the sugar back by about ¼, because it is designed to sweeten tart cranberries, not sweet blueberries. It calls for lemon and vanilla – no lemon. Should I try cider vinegar to make it tarter? Leave the lemon out? I’ll add a little of the vinegar, and some orange zest to try and make it citrusy. It is supposed to be thickened with cornstarch, but I haven’t got any that I can find (I’m pretty sure there is some, somewhere, but eventually I give up so as not to burn the cornbread) and I don’t much like the stuff anyway, so I go and look up how to thicken with flour without getting lumps.

Roasted veggies and cornbread are done and cooling. Now the streusel topping. Grind more flour to mix with rolled oats – the recipe calls for white flour for the topping, but whole wheat will be good too. No nuts, ignore them (actually, I do have hazelnuts in their shell, but I’ve no intention of shelling them – the recipe calls for chopped walnuts, which presumably come from a plastic bag). White sugar only, but I’ve got molasses, and since molasses is extracted from brown sugar to make white, I mix a bit of molasses in with the sugar, sprinkle it over and off into the oven it goes – but I’d better haul more wood, the oven is cooling.

Now it is into the oven and the last step is to take the cooked beans, fry them with oil, garlic, and spices into refried beans . I mash them with the potato masher, then sauté them. A layer of tortillas goes down in the pan, then the beans, then roasted vegetables, then more tortillas, then a layer of tomato sauce that I’ve mixed with dried chiles and roasted garlic and chile vinegar I made – to me it tastes better than conventional enchilada toppings. The recipe calls for “enchilada sauce” or “bottled local salsa” – the former would hardly be local, the latter is unavailable right now - the only local salsa maker I know of that makes it from local ingredients is me, and my family ran out of salsa two weeks ago. Now cheese. I have local mozzarella, which I use. By rights I should have made it, but the last (and only) time I made mozzarella it didn’t melt very well.

Into the oven again. Ok, I’ve timed the whole thing – 3 hours and 46 minutes for my quick, easy meal. It was excellent, by the way. And of course, the whole thing is a little self-conscious - again, I'm not trying to pick on anyone. But a lot of what we've been trained to do as "cooking" in our quick, easy recipes is use items where someone else did a lot of cooking or processing for us. If we are to imagine a diet that depends on our garden economies, we have to imagine that we are doing the work.

I think about all the times I substituted one thing for another – how many people know that baking soda and baking powder are not interchangeable, but that you can add cream of tartar to make a passable equivalent? How many people do I know personally who believe recipes appear straight from the hand of some deity and would never, ever consider deviating from them? How many times have I posted a recipe somewhere mentioning “to taste” and had six people email me about exactly what I mean by that? How many people who cook based on Martha Stewart Living and Rachel Ray know how to make a quick, easy, healthy meal *really* from scratch, when you are missing half the ingredients? Most of our cooking is grocery store cooking - it requires no substitution, no adaptability, no understanding how ingredients go together and choosing among choices - they simply prescribe a set of practices. But cooking from a garden, without a trip to the store isn't always like that.

Someone once observed that you can tell what decade you are in by how long the “quick and easy” meals take. In the 1970s, a good portion took as much as an hour. By the 80s and early 90s 30 minutes was it. Amazon now counts 23 cookbooks advertising meals in 20 minutes or 15 minutes or less, and a number of them are best sellers.

Now there are 15 minutes meals in sustainable, from scratch cooking. They are called “salads” – or if you don’t count the time spent to make cheese, can jam or bake bread, maybe a sandwich. Even those who cook on a regular gas range, who have to cook from scratch aren’t going to do it in 15 minutes. That’s not to say there are no quick prep options – a lot of times things take longer, but you don’t have to do anything. I can assemble a pot of vegetable soup in 15 minutes, and set it on the back of the woodstove, ignore it for three hours, and then a meal is provided. Bread takes 10 minutes of attention, max – the rest of the time is rising and baking. If I was pushing myself, I could produce a pot of soup, a loaf of bread and a salad in 20 minutes of actual prep time – but 3-5 hours of advance planning for rising, cooking and baking.

It isn’t that there is no such thing as sustainable, quick food – there are a lot of options there. But there is no such thing as sustainable, *THOUGHTLESS* food – that is, meals we don’t think about until five minutes before we eat them. Either we think about them far, far ahead, when we stock up on pasta and can tomato sauce so that we can have five minute spaghetti come spring, or we think about them that day, when we soak the bulgur, harvest the parsley and tomatoes, dig out the lemon juice we froze when organic lemons were on sale, and sort out a sweet onion for the tabbouleh.

It seems beyond self-evident to say that the ability to cook is tied to our ability to eat, but it has not been in the first world. That is, most of us, except for the 12% who go hungry, have had the money to buy the processed bags of baby carrots, the premade yogurt, the restaurant meals, the canned beans. Now we may not have that money, or we may not be able to get them, or we may not be able to afford the harm that shipping them around does to the planet. And we have now raised several generations of people who do not cook.

And they really don’t – slightly over half of all American houses own a roasting pan. More than 10% do not even own a frying pan. 31% of Americans say they “never” cook. More than half of all thanksgiving meals include premade, restaurant and canned items – the one time of year we cook, we don’t. And this isn’t a class issue – Americans who say they “love” to cook do it slightly less often than Americans who say they are neutral on the subject. One study I saw some years ago (and can’t cite because I can’t find it again) notes that people who own no cookbooks, and people who own 30 or more cookbooks both eat the vast majority of their meals from premade ingredients and restaurants – the only difference is that one group eats at diners and fast food places, the other eats at more expensive restaurants. But neither are cooking, and neither are cooking the way they will need to – even the people who have the best information and who say they love to cook aren’t doing it day in and day out, and they aren’t practiced at the kind of cooking we’ll do in the future.

And even those who grow food have trouble eating it. Bart Anderson, in an essay a few years ago in _Permaculture Activist Magazine_ noted that almost no one has made the connection between *growing* the food and actually eating it. Now I’m growing tons of Jerusalem artichokes and groundnuts too – but they haven’t replaced potatoes as my staple foods yet. If they ever had to, I could do it, and I flatter myself I’m a good enough cook to make it taste good too – but appetite fatigue is a real risk for children, the elderly and the ill. Sudden changes in diet can be so stressful that people simply stop eating – and those who are most vulnerable suffer malnutrition and illness as a consequence. Some even die. It is not enough to say “Oh, I’ll eat like this when I have to.” The learning curve is simply too steep, and the stakes too high.

My own observation is that in many cases, it is harder to learn to eat and preserve what you grow all the time than it is to grow it. That’s even truer as we begin eating less common foods, or moving towards a truly local diet. We are making an enormous change in our diets, and in our society as a whole. Food is more than fuel – It is culture, love, happiness, comfort, a part of who we are. How we eat and what we eat is part of our identity – far more than what we grow. We are about to change our identities in a profound way. And at the root of this transition is the question of time – the quick and easy 3 hour meal requires someone to be around to cook it, watch over it, check on it. With a majority of households working hard to make ends meet, we encounter a bind – we could make ends meet better if we didn’t have to buy our food at restaurants, but cooking quickly and sustainably requires knowledge, experience and the time at least to learn how to do it. Most often, it requires someone at home.

Aaron and I probably won’t change the title of the book, or at most we’ll add “A Nation of Cooks” to the title somehow. But the truth is this – a nation reared on instant and quick and easy is about to make a very hard transition – one that transforms the question of what to have for dinner to “how shall we transform our very society down to its deepest roots." Now the good thing is that I suspect that much of this transition will improve our lives, our health and a whole host of other things. But it will be hard, and harder still until we recognize that as challenging as getting 100 million farmers and gardeners will be the creation of 200 million home cooks.

Sharon

Food for the Solstice

2007-12-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

With the solstice, and the darkest night of the year, comes final evaluations of the year's food production. The data are mostly in, the news is quite bad. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a74e1668-ac42-11dc-82f0-0000779fd2ac.html

"The US Department of Agriculture has predicted that global corn stocks will fall to a 33-year low of just 7.5 weeks of consumption, while global wheat stocks will plunge to their lowest level in at least 47 years at 9.3 weeks."

And there's this:http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2221372,00.html#article_continue

"The risks of food riots and malnutrition will surge in the next two years as the global supply of grain comes under more pressure than at any time in 50 years, according to one of the world's leading agricultural researchers.

Recent pasta protests in Italy, tortilla rallies in Mexico and onion demonstrations in India are just the start of the social instability to come unless there is a fundamental shift to boost production of staple foods, Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, warned in an interview with the Guardian."

This blog will be quiet for a bit, while we enjoy the rebirth of the cycle of light and darkness, and relax in the quiet time of the winter. For those of you celebrating Christmas and Yule and the Solstice, I wish you a good holiday. And as we go into this time of feasting, pleasure and joy, I hope each of us will think hard about what our role in averting hunger can be in the new year.

Some of us will plant gardens, or expand the ones we have. Some of us might start selling a little more food. Some of us may volunteer with local food security programs or poverty abatement groups. Perhaps we'll give talks at our local church, synagogue, mosque, temple, community center or farmer's market about local food and food security. Perhaps we'll bring food to a neighbor and let them taste the lush glory of local eating.

Maybe we'll start a farmer's market or a coop. Maybe we'll talk to a neighbor or three about the importance of local food systems. Maybe we'll run for zoning board and change that rule about backyard chickens. Maybe we'll get some chickens this year, or rabbits or worms or bees. Maybe we'll work on preserving open space for the animals already here on the planet.

Maybe we'll join Seed Savers, pick out a single variety, and commit to maintaining it in perpetuity so that it doesn't disappear from the earth. Maybe we'll grow a new crop, or more of it, and donate to our food pantry or a local low income family. Maybe we'll make a donation to the Heifer fund or another charity that supports local food systems. Maybe we'll give a little more, and live with a little less and be happy.

Maybe we'll buy more local food, and less from the supermarket. Maybe we'll encourage our local schools or restaurants to buy from local farmers. Maybe someone will start a seed company, microbrewery or a CSA. Maybe we'll get our town to plant fruit and nut trees instead of regular street trees, or start a permaculture forest garden. Maybe we'll start a Victory Garden campaign in our town, city, state... Maybe we'll start thinking of "Victory" as not something you get from war, but from a world where no one goes hungry.

Maybe we'll learn to cook something new from scratch, or teach someone else how to cook staple foods. Maybe we'll do something to promulgate the joys of a really local diet, or explain the problems of CAFO meat and industrial agriculture to someone who doesn't understand. Maybe someone will run for office, and change agricultural policy in your region. Maybe we'll feast gloriously, and eat a little lower on the food chain the rest of the time.

Maybe we'll can or dehydrate something this year, ferment or preserve something we've never tried. Maybe we'll teach a neighbor, a friend, a school class how to put up food, or how to forage. Maybe we'll get our kids to eat the kale this year,
even if we have to disguise it somehow. Maybe we'll get our spouse to eat it too.

Maybe we'll build soil, add organic matter, and sequester some carbon this year. Maybe this year will be the one we give up the chemicals, or the gas powered tools. Maybe this year we'll stop treating the earth like dirt.

Maybe we'll do what we've been doing all along, only more and harder, because we understand what is at stake. Maybe we'll take on a new project, marshall our time and energy a little better. Maybe we'll start tentatively and gain confidence, or take courage and go further with this than we ever have. Maybe one of us will make a difference, or all of us will.

Remember, there are moments that are dark - it isn't just seeming. But the light comes back every year, and it can come back in the face of any darkness. Be the light.

Sharon

The Best Books About Nearly Everything - Part II - Books to Help Us Regenerate

2007-12-18T06:20:00.001-08:00

I assume most of you saw Michael Pollan's essay on "sustainability" and our food system, but just in case: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16wwln-lede-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&oref=slogin&oref=slogin Now "sustainable" is a word I've never much liked ever since the assholes at the World Bank began appending the term "development" to it. But I've used it because it conveys something, and I haven't been able to think of a better choice. My friend Keith Johnson, Permaculturist extraordinaire uses, however, "Regenerative/Degenerative" in place of "Sustainable/Unsustainable" - and when he mentioned it while forwarding the Pollan piece, it was like a lightbulb going on - YAY - a better word! I've never liked any of the proposed alternatives so much - after all, we're past the point of sustenence - we have to repair what is broken now.

So here are books I recommend to help us regenerate our society. When I have a chance I'll do a third such post on some other areas, but space is limited, so here's what I've got. Coming in the next post - food preservation, livestock, sewing, knitting, bicycle, soil regeneration, grassroots organizing, brewing, and non-electric vehicle repair and a host of other things. BTW, I welcome suggestions in the comments section, and I strongly suggest people looking for recommendations read the comments section of both posts. There's a lot of wise information there.

Part II: Books to Fix What Is Broken

New Visions for Society

The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies. Zed Books, London: 1999. This underrated, under-read book proposes a real and meaningful alternative to conventional Marxist/Capitalist debates, and also writes from a perspective focused on women and families. A superb book.

Earth Democracy:Justice, Sustainability and Peace. By Vandana Shiva. South End Press, Cambridge: 2005. Shiva draws the link between environmentalism and democracy quite clearly here.

Powerdown:Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg. New Society, Canada: 2004. Heinberg takes a serious look at what the possibilities are going into peak oil.

Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth by Bill McKibben. Milkweed Editions, Canada: 2007. Other places in the world have managed to navigate some of these problems. McKibben tells us how. By far the best of McKibbens many good books.

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans… by Rod Dreher. Crown Forum, New York: 2006. Dreher makes the case for a conservativism of conservation, moving right and left together to the sustainable center.

The Logic of Sufficiency by Thomas Princen. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA:2005. Wise and imaginative, Princen dares to propose an alternative vision to our present economy and culture of “efficiency.”

Low Energy Life

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende. HarperCollins, New York:2004. A lovely, poetic account of the author’s experience living with a minimal level of technology.

A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity by Wm. Coperthwaite. Chelsea Green, White River Junction VT: 2004. Coperthwaite has spent years developing a democratic way of living – homes that can be afforded and achieved by even the poor, an axe and a chair that anyone can make. This is a beautiful and useful book.

The Plain Reader: Essays on Making a Simple Life. Ed. Scott Savage Ballantine Books, New York: 1998. From the practical to the philosophical, this book offers a vision of people all over the country living imaginative, plain lives.

Homesteading and How to Do Nearly Everything – Big Books That Cover Lots of Ground

The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book By Carla Emery. If you could only take one book from this list, this would be the one. Carla tells you how to grow food, cook it, eat it preserve it, and how to do a million other things. It truly is an encyclopedia of sustainability, and despite the word “Country” in it, everyone can use this book.

When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival. By Matthew Stein, Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe: 2000. This book takes you clearly through what you need to know about every imaginable subject in a sustained crisis, and gives clear, solid information and lots and lots of further references. When I want to know something about something I know nothing about, I often go here first.

The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour. DK Publishing, London:2003. A beautiful book that covers how things were once done in Britain, Seymour offers a real sense of the scope of self-sufficiency. The emphasis is on country and rural life.

The Integral Urban House by the Farrallones Institute Sierra Club Books, San Francisco: 1979. This older book is a wonderful tool for a whole host of things, for city dwellers and rural ones. The emphasis, however is on urban dwellers and enabling them to live sustainably. A wonderful book.

The Contrary Farmer by Gene Logsdon. Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT: 1999. This book has no peer, except, perhaps, all of Logsdon’s other works. No one is as wise and funny and readable, and has as many ideas. No one is as willing to admit his own flaws and limitations, and no one has as few.

Permaculture, Design, Landscaping

Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway. Chelsea Green, Vermont: 2000. If Permaculture is a new concept to you, or you are attempting to begin transforming a small yard or area on Permaculture principles, this is the best book out there, bar none. In fact, I’m tempted to say it is the best book on Permaculture period that is out there. While others may cover more territory, none of them are as clear, thoughtful and beautifully written as this one.

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability By David Holmgren. Holmgren Design Services, Victoria AU:2002. Holmgren, the less famous founder of Permaculture, has a full grasp of the application of Permaculture to a lower energy world - he was ahead of the curve on both peak oil and climate change. Lots of great information here.

The Permaculture Design Manual by Bill Mollison. I’m not sure reading Mollison is always a good idea – he can be as obfuscatory as he is enlightening. But he’s a genius, and there’s always good stuff to be had in genius. But if it gets irritating after a while, no, it isn’t just you.

Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier. Toensmeier and Dave Jacke have also written an enormous, two volume tome about Forest gardening in temperate climates. Both are valuable. But the giant encyclopedia is representative of an anality so profound it puts my own to shame – these books are overkill. In Perennial Vegetables Toensmeier has managed to produce an admirable book of reasonable scope with a great deal of helpful information about how you can eat without replanting all the time. Check out the others if you are interested in a more expansive vision – or if you need a big doorstop. They really are of great value to temperate forest gardeners - but like JK Rowling, could have benefitted from a much more assertive editor

The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping by Rosalind Creasy. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco: 1982. The emphasis here is on food plants that are beautiful enough to be used even on covenanted lawns. Invaluable!

Adapting Your Home

Insulate and Weatherize by Bruce Harley. Taunton Press, Newtown, CT: 2002. Widely recommended. The only book on this subject that meets Linda Wigington's rigorous standards - and she knows more than anyone about this.

No Regrets Remodeling by the Editors of Home Energy Magazine. Energy Auditor and Retrofitter Inc, Berkeley: 1997. Green remodeling that actually works.

The Backyard Builder: Over 150 Projects for Your Garden, Home and Yard. Ed. Jon Warde. Random House, New York: 1994 Includes plans for a compost drum, orchard ladder, root cellar storage bins.

The ‘Have-More’ Plan by Ed and Carolyn Robinson. Storey Books, North Adams, MA:1983. More than 50 years old, this book still hasn’t lost much of its relevance. The original homesteading design book.

The Reader’s Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual by the Readers Digest Association, Pleasantville, NY: 1973. A friend of mine with much experience in the building trade noted that he could build an entire house with just this book.

The Handyman’s Book:Essential Woodworking Tools and Techniques. By Paul N. Hasluck. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, 2001. Most woodworking books emphasize power tools – this is a refreshing change, showing you how to build with and use hand tools.

Water and Outputs

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by J.C. Jenkins. Jenkins Publishing, Grove City PA:1994. What we do with our outputs is at the heart of how we adapt. This is a very important book. It is also surprisingly fun to read.

The Home Water Supply: How to Find, Filter, Store and Conserve It by Stu Campbell. Storey Books, Pownal, VT:1993. Water will be one of the great problems of the coming decades. We all need to know more about our water systems.

Playing with Fire: Heating and Cooking

The New Woodburner’s Handbook by Stephen Bushway. Storey Press, Pownal, VT: 1992. If you are going to heat with wood, be sure to know what you are doing. This book is definitive.

Build Your Own Earth Oven: A Low-Cost, Wood-Fired Mud Oven by Kiko Denzer. Handprint Press, Blodgett, OR:2000. A wonderful, clear book on how to cook cheaply. Great bread recipe as well! We've done this, and it works beautifully.

Capturing Heat and Capturing Heat II by the Aprovecho Research Institute, 1996. These two pamphlets show how to build a high heat, low fuel use rocket stove, solar oven, masonry stove and other valuable heating and cooking resources. Heating and cooking fuel will be enormous issues in the future, and unless we want to live in a deforested moonscape, we must find efficient ways to keep warm and fed

Gardening and Small Scale Farming Note: People always ask me what one gardening book they should buy - there isn't one. All gardening books are inadequate in a host of ways. You need a gardening library - or a good local library. Also, all gardens are fundamentally local, so seek out writers who focus on your own area whenever you can.

Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. Rodale Press, Emmhaus, PA:1981. There is no one garden book that covers everything, but for new gardeners, there is no better single volume.

Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots by Sharon Lovejoy Workman Publishing, New York: 1999. There can be no more essential work than teaching the next generation to garden. A wonderful, inspiring book for everyone who loves a child.

How to Grow More Vegetables… By John Jeavons. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, 2002. Technical and deep, this book may have more to do with saving our lives than any other. Jeavons shows how to produce enormous amounts of food in small spaces. The tables in the back alone are worth the price of the book.

One Circle:How to Grow a Complete Diet in Less than 1000 Square Feet. Ecology Action Publications, Willits, CA: 1985. An invaluable companion to the above, David Duhon actually lived on what he could grow in a very small space, and describes what crops and diet can enable us to grow our own food.

Rodale's Successful Organic Gardening: Fruits and Berries by Susan McClure, Rodale Press, Emmhaus, PA: 1996. Beautifully illustrated, this book goes point by point through the basics of raising small fruits and nuts, with a plant by plant guide, including variety recommendations. There are similar books for vegetables and tree fruits, both are good.

Organic Orcharding: A Grove of Trees to Live I by Gene Logsdon, Rodale Press, Emmhaus PA:1981. I like Logsdon's older book better than any current book on organic fruit tree growing. Very readable, very smart, very useful.

Small Scale Grain Raising by Gene Logsdon Rodale Press, Emmhaus, PA:1977. An absolutely essential book, very important going into the future, the only book on this subject, and absolutely definitive. I believe it is available for download.

The Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables From Your Home Garden All Year Long. By Eliot Coleman. Chelsea Green, White River Junction,VT: 1999 How to eat fresh food all year with minimal inputs – a necessary and well written book.

Incredible Vegetables from Self-Watering Containers by Edward C. Smith. Storey Publishing, Pownal, VT: 2006. Self-watering containers (aka Earthboxes) can produce enormous yields, expanding our food production capacity. See my post on this here:

Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth. Seed Saver’s Exchange Inc., Decorah:IA:1991. If we are to have truly self-sustaining food systems, we must save seed. This book tells you how.

Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties:The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving by Carol Deppe. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT: 2000. You think this sounds too arcane? Not at all - the book includes a very readable discussion of genetics and seed viability, easily understood by anyone, that everyone who plants a seed needs, regardless of your other intentions. And all of us who save seed *ARE* breeding plants - it can't be avoided. A wonderful, enjoyable, necessary book.

The Bountiful Container by McGee and Stuckey. Workman Publishing, New York: 2002. This is the best single book about container based food gardening out there.

Weedless Gardening by Lee Reich. Workman Publishing, New York: 2001. A good introduction to mulch gardening and the science behind it.

Growing 101 Herbs that Heal by Tammi Hartung. Storey Books, North Adams, MA 2000. The best book I know about growing medicinal herbs.

Medicine

Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook by Werner, Thurman and Maxwell. Hesperian Foundation, Berkeley: 2002. Everyone should own this book, read it, and be familiar with its information. This book was designed for people in rural areas who might not have access to medicine, but represent a powerful blueprint for communities in America who may also struggle to get the medical care they need in a lower energy society with climate related health problems.

Where There Is No Dentist by Murray Dickson. Hesperian Foundation, Palo Alto: 1983. Millions of Americans have no access to dental care right now. This book fills an enormous gap in our culture.

Where Women Have No Doctor by Burns, Maxwell and Shapiro. Hesperian Foundation, Berkeley: 1997. Again, an essential resource for those who may have no access to women’s medical care – either today or in the future.

The American Red Cross First Aid and Safety Handbook by the American Red Cross Society and Kathleen Handal M.D. Little, Brown and Co. New York:1995. This represents the absolute minimum an ordinary person should know about first aid.

Heart and Hands: A Midwife’s Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by Elizabeth Davis. Celestial Arts Publishing, Berkely:1997. Several of the midwives I’ve met recommend this book as one of the best books on home birth and midwifery. Everyone in community must have someone who can safely deliver a baby if it is needed. An excellent text.

Ditch Medicine:Advanced field Procedures for Emergencies by Hugh Coffee. Paladin Press, Berkeley: 1993. This is the book you hope you never, ever have to use. But in the mean time, make sure someone in your community, ideally several someones, have read this book.

The Bates Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking by Bickley and Szilagyi. Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, New York: 2007. This is a highly technical and extremely expensive book, but also very important. Knowing how to examine someone and take a medical history is essential to providing even basic community medical care.

Herbal and Alternative Medical Care

The Green Pharmacy: New Discoveries in Herbal Remedies for Common Diseases and Conditions… by James A. Duke, Ph.d. Rodale Press, Emmhaus PA: 1997. James A. Duke is one of the world’s foremost herbalists, and this is an alphabetical (by ailment) guide to the use of herbal medicine.

Herb Contraindications and Drug Interactions by Francis Brinker, N.D. Eclectic Medical Publications, Sandy, OR: 1998. This highly technical work is essential for people using herbs. It provides exhaustive lists of potential problems. Very much recommended.

Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria by Stephen Bulmer. Storey Publications, Pownal, VT: 1999. The wild growth of MRSA and other antibiotic resistant infections make this book absolutely essential.

The Herbal Medicine Maker’s Handbook: A Home Manual by James Green. Crossing Press, Berkeley:2000. Most books on herbalism assume that you will buy your remedies at the store, but this one offers real strategies for getting medicine from your yard.

The Textbook of Natural Medicine by Pizzorno and Murray. Churchill Livingston, New York: 2007. Very expensive new, and highly technical, this is not a layperson’s guide, but valuable for anyone who wants to go beyond ordinary lay knowledge.

Cookbooks

The More With Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre. One of four cookbooks in a series by the Mennonite Central Committee, all four focus on staple foods, meat used as a treat or seasoning, and accessible recipes. TMLC is great for basic, staple American-style reciples. _Extending the Table_ provides authentic ethnic recipes and stories from around the world and is my personal favorite. _Simply In Season_ focuses on seasonal eating and the _Simply in Season Children's Cookbook_ is the best kid's cookbook out there, bar none.

From the Earth:Chinese Vegetarian Cooking by Eileen Yin Fei Lo. MacMillan, New York: 1995. There are lots of recipes in American storage cookbooks for mock meat made from tofu and gluten. Most of them, frankly, suck. They don't taste anything like meat, and they don't taste particularly good, either. On the other hand, if you've ever eaten Chinese Buddhist cooking, you will realize that there exists the perfect fruition of fake meat cookery. It is very,very good. So if you think you may have soybeans and wheat for dinner any time soon, this is the cookbook to have.

Mediterranean Grains and Greens by Paula Wolfert. One of the more fascinating cookbooks I own. It is 350 pages of recipes using mostly whole grains and fresh greens. Most Americans would hardly believe it was possible to write such a cookbook, but it is not merely possible, but glorious.

The Soup and Bread Cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon. People borrow this book, and it is never seen again. I've given up lending it out, and now I make everyone get their own. It is a very simple concept - recipes for soup made of everything imaginable. Every vegetable, legume, etc... Soups with milk, soups with broth, even a few soups with meat (although the vast majority are vegetarian). And some bread and salad recipes to accompany them. The soups are the centerpiece. A definite keeper - under lock and key, if necessary.

The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. Lewis was one of the great figures of American cooking. She grew up in a community of farmers, African American descendents of freed slaves, and this book is an evocative and delicious link to that culture and its cuisine. This is real, seasonal, delicious country food, along with lovely narratives of what the life was like. The food is simple, and if you don't grow your own, you are unlikely to understand what is so beautiful about her emphasis on the natural, real flavors of food.

The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book by Laurel Robertson. Random House, New York: 1984. If you are going to grind your own to make your bread, you need this book.There's definitely an old fashioned, 1970s complete proteins and carob cookies feel to it, but who cares. There are hundreds of recipes for bread products using every kind of grain, and it is well worth having.

Local Food Systems

Coming Home to Eat by Gary Nabhan. WW Norton, New York: 2002. The first of the local food books, it remains one of the best, and is particularly useful for those looking to eat local in the West.

Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community by H.C. Flores. Funny and smart, with a strong leftist agenda, this is not so much a garden book as a food systems book. Worth a look.

Bringing the Food Economy Home by Helena Norberg-Hodge. Zed Books, London:2002. Norberg-Hodge analyzes the present food system and imagines an alternative, demolishing myths in her wake.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Racuous Year of Eating Locally. By Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. Harmony Books, New York:2007. Smith and MacKinnon had the disadvantage of their book coming out in the same year as Kingsolver’s, but both books are important and worth a read, offering different gifts.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. Harper Collins, New York: 2007. Lyrical and funny, wise and brilliant, if you read only one book about food, make it this one.

Parenting:

Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood by Sandra Steingraber. WW Norton, New York: 2001. No woman should ever enter the journey to motherhood without understand what industrial society has done to her body and her capacity to create life. A beautiful and disturbing book.

Last Child in the Wood: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. Algonquin Books, New York: 2006. Details the horrific damage we are doing to our children as we destroy the natural world.

Homeschooling and Ecological Education:

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich Marion Boyers Publishing, New York: 2002. Like all Illich’s books, wonderful, radical, inspiring, outrageous, ultimately hopeful.

Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect by David Orr. Island Press, Washington:2004. David Orr is wise and wonderful, and more fully grasps the problems of creating an ecological education than anyone I know of.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Friere. Continuum Publishing, New York:1993. A classic. First, they tell you that what you know doesn’t matter – this is the truth that underlies much of the difficulty in our educational system. Every teacher (and this means all of us) should read this book.

Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. By John Taylor Gatto. New Society, BC:2005. Gatto, a former teacher, sees little hope for “the system” but a great deal of hope for new ideas.

52 Weeks Down - Week 31 - Learn to Do It Yourself

2007-12-17T09:04:00.000-08:00

http://ago.mobile.globeandmail.com/generated/archive/RTGAM/html/20070720/wwente20.html. I liked this article, in part because I identify. I grew up with handy parents, and I learned some things from them - cooking, chopping wood, making do - but I also missed out on others. Even though my step-mother is a talented woodworker, I never learned. Even though she does plumbing repair, I didn't pay attention. My father hunted, but I wasn't interested when he might have taken me and taught me to be a good shot. My grandmother and aunt were remarkably talented at knitting, sewing and crocheting - I've had to painfully learn those skills over myself without them. Can I just say how badly I'd like to have my adolescence and early adulthood back, so I could PAY ATTENTION when people showed me useful things.

Almost all of us need to learn new/old skill sets - even if we already cook, we have to learn food preservation. Even if we already build thing, we may have to learn to do them with hand tools, rather than power tools. And in some areas, we're starting from 0. What is timber framing, anyway? What's the difference between straw and hay, and which one do I want to mulch my garden with? How do you make a pickle? How do you make a running stitch, and will that fix that hole? What's greywater?

It can seem utterly overwhelming - so many things to do, so little time. Why even start?

Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first is while I'm a big fan of enriching your neighbors, and we do hire out for a number of projects, the truth is that sometimes, things just need to get done - now, by you. The second is that many of us may not always have the money to pay someone else, or the option of hiring out in tough times. And finally, even if you don't want to do something yourself, knowing the basics of how it works means that you don't have to get taken by someone you hire. Greenpa has a great post about that here, in regards to researching, purchasing and installing solar panels (something I have no idea how to do, btw ;-): http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-solar-panels-are-up.html.

The thing is not to get overwhelmed. Just go ahead, and figure it, get started, and expect to make some stupid mistakes. Accept that it will take a good long while before this is as natural to you as it was to people who learned it from childhood - but that it will come. I'm not a patient woman, and the part where you sort of know how to do something but it takes six times as long as it takes a skillful person, you keep messing up and every step is painful is *NOT* my favorite part of anything. I get frustrated easily, and I just want to skip ahead to being a natural. But it doesn't work that way. You have to suck at things for a while first.

The best way to learn anything is to apprentice yourself to someone. Call up your neighbor the bow hunter, your grandma the canner, your uncle Al who builds boats, and say "I want to learn what you know - can I come hang around and help you. I'll do scut work if you tell me how." This is both flattering and useful, and most people will really like it. Books are good too - they can tell you the basics, and you can really learn a lot from good books - my favorite books for hands on type skills are books written for kids - they tend to be very, very clear in their directions, while books written arean't always. The internet is obviously a powerful tool too - video, for example, is wonderful. Taking classes can be great - but the absence of any of these things shouldn't keep us from starting, nor should our fear of failure ever prevent us from goinger forward

And eventually, your job is just to dive in. Never baked bread before? Well, there are some bad, horrible things you can do with baking break (a college roommate of mine somehow managed to make a loaf of bread that had the density of a collapsed star and the smell of newly made vodka - I still don't know how he did that), but if worst comes to worst, your compost pile will happily eat them. When you screw up, laugh and try again. And most of the time, things will come out fine.

So get a piece of cloth, and start cutting out quilt squares. Get a hammer, some nails and a saw, and build something. Got a broken appliance? Take it apart - maybe you'll fix it. At least you'll start to know what the inside of a toaster or a radio looks like.

The thing is, you probably will make messes, and horrible mistakes. But you'll also learn a lot - including some things that no one can tell you. No one, for example, can tell you whether you really do need a spinning wheel or if you can make do with a drop spindle until you know how much spinning you'll do and how you like to do it. No one can tell you whether you'll want a chainsaw or if you can be content with a bucksaw until you've tried. And once you've established some basic competence, you know whether you are going to like this enough to need an expert's equipment or if the cheap version will do you fine.

And then it is on to the next thing - read, research, apply, and while you keep applying, once you have some fluency and mastery, on you go to the next project. Feeling incompentent regularly makes you humble ;-). And getting competent regularly makes you proud.

So instead of lamenting what your Dad knew that you don't, just try it. Pretty soon you'll be calling up Dad and asking to borrow his belt sander.

Sharon

The Price of Things

2007-12-14T06:19:00.000-08:00

John Michael Greer has an interesting article about agriculture over at energy bulletin here: http://www.energybulletin.net/38349.html, because of its emphasis on the paying of a (largely unspecified) price for things. Generally speaking, I approve of Greer's willingness to be clear on the fact that transitions are not always easy - I think there are threads in the peak oil and climate change movements that both overestimate and underestimate the sheer amount of trauma change will cause - I think generally Greer, who doesn't sanitize things, but also is alive to possibilities, does a good job.

But here, I think, Greer's vision of a future agriculture falters, based, I think on an implied mathematics in which the full price of one side of an equation (the cost of transitioning to a sustainable agriculture) is laid up against an account that elides the costs of the other side of the equation. That is, Greer is right to want us to be open about the price of transitioning to another sort of agriculture. But he potentially overstates the price of this transition, by ignoring the gains offered in such a change, and thus, leaving readers with a misleading sense of the balance sheet.

This is not an error made by Greer alone, and I use this article as an example in part because I think it is a useful demonstration of how much what we "know" is naturalized into our lives so that we cannot see the consequences. I admire Greer's writing and thought, and don't intend to single him out here - but his are assumptions I see made often, and worth deconstructing.

Allow me to quote Greer's claims about the "price" we are likely to pay at length here.

All these transformations and the others that will come after them, though, have their price tag. The central reason why modern industrial agriculture elbowed its competitors out of the way was that, during the heyday of fossil fuel consumption, a farmer could produce more food for less money than ever before in history. The results combined with the transportation revolution of the 20th century to redefine the human food chain from top to bottom. For the first time in history, it became economical to centralize agriculture so drastically that only a very small fraction of food was grown within a thousand miles of the place where it was eaten, and to turn most foodstuffs into processed and packaged commercial products in place of the bulk commodities and garden truck of an earlier era. All of this required immense energy inputs, but at the time nobody worried about those.

As we move further into the twenty-first century, though, the industrial food chain of the late twentieth has become a costly anachronism full of feedback loops that amplify increases in energy costs manyfold. As a result, food prices have soared – up more than 20% on average in the United States over the last year – and will very likely continue to climb in the years to come. As industrial agriculture prices itself out of the market, other ways of farming are moving up to take its place, but each of these exacts its price. Replace diesel oil with biodiesel, and part of your cropland has to go into oilseeds; replace tractors altogether with horses, and part of your cropland has to go into feed; convert more farmland into small farms serving local communities, and economies of scale go away, leading to rising costs. The recent push to pour our food supply into our gas tanks by way of expanded ethanol production doesn’t help either, of course.

All this will make life more challenging. Changes in the agricultural system will ripple upwards through the rest of society, forcing unexpected adjustments in economic sectors and cultural patterns that have nothing obvious to do with agriculture at all. Rising prices and shrinking supplies will pinch budgets, damage public health, and make malnutrition a significant issue all through the developed world; actual famines are possible, and may be unavoidable, as shifting climate interacts with an agricultural economy in the throes of change. All this is part of the price of adaptation, the unavoidable cost of changing from a food system suited to the age of fossil fuels to one that can still function in the deindustrial transition.

The same process can serve as a model for other changes that will be demanded of us as the industrial system moves deeper into obsolescence. Adaptation is always possible, but it’s going to come with a price tag, and the results will likely not be as convenient, abundant, or welcome as the equivalents were in the days when every American had the energy equivalent of 260 slaves working night and day for his or her comfort. That can’t be helped. Today’s industrial agriculture and the food chain depending on it, after all, were simply the temporary result of an equally temporary abundance of fossil fuel energy, and as that goes away, so will they. The same is true of any number of other familiar and comfortable things; still, the more willing we are to pay the price of transition, the better able we will be to move forward into the possibilities of a new and unfamiliar world.

It isn't entirely clear to me what sequence of events Greer is imagining - he allows the root causes of the malnutrition, public health problems and famine he imagines to remain vague, a vagueness that me suggests that he wishes ust to take these results as a given, and an inevitability without too much scrutiny. But I think we do need to scrutinize his claims, which seem to be that Industrial agriculture produced cheap food, and a transition to sustainable agriculture comes with two big bumps in the road - long term rises in food prices, and the problems of shifting systems.

And to some degree, Greer is almost certainly correct. My objection is not to his articulation of the difficulties, but to his presumption that such difficulties must inevitably lead to a price as high as malnutrition, damage to public health and famine - this, I think he has not established, but is rather relying on the unbalanced equation mentioned above to substantiate.

To balance the equation, let's begin with the claim that we have produced more food at lower cost than ever before. There are a number of scholarly analyses that suggest otherwise. While Americans, for example, spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history, in _Bringing the Food Economy Home_ Helena Norberg-Hodge documents that this is misleading - in fact, if you account for the fact that most families are now two income households, we are paying more for our food as a percentage of income that we were before World War II and the great move to industrialization.

In addition, Chalmers Johnson documents the role that militarization has played in the food economy. The move of millions of young men and women who would have stayed on family farms into the workforce has encouraged, enabled and required enormous investment in military programs, to give working class, high school educated young men and women work to do. This money comes largely from our tax base, and if factored in, raises the price of food dramatically above all prior estimates. It is at least twice as expensive to shift your young people into the military and its subsidies and go to war as it is to let them grow dinner and eat it.

Were we, for example, in America to give up the project of empire, keep a defense-suited only, smaller military, and move the same tax subsidies into food price stabilization and (vastly cheaper) investments in agricultural job training for the young men and women who now go into the military, we could expect to see several million new young, healthy farmers, lower overhead costs for their training, medical care and lifetime disability from being blown up or blowing people up, and an enormous new body of food producers, with stable prices. This is only one possible paradigm, and one that obviously involves major foreign policy shifts, so is unlikely - but it is important to note that our food is not, in fact, cheap - the costs are externalized, and if we were able to either shift those costs that are externalized onto the general public either back to them, or towards more productive, useful places, we would reap enormous benefits.

The health costs of industrial food also exceed the likely rise in food prices in a small scale industrial agriculture. At this point, 1/4 of the US population has no access to health care at any price, and nearly half have no insurance. More than 1/3of the population spends more on medical care than on food. And the effects of better nutrition are well documented - longer lifespans in Europe during WWII and in Cuba during the special period suggests that a shift to garden agriculture can result not in malnutrition, but improved nutrition.

The reality is that food yields at present are counted only in the largest consumed staple grains - but the shift to industrial agriculture has resulted in these grains being planted to the exclusion of other foods, all foods lost in the agricultural stream. It is not just in the third world where more grain has resulted in worse nutrition, but in the rich world as well. According to Marion Nestle's _Food Politics) up to 1/4 of the US population is overweight *and* suffering from malnutrition, in the technical definition of the term which means suffering from multiple nutritional deficits. We think of malnutrition as a matter of starvation, but it is not - it is the lack of a nutritionally adequate diet, and that describes many Americans, and to a lesser extent members of other rich world nations. There are reasons to believe that a shift to small scale polyculture, and a reduced emphasis on grain agriculture would result in less malnutrtion, not more. There is every reason to believe it would result in substantially lowered costs for health care - whether those reductions in cost would come about quickly enough to help out the average family is debatable - probably not for baby boomers and other elders suffering from the consequences of a lifetime of eating industrial food. But is worth noting that Cubans saw lifespan increases and improved health not only among younger people, but among the elderly as well.

The nutritional density of the food we eat also matters as much as sheer quantity. We need a certain number of calories, of course, but the number of calories required depends in large part on our ability to meet basic nutritional needs through them. So, for example, organic produce that is in many cases 40% or more nutritious than conventional produce means that less food can still mean better nutrition. There are limits on how far this equation can be played, particularly among the elderly and children, but even normal weight adults can often live in substantially fewer calories than recommended provided they are the right calories, and that they maximize nutrition.

Greer's claim that it "became economical" to centralize agriculture also bears some scrutiny. As Peter Rosset shows in _Food is Different_, the total subsidies (overt and covert) to industrial agriculture over the last 50 years are measured in trillions of dollars. It is not, in fact, clear that it was ever more economical to centralize agriculture. As Jules Pretty has documented over and over again, low input, small scale agriculture results in a substantial increase in caloric output. His studies, covering more than 50 countries and 150,000 farmers suggest that small scale, low fossil input produce substantially more output - 150% or more, than industrial agriculture. The "economies of scale" that Greer mentions are mostly a myth - it is true that in terms of yield - that is, maximizing the production of a single crop per acre, organic yields at best can compete with but not vastly exceed present yields. But the truth is that we don't have to, as Americans mostly do, eat just corn in a variety of ways in every meal - diversified polyculture on a very small yield has a vastly greater output - that is total production of food calories and nutritional value, as Peter Rosset documents in his paper "Small is Bountiful."

The fact is, it may never have been economically sensible to centralize food production - and if that's true, we can expect to see that, again, if we shift social costs around wisely, we may not find ourselves paying so vastly much more for food that we cannot bear the price. The same is true about sheer quantities of food - a real and fair analysis must include the food we aren't growing in place of what we are, what we lost as well as what we gained.

I've written more about this in paper on the Green Revolution here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-much-did-green-revolution-matter-or.html, but as food writer Margaret Visser notes in _Much Depends on Dinner_, industrial agriculture improved grain yields, but in many cases reduced nutritional value, and in some cases, reduced the total number of available calories. The classic example was in rice paddy farming, where "higher yielding" rice varieties also had higher rates of shattering (more crop loss), were more vulnerable to pests and diseases (more crop loss), and because of their dependence on chemicals and fertilizers, killed the frogs and fish that were traditional sources of fat and protein, and destroyed the green weeds that provided nutritional balance. In the net, more grain often meant less food and worse nutrition.

It is a commonplace to believe that industrial agriculture has given us cheaper food. Why do we believe this? Not because it is definitively true - in fact, it is probably not. Even the World Bank now admits that small scale polyculture is both more productive and cheaper than fossil fueled agriculture. At best the subject is up to dispute. But so many of us "know" this that it is easy for us to begin from this assumption, and thus carry it out to argue, as Greer does, that a future of sustainable food is bound to be caught up in hunger and malnutrition.

And, of course, I've left out the obvious costs of externalization - the fossil fueled economy was only ever cheaper than the agrarian economy because we declind to pay the price of fossil fuels. That is, we shifted the price diachronically, onto future generation - right now, we are paying for planetary warming done when I was a small child. A whole host of such payments are coming due now. This I have left largely out, because there are few short term returns here to compensate for rising food prices - that is, the economic benefits here will largely fall upon our children.

Greer is not very clear on exactly what the price of a food transition will be, but he focuses on higher food prices. This is, to an extent, likely to be true. He is correct, for example, that a transition to an animal-powered agriculture will consume a substantial portion of our total production.

But again, let us balance the sheets. For example, Greer mentions the loss of about 1/3 of one's land production to animal feed. That is true for a horse-based agriculture (oxen use less, as do water buffalo), and it can be hard to imagine a society in which 1/3 of all food is fed to draft animals. But we presently live in a society where very nearly that amount of food is lost to waste. That is, 17% of our food is lost to disease and pests (up by more than 10% from the pre-pesticide era), and almost 20% more is lost, mostly in transit, or in the back of our fridges. The minimizing of waste created by local, organic agricultures (use of Integrated Pest Management can raise yields and reduce losses to below pre-green revolution levels as Pretty documents) would account for half of that. Grazing animals on unused marginal space and land unsuitable for tillage would increase production still further. And intensive, human scale agriculture would reduce the need for draft animals - such agriculture could be wholly human powered or powered by food producing animals, "pigging" up ground, or geese weeding gardens.

Here we come to the heart of the question - is a shift to a new kind of agriculture likely to be inherently disruptive? Are food prices likely to rise out of control, and shortages occur, creating famines and malnutrtion?

The answer, of course, is "it depends" which is somewhat different than Greer's claim that we have to be prepared to pay this price. It is certainly possible, even probable that the process of shifting to a new form of agriculture could be painful and disruptive. It is also within the realm of possibility that it could not be. Remember, we have made agricultural/cultural shifts before without famine. In World War II, Americans were warned to expect food shortages, and the Victory Garden movement arose to compensate - in fact, food shortages, despite enormous disruptions in the agricultural labor force, in farming techniques, in input availability and other sources never arose. While hunger did arise in Cuba and the Soviet Union, widespread malnutrition never did, nor did full scale famine. While the Soviet Union was a public health disaster, Cuba demonstrated that food system changes don't have to be accompanied by such a crisis. And it is worth asking whether, if a movement or national program to transition *in advance* of the crisis had arisen, even such consequences as were borne in both countries might have been avoided.

Now this is not World War II, George Bush is not Franklin Roosevelt, and we can all imagine here why a transition today might not be as smooth. Greer is almost certainly taking these points as a given, perhaps that's fair. But I personally prefer to call the proverbial (and apt) spade a spade here - the likelihood of system failure that Greer attributes to the process of adaptation is more accurately attributed to *poor* processes of adaptation. That may, horribly, be the best that Americans can hope for - but other rich world nations, which Greer includes in his famine list, are likely to do better. And it is not fully clear to me that even the American case is hopeless.

Nor are out of control food prices an inevitability. We can expect to see a rise in food prices, and expect the poor world to suffer from it. But a transition to a sustainable agriculture that includes large numbers of gardens can compensate by simply reducing the funds required in outlay for food. The average American yard is just over a quarter acre. That quantity of land can produce an enormous amount of food - not everything anyone might want to eat in most cases, but enough to allow Americans to compensate for rising farmer payments. Moreover, when farmers actually get to keep most of the money they put into their food, rather than passing it on to multinational corporations, it becomes feasible for farmers to make a real and adequate living. Simply eliminating middlemen, processing, shipping and supermarkets and stabilizing food prices would enrich most farmers beyond their present dreams of avarice.

In addition, we can expect to see other costs fall - health care is most likely one of these, but there are others. Housing costs are another - the decline (if there has been one) in food prices in the rich world over the last fifty years has been compensated for by rising costs for housing, and by a transition of housing into the role of "consumer of resources" rather than creator of them. Changes in zoning, home food gardens, but moreover, a move to cottage industry and small scale local economies, combined with an inventory of low cost "walkaway" housing and consolidated homes mean that US cost of living is unlikely to remain the same. It is true that energy costs will continue to rise - which is one of the reasons why a *good* transition matters so much - with guidance, average families can be guided away from a need for much fossil fueled power, to homes that operate with human power and little energy.

Public health disasters are not inevitable either - a low cost, low input health care system can be added to most local areas, improving the current health status of the 40% of all Americans who presently can't afford even the most basic of health care, because of lack of insurance access. We have as model medical infrastructure in places like Kerala and Cuba that expend little money (Cuba spends $176 per person for health care, and Kerala less than $40 per person) and manage to maintain similar lifespans and infant mortality rates to the US. Because most public health measures can be achieved with minimal energy inputs and education, there is no need for such a disaster to occur - again, the distinction between a poor transition, and the problems of transitioning, I think are important here.

It is true that in a very fast crash, such a transition might inevitably lead to famine, malnutrition and public health crises, but I find it hard to believe that Greer, one of the most reasonable voices in the discussion of "doom" has shifted his position to believe that we are all going to go straight to Mad Max. But a slower adaptive process, implied in Greer's opener, need not involve large scale shortfalls.

That is not to say that price won't be paid - it just isn't necessarily the one Greer articulates. The price would come in dietary and cultural changes, the amount of labor that food production would demand of us, and economic changes. Fairly rapidly, we would have to move to a society with many more people working on small farms, and most people growing gardens at home. The economic shift would be rapid and probably stressful - we have trained a workforce to mostly pass information and stuff back and forth, and they are going to have to learn to produce something. The educational and training component, as well as the economic and social shifts are likely to be difficult.

Schools will have to shift to teaching food production, workers will have to be rapidly retrained to grow food in gardens and on farms. Agricultural salaries will have to be ramped up, and there will be some price rises. Land will have to be acquired, large farms probably broken up and sold off, and intensive farming and gardening courses offered, along with cooking and food preservation.

All of us are going to have learn to eat regionally, to give up the fantasy that we can all eat the same thing all the time. Diets will shift away from high fat, high meat, high sugar consumption and transition to more vegetables, more staple root crops (easier to grow than grains on a home scale). More time and energy will have to be shifted into cooking and preserving food, and diets will become not only local, but seasonal. Farmers in regions will have to shift to crops that grow well in their area, and consumers will have to begin eating those crops.

Most of us are also going to have to find time to garden. The industrial economy, to the extent it goes on, is going to have to become less productive as we delve more deeply into subsistence.

But all of these transitions can come without famine, public health crises or rises in malnutrition - in fact, both the latter factors could be improved by a good transition. There will be a cost, and I do not think it is wise to underestimate what it will be - many people will mourn the days when microwave dinners filled with fat and salt were available to them. Many of us will miss our evenings curled up with a bag of cheetos. I am not joking when I say that these are real losses.

So too will some people suffer when the jobs they've trained for disappear under them and they are expected to get to work in their gardens and on farms. Men especially seem to struggle with the idea that they have lost their professional identity, and this will bring about real pain. Nor should we underestimate the physical pain of transitioning our bodies back to whole foods and regular exercise. All of these will exact prices.

But they are prices an order of magnitude different than the ones Greer articulates. His prices may still strike us - but they are a not an inevitable cost of adaptation, but a result of bad adaptation. And I do not believe that it is so self-evident that we cannot adapt well that we should begin from the assumption that we cannot. For example, it is hard to imagine a national program of leadership that led us to a large scale Victory Garden movement and an agricultural transition - but as I discussed recently in my article about Richard Heinberg's claims about how achieve such a transition, in Cuba and the Soviet Union, and in World War II, most of the largest food system changes that mitigated hunger came not from above, but from ordinary people in communities. That is, it is not evident to me that even if we have (and we do) a feckless, evil government, that the people cannot do better.

The price of change is often high. But I'm not sure I agree even with Greer's larger claim that we have to be prepared to pay this price. We were not prepared to pay the price of industrial agriculture - even now, most people do not seem to realize that industrial agriculture has something that can be described in the whoel as a "price" rather than fragmentary inconveniences. Instead, we were sold a set of benefits - told that industrial agriculture would do this and that. In fact, many of those benefits were false - they were lies and we did not get even what we were promised. But to the extent that industrial agriculture did do what we were promised, we took our promises and didn't ask the price. Which is why I think it is so important that we look carefully at the benefits of giving up industrial agriculture and shifting to a sustainable system, in relationship to the price. We need to know, just as clearly as real price we'll pay, what we get in return. And what we get is not just "avoiding the apocalypse" - there's more, much more.

Sharon