Architecture at Issue

I just finished working my way through the NYTimes Magazine Architecture issue, and the final reward was at the back, in personal essay by a small Indian architect on his reaction to the biggest, fanciest bit of architecture that India has put up to date. He points out the ways that "high tech" architecture avoids simple solutions for expensive, environmentally unfriendly ones, and the ways in which they avoid involving or engaging human beings.

Now I should say that for someone who spent the formative years of her adulthood training in the study of high culture (literature), I'm a disturbingly low culture sort of person. For all that I'm a Shakespearean by training, I often fail to be engaged by the debates and battles of contemporary high culture, not excluding literature. Quite often, I frankly couldn't give a shit. This may well be a personal failing. But I also suspect that great art of every kind comes out of cultures less priveleged and personally comfortable than our own. I suspect our wealth has come to destroy some of our capacity to make art. Or rather, I fear it.

I've seen a lot of "high culture" buildings from this half of the 20th century (although I've never lived in one - Eric lived in one of the infamous Groepius dorms at Harvard, but I merely lived in a succession of nearly equally hideous but much less famous ugly dorms at Brandeis), and I admit, I'm rarely engaged by them. They often fall in the category of "Well yes, but so?" which is my own personal, awkward construction. I invented it to apply to literary studies, in which scholars or novelists so often laboriously struggle to reach a conclusion that offers you nowhere else to go and illuminates nothing else (to be fair, I've written quite a few papers of this sort, which is why I'm so expert on them ;-). The nuances of most architecture can be appreciated in about 10 minutes - and when you are done appreciating (look, the building looks like a bird's nest, and the pipes are on the outside - wow!) what else is there to do - except, of course, if you live next to it or work in it, when its central deficiencies (office buildings suck no matter how you pretty them up) provide amusing commentary for your guests. There are buildings one goes back to again and again and sees something new in - but most of them are old, and none of them are office buildings.

The Times magazine is, of course, the mouth piece of a kind of middle of the road, capitalist liberalism, and so it sort of gets the conflict between the idea that buildings can be radical and the recognition that most of the so called radical buildings in the world are office buildings, where the most reactionary forms of capitalism are practiced. Or they are museums, monuments to establishment high culture and nostalgia. So they interview an architect who critiques the American habit of lighting buildings at night, never noticing any incongruity in his habit of building big wonking buildings so that people can commute to work in them from Pennsylvania, or they write an article about the problems of New Urbanist visions of Biloxi, and the tragedy of trying to bring overpriced yuppie housing to the poor. But the basic premise of contemporary architecture, which is about building big structures that are environmentally unsustainable, mostly ugly, and kind of pointless, is never really reconsidered, except by this lone person piece from India. And it is presented by the magazine as resolutely localized, about in part the loss of a local, indigenous culture, rather than a problem of architecture everywhere, which for the most part is about erasing nature, and people.

It isn't just architecture that has failed its form and function mission - literature has as well, and so has art in many cases. But writing a novel is comparatively cheap, and so is buying one. We all have the chance to control the environmental impact of our fiction - don't waste trees on it by buying it if it sucks. Art may need a bit of climate control to prevent deterioration, but compared to a building, it is perfectly green, no matter how much turpentine was used. Buildings are big, expensive, bits of something that is supposed to be art. But big and expensive and resource consumptive and good for business, with lots of lights and desks and climate control can never, ever, truly be radical. If it is art, it is radical, and it challenges basic assumptions.

That's not to say that architecture can't be radical. But stadiums and museums and office space can't truly be radical. Your house can be. Make a house that uses less, and is beautiful in a simple, clean way, that contains things made by you or friends, and that meets your needs but not every want, and has meaning, and you'll make better art than most practicing architects.

Sharon

Staple foods and the future - Food and Peak Oil Part II

Why, you ask, should I believe that anything about food is going to change in the future? After all, people are always predicting the end of the world, and, you point out, we've never gone hungry yet. In fact, many of us are carrying a few too many meals around on our waistlines - me definitely included. So why worry about food?

We burn 100 calories of fossil fuels, mostly oil and natural gas, for every calorie of food we eat. We burn oil and gas in every stage of food production - natural gas creates fertilizers, pesticides come from both oil and gas, soil is tilled and food is picked with oil based machinery, and with the labor of people who use trucks and cars to travel and follow the harvest. The food is packaged in plastic (oil), and then loaded on trucks, where it may be refridgerated or dried. It is then transported to your supermarket, which is heated, lighted, and run on oil. All to get that four calorie, totally out of season strawberry into your mouth.

There is nothing sustainable about this system - most vegetables are mainly made from water, and we're using a whole lot of energy to take water from places (like California) that don't have nearly enough, and ship it to places that already have plenty. And every bite funds OPEC and its dissidents. And we can't do it forever - as oil prices rise dramatically, food prices will rise. At the moment, Americans pay less for their food as a percentage of their income than anyone else in the world - but that's about to change. In fact it is changing - we've seen dramatic price rises in things like butter, produce, etc... in the last year, but not enough to make most middle class people stop buying them. That too will change.

It is rather more efficient to transport grains, which are shipped dry, often by rail, than it is to truck produce. So grains and beans may continue to be reasonably priced, particularly if grown locally. But you can expect that as energy prices rise and the economy falters, food prices will rise - a considerable problem when you've just lost your job, or your mortgage payment is about to jump with rising interest rates. But we must change our eating habits - we must start thinking about how to get the most nutritional value for the best price, how to produce food locally and at home, and rethink how we eat, before a crisis makes it happen in a much less positive way.

In one of last year's issues of "Permaculture Activist" there was an essay on common permaculture errors, one of which points out that permaculture has not fully explored the problem of how to adapt oureating habits in sustainable, practical ways. They've talked a lot about how to grow food, but less about how to change over from pringles to homegrown. I think that's absolutely true, and true of peak oil as well - one of the things wetend to elide, when talking about food and gardens, is how to actually change our eating habits, and how to adapt to the diet that is coming for us. Because it isn't a small issue - people who have other options won't eat things they don't like, no matter how deficient nutritionally their diet becomes, and adapting to a new diet in a time of crisis is not only difficult, it can be damaging, even fatal to the ill, elderly and children. If we're going to prepare for thepeak, we also have to prepare our bodies and our minds to eating sustainably.

Why do you have to change your diet now? Think back to the last time something really awful happened to you - someone close to you died, you were depressed, something horrible hit you. Think about what you ate. Not much, maybe. Or maybe just comfort foods. You certainly didn't try new recipes - you didn't have the emotional energy, nor would you even have bothered to eat if you had to try a lot of new foods. Now think about the last family celebration you had. What did you eat? Traditional foods of your community, your family, your culture. How much pleasure and satsifaction did you derive from eating those things? How much is your sense of family, community, celebration, joy, love tied up in what you eat? For many of us, food is a significant repository of our memories. Do you want to take those things away from your family at exactly the time they struggle the most?

That's why we all have to make the dietary changeover (if we haven't already) now - to establish new foods of our family and culture, or adapt the old ones to the new requirements of reasonable energy inputs, to ensure that our elderly, our children, the ill will not suffer or even die from the shock of dietary change, and to make sure we are all able to keep strong and healthy when we need it most. The changes involved strike me as taking place in two ways - the first, is eating from our food storage (and building a food storage). The second, eating locally produced, seasonal, *available* food all year round. They are seperate but inter-related issues. In a time of crisis, we may well have a year or two or three that we cannot eat fresh, local foods, and we need to find ways to make nutritious, balanced, tasty, enjoyable meals from our food storage, probably from limited ingredients. The second one doesn't seem difficult, but is - if you've ever produced a lot of food from your garden and animals, you'll realize how disconnected from seasonality our culture is - how many food combinations simply don't go together in nature (carrots and peas, the ubiquitous frozen duo, for example), or will beimpossible to replicate (I love sushi, but it isn't going to be a major feature of my diet here in upstate NY.) Eating seasonally usually involves eating a *lot* of something, for a short while, and then either not eating it again for a year, or eating it in a different preserved form - that is, tomatoes every day during the warm season, and then canned or dried tomatoes for the winter and spring. So for every major crop we produce, we need both ways to take the greatest advantage of it during its fresh season, and, if possible, a tasty way to preserve it and its nutritional value.

Now that doesn't necessarily mean you need to preserve 100 different crops - most cultures that rely on their own produce and meat have staple foodstuffs, a staple starch and a staple protein that are the mainstay of their diet and then add other ingredients as flavorings. Whether rice and fish, corn and beans, pork and corn, potatoes and milk, etc..., every peasant culture is based around easily grown starches and protein foods. In the first world, we've moved away from this habit - both in our culture's tendency to over emphasize the protein above the staple starch and in our endless demand for variety. But eating this way doesn't have to be unpleasant - while appetite fatigue is a real phenomenon, most people *like* and enjoy their staple foods, and are aware of subtleties and flavors within them that can't be perceivedby outsiders. So one of the first steps is to figure out what you are realistically going to eat if you have to live on what is grown in your climate, by you or some other local farmer. If you live in upstate NY, like me, as much as you may like rice (sadly, my staple starch of preference;-(), it isn't going to be your primary grain. Potatoes, corn, oats or wheat are much more likely. Look around at the native peoples in your area - what did they eat? Check out the farmers in your area -while small farmers may grow sweet potatoes, for example, if no one grows them on a large scale, they will probably not be available unless you grow your own.

Whatever you do, think now about food, and start finding ways of making basic foods delicious and part of your daily diet.

Sharon

Food After the Peak: Part 1: Domesticity and Common Sense

About a year ago I posted a series of articles on the ROE2 newsgroup about how to eat in a peak oil future where we are all poorer, food surpluses are smaller, and the energy we rely on for things like electric stoves, refridgeration, etc... is out of our means. I'm reprinting it in slightly modified form here, in case anyone is interested. The pieces are not in order - this was originally part 3.

If you were born after the 1940s, you were probably raised, to one degree or another, to believe that domestic work, including foodproduction is monotonous, brain numbing, unskilled, and pointless. In many cases we believe it is ideally performed, assuming you make enough money, by either a non-white, non-english speaking private employeee, or a non-white employee of a restaurant. At best, home food production issomething to fight about, a tedious conflict at the heart of your family life where you and your spouse debate yet again who will microwave the macaroni and cheese, and clean up afterwards. None of it is worthy of your intellect, of course.

If you are a 40 something, middle class liberal in your average American city, you probably would deny you think the above, but would point out that yourhigh powered job/busy schedule means that you can't help picking up fast food or pizza or eating out three nights a week, putting your kids in daycare, and hiring a lawn service and house cleaners. Of course it is more important, you argue, that you are working and paying all those people (whose skin color and/or gender is pure coincidence), and, of course, voting for the social changes that will inspire the eventual improvement of their situations. If you are an American conservative of the same approximate demographic, you probably want to know what my point is ;-) ;-).

Some facts about Americans and food.1. The wealthiest 20 % eat out for more than 60% of their meals. The poorest 20% eat out for the exact same percentage of their meals. The difference exists on only three levels - 1. how likely the restaurant is to be a fast food chain and how nutritious the meal is; 2. how many cookbooks that they never cook from are on the shelves of the kitchen they do not enter; and 3.How likely they are to say they "love" to cook, without ever actually doing it (in America, people who say they "hate" to cook actually eatin slightly more often than people who "love" it.)

2. One out of every 3 Americans eat in a fast food restaurant on any given day. More than half of all Americans eat 6 or more meals per week at a fast food restaurant. Think about that.

3. Of meals eaten at home, 65% involve the use of pre-processedor "prepared" ingredients, and 75% involve a microwave. 70% ofAmericans have no idea how to make stuffing not from a mix, 61%cannot make mashed potatoes from actual potatoes, rather than a box,and 90% buy boneless chicken breasts because they can't figure outhow to debone them.

4. A vast majority of American meals involved at least two of the following 6 ingredients - white bread, chicken breasts, ground beef, potatoes (more than 75% of which come in the form of either boxed potatoes, chips or frozen fries/tater tots), milk, ketchup.

I suspect a lot of people on this list feel rather superior at themoment. *I* bake my own bread, we say. I don't eat out that often. I never, ever go to McDonalds (just Taco Bell, and that only once ina while, right before a meeting, you know.) Ok, now imagine yourselves required to do the simple job of makingyour own food for a month. Piece of cake? Here's the deal. You haveto produce three meals a day, plus beverages and snacks entirely from whole foods in your storage, garden or barn, or easily obtained from local producers within 25 miles of your home. You must do so using sustainable methods, no microwave or electric stove. You cannot goto the store - you must use what you have, and ensure that it willlast. You have no refrigeration, so each meal must be precisely the right size to ensure no waste. You need to pay special attention tothe dietary needs and palates of the sick, elderly, children, pregnant and nursing mothers. You need to be sure that everyone gets enough to fuel increased physical labor (ie, walking places instead of driving, growing food in a garden) and a balanced and varied enough diet to make sure they remain healthy. It also must be palatable enough to ensure lack of waste and adequate consumption.

Meanwhile, you have to stretch limited food supplies, and limited supplies of fats, sugars, eggs, dairy and meats to ensure you will not go hungry later, if food supplies tighten. Of course, part of the job is the logistics and planning - did you start the sprouts on Friday, so that they would be ready for today's salad? Is the next batch of yogurt ready as the first one runs out? How early did you need to get up to get the bread baked before lunch? Did you plant a next crop of lettuce? How long can you keep those eggs warm? Did you grind enough flour for the pancakes, or do you have to go back and do it again? Are you sure that you've left enough baking soda for birthday cakes? Meanwhile, besides the ordinary work of food production, you have to inventory, maintain, track, manage, preserve, protect and prevent rot on the food you have in storage and coming in. That means that besides three meals a day, you need to keep track of how much sugar is left, to make applesauce when the last apples start to soften, dry and can those strawberries that come flooding in when the season starts, walk the six miles to the food market that is likely to have live chickens this week, forage for wild greens, make six gallons of sauerkraut, figure out away to make up for the absence of vanilla, white flour and eggs in your child's birthday cake, plan for extra guests and hospitality, as well as festival meals and special occasions.

Unskilled labor indeed. Try it for a month. Seriously, it will not only give you new appreciation for the value and creativity of domestic labor (and for the work done by human beings through most of history and in most poor cultures today), but it will also point up the fact that only part of the project is knowing good recipes for whole wheat. The rest is figuring out how to make good, interesting, balanced, varied food out of what you have 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, with your own hands,sustainable methods and local resources. If you don't know how to do it going into peak oil, you can expect your transition to be more painful, hungrier and harder all around.

Cheers,

Sharon (who hasn't managed to do it either)

How much more fun could it be.

Dick Cheney shot a friend of his while out quail hunting the other day. Now this is the kind of news we need more of. No nuance. No subtlety. Just the simple joy of seeing a real asshole look like a moron in public. And yes, it was the kind of stupid mistake that could have happened to anyone, and not a metaphor for any great truth about the administration - we don't need metaphor to critique them properly. But it was pretty funny.

My theory is that this was an elaborate attempt to act out some kind of Elmer Fudd fetish on Cheney's part. First there's the bit where he shoots his friend. Then, the white house press secretary decides, "Let's be vewy, vewy quiet." Sure. Maybe no one will notice that the president shot a guy. That seems reasonable. Yeah.

Duck Season! Lawyer Season!

Sharon

The Aristocrats

And now for something completely different....

If you haven't seen The Aristocrats, do. Or rather, do so if you are not easily horrified. The movie is gross, obscene, grotesque and vile in many ways. It contains descriptions of acts that go beyond horrible. And it is immensely funny. I really do hate movies. But I loved this one.

I loved it because it is a perfect piece of art, as perfect as the Chaucer's gloriously obscene Miller's Tale, or Rabelais. In fact, watching the movie for the first time was a little like reading "The Miller's Tale" was for me in high school. I was so overjoyed to realize that it was not the subject that mattered, but the execution, that the ordinary things of human life, gross and funny as they are, can be transformed into art - and funny art at that.

For those of you who have not seen it, it simply consists of comedian after comedian telling a truly vile joke, and meditating on its significance. Some of the performances are sublime - and the sublime performances are often the ones by people you wouldn't expect to be good. Billy the Mime proves that Mime can be very funny indeed. Gilbert Gottfried, who I've never liked, proves himself to have nerves of steel and inestimable comic timing. Bob Saggett, who I was barely aware of, tops them all.

The movie illustrates the distinction, also, between great standup and great comic acting. Most of the really wonderful comic actors can't deliver the joke to save their lives - Eric Idle, for example, literally can't get the words out. And whether intentionally or not, it also seems to illustrate that comedy is still, in many ways, segregated. This is a joke that originated in the white Jewish culture of vaudeville, and the film has only two black comedians telling the joke. Whoopie Goldberg does an admirable job, perhaps in part because of her gender, but Chris Rock is less memorable. One could only wish that Richard Pryor (who died so soon after its release) had taken a stab at the joke, both as a joke and to place race and the culture of comedy in its particular context.

I'm not sure I've ever laughed harder at a movie, and in part, I think the laughter is because there is an odd poignance to the whole thing, a poignance that the movie is aware of but does not belabor (and recognize how intensely rare that last is - that a film should ever fail to belabor an emotion) - because the joke simply isn't that good. What is funny is the imagination involved, and the energy required to keep the joke in the air like so many juggling balls. There's a nostalgia for old vaudeville culture, and for actors long gone (Martin Mull, for example, tells the joke exactly as Groucho Marx might have - the only pity is that he's still Martin Mull while doing it). But the poignance, buried inside the layers of orifices and fluids, is the determination to be funny, to create funny, out of such thin cloth.

Go see it. The world needs funny.

Sharon

The dismal science and its dismal results

It is no accident that economists begin their study of history at precisely the moment that the world discovered fossil fuels and began a century and a half of unprecedented expansion. And because economists begin their history there (everything else is pre-modern, and thus irrelevant), they have bought into Fukuyama's notion that we are at "the end of history." They believe fundamentally that growth capitalism has proven itself to be always and forever the way. And because of *that,* there are no economists in power in America who believe anything else.

I think it is easy not to realize how shocking that last fact is. But in no other academic field are the theoretical and intellectual boundaries so narrow and limited by a set of assumptions that the holders dare not question. Economists, because of the necessity of telling American politicians what they want to hear, have traded their scholarly integrity for power. Instead of allowing the ideas to lead them to the results, they have assumed a result, and spend their time debating the details. This is not only foolish, it is bad scholarship - bad by the standards of the science they'd like to claim they belong to, but bad even in my own, unscientific discipline. Because if the evidence cannot take you where it is going, if you presuppose your results, you have failed to be a scholar. We all make assumptions - but scholarship assumes a true freedom of inquiry, where others, with different assumptions, will critique one's premises. That does not exist meaningfully in American economics - tenure, book contracts, money, institute fellowships - these don't go to anyone who does not buy the party line.

There are critiques coming from outside, from Europe and south America, where the commitment to free markets is also more freely questioned. But I fear it may be too late for American economics. As a new leader takes over the Fed, we'll see where the economy is headed, and whether it can withstand rising interest rates alongside rising energy prices and the popping of the housing bubble. But the true problem may be that no American questions the concept that we have to keep growing, keep getting bigger, keep making and having more. But outside, in the rest of the world, people are questioning that. The rising socialist governments of South America, for example, are at least using a rhetoric of prioritizing the general welfare of its people, improving the status of everyone, rather than allowing the rich to profit as they may. Whether they can do it or not is another question. But at least they are asking the right questions - asking, for example, whether their resources should serve the world economy or their own, and asking whether it is more important to have a large middle class, or for everyone to have food. And everyone recognizes that those are choices - that the myth, so firmly held here, that everyone can have everything, is just that - a myth.

In this nation of immigrants, the rhetoric has always been that we want our children to have more than we did. But for those of us in the middle class, we are thinking about this wrong. What can we give them that we didn't have? A tv in every room? More, more expensive cars? Bigger houses than the enormous ones we already have? We can already see the moral consequences of trying to give more to those who already have inestimable wealth - greed, obesity, lack of appreciation, lack of principle. But we might be able to give our children something immeasurably greater - we might be able to give them something that we who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s had - something that they are in danger of losing. That is, greenspace, undeveloped land, places with reasonably clean air. Enough food. Shelter. Time to play. Warm clothes. Love. But even that is in danger because of the eternal capitalist rhetoric of more, more, more.

Sharon

NAIS - a really bad idea

The government's latest desire is to be able to track every farm animal in America by microchipping them, down to the backyard chicken owner. This is a really, really bad idea. And it is going to exacerbate peak oil issues.

The cost of having your animals registered and microchipped is going to be a big deterrent for those who raise meat only for themselves, or sell on a very small scale. Most people who raise a few chickens for their dinner and for sale barely break even on the deal - we do it because it gets us better, safer food than other methods, and, if we're lucky, it might make a tiny profit.

Well, kiss your profit goodbye - it will be eaten by vet bills (my chickens don't ordinarily need vets, but NAIS will require I use them to microchip each bird), fines (if, G-d forbid, you don't tag that lamb fast enough) and fees.

This is not an issue for large scale producers, who are already required to keep these records - this is a stab at backyard producers, many of whom are going to go out of business. So your food is going to come from further away, and cost more.

Moreover, this is a lousy idea for another reason - after surpassing the national debt ceiling, we're going to be creating another enormous, stupid, inefficient administrative entity?

And most of all, it is going to be hard enough, in times to come, to convince people that they need to put a few chickens in their backyard. How do we do it now?

Write your congresspeople. Tell them No on NAIS

Sharon

What will my grandchildren read?

It is a strange thought to imagine that in 75 years or so, there will be a collection of books, sorted out from the thousands published in the last decade or two, that will be considered the "canon" of my era. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read them in high school and college, and argue about what they meant and what was intended. I haven't, however, the faintest idea which books they will be - whether McEwan or Roth, Delillo or Rowling.

My best guess is that most of them won't be high culture books, post modern, or winners of the Nobel prize for literature. If you look back at the history of fiction, comparatively little of it was written as "art" or as "high culture" (poetry being to some degree an exception, but not quite as much as one might think). The books that we read over and over again tend to be their day's low culture, books read by most of the literate populace, for their own pleasure. While it may be hard for modern tv addicts to imagine reading George Eliot or going to see "Tamburlaine" for pleasure, it is a simple fact.

They also probably won't arise from the lowest of low cultures, either. While some bad books have made it into the canon, and some bad books have been reclaimed in the name of the gender or history of their authors, mostly people don't like to read bad ooks. And who can blame them. The occasional over-the-top potboiler, that is fun to read but with virtually no meaningful content (given where I live, I probably shouldn't say this, but Cooper leaps to mind), and the occasional bad bit of high culture, that no one really likes to read but everyone says is interesting ("Finnegan's Wake" will do as an obvious example, but there are plenty of others.), but mostly, the books in the canon are well beloved by most readers, precisely because they are fun and readable.

So I'd be inclined to toss out things like Delillo, who is a very entertaining novelist, but an awful lot of work to read for very little return. I don't claim to know whether it is identification or vicarious enjoyment that allows one to fall thoroughly into a book's world and have trouble escaping its gravity, but I'm fairly sure that's never happened in a Delillo novel. My experience of most self-consciously post-modern authors is that I admire the way they right, the fun they are having, the ideas they are playing with, but don't much care what happens.

Wanting to care what happens next is a very old fashioned, dull way to think about what makes a good book, but I'm not sure it has been exceeded. Certainly, I don't think it has been exceeded by the contemporary psychological novel, an example of which would be the novels of Toni Morrison, or Dorothy Allison, which goes on and on explaining how someone came to be the way they are. The characters become who they are through the survival of an unending history of suffering, which logically concludes in the result at hand. Enduring that much suffering with a character is possible, if you very much like the character. But characters who are always and only formed by their experience of pain and suffering are usually hard to like, and after reading a few such novels, the process of being wrenched, over and over again, gets extremely tedious. I suspect some will survive, as exemplars in literary classes, of a recreation of the sentimental novel (the 18th century genre we seemed compelled to relive). But by and large, I don't forsee them making it either.

I suspect a few big, important novels, that lay open the politics and history of the times will also survive, but again, mostly to be read by scholars, not book lovers. There's something fundamentally archaic, and often dull, about reading a radical tract from the past. Try it sometime - pick one that has held up fairly, perhaps "The Jungle" and try to care about its political agenda. It works fine in the abstract, but I'd be shocked to learn there is someone out there who re-reads "The Jungle" the way people re-read Jane Austen. I fear McEwan, who I rather like, will be toast. I kind of hope that Roth and his indescribably dull _Plot Against America_ will be.

If I were placing bets (which I am, in fact), I'd lay odds that many of the books best remembered from my time will be children's literature, which has bloomed in the last decade in ways that are both exciting and novel. Freed by the constraints of being timely and meaningful, people have gone about writing really good, deeply enjoyable books, many of them quite literary.

Rowling and Pullman, so often discussed in the same sentence, seem to me like logical survivors both. Pullman is more "literary" but he is also less fun - his style is heavy handed and tedious at times, and his characters aren't very interesting. On the other hand, the story is compelling - despite the flaws in his telling, despite the fact that it is never made clear why the characters, who supposedly love so deeply, can even stand to be together, there is something both original and engaging about him. One can imagine this book as a high culture novel, rather than a children's novel, and recognize that the adult version would be nigh on unreadable, but in writing for a younger audience, Pullman is freed of his worst writing, and pulled towards something greater in scope than most adult novels would dare imagine. Pullman is a Romantic, in the old sense, and I rather think that a little romanticism might do us good.

Rowling's style is less self-consciously artistic, but more readable, and her characters better drawn and more complex. She's very uneven - the second book in the series is quite awful; and at times terribly predictable - in her fifth book, for example, the death of Dumbledore is both inevitable and endlessly foreshadowed. Having grown too big for an editor, with a desperate readership that demands length above all, the faults in her writing have been somewhat magnified.

But Rawling's books are smart, and funny (sadly, Pullman's aren't), and many of her characters are astonishingly complex. And she and Pullman make excellent companions, because if there is one thing that Rawling is not, despite her reliance on magic, it is romantic. Her novels are, oddly, novels about being grown-up (despite the fact that her main characters are children), and they are about recognizing that the flawed and fallen adult world is a place of magic and power. In a world where real adulthood is increasingly rare, and where fantasies of youth are everywhere, there is something astonishing about Rawlings, flaws and all.

If I had to place a bet on the books that will survive, I would look to children's literature - not exclusively, but to a large degree. Because those are the books that people of all ages and genders in my culture turn to, for the sheer pleasure of reading. I hope one of these days I can say that about the majority of adult fiction I read.

Sharon in upstate NY

My new career - full time mitten knitting

I'm pretty sure if I gave up gardening, writing, teaching, sleeping, sex and eating, and just knitted mittens full time, I could make them faster than my husband and children can lose them. Now the good thing about this is that I really enjoy knitting mittens and socks - the bad thing is that even sock and mitten knitting isn't nearly as good as sex, sleep, food, or gardening.

It amazes me how fast they lose them - Eric too! And it doesn't matter whether they are the quickie, all stockinette mittens knitted in bulky weight yarn, or the fancy ones with elaborate fair-isle patterns knitted in yarn the approximate weight of thread on needles that look like toothpicks. Nor does it matter if I tell my husband, presumably an adult, don't lose these - they took me many, many hours. Much less the children. (Why, you ask sagely, do I bother knitting the fancy kind, when they are simply going to get lost? This is a perfectly legitimate question, to which I can only answer...I haven't the faintest idea. Nor do I have the faintest idea why I have just cast on yet another such pair for Eric in a Danish star pattern.)

I've tried the cords that run through the sleeves of their coats, but that just means they lose both mittens at once, instead of one at a time (and Eric won't let me make one for him, on the not unreasonable assumption that having his wife tie his mittens to his clothes might infantilize him in front of his students.) So I've decided the only solution is to knit mittens to the exclusion of all other activities, or, horrors, to actually purchase some cheap mittens for them to lose. I think it says something about me that I haven't done the latter yet, and am still debating whether I can simply knit full time. I'm sure what it says is nothing good.

In other news around the homestead, the robins are back, which is not surprising since today, at the end of January, we had our 8th day of the month above 50 degrees. This has been a very, very strange winter so far.

Eli has lost his first tooth, and the second of his bottom front teeth is on the verge of falling out, giving him a look that can only be described as "hillbilly child." He's doing very, very well in kindergarten, and really starting to initiate and respond to conversation with us, a very great joy.

Simon has learned to play "The Minister's Cat" with us - I was surprised by how fast he picked up what an adjective was, and by some of the adjectives he was able to come up with. I was particularly impressed by "The Minister's Cat is a Rufous Cat" which he was able to intuit, means reddish, from a comparison of the birds in his audobon book.

Isaiah is starting to seriously potty train (hurray!!), and despite a severe case of control freakism (also known as two-ness), is a lot of fun to have around. And Asher is starting to wave and grab at things, and last night, slept 6 1/2 consecutive hours.

So things are going pretty well around here.

Sharon

Making Changes

This is counter-intuitive, but ultimately, I think radical change is easier than incremental change. The more radically and dramatically you transform your life, the harder it is to slip backwards into old habits, and the more compelling the arguments for adaptation, rather than rejection.

To use our own experience as an example, we picked up and moved out of our urban home, and out to the country, and took up growing our own food. DH and I gave up our fantasies of a two career academic coupling in exchange for more time, less money, and less need for money. Those are all transformations we might have made in another context, but I suspect we would never have fully succeeded in making them had we stayed where we were - the temptation to revert to our prior ways would have been too compelling, and everything about the demands of our life would have drawn us in a different direction.

I understand the desire to stay in an urban environmentand make money. Our own experience (YMMV, of course) was that it wasvery difficult to save money when we lived in Boston. In one of themost expensive housing markets in the country, more than 50% of ourincome went for housing costs. Here in upstate NY, my 4000 sqft farmhouse on 27 acres with outbuildings cost about the same as a condo in an exurb 45 minutes from downtown Boston (that was five years ago - now there's not a chance we could get a condo for that!). The taxes areconsiderably lower. Cost of living is substantially lower as well -gas and oil prices, cordwood, cars, clothing, childcare, food - allare lower here, and mostly of higher quality - ie, the used car onecan get for 2K here is considerably better than the same used car for2K in Boston. The food I can buy most cheaply here is local in-season produce, bought direct from local farmers, and of much higher quality than even the trucked in local produce in an urban environment. On the other hand, farmer's market produce in Boston was extremely expensive. Moreoever, it is easy to eliminate certain costs. We can cut firewood. We can grow much of our own food, including eggs and meat. We can barter for honey, milk and beef with neighbors. Salaries in rural areas are lower - but my observation isthat they are not proportionally lower - that is, the lower salary ismore than offset by the increased resources and the lower cost of living.

Moreover, the lifestyle is different. In the Boston area, most people live in fairly class-segregated communities - rich people do not live next door to poor people. And because of that, the standards of the community are extremely rigid - just try to leave your lawn uncut in most middle-class suburban neighborhoods. Here, however, we literally have mansions next to trailers (just up the street), and there is no single economic or aesthetic standard. Thus, when we couldn't afford a lawn mower for an extended period, we were not the only people with grass up to our waists.

Fighting the class system is hard work - it is hard to get over the embarassment of doing things that people associate with poverty, it is hard to change your standards of beauty to see the homemade wooden bench as more beautiful than the embroidered couch, and it is hard to live cheap. It is also wise. But for those without a strong sense of self discipline in that regard (like me!), I think a radical change is in many ways better and easier than small transformations.

Sharon

Drinks for Everyone!

Well, maybe not. But I can't claim that I'm not enjoying the current sequence of Washington scandals. Now *these* are the Republicans I recall from my youth in the 1980s - corrupt, venal, foolish. The great frustration of the Karl Rove 21st century has been how good the Republicans have been at getting what they want. It is delightful to finally see a few of them paying the price for their sins. Schaudenfreude, to be sure, is an emotion not to be proud of. But I'm enjoying myself a bit too much to conceal it.

None of which says much about the future - watch John McCain distance himself from the realities of the Republican administration he's been whoring himself to for the last 8 years. Watch him be elected. Just watch. But in the meantime, I'll take my pleasures where I can.

Sharon

What of the great middle class?

In America, "the middle class" encompasses everyone. Ask around. Most of the rich and almost all of the poor call themselves, at best, upper and lower-middle class. No one here ever really admits to being rich or poor. Neither do we admit, even to ourselves, that wealth is a fairly fixed thing in our society, that the vast majority of those who are born poor or wealthy will never leave that state.

And yet, I suspect a new wave of social mobility is in the works, one that rivals the Veblens development of the middle class - the move of the middle class into the realm of the poor (comparatively - if we're being honest with ourselves, all Americans, poor or rich, are so astonishingly wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world that we can't even imagine, but then again, context is everything), all without anyone in the middle class noticing.

The first step has been the refusal of the government to contain the costs of health care in any sane way - meaning that the poor, and even middle class in our society have something in common with the poor of the third world - they can't afford the medical treatment they need. As more companies decline to provide insurance, or demand huge payments from their employees, and health care costs rise, parents, the elderly and anyone with a medical problem gets poorer.

Next, note that while we all were so pleased to see that the GDP was rising, that rise provided absolutely no benefit to the middle or lower classes - nada. The country got richer, but only really rich people actually experienced a net benefit. In fact, adjusted for inflation, the rest of us were worse off.

Now watch the way that rising energy prices (yep, they are still rising!) are affecting consumers - as more of their income goes to keep warm and get to work, they can afford less. The poorest percentages are already making choices - food or heat? Medicine or gas? Our local fuel assistance programs are totally overwhelmed.

How long before the pattern drags the "middle class" down with them. Don't get me wrong, no one will ever stop calling themselves middle class, but we'll start to notice that the things that have been the hallmark of that class are gone - home ownership, health insurance, travel, leisure, entertainment - and the fact that people can no longer indulge in the above is likely to hurt the economy further.

It may be that someday, everyone is still calling themselves middle class here, despite the fact that we've moved to a perfect, two class society - the poor and the rich - eliminating 500 years of economic progress.

Sharon

Life goes trickling by...

It has been a stressful 5 1/2 weeks. Asher was born at 8lbs even, but lost a considerable amount of weight in the hospital and in the days immediately after - he was down to 6lbs, 10 oz four days after birth, even though my milk was in on the second day. We narrowly escaped having him hospitalized, and slowly, slowly, over his first 5 weeks, he made it back up to his birth weight. He's just over 8lbs now.

I've never had this problem before - Simon and Eli were both born well over 8lbs, dropped a few ounces, and then merrily began growing. But even Isaiah, born a bit early at 6lbs, 10 oz grew steadily. My kids tend to settle just below the 50th percentile in weight (and are all off the charts in height - we're a tall family). I'm not sure if this is a Jewish mother thing or what, but not being able to adequately feed my baby hits into a fairly deep pocket of panic in me.

That said, he's been fine. He's vigorous and healthy, just on the skinny side (little chicken legs). All this has bothered me far more than it ever has him. I'm finally starting to get over it - he slept 6 straight hours last night (hallelujah!!), and I didn't consider waking him to nurse more than twice. Ordinarily, he nurses more or less constantly, interspersing dozing with feeding. I think this was the problem initially - nursing is exhausting, apparently, and it took a while before he could do it for any period of time.

Otherwise, all is well here. Big brothers have been surprisingly pleased about him, even Isaiah, who is ordinarily very possessive of Mommy (for a while I referred to not as "Mommy" but "de lap" - not "a" lap, but "the lap," and no other brothers were welcome upon it.) Simon regularly holds and even feeds Asher, during those rare moments in which Mommy's breasts are temporarily not in play.

Because I am nursing just about every moment, I am not doing much, including posting on this blog. I have never before *longed* to clean - I'm not the most elegant housekeeper you'll ever meet, but boy, just getting up and sorting some laundry without a baby in my arms is such a joy. I try not to appreciate it too much - this is the last baby I'll ever have, and holding him is a pleasure. But with each of my children came the realization that at least for me, there is only so long that can be spent staring adoringly into your child's eyes, before you start looking around for something to read.

Cheers,

Sharon

Finally, and well worth the wait...

Asher Cary Woods was born at 10:54 am on Saturday. He was 8lbs even, 21 inches, and is absolutely perfect. I'm doing well, despite 11 days (!!!!) of labor. Just very happy to be home and enjoying my family. More soon!

Sharon

Well, there's a baby...

Except it isn't mine! My sister Vicki, who was due 3 days ahead of me had her daughter, Katherine, about 30 minutes ago. Mother and baby are doing great, and little Katie is 7lbs 11oz, 22 inches. I'm so excited about my new niece - my mother's phone was busy, so I was actually the first family member to know, except the big sister, my niece Abby.

The baby saga here just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Two weeks ago tomorrow, I started having pointless prodromal contractions, just enough to drive me insane and keep me from sleeping.

Early this past Tuesday am, the contractions picked up big time - I was having them every 3 minutes, and they were long, intense and strong. My sweet MIL volunteered to come up, my kind neighbor came down, and off we went to the birthing center of have this baby. I was my usual 2cm, and after some walking, got gradually to four. The baby's head was engaged, I'd lost my mucus plug, my water bag was nice and bulgy and ready to blow, and I was starting to transition into active labor. I was offered some pitocin, accepted, and about an hour later, my midwife went to check to see what progress I'd made. The next words out of her mouth were, "Where's the baby?"

Well, somewhere in that hour, my very active little boy had left the pelvis and decided to go way, way back up into my uterus (they aren't supposed to be able to do that at this point.) I was dilated to 5 cm. And there he has remained for the last 3 1/2 days. I'm still having the contractions (not quite as intense or as frequent, but quite enough to be maddening), and we're all sitting here waiting for the baby's head to reengage. Sigh.

I haven't slept much in days, and I'm on the verge of losing it, but I'm trying to hold out as long as I can, because an induction without that head down will end up in a csection. So keep your digits crossed and your prayers going, and try and explain to this baby that out is down!

Sharon

A life, 30 years in revision.

Carla Emery died yesterday of a heart attack, caused by a pericardial infection. Two weeks ago, she was sitting in my mother's house, telling us about her adventures at the Common Ground fair, making us laugh as she described how far her husband had to go to obtain coffee among the ecologically pure. And that night she stood up in front of a small audience of community gardeners and interested parties and talked about the urgency of producing food and fertility in urban and suburban communities. She talked about peak energy, and about the day when we may all be poor enough that the food we grow makes the critical difference in our thriving over surviving. I saw suburbanites who garden for pleasure make the turn into understanding how terribly urgent that work is, for themselves and their community.

I'm not someone who is inclined to lionize, nor someone who starts fan clubs, but if I were ever to have done so, I would have done it for Carla. It isn't that she was perfect - she wasn't. But she had a store of knowledge as wide as the whole world. She could tell you how to make a turkey sandwich - and start with how to hatch out the baby turkey poults, plant your seed wheat in the ground, save seeds so you could grow the nicest tomatoes, lettuce and sweet onion. And she'd get you all the way to making your own mayo from your own eggs, raising and grinding your mustard seed and baking the best bread you've ever tasted.

Does that sound too arcane? It is so much simpler to go buy the turkey, bread and mayo at the store, but she could convince a die-hard urbanite that there were compelling reasons for growing their food, and she never missed the most important one - taste! And she could tell you how to birth your baby safely alone, how to get water when your well pump broke down or your well went dry, how to can jam, shear your sheep, or pinch a penny. She knew nearly everything about how to make the things we have become dependent upon industrial production for, and what she didn't want to know, she wanted to learn. Both her curiosity and knowledge ran so deep you could never get to the bottom.

Those are such ordinary, domestic skills and virtues and so few people now have them. When she sat down to write her book 30 years ago, people were just starting to notice that the generation that knew those things was disappearing. Now, they are gone. Most of us were raised with the wealth to buy what we need and no need to know those ordinary skills, that so often were part of the lives of ordinary women. I know when I was younger, I was interested in what extraordinary people did, in the transformative power of the exceptional. But I've come to appreciate that those ordinary domestic skills are what make the extraordinary possible, and they can be executed with grace, courage and the most astonishing skill, and become an extraordinary art in themselves. Not everyone can write _Middlemarch_ or paint like Mary Cassat. And not all of us would want to pay the price in our family life and our energies that it would take to produce a great work of art. But all of us have to eat, to dress in clothing, to have clean water. And teaching people how to have it, how to get it, how to live well even in poverty and have clean, safe food and water is, I think, a greater accomplishment than the production of a piece of art fit best for the educated and priveleged audience. Thousands of people in this country and all over the world have more of what they most urgently need because she shared her knowledge.

Carla Emery was blessed with both the extraordinary talent of being able to teach others what they needed to know, and also with the ability to do all those things. I doubt Carla would ever have called herself a feminist, but she did more for women than most feminists could ever do, because she saw very early, back when feminism was still paying most of its attention to the lives of women who did unusual things, that the most basic, simplest skills were what mattered most, and were the most exceptional things of all. The ordinary lives of women (and men, but it was no accident this was called a recipe book), and the things they did to survive and thrive, raise their families and meet their needs were recorded for all of us, and valorized here, if nowhere else. Later, the ordinary lives of women became a trend. But Carla was there when poor women having children and managing to keep them healthy and fed, warm and loved was not considered either exceptional or an art. She, however, knew otherwise.

Look at the _Encyclopedia of Country Living_ carefully. She wrote this enormous book while bearing and raising seven children, while living the life she described, milking her cows and growing her garden. And she kept on revising it her whole life. At 66 years old, last week she stood up and told us about how she maintains her entire 8000 square foot garden by herself, with a shovel and a hoe. She produced enough food to feed her chickens (lots), rabbits, her husband and herself, and take bushels and bushels of produce to market. These are ordinary things - in the academic culture I took on, having babies and feeding them good food, and growing old gracefully and working hard are not the virtues to be rewarded. Why does it feel to me as though those "ordinary" virtues are rarer and more valuable than anything more exotic? How many of us could raise our children without the benefit of the grocery stores and the power companies? She told you how, because she was sorry to see the skills die, and afraid we wouldn't be able to get along without them someday. She was right.

I was lucky enough to meet her on the internet. A few of my recipes and suggestions are in the most recent edition of her book, and I was fortunate enough to help her with some editing. It was a book that explained so many things to me, and I was so excited to get to add a little touch of myself to it. And she was tremendously generous, both with her guidance and her energies. She let me and dozens of other homesteaders comment, critique, recipe test, and be part of her work. And then she came, and spoke to my CSA customers, my friends, my parents, and told them what she knew, all because she wanted so badly for us all to know what she did.

She was on the road, telling people about why and how to grow food and cut energy usage, for more than half the year. She and her husband Don covered thousands and thousands of miles in their old van filled with books on gardening and sustainability. It was grueling, and they didn't make much money, in part because she refused to charge people more than $100 to hear her speak. She'd stand up in an auditorium, a library, a church, in your living room, and tell you what she had to say and what she thought you needed to know, and then she'd do it again the next day. She was a missionary - because she really believed that the world would be a better place if others would just stop putting their faith in corporations and industrial production, and start growing a pot of basil and a few tomatoes, if someone would grow some grains and beans themselves instead of a lawn. And she was right. She told people this in the 1970s, when the hippies wanted to hear it. She drove around the country in a van filled with her babies and children, speaking wherever people listened. And at 66 years old, two weeks ago, she was still doing it, for the grown-up children of hippies (like me) and anyone else who would listen, because she was concerned for us in the face of rising energy costs.

I didn't host her at our house this year. It was too hard with the baby coming and my sister's wedding at the same time, and Grandma and Grandpa both dying - or that was my sad excuse. And she said of course, no matter what *she* produced while having seven children. I used to tell my husband that I want to be Carla Emery when I grow up. I wanted to be as strong, and courageous, and focused on doing right as she was. And I wanted to be as kind and honorable and smart and funny. I'm not her. I don't have what she has. But I still keep her in my head as the kind of person whose moral courage and knowledge, expressiveness and sheer desire to save the world was one what I would most like myself and my children to become.

If you pray, pray for her husband Don, her children and her grandchildren, including the new one on the way. And pray that in the times that come, someone with as much missionary zeal and energy will come our way and pass as much knowledge along. I know I do.

Shalom.

Sharon

Self-inflicted injuries

L'Shana Tova, All! I hope the coming year is both happy and healthy. I know we're excited about this year's coming blessings - the biggest one being that for most of it, I will not be pregnant any more (oh, and there's a baby too ;-))

It is time to consider, in the Christian terminology, what we have done and what we have left undone in the past year. I've made a few major screwups, and am presently paying the price for them, at least in stress and anxiety, and the embarassment of owing others my contrition. While I'm not yet ready to write about the details, it occurs to me that it is both a blessing and a curse that almost all the major crises in my life have been self-inflicted. It is a curse, of course, because shooting yourself in the foot is neither smart nor credibility inspiring, and you look like an idiot. Plus, you get to pay the price of whatever mistakes you've made, and many of mine have not been small.

On the other hand, it is blessing because up until now (and forever, G-d willing), I've only shot myself in the foot, never the head. None of my self-made disasters, no matter how traumatic, idiotic, terrifying and terrible, have ever been left me irretrievably lost, or caused me suffering from which I was unable to recover. Disappointment, embarassment, sorrow, shame, pain, yes. But I've never had been broken by something outside myself that I simply couldn't address. I think my situation is probably easier, if way more humiliating. I wish, however, that I could give myself the clean slate that I am taught to believe G-d gives. But I fear that would require direct divine intervention. The best I can hope for is to aim for the ground next time I'm determined to do something idiotic.

Shalom,

Sharon

Will Katrina and Rita tip us past the point of no return?

Peak oil, is, again, not about how much oil is in the ground. It is about the price of oil, and its availability to ordinary people. That availability is about to change yet again - with the second nightmare hurricane in a month. Hurricane Rita, at category 4, is presently heading towards our main oil shipping lanes, 30% of our refinery capacity, all of our diesel refining capacity and a large portion of our natural gas production - the latter of which cannot be replaced by offshore inputs.

The loss of diesel refining capacity is particularly troublesome, since our trucking and agricultural industries depend almost entirely on diesel. So what we're discussing are higher prices for gas - and every single other thing that people depend on. Heat. Food. Clothing. Power.

The economy has mostly absorbed $3 gallon gas, although with some pain, most of it to the poor, but some resonating through the economy (Walmart's falling profits, etc...) But can it absorb $4 or $5 gas and heating oil, just as we enter the heating season. Can it absorb the loss of diesel production just as harvesting and food production is at its most intense across the nation? I guess we'll see.

In the end, it may not matter how much oil the Saudis or the Russians have. If ordinary people can't afford to buy heating oil, or drive to work, the cycle of collapse begins, long before the last drops come out of the ground.

Sharon

The population issue - from a women with four children

I'm probably the last person who should ever be allowed to comment on this, and yet it would be intellectually dishonest not to confront it on some level. I spend my time exhorting people to prepare, to consume less, to need less, and yet I keep having children. That not all of them were exactly planned is not really an excuse - I certainly was not displeased by the situation. And I do think we have to talk about this, and think about this, and maybe consider some public solutions - I simply hope they will not be the repressive ones that I fear over the longer term.

The world sustainable carrying capacity is probably somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people. we've got about 6.5 billion at the moment, and we're going to make 7. I still remember when we achieved six, just five years ago. I was pregnant with Eli, an irony I did not miss. The official six billionth was identified as a little girl, born in rural India, and this seemed grotesque to me - my little boy, born a few months later here, will consume five times the resources of that girl. To use the western world's vision of the "culprits" of overpopulation is unjust - because my children are the culprits. For all that I try to reduce my consumption and my children's consumption, there is no doubt whose children are the problem. Which is why I would argue that the best and only serious way to address this is to focus on the consumption issues, and the positive things that make men and women want to have fewer children.

I'm not sure there's much we can do about the overpopulation problem without becoming essentially a fascist society. Beyond simply keeping women's lives as healthy and secure and free as possible - what solution could possibly exist that would allow us to remain ethical and human? China solves its problems by draconian restrictions upon private people, ones I do not want to see enacted on myself or my daughters in law. And in addition to those restrictions, it (and other poor nations) resolves its problems by having an available outlet among rich nations for its unwanted children. What happens when that outlet dries up, because of political controversy and the sheer cost of moving prohibited children around the globe? What happens to those children in orphanages afterwards? Who would take our "extra" babies?
These questions are not as arcane as they sound - while in the short term the primacy of the religious right is unlikely to make this an immediate crisis, in the long term when population pressures grow, demographic anxiety and violence towards those perceived as "in excess" grows too.

I'm not sure I'm the right person to address the biology of having children - not because I don't have a strong desire to have children, but because I couldn't care less if they were born of my flesh - in many ways, my husband and I would actually have preferred to adopt, except that doing so meant allowing the government to regulate our lives and limit our activities to a significant degree, or, had we chosen private or international adoption, it would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars we did not have. Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't trade my children now for anything, and I take some pleasure in figuring out who they look most like, but I don't identify in the slightest with the "must have a perfect,white baby that looks just like hubby and me." Frankly, if one looked carefully at those related to either one of us, you'd note that the odds are better that I will be able to stand you if you *aren't* biologically related to either one of us.

Restricting the right of people to procreate generally comes with some disturbing trends. First of all, as our culture becomes poorer and probably more traditional,we're going to start valuing some children over others (ok, we already do - let's think about how much outrage there would have been if a lot of white children were dying of dehydration in New Orleans) - in many nations, for example, the trend is to valuing boys over girls, in addition to the obvious preference for white and non-disabled children. In the US, the trend actually runs quite strongly in the opposite direction - girls are perceived as easier, healthier, preferrable. My mother was an adoptive placement social worker for the state of MA for many years, and at least in that state, all boys are harder to place than all girls, and boys qualified as "unadoptable" or "special needs" (the latter of which doesn't necessarily mean any disability -just hard to place) on average 2 years before a girl (for example, whiteness being valued, a white boy was defined as special needs at 5, where as a white girl up to 7 was cosidered potentially adoptable. When you get into non-white children, an african-american male child was considered unadoptable as soon as he left babyhood, more or less.) Sex selection technology is also used overwhelmingly to get girls in the US - both to select out disabilities, but also just for female preference - more than 85% of the requests at most facilities are for daughters, overwhelmingly driven by mothers who prefer female children. If this continues, I wouldn't be surprised to see that in a one-child society, we have as huge an "extra boy" syndrome as China has an "extra girl" one. And, as the mother of a child with a disability who costs his community and school system an awful lot, I suspect that disabled children, already less valued in the commodity market of child adoption, will be subject to measures that are pretty horrible. When middle class women stop being able to afford amniocentesis to abort babies that would be "too much to handle," what will become of those babies?

The best solutions to unsustainable reproductive rates we've ever found so far are freedom for women, easy access to birth control, education for women, good prenatal and pediatric care and reproductive freedom. This is yet another argument for not returning to patriarchal culture - for example, highly educated women with significant careers only have children about 40%of the time - and the numbers get lower as they become more powerful. The more educated, autonomous and healthy women and their children are, the fewer they have, generally speaking (I'm not a good example right here ;-).

In order to be even remotely just, any restriction on fertility has to impact men as well - male behavior, male beliefs about the value of women, and male fertility - this isn't just a woman's problem, and cannot be. For example, women in patriarchal cultures that are dependent upon men for support depend on not only husbands, but sons to support them in their old age. Male pressure to procreate, and male desire to have fertile wives can also be a very powerful driving force - and men, in my observation, are often more reluctant than women to care for the babies of others, possibly for reasons of evolutionary psychology. (On this subject, and slipping a bit of my dissertation in, the philosopher Stanley Cavell is a fascinating read - he argues that skepticism of all kinds originates in the inability of men to ever know with certainty if they are the fathers of their children - one might read his _Disowning Knowledge_ or_The Claim of Reason_ were anyone besides me even remotely interested.) So all those things have to be addressed if we are ever to have any kind of public attempt to lower the birthrate or restrain fertility.

Keeping infant mortality low is also key - it is very hard to persuade women not to get pregnant over and over again if they are going to lose their children young to the diseases of poverty- a woman who is trying to get one or two children to adulthood might have to have as many as 5 or 6 in a society with poor survival rates. Raising children up in societies perpetually at war raises another issue, and a key one for those of us in the priveleged west who are presently at war with the idea of terrorism - parents who believe theywill lose their sons to military machines have reason to keep having them - or at least keep trying for daughters. And those, like we Americans, who will presumably have to risk their daughters as well are doubly so inspired. I know that our nation's language of perpetual war causes me blind terror when I think about my little boys. If you want people toobey your restrictions on reproduction, they need children that live. It is truly that simple. America has the worst infant mortality rates in the industrial world, especially among the poor. As our economy softens and fades, if we want to keep the birthrate stable or down, we must, must, must, put our resources into prenatal care and pediatric care, and we must not send all of our children to war.

I will say that the urge to have children is basic and profound - speaking as someone who never particularly cared whether her childrenwere biological or not, the experience of carrying and nursing an infant comes with some hormone and reptile-brain level intensities about them. I am told (and believe) that that is true of the children you adopt as well. We might look at Hannah's prayers to G-d in her barrenness, or at the journals that 17th century women wrote before childbirth to their unborn child - maternal mortality being a major issue, women entered childbirth expecting to die, and yet often also entered it willingly, even joyfully, despite the stakes. For myself, I see the necessity of children as a kind of meaning-making - I'm not sure I could stir up the passion required to ensure my own survival in the fact of a crisis - but the survival, happiness and security of my children, and their children, now that inspires me. All of which is just a way of saying that the reproductive nut is going to be a very, very hard oneto crack.

The very best that those of us who are priveleged to give birth into a world of reasonable security and wealth can do is to try with all our might to absorb less, consume less, take less, so that the babies of others can have just a little bit more.

Sharon