Ok, I have a project for you technical folks. It won't get you the glory of developing the perfect hydrogen fuel cell or the newest wind turbine. But it might have a bigger impact than either. And it will make you rich. So I need someone out there to develop, perfect and patent the reusable condom.
This is not a joke. The condom is the most commonly used form of birth control in the world, especially during sexual activities that pose a high risk of pregnancy or disease transmission. The people who are most likely to use them are more likely to be poor than those using other forms of birth control. They are more likely to be in temporary or at least unmarried relationships, so that the pregnancies that result are more likely to lead to single parenthood for women. They are cheap by industrial standards, but expensive by the standards of most of the developing world. And because they are single use, and most human beings have sex fairly often, keeping yourself in condoms can be pricey. Lack of a condom, or lack of funds for condoms, is a classic reason for accidental pregnancy or disease transmission.
So what if everyone had their own? What if condoms could be reused hundreds of times, like diaphragms, or menstrual cups? What if you could wash it was soap and water, squeeze out a drop from a little tube of spermicidal lubricant, and have sex without worrying about breaking the condom budget. What if everyone in Africa could afford condoms, because they only had to buy 1 per year? How many unwanted pregnancies would be prevented?
It has got to be possible - both the menstrual cup and the diaphragm already exist, although both are made of materials thicker than most people would want in a condom. But there are very fine, very strong materials out there that would also be impermeable to disease organisms.
Regardless of your take on the population issue, I think we all can agree that the world is a happier place when people who don't want to have children don't get pregnant. So c'mon, engineers - save the world, change a condom!
Sharon
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Dancing with the Elephant
I thought about it for a while before I put the fact that I have four children in my biography and my talk. It would have been easy enough to leave out - no one else mentioned their kids, and that's probably the cultural norm, especially for women. Mentioning your kids in a professional thing is considered a sign that you are not a serious sort of person, just a Mom, in many cases.
But in this case, I really thought it was important that I put it in both my talk and my bio - because the population issue is such a BIG DEAL in the peak oil and environmental movements. I certainly didn't want to be accused of attempting to conceal it later, and also, for me at least, my children are the sole and primary reason I'm so involved in this. Don't get me wrong - I like life, but what drives me is their future security. Being a parent shapes my thinking in a lot of ways that I think it would be intellectually dishonest to leave out. Finally, I think copping to the things you do that don't fit the "can everyone do it and have us survive" model is important - because we tend to be very protective of our personal little pockets of greed and privelege - and never more than when we're talking about our kids. So I very intentionally put it in. I expected it to come up for critique and comment (it did), and that was fine.
What I didn't expect was to have more than 30 people come up to me and tell me how glad they were that I put the population issue on the table. Some of them had lots of kids - an older woman with six children who has been involved in the environmental movement for decades told me about how she tried never to mention the number of children in her family. An Amish gentleman pointed out that by his standards, my family of four was quite small. Some of them were on the other side - I talked with several people who have chosen not to have children, or who only have one, a man from Zero Population Growth and quite a few others. Some of those were quite fierce on the subject of my choices, and that's ok. But everyone, on every side of this issue said, "I'm so glad you brought it up - we have to talk about it." And the more I watched, the more I thought that while there are quite a few elephants in the room in the peak oil movement, this one deserves to come out for a trot around the floor - and soon.
To be fair, I didn't bring it up. It was raised earlier in the conference as a panel question to Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg and Pat Murphy. Pat called for voluntary population reduction, Richard called for policy initiatives without naming them, and that was it. But that's not enough. No one was sure what Richard Heinberg was suggesting - is he suggesting China-esque policy initiatives or tax penalties? No one talked about what we would have to do to achieve world-wide voluntary reductions - that is, raising the cultural status of women, providing them with education and enough medical care to make sure that their children live to adulthood (there's a long post from last year on this blog somewhere on just this subject, if anyone is interested). How would we fund that? Is there some way to accomplish that goal, or do we just have to give up on it? The generalities are not sufficient.
Nor are the questions that aren't being discussed. It is very easy for discussions of population to demonize women in general, and poor women (especially poor women of color) in particular. Are we going to talk about American consumption rates, and they way they alter the population equation - the way that American children consume the resources of many non-American children. Are we going to talk about immigration? About life extension techniques for the elderly? Are we going to have orphanages? Rationing? Free sterilization? Mandatory sterilization? What about the disabled? What about people who lose their children? Are we going to talk about the care of the elderly in a society with a drastically lowering population? Are we going to continue to subsidize the fertility business? What will this do to adoption? To family structures in general? How will we handle growing poverty rates? Ensure equal application, so that the rich and poor are both evenly affected? How shall we persuade people of this, and enlist the support of things like religious organizations? And there are a thousand other questions. And we have to talk about this. But nobody is.
To his credit, Julian Darley seems willing to both put it on the table (he told my friend from Zero Population Growth that he could organize something and he'd speak), and to talk about his own choices (he has one child, and plans no more). So is Richard Heinberg (none, no plans). But that's not enough. First of all, ultimately, this discussion MUST include women, perhaps a majority of women - a bunch of men, no matter how thoughtful, wise and brilliant, cannot set policy that will so deeply affect women in their bodies, without including them.
Every single person I spoke to said that we had to talk about this - even the Amish gentleman admitted that without prompting. Not one of the people who talked about their children denied that population was an issue that had to be addressed publically, and perhaps with policy initiatives like tax penalties for having more than two children. Not one of the people who wanted to constrain childbearing denied that there were compelling issues of freedom involved. And like most elephant-in-the-room situations, it is made much worse by silence. Everyone is scared to speak - the population limitation crowd "knows" that we can't talk about it because we're too religious, or it is too sensitive a subject. The people who have more than the official set number of children (as Darley put it..2, 3, or...even 4!) are afraid to talk about why they have children. And that needs to change.
I do know this. No mainstream movement can ever function if it makes women like the wonderful, wise, engaged, activist woman I spoke to with six children, or the young farmer with 7 feel ashamed of themselves. Nor can those of us who had more than a fair share fail to face that reality, and talk to the people who are concerned about overshoot.
Personally, my proposal would be that family energy rations be pegged to a family of four. Heinberg has a detailed plan for this in his new book, and he outlined it at the petroleum depletion protocol. What I suggest is that biological reproduction wouldn't get you any increase in your yearly energy credit, whereas non-biological reproduction would - bring your Mom to live with you, and you get a fifth person's energy to work with. Adopt a child, and you get a fifth person's energy. Give birth, and you have to make do with what you've got (this *ONLY* works with good access to birth control and basic medical care - if we lose this, we simply end up penalizing the poor and unlucky even more than they are already penalized). Thus, those couples who elect to have more than two children would either have to be able to pay for it by buying extra energy on the markets, or they would have to be very frugal, and consume much less, which knocks out the very worst effect of having a child in the US anyhow - the obscene rate of consumption. Most of the larger families I know are very, very frugal and I'm going to bet that they'd still have spare energy at the end of the year to sell back into the community at large, or to save for the next year (when allotments drop at the same rate as oil production drops). I'd also be fine with tax penalties, but I suspect these may function less well as the nation gets poorer and poorer. I will tell the simple truth - I would have paid any amount of money I could possibly have produced in order to have children. But for those who would rather have a more comfortable existence than more children, this will provide further incentives (overwhelmingly, people in the US cite money as a main reason for not having more children anyhow).
I do believe however, that no movement can afford to make people ashamed of the children they already have. Nor can we afford to be anti-child, or anti-elderly, or anti-disability. If we can't find a moral way to deal with the population issue, than we've no hope of dealing with it at all. But nor can we lie to ourselves and say, "it was ok for me to do X - just not those women in Bangladesh."
I'm going to lobby Pat Murphy or someone to put on a public discussion of this at next year's conference, if I can't find a venue to do it sooner. Actually, when I first spoke to Pat, I suggested to him that I talk about peak oil as a woman's issue, and he told me that he doubted anyone would attend my talk if I did. After this conference, I don't think we need just a talk on that subject - we need a whole conference. But however we do it, the elephant needs to dance for a while, and we need to think about a coherent way of both valuing children, women and people in general, and also addressing the fact that the planet has biological limits.
Sharon in upstate NY
But in this case, I really thought it was important that I put it in both my talk and my bio - because the population issue is such a BIG DEAL in the peak oil and environmental movements. I certainly didn't want to be accused of attempting to conceal it later, and also, for me at least, my children are the sole and primary reason I'm so involved in this. Don't get me wrong - I like life, but what drives me is their future security. Being a parent shapes my thinking in a lot of ways that I think it would be intellectually dishonest to leave out. Finally, I think copping to the things you do that don't fit the "can everyone do it and have us survive" model is important - because we tend to be very protective of our personal little pockets of greed and privelege - and never more than when we're talking about our kids. So I very intentionally put it in. I expected it to come up for critique and comment (it did), and that was fine.
What I didn't expect was to have more than 30 people come up to me and tell me how glad they were that I put the population issue on the table. Some of them had lots of kids - an older woman with six children who has been involved in the environmental movement for decades told me about how she tried never to mention the number of children in her family. An Amish gentleman pointed out that by his standards, my family of four was quite small. Some of them were on the other side - I talked with several people who have chosen not to have children, or who only have one, a man from Zero Population Growth and quite a few others. Some of those were quite fierce on the subject of my choices, and that's ok. But everyone, on every side of this issue said, "I'm so glad you brought it up - we have to talk about it." And the more I watched, the more I thought that while there are quite a few elephants in the room in the peak oil movement, this one deserves to come out for a trot around the floor - and soon.
To be fair, I didn't bring it up. It was raised earlier in the conference as a panel question to Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg and Pat Murphy. Pat called for voluntary population reduction, Richard called for policy initiatives without naming them, and that was it. But that's not enough. No one was sure what Richard Heinberg was suggesting - is he suggesting China-esque policy initiatives or tax penalties? No one talked about what we would have to do to achieve world-wide voluntary reductions - that is, raising the cultural status of women, providing them with education and enough medical care to make sure that their children live to adulthood (there's a long post from last year on this blog somewhere on just this subject, if anyone is interested). How would we fund that? Is there some way to accomplish that goal, or do we just have to give up on it? The generalities are not sufficient.
Nor are the questions that aren't being discussed. It is very easy for discussions of population to demonize women in general, and poor women (especially poor women of color) in particular. Are we going to talk about American consumption rates, and they way they alter the population equation - the way that American children consume the resources of many non-American children. Are we going to talk about immigration? About life extension techniques for the elderly? Are we going to have orphanages? Rationing? Free sterilization? Mandatory sterilization? What about the disabled? What about people who lose their children? Are we going to talk about the care of the elderly in a society with a drastically lowering population? Are we going to continue to subsidize the fertility business? What will this do to adoption? To family structures in general? How will we handle growing poverty rates? Ensure equal application, so that the rich and poor are both evenly affected? How shall we persuade people of this, and enlist the support of things like religious organizations? And there are a thousand other questions. And we have to talk about this. But nobody is.
To his credit, Julian Darley seems willing to both put it on the table (he told my friend from Zero Population Growth that he could organize something and he'd speak), and to talk about his own choices (he has one child, and plans no more). So is Richard Heinberg (none, no plans). But that's not enough. First of all, ultimately, this discussion MUST include women, perhaps a majority of women - a bunch of men, no matter how thoughtful, wise and brilliant, cannot set policy that will so deeply affect women in their bodies, without including them.
Every single person I spoke to said that we had to talk about this - even the Amish gentleman admitted that without prompting. Not one of the people who talked about their children denied that population was an issue that had to be addressed publically, and perhaps with policy initiatives like tax penalties for having more than two children. Not one of the people who wanted to constrain childbearing denied that there were compelling issues of freedom involved. And like most elephant-in-the-room situations, it is made much worse by silence. Everyone is scared to speak - the population limitation crowd "knows" that we can't talk about it because we're too religious, or it is too sensitive a subject. The people who have more than the official set number of children (as Darley put it..2, 3, or...even 4!) are afraid to talk about why they have children. And that needs to change.
I do know this. No mainstream movement can ever function if it makes women like the wonderful, wise, engaged, activist woman I spoke to with six children, or the young farmer with 7 feel ashamed of themselves. Nor can those of us who had more than a fair share fail to face that reality, and talk to the people who are concerned about overshoot.
Personally, my proposal would be that family energy rations be pegged to a family of four. Heinberg has a detailed plan for this in his new book, and he outlined it at the petroleum depletion protocol. What I suggest is that biological reproduction wouldn't get you any increase in your yearly energy credit, whereas non-biological reproduction would - bring your Mom to live with you, and you get a fifth person's energy to work with. Adopt a child, and you get a fifth person's energy. Give birth, and you have to make do with what you've got (this *ONLY* works with good access to birth control and basic medical care - if we lose this, we simply end up penalizing the poor and unlucky even more than they are already penalized). Thus, those couples who elect to have more than two children would either have to be able to pay for it by buying extra energy on the markets, or they would have to be very frugal, and consume much less, which knocks out the very worst effect of having a child in the US anyhow - the obscene rate of consumption. Most of the larger families I know are very, very frugal and I'm going to bet that they'd still have spare energy at the end of the year to sell back into the community at large, or to save for the next year (when allotments drop at the same rate as oil production drops). I'd also be fine with tax penalties, but I suspect these may function less well as the nation gets poorer and poorer. I will tell the simple truth - I would have paid any amount of money I could possibly have produced in order to have children. But for those who would rather have a more comfortable existence than more children, this will provide further incentives (overwhelmingly, people in the US cite money as a main reason for not having more children anyhow).
I do believe however, that no movement can afford to make people ashamed of the children they already have. Nor can we afford to be anti-child, or anti-elderly, or anti-disability. If we can't find a moral way to deal with the population issue, than we've no hope of dealing with it at all. But nor can we lie to ourselves and say, "it was ok for me to do X - just not those women in Bangladesh."
I'm going to lobby Pat Murphy or someone to put on a public discussion of this at next year's conference, if I can't find a venue to do it sooner. Actually, when I first spoke to Pat, I suggested to him that I talk about peak oil as a woman's issue, and he told me that he doubted anyone would attend my talk if I did. After this conference, I don't think we need just a talk on that subject - we need a whole conference. But however we do it, the elephant needs to dance for a while, and we need to think about a coherent way of both valuing children, women and people in general, and also addressing the fact that the planet has biological limits.
Sharon in upstate NY
Monday, September 25, 2006
12 Months of Naked Men
So like most of my "brilliant" ideas, this was conceived in a moment of madness, and committed to without really any plan. On Saturday, I slipped out for a bit to see former grad school friends, and while I was waiting for them to arrive, I met Andrew, the CSA farmer of song and story. We were chatting, and some how I got on to my theory that the peak oil movement needs to pander more. I had been very much annoyed by a section of David Orr's talk (not because it was in any way inherently annoying, just because it hit one of my buttons) describing all the terrible ways that the current administration, corporations and the right use sex and power amd fear to manipulate us. And this reason this annoys me is because I hear that outrage so often. But let's be honest - all of us, even we environmental and peak oil activists, like sex and power. I like sex, and I think I could get used to power too. To me, when we complain that the "other side" (a misnomer, but I'll use it) is using these terribly unfair techniques, that we won't use because we're so high minded (and really, that wasn't what David Orr said at all - this is just me riffing) and noble, we really mean that we're bad at using those techniques, so we're going to call them out of bounds.
Seriously, PETA has become a mainstream movement in large part because of a lot of naked models who will strip rather than wear fir. They could be our role models (that's really the only good thing I may ever say about PETA). So could the anti-tobacco campaigns showing the woman in her 30s dying. We have, as I said in my talk (I have largely forgotten my talk, and will never ever be able to reproduce it, except for this one short section, which I sort of remember, and a quote from Thomas Paine which I had to write down anyhow), got all the good stuff on our side (I'm going to write much more about this later, because I think it may be centrally important) - the images of the farm, and world war II levels of cooperation, of victory gardens - and truth and justice. I said something about pictures of cute kids holding baby lambs, I'm fairly sure. And then I think I mentioned sexy dairy maids and muscular men planting vegetables (the whole thing is really a total blur - that I didn't fall on my ass is a miracle). All of which came out of this conversation with Andrew the day before, where somehow we'd gotten to joking about a "Men of Peak Oil" Calendar. And G-d help me, I said something about it on stage. It definitely got a laugh. And I was still wired and insane enough to actually ask Richard Heinberg to do it (I'm sure the covering of his face and turning away in horror was a "yes").
But now, 30+ hours later, I still think its a good idea, from a slightly cooler perspective. First of all, because peak oil needs its first fund raiser - if we're ever going to get people to start associating us with lambs, muscles and little house on the prarie, which is absolutely essential (here I am not joking), that costs. And while women are the traditional models on these things, there are two reasons not to do that - a. It would be 12 months of Megan Quinn (no bad thought, certainly it would get a following, probably a big one, but that seems really unfair to her, and there's no one else) and b. the boys started this - they should skin for it.
Actually, the real reason that this would work is simple - the peak oil movement needs women more than anything in the world. Think that's an exaggeration? I don't. Because an enormous amount of the social capital (I hate that word, but we'll use it) in the world comes through women. They tend to be the organizers in small communities. They run the church functions, the synagogue sisterhood, cook the food, administrate the PTA, call people in emergencies, drive the carpools, spend time with the kids when their values are forming, talk about their worries with friends and families - including peak oil. They pick the clothes and decorate the houses - they do the grocery shopping and run the appliances - most of our energy consumption is managed by women. I don't mean to stereotype, but whether they work or have kids or neither, they probably do most of the household labor and most of the "processing" and maintaing of relationships - and those are big, big things for us. This cannot be a guy's thing and succeed. There were many, many, many women at that conference who I know just from speaking to them have organizational skills that this movement should be tapping, who have contacts and power that they don't think of as a potential asset but that they should. And because a lot of women (not all, there are plenty who can) don't have my willingness to talk loud in front of crowds, those skills aren't seen and gathered up and in.
I have no idea whatsoever whether any of these women really want to see the gentlemen who have done so much for the peak oil movement naked or not (actually, a few of them told me they did, but I don't know if they constitute a quorum or not ;-) - but what they want is to *laugh* (no, no, they aren't going to be laughing at your ummm, accoutrements...I'm talking about the kind of good natured laughter that women...oh, just go rent The Full Monty if you don't understand.) But the calendar would make some money, it would bring peak oil to some more mainstream people in a lighter, less scary way, and it would also say we're serious in a different way - that we're willing to embarass ourselves for a good cause. The other thing that I do remember from my presentation (oh, lord, I rather wish I didn't) was me pirouetting, showing off just how fat and flabby I am, in order to prove that many, many people can grow food - that it really isn't that hard. If you don't think that that scared me to death, well...let's just not talk about it)
I'm sure there are better ideas - in fact, I've got quite a few more serious ideas. For example, if you pushed me I might admit that we could get even further with some of them, and that I'm just fixating on this because it is so much fun. But I think that something funny-serious might not be a bad start. Because peak oil isn't just a fact, now its a movement, and people aren't they want to move when the whole thing is so depressing. Lightening things up just a little might do some real good. I keep thinking about the "Scenes From a Liberal Apocalypse" article in Harpers a few months ago (about last year's conference), in which the article attempted to dismiss peak oil because the whole thing seemed so humorless, so sincere. That article is the one thing that no one talked about at this conference (we should have, IMHO) and that no one talks about on the lists I'm on. We're afraid of being made fun of, because we think it takes away our credibility. But we're a lot less easy to be made fun of if we make fun of ourselves first. Satire is powerful. So let's steal it for a good cause.
I'm going to ASPO. I'll be seeing Richard Heinberg again (I was wondering if he'd remember me, but now I suspect he will ;-), and I'm going to ask him to introduce me to Matthew Simmons. I wonder if *he'll* take his shirt off ;-).
Sharon in upstate NY, who has had very, very little sleep in the last few days, and may regret this post later, particularly when she finds out that no one important in the peak oil movement will ever speak to her again.
Seriously, PETA has become a mainstream movement in large part because of a lot of naked models who will strip rather than wear fir. They could be our role models (that's really the only good thing I may ever say about PETA). So could the anti-tobacco campaigns showing the woman in her 30s dying. We have, as I said in my talk (I have largely forgotten my talk, and will never ever be able to reproduce it, except for this one short section, which I sort of remember, and a quote from Thomas Paine which I had to write down anyhow), got all the good stuff on our side (I'm going to write much more about this later, because I think it may be centrally important) - the images of the farm, and world war II levels of cooperation, of victory gardens - and truth and justice. I said something about pictures of cute kids holding baby lambs, I'm fairly sure. And then I think I mentioned sexy dairy maids and muscular men planting vegetables (the whole thing is really a total blur - that I didn't fall on my ass is a miracle). All of which came out of this conversation with Andrew the day before, where somehow we'd gotten to joking about a "Men of Peak Oil" Calendar. And G-d help me, I said something about it on stage. It definitely got a laugh. And I was still wired and insane enough to actually ask Richard Heinberg to do it (I'm sure the covering of his face and turning away in horror was a "yes").
But now, 30+ hours later, I still think its a good idea, from a slightly cooler perspective. First of all, because peak oil needs its first fund raiser - if we're ever going to get people to start associating us with lambs, muscles and little house on the prarie, which is absolutely essential (here I am not joking), that costs. And while women are the traditional models on these things, there are two reasons not to do that - a. It would be 12 months of Megan Quinn (no bad thought, certainly it would get a following, probably a big one, but that seems really unfair to her, and there's no one else) and b. the boys started this - they should skin for it.
Actually, the real reason that this would work is simple - the peak oil movement needs women more than anything in the world. Think that's an exaggeration? I don't. Because an enormous amount of the social capital (I hate that word, but we'll use it) in the world comes through women. They tend to be the organizers in small communities. They run the church functions, the synagogue sisterhood, cook the food, administrate the PTA, call people in emergencies, drive the carpools, spend time with the kids when their values are forming, talk about their worries with friends and families - including peak oil. They pick the clothes and decorate the houses - they do the grocery shopping and run the appliances - most of our energy consumption is managed by women. I don't mean to stereotype, but whether they work or have kids or neither, they probably do most of the household labor and most of the "processing" and maintaing of relationships - and those are big, big things for us. This cannot be a guy's thing and succeed. There were many, many, many women at that conference who I know just from speaking to them have organizational skills that this movement should be tapping, who have contacts and power that they don't think of as a potential asset but that they should. And because a lot of women (not all, there are plenty who can) don't have my willingness to talk loud in front of crowds, those skills aren't seen and gathered up and in.
I have no idea whatsoever whether any of these women really want to see the gentlemen who have done so much for the peak oil movement naked or not (actually, a few of them told me they did, but I don't know if they constitute a quorum or not ;-) - but what they want is to *laugh* (no, no, they aren't going to be laughing at your ummm, accoutrements...I'm talking about the kind of good natured laughter that women...oh, just go rent The Full Monty if you don't understand.) But the calendar would make some money, it would bring peak oil to some more mainstream people in a lighter, less scary way, and it would also say we're serious in a different way - that we're willing to embarass ourselves for a good cause. The other thing that I do remember from my presentation (oh, lord, I rather wish I didn't) was me pirouetting, showing off just how fat and flabby I am, in order to prove that many, many people can grow food - that it really isn't that hard. If you don't think that that scared me to death, well...let's just not talk about it)
I'm sure there are better ideas - in fact, I've got quite a few more serious ideas. For example, if you pushed me I might admit that we could get even further with some of them, and that I'm just fixating on this because it is so much fun. But I think that something funny-serious might not be a bad start. Because peak oil isn't just a fact, now its a movement, and people aren't they want to move when the whole thing is so depressing. Lightening things up just a little might do some real good. I keep thinking about the "Scenes From a Liberal Apocalypse" article in Harpers a few months ago (about last year's conference), in which the article attempted to dismiss peak oil because the whole thing seemed so humorless, so sincere. That article is the one thing that no one talked about at this conference (we should have, IMHO) and that no one talks about on the lists I'm on. We're afraid of being made fun of, because we think it takes away our credibility. But we're a lot less easy to be made fun of if we make fun of ourselves first. Satire is powerful. So let's steal it for a good cause.
I'm going to ASPO. I'll be seeing Richard Heinberg again (I was wondering if he'd remember me, but now I suspect he will ;-), and I'm going to ask him to introduce me to Matthew Simmons. I wonder if *he'll* take his shirt off ;-).
Sharon in upstate NY, who has had very, very little sleep in the last few days, and may regret this post later, particularly when she finds out that no one important in the peak oil movement will ever speak to her again.
Return from Ohio Part II - Famous Folk
My favorite moment at the whole conference was after I spoke, a woman I'd met earlier at the conference came up to me and said, "I had no idea you were *someone.*" I think that describes a lot of the experience for me - until sometime Sunday mid-morning, I was essentially travelling incognito among the famous (not Oprah famous, but definitely peak oil famous). Quite reasonably, no one but Pat had any idea who I was (and realistically, if you had any idea who I was that still wouldn't tell you anything important). I have no book. I have a teeny website that went up last week and remains partly unreadable because of technical difficulties. I was there because Pat liked my writing style and took a chance on the possibility that I could speak too. And I'm tremendously grateful that he did. But I'm still not "someone" in the sense that the kind lady meant it. (BTW, if the people I'm writing about aren't famous to you, here's their info, so you can follow along http://www.communitysolution.org/06conf2.html)
But the serious someones were out in force. Let me start with the person who was the absolute highlight of the conference for me - Peter Bane. I think we were 20 minutes into the speakers dinner when it became clear to me that I had fallen deeply, passionately in love with Peter. Fortunately for Eric, Peter's partner Keith (who is just as wonderful) and probably the gentleman himself, this was the kind of love that makes you want to get down and worship someone as a god, rather than anything more earthy. When Peter Bane speaks, you get TRUTH - capital letters truth. And unlike every single other person at the conference who, no matter how deeply committed they were to telling everyone about peak oil (and they were), was selling something - a worldview, books, a website, etc... (I do not exclude myself - I was selling a perspective). Peter wasn't. He has things to sell - he and Keith do courses, which I can only imagine are amazing, and of course, he's the editor of Permaculture Activist Magazine. But while he answered questions about his magazine and other enterprises readily enough, but there was no agenda, just wisdom that he was passing along as fast as it could flow out of him. I don't really know how to describe what was different about Peter than everyone else there - and anyone who can put their finger on it better than I should definitely try - but it was one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen. If you ever have a chance to hear him speak or take one of his classes, do.
Probably the biggest star of the event was Vicki Robin. Now I have to confess something. I went into this assuming that she would be a lightweight - I've read The Book, as it is called, and I thought it was very wise. But most of the representatives of the voluntary simplicity movement that I had met have been in it for purely personal reasons, and never really connected fully to the culture at large, and as far as I could tell, the impact of the movement on our culture of consumption didn't seem perceptible. While I could understand why Pat might invite someone from a related movement who had millions of followers, while I liked *her* personally on sight, I wasn't expecting all that much other than some good advice on frugality.
Boy, oh boy was I wrong. Vicki Robin is a smarter person's Oprah, with a much better sense of humor (and I don't think Oprah is either dumb or humorless, so that's saying something). She was a terrific showwoman, but never anything but sincere. And she looked at us in the audience, read the audience, and gave it what it needed - not only a way to get out of an overpowering inertia, but also a good talking to about self-righteousness. Afterwards, she joked that I should kiss her feet - and I'd have been glad to. Because I've never seen 250ish people lose 10,000lbs off their shoulders in an hour before. After Vicki spoke, everyone straightened up, shook their heads and was ready to *go forward* - that sense that they could go on from where they were was of inestimable value, and she deserved all the foot kissing she wanted.
Now of course, like any peaker, the three people I was most excited to meet were Richard Heinberg, Julian Darley and especially David Orr. In a purely technical sense I met David Orr - I was introduced to him. But at the speakers dinner he was at the other table, and after that I never quite worked up the nerve to go chat him up. Which is really too bad because David Orr is one of the most wonderful and brilliant of all agrarian writers, really just a shadow below Wendell Berry.
That said, I really didn't like his speech much. Despite its attempts to talk about the root of the problems we're facing, I think it got bogged down in partisanisms and laying blame. Nothing he said was untrue, but it didn't take me anywhere I needed to go, personally. But I was thrilled I got to hear him.
Richard Heinberg is a very, very polite man. We stayed across the hall from one another, and he managed very quickly when Pat Murphy introduced me to him, to lie and say he'd heard of me (Suuuuuurrre.) Later on, when I think he might actually have placed the face to the fact that I was on the stage too, he was kind enough to praise my talk and not run screaming away when I first lobbied him about putting education and agitprop more seriously on the agenda for peak oil (more about that later), and then asked him to consider taking off his shirt for a camera for my randomly generated idea of "The Men of Peak Oil Calendar" (which I still think is a good idea - more on that later too!) He is also a terrific violinist. Those are the only things I can say about him personally, since neither conversation lasted more than 3 minutes. As a speaker he was very good, very graceful, even unveiling something that was both very important and a little boring on some level (oil depletion protocols - we need to know this stuff, it is very important, he's written a book about it and we should all read it, but 40 minutes of powerpoint, after 40 prior minutes of power point, all first thing in the morning was a bit long). This was not Heinberg's fault so much as the structure of the conference's. And it wasn't the conference's fault either, because we need this information - I think we just needed a step aerobics class in the middle or something to get everyone moving (yeah, right, like I would ever do that).
Julian Darley preceded Richard Heinberg. In a personal sense, I would say that Julian Darley seems like one of the most over-extended people in human history. Despite that, he's very nice. Much, much, much nicer than I could be if I had as many balls in the air as he did, and as many people who want to add more balls. And he handled his over-extension astonishingly well - not only are all these balls in the air, but he's juggling with both hands and feet.
I managed to irritate him during the first 2 minutes of our acquaintance during the speaker's dinner (he was late after a bad day, trying desperately to stuff down his first meal of the day before the keynote address, and I was caught up in a prior discussion, and accidentally
baited him a little at a bad moment - my fault, not his). The very first thing he said to me, having caught my statement that I have four kids was "Have you Read a Book Called _Maybe One_?" (Yes, I'd read it - for those not in the know it is Bill McKibben's account of why he and others should only have one child, and it is quite good. As you know if you read the blog, I'm not trying to pretend the population issue doesn't exist or that I'm not culpable - much more on that later, too). I think this may be a new personal record - I've never before ticked off a famous person enough to have them be rude to me in under 2 minutes (please note the modifier "famous" here - I've ticked off regular folk in under 2 *seconds* ;-). His was definitely the most obvious "And who are you and why should I be polite to you" moment. I'm actually kind of glad it worked out that way, because it is a much funnier story this way.
But I did have a chance to both watch Julian Darley speak and to talk to him several other times, and I was impressed by his genuine commitment to live as sustainably as possible given his job(s), by his really astonishing range of knowledge about nearly everything, and about the fact that he may be the only person that I've seen in the peak oil movement who fully gets how mainstream this is about to be, and how many ways this is going to have to play out. He's quite astonishing, and he handles 50 new proposals every 20 minutes with grace and style. The talk was again, a bit too much crammed into a little. I think the problem is that it is a fairly new thing for peak oil speakers not to have to explain the problem to their audience - for so long Heinberg and Darley have been speaking to people who are only just getting it, and all of a sudden, there's a critical mass of people who understand and are ready for the next move. And to both Heinberg and Darley's credit, they are ready with next moves - the Oil Depletion protocol Heinberg has worked out with Colin Campbell, the smart jitney program he and Pat Murphy put together, and all the thousands of projects Julian Darley is juggling between Global Public Media, Post-Carbon Institute and the relocalization project are exactly what is needed, on both grassroots and policy levels. They are keeping ahead of the curve on what they have to offer (think about how rare that is - if they were rock and roll musicians, they'd be Paul Simon and Madonna, not the Beach Boys, playing the same stuff at the state fair). But I think they are still trying to explain peak oil a bit too much. On another note, I regret, since I didn't get to talk to Darley again after my talk, I have nothing to report on his willingness or unwillingness to strip at least partially naked for the cause ;-).
I admired Richard Olson from afar, which was a great pity, because he was a terrific speaker and the things he is doing at Berea College are astounding - and like Jeff Christian, they aren't building houses for the priveleged, but bringing sustainability to the poor. I think that big old economic issue - how do we get down away from the relatively educated and priveleged - is going to be a huge deal, and Richard Olson is doing it right now (along with his wife who I did chat with briefly). I never even shook hands with Jeff Christian - he was there and he wasn't, and we passed in the night. Pity that.
Bob Brecha was my fellow non-celebrity, and I'm so grateful he was there. He's local, and we got to see the strawbale house he built, which was amazing. He's a good guy, fun to argue with, and he gave a really nice, solid presentation - at least the 1/2 of it I saw. I ducked out to drink tea with my old grad school friends who were in town, and missed some of it. I got the sense at the end, as I came back, that 3 engineer/scientist types talking about building in a row may have been a mistake in terms of excitement levels, but that's hardly his fault. He should be more famous in the peak oil movement than he is - a lot more. I think after his talk, he was.
As for me, I think it went fairly well. It was clear early on that Peter Bane and I were going to be saying some of the same things. As Peter spoke, it became clear that my talk was essentially a faint subset of his, and had to go in the trash. So while he talked I scribbled this sad little outline, and got up and ranted for a while. And people clapped, and said it was good. So I guess I got my five minutes of being somebody. Fortunately, my ego did not overflow, because when I came home, Simon told me, "Your job is to take care of *me*" - ie, I'm somebody already, and let's not forget precisely who - the one who cooks lunch.
Next post - Pat, Megan, Faith and why you should go next year.
Sharon
But the serious someones were out in force. Let me start with the person who was the absolute highlight of the conference for me - Peter Bane. I think we were 20 minutes into the speakers dinner when it became clear to me that I had fallen deeply, passionately in love with Peter. Fortunately for Eric, Peter's partner Keith (who is just as wonderful) and probably the gentleman himself, this was the kind of love that makes you want to get down and worship someone as a god, rather than anything more earthy. When Peter Bane speaks, you get TRUTH - capital letters truth. And unlike every single other person at the conference who, no matter how deeply committed they were to telling everyone about peak oil (and they were), was selling something - a worldview, books, a website, etc... (I do not exclude myself - I was selling a perspective). Peter wasn't. He has things to sell - he and Keith do courses, which I can only imagine are amazing, and of course, he's the editor of Permaculture Activist Magazine. But while he answered questions about his magazine and other enterprises readily enough, but there was no agenda, just wisdom that he was passing along as fast as it could flow out of him. I don't really know how to describe what was different about Peter than everyone else there - and anyone who can put their finger on it better than I should definitely try - but it was one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen. If you ever have a chance to hear him speak or take one of his classes, do.
Probably the biggest star of the event was Vicki Robin. Now I have to confess something. I went into this assuming that she would be a lightweight - I've read The Book, as it is called, and I thought it was very wise. But most of the representatives of the voluntary simplicity movement that I had met have been in it for purely personal reasons, and never really connected fully to the culture at large, and as far as I could tell, the impact of the movement on our culture of consumption didn't seem perceptible. While I could understand why Pat might invite someone from a related movement who had millions of followers, while I liked *her* personally on sight, I wasn't expecting all that much other than some good advice on frugality.
Boy, oh boy was I wrong. Vicki Robin is a smarter person's Oprah, with a much better sense of humor (and I don't think Oprah is either dumb or humorless, so that's saying something). She was a terrific showwoman, but never anything but sincere. And she looked at us in the audience, read the audience, and gave it what it needed - not only a way to get out of an overpowering inertia, but also a good talking to about self-righteousness. Afterwards, she joked that I should kiss her feet - and I'd have been glad to. Because I've never seen 250ish people lose 10,000lbs off their shoulders in an hour before. After Vicki spoke, everyone straightened up, shook their heads and was ready to *go forward* - that sense that they could go on from where they were was of inestimable value, and she deserved all the foot kissing she wanted.
Now of course, like any peaker, the three people I was most excited to meet were Richard Heinberg, Julian Darley and especially David Orr. In a purely technical sense I met David Orr - I was introduced to him. But at the speakers dinner he was at the other table, and after that I never quite worked up the nerve to go chat him up. Which is really too bad because David Orr is one of the most wonderful and brilliant of all agrarian writers, really just a shadow below Wendell Berry.
That said, I really didn't like his speech much. Despite its attempts to talk about the root of the problems we're facing, I think it got bogged down in partisanisms and laying blame. Nothing he said was untrue, but it didn't take me anywhere I needed to go, personally. But I was thrilled I got to hear him.
Richard Heinberg is a very, very polite man. We stayed across the hall from one another, and he managed very quickly when Pat Murphy introduced me to him, to lie and say he'd heard of me (Suuuuuurrre.) Later on, when I think he might actually have placed the face to the fact that I was on the stage too, he was kind enough to praise my talk and not run screaming away when I first lobbied him about putting education and agitprop more seriously on the agenda for peak oil (more about that later), and then asked him to consider taking off his shirt for a camera for my randomly generated idea of "The Men of Peak Oil Calendar" (which I still think is a good idea - more on that later too!) He is also a terrific violinist. Those are the only things I can say about him personally, since neither conversation lasted more than 3 minutes. As a speaker he was very good, very graceful, even unveiling something that was both very important and a little boring on some level (oil depletion protocols - we need to know this stuff, it is very important, he's written a book about it and we should all read it, but 40 minutes of powerpoint, after 40 prior minutes of power point, all first thing in the morning was a bit long). This was not Heinberg's fault so much as the structure of the conference's. And it wasn't the conference's fault either, because we need this information - I think we just needed a step aerobics class in the middle or something to get everyone moving (yeah, right, like I would ever do that).
Julian Darley preceded Richard Heinberg. In a personal sense, I would say that Julian Darley seems like one of the most over-extended people in human history. Despite that, he's very nice. Much, much, much nicer than I could be if I had as many balls in the air as he did, and as many people who want to add more balls. And he handled his over-extension astonishingly well - not only are all these balls in the air, but he's juggling with both hands and feet.
I managed to irritate him during the first 2 minutes of our acquaintance during the speaker's dinner (he was late after a bad day, trying desperately to stuff down his first meal of the day before the keynote address, and I was caught up in a prior discussion, and accidentally
baited him a little at a bad moment - my fault, not his). The very first thing he said to me, having caught my statement that I have four kids was "Have you Read a Book Called _Maybe One_?" (Yes, I'd read it - for those not in the know it is Bill McKibben's account of why he and others should only have one child, and it is quite good. As you know if you read the blog, I'm not trying to pretend the population issue doesn't exist or that I'm not culpable - much more on that later, too). I think this may be a new personal record - I've never before ticked off a famous person enough to have them be rude to me in under 2 minutes (please note the modifier "famous" here - I've ticked off regular folk in under 2 *seconds* ;-). His was definitely the most obvious "And who are you and why should I be polite to you" moment. I'm actually kind of glad it worked out that way, because it is a much funnier story this way.
But I did have a chance to both watch Julian Darley speak and to talk to him several other times, and I was impressed by his genuine commitment to live as sustainably as possible given his job(s), by his really astonishing range of knowledge about nearly everything, and about the fact that he may be the only person that I've seen in the peak oil movement who fully gets how mainstream this is about to be, and how many ways this is going to have to play out. He's quite astonishing, and he handles 50 new proposals every 20 minutes with grace and style. The talk was again, a bit too much crammed into a little. I think the problem is that it is a fairly new thing for peak oil speakers not to have to explain the problem to their audience - for so long Heinberg and Darley have been speaking to people who are only just getting it, and all of a sudden, there's a critical mass of people who understand and are ready for the next move. And to both Heinberg and Darley's credit, they are ready with next moves - the Oil Depletion protocol Heinberg has worked out with Colin Campbell, the smart jitney program he and Pat Murphy put together, and all the thousands of projects Julian Darley is juggling between Global Public Media, Post-Carbon Institute and the relocalization project are exactly what is needed, on both grassroots and policy levels. They are keeping ahead of the curve on what they have to offer (think about how rare that is - if they were rock and roll musicians, they'd be Paul Simon and Madonna, not the Beach Boys, playing the same stuff at the state fair). But I think they are still trying to explain peak oil a bit too much. On another note, I regret, since I didn't get to talk to Darley again after my talk, I have nothing to report on his willingness or unwillingness to strip at least partially naked for the cause ;-).
I admired Richard Olson from afar, which was a great pity, because he was a terrific speaker and the things he is doing at Berea College are astounding - and like Jeff Christian, they aren't building houses for the priveleged, but bringing sustainability to the poor. I think that big old economic issue - how do we get down away from the relatively educated and priveleged - is going to be a huge deal, and Richard Olson is doing it right now (along with his wife who I did chat with briefly). I never even shook hands with Jeff Christian - he was there and he wasn't, and we passed in the night. Pity that.
Bob Brecha was my fellow non-celebrity, and I'm so grateful he was there. He's local, and we got to see the strawbale house he built, which was amazing. He's a good guy, fun to argue with, and he gave a really nice, solid presentation - at least the 1/2 of it I saw. I ducked out to drink tea with my old grad school friends who were in town, and missed some of it. I got the sense at the end, as I came back, that 3 engineer/scientist types talking about building in a row may have been a mistake in terms of excitement levels, but that's hardly his fault. He should be more famous in the peak oil movement than he is - a lot more. I think after his talk, he was.
As for me, I think it went fairly well. It was clear early on that Peter Bane and I were going to be saying some of the same things. As Peter spoke, it became clear that my talk was essentially a faint subset of his, and had to go in the trash. So while he talked I scribbled this sad little outline, and got up and ranted for a while. And people clapped, and said it was good. So I guess I got my five minutes of being somebody. Fortunately, my ego did not overflow, because when I came home, Simon told me, "Your job is to take care of *me*" - ie, I'm somebody already, and let's not forget precisely who - the one who cooks lunch.
Next post - Pat, Megan, Faith and why you should go next year.
Sharon
Back from the Community Solutions Conference - Part I
A Report from the Community Solutions Conference : Part I - the non-famous people
Well, first I have to say how glad I am to be home. I think Eric was faintly worried that all
the attention would turn my head, and home with its clutter and long list of chores would pale by comparison. But I actually was dying to come home and get to work on all the new projects and ideas that the wonderful people at the conference inspired. I missed my little boys terribly, and got very, very sick of my breast pump. Not to mention that I missed Eric terribly - I think a happy marriage can best be described as the perfect person to make all your jokes and snide comments to, and life without that is very pale indeed.
The trip was great - something big only fell off the plane once, and thankfully it was already on the ground, so we lived. That’s really all I hope for from the airline industry these days. And Yellow Springs OH is a really cool place - if Pat will hire me to be Megan’s slave and Antioch will hire Eric, we’d move in a heartbeat (well…) I especially was thrilled to meet several local CSA farmers, including the famous Andrew, who had been mentioned and described to me at least half a dozen times by the time I actually ran into him on Saturday. He’s already doing more with his farm than I am, and the thing I love best about him is that he’s mad as hell (in fun way) about all the right things, in all the right ways. Since I have a little outrage problem myself, I was thrilled to meet him! I’m also mentally collecting people - I suspect the peak oil movement is going to need a lot of new, different kinds of public figures really soon, and Andrew struck me as someone who could matter a lot (and not just because I want him to pose for my “men of peak oil” fund raising calender - btw, I wish I’d had a camera when I asked Richard Heinberg!). There’s a moral seriousness and authenticity to him that is potentially important.
I must now begin a series of apologies to people I met, adored, want desperately to meet again, and I still can’t remember their names. I’m sorry - I’m like that. I remember about 1/50th of people who name themselves to me, and sometimes it takes several tries for me to get it. Please understand that this in no way is a reflection of my liking or esteem for you, just my own neurological failings.
Larry and his partner, whose name I’ve lost, even though I met her several times (aaaggghhh) were kind enough to drive me back and forth from the Dayton airport, and they impressed me as two of the most practical and clear-eyed people out there. They aren’t sentimental (that’s a compliment from me, btw - I’m not incapable of sentimentality, but it isn’t my favorite characteristic) and Larry especially was extremely perceptive. I would never have noticed that part of Richard Heinberg’s effectiveness was that he has perfect pitch (as does Bill Clinton, according to Larry, something else I didn’t know). The two of them are living a low key, sustainable life in a small, depressed city near Yellow Springs (YS is pricey), and doing it for reasons in part of economic necessity. They are doing all the right things, with no hype and no fuss, and that in itself is admirable. Unlike me, they aren’t proclaiming things from the rooftop, just pointing out how simple and practical it is.
I met many other wonderful people - a man who is planning on transforming a large chunk of his Ontario farm into a permaculture farm, and who immediately connected me with someone who could answer questions about horses. There was the very sweet gentleman with the public health background who was speaking very seriously about zero population growth until I embarrassed him by asking him if he was telling me all this because of the number of children I have (he wasn’t, and it would have been ok even if he had ). There were several couples who read me on ROE2 or ROE3, who came up and told me how very excited they were to meet me. While I was deeply flattered, I hope they went and met some of the really important and famous people there, who merited a great deal more excitement than me.
I met people who had been in the environmental movements and energy movements not for years, but for decades. I met a lovely Amish gentleman who knows more about almost everything I want to know than I do, and who sadly kind of got shafted in the end because short time compelled us to move on from his legitimate question about patriarchy (the shafting was my fault in part - I made a joke out of it, which I often do, but I don’t think I sufficiently acknowledged that I think patriarchal and hierarchical structures are a real issue that deserves discussion). I met people who farm with horses, build amazing houses (one woman showed me the most gorgeous tiny house she designed for herself, and I immediately wanted to move in!), and people who know about almost everything.
I call it human google - want to know the answer to a question? Want to know about land trusts? Tillage equipment for small draft horses? Bicycle powered-washing machines? Ferments for beer? Hand-spindling angora? How much biodiesel it would take to keep the airlines running? What kind of solar greenhouse is best? Turn around and ask the person next to you. If they don’t know, they’ll find the person who does - on average, I think it took less than 3 minutes to answer any single question I had at any given time.
There were so many wonderful other people, and I can’t talk about them all, but I do want to mention Aaron Newton. First of all, he gave me his card the first day, and I didn’t look at it carefully until this morning - he’s *THAT* Aaron, of the powering down blog (www.powering down.blogspot.com) - he’s a terrific writer and thinker, and I’ve actually been reading him for a while, but never made the connection. He’s also an editor of a new Environmental magazines, www.groovygreen.com (also well worth checking out). He’s an absolute delight as a conference buddy - we're both shy about approaching people, and so we strategized together. And he’s my personal pick for the charismatic face of peak oil phase 2, the part where we need a bunch of new figures who can present the message in a way that is compelling to a mainstream audience. I’ve been watching for a while, and despairing that I hadn’t seen anyone (besides Megan Quinn, of course, who is already there) who was fairly young, smart and had the gift of connecting to people. Aaron’s got that, and if I have any role at all in determining who helps introduce the rest of America to this, he’s going to be in it (not that I’ve mentioned this to Aaron - oops, guess I just did!) His wife asked him if he’d picked up a lot of crazy ideas at the conference - well, she has no idea how crazy *my* ideas are.
Ok, on to the famous people next time I get a chance!
Sharon
Well, first I have to say how glad I am to be home. I think Eric was faintly worried that all
the attention would turn my head, and home with its clutter and long list of chores would pale by comparison. But I actually was dying to come home and get to work on all the new projects and ideas that the wonderful people at the conference inspired. I missed my little boys terribly, and got very, very sick of my breast pump. Not to mention that I missed Eric terribly - I think a happy marriage can best be described as the perfect person to make all your jokes and snide comments to, and life without that is very pale indeed.
The trip was great - something big only fell off the plane once, and thankfully it was already on the ground, so we lived. That’s really all I hope for from the airline industry these days. And Yellow Springs OH is a really cool place - if Pat will hire me to be Megan’s slave and Antioch will hire Eric, we’d move in a heartbeat (well…) I especially was thrilled to meet several local CSA farmers, including the famous Andrew, who had been mentioned and described to me at least half a dozen times by the time I actually ran into him on Saturday. He’s already doing more with his farm than I am, and the thing I love best about him is that he’s mad as hell (in fun way) about all the right things, in all the right ways. Since I have a little outrage problem myself, I was thrilled to meet him! I’m also mentally collecting people - I suspect the peak oil movement is going to need a lot of new, different kinds of public figures really soon, and Andrew struck me as someone who could matter a lot (and not just because I want him to pose for my “men of peak oil” fund raising calender - btw, I wish I’d had a camera when I asked Richard Heinberg!). There’s a moral seriousness and authenticity to him that is potentially important.
I must now begin a series of apologies to people I met, adored, want desperately to meet again, and I still can’t remember their names. I’m sorry - I’m like that. I remember about 1/50th of people who name themselves to me, and sometimes it takes several tries for me to get it. Please understand that this in no way is a reflection of my liking or esteem for you, just my own neurological failings.
Larry and his partner, whose name I’ve lost, even though I met her several times (aaaggghhh) were kind enough to drive me back and forth from the Dayton airport, and they impressed me as two of the most practical and clear-eyed people out there. They aren’t sentimental (that’s a compliment from me, btw - I’m not incapable of sentimentality, but it isn’t my favorite characteristic) and Larry especially was extremely perceptive. I would never have noticed that part of Richard Heinberg’s effectiveness was that he has perfect pitch (as does Bill Clinton, according to Larry, something else I didn’t know). The two of them are living a low key, sustainable life in a small, depressed city near Yellow Springs (YS is pricey), and doing it for reasons in part of economic necessity. They are doing all the right things, with no hype and no fuss, and that in itself is admirable. Unlike me, they aren’t proclaiming things from the rooftop, just pointing out how simple and practical it is.
I met many other wonderful people - a man who is planning on transforming a large chunk of his Ontario farm into a permaculture farm, and who immediately connected me with someone who could answer questions about horses. There was the very sweet gentleman with the public health background who was speaking very seriously about zero population growth until I embarrassed him by asking him if he was telling me all this because of the number of children I have (he wasn’t, and it would have been ok even if he had ). There were several couples who read me on ROE2 or ROE3, who came up and told me how very excited they were to meet me. While I was deeply flattered, I hope they went and met some of the really important and famous people there, who merited a great deal more excitement than me.
I met people who had been in the environmental movements and energy movements not for years, but for decades. I met a lovely Amish gentleman who knows more about almost everything I want to know than I do, and who sadly kind of got shafted in the end because short time compelled us to move on from his legitimate question about patriarchy (the shafting was my fault in part - I made a joke out of it, which I often do, but I don’t think I sufficiently acknowledged that I think patriarchal and hierarchical structures are a real issue that deserves discussion). I met people who farm with horses, build amazing houses (one woman showed me the most gorgeous tiny house she designed for herself, and I immediately wanted to move in!), and people who know about almost everything.
I call it human google - want to know the answer to a question? Want to know about land trusts? Tillage equipment for small draft horses? Bicycle powered-washing machines? Ferments for beer? Hand-spindling angora? How much biodiesel it would take to keep the airlines running? What kind of solar greenhouse is best? Turn around and ask the person next to you. If they don’t know, they’ll find the person who does - on average, I think it took less than 3 minutes to answer any single question I had at any given time.
There were so many wonderful other people, and I can’t talk about them all, but I do want to mention Aaron Newton. First of all, he gave me his card the first day, and I didn’t look at it carefully until this morning - he’s *THAT* Aaron, of the powering down blog (www.powering down.blogspot.com) - he’s a terrific writer and thinker, and I’ve actually been reading him for a while, but never made the connection. He’s also an editor of a new Environmental magazines, www.groovygreen.com (also well worth checking out). He’s an absolute delight as a conference buddy - we're both shy about approaching people, and so we strategized together. And he’s my personal pick for the charismatic face of peak oil phase 2, the part where we need a bunch of new figures who can present the message in a way that is compelling to a mainstream audience. I’ve been watching for a while, and despairing that I hadn’t seen anyone (besides Megan Quinn, of course, who is already there) who was fairly young, smart and had the gift of connecting to people. Aaron’s got that, and if I have any role at all in determining who helps introduce the rest of America to this, he’s going to be in it (not that I’ve mentioned this to Aaron - oops, guess I just did!) His wife asked him if he’d picked up a lot of crazy ideas at the conference - well, she has no idea how crazy *my* ideas are.
Ok, on to the famous people next time I get a chance!
Sharon
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Website is Up!!
Thanks to Sandy, my wonderful and noble neighbor, the preliminary form of my website www.ourvictoryathome.com is now up and running. There will be much, much more soon. The goal is to encourage people who haven't traditionally been engaged by the peak oil and environmental movement to see themselves as potential participants in saving the world and our nation. And the stakes really are just that high. I welcome comments, critiques, question, anything. You can respond here, or send them to me at sharondownonthefarm@yahoo.com
Thanks,
Sharon, who promises much more as soon as she returns from Ohio
Thanks,
Sharon, who promises much more as soon as she returns from Ohio
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Peak Oil and Credibility
http://www.aspo-usa.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=49&Itemid=9
There's an interesting list here of all the people who believe in peak oil. I don't offer this as an attempt to persuade anyone, although I've always thought that anything that Michael Moore and Dick Cheney agree on must at least be worthy of consideration. But I do offer it as a bit more proof being the raving chick on the blog may make me nuts, but I'm in interesting company.
ASPO, by the way, is the most serious and dignified of the peak oil groups. If you look at the list of speakers, they are almost all very respectable, very important, very knowledgeable. They also pretty much all have penises. I tend to think of ASPO as the penis conference - not in a bad way, precisely, but as something that focuses on the manly attributes of peak oil - energy depletion curves, large scale economic planning, the hard science of alternative energy. All of those things are important, and the people who are bringing them to us are doing urgent work. Many of them have paid a price in credibility for supporting where their data takes them, and I'm mostly not making fun of them, even gently.
But I do want to point one thing out - this is a conference with a stated agenda - they want to talk to the elite managers, leaders and thinkers (and they say so on the conference page). This is not a conference designed to create bottom up change, or to attract and engage people who haven't fully connected to peak oil, except perhaps rich, priveleged, highly educated ones. I admire many of the speakers deeply, and am grateful to ASPO for the information it passes out and the programs it runs. I look forward to the conference. But I also believe that a solution to peak oil will never be a top-down process, created by the Elite and run for people with penises and portfolios. If we're to transform our culture, the work of that transformation must come from ordinary people who demand it because it is right and because it is necessary.
I'm going to ASPO, I suggest you do too. But I also suggest that while you are there, you do as I do, and point out that true revolution comes from the bottom up, not the top down, and includes people without stock portfolios, ph.ds and penises ;-).
Sharon
There's an interesting list here of all the people who believe in peak oil. I don't offer this as an attempt to persuade anyone, although I've always thought that anything that Michael Moore and Dick Cheney agree on must at least be worthy of consideration. But I do offer it as a bit more proof being the raving chick on the blog may make me nuts, but I'm in interesting company.
ASPO, by the way, is the most serious and dignified of the peak oil groups. If you look at the list of speakers, they are almost all very respectable, very important, very knowledgeable. They also pretty much all have penises. I tend to think of ASPO as the penis conference - not in a bad way, precisely, but as something that focuses on the manly attributes of peak oil - energy depletion curves, large scale economic planning, the hard science of alternative energy. All of those things are important, and the people who are bringing them to us are doing urgent work. Many of them have paid a price in credibility for supporting where their data takes them, and I'm mostly not making fun of them, even gently.
But I do want to point one thing out - this is a conference with a stated agenda - they want to talk to the elite managers, leaders and thinkers (and they say so on the conference page). This is not a conference designed to create bottom up change, or to attract and engage people who haven't fully connected to peak oil, except perhaps rich, priveleged, highly educated ones. I admire many of the speakers deeply, and am grateful to ASPO for the information it passes out and the programs it runs. I look forward to the conference. But I also believe that a solution to peak oil will never be a top-down process, created by the Elite and run for people with penises and portfolios. If we're to transform our culture, the work of that transformation must come from ordinary people who demand it because it is right and because it is necessary.
I'm going to ASPO, I suggest you do too. But I also suggest that while you are there, you do as I do, and point out that true revolution comes from the bottom up, not the top down, and includes people without stock portfolios, ph.ds and penises ;-).
Sharon
Astronomers are Weenies
Ok, except for the one I'm married to. But I feel a need to express this point of view, speaking as the mother of a space obsessed kindergartener (not to mention the mother of a 2 1/2 year old who tags along on all his big brother's obsessions), about the demotion of Pluto. Astronomers are major weenies. As I understand (and DH teaches history of space exploration, and thus is something of an expert) it there was no true, compelling reason to demote Pluto - scientifically it was equally possible to expand the definition of planets or contract it. Neither had much effect on anything, except certain obscurist elements of astronomical terminology, and on the pedagogy of space for kids and young adults. And thus, the Union of Astronomical Twits chose to demote Pluto, rather than expand the definition of planet in such a way as to actually teach people something about what makes a planet. We might have included Ceres, and children might have needed to learn about the asteroid belt, what makes a planet a planet, etc... Instead, we all now get to take our model solar systems, and add a little notation that Pluto doesn't really count - and neither does the newly named Eris, Ceres or anything else.
Speaking as someone whose four year old and 2 year old knows the names and/or numbers of all the moons of Jupiter (Do you? Nope, me neither), I find the claim that we're all better off with a narrower canon of objects being called by the dignification "planet" lest we be unable to learn their names, umm...stupid. We're dumbing down our solar system. This is, I think a sign of the apocalypse.
In the past I've noted that an astronomer/astrophysicist a la my husband is a handy fellow to have around in an apocalypse, or at least a whole lot of science fiction novels include an astrophyisicist who saves the world. If you have a comet racing towards you, or a the earth is being wrenched out of its orbit, fiction would suggest that an astronomer is just what you need to save the world. That, of course, is why I married my husband - so I could keep him handy in case of cometary collision. However, the recent course of events has forced me to revise my opinion of at least some astronomers. They are weenies. If they expect us to keep them around in case of sudden space-borne disaster, they'd better shape up.
Sharon
Speaking as someone whose four year old and 2 year old knows the names and/or numbers of all the moons of Jupiter (Do you? Nope, me neither), I find the claim that we're all better off with a narrower canon of objects being called by the dignification "planet" lest we be unable to learn their names, umm...stupid. We're dumbing down our solar system. This is, I think a sign of the apocalypse.
In the past I've noted that an astronomer/astrophysicist a la my husband is a handy fellow to have around in an apocalypse, or at least a whole lot of science fiction novels include an astrophyisicist who saves the world. If you have a comet racing towards you, or a the earth is being wrenched out of its orbit, fiction would suggest that an astronomer is just what you need to save the world. That, of course, is why I married my husband - so I could keep him handy in case of cometary collision. However, the recent course of events has forced me to revise my opinion of at least some astronomers. They are weenies. If they expect us to keep them around in case of sudden space-borne disaster, they'd better shape up.
Sharon
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Cookbooks for the Future
As an inveterate cookbook collector, I'm aware that a lot of my beloved books about food, food history, and food culture aren't goingto be all that useful after peak oil. In fact, many of them aren't all that useful to me now, much as I enjoy reading them. Most cookbooks emphasize fancy, elaborate cooking that takes a long time, involves combining odd or unlikely (certainly unseasonable) combinations, and have a heavy emphasis on foods that are likely to be unusual treats or festival food in the future - cakes, large roasted animals, etc... But there are some that I truly use now, and expect to continue using in the long term. I thought I might list some off, in hopes of inspiring others to do the same (after all, I need more cookbooks...really.) These are the books I know that I think can genuinely help people make the connection between the food they grow and the food available to them and what we really eat.
I'm going to assume that nearly everyone owns _The Encyclopedia ofCountry Living_, Carla Emery's recipe bible that begins her noodle recipes with "first, till the soil..." I was lucky enough to be Carla's friend (I miss her still) and part of a group that tested recipes for her. I tested quite a lot of them. I have to say some of the recipes are straight out dreadful. Others are really good. But there are recipes for everything, few call for exotics or out of season combinations, and most, if not perfect in themselves are good jumping off points - they operate as ideas about how to cook and eat sustainably.
Another book I consider a basic staple is Doris Janzen Longacre's _More with Less Cookbook_ - conceived by the Mennonite Central Committee as a way to help people eat more sustainably and ethically, it is effectively a Joy of Cooking for the poor, plain and frugal. It is a bit dated, and some of the ethnic recipes are not very authentic (_Extending the Table_ part of the same series, is a much better source of ethnic recipes and an excellent cookbook in its own right), but for staple food recipes, Longacres' is one of the best.
Totally unlike the pragmatic conscience of the two previous books is a new favorite of mine (a gift from my MIL), _Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations_ - it is a pretty hardcover, designed to appeal to the kind of people who buy cookbooks and try three recipes in their Calphalon kitchen. A few of the recipes are of the fussy type - I suspect even before peak oil I am quite unlikely to ever stuff and roast a quail with black walnuts, white sage and adobe bread. But by and large, this book is a slightly modernized three sisters cookbook, with additional recipes for desert foods like cactus pads and prickly pears. I don't live in a desert climate, but I've rarely seen so many wonderful recipes for corn, squash, hot peppers and beans. The meat section emphasizes game and includes recipes for jerky. The sunflower cakes were a huge hit with my kids last summer, and the garbanzo bean stew is totally delicious. Definitely worth looking past the fancy cover.
Another cookbook that would be easy to overlook would be Eileen YinFei Lo's _From the Earth_, a cookbook of Chinese Vegetarian (some fish is involved) recipes. 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 to make do with soybeans andwheat for dinner any time soon, this is the cookbook to have. That is not to say that everything is a perfect substitute - but the textures are good and the flavors are spectacular. So are all the vegetable recipes I've tried, many of which are for traditional asian vegetables. If you grow these things (and you should), this is worth having. While not all of the recipes are easily adaptable to storage or local foods, most of the sauces can be reproduced. I've had excellent luck, for example, with my first bottles of homemade soy sauce, made by the recipe in Carla Emery's book.
On the other hand, if you want to find more conventional recipes for gluten, the best of the wheat related books I've seen is LeArtaMoulton's _The Amazing Wheat Book_ - not only does she do bulghur, bread, noodles, porridge, etc... but also gluten meats, sweets made from whole grains, even faux non-dairy "ice cream" made from the settled starch after gluten making. I haven't loved everything I've tried here, but the ideas are right, and the recipes work, and can be fixed with a lot more seasoning (blandness is endemic in American cookbooks).
Paula Wolfert's book _Mediterranean Grains and Greens_ is 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. Wolfert knows Mediterranean cuisine inside and out, and the recipes are a look into real peasant cuisine - a peasant cuisine that is all the more luxurious because it does so much with so little.
_Please to the Table:The Russian Cookbook_ was written by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman back when "Russia" was the entire Soviet Union. And while there are recipes here for luxury foods, there are also plenty of simple, cold climate foods that are absolutely delicious, simple and eminently reproduceable in a post-peak future. This was one of the first cookbooks I ever owned, and in college, I ate von Bremzen's Mothers "Super-Quick Vegetarian Borscht" more or less constantly, often with Holubtsi (stuffed cabbage with buckwheat and mushrooms). My family on one side is Polish, and this was the cuisine of my great-grandmother. It is delicious food, but also food suited to cold, wet places like the one I live in.
I've bought 5 copies of Crescent Dragonwagon's _Soup and Bread_cookbook for myself and others since I first acquired it in college, and they keep disappearing. 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. Speaking as someone with no southern credentials whatsoever (you can laugh at me for this), her gumbo is spectacular. She has three recipes for zucchini soup, which alone is endearing when you are trying to use the bloody things up. There are 50 different recipes for bean soup. Not everything is sustainable, it certainly isn't designed with peak oil in mind, but the recipes are unfailingly good, and fairly simple. A definite keeper - under lock and key, if necessary.
If I could only have one cookbook, it would be Laurie Colwin's _Home Cooking_ or perhaps her equally indispensible _More Home Cooking_. I like the recipes in these books - I've never made anything from these books I didn't like, and by now I think I've made nearly everything in them (her Damp Gingerbread is the best on earth and Creamed Spinach with Jalapeno Peppers will kill you, but is worth it). But it is her way of thinking about food that is most wonderful - she writes wryly, humorously, warmly about her love of food and the pleasures of eating regular old homemade things. If I met someone who did not cook, and wanted to, these would be the books I would suggest they start out with.
Sylvia Thompson's _The Kitchen Garden Cookbook_ is a pleasure, and she emphasizes making use of what you have. Thus, there is a recipe for using the outer leaves of cabbage, cooked Ceylonese style and one for stuffed stems of chard. We will need to minimize waste in our kitchens in the future, and learning how use these foods is potentially important.
Edna Lewis died not long ago. She was one of the great figures of American cooking. She grew up in a community of farmers, African American descendents of freed slaves, and her _The Taste of Country Cooking_ 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.
It is possible that a book on whole grain breadmaking has superceeded _The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_, but if so, I missed it. If youare 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.
If you want really old-fashioned, try _The Little House Cookbook_ byBarbara M. Walker. She's a food historian who went back and found ways of making all the foods in the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm not sure how often one would cook out of thisbook, except perhaps as an educational project (we've been doing some of that), but it is an excellent overview of a poor to middle class family's diet 130 yearsago, and how it was shaped by politics, science, and environment. I've only cooked a few things from here, among them the green pumpkin pie (it really does taste kind of like apples) and the buckwheat pancakes. But mostly, I think it gives you a sense of the centrality of food production to everyday life, and what our own lives may be like.
On the subject of books that are only sort-of cookbooks, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Albert Bates's _The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook_ - the couple of recipes I've tried were both quite good. The chick pea patties and the spicy cabbage salad were very good. The book contains a lot more information than this - the recipes are almost a side-note. It is worth having on several fronts - Bates knows a lot, and writes wonderfully. His focus on vegetarian food I think is right on, although I do have my doubts that, say, rum will be vastly more available than eggs. But it is a book well worth having.
Equally valuable, I think is Laura Schenone's _A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove_ which tells the story of women in America throughout history through their food, including recipes. This is a wise and important book, and well worth a read for anyone, even if you never do use any of the recipes - and some of them are very good. Our future is probably somewhere in our past, at least in terms of cooking, and the more we know about that past, the better off we are.
_The Joy of Pickling_ is my favorite book on pickles and lactofermentation, although there are other good ones out there as well, including Bill Mollison's (of permaculture fame) _Ferment and Human Nutrition_ - lactofermentation particularly is an important skill, because lactofermented foods have natural antibiotics specific to ecoli in them. Eating kimchi and sauerkraut with your food can protect you from food poisoning. And nutritionally, lactofermented vegetables are very good for you - not to mention unbelievably delicious. If our future is mostly local food, we are going to want that food to be as tasty as possible, and lactofermentation is one way to make that happen.
I have more to add - this is a subject on which I could go infinitely, because food is my favorite subject, but I think I'll stop for the moment with one addition, _Keeping Food Fresh_, a community food preservation cookbook by thegardeners and farmres of Terre Vivante. This is another must-have book, for it details ways of preserving food used by European farmers for hundreds of years, excluding freezing and canning. Some of the recipes are obvious, dried apples on a string. Most of them are not, and some are methods that get little consideration now, but might yet again, such as preserving meat in wine, home salting of fish, traditional candying, and lacto-fermenting. Some of the combinations, like the apples kept in elderflowers, are truly spectacular. I'm pretty sure the recipes haven't been vetted by the FDA, so use with a grain of salt. But it is worth knowing how people preserved food before the FDA.
I think here I will stop. But I'd welcome more suggestions!
Sharon
I'm going to assume that nearly everyone owns _The Encyclopedia ofCountry Living_, Carla Emery's recipe bible that begins her noodle recipes with "first, till the soil..." I was lucky enough to be Carla's friend (I miss her still) and part of a group that tested recipes for her. I tested quite a lot of them. I have to say some of the recipes are straight out dreadful. Others are really good. But there are recipes for everything, few call for exotics or out of season combinations, and most, if not perfect in themselves are good jumping off points - they operate as ideas about how to cook and eat sustainably.
Another book I consider a basic staple is Doris Janzen Longacre's _More with Less Cookbook_ - conceived by the Mennonite Central Committee as a way to help people eat more sustainably and ethically, it is effectively a Joy of Cooking for the poor, plain and frugal. It is a bit dated, and some of the ethnic recipes are not very authentic (_Extending the Table_ part of the same series, is a much better source of ethnic recipes and an excellent cookbook in its own right), but for staple food recipes, Longacres' is one of the best.
Totally unlike the pragmatic conscience of the two previous books is a new favorite of mine (a gift from my MIL), _Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations_ - it is a pretty hardcover, designed to appeal to the kind of people who buy cookbooks and try three recipes in their Calphalon kitchen. A few of the recipes are of the fussy type - I suspect even before peak oil I am quite unlikely to ever stuff and roast a quail with black walnuts, white sage and adobe bread. But by and large, this book is a slightly modernized three sisters cookbook, with additional recipes for desert foods like cactus pads and prickly pears. I don't live in a desert climate, but I've rarely seen so many wonderful recipes for corn, squash, hot peppers and beans. The meat section emphasizes game and includes recipes for jerky. The sunflower cakes were a huge hit with my kids last summer, and the garbanzo bean stew is totally delicious. Definitely worth looking past the fancy cover.
Another cookbook that would be easy to overlook would be Eileen YinFei Lo's _From the Earth_, a cookbook of Chinese Vegetarian (some fish is involved) recipes. 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 to make do with soybeans andwheat for dinner any time soon, this is the cookbook to have. That is not to say that everything is a perfect substitute - but the textures are good and the flavors are spectacular. So are all the vegetable recipes I've tried, many of which are for traditional asian vegetables. If you grow these things (and you should), this is worth having. While not all of the recipes are easily adaptable to storage or local foods, most of the sauces can be reproduced. I've had excellent luck, for example, with my first bottles of homemade soy sauce, made by the recipe in Carla Emery's book.
On the other hand, if you want to find more conventional recipes for gluten, the best of the wheat related books I've seen is LeArtaMoulton's _The Amazing Wheat Book_ - not only does she do bulghur, bread, noodles, porridge, etc... but also gluten meats, sweets made from whole grains, even faux non-dairy "ice cream" made from the settled starch after gluten making. I haven't loved everything I've tried here, but the ideas are right, and the recipes work, and can be fixed with a lot more seasoning (blandness is endemic in American cookbooks).
Paula Wolfert's book _Mediterranean Grains and Greens_ is 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. Wolfert knows Mediterranean cuisine inside and out, and the recipes are a look into real peasant cuisine - a peasant cuisine that is all the more luxurious because it does so much with so little.
_Please to the Table:The Russian Cookbook_ was written by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman back when "Russia" was the entire Soviet Union. And while there are recipes here for luxury foods, there are also plenty of simple, cold climate foods that are absolutely delicious, simple and eminently reproduceable in a post-peak future. This was one of the first cookbooks I ever owned, and in college, I ate von Bremzen's Mothers "Super-Quick Vegetarian Borscht" more or less constantly, often with Holubtsi (stuffed cabbage with buckwheat and mushrooms). My family on one side is Polish, and this was the cuisine of my great-grandmother. It is delicious food, but also food suited to cold, wet places like the one I live in.
I've bought 5 copies of Crescent Dragonwagon's _Soup and Bread_cookbook for myself and others since I first acquired it in college, and they keep disappearing. 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. Speaking as someone with no southern credentials whatsoever (you can laugh at me for this), her gumbo is spectacular. She has three recipes for zucchini soup, which alone is endearing when you are trying to use the bloody things up. There are 50 different recipes for bean soup. Not everything is sustainable, it certainly isn't designed with peak oil in mind, but the recipes are unfailingly good, and fairly simple. A definite keeper - under lock and key, if necessary.
If I could only have one cookbook, it would be Laurie Colwin's _Home Cooking_ or perhaps her equally indispensible _More Home Cooking_. I like the recipes in these books - I've never made anything from these books I didn't like, and by now I think I've made nearly everything in them (her Damp Gingerbread is the best on earth and Creamed Spinach with Jalapeno Peppers will kill you, but is worth it). But it is her way of thinking about food that is most wonderful - she writes wryly, humorously, warmly about her love of food and the pleasures of eating regular old homemade things. If I met someone who did not cook, and wanted to, these would be the books I would suggest they start out with.
Sylvia Thompson's _The Kitchen Garden Cookbook_ is a pleasure, and she emphasizes making use of what you have. Thus, there is a recipe for using the outer leaves of cabbage, cooked Ceylonese style and one for stuffed stems of chard. We will need to minimize waste in our kitchens in the future, and learning how use these foods is potentially important.
Edna Lewis died not long ago. She was one of the great figures of American cooking. She grew up in a community of farmers, African American descendents of freed slaves, and her _The Taste of Country Cooking_ 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.
It is possible that a book on whole grain breadmaking has superceeded _The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_, but if so, I missed it. If youare 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.
If you want really old-fashioned, try _The Little House Cookbook_ byBarbara M. Walker. She's a food historian who went back and found ways of making all the foods in the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm not sure how often one would cook out of thisbook, except perhaps as an educational project (we've been doing some of that), but it is an excellent overview of a poor to middle class family's diet 130 yearsago, and how it was shaped by politics, science, and environment. I've only cooked a few things from here, among them the green pumpkin pie (it really does taste kind of like apples) and the buckwheat pancakes. But mostly, I think it gives you a sense of the centrality of food production to everyday life, and what our own lives may be like.
On the subject of books that are only sort-of cookbooks, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Albert Bates's _The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook_ - the couple of recipes I've tried were both quite good. The chick pea patties and the spicy cabbage salad were very good. The book contains a lot more information than this - the recipes are almost a side-note. It is worth having on several fronts - Bates knows a lot, and writes wonderfully. His focus on vegetarian food I think is right on, although I do have my doubts that, say, rum will be vastly more available than eggs. But it is a book well worth having.
Equally valuable, I think is Laura Schenone's _A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove_ which tells the story of women in America throughout history through their food, including recipes. This is a wise and important book, and well worth a read for anyone, even if you never do use any of the recipes - and some of them are very good. Our future is probably somewhere in our past, at least in terms of cooking, and the more we know about that past, the better off we are.
_The Joy of Pickling_ is my favorite book on pickles and lactofermentation, although there are other good ones out there as well, including Bill Mollison's (of permaculture fame) _Ferment and Human Nutrition_ - lactofermentation particularly is an important skill, because lactofermented foods have natural antibiotics specific to ecoli in them. Eating kimchi and sauerkraut with your food can protect you from food poisoning. And nutritionally, lactofermented vegetables are very good for you - not to mention unbelievably delicious. If our future is mostly local food, we are going to want that food to be as tasty as possible, and lactofermentation is one way to make that happen.
I have more to add - this is a subject on which I could go infinitely, because food is my favorite subject, but I think I'll stop for the moment with one addition, _Keeping Food Fresh_, a community food preservation cookbook by thegardeners and farmres of Terre Vivante. This is another must-have book, for it details ways of preserving food used by European farmers for hundreds of years, excluding freezing and canning. Some of the recipes are obvious, dried apples on a string. Most of them are not, and some are methods that get little consideration now, but might yet again, such as preserving meat in wine, home salting of fish, traditional candying, and lacto-fermenting. Some of the combinations, like the apples kept in elderflowers, are truly spectacular. I'm pretty sure the recipes haven't been vetted by the FDA, so use with a grain of salt. But it is worth knowing how people preserved food before the FDA.
I think here I will stop. But I'd welcome more suggestions!
Sharon
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Well, someone thinks I'm a grownup, not just a lunatic ;-)
If any of you are even remotely interested, I'm going to be speaking on sustainable agriculture and food security at the Community Solutions Conference on Peak oil. Check them out www.communitysolution.org, and then check out the cool bio and picture of me (yes, I know the website isn't up yet...I'm working on it, I swear!) under the speakers section, here http://www.communitysolution.org/06conf2.html. The conference is this month from the 20th to the 22nd, and I'd love to meet anyone who is interested there!
Wow, I'm kind of amazed to see myself looking so credible. I always thought my fame would come with a mug shot!
Shalom,
Sharon, who is frantically wondering how she can loose 40lbs, so she won't look like a large consumer of resources ;-)!
Wow, I'm kind of amazed to see myself looking so credible. I always thought my fame would come with a mug shot!
Shalom,
Sharon, who is frantically wondering how she can loose 40lbs, so she won't look like a large consumer of resources ;-)!
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Scientific Progress goes "Boink"
Most people I know recognize that oil and gas reserves are finite. Most of my friends and family lived through or grew up in the 1970s during the oil shocks, and they always knew we were going to run out...some day. The leap that is intellectually most difficult for people to make isn't to recognition of scarcity, but to recognize the fact that there's no evidence that we can buy our way out of this one.
What most people, including those who believe we need to cut fossil fuel usage dramatically say is something like, "we need to devote a lot of money and energy to researching alternatives to oil and gas." And to a certain degree, of course, they are right. If we're going to blow our GDP on something, improving solar efficiency would be a lot more useful than buying more crap at ChinaMart. But that claim reflects an inability to grasp that alternative fuels may not, in fact probably will not, fix the problem.
We have an unrestrained faith in science and progress - even people who say they don't really believe that if we put our mind and wallets to something, we can fix it. And, after all, we've had a remarkable degree of success in that regard. But we tend to remember the success stories and let slide all the failures, giving us a skewed sense of our own power.
For example, over 30+ years we have devoted at least 28 billion dollars, and untold hours of brain power to research into fusion reactors, and, as Julian Darley points, we're always at least 30 years from creating useful fusion reactors. We have devoted over 100 billion dollars and the whole lives of many scientists to eradicating and eliminating the influenza virus from the earth, with the result that we're no closer than we were before. We have spent over 60 billion dollars world-wide researching and developing wind power, with the result that at this point, wind power produces less than 1% of the world's electricity. While wind generators rose in efficiency by 69% over that time, their efficiency is still many, many times less than burnable fossil fuels. The same could be said of hydrogen - the billions of dollars to create a "hydrogen economy" has left us about as far from having one as we were when we started. Ethanol has consumed even more billions, and it still takes more energy to turn corn into ethanol than the ethanol itself produces - and alcohol manufacture has been gradually refined over the whole of human history, so it isn't exactly a new industry.
The hardest idea to get your brain around on peak oil is that just putting money into research, just getting smart people to think hard isn't going to make magic happen. There are things we can't do - or perhaps we could do them, or could have done them, had we devoted our energies to them when we recognized the problem 30 years ago, but we probably can't do them now.
For example, we probably can't create a solar and wind-based electrical grid. Among other reasons, because doing so requires a major technological breakthrough. Wind is an intermittent power source, as is solar - they only work when the sun shines or the wind blows, and intermittent power sources can destabilize the grid, because we don't really have a good way to store electricity at a lot of seperate sites, as is required for wind farms - even Denmark, which uses more wind power than any country in the world, has capped its wind power at about 15%. Wind provides less than 1/10 of 1% of the total power usage in the US - we'd need 150 times the wind farms we have to get even that 15% up and running, and that would be our maximum for all intermittent sources.
I posted back a while ago a link to the DOE Hirsch report, which evaluates the threat of peak oil to the US. Its essential message is that if we devoted our money and our time and our national will towards resolving the energy crisis for 20 years on the same scale or higher than we worked on WWII, we could avoid ill effects. The problem is that we're much closer to the peak points for oil and natural gas than 20 years - by a decade or so, at least. And we're not putting our energy there.
To convert to nuclear energy would require 500 new nuclear plants, and nuclear plants are extremely time consuming to build (10-15 years), very expensive (costs borne by the tax base) and vulnerable to attack, accident and storage issues. At the moment, there are 0 nuclear power plants in production in the US. So even if we all wanted another several hundred (coming soon to your neighborhood!), we couldn't have them tomorrow. No matter how hard we research, we haven't found a way to turn gold (money) rapidly into nuclear power.
Yes, alternative energy is a good thing. But most alternative energies produce a few times the amount of energy they consume. Oil, gas and coal produce many, many, many times the energy they consume when you burn them. Nothing anyone has proposed offers the return of fossil fuels. And nothing we've done in research for three decades has changed that. Sure, solar efficiency has risen, and we can now make gas from algae...maybe. But scientific progress doesn't have time to save us. And as the economy starts to tank and energy costs eat up more of our reserves, we're going to have to decide. Do we fund scientists looking for the ultimate magic bullet, or do we put our money and time and resources into things like trains for public transport, and insulating our houses so that we can do without oil and gas to heat them.
Part of the problem is that for our whole lives we've been taught to believe in magical economic thinking - free markets will fix it. If we just put our money and energy into it, we can make anything we want happen. But free markets don't have brains, and they don't see things coming. By the time it is cheaper to use solar than buy oil, it will be too late - our economy will be in collapse and we won't be able to afford solar. And as wonderful as our accomplishments and brilliance has been, we keep running up against reality - sometimes we can't fix it, and we can't buy our way out of it. All we can do is live with it.
Sharon
What most people, including those who believe we need to cut fossil fuel usage dramatically say is something like, "we need to devote a lot of money and energy to researching alternatives to oil and gas." And to a certain degree, of course, they are right. If we're going to blow our GDP on something, improving solar efficiency would be a lot more useful than buying more crap at ChinaMart. But that claim reflects an inability to grasp that alternative fuels may not, in fact probably will not, fix the problem.
We have an unrestrained faith in science and progress - even people who say they don't really believe that if we put our mind and wallets to something, we can fix it. And, after all, we've had a remarkable degree of success in that regard. But we tend to remember the success stories and let slide all the failures, giving us a skewed sense of our own power.
For example, over 30+ years we have devoted at least 28 billion dollars, and untold hours of brain power to research into fusion reactors, and, as Julian Darley points, we're always at least 30 years from creating useful fusion reactors. We have devoted over 100 billion dollars and the whole lives of many scientists to eradicating and eliminating the influenza virus from the earth, with the result that we're no closer than we were before. We have spent over 60 billion dollars world-wide researching and developing wind power, with the result that at this point, wind power produces less than 1% of the world's electricity. While wind generators rose in efficiency by 69% over that time, their efficiency is still many, many times less than burnable fossil fuels. The same could be said of hydrogen - the billions of dollars to create a "hydrogen economy" has left us about as far from having one as we were when we started. Ethanol has consumed even more billions, and it still takes more energy to turn corn into ethanol than the ethanol itself produces - and alcohol manufacture has been gradually refined over the whole of human history, so it isn't exactly a new industry.
The hardest idea to get your brain around on peak oil is that just putting money into research, just getting smart people to think hard isn't going to make magic happen. There are things we can't do - or perhaps we could do them, or could have done them, had we devoted our energies to them when we recognized the problem 30 years ago, but we probably can't do them now.
For example, we probably can't create a solar and wind-based electrical grid. Among other reasons, because doing so requires a major technological breakthrough. Wind is an intermittent power source, as is solar - they only work when the sun shines or the wind blows, and intermittent power sources can destabilize the grid, because we don't really have a good way to store electricity at a lot of seperate sites, as is required for wind farms - even Denmark, which uses more wind power than any country in the world, has capped its wind power at about 15%. Wind provides less than 1/10 of 1% of the total power usage in the US - we'd need 150 times the wind farms we have to get even that 15% up and running, and that would be our maximum for all intermittent sources.
I posted back a while ago a link to the DOE Hirsch report, which evaluates the threat of peak oil to the US. Its essential message is that if we devoted our money and our time and our national will towards resolving the energy crisis for 20 years on the same scale or higher than we worked on WWII, we could avoid ill effects. The problem is that we're much closer to the peak points for oil and natural gas than 20 years - by a decade or so, at least. And we're not putting our energy there.
To convert to nuclear energy would require 500 new nuclear plants, and nuclear plants are extremely time consuming to build (10-15 years), very expensive (costs borne by the tax base) and vulnerable to attack, accident and storage issues. At the moment, there are 0 nuclear power plants in production in the US. So even if we all wanted another several hundred (coming soon to your neighborhood!), we couldn't have them tomorrow. No matter how hard we research, we haven't found a way to turn gold (money) rapidly into nuclear power.
Yes, alternative energy is a good thing. But most alternative energies produce a few times the amount of energy they consume. Oil, gas and coal produce many, many, many times the energy they consume when you burn them. Nothing anyone has proposed offers the return of fossil fuels. And nothing we've done in research for three decades has changed that. Sure, solar efficiency has risen, and we can now make gas from algae...maybe. But scientific progress doesn't have time to save us. And as the economy starts to tank and energy costs eat up more of our reserves, we're going to have to decide. Do we fund scientists looking for the ultimate magic bullet, or do we put our money and time and resources into things like trains for public transport, and insulating our houses so that we can do without oil and gas to heat them.
Part of the problem is that for our whole lives we've been taught to believe in magical economic thinking - free markets will fix it. If we just put our money and energy into it, we can make anything we want happen. But free markets don't have brains, and they don't see things coming. By the time it is cheaper to use solar than buy oil, it will be too late - our economy will be in collapse and we won't be able to afford solar. And as wonderful as our accomplishments and brilliance has been, we keep running up against reality - sometimes we can't fix it, and we can't buy our way out of it. All we can do is live with it.
Sharon
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
The Alphabet Garden
Eli, Simon and Isaiah have their own garden this year. Last year Simon had a bed in my garden, but this year he has his own (shared with his brothers) right next to their playset, and it has been an enormous success.
Simon like to address the world alphabetically. When he set himself to memorizing the states and their capitals, it was alphabetically. He likes alphabets of places, birds, historical sites - you name it, if it comes in A-Z form, Simon will be pleased. So it shouldn't have surprised me, but did, that Simon insisted on an alphabetical garden. And that's what we did. We had a mix of flowers and vegetables. Here's our list.
A=Angelica
B=Beans (cool purple bush ones)
C=Cucumbers (pickling type, Simon and Isaiah are both pickle addicts)
D=Dianthus (these were picked out at the local garden center)
E= Eggplant (didn't really thrive in the cool, wet weather we've had all summer, but we picked a couple.
F=Flower of an Hour (did poorly)
G=Gourd (birdhouse type)
H=Heliotrope (also known as "vanilla cookie flower" for its scent at our house)
I=Impatiens
J=Johnny Jump Ups
K= Kiss me Over the Garden Gate (which took up way more than its share of space).
L= was supposed to be liatris, which I didn't plant until the bulb had sat in the sun too long, so became Lemon balm
M=Morning Glory - Grandpa Ott's (which tries to take over everything)
N=Nasturtium
O=Okra (we're just about to harvest our first pods - it has been a cool summer here)
P=Pumpkins (jack o lantern type)
Q=Queen Anne's Lace (laboriously transplanted by Mommy who muttered a lot of not too nice things about transplanting weeds into gardens and the lack of better plants beginning with Q)
R=radishes (which no one but Mommy and Daddy really liked, but provide instant gratification)
S= Snapdragons and strawberries (there was some debate)
T=Tomatoes
U=Umbellifarae (sort of cheating, carrots are umbellifarae)
V=Vinca
W= Watermelon (which isn't going to mature, but is exciting to loook at - we only succeed with watermelon in pots or black plastic)
X= X-tra flowers. There's actually some wildflower out there that has a latin name including X, but we got lazy.
Y=Yarrow
Z=Zinnias and Zucchini
Tonight we're eating the last of the purple beans, stir fried with oyster sauce, chicken soup with zucchini and carrots in it, and the last of the alpine strawberries with a bit of sugar and lemon balm. A bouquet of zinnias and snapdragons is on the table. And we're planning next year's garden, which is going to have a colonial American theme, if Simon's attention span for that sticks long enough.
Garden with your kids.
Sharon
Simon like to address the world alphabetically. When he set himself to memorizing the states and their capitals, it was alphabetically. He likes alphabets of places, birds, historical sites - you name it, if it comes in A-Z form, Simon will be pleased. So it shouldn't have surprised me, but did, that Simon insisted on an alphabetical garden. And that's what we did. We had a mix of flowers and vegetables. Here's our list.
A=Angelica
B=Beans (cool purple bush ones)
C=Cucumbers (pickling type, Simon and Isaiah are both pickle addicts)
D=Dianthus (these were picked out at the local garden center)
E= Eggplant (didn't really thrive in the cool, wet weather we've had all summer, but we picked a couple.
F=Flower of an Hour (did poorly)
G=Gourd (birdhouse type)
H=Heliotrope (also known as "vanilla cookie flower" for its scent at our house)
I=Impatiens
J=Johnny Jump Ups
K= Kiss me Over the Garden Gate (which took up way more than its share of space).
L= was supposed to be liatris, which I didn't plant until the bulb had sat in the sun too long, so became Lemon balm
M=Morning Glory - Grandpa Ott's (which tries to take over everything)
N=Nasturtium
O=Okra (we're just about to harvest our first pods - it has been a cool summer here)
P=Pumpkins (jack o lantern type)
Q=Queen Anne's Lace (laboriously transplanted by Mommy who muttered a lot of not too nice things about transplanting weeds into gardens and the lack of better plants beginning with Q)
R=radishes (which no one but Mommy and Daddy really liked, but provide instant gratification)
S= Snapdragons and strawberries (there was some debate)
T=Tomatoes
U=Umbellifarae (sort of cheating, carrots are umbellifarae)
V=Vinca
W= Watermelon (which isn't going to mature, but is exciting to loook at - we only succeed with watermelon in pots or black plastic)
X= X-tra flowers. There's actually some wildflower out there that has a latin name including X, but we got lazy.
Y=Yarrow
Z=Zinnias and Zucchini
Tonight we're eating the last of the purple beans, stir fried with oyster sauce, chicken soup with zucchini and carrots in it, and the last of the alpine strawberries with a bit of sugar and lemon balm. A bouquet of zinnias and snapdragons is on the table. And we're planning next year's garden, which is going to have a colonial American theme, if Simon's attention span for that sticks long enough.
Garden with your kids.
Sharon
Sunday, August 20, 2006
The Permaculture of Domesticity Part II - Practice
Now, on from the theory (which is, after all, the easy part), to the practice. Here are some strategies of mine, complete with thestupid things I've done to learn them
-1. Attitude adjustment is probably the first alteration any of us can make. We can choose how we think about domestic labor, how we respond to the activity, at least in a purely mental and emotional sense, and often in a physical one as well. I can think of 2 kinds of attitude adjustment that apply to domestic work. First, there's lowering or altering your standards. Most of us can do this (in my case, further lowering might not be such a good idea), and it can be a considerable time-saver. For example, if you ordinarily wash sheets and towels every week, try stretching it to two weeks or three, and see if there is a significant reduction in quality of life. Clothes can be worn more often before washing, floors can go longer between washings as well. While some jobs (laundry for example) get bigger and less manageable by ignoring them, many things can be put aside for a while.
You might also adjust to less white whites, or a less tidy house. Only you can say where your quality of life is unacceptably diminished. This should not be used, however, for any household work that involves basic hygiene, health issues and safety. So while you could choose to let your floors get grubby in many cases, if you have an infant eating crud off of them, that may not be wise.
Second attitude adjustment can be choosing to enjoy or find satisfaction in work you have previously not enjoyed. People can change their preferences, and can choose to find pleasure in most activities. You might consider taking a chore you particularly dislike and attempting to find a way to enjoy it, either by trying to take pleasure in the process, altering the process to make it more pleasurable, or by deriving satisfaction from the accomplishment. Obviously, there may be some chores that simply can't be readjusted to, either because the activity is in some way stressful or painful, or because no matter how hard you try, you can't come to like it. Some people with physical limitations will have fewer options in this department. But it is worth trying.
I strongly disliked organizing clothing for my four sons. With four kids who grow rapidly, I have boxes of clothing for every size from preemie to boys 12, plus cloth diapers and covers in many sizes, andtracking the clothes, sorting outgrown things, switching them around as the seasons change, mending them, keeping track of what I have and what I need, etc… was time consuming, and, I felt, extremely boring. But I've managed to convince myself, if not to like it, to take a good deal of satisfaction from doing it, simply by, instead of begrudging the time it takes and seeing it as an annoyance, recognizing it for what it is - a useful and necessary job that saves us money and time in the longer term. I still like other things more, but I don't find the job as difficult and intimidating.
A third way of adjusting your own attitude is to think seriously about the requirements of your life, and distinguish carefullybetween wants and needs. The classic example of this is the parent who works full time, but when commute, wardrobe, meals, daycare,etc… are calculated in has a household net loss, or only a tiny gain. (Please note, this is not to say that parents should stay home - this is merely an example, so don't get your kidneys in an uproar, as DH's grandmother liked to say). For example, if you dislike dusting, perhaps you could choose to have fewer dustable objects, or to keep them in closed boxes, even if there was some slight inconvenience.
2. After attitude adjustment, the next lowest input thing to do about household work is to find ways to either do chores with others, or to get others to help with difficult or distasteful projects. The most obvious such method, if you have kids, is to train them to help out. The difficulty with this is that teaching children to do things is, in the short term, inevitably much more time consuming (although it can be fun) than just doing it yourself. After a while this ceases to be so, but many parents find it difficult to build time into their daily lives to teach their kids the necessary skills. Planning for this, accepting the short-term reduction in efficiency, and adapting to it is usually worth the hassle. Even very small kids can help out if you give them time to learn how.
The same is true of getting a spouse or other family member to take on an job they have traditionally not done. It is worth noting, however, that it helps not to be over-committed to a single technique. Many people who would willingly take over X job are turned off by someone insisting that it be done exactly X way and to X's standards. Women are, I think, particularly guilty of the sin of over management.
For large scale chores, involving other members of your community, or friends and extended family might improve the experience. For example, my extended family on one side has at times had an annual "work-weekend" where once per year, the entire family descended upon one of the members who owns a home and devotes a long weekend to making repairs or completing major projects. The whole thing is considered enjoyable by everyone - the homeowner provides accommodations, food and materials, and everyone enjoys being together. Everyone eventually gets a turn. We're working on build a neighborhood coop, which functions in the same way, volunteering once per month to help each family get a big work project done.
Also, the simple act of working together can provide a tremendous degree of satisfaction. Cooking can be an unpleasant job if it takes you away from your family and isolates the cook in the kitchen. The same job is quite enjoyable when done with a partner, a friend, or even a child helping. Simple proximity to one another makes big jobs much more manageable in many cases. Finding ways to bring people into the kitchen when you have guests, or to make whatever job you are doing part of the life of your household can make an enormous difference. One neighbor I know has her children read aloud to her while she cleans - they get practice reading, the family hears a story together, and everyone has a good time.
3. The next most significant way to reduce labor sustainably is to experiment with time and energy costs. Most of us have a built in set of assumptions about what constitutes labor, and what constitutes labor savings, what is efficient, what is easy and what is difficult, andwhat the best uses of one's time and energy are. But these assumptions may not be correct, and can only be verified by experimentation. It is not at all uncommon to assume that that one thing is faster than another, only to realize that it is quite the opposite - our own perceptions are shaped by what we expect to find. Want to know how much time it takes you to do a load of laundry by hand, compared to the washing machine? Try it. But not just once - try it three or four different times, in as many ways as you can think of. Think about ways in which you can make the process more efficient. The next time you chop an onion, do it a different way than you usually do. Don't take for granted that labor-saving devices actually are. Some are. Some aren't. For example, my husband and I were given an electric citrus juicer as a wedding gift, and we rather unthinkingly used it for a while, until one day my husband got frustrated and said, "I could do this faster with a lemon reamer." Well, what do you know - he could. The same is true for me of the dryer - I can just as easily hang laundry as transfer it over, clean the lint filter and earn the money to pay for the electricity.
When you calculate labor-savings, make sure that all labor required to buy, maintain, use, clean, repair, store and tend to the item is included. For example, my husband and I don't drink coffee, but keep a coffee maker around for guests. Because the coffee maker is stored in an inconvenient place (which makes sense since the convenient ones are for things we actually use regularly), the time spent climbing upon the step-ladder and pulling the box down, cleaning the parts which get dusty between uses, etc.... make it a surprisingly time-consuming project. I suspect a press-style glass coffee maker which could also be used for tea (which we drink a lot of) would be more efficient (although I've not done anything about it), even if making coffee that way were slightly more work.
4. Design your infrastructure to accommodate *your* needs. If you are going to spend money and energy on your domestic life, try and reduce labor by adapting your home and work space to the way you actually live, rather than based on the assumptions builders and the consumer culture make about how people ought to live. A one-time investment of non-renewable energy that makes things easier, or quicker, or enables you to consume less is always probably worth while. Looking carefully at how you actually use things can make things more efficient - for example, if you use one set of bowls for mixing bread, it might make sense to also keep other bread-related materials right next to them. If you can't stand for very long, setting up your kitchen so that you can sit while working there simply makes sense.
Most kitchens are designed for women, whose average height is about5'5. At 6' and with a 6'2 husband, and children who promise to be quite tall (6 year old oldest is already 4'5), one of my dreams is a kitchen with counters properly designed for tall people. In the meantime, we've put a couple of blocks of wood on top of the existing counters so that we don't have to bend uncomfortably while chopping things. For a shorter than average person, lower counters, or alower work area (a simple butcher block, for example) might makesense.
My children get dressed downstairs, under the supervision of their father every morning, but for quite a while I was washing their clothes downstairs, hanging them outside, then carrying the clothing upstairs to be put away, because upstairs was where we had room for the dressers. But that meant that laundry had to be carried upstairs to be stored, and then down again to be worn. We put up a long set ofopen shelves in our largest downstairs closet, and now all the children's clothing is out on those open shelves, and I no longer carry their clothes up and down stairs (I haven't yet adapted this system to my husband and I, but I'm thinking about it, since we can perfectly well get dressed downstairs too. This is, frankly, one of the best things I've done - it is an enormous time saver, and it cuts the mess, since I often had laundry baskets sitting at the bottom of the stairs waiting to go up.
5. Get the right tool for the job, and learn how to do the job well. Learn how to use and maintain the tools well. Before using non-renewables, try developing skill at using renewable techniques and human-powered tools. Do what you need to develop the physical skills needed to do things well and easily. Everyone find unfamiliar work time consuming and stressful - it takes time to become quick and comfortable with any kind of work. Anyone who has ever seen a professional chef chop a clove of garlic and someone without the same skills laboriously peel and slice the same clove knows that there are a lot of bad ways to do domestic chores. But there are few domestic skills that truly require talent - they mostly need practice. So practice, practice, practice. Learn to handle a knife, to do laundry by hand efficiently (ie, to get most of the cleaning done by soaking, rather than scrubbing), how to use a hammer well, or wash dishes quickly. Watch other people do these chores. Think about ways to increase your own comfort and efficiency. And do them the hard way enough times that you find yourself looking for ways to make things easier.
If you are going to invest in a tool for whatever job you want to do, get a good one. Cheap shovels are not worth the cost. In many cases, a non-electric tool of high quality will be much cheaper than a powered one of low quality, and the difference may not be as great as you think. In fact, the non-electric tool is often better. If the powered tool is superior, get as much use out of it as possible, while using it as efficiently as possible - for example, wash your clothes whenever possible in cold water. You can't really do this with a wringer washer, and it is one of the virtues of the electric washing machine - clothes will get clean without water heating. On the other hand, the wringer might make sense for able bodied people who do only a few laundry loads a week, or during the winter if you can heat water as part of radiant floor or wood heat.
My one experience with a wringer washer was pretty dreadful - I actually preferred using a soak and rinse method of hand washing. But I've since heard from several people that swingle-handledwringer washers are quite easy on the body and low in effort. I'm looking forward to trying one, and seeing if the tool makes a difference.
6. Integrate the waste products. It doesn't take a lot of effort to re-route your pipes so that your grey water (ie, water used in showers and sinks, but not toilets) goes for irrigation or toilet flushing, and yet it makes a dramatic difference in water usage. If you have food scraps, feed something with them (garden,worms, chickens, rabbits, goats, whatever). Even apartment dwellers can have worms or a pet rabbit. Compost your humanure if possible - it doesn't take a fancy composting toilet in most places, just a commode, two buckets and a place to do it. It really isn't gross at all, and the product doesn't smell. Read John Jenkins's _The Humanure Handbook_ before you run away. Or, if you grow things, at least pee in a bucket during the growing season and dilute it 10-1 to feed your plants. Seriously - people pay a lot of money for dehydrated pee for their gardens in the form of urea - you make it for free! Why waste it?
Most parts of food plants commonly wasted have potential uses - as dyes, animal feeds, fiber, extra food for your plate, etc… Use them up. Make your own non-toxic cleaners if you don't already, as well as beauty products. I know that sounds overwhelming, but it is as simple as putting vinegar in a jar in many cases. Only put into your system (your body, your household system, your town, your nation, your world) the things you want to take out of them.
7. If you don't love it or need it, there is no reason to own it. We're all storing things for the future, and it can be hard to distinguish between necessity and junk. But every possession takes energy to manage - it has to be cleaned, dusted, stored, serviced,attended to. You pay rent or a mortgage or taxes on a house big enough for the stuff. Things demand energy we don't have. So unless you are sure you'll need it, or you care about it, get rid of it. That goes double for things like wall to wall carpeting that not only need maintenance, but need *powered* maintenance.
I have a problem here - I often dither about whether something is truly needed or not. But it is worth making these distinctions to haveless to do. I'm trying to reduce our possessions by ¼ over the next year, and I'm finding it an interesting exercise.
8. Hire people rather than buy stuff. If you can, hire help rather than buying a tool. The money for local help goes into the local economy. Or barter for labor you can't or won't do yourself. Whenever possible, give your resources to someone local, or someone who needs it. So if you need more time to get work or family things done, perhaps you could hire help with the chores, or a mother's helper to play with the kids, or trade labor with a neighbor - you do her most hated job and she'll do yours. Only buy a device or tool if you really need it.
The corollary of this is that most neighborhoods do not need one of everything. You may need a washing machine, and so may your neighbor, but you might not need two between you. Try sharing whenever possible. It took us a while after we moved here to get into the sharing mode with neighbors - sharing is scary, because it involves asking people for things, and trusting them to say "no" or "yes" and building relationships. Now we barter or share quite a few things (at times we've had a shared car with our neighbors, among other things), and we try always to offer more than we take. It is worth the risk, but it does take time and practice and a kind of courage, I think.
9. Keep records! Keep lots of records. Organize. You save time by tracking what you use and what you need, by noting the best way to do things (if you are the forgetful type like me). By sorting and organizing and writing down what is stored where. It always seems like keeping notes adds in time, but the time spent *not* trying to figure something out for the 7th time is well worth it. One trick that works well for me is to have multiple calendars. I buy them cheap at our dollar store, or after we're a few days into the new year. We have one for religious events and family stuff (birthdays, etc…), another is for the garden - what to start, what to harvest, what the temperature was, the first time we saw a blackbird, how many eggs we got. Another calender is for every little daily event - playdates, when the compost guy is coming, travels, etc.. the usual stuff. Then there are the lists in my notebooks - lists of books to find cheaply, things we need to look for at grocery stores, things to do, articles to write, how much of each food we've got in storage - I save a considerable bit of time and money by knowing what I have and what I need.
Related to this, find ways to store and sort so that you don't have to waste time hunting for things. Figure out a system and make yourself stick to it. I'm not always good about this, but when it works, it is glorious. Think about the last time you needed to do a project and couldn't find the right tool or materials. You know you just had it...make sure you know where things are, so you don't waste time and energy.
10. Have a place for everything. Try and mostly put things in their places. One of our biggest problems in keeping clean is the stuff that doesn't really live anywhere. Mail we might want to look at eventually. The books that don't really fit on the shelves. The clothes that don't fit in the drawer, or on our bodies anymore. Instant mess. The more you can either get rid of things or make an appropriate place, the easier this all is. Make workspace for yourself, if you need it - accepting the realities of your life (ie, "I'm never going to dump all the junk mail, I like looking in the catalogs too much." And make a space for the catalogs). If you are going to be canning, for example, make room for it if possible, and plan that room into at least the times when you are canning. Have a place to put the mending, the knitting needles, a chair to sew in, a useful and comfortable space to do necessary mobile (ie, can be done in more than one place) chores.
11. Look at your schedule for time and space that might go unused (although remember, down time is good too) . Try new stuff and see if you can multi-task. For example, I learned to knit and breastfeed, to type and breastfeed, etc… out of sheer desperation to get things done. Otherwise, I never got to knit or write. I find that I can get a surprising amount of cleaning done if I set a timer for 15 minutes and say, "ok, I'm going to do what I can in the next 15 minutes". Knowing the time is short increases my efficiency. Remember, nothing has to be all or nothing. Can't hang all yourlaundry? Hang as much as you can, and the next dryer load will be that much shorter and use that much less energy. Don't have time to wash all the dishes by hand? Do as many as you can in 10 minutes,and try to do more each time. Then, you'll have that much longer between dishwasher loads. Most of us have a few 10 minute increments now and then we could spend doing some simple chore.
12. When in doubt, drink beer. Permaculture works from the principle that theoretically, yields are unlimited - you can optimize so much you get more out of a system than you ever put into it. That violates the laws of physics, of course, but it is fun to try. Beer works kind of like magic - you ferment it, people get to drink the beer ,and the grain is nearly as good for animal feed (and more digestible) as it was nutritionally before. So drink locally made, sustainable beer before doing household chores, and you'll find them much easier to bear. As you strive to get more out of it than you put into it, strive also to relax and enjoy yourself. Really, no one is going to remember whether the tile was grouted and the towels were clean when bad times come. But they will remember whether there was food, basic hygeine, a place to sleep, hospitality, good things to drink, and peace in the home. These are things worth having, and worth making time for. The rest is gravy.
Sharon in upstate NY, who is still nursing and, sadly, drinks verylittle beer.
-1. Attitude adjustment is probably the first alteration any of us can make. We can choose how we think about domestic labor, how we respond to the activity, at least in a purely mental and emotional sense, and often in a physical one as well. I can think of 2 kinds of attitude adjustment that apply to domestic work. First, there's lowering or altering your standards. Most of us can do this (in my case, further lowering might not be such a good idea), and it can be a considerable time-saver. For example, if you ordinarily wash sheets and towels every week, try stretching it to two weeks or three, and see if there is a significant reduction in quality of life. Clothes can be worn more often before washing, floors can go longer between washings as well. While some jobs (laundry for example) get bigger and less manageable by ignoring them, many things can be put aside for a while.
You might also adjust to less white whites, or a less tidy house. Only you can say where your quality of life is unacceptably diminished. This should not be used, however, for any household work that involves basic hygiene, health issues and safety. So while you could choose to let your floors get grubby in many cases, if you have an infant eating crud off of them, that may not be wise.
Second attitude adjustment can be choosing to enjoy or find satisfaction in work you have previously not enjoyed. People can change their preferences, and can choose to find pleasure in most activities. You might consider taking a chore you particularly dislike and attempting to find a way to enjoy it, either by trying to take pleasure in the process, altering the process to make it more pleasurable, or by deriving satisfaction from the accomplishment. Obviously, there may be some chores that simply can't be readjusted to, either because the activity is in some way stressful or painful, or because no matter how hard you try, you can't come to like it. Some people with physical limitations will have fewer options in this department. But it is worth trying.
I strongly disliked organizing clothing for my four sons. With four kids who grow rapidly, I have boxes of clothing for every size from preemie to boys 12, plus cloth diapers and covers in many sizes, andtracking the clothes, sorting outgrown things, switching them around as the seasons change, mending them, keeping track of what I have and what I need, etc… was time consuming, and, I felt, extremely boring. But I've managed to convince myself, if not to like it, to take a good deal of satisfaction from doing it, simply by, instead of begrudging the time it takes and seeing it as an annoyance, recognizing it for what it is - a useful and necessary job that saves us money and time in the longer term. I still like other things more, but I don't find the job as difficult and intimidating.
A third way of adjusting your own attitude is to think seriously about the requirements of your life, and distinguish carefullybetween wants and needs. The classic example of this is the parent who works full time, but when commute, wardrobe, meals, daycare,etc… are calculated in has a household net loss, or only a tiny gain. (Please note, this is not to say that parents should stay home - this is merely an example, so don't get your kidneys in an uproar, as DH's grandmother liked to say). For example, if you dislike dusting, perhaps you could choose to have fewer dustable objects, or to keep them in closed boxes, even if there was some slight inconvenience.
2. After attitude adjustment, the next lowest input thing to do about household work is to find ways to either do chores with others, or to get others to help with difficult or distasteful projects. The most obvious such method, if you have kids, is to train them to help out. The difficulty with this is that teaching children to do things is, in the short term, inevitably much more time consuming (although it can be fun) than just doing it yourself. After a while this ceases to be so, but many parents find it difficult to build time into their daily lives to teach their kids the necessary skills. Planning for this, accepting the short-term reduction in efficiency, and adapting to it is usually worth the hassle. Even very small kids can help out if you give them time to learn how.
The same is true of getting a spouse or other family member to take on an job they have traditionally not done. It is worth noting, however, that it helps not to be over-committed to a single technique. Many people who would willingly take over X job are turned off by someone insisting that it be done exactly X way and to X's standards. Women are, I think, particularly guilty of the sin of over management.
For large scale chores, involving other members of your community, or friends and extended family might improve the experience. For example, my extended family on one side has at times had an annual "work-weekend" where once per year, the entire family descended upon one of the members who owns a home and devotes a long weekend to making repairs or completing major projects. The whole thing is considered enjoyable by everyone - the homeowner provides accommodations, food and materials, and everyone enjoys being together. Everyone eventually gets a turn. We're working on build a neighborhood coop, which functions in the same way, volunteering once per month to help each family get a big work project done.
Also, the simple act of working together can provide a tremendous degree of satisfaction. Cooking can be an unpleasant job if it takes you away from your family and isolates the cook in the kitchen. The same job is quite enjoyable when done with a partner, a friend, or even a child helping. Simple proximity to one another makes big jobs much more manageable in many cases. Finding ways to bring people into the kitchen when you have guests, or to make whatever job you are doing part of the life of your household can make an enormous difference. One neighbor I know has her children read aloud to her while she cleans - they get practice reading, the family hears a story together, and everyone has a good time.
3. The next most significant way to reduce labor sustainably is to experiment with time and energy costs. Most of us have a built in set of assumptions about what constitutes labor, and what constitutes labor savings, what is efficient, what is easy and what is difficult, andwhat the best uses of one's time and energy are. But these assumptions may not be correct, and can only be verified by experimentation. It is not at all uncommon to assume that that one thing is faster than another, only to realize that it is quite the opposite - our own perceptions are shaped by what we expect to find. Want to know how much time it takes you to do a load of laundry by hand, compared to the washing machine? Try it. But not just once - try it three or four different times, in as many ways as you can think of. Think about ways in which you can make the process more efficient. The next time you chop an onion, do it a different way than you usually do. Don't take for granted that labor-saving devices actually are. Some are. Some aren't. For example, my husband and I were given an electric citrus juicer as a wedding gift, and we rather unthinkingly used it for a while, until one day my husband got frustrated and said, "I could do this faster with a lemon reamer." Well, what do you know - he could. The same is true for me of the dryer - I can just as easily hang laundry as transfer it over, clean the lint filter and earn the money to pay for the electricity.
When you calculate labor-savings, make sure that all labor required to buy, maintain, use, clean, repair, store and tend to the item is included. For example, my husband and I don't drink coffee, but keep a coffee maker around for guests. Because the coffee maker is stored in an inconvenient place (which makes sense since the convenient ones are for things we actually use regularly), the time spent climbing upon the step-ladder and pulling the box down, cleaning the parts which get dusty between uses, etc.... make it a surprisingly time-consuming project. I suspect a press-style glass coffee maker which could also be used for tea (which we drink a lot of) would be more efficient (although I've not done anything about it), even if making coffee that way were slightly more work.
4. Design your infrastructure to accommodate *your* needs. If you are going to spend money and energy on your domestic life, try and reduce labor by adapting your home and work space to the way you actually live, rather than based on the assumptions builders and the consumer culture make about how people ought to live. A one-time investment of non-renewable energy that makes things easier, or quicker, or enables you to consume less is always probably worth while. Looking carefully at how you actually use things can make things more efficient - for example, if you use one set of bowls for mixing bread, it might make sense to also keep other bread-related materials right next to them. If you can't stand for very long, setting up your kitchen so that you can sit while working there simply makes sense.
Most kitchens are designed for women, whose average height is about5'5. At 6' and with a 6'2 husband, and children who promise to be quite tall (6 year old oldest is already 4'5), one of my dreams is a kitchen with counters properly designed for tall people. In the meantime, we've put a couple of blocks of wood on top of the existing counters so that we don't have to bend uncomfortably while chopping things. For a shorter than average person, lower counters, or alower work area (a simple butcher block, for example) might makesense.
My children get dressed downstairs, under the supervision of their father every morning, but for quite a while I was washing their clothes downstairs, hanging them outside, then carrying the clothing upstairs to be put away, because upstairs was where we had room for the dressers. But that meant that laundry had to be carried upstairs to be stored, and then down again to be worn. We put up a long set ofopen shelves in our largest downstairs closet, and now all the children's clothing is out on those open shelves, and I no longer carry their clothes up and down stairs (I haven't yet adapted this system to my husband and I, but I'm thinking about it, since we can perfectly well get dressed downstairs too. This is, frankly, one of the best things I've done - it is an enormous time saver, and it cuts the mess, since I often had laundry baskets sitting at the bottom of the stairs waiting to go up.
5. Get the right tool for the job, and learn how to do the job well. Learn how to use and maintain the tools well. Before using non-renewables, try developing skill at using renewable techniques and human-powered tools. Do what you need to develop the physical skills needed to do things well and easily. Everyone find unfamiliar work time consuming and stressful - it takes time to become quick and comfortable with any kind of work. Anyone who has ever seen a professional chef chop a clove of garlic and someone without the same skills laboriously peel and slice the same clove knows that there are a lot of bad ways to do domestic chores. But there are few domestic skills that truly require talent - they mostly need practice. So practice, practice, practice. Learn to handle a knife, to do laundry by hand efficiently (ie, to get most of the cleaning done by soaking, rather than scrubbing), how to use a hammer well, or wash dishes quickly. Watch other people do these chores. Think about ways to increase your own comfort and efficiency. And do them the hard way enough times that you find yourself looking for ways to make things easier.
If you are going to invest in a tool for whatever job you want to do, get a good one. Cheap shovels are not worth the cost. In many cases, a non-electric tool of high quality will be much cheaper than a powered one of low quality, and the difference may not be as great as you think. In fact, the non-electric tool is often better. If the powered tool is superior, get as much use out of it as possible, while using it as efficiently as possible - for example, wash your clothes whenever possible in cold water. You can't really do this with a wringer washer, and it is one of the virtues of the electric washing machine - clothes will get clean without water heating. On the other hand, the wringer might make sense for able bodied people who do only a few laundry loads a week, or during the winter if you can heat water as part of radiant floor or wood heat.
My one experience with a wringer washer was pretty dreadful - I actually preferred using a soak and rinse method of hand washing. But I've since heard from several people that swingle-handledwringer washers are quite easy on the body and low in effort. I'm looking forward to trying one, and seeing if the tool makes a difference.
6. Integrate the waste products. It doesn't take a lot of effort to re-route your pipes so that your grey water (ie, water used in showers and sinks, but not toilets) goes for irrigation or toilet flushing, and yet it makes a dramatic difference in water usage. If you have food scraps, feed something with them (garden,worms, chickens, rabbits, goats, whatever). Even apartment dwellers can have worms or a pet rabbit. Compost your humanure if possible - it doesn't take a fancy composting toilet in most places, just a commode, two buckets and a place to do it. It really isn't gross at all, and the product doesn't smell. Read John Jenkins's _The Humanure Handbook_ before you run away. Or, if you grow things, at least pee in a bucket during the growing season and dilute it 10-1 to feed your plants. Seriously - people pay a lot of money for dehydrated pee for their gardens in the form of urea - you make it for free! Why waste it?
Most parts of food plants commonly wasted have potential uses - as dyes, animal feeds, fiber, extra food for your plate, etc… Use them up. Make your own non-toxic cleaners if you don't already, as well as beauty products. I know that sounds overwhelming, but it is as simple as putting vinegar in a jar in many cases. Only put into your system (your body, your household system, your town, your nation, your world) the things you want to take out of them.
7. If you don't love it or need it, there is no reason to own it. We're all storing things for the future, and it can be hard to distinguish between necessity and junk. But every possession takes energy to manage - it has to be cleaned, dusted, stored, serviced,attended to. You pay rent or a mortgage or taxes on a house big enough for the stuff. Things demand energy we don't have. So unless you are sure you'll need it, or you care about it, get rid of it. That goes double for things like wall to wall carpeting that not only need maintenance, but need *powered* maintenance.
I have a problem here - I often dither about whether something is truly needed or not. But it is worth making these distinctions to haveless to do. I'm trying to reduce our possessions by ¼ over the next year, and I'm finding it an interesting exercise.
8. Hire people rather than buy stuff. If you can, hire help rather than buying a tool. The money for local help goes into the local economy. Or barter for labor you can't or won't do yourself. Whenever possible, give your resources to someone local, or someone who needs it. So if you need more time to get work or family things done, perhaps you could hire help with the chores, or a mother's helper to play with the kids, or trade labor with a neighbor - you do her most hated job and she'll do yours. Only buy a device or tool if you really need it.
The corollary of this is that most neighborhoods do not need one of everything. You may need a washing machine, and so may your neighbor, but you might not need two between you. Try sharing whenever possible. It took us a while after we moved here to get into the sharing mode with neighbors - sharing is scary, because it involves asking people for things, and trusting them to say "no" or "yes" and building relationships. Now we barter or share quite a few things (at times we've had a shared car with our neighbors, among other things), and we try always to offer more than we take. It is worth the risk, but it does take time and practice and a kind of courage, I think.
9. Keep records! Keep lots of records. Organize. You save time by tracking what you use and what you need, by noting the best way to do things (if you are the forgetful type like me). By sorting and organizing and writing down what is stored where. It always seems like keeping notes adds in time, but the time spent *not* trying to figure something out for the 7th time is well worth it. One trick that works well for me is to have multiple calendars. I buy them cheap at our dollar store, or after we're a few days into the new year. We have one for religious events and family stuff (birthdays, etc…), another is for the garden - what to start, what to harvest, what the temperature was, the first time we saw a blackbird, how many eggs we got. Another calender is for every little daily event - playdates, when the compost guy is coming, travels, etc.. the usual stuff. Then there are the lists in my notebooks - lists of books to find cheaply, things we need to look for at grocery stores, things to do, articles to write, how much of each food we've got in storage - I save a considerable bit of time and money by knowing what I have and what I need.
Related to this, find ways to store and sort so that you don't have to waste time hunting for things. Figure out a system and make yourself stick to it. I'm not always good about this, but when it works, it is glorious. Think about the last time you needed to do a project and couldn't find the right tool or materials. You know you just had it...make sure you know where things are, so you don't waste time and energy.
10. Have a place for everything. Try and mostly put things in their places. One of our biggest problems in keeping clean is the stuff that doesn't really live anywhere. Mail we might want to look at eventually. The books that don't really fit on the shelves. The clothes that don't fit in the drawer, or on our bodies anymore. Instant mess. The more you can either get rid of things or make an appropriate place, the easier this all is. Make workspace for yourself, if you need it - accepting the realities of your life (ie, "I'm never going to dump all the junk mail, I like looking in the catalogs too much." And make a space for the catalogs). If you are going to be canning, for example, make room for it if possible, and plan that room into at least the times when you are canning. Have a place to put the mending, the knitting needles, a chair to sew in, a useful and comfortable space to do necessary mobile (ie, can be done in more than one place) chores.
11. Look at your schedule for time and space that might go unused (although remember, down time is good too) . Try new stuff and see if you can multi-task. For example, I learned to knit and breastfeed, to type and breastfeed, etc… out of sheer desperation to get things done. Otherwise, I never got to knit or write. I find that I can get a surprising amount of cleaning done if I set a timer for 15 minutes and say, "ok, I'm going to do what I can in the next 15 minutes". Knowing the time is short increases my efficiency. Remember, nothing has to be all or nothing. Can't hang all yourlaundry? Hang as much as you can, and the next dryer load will be that much shorter and use that much less energy. Don't have time to wash all the dishes by hand? Do as many as you can in 10 minutes,and try to do more each time. Then, you'll have that much longer between dishwasher loads. Most of us have a few 10 minute increments now and then we could spend doing some simple chore.
12. When in doubt, drink beer. Permaculture works from the principle that theoretically, yields are unlimited - you can optimize so much you get more out of a system than you ever put into it. That violates the laws of physics, of course, but it is fun to try. Beer works kind of like magic - you ferment it, people get to drink the beer ,and the grain is nearly as good for animal feed (and more digestible) as it was nutritionally before. So drink locally made, sustainable beer before doing household chores, and you'll find them much easier to bear. As you strive to get more out of it than you put into it, strive also to relax and enjoy yourself. Really, no one is going to remember whether the tile was grouted and the towels were clean when bad times come. But they will remember whether there was food, basic hygeine, a place to sleep, hospitality, good things to drink, and peace in the home. These are things worth having, and worth making time for. The rest is gravy.
Sharon in upstate NY, who is still nursing and, sadly, drinks verylittle beer.
The Permaculture of Domesticity (Part I - Theory)
It struck me that since for many people the biggest problem in their domestic life is time, and thus the most compelling argument for using high-energy consumptive appliances like dishwashers and dryers is the time spent on chores, it might be worth strategizing on ways to manage domestic labor with the fewest possible inputs and the greatest degree of productivity and pleasure. (Of course, the first trick to increased productivity at my house would be to actually go do the domestic labor instead ofwriting about it - say, to go fold the laundry and put it away, rather than nattering on about the best ways to get it done. But*that's* not going to happen, is it ;-)?
I'm calling this the Permaculture of domestic life. For those not in the know, permaculture is "permanent culture" and it is one of the ways to get the most out of everything in life. And whether you do this because you have to (ie, the rolling blackouts in your area make it necessary) or because you want to, IMHO, all of us need to figure out ways to makeour domestic work manageable alongside our other work in the coming years. I'm by no means an expert here, and would welcome suggestions for more and better techniques.
First, the theory (even the sorting of underwear requires a good grounding in theory, or so I try to convince myself, as I merrily ignore the actual underwear in favor of the meta-under things and their philosophical grounding.) So here are the broad points of a Permaculture philosophy of domesticity (much of it stolen wholesale from various other, smarter people).
-1. "In Chaos lies unparalleled opportunity for imposing creative order." (Bill Mollison). Given that housekeeping is the act of imposing order, the key term here is "creative" - old ways may not do, traditional assumptions may be flawed. The first thing we needto do with housekeeping is look at the project with new eyes. We may find that there are better ways to do things, our what seems efficient, isn't.
-2. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" (Robert Heinlein, articulating the second law of thermodynamics). Energy must be used as wisely and efficiently as possible, and we must make as much effort as possible to use ambient energy before it escapes our reach. Human energy, fossil fuel energy, mental energy, renewable resource energy - all have end points. Those that are most limited must be used with the most care and attention to avoid waste.
-3. "Every object must responsibly provide for its replacement; society must, as a condition of use, replace an equal or greater resource than the one used up." (Mollison) When energy is consumed, it should be gainful, and provide the maximum benefit with the fewest possible consequences both for the user and for others affected. If we use labor saving devices, the uses we turn our saved time to should be valuable, since our use of them cost others and the environment something. If we use fossil fuel energies, we should store or conserve more energy than it cost us.
-4. "The problem is the solution. Everything works both ways. It is only how we see things that makes them advantageous or not."(Mollison) We can choose actively to see domestic labor however we want, and we can choose to make use of things we've often viewed as a problem. Wastes and involuntary outputs should be reintegrated into the system. Our attitude, and our creative adaptability are perhaps the most important tools we have.
-5. "That Which is Hateful to You, Do Not Do to the Other." (TheTalmud). If you are not willing to absorb all the consequences of your actions personally, in your own immediate environment, you should reconsider your actions. There is no such place as "away" - we cannot throw things "away" or waste things without doing harm to others. Thus, we cannot conceive environmental consequences, or consequences to people we cannot see as not part of our practice. Preserving what we have is virtually always the most energy, time and money efficient way of acting for the earth and people as awhole.
-6 "Make the Least Change for the Greatest Possible effect"(Mollison) Don't make more work for yourself than you need to. Evaluate carefully what you already have, and what resources(and "problems") you can make use of. Domestic life, like any other part of life, can be an optimization exercise.
Ok, now that we're done talking theory, how does that play out in actual life, when you've got dirty dishes to wash, laundry to do, things to get done, meals to cook, plus your job, your internet life, your family, and all the other stuff you've taken on. How do you get things done?
That'll be the subject of Part II.
Sharon
I'm calling this the Permaculture of domestic life. For those not in the know, permaculture is "permanent culture" and it is one of the ways to get the most out of everything in life. And whether you do this because you have to (ie, the rolling blackouts in your area make it necessary) or because you want to, IMHO, all of us need to figure out ways to makeour domestic work manageable alongside our other work in the coming years. I'm by no means an expert here, and would welcome suggestions for more and better techniques.
First, the theory (even the sorting of underwear requires a good grounding in theory, or so I try to convince myself, as I merrily ignore the actual underwear in favor of the meta-under things and their philosophical grounding.) So here are the broad points of a Permaculture philosophy of domesticity (much of it stolen wholesale from various other, smarter people).
-1. "In Chaos lies unparalleled opportunity for imposing creative order." (Bill Mollison). Given that housekeeping is the act of imposing order, the key term here is "creative" - old ways may not do, traditional assumptions may be flawed. The first thing we needto do with housekeeping is look at the project with new eyes. We may find that there are better ways to do things, our what seems efficient, isn't.
-2. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" (Robert Heinlein, articulating the second law of thermodynamics). Energy must be used as wisely and efficiently as possible, and we must make as much effort as possible to use ambient energy before it escapes our reach. Human energy, fossil fuel energy, mental energy, renewable resource energy - all have end points. Those that are most limited must be used with the most care and attention to avoid waste.
-3. "Every object must responsibly provide for its replacement; society must, as a condition of use, replace an equal or greater resource than the one used up." (Mollison) When energy is consumed, it should be gainful, and provide the maximum benefit with the fewest possible consequences both for the user and for others affected. If we use labor saving devices, the uses we turn our saved time to should be valuable, since our use of them cost others and the environment something. If we use fossil fuel energies, we should store or conserve more energy than it cost us.
-4. "The problem is the solution. Everything works both ways. It is only how we see things that makes them advantageous or not."(Mollison) We can choose actively to see domestic labor however we want, and we can choose to make use of things we've often viewed as a problem. Wastes and involuntary outputs should be reintegrated into the system. Our attitude, and our creative adaptability are perhaps the most important tools we have.
-5. "That Which is Hateful to You, Do Not Do to the Other." (TheTalmud). If you are not willing to absorb all the consequences of your actions personally, in your own immediate environment, you should reconsider your actions. There is no such place as "away" - we cannot throw things "away" or waste things without doing harm to others. Thus, we cannot conceive environmental consequences, or consequences to people we cannot see as not part of our practice. Preserving what we have is virtually always the most energy, time and money efficient way of acting for the earth and people as awhole.
-6 "Make the Least Change for the Greatest Possible effect"(Mollison) Don't make more work for yourself than you need to. Evaluate carefully what you already have, and what resources(and "problems") you can make use of. Domestic life, like any other part of life, can be an optimization exercise.
Ok, now that we're done talking theory, how does that play out in actual life, when you've got dirty dishes to wash, laundry to do, things to get done, meals to cook, plus your job, your internet life, your family, and all the other stuff you've taken on. How do you get things done?
That'll be the subject of Part II.
Sharon
Monday, August 07, 2006
Buy nothing, week 1
Well, it has been a week now. I'm not missing the shopping at all - the goal is to shop 1x per month at our local coop and the asian grocery store, and then no more than 3xs per week at our local farmstand for things like milk (not currently able to barter for milk, although we have at times), fruit outside what we grow, and other things we don't produce.
So far the big dilemma is whether to replace the 50 chicks that gotten eaten by something unknown (very mysterious). We lost our layers for next year (our current batch are 2+ years old and starting to slow a bit), as well as 25 bantam chicks that I'd planned to give away to various people I know who want to try keeping chickens in their suburban backyards. I figured cochin bantams would be excellent - they are attractive, quiet, decent layers and good setters, as well as small and good foragers.
I think I've decided that I will replace the layers, since they are a business expense - we sell eggs and make a decent profit off of them. But I'm less sure about the banties - a pity, since it was a good cause.
I'm also looking for a free kitten - we lost two cats last week. One of our indoor cats (Tycho, our cat's cat) slipped out and met with a neighbor's German Shepherd. His spine was broken, and he had to be put down. And we lost Yorick (Alas Poor Yorick, actually) to the neurological condition that he's had for years. That leaves us with three cats, all fairly elderly, none of them a spectacular mouser (Yorick was by far our best, although Angus is good at catching bats and birds that slip into the house). I think we need a kitten. But, of course, nobody *needs* a kitten, right? Hence, we look for a freebie.
But I admit, otherwise, I feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction at not having to go near a mall, particularly as my friends complain about the joys of back to school shopping. My children, dressed in a combination of gifts, yard sale clothes, cousin cast offs and things I've made for them may look like hopeless ragamuffins, but they are cute ragamuffins, and at least I don't have to go to the mall.
We had guests all this week, including my Mother-in-law, who despite the fact that we've explicitly asked her not to compensate for our not-buying things (after all, we're choosing this, not living in a cardboard box in the train station) arrived with a big bag of toys for the kids (just little things, of course, she said ;-)), brought cookies and a meal of take out malay food, and insisted on buying us some ice cream before she left. She's very, very worried her son and grandsons might die of starvation or deprivation, I suspect. But she's also very, very sweet. My sister kindly asked me, "Can you go out to dinner if I buy?" I find it kind of funny (although also very wonderful) that people are so willing to try and save us from ourselves. And who knows, after a year without restaurants, I might be. But so far (and fortified by the take-out Malay MIL brought) I'm able to handle the first week sans restaurants (given that where we live there are only two options - pizza and diner, neither very good, I often go months without eating out - we're better cooks than any food we can buy very locally) without *too* much strain ;-).
Someone asked what we are saving money for. Partly to increase our charitable donations. Partly to add to our preparations - we want to reinsulate, add more food storage, rip up the carpet, fence the yard. But mostly, I'm only generally curious about how much money we'll save (although, of course, we can always use the money). What I most want to accomplish is transforming my relationship to scarcity - I want my instinctive reaction to losing something, breaking something, running out to be "how can I manage without it/repair it myself/find something else/make it do" not "I need to get..."
Sharon
So far the big dilemma is whether to replace the 50 chicks that gotten eaten by something unknown (very mysterious). We lost our layers for next year (our current batch are 2+ years old and starting to slow a bit), as well as 25 bantam chicks that I'd planned to give away to various people I know who want to try keeping chickens in their suburban backyards. I figured cochin bantams would be excellent - they are attractive, quiet, decent layers and good setters, as well as small and good foragers.
I think I've decided that I will replace the layers, since they are a business expense - we sell eggs and make a decent profit off of them. But I'm less sure about the banties - a pity, since it was a good cause.
I'm also looking for a free kitten - we lost two cats last week. One of our indoor cats (Tycho, our cat's cat) slipped out and met with a neighbor's German Shepherd. His spine was broken, and he had to be put down. And we lost Yorick (Alas Poor Yorick, actually) to the neurological condition that he's had for years. That leaves us with three cats, all fairly elderly, none of them a spectacular mouser (Yorick was by far our best, although Angus is good at catching bats and birds that slip into the house). I think we need a kitten. But, of course, nobody *needs* a kitten, right? Hence, we look for a freebie.
But I admit, otherwise, I feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction at not having to go near a mall, particularly as my friends complain about the joys of back to school shopping. My children, dressed in a combination of gifts, yard sale clothes, cousin cast offs and things I've made for them may look like hopeless ragamuffins, but they are cute ragamuffins, and at least I don't have to go to the mall.
We had guests all this week, including my Mother-in-law, who despite the fact that we've explicitly asked her not to compensate for our not-buying things (after all, we're choosing this, not living in a cardboard box in the train station) arrived with a big bag of toys for the kids (just little things, of course, she said ;-)), brought cookies and a meal of take out malay food, and insisted on buying us some ice cream before she left. She's very, very worried her son and grandsons might die of starvation or deprivation, I suspect. But she's also very, very sweet. My sister kindly asked me, "Can you go out to dinner if I buy?" I find it kind of funny (although also very wonderful) that people are so willing to try and save us from ourselves. And who knows, after a year without restaurants, I might be. But so far (and fortified by the take-out Malay MIL brought) I'm able to handle the first week sans restaurants (given that where we live there are only two options - pizza and diner, neither very good, I often go months without eating out - we're better cooks than any food we can buy very locally) without *too* much strain ;-).
Someone asked what we are saving money for. Partly to increase our charitable donations. Partly to add to our preparations - we want to reinsulate, add more food storage, rip up the carpet, fence the yard. But mostly, I'm only generally curious about how much money we'll save (although, of course, we can always use the money). What I most want to accomplish is transforming my relationship to scarcity - I want my instinctive reaction to losing something, breaking something, running out to be "how can I manage without it/repair it myself/find something else/make it do" not "I need to get..."
Sharon
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Hot Weather
We're pretty comfortable today inside the house. It is 101 degrees outside, and 77 in here, with windows closed, shades drawn and ceiling fans on. We're lucky to have a good house for this - the newer part of the house is tremendously well insulated, and the older part, is, for reasons completely inexplicable to me, cool in the summer while it is cold in the winter. The dogs have dug a den under the porch and seem happy there. But even when we lived in a fourth floor apartment, we could manage with regular cool showers, window fans and trips to the movies. We had an air conditioner for a while - and then my cat, Entropy (now long deceased) had a horrible incontinent period as he was dying, and peed in the air conditioner. The scent of cat-urine processed cool air was not worth the price.
But the heat is frustrating and scary, not least because it leads us to the worst kinds of short-term thinking. I can't count the people I know who say they "need" air conditioning - even though air conditioning emits greenhouse gasses at a rate that means that their kids are only going to need it much worse. We're unwilling to endure even the shortest term discomfort for long term security.
Not to mention the fact that everything feels worse when you come out of air conditioning. Unless you are in serious danger of health consequences, find other ways, particularly here in the Northeast. And remember, it is temporary. Winter will be here soon enough.
Sharon
But the heat is frustrating and scary, not least because it leads us to the worst kinds of short-term thinking. I can't count the people I know who say they "need" air conditioning - even though air conditioning emits greenhouse gasses at a rate that means that their kids are only going to need it much worse. We're unwilling to endure even the shortest term discomfort for long term security.
Not to mention the fact that everything feels worse when you come out of air conditioning. Unless you are in serious danger of health consequences, find other ways, particularly here in the Northeast. And remember, it is temporary. Winter will be here soon enough.
Sharon
The Buy-Nothing Year Begins
Today begins Eric and my exercise in non-consumption. For one year, we're going to purchase nothing that isn't necessary. No processed foods. Much less gas (we're trying to reduce driving by 50%). Much less electricity (50% reduction). No books, no music, no movies, no videos (this last won't be much of a hardship - my MIL gave us netflix last year, so we've got that for a while, but we won't renew unless she does). No junk food. No clothing. No toys. No meals out. No alcohol (given that I've been pregnant or nursing for the last 7 years, this won't be the hardship it sounds like to others). No reeses peanut butter cups (which to me do not fall in the category of junk, processed foods or non-essentials ordinarily ;-). No coffee or tea (we don't drink coffee, and we'll use up the tea we have or do without.) No magazine subscriptions, presents for anyone (we make 'em or do without.) No travel except mandatory work or to visit relatives, and a lot less of that.
We did buy a few things in advance, front-loading as we call it, mostly homeschooling materials for Simon for this year, and a few extra (but desperately needed, of course ;-P) books for me. And I've got a tiny stash of Reeses. Eric's got a couple of 12 packs of beer (he asked me, "Am I being rude if I don't offer guests beer, when I've only got 30 bottles for an entire year." My answer is "yes.") But when things run out, we will try not to replace them. The rule is that first, we make do or do without. If we can't, we then try and either fix it or make it ourselves. Last and only if we deem it impossible to live without do we replace it.
We will buy toilet paper, the components of food (no pre-made foods - not that we ate many, but the kids like pretzels and granola bars and I'm fond of a particular kind of sesame sauce, etc...). We'll buy the components to make gifts, if we cannot make them from what we have (sadly, this is not an excuse to purchase yarn, since I could make gifts for many thousands of people from the yarn I already possess, or so Eric estimates ;-).
Books will be the hard thing for me, I know. I read a lot and read fast. Eric will miss movies and music, and we'll both miss eating out. The kid will miss trips out for ice cream (we'll make ice cream at home instead), but they are young enough not to mind this very much, and over-indulged enough not to feel a drastic loss having to play with their many, many toys.
The thing is, we're on average far more frugal than most people in the culture - but there's a surprising amount of fat in our budget (not to mention the fat on me from the reeses and other indulgences - I'm hoping to lose some weight this year). And someone has to do it. Actually, people have done it - there's a book, one I'm working on now but recommend _Not Buying It_ by Judith Levine, about a couple that did the same. I admit, much as I like Ms. Levine's writing style (I do, quite a lot) and find her funny and erudite, I don't find myself drawing a lot of logical parallels. Much of the book is devoted to how much she misses entertainment - theater, art, musical performances and especially movies. Perhaps because I have four kids under 7, those joys are already mostly closed to me. I've been to three plays since Eli was born, one concert, and perhaps a dozen movies. I'm fine without it. She also misses buying clothes, something that I do only when roped and hogtied.
What will be hard for me is the pleasure of yard saling, of browsing used book stores, and of buying supplies to make things like quilts and knitted objects. And it will be hard to eliminate the convenience of not meeting people at restaurants. But mostly, it will be about gaining things - more time, more money for essentials (we will use some of the funds during the year to reinsulate our house and do other energy conservation activities), for tzedakah (1/4 of our savings will go to charity), and less thought about what I don't have, what I need, what I want. I suspect I'll enjoy it.
Wish me luck!
Sharon
We did buy a few things in advance, front-loading as we call it, mostly homeschooling materials for Simon for this year, and a few extra (but desperately needed, of course ;-P) books for me. And I've got a tiny stash of Reeses. Eric's got a couple of 12 packs of beer (he asked me, "Am I being rude if I don't offer guests beer, when I've only got 30 bottles for an entire year." My answer is "yes.") But when things run out, we will try not to replace them. The rule is that first, we make do or do without. If we can't, we then try and either fix it or make it ourselves. Last and only if we deem it impossible to live without do we replace it.
We will buy toilet paper, the components of food (no pre-made foods - not that we ate many, but the kids like pretzels and granola bars and I'm fond of a particular kind of sesame sauce, etc...). We'll buy the components to make gifts, if we cannot make them from what we have (sadly, this is not an excuse to purchase yarn, since I could make gifts for many thousands of people from the yarn I already possess, or so Eric estimates ;-).
Books will be the hard thing for me, I know. I read a lot and read fast. Eric will miss movies and music, and we'll both miss eating out. The kid will miss trips out for ice cream (we'll make ice cream at home instead), but they are young enough not to mind this very much, and over-indulged enough not to feel a drastic loss having to play with their many, many toys.
The thing is, we're on average far more frugal than most people in the culture - but there's a surprising amount of fat in our budget (not to mention the fat on me from the reeses and other indulgences - I'm hoping to lose some weight this year). And someone has to do it. Actually, people have done it - there's a book, one I'm working on now but recommend _Not Buying It_ by Judith Levine, about a couple that did the same. I admit, much as I like Ms. Levine's writing style (I do, quite a lot) and find her funny and erudite, I don't find myself drawing a lot of logical parallels. Much of the book is devoted to how much she misses entertainment - theater, art, musical performances and especially movies. Perhaps because I have four kids under 7, those joys are already mostly closed to me. I've been to three plays since Eli was born, one concert, and perhaps a dozen movies. I'm fine without it. She also misses buying clothes, something that I do only when roped and hogtied.
What will be hard for me is the pleasure of yard saling, of browsing used book stores, and of buying supplies to make things like quilts and knitted objects. And it will be hard to eliminate the convenience of not meeting people at restaurants. But mostly, it will be about gaining things - more time, more money for essentials (we will use some of the funds during the year to reinsulate our house and do other energy conservation activities), for tzedakah (1/4 of our savings will go to charity), and less thought about what I don't have, what I need, what I want. I suspect I'll enjoy it.
Wish me luck!
Sharon
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