I'm hoping to transform this into a flyer than can be handed out to parents at parent-type events, and hopefully encourage more people to look more deeply into peak oil. There will be website addresses and book references at the end for further investigation. Comments please?
Gas Prices are rising, with no end in sight. New Oil discoveries fall further every year. The oil being extracted is of lower quality, and costs more to get at. Natural gas is getting more expensive every year and is in danger of running out. It is called peak oil - and it means that fossil fuel will be getting more expensive and less available every year.
What will your children’s lives be like in 20 years if we don’t prepare for fossil fuel shortage TODAY?
Your children will be unlikely to:
- Be able to attend college. One logical economic effect of fossil fuel shortages is economic crisis. You can expect to lose your job, and have difficulty saving for children’s education. We can expect cuts in student aid packages, and to find financial aid more difficult to get, as more and more families need it.
- Find good jobs. Everything we do right now depends on large quantities of energy - energy to commute to work, to heat and cool and run the workplace, to purchase materials, to market and sell them, to transport them. When the economy falters, and costs get higher, unemployment rises, dramatically. Your children and grandchildren will face a world where jobs are much scarcer than they are today.
- Have adequate medical care. As companies are more and more strapped by high fuel prices, even those who have jobs will likely lose their benefits. More and more people will be uninsured, and too poor to pay for medical care. Your children may have to choose between groceries and dental care, essential medications and paying their rent or mortgage.
- Have enough food to eat. With poverty comes hunger. Rising fossil fuel prices raise the cost of EVERYTHING, including food. Lack of fertilizer and fuel for growing and transporting food means that your children and grandchildren are likely to grow up in a world where supermarket shelves are empty and they know hunger.
- Be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Heating oil and natural gas are both rising rapidly in price, and that rise reflects the fact that there is little new oil being found. Competition for resources from other nations will drive prices still higher, and may make oil and gas nearly unavailable for heating and cooling. At the same time, as the climate shifts, temperature extremes get more severe. Your children may grow up shivering in their beds, and in danger of heat stroke, asthma attacks and other medical consequences from extreme heat and poor summer air quality.
- Travel much - the cost of visiting you far away, or seeing the world is about to get prohibitive. You may not see much of your children and grandchildren if they live far away.
They will be likely to:
- Live in a much more polluted world than you do. Because we’ve squandered a lot of time to work on renewable energy, we’re most likely to shift to coal and nuclear energy to take up some of the slack. Coal puts mercury into the atmosphere causing autism and brain damage in children, poisons ground water and acidifies rain. Nuclear accidents and storage leaks can cause increased cancer rates and endanger thousands - including your kids.
- Go to war over oil and gas resources. Already, we’re fighting in part to ensure access to fossil fuel resources in the middle east. As we run shorter, we’re likely to see the draft reinstituted and our children sent around the world to fight, be disabled and die for oil and gas.
- Live as long as you do. With poorer nutrition, medical care, more wars and more pollution, your children are likely to die younger than you do. Watching our children die is the worst nightmare of most parents, and it may be our reality.
What can we do to stop it?
-CONSERVE - don’t just recycle, change your life so that you children can have a life. Bicycle or walk instead of driving. Turn off the a/c. Skip the vacation. Use less, use it up, make it do, do without.
- BUY - local food, produced with the fewest possible chemical and fossil fuel inputs. Don’t spend money you don’t have to. Purchase things from local merchants, rather than large corporations whenever possible.
- WRITE (or email) your congresspeople and vote for increased funding for conservation, renewable energy and public transportation. Tell the president and congress that you want to get out of Iraq, and turn our resources to preparing our nation for the coming crisis.
-VOTE for candidates who support the above, and for those who support anti-poverty programs like food pantries and WIC. Remember, your children may be the poor of tomorrow through no fault of their own.
-AGITATE - demonstrate, write and speak in support of programs that encourage conservation and sustainability in your community, your state and your nation.
- SPEAK - tell others about peak oil. Warn your friends, your neighbors, your family. Get together with neighbors, church, synagogue, mosque members, family members and friends, and make plans for a future with a lot less.
- GROW - a garden, no matter how small. Every bit of your food that you can produce is one less calorie of oil we have to burn.
- TEACH - your children about the future, and prepare them for the skills they may need in the future. Teach them to grow a garden, to have healthy bodies that can walk and bike for miles, to live simply, to make do, to appreciate what they have.
- PREPARE - build a three month supply of stored foods for a balanced diet. Store water. Consider collecting rainwater from your roof. Take advantage of medical benefits now to get healthier.
- GIVE - your children a chance at a life as good as the one you’ve had, by using less and taking less.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Did World War III start yesterday morning?
The great thing about predicting human events is that you are so often wrong. In this case, nothing would make me happier than to be in error. But, G-d help us all, I think the odds aren't that bad that I' m right. It is possible that yesterday morning, we started World War III.
The beginnings of wars are often hard to identify. Which act lit the spark on the tinderbox? Which straw was the final one? Like peak oil itself, the beginnings of war are often visible only in retrospect. Why today? Why, when we might make the case a world war war began when the US invaded Iraq? Why when this particular cause might turn out to be just another brush fire?
We don't know. We can only guess. Yesterday morning, Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and began shelling civilian targets. Hezbollah is demanding the release of 9000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel is threatening to destroy Lebanon and potentially Syria as well. Iran and Syria are both making noises in support ofHezbollah, and our president and Germany are making noises in support of Israel. Iran has already threatened to close the gulf to oil transport in retaliation for any US or Israeli strike into Syria. Our government has been looking for an excuse to invade Iran, and here is one ready-made - Iran's long standing economic support and military support of Hezbollah. Moreover, American strategy in the middle east is deeply tied into Israel, and there is no questionthat we will provide support of some sort or another if Israel fully commits to war with Lebanon and perhaps Syria.
Another American beachhead, run through Israel, is likely to spark more conflict with Iran and other nations in the middle east, and encourage them to retaliate by cutting off oil supplies. And full-scale, multi-national war in the middle east is something no energy dependent nation inthe world (that is, basically all of us) can afford to ignore. As Iraq fragments and the US is increasingly over committed, China and Russia are caught between their economic and energy ties to Syria and Iran, and their desire not to antagonize the US. But if the middle east fully ignites, neither China nor Russia will be free not to choose sides. They will have to protect their own interests. And I believe nothing good could possibly come from so many people with big guns and nuclear bombs trying to decide which side they are on.
I could be wrong. This could all just peter out, or end in a peaceful solution. I pray it be so. But the crisis pattern we're seeing resembles things I've seen before in history books. I won't be surprised if someday, today is named the beginning of the next world conflict, the one that we've all known was coming. As I said before, G-d help us all, and may I just end up looking silly, making predictions that don't come true.
If not, though, the only thing that will stop this from becoming a greater disaster is the will and strength of people all over the world to say, "stop." Because this is madness. In Israel, I would pray you will say "Stop!" no matter how desperately your hearts are aching for those children/soldiers who were stolen from you. In Gaza and Iran and Beirut, I pray you will say "Stop!" and find a way that leads to peace. In the US, we must say "Stop!" and prepare to consume less and use less and absorb any oil shocks coming to us, rather than strike military blows to get our way. And those who could be drawn in so disastrously must stand up as the voices of wisdom, and also say "Stop!" and talk peace at those who are so hurt and angry they can only see war. Please G-d, we all have such wisdom.
Sharon
The beginnings of wars are often hard to identify. Which act lit the spark on the tinderbox? Which straw was the final one? Like peak oil itself, the beginnings of war are often visible only in retrospect. Why today? Why, when we might make the case a world war war began when the US invaded Iraq? Why when this particular cause might turn out to be just another brush fire?
We don't know. We can only guess. Yesterday morning, Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and began shelling civilian targets. Hezbollah is demanding the release of 9000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel is threatening to destroy Lebanon and potentially Syria as well. Iran and Syria are both making noises in support ofHezbollah, and our president and Germany are making noises in support of Israel. Iran has already threatened to close the gulf to oil transport in retaliation for any US or Israeli strike into Syria. Our government has been looking for an excuse to invade Iran, and here is one ready-made - Iran's long standing economic support and military support of Hezbollah. Moreover, American strategy in the middle east is deeply tied into Israel, and there is no questionthat we will provide support of some sort or another if Israel fully commits to war with Lebanon and perhaps Syria.
Another American beachhead, run through Israel, is likely to spark more conflict with Iran and other nations in the middle east, and encourage them to retaliate by cutting off oil supplies. And full-scale, multi-national war in the middle east is something no energy dependent nation inthe world (that is, basically all of us) can afford to ignore. As Iraq fragments and the US is increasingly over committed, China and Russia are caught between their economic and energy ties to Syria and Iran, and their desire not to antagonize the US. But if the middle east fully ignites, neither China nor Russia will be free not to choose sides. They will have to protect their own interests. And I believe nothing good could possibly come from so many people with big guns and nuclear bombs trying to decide which side they are on.
I could be wrong. This could all just peter out, or end in a peaceful solution. I pray it be so. But the crisis pattern we're seeing resembles things I've seen before in history books. I won't be surprised if someday, today is named the beginning of the next world conflict, the one that we've all known was coming. As I said before, G-d help us all, and may I just end up looking silly, making predictions that don't come true.
If not, though, the only thing that will stop this from becoming a greater disaster is the will and strength of people all over the world to say, "stop." Because this is madness. In Israel, I would pray you will say "Stop!" no matter how desperately your hearts are aching for those children/soldiers who were stolen from you. In Gaza and Iran and Beirut, I pray you will say "Stop!" and find a way that leads to peace. In the US, we must say "Stop!" and prepare to consume less and use less and absorb any oil shocks coming to us, rather than strike military blows to get our way. And those who could be drawn in so disastrously must stand up as the voices of wisdom, and also say "Stop!" and talk peace at those who are so hurt and angry they can only see war. Please G-d, we all have such wisdom.
Sharon
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
In Praise of Weeds
Last year I decided not to mulch a good chunk of our garden, in the interest of seeing how hard it was to maintain if mulch materials wereever scarce. I love permanent mulch - I love the way the soil improves under it, I love the way that the soil stays moist when it is dry and also handles heavy rainfall much better, and I love sitting on the warm mulch while I pick tomatoes or cucumbers. But I don't wantto be too dependent upon any particular gardening method, so I left a patch in front of the house (on the theory that sheer embarassment might encourage me to weed) unmulched and went about my business.
This was partly fueled by a discussion I had a few years ago with afriend of mine who is an herbalist and gardener at Sturbridge Village(an 1830s living history museum), who pointed out that most garden descriptions of the time are very unconcerned with weeding, and many permitted large quantities of weeds to grow up as mulch underneath plantings, just pulling them as they began to shade other plants. I've done that a few times by accident, but this, (besides proving that embarassment will not drive me to weeding if there is anything more fun to do ;-)), was my first formal experiment. I have to say, I think the weeds have done me more good than bad. Now obviously, ymmv, and those of you with moisture shortages or very tight spaces probably won't have this luxury, but my observation so far has been that as long as the weeds aren't allowed to take over completely, or to shade out food plants, that the competition isn't a bad one, necessarily.
My weedy tomatoes have actually grown faster than the mulched ones, and set fruit earlier than mulched varieties ofthe same species. I've been managing the weeds, rather than completely getting rid of them. Some, we eat or use for medicinal purposes, and that takes care of that. I pull out the lambsquarters and wild salsify as I eat them, but don't worry too much about them when they are small. I'm lettingsome of the wild oats that aren't too much in the way mature, and will feed them to the chickens. I even transplanted a few over to a better spot ;-). The mulleins I left because I think they are pretty, and if there's ever a shortage, the leaves make terrific toilet paper. Some of the greens (extra plantain that we don't want, pigweeds, chickweed) go straight to the chickens and geese as harvested feed. Then, there are some weeds I'm actually delighted to see - I've never had them before, and I want them. I'm encouraging the wild yarrow to grow, since I find it better for medicinal purposes than the stuff I cultivate, and it is lovely - one of my favorite wildflowers. This is the first year I've had either purslane or stinging nettle anywhere on the property - I've always had to forage elswhere, and I'm more than a little pleased to see them. Both are fairly well-behaved (in that they don't really take over), and very good to eat (use gloves with the nettles, and cook them first). I'm also excited to seecteasel here - people in upstate NY used to grow fields of them for thewool processing industry, and I'm planning on harvesting mine for thesame reason. Plantain I like to let go to the green seed stage, and then harvest and dry the seed heads - they make marvellous free birdfood in the winter. Pigweeds and other wild amaranths are great for the same purpose. Bedstraw and Burdock are allowed to mature until just before they set seeds, and used for dyeing and eating respectively (ok, I don't always get to them before they set seed, which is a problem).
I also always allow some weeds to go to flower on the fringes of the garden. Along with the dill and cilantro I plant to attract pollinators, I notice that queen anne's lace and mullein are good insect attractants. Canada and Bull thistle get taken right out, as do a few others, like ground ivy, which are real pests. I reserve the right to kick out any weed that takes more than its fair share, or sticks me with prickers when I step on it. But for the most part, weeding is a desultory chore for me, done at a fairly low key. As long as the plants aren't too crowded or shaded, and the weeds are useful ones to me, leaving them be doesn't seem to do a lot of harm to *most* crops, and the weeds will generally get pulled for whatever purpose eventually.
There are exceptions -peppers here are easily shaded out by faster growing weeds, and carrots can't handle any weed pressure at all. But for every crop that needs hand weeding, there are those, like bush beans, zinnias,tomatoes and corn that on fertile soil, with adequate moisture, seem entirely untroubled by competition, and that will eventually shade out the weeds on their own. My math so far suggests that I actually take more useful plants off of my land when I plant a little further apart and allow some weed competetion than when I plant my own food plants more tightly together.
One of the biggest pests in my garden is the tomato. No matter how diligently I harvest, every year I spend more time pulling out fast growing tomato volunteers than I do burdock or thistles. They tend to shade everything out, because they grow so fast. I leave some, of course, but it does point out that even in my cold climate, I could probably rely for much of my tomato crop on volunteers, provided I didn't mind waiting until September to harvest (I do). I'll probably go back to mulching next year - after I transplant in my plantain and wild yarrows. But the other advantage of leaving the weeds, assuming you can afford the loss in moisture and fertility, is that pulled weeds make an excellent mulch. If I ever run out of straw and undercropping material, I probably will do just that and allow theweeds to grow up, pull them, and use them to smother the rest.
I think it worth praising the weeds, at least once in a while,before I squish them ;-).
This was partly fueled by a discussion I had a few years ago with afriend of mine who is an herbalist and gardener at Sturbridge Village(an 1830s living history museum), who pointed out that most garden descriptions of the time are very unconcerned with weeding, and many permitted large quantities of weeds to grow up as mulch underneath plantings, just pulling them as they began to shade other plants. I've done that a few times by accident, but this, (besides proving that embarassment will not drive me to weeding if there is anything more fun to do ;-)), was my first formal experiment. I have to say, I think the weeds have done me more good than bad. Now obviously, ymmv, and those of you with moisture shortages or very tight spaces probably won't have this luxury, but my observation so far has been that as long as the weeds aren't allowed to take over completely, or to shade out food plants, that the competition isn't a bad one, necessarily.
My weedy tomatoes have actually grown faster than the mulched ones, and set fruit earlier than mulched varieties ofthe same species. I've been managing the weeds, rather than completely getting rid of them. Some, we eat or use for medicinal purposes, and that takes care of that. I pull out the lambsquarters and wild salsify as I eat them, but don't worry too much about them when they are small. I'm lettingsome of the wild oats that aren't too much in the way mature, and will feed them to the chickens. I even transplanted a few over to a better spot ;-). The mulleins I left because I think they are pretty, and if there's ever a shortage, the leaves make terrific toilet paper. Some of the greens (extra plantain that we don't want, pigweeds, chickweed) go straight to the chickens and geese as harvested feed. Then, there are some weeds I'm actually delighted to see - I've never had them before, and I want them. I'm encouraging the wild yarrow to grow, since I find it better for medicinal purposes than the stuff I cultivate, and it is lovely - one of my favorite wildflowers. This is the first year I've had either purslane or stinging nettle anywhere on the property - I've always had to forage elswhere, and I'm more than a little pleased to see them. Both are fairly well-behaved (in that they don't really take over), and very good to eat (use gloves with the nettles, and cook them first). I'm also excited to seecteasel here - people in upstate NY used to grow fields of them for thewool processing industry, and I'm planning on harvesting mine for thesame reason. Plantain I like to let go to the green seed stage, and then harvest and dry the seed heads - they make marvellous free birdfood in the winter. Pigweeds and other wild amaranths are great for the same purpose. Bedstraw and Burdock are allowed to mature until just before they set seeds, and used for dyeing and eating respectively (ok, I don't always get to them before they set seed, which is a problem).
I also always allow some weeds to go to flower on the fringes of the garden. Along with the dill and cilantro I plant to attract pollinators, I notice that queen anne's lace and mullein are good insect attractants. Canada and Bull thistle get taken right out, as do a few others, like ground ivy, which are real pests. I reserve the right to kick out any weed that takes more than its fair share, or sticks me with prickers when I step on it. But for the most part, weeding is a desultory chore for me, done at a fairly low key. As long as the plants aren't too crowded or shaded, and the weeds are useful ones to me, leaving them be doesn't seem to do a lot of harm to *most* crops, and the weeds will generally get pulled for whatever purpose eventually.
There are exceptions -peppers here are easily shaded out by faster growing weeds, and carrots can't handle any weed pressure at all. But for every crop that needs hand weeding, there are those, like bush beans, zinnias,tomatoes and corn that on fertile soil, with adequate moisture, seem entirely untroubled by competition, and that will eventually shade out the weeds on their own. My math so far suggests that I actually take more useful plants off of my land when I plant a little further apart and allow some weed competetion than when I plant my own food plants more tightly together.
One of the biggest pests in my garden is the tomato. No matter how diligently I harvest, every year I spend more time pulling out fast growing tomato volunteers than I do burdock or thistles. They tend to shade everything out, because they grow so fast. I leave some, of course, but it does point out that even in my cold climate, I could probably rely for much of my tomato crop on volunteers, provided I didn't mind waiting until September to harvest (I do). I'll probably go back to mulching next year - after I transplant in my plantain and wild yarrows. But the other advantage of leaving the weeds, assuming you can afford the loss in moisture and fertility, is that pulled weeds make an excellent mulch. If I ever run out of straw and undercropping material, I probably will do just that and allow theweeds to grow up, pull them, and use them to smother the rest.
I think it worth praising the weeds, at least once in a while,before I squish them ;-).
When I started this blog...
...not quite two years ago, I announced that oil was at $50 per barrel. Early last week, it passed $75, and oil futures, I'm told, are being traded at above $80. The only good thing about this is that I stand to win my bet with my economist buddy, Steve (that oil will pass $100 per barrel within 3 years- a bet I made about 2 years ago) with plenty of time to say, "nyah, nyah." Small satisfaction that.
This is just the beginning, folks. We're looking from just before, or just after the peak, but things start going downhill pretty fast from here. I'm sure some readers believe that I'm just that wacky doomsday chick on the blog, but you cannot lose by preparing yourself now. By storing some food, and water, by adapting your home to low or no fossil fuel use. If worse comes to worse, you'll still be better off having that food, that water, that money you save. We're in an inflationary economic cycle - at a minimum, the food, woodstove and insulation you buy today will be cheaper than buying it tomorrow.
Please. If you read this, take me seriously for one moment. You can make fun of me later. You can call me a fool. But do a few things to keep yourselves safe in hard times. It can only help.
Sharon
This is just the beginning, folks. We're looking from just before, or just after the peak, but things start going downhill pretty fast from here. I'm sure some readers believe that I'm just that wacky doomsday chick on the blog, but you cannot lose by preparing yourself now. By storing some food, and water, by adapting your home to low or no fossil fuel use. If worse comes to worse, you'll still be better off having that food, that water, that money you save. We're in an inflationary economic cycle - at a minimum, the food, woodstove and insulation you buy today will be cheaper than buying it tomorrow.
Please. If you read this, take me seriously for one moment. You can make fun of me later. You can call me a fool. But do a few things to keep yourselves safe in hard times. It can only help.
Sharon
Thursday, July 06, 2006
We lost one today.
In wedding magazine rhetoric, and victorian prose, a wedding day is the happiest day of one's life. Now I had fun at both my weddings, the one that took and the one that didn't, but neither one ranked up there in the happiest days of my life. But there's a wedding that *did* rank up there - not my own, but my mother and step-mother's. The day they were able to legalize their relationship (at that point 25 years and still going strong) may have been the happiest day of my life, other than when my children were born. I remember telling my sons that someday, they would be able to tell their own grandchildren that Nana and Nunu (don't ask about the Nunu thing) got married on that day in May. That they were the first gay people in their town to marry, and that their children were so very proud of them and happy for them.
It wasn't just their children, either. My phone rang off the hook all that day with friends and family members calling to wish joy to my Mom and Sue. Members of my synagogue called. My neighbors in our rural farming community called. Friends I hadn't seen in years called. My ex-husband (and good friend) called, with wishes from himself, his wife and his parents. On an internet list I've belonged to for years, where a lot of the population is conservative Christian, people wished my mothers joy, no matter what they thought of the issue in general. I don't think I've ever wept with happiness before, but I did that day, not just because my mother and Sue were able to enter into legal protections they've never had before, but because this was an act of justice and delight, and everyone who knew me, and knew my family was shared our happiness. My friend and honorary brother Jesse was there in Cambridge when, at midnight, city hall began to issue marriage licenses. He hollered and yelled and laughed and danced at one of the biggest parties he'd ever been to, and called me to share the joy.
New York missed its chance to be the second state in the Union to adopt gay marriage. It missed its chance to lead the nation today, when the state supreme court argued that there were compelling reasons, mostly about parenting, for the state to limit marriage to heterosexuals. Besides rehashing a whole lot of unproven speculation (no one has ever successfully demonstrated that children of gay families are any worse off than the children of any other families), New York missed its own chance to be right, and just and *JOYFUL* - because in a sense, that's what it this is about. Yes, it is about civil rights and politics, justice and mercy. But a wedding (at least a state sanctioned one - we can leave sacredness and holiness to those who concern themselves with faith, not legality) is a party, and a good one, when it is done right. People laugh and dance, they drink wine and sing, and celebrate love and trust and happiness. And the people getting married in New York, who have been denied and reviled and left out for decades would throw the best party anyone has ever seen. Love is a many splendored thing, and its greatest splendor is joy, delight (in the true sublime sense), happiness.
Four bitter judges cost a hell of a lot of joy today.
On a personal note, I've long hoped to convince my mother and Sue to move here for their retirement someday. That won't happen unless the New York State Legislature fixes the errors of the court. I hope it does. But what New York lost can't fully be replaced - a chance to spot the error, fix it fast, and turn to the party and a celebration of human love. I know I'll be there dancing on the day it does, and my children too.
Sharon
It wasn't just their children, either. My phone rang off the hook all that day with friends and family members calling to wish joy to my Mom and Sue. Members of my synagogue called. My neighbors in our rural farming community called. Friends I hadn't seen in years called. My ex-husband (and good friend) called, with wishes from himself, his wife and his parents. On an internet list I've belonged to for years, where a lot of the population is conservative Christian, people wished my mothers joy, no matter what they thought of the issue in general. I don't think I've ever wept with happiness before, but I did that day, not just because my mother and Sue were able to enter into legal protections they've never had before, but because this was an act of justice and delight, and everyone who knew me, and knew my family was shared our happiness. My friend and honorary brother Jesse was there in Cambridge when, at midnight, city hall began to issue marriage licenses. He hollered and yelled and laughed and danced at one of the biggest parties he'd ever been to, and called me to share the joy.
New York missed its chance to be the second state in the Union to adopt gay marriage. It missed its chance to lead the nation today, when the state supreme court argued that there were compelling reasons, mostly about parenting, for the state to limit marriage to heterosexuals. Besides rehashing a whole lot of unproven speculation (no one has ever successfully demonstrated that children of gay families are any worse off than the children of any other families), New York missed its own chance to be right, and just and *JOYFUL* - because in a sense, that's what it this is about. Yes, it is about civil rights and politics, justice and mercy. But a wedding (at least a state sanctioned one - we can leave sacredness and holiness to those who concern themselves with faith, not legality) is a party, and a good one, when it is done right. People laugh and dance, they drink wine and sing, and celebrate love and trust and happiness. And the people getting married in New York, who have been denied and reviled and left out for decades would throw the best party anyone has ever seen. Love is a many splendored thing, and its greatest splendor is joy, delight (in the true sublime sense), happiness.
Four bitter judges cost a hell of a lot of joy today.
On a personal note, I've long hoped to convince my mother and Sue to move here for their retirement someday. That won't happen unless the New York State Legislature fixes the errors of the court. I hope it does. But what New York lost can't fully be replaced - a chance to spot the error, fix it fast, and turn to the party and a celebration of human love. I know I'll be there dancing on the day it does, and my children too.
Sharon
Saturday, July 01, 2006
The rain is raining all around...
The rhymes and poems of my childhood stuck around in the back of my head until I had children of my own to read them too, and now they are back faster. Simon challenged me to recite as many poems about rain (since I constantly recite odd bits to the kids) as I could, and I got to 9 before breaking up. The one most appropriate at the moment is probably the old nursery rhyme about Dr. Foster, who went to Gloucester. As you'll recall, "He stepped in a puddle up to his middle/And never went there again." Well, if you had been here this past week, I think there's a good shot you'd never want to come again. The puddles weren't quite as high here as closer to the Mohawk, Hudson and Schoharie rivers, but there was enough rain that our occasional patches of sun have never dried the ground enough for me to mow the lawn in the back. Thus, Eric is scything it down for hay. This is not a part of the property that is *supposed* to be growing hay.
Still, we're fortunate. We're too high for the floods. And the Gilboa dam, a few miles west of here, has held through all the spring and summer rains. We're not in the flood path, but if the dam breaks (and it may), we're on the escape route. As far as I can tell, after much angst about whether and when the dam might break, the major result has been a bunch of signs saying "Flood Evacuation Route" pointing up. That's helpful.
What else is going on here? We're harvesting peas, onions, greens of all kinds, radishes and baby carrots. We usually try to have our first tomatoes ready by the fourth of July, but everything is so late this year that I have no hope at all of success. We're working on the fall crops - we've had so much wet weather and difficulty that I fear we have to give up on many of the earlier summer ones.
The boys were delighted when the sun came out for a bit today - it gave them a chance to splash in the little wading pool I got at a yard sale this year. And, of course, there's the playset. Grandma sweetly gave the children an *enormous* playset, and the kids in the neighborhood swarm over it like bees. It is a wonderful blessing, enabling us to cut car trips (Eli has a strong need for sensory stimulation and playgrounds fill it), and giving us a neighborhood play area. One of the houses on our road just sold, and rumor has it, to a family with *10* kids - I'm delighted. More playmates for my kids, more pickup baseball games, more friendships, more grownups to chat over the pleasures and angst of parenting. Our neighborhood is clearly an odd demographic - our 8 house street will, if this rumor is correct, have 23 children on it, at least 8 of whom are homeschooled.
We're currently plotting how best to reduce our energy consumption and adapt our home for lowered inputs. We have, of course, limited funds and many desires. Do we renovate the old kitchen to make it completely non-electric, so that we can use our existing wood cookstove and cisterns to cook? Do we convert the addition to passive solar gain? Replace the crappy windows on the sunporch? Add a greenhouse? Add a masonry stove? An outside wood furnace and solar panels to run it? Convert entirely to indoor wood heat? What shall we do?
That's about the excitement here!
Sharon
Still, we're fortunate. We're too high for the floods. And the Gilboa dam, a few miles west of here, has held through all the spring and summer rains. We're not in the flood path, but if the dam breaks (and it may), we're on the escape route. As far as I can tell, after much angst about whether and when the dam might break, the major result has been a bunch of signs saying "Flood Evacuation Route" pointing up. That's helpful.
What else is going on here? We're harvesting peas, onions, greens of all kinds, radishes and baby carrots. We usually try to have our first tomatoes ready by the fourth of July, but everything is so late this year that I have no hope at all of success. We're working on the fall crops - we've had so much wet weather and difficulty that I fear we have to give up on many of the earlier summer ones.
The boys were delighted when the sun came out for a bit today - it gave them a chance to splash in the little wading pool I got at a yard sale this year. And, of course, there's the playset. Grandma sweetly gave the children an *enormous* playset, and the kids in the neighborhood swarm over it like bees. It is a wonderful blessing, enabling us to cut car trips (Eli has a strong need for sensory stimulation and playgrounds fill it), and giving us a neighborhood play area. One of the houses on our road just sold, and rumor has it, to a family with *10* kids - I'm delighted. More playmates for my kids, more pickup baseball games, more friendships, more grownups to chat over the pleasures and angst of parenting. Our neighborhood is clearly an odd demographic - our 8 house street will, if this rumor is correct, have 23 children on it, at least 8 of whom are homeschooled.
We're currently plotting how best to reduce our energy consumption and adapt our home for lowered inputs. We have, of course, limited funds and many desires. Do we renovate the old kitchen to make it completely non-electric, so that we can use our existing wood cookstove and cisterns to cook? Do we convert the addition to passive solar gain? Replace the crappy windows on the sunporch? Add a greenhouse? Add a masonry stove? An outside wood furnace and solar panels to run it? Convert entirely to indoor wood heat? What shall we do?
That's about the excitement here!
Sharon
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Is Peak Oil a Penis Thing?
Most of the major figures in the peak oil movement are men, and white men at that. That's not an indictment of some very smart people who are doing their best to let people know what's coming, but it is an observation that requires some analysis. Because every disaster strikes the most vulnerable people in society first and hardest, and in many cases, women and people of color stand to bear the brunt of some disturbing changes, and yet they mostly aren't being told this by people who look like them, or with whom they can easily identify. Peak oil gets chat in _Fortune_ and on NPR, but not on hip hop stations, or in _Good Housekeeping_. And while I might be hoping for too much to expect _Cosmo_ to do a feature keeping your lips moist after all the petroleum based glosses are gone, some of this has to do with medium.
Visit a peak oil website and look around. A lot of the articles are by petroleum geologists, and a lot of them are about arcane (to ordinary people) things like extraction rates and tar sands. This makes perfect sense - the first calls to action came from the people who were best equipped to evaluate how much fossil fuel there is in the ground (although honestly, no one really knows exactly - we can only give estimates). And petroleum geologists, no matter how wonderful and smart, tend to focus on the arcane. They, and a lot of the people who follow this (including me, oddly enough, despite my creds as a humanities scholar who is supposed to fear numbers, but doesn't) are interested in the details of how many million gallons of seawater are being pumped in the Ghawar, and whether the date of the peak is 2005 or 2010. And they write with that stuff in mind. While there are certainly increasing numbers of female petroleum geologists, it is a field that is weighted towards men, and they tend to talk to one another like overeducated white guys talk to one another - debating the details. Matt Savinar, author a good book on peak oil and a useful website wrote an article recently about this (And I'm not just mentioning this because my name is in there along with a lot of semi-famous petroleum geologists - although it is, and Matt very sweetly suggests that I'm too gentle and nurturing to toot my own horn or butt heads too hard on these subjects. Those of you who know me should try really hard not to choke to death as you laugh about the idea that I'm too gentle and nurturing for anything ;-)), in which he suggests that mostly peak oil scholars do this to look good to girls, which is why there aren't many women involved ;-).
But here's the thing - you can spend a lot of time on the math of peak oil if that's your sort of thing, but it isn't really necessary. The one figure you do need to understand is the concept of EROEI - Energy Returned Over Energy Input. All that means is that you have to get a certain amount of energy back over and above what you have to use to get the energy. That's why things like biodiesel aren't going to save us - they use more energy to make than they provide (ok, not the only reason - the other one is that if we grow fuel instead of food, we all get skinny and cranky). We all took 7th grade earth science - everyone, that is, every person in the whole world with two brain cells to rub together knows that we're going to have used up half the oil in the ground someday - we all know this is a finite resource. There isn't really any debate on that subject. The US Geological Survey says about 20 years. My husband's college environmental physics textbook (written by a guy who works for Shell, no less) says 20 years from 1997. Some people say we've already peaked. Some people say 2010.
The only other thing you really need to know is that regardless of when it happens - today or last week or 15 years from now, we're in trouble if we don't fix our culture NOW. The DOE report that came out last year suggested that we *might* be able to avoid major economic problems and fuel shortages if we work like crazy for 20 years, devoting most of our energy and resources as a nation to it. But we're not, and even the USGS numbers suggest that we're just at the 20 year mark right now.
So peak oil isn't really about the hard science. Oh, it is still fascinating to watch people like Ken Deffeyes (who probably rightly makes some fun of humanitites trained people like me who don't much care about the details) try and date peak oil to the day. But all of us know peak oil is coming - that only takes common sense. And we have the information to know that we have to fix this problem right now, today, with all the power and energy we have. And the reality is, that we might not have enough time. This is not a subject that requires a rocket scientist (even though I'm married to one - he's not as useful as you'd think ;-)) - ordinary people can look easily at the data that others, who went before us, have so helpfully compiled. And the reality is that petroleum geologists and environmental physicists and economists aren't any better than you and I at answering the big question - where do we go from here? How do we protect ourselves, our country, our communities?
So the next question is what do we do. And that's not just a question for petroleum geologists, but for ordinary people - for bus drivers and farmers, engineers and music teachers, carpenters and homemakers, long haul truckers and ministers, women and men, white people, black people, Asians, members of every ethnicity and community and culture we've got. Because every single one of us is going to feel peak oil. We don't have to sit around and argue about how long before hydrogen fuel cells are ready - we just have to know the simple things - the future for our kids and grandkids is less bright than for our own. Maybe we can make it just as good if we really get down to it today. More likely, it is too late, and we're like the weakest fairy godmothers at the baptism - we can't take the curse away, we can just soften it a little. But everything we do to soften it is a victory for ourselves, for our kids, our grandkids, our world, our culture. Everything. We need real, democratic input, but for that, we need peak oil to have the same face as the rest of us, and be spoken of in the languages of all the people, not just white guys with Ph.ds (please don't mistake me - I'm damned grateful to all of them, and am not belittling their contribution at all).
Matt Savinar suggested that we women aren't going to get girls out of being a peak oil activist, so there's less incentive for us to make ourselves famous, to get down and dirty in the peak oil fights (check it out here http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/OriginalArticles/whymen.html. ) But he's not quite correct - me, I'm just as ambitious for peak oil fame as he is. But for different reasons. My kids *lives* depend on me getting the word out, and getting the world to change. Not to mention the fact that changing diapers and doing laundry get dull now and again, and discussing this stuff does exercise the brain. I'm working on getting a little bit famous myself - Eric and I are writing a book and looking for a publisher, and I'm going to be a speaker at a national peak oil conference in Ohio this fall. I admit, it isn't the immediate gratification of getting male admirers (my husband would definitely object, though) - but the long term isn't that long when you have kids. I'd like to be famous because people think I'm smart and have a lot of good stuff to say - but I'll settle for making a lot of noise and praying that someone pays attention, and that we begin to make changes.
It is time to have women and minorities stand up and speak out about peak oil. To speak out about its potential effects for our communities, and to speak out about the future. Our lives and our kids lives depend on it. So write those emails. Write those books. Post those messages. Start those websites. Start marching and talking and yelling at playdate and the bar and on the radio. Make some noise. There are people out there who need to hear.
Sharon
Visit a peak oil website and look around. A lot of the articles are by petroleum geologists, and a lot of them are about arcane (to ordinary people) things like extraction rates and tar sands. This makes perfect sense - the first calls to action came from the people who were best equipped to evaluate how much fossil fuel there is in the ground (although honestly, no one really knows exactly - we can only give estimates). And petroleum geologists, no matter how wonderful and smart, tend to focus on the arcane. They, and a lot of the people who follow this (including me, oddly enough, despite my creds as a humanities scholar who is supposed to fear numbers, but doesn't) are interested in the details of how many million gallons of seawater are being pumped in the Ghawar, and whether the date of the peak is 2005 or 2010. And they write with that stuff in mind. While there are certainly increasing numbers of female petroleum geologists, it is a field that is weighted towards men, and they tend to talk to one another like overeducated white guys talk to one another - debating the details. Matt Savinar, author a good book on peak oil and a useful website wrote an article recently about this (And I'm not just mentioning this because my name is in there along with a lot of semi-famous petroleum geologists - although it is, and Matt very sweetly suggests that I'm too gentle and nurturing to toot my own horn or butt heads too hard on these subjects. Those of you who know me should try really hard not to choke to death as you laugh about the idea that I'm too gentle and nurturing for anything ;-)), in which he suggests that mostly peak oil scholars do this to look good to girls, which is why there aren't many women involved ;-).
But here's the thing - you can spend a lot of time on the math of peak oil if that's your sort of thing, but it isn't really necessary. The one figure you do need to understand is the concept of EROEI - Energy Returned Over Energy Input. All that means is that you have to get a certain amount of energy back over and above what you have to use to get the energy. That's why things like biodiesel aren't going to save us - they use more energy to make than they provide (ok, not the only reason - the other one is that if we grow fuel instead of food, we all get skinny and cranky). We all took 7th grade earth science - everyone, that is, every person in the whole world with two brain cells to rub together knows that we're going to have used up half the oil in the ground someday - we all know this is a finite resource. There isn't really any debate on that subject. The US Geological Survey says about 20 years. My husband's college environmental physics textbook (written by a guy who works for Shell, no less) says 20 years from 1997. Some people say we've already peaked. Some people say 2010.
The only other thing you really need to know is that regardless of when it happens - today or last week or 15 years from now, we're in trouble if we don't fix our culture NOW. The DOE report that came out last year suggested that we *might* be able to avoid major economic problems and fuel shortages if we work like crazy for 20 years, devoting most of our energy and resources as a nation to it. But we're not, and even the USGS numbers suggest that we're just at the 20 year mark right now.
So peak oil isn't really about the hard science. Oh, it is still fascinating to watch people like Ken Deffeyes (who probably rightly makes some fun of humanitites trained people like me who don't much care about the details) try and date peak oil to the day. But all of us know peak oil is coming - that only takes common sense. And we have the information to know that we have to fix this problem right now, today, with all the power and energy we have. And the reality is, that we might not have enough time. This is not a subject that requires a rocket scientist (even though I'm married to one - he's not as useful as you'd think ;-)) - ordinary people can look easily at the data that others, who went before us, have so helpfully compiled. And the reality is that petroleum geologists and environmental physicists and economists aren't any better than you and I at answering the big question - where do we go from here? How do we protect ourselves, our country, our communities?
So the next question is what do we do. And that's not just a question for petroleum geologists, but for ordinary people - for bus drivers and farmers, engineers and music teachers, carpenters and homemakers, long haul truckers and ministers, women and men, white people, black people, Asians, members of every ethnicity and community and culture we've got. Because every single one of us is going to feel peak oil. We don't have to sit around and argue about how long before hydrogen fuel cells are ready - we just have to know the simple things - the future for our kids and grandkids is less bright than for our own. Maybe we can make it just as good if we really get down to it today. More likely, it is too late, and we're like the weakest fairy godmothers at the baptism - we can't take the curse away, we can just soften it a little. But everything we do to soften it is a victory for ourselves, for our kids, our grandkids, our world, our culture. Everything. We need real, democratic input, but for that, we need peak oil to have the same face as the rest of us, and be spoken of in the languages of all the people, not just white guys with Ph.ds (please don't mistake me - I'm damned grateful to all of them, and am not belittling their contribution at all).
Matt Savinar suggested that we women aren't going to get girls out of being a peak oil activist, so there's less incentive for us to make ourselves famous, to get down and dirty in the peak oil fights (check it out here http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/OriginalArticles/whymen.html. ) But he's not quite correct - me, I'm just as ambitious for peak oil fame as he is. But for different reasons. My kids *lives* depend on me getting the word out, and getting the world to change. Not to mention the fact that changing diapers and doing laundry get dull now and again, and discussing this stuff does exercise the brain. I'm working on getting a little bit famous myself - Eric and I are writing a book and looking for a publisher, and I'm going to be a speaker at a national peak oil conference in Ohio this fall. I admit, it isn't the immediate gratification of getting male admirers (my husband would definitely object, though) - but the long term isn't that long when you have kids. I'd like to be famous because people think I'm smart and have a lot of good stuff to say - but I'll settle for making a lot of noise and praying that someone pays attention, and that we begin to make changes.
It is time to have women and minorities stand up and speak out about peak oil. To speak out about its potential effects for our communities, and to speak out about the future. Our lives and our kids lives depend on it. So write those emails. Write those books. Post those messages. Start those websites. Start marching and talking and yelling at playdate and the bar and on the radio. Make some noise. There are people out there who need to hear.
Sharon
Sunday, June 04, 2006
The Omnivore's Dilemma
I didn't expect to learn much from Michael Pollan's new book, _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ - since I write and talk regularly about the problems of industrial agriculture, local food production and sustainability, I thought that while I'd probably enjoy his writing (I took a great deal of pleasure in his prior books on gardening), his book would be enlightening to a rather different audience than myself. But, in fact, I did learn a great deal. Pollan's gift is to entertainingly present complexities, without being weighed down by his own excellent scholarship - it is a gift, to know that much about something and to know which bits of evidence will compell and which will merely bore. He's an enormously erudite guy, without being even slightly dull. Several people I know who are far less engaged by food issues than I say they found it compelling and readable.
I will add up front, that one of the two things that most irritated me about this book was that in the mid-1980s, Margaret Visser, a brilliant food writer, wrote a very similar book, _Much Depends on Dinner_. Neither the book nor the author were particularly obscure - the book won several awards, and Visser went on to write another one about table manners (great book, btw, and highly recommended), and the books were published by Pollan's own publisher. And yet, Pollan's book does not cite or acknowledge the book, even though many of the chapters (those on chicken and corn especially) were very similar in their approach and analysis. Someone, either Pollan in his research (which, I think, was otherwise good), or his editor missed something - because the concept of eating a meal and being outraged by the history of its context is not his. Visser's book, particularly the chapter on rice, which I read in high school, was my biggest early influence in thinking about food, so it rankles me (even though these things happen in books) that Pollan ignored her.
But returning to the main point, I did learn a great deal from Pollan - I found out, among other things, exactly what Xanthan gum is (hadn't you always wondered, even if you knew it couldn't be good?), made a connection I'd never perceived before between the widespread alcoholism in America in the 19th century and the widespread obesity of today (both due to the need to use up agricultural excesses of corn) and heard as concise and compelling an account of the complexities of farm subsidies as I've heard before. I hadn't thought, for example that anyone could give me any more reasons not to eat at McDonalds, but Pollan added a couple.
The first section of the book traces a meal at McDonalds back to its basic ingredient - corn. From the corn that feeds the chickens to the xanthan gum in the milkshake to the sweetener in the ketchup and oil in which the fries are cooked, McDonalds is mostly corn. Since Fast Food Nation and the other exposes, I don't think there's anyone who cares who doesn't know how gross fast food is, and Pollan admirably stays away from the yuckiness factor (not that there isn't reason to go there, but it has been rather overdone of late). Instead, he goes to the aesthetic one, accusing Americans who eat fast food of having become like koalas, capable of absorbing only corn, to terrible cost. In some sense, as someone who likes to eat, his description of our reliance upon (and the costs thereof) corn is more grotesque than any expose of slaughterhouses could be.
He then describes the history of two organic meals, one of them bought on a trip to whole foods, and an industrially produced organic meal, the other local, sustainable and produced to a large degree from Joel Salatin's Polyface farm, where he acted as reporter/farm hand for a week. It may be here that Pollan's book is most valuable, because it makes a distinction that your average Mom who buys at Whole foods has never made - that industrial organic food is more industrial than organic. This book has been roundly hyped on NPR and in the New York Times, and has the potential to change a lot of minds - and despite my later critiques, I will be enormously grateful if Pollan can simply convince people to look beyond the word organic and think about the costs of their food to the environment and the people who grow it. This is a potentially influential book, and Pollan does not make the mistake that many, many food writers make, of reading the word "organic" to mean sustainable.
While acknowledges that large scale, organic, industrial food is better than nothing, he doesn't cut it a lot of slack for its drenching in fossil fuels, use and sometimes misuse of migrant labor, and general unsustainability. Perhaps his best writing in the book is when he attempts to analyze whether it is possible to grow food sustainably and well on any scale at all, and when he concludes that you can't, someone like me, who is trying to grow food on a small scale, looks up ready to cheer. Because such a conclusion should lead inevitably to the next step - ie, to the idea that the only solution to the problem of industrial agriculture is that a lot more people have to grow food, both for sale and at home. But he never quite gets there, and that may be the great flaw of the book. Still, however, I think that the line that the distinctions Pollan does draw are deeply helpful, and could potentially change things a great deal.
In the final section, Pollan eats a meal that he has hunted, or gathered, or grown himself. In doing this, he spends a lot of time coming to terms with hunting and meat eating (he kills his own chicken for dinner at Polyface farm, and also purchases a steer destined for McDonalds, although its final end is as much of a mystery as such things could possibly ever be). Here is where, I expected, Pollan will figure out how we might reasonably eat, humanely and sustainably. But in fact, the last chapter could be described as "Yuppie Jewish guy goes hunting for the first time" - and not just any kind of hunting, but hunting for wild boar in the California mountains with a bunch of European chefs bent on recreating the food of their homelands for Chez Panisse. Pollan may be violating the traditions of his Jewish upbringing (Jews don't hunt, not just because they are often urbanites, but because the laws of kashruth forbid it, and the sense of it as unfitting has lingered long past the observation of the law in other respects for many Jews), but he never actually leaves his class behind. And that is one of the deeper problems of the book - the meal he seeks to make is not a deer burger and homemade potato fries, but wine-braised leg of boar with boar liver pate and cherry something or other (admittedly, it sounded terrific).
Intermittently throughout the book, Pollan attempts to deal with the problem of elitism - whether or not sustainable food is yuppie food. And there's a legitimate case to be made that there is. Pollan, of course, points out the illogic both of what we spend on food (less than anyone in the world) and the externalities that are not figured into the cost of the McDonalds meal, but he never gets down and dirty with the question of class. He quotes Joel Salatin on the subject that regulation adds more to his cost than organic production, notes the costs of meals and that Salatin's customers are mixed in economic situation, but he never fully addresses who it is who mostly eats fast food and who it is who mostly eats organic, and the all-important whys of that question.
When Pollan finally gets down to the ultimate local meal, the chapter is mostly about his angst over killing animals and meat eating (although it was fun to watch Pollan duke it out intellectually with Peter Singer), but it all gets played out over a meal with class overtones so profound and powerful that you cannot escape them. Going boar hunting with a sicilian chef doesn't seem to have much relevance to going deer hunting with a bunch of blue collar guys who live next door, nor is the meal he plans to produce something that anyone could make and eat very often. Speaking as someone who does not hunt (that kosher thing) but whose father did, and who believes that human predation is a perfectly normal thing, and preferrable, say, to having lyme disease from an excess of white-tailed deer (oh, it isn't that easy, of course, but I'll write more on vegetarianism and meat eating another time), I think Pollan ends up using the meal he decided to make as a way of choosing to avoid the logical conclusion of his writing, and the book is the poorer for it. The closing chapter is not about how we could eat, but about the impossibility of producing our own food, and, to a large degree, about the impossibility of even eating sustainably. And I think to a large degree that's because he chose a meal that is unreproducable for millions - as opposed to the simple, ordinary chicken and corn or french fries of his organic and conventional prior meals.
His conclusions, drawn from his experiences on Salatin's farm and of hunting and gathering (and presumably of eating at McDonalds) are implicitly that sustainable eating is never going to happen on any great scale. At the end of his section on Salatin's farm, he likens Salatin to Luther, creating his own new denominations of people for whom food quality and healthfulness matters, small niches of (elitist) people who care about their food in the great wilderness. But implying this suggests that most other people (I wonder who - the ones who eat at McDonalds more and are mostly of a different class?) don't actually care deeply about their food's taste, health and environmental cost.
And his final set of conclusions are deeply disappointing to me, personally. Because he creates the ground work for a fairly simple conclusion - industrial scale food production, whether organic or non, is a failure, a disaster for those who care about ethics or the environment. In a way, it doesn't matter whether what you care about is the suffering of animals (industrial slaughter) or the suffering of humans (malnutrition), the extermination of songbirds (pesticides) or rising cancer rates (pesticides) or the extermination of everyone due to global warming, the conclusion that Pollan expertly and gracefully leads us to - ie, that many more people need to take a role in their own food systems, both by buying locally, encouraging the creation of millions of new small farms instead of an expanding industrial system, and by growing some of their own (or hunting it, or foraging), is finally left off, in the interest of implying that the problem is irresolvable. This, I think, is rather a cheap ending, and an unfair one to the person who has sorted through the complexities of his arguments and analysis and comes out wanting to know what to do next.
Pollan tells us at the very end, referring to his home produced meal and the one from McDonalds, "...these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable." But the fact that the home produced meal is unsustainable and unreproducable is his choice - because a dinner of potatoes and eggs with salad, equally local, equally gathered, is sustainable and available to anyone with a bit of backyard if they want it. By implying that self-provisioning is a fantasy in this modern world, Pollan essentially suggests we leave the farming to the farmers - but there simply aren't enough farmers to have a small, local, organic farm everywhere. If we're to reduce our footprint more than anyone can by hopping over to whole foods in the SUV and picking up a box of whole wheat mac and cheese and some organic apples from China, people are going to have to take some responsibility for feeding themselves. No, they don't have to go hunt wild boar. But they might have to grow a garden, or make possible a nearby farm. They might have to encourage their children to grow up to be farmers. And they might have to imagine a world in which feeding oneself is not either a work of magic or a work of industry, but simply the ordinary job that ordinary people have been doing for thousands of years.
Sharon
I will add up front, that one of the two things that most irritated me about this book was that in the mid-1980s, Margaret Visser, a brilliant food writer, wrote a very similar book, _Much Depends on Dinner_. Neither the book nor the author were particularly obscure - the book won several awards, and Visser went on to write another one about table manners (great book, btw, and highly recommended), and the books were published by Pollan's own publisher. And yet, Pollan's book does not cite or acknowledge the book, even though many of the chapters (those on chicken and corn especially) were very similar in their approach and analysis. Someone, either Pollan in his research (which, I think, was otherwise good), or his editor missed something - because the concept of eating a meal and being outraged by the history of its context is not his. Visser's book, particularly the chapter on rice, which I read in high school, was my biggest early influence in thinking about food, so it rankles me (even though these things happen in books) that Pollan ignored her.
But returning to the main point, I did learn a great deal from Pollan - I found out, among other things, exactly what Xanthan gum is (hadn't you always wondered, even if you knew it couldn't be good?), made a connection I'd never perceived before between the widespread alcoholism in America in the 19th century and the widespread obesity of today (both due to the need to use up agricultural excesses of corn) and heard as concise and compelling an account of the complexities of farm subsidies as I've heard before. I hadn't thought, for example that anyone could give me any more reasons not to eat at McDonalds, but Pollan added a couple.
The first section of the book traces a meal at McDonalds back to its basic ingredient - corn. From the corn that feeds the chickens to the xanthan gum in the milkshake to the sweetener in the ketchup and oil in which the fries are cooked, McDonalds is mostly corn. Since Fast Food Nation and the other exposes, I don't think there's anyone who cares who doesn't know how gross fast food is, and Pollan admirably stays away from the yuckiness factor (not that there isn't reason to go there, but it has been rather overdone of late). Instead, he goes to the aesthetic one, accusing Americans who eat fast food of having become like koalas, capable of absorbing only corn, to terrible cost. In some sense, as someone who likes to eat, his description of our reliance upon (and the costs thereof) corn is more grotesque than any expose of slaughterhouses could be.
He then describes the history of two organic meals, one of them bought on a trip to whole foods, and an industrially produced organic meal, the other local, sustainable and produced to a large degree from Joel Salatin's Polyface farm, where he acted as reporter/farm hand for a week. It may be here that Pollan's book is most valuable, because it makes a distinction that your average Mom who buys at Whole foods has never made - that industrial organic food is more industrial than organic. This book has been roundly hyped on NPR and in the New York Times, and has the potential to change a lot of minds - and despite my later critiques, I will be enormously grateful if Pollan can simply convince people to look beyond the word organic and think about the costs of their food to the environment and the people who grow it. This is a potentially influential book, and Pollan does not make the mistake that many, many food writers make, of reading the word "organic" to mean sustainable.
While acknowledges that large scale, organic, industrial food is better than nothing, he doesn't cut it a lot of slack for its drenching in fossil fuels, use and sometimes misuse of migrant labor, and general unsustainability. Perhaps his best writing in the book is when he attempts to analyze whether it is possible to grow food sustainably and well on any scale at all, and when he concludes that you can't, someone like me, who is trying to grow food on a small scale, looks up ready to cheer. Because such a conclusion should lead inevitably to the next step - ie, to the idea that the only solution to the problem of industrial agriculture is that a lot more people have to grow food, both for sale and at home. But he never quite gets there, and that may be the great flaw of the book. Still, however, I think that the line that the distinctions Pollan does draw are deeply helpful, and could potentially change things a great deal.
In the final section, Pollan eats a meal that he has hunted, or gathered, or grown himself. In doing this, he spends a lot of time coming to terms with hunting and meat eating (he kills his own chicken for dinner at Polyface farm, and also purchases a steer destined for McDonalds, although its final end is as much of a mystery as such things could possibly ever be). Here is where, I expected, Pollan will figure out how we might reasonably eat, humanely and sustainably. But in fact, the last chapter could be described as "Yuppie Jewish guy goes hunting for the first time" - and not just any kind of hunting, but hunting for wild boar in the California mountains with a bunch of European chefs bent on recreating the food of their homelands for Chez Panisse. Pollan may be violating the traditions of his Jewish upbringing (Jews don't hunt, not just because they are often urbanites, but because the laws of kashruth forbid it, and the sense of it as unfitting has lingered long past the observation of the law in other respects for many Jews), but he never actually leaves his class behind. And that is one of the deeper problems of the book - the meal he seeks to make is not a deer burger and homemade potato fries, but wine-braised leg of boar with boar liver pate and cherry something or other (admittedly, it sounded terrific).
Intermittently throughout the book, Pollan attempts to deal with the problem of elitism - whether or not sustainable food is yuppie food. And there's a legitimate case to be made that there is. Pollan, of course, points out the illogic both of what we spend on food (less than anyone in the world) and the externalities that are not figured into the cost of the McDonalds meal, but he never gets down and dirty with the question of class. He quotes Joel Salatin on the subject that regulation adds more to his cost than organic production, notes the costs of meals and that Salatin's customers are mixed in economic situation, but he never fully addresses who it is who mostly eats fast food and who it is who mostly eats organic, and the all-important whys of that question.
When Pollan finally gets down to the ultimate local meal, the chapter is mostly about his angst over killing animals and meat eating (although it was fun to watch Pollan duke it out intellectually with Peter Singer), but it all gets played out over a meal with class overtones so profound and powerful that you cannot escape them. Going boar hunting with a sicilian chef doesn't seem to have much relevance to going deer hunting with a bunch of blue collar guys who live next door, nor is the meal he plans to produce something that anyone could make and eat very often. Speaking as someone who does not hunt (that kosher thing) but whose father did, and who believes that human predation is a perfectly normal thing, and preferrable, say, to having lyme disease from an excess of white-tailed deer (oh, it isn't that easy, of course, but I'll write more on vegetarianism and meat eating another time), I think Pollan ends up using the meal he decided to make as a way of choosing to avoid the logical conclusion of his writing, and the book is the poorer for it. The closing chapter is not about how we could eat, but about the impossibility of producing our own food, and, to a large degree, about the impossibility of even eating sustainably. And I think to a large degree that's because he chose a meal that is unreproducable for millions - as opposed to the simple, ordinary chicken and corn or french fries of his organic and conventional prior meals.
His conclusions, drawn from his experiences on Salatin's farm and of hunting and gathering (and presumably of eating at McDonalds) are implicitly that sustainable eating is never going to happen on any great scale. At the end of his section on Salatin's farm, he likens Salatin to Luther, creating his own new denominations of people for whom food quality and healthfulness matters, small niches of (elitist) people who care about their food in the great wilderness. But implying this suggests that most other people (I wonder who - the ones who eat at McDonalds more and are mostly of a different class?) don't actually care deeply about their food's taste, health and environmental cost.
And his final set of conclusions are deeply disappointing to me, personally. Because he creates the ground work for a fairly simple conclusion - industrial scale food production, whether organic or non, is a failure, a disaster for those who care about ethics or the environment. In a way, it doesn't matter whether what you care about is the suffering of animals (industrial slaughter) or the suffering of humans (malnutrition), the extermination of songbirds (pesticides) or rising cancer rates (pesticides) or the extermination of everyone due to global warming, the conclusion that Pollan expertly and gracefully leads us to - ie, that many more people need to take a role in their own food systems, both by buying locally, encouraging the creation of millions of new small farms instead of an expanding industrial system, and by growing some of their own (or hunting it, or foraging), is finally left off, in the interest of implying that the problem is irresolvable. This, I think, is rather a cheap ending, and an unfair one to the person who has sorted through the complexities of his arguments and analysis and comes out wanting to know what to do next.
Pollan tells us at the very end, referring to his home produced meal and the one from McDonalds, "...these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable." But the fact that the home produced meal is unsustainable and unreproducable is his choice - because a dinner of potatoes and eggs with salad, equally local, equally gathered, is sustainable and available to anyone with a bit of backyard if they want it. By implying that self-provisioning is a fantasy in this modern world, Pollan essentially suggests we leave the farming to the farmers - but there simply aren't enough farmers to have a small, local, organic farm everywhere. If we're to reduce our footprint more than anyone can by hopping over to whole foods in the SUV and picking up a box of whole wheat mac and cheese and some organic apples from China, people are going to have to take some responsibility for feeding themselves. No, they don't have to go hunt wild boar. But they might have to grow a garden, or make possible a nearby farm. They might have to encourage their children to grow up to be farmers. And they might have to imagine a world in which feeding oneself is not either a work of magic or a work of industry, but simply the ordinary job that ordinary people have been doing for thousands of years.
Sharon
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Architecture at Issue
I just finished working my way through the NYTimes Magazine Architecture issue, and the final reward was at the back, in personal essay by a small Indian architect on his reaction to the biggest, fanciest bit of architecture that India has put up to date. He points out the ways that "high tech" architecture avoids simple solutions for expensive, environmentally unfriendly ones, and the ways in which they avoid involving or engaging human beings.
Now I should say that for someone who spent the formative years of her adulthood training in the study of high culture (literature), I'm a disturbingly low culture sort of person. For all that I'm a Shakespearean by training, I often fail to be engaged by the debates and battles of contemporary high culture, not excluding literature. Quite often, I frankly couldn't give a shit. This may well be a personal failing. But I also suspect that great art of every kind comes out of cultures less priveleged and personally comfortable than our own. I suspect our wealth has come to destroy some of our capacity to make art. Or rather, I fear it.
I've seen a lot of "high culture" buildings from this half of the 20th century (although I've never lived in one - Eric lived in one of the infamous Groepius dorms at Harvard, but I merely lived in a succession of nearly equally hideous but much less famous ugly dorms at Brandeis), and I admit, I'm rarely engaged by them. They often fall in the category of "Well yes, but so?" which is my own personal, awkward construction. I invented it to apply to literary studies, in which scholars or novelists so often laboriously struggle to reach a conclusion that offers you nowhere else to go and illuminates nothing else (to be fair, I've written quite a few papers of this sort, which is why I'm so expert on them ;-). The nuances of most architecture can be appreciated in about 10 minutes - and when you are done appreciating (look, the building looks like a bird's nest, and the pipes are on the outside - wow!) what else is there to do - except, of course, if you live next to it or work in it, when its central deficiencies (office buildings suck no matter how you pretty them up) provide amusing commentary for your guests. There are buildings one goes back to again and again and sees something new in - but most of them are old, and none of them are office buildings.
The Times magazine is, of course, the mouth piece of a kind of middle of the road, capitalist liberalism, and so it sort of gets the conflict between the idea that buildings can be radical and the recognition that most of the so called radical buildings in the world are office buildings, where the most reactionary forms of capitalism are practiced. Or they are museums, monuments to establishment high culture and nostalgia. So they interview an architect who critiques the American habit of lighting buildings at night, never noticing any incongruity in his habit of building big wonking buildings so that people can commute to work in them from Pennsylvania, or they write an article about the problems of New Urbanist visions of Biloxi, and the tragedy of trying to bring overpriced yuppie housing to the poor. But the basic premise of contemporary architecture, which is about building big structures that are environmentally unsustainable, mostly ugly, and kind of pointless, is never really reconsidered, except by this lone person piece from India. And it is presented by the magazine as resolutely localized, about in part the loss of a local, indigenous culture, rather than a problem of architecture everywhere, which for the most part is about erasing nature, and people.
It isn't just architecture that has failed its form and function mission - literature has as well, and so has art in many cases. But writing a novel is comparatively cheap, and so is buying one. We all have the chance to control the environmental impact of our fiction - don't waste trees on it by buying it if it sucks. Art may need a bit of climate control to prevent deterioration, but compared to a building, it is perfectly green, no matter how much turpentine was used. Buildings are big, expensive, bits of something that is supposed to be art. But big and expensive and resource consumptive and good for business, with lots of lights and desks and climate control can never, ever, truly be radical. If it is art, it is radical, and it challenges basic assumptions.
That's not to say that architecture can't be radical. But stadiums and museums and office space can't truly be radical. Your house can be. Make a house that uses less, and is beautiful in a simple, clean way, that contains things made by you or friends, and that meets your needs but not every want, and has meaning, and you'll make better art than most practicing architects.
Sharon
Now I should say that for someone who spent the formative years of her adulthood training in the study of high culture (literature), I'm a disturbingly low culture sort of person. For all that I'm a Shakespearean by training, I often fail to be engaged by the debates and battles of contemporary high culture, not excluding literature. Quite often, I frankly couldn't give a shit. This may well be a personal failing. But I also suspect that great art of every kind comes out of cultures less priveleged and personally comfortable than our own. I suspect our wealth has come to destroy some of our capacity to make art. Or rather, I fear it.
I've seen a lot of "high culture" buildings from this half of the 20th century (although I've never lived in one - Eric lived in one of the infamous Groepius dorms at Harvard, but I merely lived in a succession of nearly equally hideous but much less famous ugly dorms at Brandeis), and I admit, I'm rarely engaged by them. They often fall in the category of "Well yes, but so?" which is my own personal, awkward construction. I invented it to apply to literary studies, in which scholars or novelists so often laboriously struggle to reach a conclusion that offers you nowhere else to go and illuminates nothing else (to be fair, I've written quite a few papers of this sort, which is why I'm so expert on them ;-). The nuances of most architecture can be appreciated in about 10 minutes - and when you are done appreciating (look, the building looks like a bird's nest, and the pipes are on the outside - wow!) what else is there to do - except, of course, if you live next to it or work in it, when its central deficiencies (office buildings suck no matter how you pretty them up) provide amusing commentary for your guests. There are buildings one goes back to again and again and sees something new in - but most of them are old, and none of them are office buildings.
The Times magazine is, of course, the mouth piece of a kind of middle of the road, capitalist liberalism, and so it sort of gets the conflict between the idea that buildings can be radical and the recognition that most of the so called radical buildings in the world are office buildings, where the most reactionary forms of capitalism are practiced. Or they are museums, monuments to establishment high culture and nostalgia. So they interview an architect who critiques the American habit of lighting buildings at night, never noticing any incongruity in his habit of building big wonking buildings so that people can commute to work in them from Pennsylvania, or they write an article about the problems of New Urbanist visions of Biloxi, and the tragedy of trying to bring overpriced yuppie housing to the poor. But the basic premise of contemporary architecture, which is about building big structures that are environmentally unsustainable, mostly ugly, and kind of pointless, is never really reconsidered, except by this lone person piece from India. And it is presented by the magazine as resolutely localized, about in part the loss of a local, indigenous culture, rather than a problem of architecture everywhere, which for the most part is about erasing nature, and people.
It isn't just architecture that has failed its form and function mission - literature has as well, and so has art in many cases. But writing a novel is comparatively cheap, and so is buying one. We all have the chance to control the environmental impact of our fiction - don't waste trees on it by buying it if it sucks. Art may need a bit of climate control to prevent deterioration, but compared to a building, it is perfectly green, no matter how much turpentine was used. Buildings are big, expensive, bits of something that is supposed to be art. But big and expensive and resource consumptive and good for business, with lots of lights and desks and climate control can never, ever, truly be radical. If it is art, it is radical, and it challenges basic assumptions.
That's not to say that architecture can't be radical. But stadiums and museums and office space can't truly be radical. Your house can be. Make a house that uses less, and is beautiful in a simple, clean way, that contains things made by you or friends, and that meets your needs but not every want, and has meaning, and you'll make better art than most practicing architects.
Sharon
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Staple foods and the future - Food and Peak Oil Part II
Why, you ask, should I believe that anything about food is going to change in the future? After all, people are always predicting the end of the world, and, you point out, we've never gone hungry yet. In fact, many of us are carrying a few too many meals around on our waistlines - me definitely included. So why worry about food?
We burn 100 calories of fossil fuels, mostly oil and natural gas, for every calorie of food we eat. We burn oil and gas in every stage of food production - natural gas creates fertilizers, pesticides come from both oil and gas, soil is tilled and food is picked with oil based machinery, and with the labor of people who use trucks and cars to travel and follow the harvest. The food is packaged in plastic (oil), and then loaded on trucks, where it may be refridgerated or dried. It is then transported to your supermarket, which is heated, lighted, and run on oil. All to get that four calorie, totally out of season strawberry into your mouth.
There is nothing sustainable about this system - most vegetables are mainly made from water, and we're using a whole lot of energy to take water from places (like California) that don't have nearly enough, and ship it to places that already have plenty. And every bite funds OPEC and its dissidents. And we can't do it forever - as oil prices rise dramatically, food prices will rise. At the moment, Americans pay less for their food as a percentage of their income than anyone else in the world - but that's about to change. In fact it is changing - we've seen dramatic price rises in things like butter, produce, etc... in the last year, but not enough to make most middle class people stop buying them. That too will change.
It is rather more efficient to transport grains, which are shipped dry, often by rail, than it is to truck produce. So grains and beans may continue to be reasonably priced, particularly if grown locally. But you can expect that as energy prices rise and the economy falters, food prices will rise - a considerable problem when you've just lost your job, or your mortgage payment is about to jump with rising interest rates. But we must change our eating habits - we must start thinking about how to get the most nutritional value for the best price, how to produce food locally and at home, and rethink how we eat, before a crisis makes it happen in a much less positive way.
In one of last year's issues of "Permaculture Activist" there was an essay on common permaculture errors, one of which points out that permaculture has not fully explored the problem of how to adapt oureating habits in sustainable, practical ways. They've talked a lot about how to grow food, but less about how to change over from pringles to homegrown. I think that's absolutely true, and true of peak oil as well - one of the things wetend to elide, when talking about food and gardens, is how to actually change our eating habits, and how to adapt to the diet that is coming for us. Because it isn't a small issue - people who have other options won't eat things they don't like, no matter how deficient nutritionally their diet becomes, and adapting to a new diet in a time of crisis is not only difficult, it can be damaging, even fatal to the ill, elderly and children. If we're going to prepare for thepeak, we also have to prepare our bodies and our minds to eating sustainably.
Why do you have to change your diet now? Think back to the last time something really awful happened to you - someone close to you died, you were depressed, something horrible hit you. Think about what you ate. Not much, maybe. Or maybe just comfort foods. You certainly didn't try new recipes - you didn't have the emotional energy, nor would you even have bothered to eat if you had to try a lot of new foods. Now think about the last family celebration you had. What did you eat? Traditional foods of your community, your family, your culture. How much pleasure and satsifaction did you derive from eating those things? How much is your sense of family, community, celebration, joy, love tied up in what you eat? For many of us, food is a significant repository of our memories. Do you want to take those things away from your family at exactly the time they struggle the most?
That's why we all have to make the dietary changeover (if we haven't already) now - to establish new foods of our family and culture, or adapt the old ones to the new requirements of reasonable energy inputs, to ensure that our elderly, our children, the ill will not suffer or even die from the shock of dietary change, and to make sure we are all able to keep strong and healthy when we need it most. The changes involved strike me as taking place in two ways - the first, is eating from our food storage (and building a food storage). The second, eating locally produced, seasonal, *available* food all year round. They are seperate but inter-related issues. In a time of crisis, we may well have a year or two or three that we cannot eat fresh, local foods, and we need to find ways to make nutritious, balanced, tasty, enjoyable meals from our food storage, probably from limited ingredients. The second one doesn't seem difficult, but is - if you've ever produced a lot of food from your garden and animals, you'll realize how disconnected from seasonality our culture is - how many food combinations simply don't go together in nature (carrots and peas, the ubiquitous frozen duo, for example), or will beimpossible to replicate (I love sushi, but it isn't going to be a major feature of my diet here in upstate NY.) Eating seasonally usually involves eating a *lot* of something, for a short while, and then either not eating it again for a year, or eating it in a different preserved form - that is, tomatoes every day during the warm season, and then canned or dried tomatoes for the winter and spring. So for every major crop we produce, we need both ways to take the greatest advantage of it during its fresh season, and, if possible, a tasty way to preserve it and its nutritional value.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean you need to preserve 100 different crops - most cultures that rely on their own produce and meat have staple foodstuffs, a staple starch and a staple protein that are the mainstay of their diet and then add other ingredients as flavorings. Whether rice and fish, corn and beans, pork and corn, potatoes and milk, etc..., every peasant culture is based around easily grown starches and protein foods. In the first world, we've moved away from this habit - both in our culture's tendency to over emphasize the protein above the staple starch and in our endless demand for variety. But eating this way doesn't have to be unpleasant - while appetite fatigue is a real phenomenon, most people *like* and enjoy their staple foods, and are aware of subtleties and flavors within them that can't be perceivedby outsiders. So one of the first steps is to figure out what you are realistically going to eat if you have to live on what is grown in your climate, by you or some other local farmer. If you live in upstate NY, like me, as much as you may like rice (sadly, my staple starch of preference;-(), it isn't going to be your primary grain. Potatoes, corn, oats or wheat are much more likely. Look around at the native peoples in your area - what did they eat? Check out the farmers in your area -while small farmers may grow sweet potatoes, for example, if no one grows them on a large scale, they will probably not be available unless you grow your own.
Whatever you do, think now about food, and start finding ways of making basic foods delicious and part of your daily diet.
Sharon
We burn 100 calories of fossil fuels, mostly oil and natural gas, for every calorie of food we eat. We burn oil and gas in every stage of food production - natural gas creates fertilizers, pesticides come from both oil and gas, soil is tilled and food is picked with oil based machinery, and with the labor of people who use trucks and cars to travel and follow the harvest. The food is packaged in plastic (oil), and then loaded on trucks, where it may be refridgerated or dried. It is then transported to your supermarket, which is heated, lighted, and run on oil. All to get that four calorie, totally out of season strawberry into your mouth.
There is nothing sustainable about this system - most vegetables are mainly made from water, and we're using a whole lot of energy to take water from places (like California) that don't have nearly enough, and ship it to places that already have plenty. And every bite funds OPEC and its dissidents. And we can't do it forever - as oil prices rise dramatically, food prices will rise. At the moment, Americans pay less for their food as a percentage of their income than anyone else in the world - but that's about to change. In fact it is changing - we've seen dramatic price rises in things like butter, produce, etc... in the last year, but not enough to make most middle class people stop buying them. That too will change.
It is rather more efficient to transport grains, which are shipped dry, often by rail, than it is to truck produce. So grains and beans may continue to be reasonably priced, particularly if grown locally. But you can expect that as energy prices rise and the economy falters, food prices will rise - a considerable problem when you've just lost your job, or your mortgage payment is about to jump with rising interest rates. But we must change our eating habits - we must start thinking about how to get the most nutritional value for the best price, how to produce food locally and at home, and rethink how we eat, before a crisis makes it happen in a much less positive way.
In one of last year's issues of "Permaculture Activist" there was an essay on common permaculture errors, one of which points out that permaculture has not fully explored the problem of how to adapt oureating habits in sustainable, practical ways. They've talked a lot about how to grow food, but less about how to change over from pringles to homegrown. I think that's absolutely true, and true of peak oil as well - one of the things wetend to elide, when talking about food and gardens, is how to actually change our eating habits, and how to adapt to the diet that is coming for us. Because it isn't a small issue - people who have other options won't eat things they don't like, no matter how deficient nutritionally their diet becomes, and adapting to a new diet in a time of crisis is not only difficult, it can be damaging, even fatal to the ill, elderly and children. If we're going to prepare for thepeak, we also have to prepare our bodies and our minds to eating sustainably.
Why do you have to change your diet now? Think back to the last time something really awful happened to you - someone close to you died, you were depressed, something horrible hit you. Think about what you ate. Not much, maybe. Or maybe just comfort foods. You certainly didn't try new recipes - you didn't have the emotional energy, nor would you even have bothered to eat if you had to try a lot of new foods. Now think about the last family celebration you had. What did you eat? Traditional foods of your community, your family, your culture. How much pleasure and satsifaction did you derive from eating those things? How much is your sense of family, community, celebration, joy, love tied up in what you eat? For many of us, food is a significant repository of our memories. Do you want to take those things away from your family at exactly the time they struggle the most?
That's why we all have to make the dietary changeover (if we haven't already) now - to establish new foods of our family and culture, or adapt the old ones to the new requirements of reasonable energy inputs, to ensure that our elderly, our children, the ill will not suffer or even die from the shock of dietary change, and to make sure we are all able to keep strong and healthy when we need it most. The changes involved strike me as taking place in two ways - the first, is eating from our food storage (and building a food storage). The second, eating locally produced, seasonal, *available* food all year round. They are seperate but inter-related issues. In a time of crisis, we may well have a year or two or three that we cannot eat fresh, local foods, and we need to find ways to make nutritious, balanced, tasty, enjoyable meals from our food storage, probably from limited ingredients. The second one doesn't seem difficult, but is - if you've ever produced a lot of food from your garden and animals, you'll realize how disconnected from seasonality our culture is - how many food combinations simply don't go together in nature (carrots and peas, the ubiquitous frozen duo, for example), or will beimpossible to replicate (I love sushi, but it isn't going to be a major feature of my diet here in upstate NY.) Eating seasonally usually involves eating a *lot* of something, for a short while, and then either not eating it again for a year, or eating it in a different preserved form - that is, tomatoes every day during the warm season, and then canned or dried tomatoes for the winter and spring. So for every major crop we produce, we need both ways to take the greatest advantage of it during its fresh season, and, if possible, a tasty way to preserve it and its nutritional value.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean you need to preserve 100 different crops - most cultures that rely on their own produce and meat have staple foodstuffs, a staple starch and a staple protein that are the mainstay of their diet and then add other ingredients as flavorings. Whether rice and fish, corn and beans, pork and corn, potatoes and milk, etc..., every peasant culture is based around easily grown starches and protein foods. In the first world, we've moved away from this habit - both in our culture's tendency to over emphasize the protein above the staple starch and in our endless demand for variety. But eating this way doesn't have to be unpleasant - while appetite fatigue is a real phenomenon, most people *like* and enjoy their staple foods, and are aware of subtleties and flavors within them that can't be perceivedby outsiders. So one of the first steps is to figure out what you are realistically going to eat if you have to live on what is grown in your climate, by you or some other local farmer. If you live in upstate NY, like me, as much as you may like rice (sadly, my staple starch of preference;-(), it isn't going to be your primary grain. Potatoes, corn, oats or wheat are much more likely. Look around at the native peoples in your area - what did they eat? Check out the farmers in your area -while small farmers may grow sweet potatoes, for example, if no one grows them on a large scale, they will probably not be available unless you grow your own.
Whatever you do, think now about food, and start finding ways of making basic foods delicious and part of your daily diet.
Sharon
Food After the Peak: Part 1: Domesticity and Common Sense
About a year ago I posted a series of articles on the ROE2 newsgroup about how to eat in a peak oil future where we are all poorer, food surpluses are smaller, and the energy we rely on for things like electric stoves, refridgeration, etc... is out of our means. I'm reprinting it in slightly modified form here, in case anyone is interested. The pieces are not in order - this was originally part 3.
If you were born after the 1940s, you were probably raised, to one degree or another, to believe that domestic work, including foodproduction is monotonous, brain numbing, unskilled, and pointless. In many cases we believe it is ideally performed, assuming you make enough money, by either a non-white, non-english speaking private employeee, or a non-white employee of a restaurant. At best, home food production issomething to fight about, a tedious conflict at the heart of your family life where you and your spouse debate yet again who will microwave the macaroni and cheese, and clean up afterwards. None of it is worthy of your intellect, of course.
If you are a 40 something, middle class liberal in your average American city, you probably would deny you think the above, but would point out that yourhigh powered job/busy schedule means that you can't help picking up fast food or pizza or eating out three nights a week, putting your kids in daycare, and hiring a lawn service and house cleaners. Of course it is more important, you argue, that you are working and paying all those people (whose skin color and/or gender is pure coincidence), and, of course, voting for the social changes that will inspire the eventual improvement of their situations. If you are an American conservative of the same approximate demographic, you probably want to know what my point is ;-) ;-).
Some facts about Americans and food.1. The wealthiest 20 % eat out for more than 60% of their meals. The poorest 20% eat out for the exact same percentage of their meals. The difference exists on only three levels - 1. how likely the restaurant is to be a fast food chain and how nutritious the meal is; 2. how many cookbooks that they never cook from are on the shelves of the kitchen they do not enter; and 3.How likely they are to say they "love" to cook, without ever actually doing it (in America, people who say they "hate" to cook actually eatin slightly more often than people who "love" it.)
2. One out of every 3 Americans eat in a fast food restaurant on any given day. More than half of all Americans eat 6 or more meals per week at a fast food restaurant. Think about that.
3. Of meals eaten at home, 65% involve the use of pre-processedor "prepared" ingredients, and 75% involve a microwave. 70% ofAmericans have no idea how to make stuffing not from a mix, 61%cannot make mashed potatoes from actual potatoes, rather than a box,and 90% buy boneless chicken breasts because they can't figure outhow to debone them.
4. A vast majority of American meals involved at least two of the following 6 ingredients - white bread, chicken breasts, ground beef, potatoes (more than 75% of which come in the form of either boxed potatoes, chips or frozen fries/tater tots), milk, ketchup.
I suspect a lot of people on this list feel rather superior at themoment. *I* bake my own bread, we say. I don't eat out that often. I never, ever go to McDonalds (just Taco Bell, and that only once ina while, right before a meeting, you know.) Ok, now imagine yourselves required to do the simple job of makingyour own food for a month. Piece of cake? Here's the deal. You haveto produce three meals a day, plus beverages and snacks entirely from whole foods in your storage, garden or barn, or easily obtained from local producers within 25 miles of your home. You must do so using sustainable methods, no microwave or electric stove. You cannot goto the store - you must use what you have, and ensure that it willlast. You have no refrigeration, so each meal must be precisely the right size to ensure no waste. You need to pay special attention tothe dietary needs and palates of the sick, elderly, children, pregnant and nursing mothers. You need to be sure that everyone gets enough to fuel increased physical labor (ie, walking places instead of driving, growing food in a garden) and a balanced and varied enough diet to make sure they remain healthy. It also must be palatable enough to ensure lack of waste and adequate consumption.
Meanwhile, you have to stretch limited food supplies, and limited supplies of fats, sugars, eggs, dairy and meats to ensure you will not go hungry later, if food supplies tighten. Of course, part of the job is the logistics and planning - did you start the sprouts on Friday, so that they would be ready for today's salad? Is the next batch of yogurt ready as the first one runs out? How early did you need to get up to get the bread baked before lunch? Did you plant a next crop of lettuce? How long can you keep those eggs warm? Did you grind enough flour for the pancakes, or do you have to go back and do it again? Are you sure that you've left enough baking soda for birthday cakes? Meanwhile, besides the ordinary work of food production, you have to inventory, maintain, track, manage, preserve, protect and prevent rot on the food you have in storage and coming in. That means that besides three meals a day, you need to keep track of how much sugar is left, to make applesauce when the last apples start to soften, dry and can those strawberries that come flooding in when the season starts, walk the six miles to the food market that is likely to have live chickens this week, forage for wild greens, make six gallons of sauerkraut, figure out away to make up for the absence of vanilla, white flour and eggs in your child's birthday cake, plan for extra guests and hospitality, as well as festival meals and special occasions.
Unskilled labor indeed. Try it for a month. Seriously, it will not only give you new appreciation for the value and creativity of domestic labor (and for the work done by human beings through most of history and in most poor cultures today), but it will also point up the fact that only part of the project is knowing good recipes for whole wheat. The rest is figuring out how to make good, interesting, balanced, varied food out of what you have 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, with your own hands,sustainable methods and local resources. If you don't know how to do it going into peak oil, you can expect your transition to be more painful, hungrier and harder all around.
Cheers,
Sharon (who hasn't managed to do it either)
If you were born after the 1940s, you were probably raised, to one degree or another, to believe that domestic work, including foodproduction is monotonous, brain numbing, unskilled, and pointless. In many cases we believe it is ideally performed, assuming you make enough money, by either a non-white, non-english speaking private employeee, or a non-white employee of a restaurant. At best, home food production issomething to fight about, a tedious conflict at the heart of your family life where you and your spouse debate yet again who will microwave the macaroni and cheese, and clean up afterwards. None of it is worthy of your intellect, of course.
If you are a 40 something, middle class liberal in your average American city, you probably would deny you think the above, but would point out that yourhigh powered job/busy schedule means that you can't help picking up fast food or pizza or eating out three nights a week, putting your kids in daycare, and hiring a lawn service and house cleaners. Of course it is more important, you argue, that you are working and paying all those people (whose skin color and/or gender is pure coincidence), and, of course, voting for the social changes that will inspire the eventual improvement of their situations. If you are an American conservative of the same approximate demographic, you probably want to know what my point is ;-) ;-).
Some facts about Americans and food.1. The wealthiest 20 % eat out for more than 60% of their meals. The poorest 20% eat out for the exact same percentage of their meals. The difference exists on only three levels - 1. how likely the restaurant is to be a fast food chain and how nutritious the meal is; 2. how many cookbooks that they never cook from are on the shelves of the kitchen they do not enter; and 3.How likely they are to say they "love" to cook, without ever actually doing it (in America, people who say they "hate" to cook actually eatin slightly more often than people who "love" it.)
2. One out of every 3 Americans eat in a fast food restaurant on any given day. More than half of all Americans eat 6 or more meals per week at a fast food restaurant. Think about that.
3. Of meals eaten at home, 65% involve the use of pre-processedor "prepared" ingredients, and 75% involve a microwave. 70% ofAmericans have no idea how to make stuffing not from a mix, 61%cannot make mashed potatoes from actual potatoes, rather than a box,and 90% buy boneless chicken breasts because they can't figure outhow to debone them.
4. A vast majority of American meals involved at least two of the following 6 ingredients - white bread, chicken breasts, ground beef, potatoes (more than 75% of which come in the form of either boxed potatoes, chips or frozen fries/tater tots), milk, ketchup.
I suspect a lot of people on this list feel rather superior at themoment. *I* bake my own bread, we say. I don't eat out that often. I never, ever go to McDonalds (just Taco Bell, and that only once ina while, right before a meeting, you know.) Ok, now imagine yourselves required to do the simple job of makingyour own food for a month. Piece of cake? Here's the deal. You haveto produce three meals a day, plus beverages and snacks entirely from whole foods in your storage, garden or barn, or easily obtained from local producers within 25 miles of your home. You must do so using sustainable methods, no microwave or electric stove. You cannot goto the store - you must use what you have, and ensure that it willlast. You have no refrigeration, so each meal must be precisely the right size to ensure no waste. You need to pay special attention tothe dietary needs and palates of the sick, elderly, children, pregnant and nursing mothers. You need to be sure that everyone gets enough to fuel increased physical labor (ie, walking places instead of driving, growing food in a garden) and a balanced and varied enough diet to make sure they remain healthy. It also must be palatable enough to ensure lack of waste and adequate consumption.
Meanwhile, you have to stretch limited food supplies, and limited supplies of fats, sugars, eggs, dairy and meats to ensure you will not go hungry later, if food supplies tighten. Of course, part of the job is the logistics and planning - did you start the sprouts on Friday, so that they would be ready for today's salad? Is the next batch of yogurt ready as the first one runs out? How early did you need to get up to get the bread baked before lunch? Did you plant a next crop of lettuce? How long can you keep those eggs warm? Did you grind enough flour for the pancakes, or do you have to go back and do it again? Are you sure that you've left enough baking soda for birthday cakes? Meanwhile, besides the ordinary work of food production, you have to inventory, maintain, track, manage, preserve, protect and prevent rot on the food you have in storage and coming in. That means that besides three meals a day, you need to keep track of how much sugar is left, to make applesauce when the last apples start to soften, dry and can those strawberries that come flooding in when the season starts, walk the six miles to the food market that is likely to have live chickens this week, forage for wild greens, make six gallons of sauerkraut, figure out away to make up for the absence of vanilla, white flour and eggs in your child's birthday cake, plan for extra guests and hospitality, as well as festival meals and special occasions.
Unskilled labor indeed. Try it for a month. Seriously, it will not only give you new appreciation for the value and creativity of domestic labor (and for the work done by human beings through most of history and in most poor cultures today), but it will also point up the fact that only part of the project is knowing good recipes for whole wheat. The rest is figuring out how to make good, interesting, balanced, varied food out of what you have 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, with your own hands,sustainable methods and local resources. If you don't know how to do it going into peak oil, you can expect your transition to be more painful, hungrier and harder all around.
Cheers,
Sharon (who hasn't managed to do it either)
Sunday, February 19, 2006
How much more fun could it be.
Dick Cheney shot a friend of his while out quail hunting the other day. Now this is the kind of news we need more of. No nuance. No subtlety. Just the simple joy of seeing a real asshole look like a moron in public. And yes, it was the kind of stupid mistake that could have happened to anyone, and not a metaphor for any great truth about the administration - we don't need metaphor to critique them properly. But it was pretty funny.
My theory is that this was an elaborate attempt to act out some kind of Elmer Fudd fetish on Cheney's part. First there's the bit where he shoots his friend. Then, the white house press secretary decides, "Let's be vewy, vewy quiet." Sure. Maybe no one will notice that the president shot a guy. That seems reasonable. Yeah.
Duck Season! Lawyer Season!
Sharon
My theory is that this was an elaborate attempt to act out some kind of Elmer Fudd fetish on Cheney's part. First there's the bit where he shoots his friend. Then, the white house press secretary decides, "Let's be vewy, vewy quiet." Sure. Maybe no one will notice that the president shot a guy. That seems reasonable. Yeah.
Duck Season! Lawyer Season!
Sharon
Sunday, February 05, 2006
The Aristocrats
And now for something completely different....
If you haven't seen The Aristocrats, do. Or rather, do so if you are not easily horrified. The movie is gross, obscene, grotesque and vile in many ways. It contains descriptions of acts that go beyond horrible. And it is immensely funny. I really do hate movies. But I loved this one.
I loved it because it is a perfect piece of art, as perfect as the Chaucer's gloriously obscene Miller's Tale, or Rabelais. In fact, watching the movie for the first time was a little like reading "The Miller's Tale" was for me in high school. I was so overjoyed to realize that it was not the subject that mattered, but the execution, that the ordinary things of human life, gross and funny as they are, can be transformed into art - and funny art at that.
For those of you who have not seen it, it simply consists of comedian after comedian telling a truly vile joke, and meditating on its significance. Some of the performances are sublime - and the sublime performances are often the ones by people you wouldn't expect to be good. Billy the Mime proves that Mime can be very funny indeed. Gilbert Gottfried, who I've never liked, proves himself to have nerves of steel and inestimable comic timing. Bob Saggett, who I was barely aware of, tops them all.
The movie illustrates the distinction, also, between great standup and great comic acting. Most of the really wonderful comic actors can't deliver the joke to save their lives - Eric Idle, for example, literally can't get the words out. And whether intentionally or not, it also seems to illustrate that comedy is still, in many ways, segregated. This is a joke that originated in the white Jewish culture of vaudeville, and the film has only two black comedians telling the joke. Whoopie Goldberg does an admirable job, perhaps in part because of her gender, but Chris Rock is less memorable. One could only wish that Richard Pryor (who died so soon after its release) had taken a stab at the joke, both as a joke and to place race and the culture of comedy in its particular context.
I'm not sure I've ever laughed harder at a movie, and in part, I think the laughter is because there is an odd poignance to the whole thing, a poignance that the movie is aware of but does not belabor (and recognize how intensely rare that last is - that a film should ever fail to belabor an emotion) - because the joke simply isn't that good. What is funny is the imagination involved, and the energy required to keep the joke in the air like so many juggling balls. There's a nostalgia for old vaudeville culture, and for actors long gone (Martin Mull, for example, tells the joke exactly as Groucho Marx might have - the only pity is that he's still Martin Mull while doing it). But the poignance, buried inside the layers of orifices and fluids, is the determination to be funny, to create funny, out of such thin cloth.
Go see it. The world needs funny.
Sharon
If you haven't seen The Aristocrats, do. Or rather, do so if you are not easily horrified. The movie is gross, obscene, grotesque and vile in many ways. It contains descriptions of acts that go beyond horrible. And it is immensely funny. I really do hate movies. But I loved this one.
I loved it because it is a perfect piece of art, as perfect as the Chaucer's gloriously obscene Miller's Tale, or Rabelais. In fact, watching the movie for the first time was a little like reading "The Miller's Tale" was for me in high school. I was so overjoyed to realize that it was not the subject that mattered, but the execution, that the ordinary things of human life, gross and funny as they are, can be transformed into art - and funny art at that.
For those of you who have not seen it, it simply consists of comedian after comedian telling a truly vile joke, and meditating on its significance. Some of the performances are sublime - and the sublime performances are often the ones by people you wouldn't expect to be good. Billy the Mime proves that Mime can be very funny indeed. Gilbert Gottfried, who I've never liked, proves himself to have nerves of steel and inestimable comic timing. Bob Saggett, who I was barely aware of, tops them all.
The movie illustrates the distinction, also, between great standup and great comic acting. Most of the really wonderful comic actors can't deliver the joke to save their lives - Eric Idle, for example, literally can't get the words out. And whether intentionally or not, it also seems to illustrate that comedy is still, in many ways, segregated. This is a joke that originated in the white Jewish culture of vaudeville, and the film has only two black comedians telling the joke. Whoopie Goldberg does an admirable job, perhaps in part because of her gender, but Chris Rock is less memorable. One could only wish that Richard Pryor (who died so soon after its release) had taken a stab at the joke, both as a joke and to place race and the culture of comedy in its particular context.
I'm not sure I've ever laughed harder at a movie, and in part, I think the laughter is because there is an odd poignance to the whole thing, a poignance that the movie is aware of but does not belabor (and recognize how intensely rare that last is - that a film should ever fail to belabor an emotion) - because the joke simply isn't that good. What is funny is the imagination involved, and the energy required to keep the joke in the air like so many juggling balls. There's a nostalgia for old vaudeville culture, and for actors long gone (Martin Mull, for example, tells the joke exactly as Groucho Marx might have - the only pity is that he's still Martin Mull while doing it). But the poignance, buried inside the layers of orifices and fluids, is the determination to be funny, to create funny, out of such thin cloth.
Go see it. The world needs funny.
Sharon
The dismal science and its dismal results
It is no accident that economists begin their study of history at precisely the moment that the world discovered fossil fuels and began a century and a half of unprecedented expansion. And because economists begin their history there (everything else is pre-modern, and thus irrelevant), they have bought into Fukuyama's notion that we are at "the end of history." They believe fundamentally that growth capitalism has proven itself to be always and forever the way. And because of *that,* there are no economists in power in America who believe anything else.
I think it is easy not to realize how shocking that last fact is. But in no other academic field are the theoretical and intellectual boundaries so narrow and limited by a set of assumptions that the holders dare not question. Economists, because of the necessity of telling American politicians what they want to hear, have traded their scholarly integrity for power. Instead of allowing the ideas to lead them to the results, they have assumed a result, and spend their time debating the details. This is not only foolish, it is bad scholarship - bad by the standards of the science they'd like to claim they belong to, but bad even in my own, unscientific discipline. Because if the evidence cannot take you where it is going, if you presuppose your results, you have failed to be a scholar. We all make assumptions - but scholarship assumes a true freedom of inquiry, where others, with different assumptions, will critique one's premises. That does not exist meaningfully in American economics - tenure, book contracts, money, institute fellowships - these don't go to anyone who does not buy the party line.
There are critiques coming from outside, from Europe and south America, where the commitment to free markets is also more freely questioned. But I fear it may be too late for American economics. As a new leader takes over the Fed, we'll see where the economy is headed, and whether it can withstand rising interest rates alongside rising energy prices and the popping of the housing bubble. But the true problem may be that no American questions the concept that we have to keep growing, keep getting bigger, keep making and having more. But outside, in the rest of the world, people are questioning that. The rising socialist governments of South America, for example, are at least using a rhetoric of prioritizing the general welfare of its people, improving the status of everyone, rather than allowing the rich to profit as they may. Whether they can do it or not is another question. But at least they are asking the right questions - asking, for example, whether their resources should serve the world economy or their own, and asking whether it is more important to have a large middle class, or for everyone to have food. And everyone recognizes that those are choices - that the myth, so firmly held here, that everyone can have everything, is just that - a myth.
In this nation of immigrants, the rhetoric has always been that we want our children to have more than we did. But for those of us in the middle class, we are thinking about this wrong. What can we give them that we didn't have? A tv in every room? More, more expensive cars? Bigger houses than the enormous ones we already have? We can already see the moral consequences of trying to give more to those who already have inestimable wealth - greed, obesity, lack of appreciation, lack of principle. But we might be able to give our children something immeasurably greater - we might be able to give them something that we who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s had - something that they are in danger of losing. That is, greenspace, undeveloped land, places with reasonably clean air. Enough food. Shelter. Time to play. Warm clothes. Love. But even that is in danger because of the eternal capitalist rhetoric of more, more, more.
Sharon
I think it is easy not to realize how shocking that last fact is. But in no other academic field are the theoretical and intellectual boundaries so narrow and limited by a set of assumptions that the holders dare not question. Economists, because of the necessity of telling American politicians what they want to hear, have traded their scholarly integrity for power. Instead of allowing the ideas to lead them to the results, they have assumed a result, and spend their time debating the details. This is not only foolish, it is bad scholarship - bad by the standards of the science they'd like to claim they belong to, but bad even in my own, unscientific discipline. Because if the evidence cannot take you where it is going, if you presuppose your results, you have failed to be a scholar. We all make assumptions - but scholarship assumes a true freedom of inquiry, where others, with different assumptions, will critique one's premises. That does not exist meaningfully in American economics - tenure, book contracts, money, institute fellowships - these don't go to anyone who does not buy the party line.
There are critiques coming from outside, from Europe and south America, where the commitment to free markets is also more freely questioned. But I fear it may be too late for American economics. As a new leader takes over the Fed, we'll see where the economy is headed, and whether it can withstand rising interest rates alongside rising energy prices and the popping of the housing bubble. But the true problem may be that no American questions the concept that we have to keep growing, keep getting bigger, keep making and having more. But outside, in the rest of the world, people are questioning that. The rising socialist governments of South America, for example, are at least using a rhetoric of prioritizing the general welfare of its people, improving the status of everyone, rather than allowing the rich to profit as they may. Whether they can do it or not is another question. But at least they are asking the right questions - asking, for example, whether their resources should serve the world economy or their own, and asking whether it is more important to have a large middle class, or for everyone to have food. And everyone recognizes that those are choices - that the myth, so firmly held here, that everyone can have everything, is just that - a myth.
In this nation of immigrants, the rhetoric has always been that we want our children to have more than we did. But for those of us in the middle class, we are thinking about this wrong. What can we give them that we didn't have? A tv in every room? More, more expensive cars? Bigger houses than the enormous ones we already have? We can already see the moral consequences of trying to give more to those who already have inestimable wealth - greed, obesity, lack of appreciation, lack of principle. But we might be able to give our children something immeasurably greater - we might be able to give them something that we who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s had - something that they are in danger of losing. That is, greenspace, undeveloped land, places with reasonably clean air. Enough food. Shelter. Time to play. Warm clothes. Love. But even that is in danger because of the eternal capitalist rhetoric of more, more, more.
Sharon
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
NAIS - a really bad idea
The government's latest desire is to be able to track every farm animal in America by microchipping them, down to the backyard chicken owner. This is a really, really bad idea. And it is going to exacerbate peak oil issues.
The cost of having your animals registered and microchipped is going to be a big deterrent for those who raise meat only for themselves, or sell on a very small scale. Most people who raise a few chickens for their dinner and for sale barely break even on the deal - we do it because it gets us better, safer food than other methods, and, if we're lucky, it might make a tiny profit.
Well, kiss your profit goodbye - it will be eaten by vet bills (my chickens don't ordinarily need vets, but NAIS will require I use them to microchip each bird), fines (if, G-d forbid, you don't tag that lamb fast enough) and fees.
This is not an issue for large scale producers, who are already required to keep these records - this is a stab at backyard producers, many of whom are going to go out of business. So your food is going to come from further away, and cost more.
Moreover, this is a lousy idea for another reason - after surpassing the national debt ceiling, we're going to be creating another enormous, stupid, inefficient administrative entity?
And most of all, it is going to be hard enough, in times to come, to convince people that they need to put a few chickens in their backyard. How do we do it now?
Write your congresspeople. Tell them No on NAIS
Sharon
The cost of having your animals registered and microchipped is going to be a big deterrent for those who raise meat only for themselves, or sell on a very small scale. Most people who raise a few chickens for their dinner and for sale barely break even on the deal - we do it because it gets us better, safer food than other methods, and, if we're lucky, it might make a tiny profit.
Well, kiss your profit goodbye - it will be eaten by vet bills (my chickens don't ordinarily need vets, but NAIS will require I use them to microchip each bird), fines (if, G-d forbid, you don't tag that lamb fast enough) and fees.
This is not an issue for large scale producers, who are already required to keep these records - this is a stab at backyard producers, many of whom are going to go out of business. So your food is going to come from further away, and cost more.
Moreover, this is a lousy idea for another reason - after surpassing the national debt ceiling, we're going to be creating another enormous, stupid, inefficient administrative entity?
And most of all, it is going to be hard enough, in times to come, to convince people that they need to put a few chickens in their backyard. How do we do it now?
Write your congresspeople. Tell them No on NAIS
Sharon
Sunday, January 29, 2006
What will my grandchildren read?
It is a strange thought to imagine that in 75 years or so, there will be a collection of books, sorted out from the thousands published in the last decade or two, that will be considered the "canon" of my era. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read them in high school and college, and argue about what they meant and what was intended. I haven't, however, the faintest idea which books they will be - whether McEwan or Roth, Delillo or Rowling.
My best guess is that most of them won't be high culture books, post modern, or winners of the Nobel prize for literature. If you look back at the history of fiction, comparatively little of it was written as "art" or as "high culture" (poetry being to some degree an exception, but not quite as much as one might think). The books that we read over and over again tend to be their day's low culture, books read by most of the literate populace, for their own pleasure. While it may be hard for modern tv addicts to imagine reading George Eliot or going to see "Tamburlaine" for pleasure, it is a simple fact.
They also probably won't arise from the lowest of low cultures, either. While some bad books have made it into the canon, and some bad books have been reclaimed in the name of the gender or history of their authors, mostly people don't like to read bad ooks. And who can blame them. The occasional over-the-top potboiler, that is fun to read but with virtually no meaningful content (given where I live, I probably shouldn't say this, but Cooper leaps to mind), and the occasional bad bit of high culture, that no one really likes to read but everyone says is interesting ("Finnegan's Wake" will do as an obvious example, but there are plenty of others.), but mostly, the books in the canon are well beloved by most readers, precisely because they are fun and readable.
So I'd be inclined to toss out things like Delillo, who is a very entertaining novelist, but an awful lot of work to read for very little return. I don't claim to know whether it is identification or vicarious enjoyment that allows one to fall thoroughly into a book's world and have trouble escaping its gravity, but I'm fairly sure that's never happened in a Delillo novel. My experience of most self-consciously post-modern authors is that I admire the way they right, the fun they are having, the ideas they are playing with, but don't much care what happens.
Wanting to care what happens next is a very old fashioned, dull way to think about what makes a good book, but I'm not sure it has been exceeded. Certainly, I don't think it has been exceeded by the contemporary psychological novel, an example of which would be the novels of Toni Morrison, or Dorothy Allison, which goes on and on explaining how someone came to be the way they are. The characters become who they are through the survival of an unending history of suffering, which logically concludes in the result at hand. Enduring that much suffering with a character is possible, if you very much like the character. But characters who are always and only formed by their experience of pain and suffering are usually hard to like, and after reading a few such novels, the process of being wrenched, over and over again, gets extremely tedious. I suspect some will survive, as exemplars in literary classes, of a recreation of the sentimental novel (the 18th century genre we seemed compelled to relive). But by and large, I don't forsee them making it either.
I suspect a few big, important novels, that lay open the politics and history of the times will also survive, but again, mostly to be read by scholars, not book lovers. There's something fundamentally archaic, and often dull, about reading a radical tract from the past. Try it sometime - pick one that has held up fairly, perhaps "The Jungle" and try to care about its political agenda. It works fine in the abstract, but I'd be shocked to learn there is someone out there who re-reads "The Jungle" the way people re-read Jane Austen. I fear McEwan, who I rather like, will be toast. I kind of hope that Roth and his indescribably dull _Plot Against America_ will be.
If I were placing bets (which I am, in fact), I'd lay odds that many of the books best remembered from my time will be children's literature, which has bloomed in the last decade in ways that are both exciting and novel. Freed by the constraints of being timely and meaningful, people have gone about writing really good, deeply enjoyable books, many of them quite literary.
Rowling and Pullman, so often discussed in the same sentence, seem to me like logical survivors both. Pullman is more "literary" but he is also less fun - his style is heavy handed and tedious at times, and his characters aren't very interesting. On the other hand, the story is compelling - despite the flaws in his telling, despite the fact that it is never made clear why the characters, who supposedly love so deeply, can even stand to be together, there is something both original and engaging about him. One can imagine this book as a high culture novel, rather than a children's novel, and recognize that the adult version would be nigh on unreadable, but in writing for a younger audience, Pullman is freed of his worst writing, and pulled towards something greater in scope than most adult novels would dare imagine. Pullman is a Romantic, in the old sense, and I rather think that a little romanticism might do us good.
Rowling's style is less self-consciously artistic, but more readable, and her characters better drawn and more complex. She's very uneven - the second book in the series is quite awful; and at times terribly predictable - in her fifth book, for example, the death of Dumbledore is both inevitable and endlessly foreshadowed. Having grown too big for an editor, with a desperate readership that demands length above all, the faults in her writing have been somewhat magnified.
But Rawling's books are smart, and funny (sadly, Pullman's aren't), and many of her characters are astonishingly complex. And she and Pullman make excellent companions, because if there is one thing that Rawling is not, despite her reliance on magic, it is romantic. Her novels are, oddly, novels about being grown-up (despite the fact that her main characters are children), and they are about recognizing that the flawed and fallen adult world is a place of magic and power. In a world where real adulthood is increasingly rare, and where fantasies of youth are everywhere, there is something astonishing about Rawlings, flaws and all.
If I had to place a bet on the books that will survive, I would look to children's literature - not exclusively, but to a large degree. Because those are the books that people of all ages and genders in my culture turn to, for the sheer pleasure of reading. I hope one of these days I can say that about the majority of adult fiction I read.
Sharon in upstate NY
My best guess is that most of them won't be high culture books, post modern, or winners of the Nobel prize for literature. If you look back at the history of fiction, comparatively little of it was written as "art" or as "high culture" (poetry being to some degree an exception, but not quite as much as one might think). The books that we read over and over again tend to be their day's low culture, books read by most of the literate populace, for their own pleasure. While it may be hard for modern tv addicts to imagine reading George Eliot or going to see "Tamburlaine" for pleasure, it is a simple fact.
They also probably won't arise from the lowest of low cultures, either. While some bad books have made it into the canon, and some bad books have been reclaimed in the name of the gender or history of their authors, mostly people don't like to read bad ooks. And who can blame them. The occasional over-the-top potboiler, that is fun to read but with virtually no meaningful content (given where I live, I probably shouldn't say this, but Cooper leaps to mind), and the occasional bad bit of high culture, that no one really likes to read but everyone says is interesting ("Finnegan's Wake" will do as an obvious example, but there are plenty of others.), but mostly, the books in the canon are well beloved by most readers, precisely because they are fun and readable.
So I'd be inclined to toss out things like Delillo, who is a very entertaining novelist, but an awful lot of work to read for very little return. I don't claim to know whether it is identification or vicarious enjoyment that allows one to fall thoroughly into a book's world and have trouble escaping its gravity, but I'm fairly sure that's never happened in a Delillo novel. My experience of most self-consciously post-modern authors is that I admire the way they right, the fun they are having, the ideas they are playing with, but don't much care what happens.
Wanting to care what happens next is a very old fashioned, dull way to think about what makes a good book, but I'm not sure it has been exceeded. Certainly, I don't think it has been exceeded by the contemporary psychological novel, an example of which would be the novels of Toni Morrison, or Dorothy Allison, which goes on and on explaining how someone came to be the way they are. The characters become who they are through the survival of an unending history of suffering, which logically concludes in the result at hand. Enduring that much suffering with a character is possible, if you very much like the character. But characters who are always and only formed by their experience of pain and suffering are usually hard to like, and after reading a few such novels, the process of being wrenched, over and over again, gets extremely tedious. I suspect some will survive, as exemplars in literary classes, of a recreation of the sentimental novel (the 18th century genre we seemed compelled to relive). But by and large, I don't forsee them making it either.
I suspect a few big, important novels, that lay open the politics and history of the times will also survive, but again, mostly to be read by scholars, not book lovers. There's something fundamentally archaic, and often dull, about reading a radical tract from the past. Try it sometime - pick one that has held up fairly, perhaps "The Jungle" and try to care about its political agenda. It works fine in the abstract, but I'd be shocked to learn there is someone out there who re-reads "The Jungle" the way people re-read Jane Austen. I fear McEwan, who I rather like, will be toast. I kind of hope that Roth and his indescribably dull _Plot Against America_ will be.
If I were placing bets (which I am, in fact), I'd lay odds that many of the books best remembered from my time will be children's literature, which has bloomed in the last decade in ways that are both exciting and novel. Freed by the constraints of being timely and meaningful, people have gone about writing really good, deeply enjoyable books, many of them quite literary.
Rowling and Pullman, so often discussed in the same sentence, seem to me like logical survivors both. Pullman is more "literary" but he is also less fun - his style is heavy handed and tedious at times, and his characters aren't very interesting. On the other hand, the story is compelling - despite the flaws in his telling, despite the fact that it is never made clear why the characters, who supposedly love so deeply, can even stand to be together, there is something both original and engaging about him. One can imagine this book as a high culture novel, rather than a children's novel, and recognize that the adult version would be nigh on unreadable, but in writing for a younger audience, Pullman is freed of his worst writing, and pulled towards something greater in scope than most adult novels would dare imagine. Pullman is a Romantic, in the old sense, and I rather think that a little romanticism might do us good.
Rowling's style is less self-consciously artistic, but more readable, and her characters better drawn and more complex. She's very uneven - the second book in the series is quite awful; and at times terribly predictable - in her fifth book, for example, the death of Dumbledore is both inevitable and endlessly foreshadowed. Having grown too big for an editor, with a desperate readership that demands length above all, the faults in her writing have been somewhat magnified.
But Rawling's books are smart, and funny (sadly, Pullman's aren't), and many of her characters are astonishingly complex. And she and Pullman make excellent companions, because if there is one thing that Rawling is not, despite her reliance on magic, it is romantic. Her novels are, oddly, novels about being grown-up (despite the fact that her main characters are children), and they are about recognizing that the flawed and fallen adult world is a place of magic and power. In a world where real adulthood is increasingly rare, and where fantasies of youth are everywhere, there is something astonishing about Rawlings, flaws and all.
If I had to place a bet on the books that will survive, I would look to children's literature - not exclusively, but to a large degree. Because those are the books that people of all ages and genders in my culture turn to, for the sheer pleasure of reading. I hope one of these days I can say that about the majority of adult fiction I read.
Sharon in upstate NY
Saturday, January 28, 2006
My new career - full time mitten knitting
I'm pretty sure if I gave up gardening, writing, teaching, sleeping, sex and eating, and just knitted mittens full time, I could make them faster than my husband and children can lose them. Now the good thing about this is that I really enjoy knitting mittens and socks - the bad thing is that even sock and mitten knitting isn't nearly as good as sex, sleep, food, or gardening.
It amazes me how fast they lose them - Eric too! And it doesn't matter whether they are the quickie, all stockinette mittens knitted in bulky weight yarn, or the fancy ones with elaborate fair-isle patterns knitted in yarn the approximate weight of thread on needles that look like toothpicks. Nor does it matter if I tell my husband, presumably an adult, don't lose these - they took me many, many hours. Much less the children. (Why, you ask sagely, do I bother knitting the fancy kind, when they are simply going to get lost? This is a perfectly legitimate question, to which I can only answer...I haven't the faintest idea. Nor do I have the faintest idea why I have just cast on yet another such pair for Eric in a Danish star pattern.)
I've tried the cords that run through the sleeves of their coats, but that just means they lose both mittens at once, instead of one at a time (and Eric won't let me make one for him, on the not unreasonable assumption that having his wife tie his mittens to his clothes might infantilize him in front of his students.) So I've decided the only solution is to knit mittens to the exclusion of all other activities, or, horrors, to actually purchase some cheap mittens for them to lose. I think it says something about me that I haven't done the latter yet, and am still debating whether I can simply knit full time. I'm sure what it says is nothing good.
In other news around the homestead, the robins are back, which is not surprising since today, at the end of January, we had our 8th day of the month above 50 degrees. This has been a very, very strange winter so far.
Eli has lost his first tooth, and the second of his bottom front teeth is on the verge of falling out, giving him a look that can only be described as "hillbilly child." He's doing very, very well in kindergarten, and really starting to initiate and respond to conversation with us, a very great joy.
Simon has learned to play "The Minister's Cat" with us - I was surprised by how fast he picked up what an adjective was, and by some of the adjectives he was able to come up with. I was particularly impressed by "The Minister's Cat is a Rufous Cat" which he was able to intuit, means reddish, from a comparison of the birds in his audobon book.
Isaiah is starting to seriously potty train (hurray!!), and despite a severe case of control freakism (also known as two-ness), is a lot of fun to have around. And Asher is starting to wave and grab at things, and last night, slept 6 1/2 consecutive hours.
So things are going pretty well around here.
Sharon
It amazes me how fast they lose them - Eric too! And it doesn't matter whether they are the quickie, all stockinette mittens knitted in bulky weight yarn, or the fancy ones with elaborate fair-isle patterns knitted in yarn the approximate weight of thread on needles that look like toothpicks. Nor does it matter if I tell my husband, presumably an adult, don't lose these - they took me many, many hours. Much less the children. (Why, you ask sagely, do I bother knitting the fancy kind, when they are simply going to get lost? This is a perfectly legitimate question, to which I can only answer...I haven't the faintest idea. Nor do I have the faintest idea why I have just cast on yet another such pair for Eric in a Danish star pattern.)
I've tried the cords that run through the sleeves of their coats, but that just means they lose both mittens at once, instead of one at a time (and Eric won't let me make one for him, on the not unreasonable assumption that having his wife tie his mittens to his clothes might infantilize him in front of his students.) So I've decided the only solution is to knit mittens to the exclusion of all other activities, or, horrors, to actually purchase some cheap mittens for them to lose. I think it says something about me that I haven't done the latter yet, and am still debating whether I can simply knit full time. I'm sure what it says is nothing good.
In other news around the homestead, the robins are back, which is not surprising since today, at the end of January, we had our 8th day of the month above 50 degrees. This has been a very, very strange winter so far.
Eli has lost his first tooth, and the second of his bottom front teeth is on the verge of falling out, giving him a look that can only be described as "hillbilly child." He's doing very, very well in kindergarten, and really starting to initiate and respond to conversation with us, a very great joy.
Simon has learned to play "The Minister's Cat" with us - I was surprised by how fast he picked up what an adjective was, and by some of the adjectives he was able to come up with. I was particularly impressed by "The Minister's Cat is a Rufous Cat" which he was able to intuit, means reddish, from a comparison of the birds in his audobon book.
Isaiah is starting to seriously potty train (hurray!!), and despite a severe case of control freakism (also known as two-ness), is a lot of fun to have around. And Asher is starting to wave and grab at things, and last night, slept 6 1/2 consecutive hours.
So things are going pretty well around here.
Sharon
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Making Changes
This is counter-intuitive, but ultimately, I think radical change is easier than incremental change. The more radically and dramatically you transform your life, the harder it is to slip backwards into old habits, and the more compelling the arguments for adaptation, rather than rejection.
To use our own experience as an example, we picked up and moved out of our urban home, and out to the country, and took up growing our own food. DH and I gave up our fantasies of a two career academic coupling in exchange for more time, less money, and less need for money. Those are all transformations we might have made in another context, but I suspect we would never have fully succeeded in making them had we stayed where we were - the temptation to revert to our prior ways would have been too compelling, and everything about the demands of our life would have drawn us in a different direction.
I understand the desire to stay in an urban environmentand make money. Our own experience (YMMV, of course) was that it wasvery difficult to save money when we lived in Boston. In one of themost expensive housing markets in the country, more than 50% of ourincome went for housing costs. Here in upstate NY, my 4000 sqft farmhouse on 27 acres with outbuildings cost about the same as a condo in an exurb 45 minutes from downtown Boston (that was five years ago - now there's not a chance we could get a condo for that!). The taxes areconsiderably lower. Cost of living is substantially lower as well -gas and oil prices, cordwood, cars, clothing, childcare, food - allare lower here, and mostly of higher quality - ie, the used car onecan get for 2K here is considerably better than the same used car for2K in Boston. The food I can buy most cheaply here is local in-season produce, bought direct from local farmers, and of much higher quality than even the trucked in local produce in an urban environment. On the other hand, farmer's market produce in Boston was extremely expensive. Moreoever, it is easy to eliminate certain costs. We can cut firewood. We can grow much of our own food, including eggs and meat. We can barter for honey, milk and beef with neighbors. Salaries in rural areas are lower - but my observation isthat they are not proportionally lower - that is, the lower salary ismore than offset by the increased resources and the lower cost of living.
Moreover, the lifestyle is different. In the Boston area, most people live in fairly class-segregated communities - rich people do not live next door to poor people. And because of that, the standards of the community are extremely rigid - just try to leave your lawn uncut in most middle-class suburban neighborhoods. Here, however, we literally have mansions next to trailers (just up the street), and there is no single economic or aesthetic standard. Thus, when we couldn't afford a lawn mower for an extended period, we were not the only people with grass up to our waists.
Fighting the class system is hard work - it is hard to get over the embarassment of doing things that people associate with poverty, it is hard to change your standards of beauty to see the homemade wooden bench as more beautiful than the embroidered couch, and it is hard to live cheap. It is also wise. But for those without a strong sense of self discipline in that regard (like me!), I think a radical change is in many ways better and easier than small transformations.
Sharon
To use our own experience as an example, we picked up and moved out of our urban home, and out to the country, and took up growing our own food. DH and I gave up our fantasies of a two career academic coupling in exchange for more time, less money, and less need for money. Those are all transformations we might have made in another context, but I suspect we would never have fully succeeded in making them had we stayed where we were - the temptation to revert to our prior ways would have been too compelling, and everything about the demands of our life would have drawn us in a different direction.
I understand the desire to stay in an urban environmentand make money. Our own experience (YMMV, of course) was that it wasvery difficult to save money when we lived in Boston. In one of themost expensive housing markets in the country, more than 50% of ourincome went for housing costs. Here in upstate NY, my 4000 sqft farmhouse on 27 acres with outbuildings cost about the same as a condo in an exurb 45 minutes from downtown Boston (that was five years ago - now there's not a chance we could get a condo for that!). The taxes areconsiderably lower. Cost of living is substantially lower as well -gas and oil prices, cordwood, cars, clothing, childcare, food - allare lower here, and mostly of higher quality - ie, the used car onecan get for 2K here is considerably better than the same used car for2K in Boston. The food I can buy most cheaply here is local in-season produce, bought direct from local farmers, and of much higher quality than even the trucked in local produce in an urban environment. On the other hand, farmer's market produce in Boston was extremely expensive. Moreoever, it is easy to eliminate certain costs. We can cut firewood. We can grow much of our own food, including eggs and meat. We can barter for honey, milk and beef with neighbors. Salaries in rural areas are lower - but my observation isthat they are not proportionally lower - that is, the lower salary ismore than offset by the increased resources and the lower cost of living.
Moreover, the lifestyle is different. In the Boston area, most people live in fairly class-segregated communities - rich people do not live next door to poor people. And because of that, the standards of the community are extremely rigid - just try to leave your lawn uncut in most middle-class suburban neighborhoods. Here, however, we literally have mansions next to trailers (just up the street), and there is no single economic or aesthetic standard. Thus, when we couldn't afford a lawn mower for an extended period, we were not the only people with grass up to our waists.
Fighting the class system is hard work - it is hard to get over the embarassment of doing things that people associate with poverty, it is hard to change your standards of beauty to see the homemade wooden bench as more beautiful than the embroidered couch, and it is hard to live cheap. It is also wise. But for those without a strong sense of self discipline in that regard (like me!), I think a radical change is in many ways better and easier than small transformations.
Sharon
Drinks for Everyone!
Well, maybe not. But I can't claim that I'm not enjoying the current sequence of Washington scandals. Now *these* are the Republicans I recall from my youth in the 1980s - corrupt, venal, foolish. The great frustration of the Karl Rove 21st century has been how good the Republicans have been at getting what they want. It is delightful to finally see a few of them paying the price for their sins. Schaudenfreude, to be sure, is an emotion not to be proud of. But I'm enjoying myself a bit too much to conceal it.
None of which says much about the future - watch John McCain distance himself from the realities of the Republican administration he's been whoring himself to for the last 8 years. Watch him be elected. Just watch. But in the meantime, I'll take my pleasures where I can.
Sharon
None of which says much about the future - watch John McCain distance himself from the realities of the Republican administration he's been whoring himself to for the last 8 years. Watch him be elected. Just watch. But in the meantime, I'll take my pleasures where I can.
Sharon
What of the great middle class?
In America, "the middle class" encompasses everyone. Ask around. Most of the rich and almost all of the poor call themselves, at best, upper and lower-middle class. No one here ever really admits to being rich or poor. Neither do we admit, even to ourselves, that wealth is a fairly fixed thing in our society, that the vast majority of those who are born poor or wealthy will never leave that state.
And yet, I suspect a new wave of social mobility is in the works, one that rivals the Veblens development of the middle class - the move of the middle class into the realm of the poor (comparatively - if we're being honest with ourselves, all Americans, poor or rich, are so astonishingly wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world that we can't even imagine, but then again, context is everything), all without anyone in the middle class noticing.
The first step has been the refusal of the government to contain the costs of health care in any sane way - meaning that the poor, and even middle class in our society have something in common with the poor of the third world - they can't afford the medical treatment they need. As more companies decline to provide insurance, or demand huge payments from their employees, and health care costs rise, parents, the elderly and anyone with a medical problem gets poorer.
Next, note that while we all were so pleased to see that the GDP was rising, that rise provided absolutely no benefit to the middle or lower classes - nada. The country got richer, but only really rich people actually experienced a net benefit. In fact, adjusted for inflation, the rest of us were worse off.
Now watch the way that rising energy prices (yep, they are still rising!) are affecting consumers - as more of their income goes to keep warm and get to work, they can afford less. The poorest percentages are already making choices - food or heat? Medicine or gas? Our local fuel assistance programs are totally overwhelmed.
How long before the pattern drags the "middle class" down with them. Don't get me wrong, no one will ever stop calling themselves middle class, but we'll start to notice that the things that have been the hallmark of that class are gone - home ownership, health insurance, travel, leisure, entertainment - and the fact that people can no longer indulge in the above is likely to hurt the economy further.
It may be that someday, everyone is still calling themselves middle class here, despite the fact that we've moved to a perfect, two class society - the poor and the rich - eliminating 500 years of economic progress.
Sharon
And yet, I suspect a new wave of social mobility is in the works, one that rivals the Veblens development of the middle class - the move of the middle class into the realm of the poor (comparatively - if we're being honest with ourselves, all Americans, poor or rich, are so astonishingly wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world that we can't even imagine, but then again, context is everything), all without anyone in the middle class noticing.
The first step has been the refusal of the government to contain the costs of health care in any sane way - meaning that the poor, and even middle class in our society have something in common with the poor of the third world - they can't afford the medical treatment they need. As more companies decline to provide insurance, or demand huge payments from their employees, and health care costs rise, parents, the elderly and anyone with a medical problem gets poorer.
Next, note that while we all were so pleased to see that the GDP was rising, that rise provided absolutely no benefit to the middle or lower classes - nada. The country got richer, but only really rich people actually experienced a net benefit. In fact, adjusted for inflation, the rest of us were worse off.
Now watch the way that rising energy prices (yep, they are still rising!) are affecting consumers - as more of their income goes to keep warm and get to work, they can afford less. The poorest percentages are already making choices - food or heat? Medicine or gas? Our local fuel assistance programs are totally overwhelmed.
How long before the pattern drags the "middle class" down with them. Don't get me wrong, no one will ever stop calling themselves middle class, but we'll start to notice that the things that have been the hallmark of that class are gone - home ownership, health insurance, travel, leisure, entertainment - and the fact that people can no longer indulge in the above is likely to hurt the economy further.
It may be that someday, everyone is still calling themselves middle class here, despite the fact that we've moved to a perfect, two class society - the poor and the rich - eliminating 500 years of economic progress.
Sharon
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