Its raining, again. Third rain storm of the month. Governor Patrick asked President Obama to declare my county (among others) a disaster area, and he did. “My” river, the Sudbury River, is overflowing onto already well-saturated grounds, flooding roads and basements. As for us, we’re up here on our hill and have no water trouble. The part of the front yard at the bottom of our hill that is flooded is destined anyway to become a seasonal pool or permanent pond.
The only rain trouble would be of the mood, but how convenient it has been, that the rain has been coming down on weekdays and that on weekends the sun has been shining. Last weekend left the inside of the house sorely neglected, but now I’ve caught up, having vacuumed, done and folded a mountain of laundry, cleaned the kitchen, dusted. In the basement I finished putting the final coat of paint on the hive, and primed the room that will become a library/study and (in a pinch) a third bedroom on one side, a storage and cold room/root cellar on the other. Also in the basement I watered the seedlings – they’re getting thirstier by the minute – and wished the rains would stop, so I could transplant some out, to make room for potting up others.
Turns out we won’t be replacing our old, rotting, dirt-floor small shed with a new and larger, insulated workshop/pottery studio. The previous owner had an unwieldy septic system put in, and some digging today confirmed that part of that system lies within 10 feet of the corner of the old shed – and closer than 10 feet we may not go. We’ll try to appeal to our Town’s Board of Health, but I’m pessimistic.
My idea now is to keep the old structure, to reorganize its shelving, and to build a platform for a floor so DH can still have a small workshop in it. We might put up a small potting shed nearer to the vegetable garden.
Well, at least we saved $13.000 today! Should this make me feel better about that pending $400 order from Burn Ridge (for paw paws, hardy kiwis, rosa rugosa, elderberries, among others)? The $350 for the hive and accessories? Shall I throw in some extra mushroom spawn too?
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Then we have the root cellar. The asbestos tiles were removed so we’re a go. But since our future in this place is (dare I say it) not as certain as it once was (aargh), we may not go ahead until we know that future better (more news at the end of April). Let’s just say that taking a large chunk out of a basement room that could be finished as a tv room (gack), so as to install a root cellar (a what?), would not be a good “investment decision” (in case we sell).
That of course also makes the bushes and trees order and the spawn order problematic.
Do you think about the future? Do you wonder what it will be like? Or do you live like it’s always going to be the way it has been?
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I found at least 5 entries like this one, all in drafts, abandoned. As I prepare for the growing season with more resolve and urgency than ever before now that my apprenticeship is over (ha!), I need to line up my motivations like a general does her troops. This is just a declaration, not a proof or demonstration: others are supplying the data much more clearly and comprehensively than I ever could.
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1. We’ve got problems
I believe that sometime in my lifetime, and certainly in the lifetime of my daughter, life will be changed, drastically. This is because three changes are already happening.
Peak Oil
(I believe that) there will be a chronic shortage in oil production and thus cheap oil. This year, in 20 years, I don’t know, but in my lifetime. This will not just affect the heating of our houses and our trips to the grocery store, but also the delivery trucks’ trips to the grocery store, and the farm equipment that “grows” our produce, and the factory equipment that put together all those plastic containers for our shampoos, and the pharmaceuticals producing our medicine, etc. (cf. The Oil Drum)
Economic Depression
(I believe that) increasing debt, decreasing value of money, hyperinflation, the precariousness of globalization and the lie of never-ending growth will soon mean the end of any value to our national currency, the end of imports, the closing of businesses and banks, rampant unemployment, the end of the middle class as we know it, and the cessation of public services. (cf. The Crash Course)
Climate Change and Overpopulation
(I believe that) the Earth is changing and that it’s too late to do anything about it (if we ever could), that several tipping points have been already been (b)reached. The effect is the disturbance of the climate pattern upon which our agriculture and settlements developed and rely, and thus a growing difficulty for growing food and maintaining our towns and cities. This means a growing number of climate refugees and massive immigrations of our immense world population.
All three are interrelated. I suspect Economic Depression will be the first step, soon exacerbated by Peak Oil, then, more gradually but much more insistently, Climate Change. (Read also, John Michael Greer’s “Endgame” and Richard Heinberg’s Museletter).
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2. Collapse
I believe that even just one and certainly all of these events together will lead to collapse. I don’t believe it will be as bad as zombies or The Road, but I foresee some hard times and, at the very least, the end of the way we live our lives today.
I can’t say that it is my hope that this won’t happen. Don’t get me wrong, it would be great if it didn’t. If, for instance, we found some renewable, clean and omnipresent source of energy, freely and democratically available, capable of powering our fleet of vehicles and our agricultural and factory equipment. Oh, and if it could also reverse the climate change tipping points… Sounds like heaven on earth to me, but I’ll just go ahead and prepare for if that doesn’t happen.
And it’s not like we have a lot of time. Collapse is already happening. Maybe not to me, or you, but to many in this country, in the world, and to whole countries even, to some degree or another. But for reasons that will become clear, here I just want to talk about myself, my family, and my neighborhood.
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3. Hope
Still, I have hope. I hope that (for myself and my community, at least), collapse will be gradual enough. I hope it’s not a precipice, but a staircase, and that at each step enough people will (have to) take sufficient action to “catch up” on the decline. I hope that we can descend gracefully: without famine, violence, the destruction of culture and civilization…
A funny thing, though, this hope. I hope it’s reasonable (unlike “aw, come on, nothing’s going to happen!”). It will require hard work and sacrifices, but we could pull it off. And to those who say “forget it, it’s too late, TS is really going to HTF,” I say “I hear you, but you know what? I have no choice but to hope. My child leaves me no choice.” I must do my best to make my hope, her hope come true.
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4. Starting descent
How do I do this? We, myself and my immediate family, have already started to power down. For instance, this month, February 2010, is our 16th month of the Riot for Austerity. In the Riot we try to decrease our consumption of oil, water, electricity, and consumer goods, and our production of waste, all to10% of the US national average. It’s tough! We’re almost there with certain things, but not anywhere near 10% with others.
We changed our eating habits: less meat, less food, more bulk, dry goods, and very little eating out. We are establishing a large food garden, with a hoop house for a winter harvest, and hopefully a beehive soon, and chickens. We work on our food storage and emergency supplies. The immediate goal is to grow and store enough and a healthy variety of food to feed two families, and to plant an extra row for the hungry. You can find more details of our lifestyle changes on the “What We Do” page.
Why are we doing this, making these sacrifices in the time and the land that is still plenty? Do I think it’s going to make a difference to climate change? I’m not that naive.
But I do it out of principle: to take more than what one needs is to be greedy and bad for the soul.
I do it because, when I make something myself, with my own time and genius and effort, I take responsibility for it and I take care of it as a thing that I love. When I buy it, I just get the responsibility, like an extra price tag, easily snipped off. I “take care” of it only because it cost me so much – or, more frequently, I don’t take care of it at all, because it cost me so very little. I want to take control, responsibility, and care.
I want to be prepared – practically and psychologically – for a future with less cheap oil, less income, less security, more manual labor, the need for different kinds of skills, etc.
I do it to set up a model for others, for when circumstances will force them, too, to adopt such a lifestyle. That’s my next point.
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5. A model
We take these and many other actions as an average (middle class) family, with an average income and debt. We can’t bring in the big machines to flatten the land and mow down all the trees that shade our vegetable garden. We can’t tear down our 1950’s ranch and put a zero energy house in its place. We can’t buy the $1000 compost toilet, the photovoltaics, the hybrid car. And that’s good, because that makes our place an attainable model for anyone in our quite average situation around here.
As people start realizing they can no longer afford the $300 electricity bill, the $4000 oil bill, or the cable subscription, we can show them that it’s possible both practically and psychologically, for them to descend without hurting and actually even gaining something. For we don’t need television and video games to entertain ourselves, and digging in the garden is better exercise than the gym, and eating from that garden is healthier than take-out. I hope to demonstrate by example that living with a little less at a time does not need to hurt.
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6. Will that be all?
Do I think that what we are doing and working on – this 90% reduction in consumption of this and that, this 50% (?) self-reliance in food, this reskilling, etc. – will be all that is required of us?
Not by a long shot! But as a first step it’s the perfect preparation for the second step.
Which is? I don’t know. Ask me on a good day, then ask me again on a bad day. All I know is that what my family and I are doing right now is not what will be required, at some point, of all of us, and that after that, there will be even more.
Think of it. When oil hits $5, or $10, or $50 a gallon? When the shelves in the grocery store stay empty? When we are freezing in our houses? When half the people on the street are unemployed, and one third is homeless to boot? When a shift in climate wipes out a major crop? When the majority of us can no longer ignore or evade the situation, because our money can’t buy anything? Now we’re talking collapse.
There are times when I think the worst and that head-for-the-hills feeling flares up. When, in essence, I lose hope. But I squash it. Many reasons make it impossible for my family to pack up and dig in. It wouldn’t work for me to want to live as if collapse has already happened. It would wreck my family and isolate me. That’s not what I’m aiming for.
So if in the eyes of some I take it too fast, and in the eyes of others I take it too slow, so be it. I hope I’m hitting that golden mean, but I also know that mean is sliding down as we speak, until at some point “too much” and “too little” collapse into one.
In the meantime I hope the forerunners can be helpful, by their example, to the masses descending behind them. But if there’s suddenly going to be a whole lot of people barreling down that ever steeper and narrower staircase, it would be good for those who are ahead to install a railing as they go. Or else we’re all going to end up in a big, crushed heap at the bottom.
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That railing is relocalization, but about that, next time. It takes a lot out of me to write this, and it takes a long time to write, because I know that most of you don’t agree, and I feel I have to be argumentative, on the defensive, and watch my words. While I just want to say it like it is for me, so we know where I stand.
During the Transition Training we watched a lot of images and videos of Transition Initiatives, and at first I watched them with mixed feelings of joy and anxiousness. My heart sank because I inevitably thought: “I can’t make that happen.”
That sinking feeling stems from the fact that, though I arrived here over 11 years ago, studied, married, bought a house and had a child here, I still don’t feel at home. Why? Not because of the people around me: I have found each and every one of my colleagues, neighbors and friends – Americans or not – to be sincerely welcoming. So it must be me.
I always assumed children have a natural sense of being at home, for I myself, as a child, felt at home, without ever a shadow of a doubt. But was it because of something a child does or is, or was it because of what my parents did and modeled? Or was it because of the place?
The place was Antwerp (Belgium), a city within half an hour’s drive of the city where my grandparents and aunts and uncles all lived. A place where my family can trace and place our ancestry as far back as the 1700s. And a place with a culture in which “migrating” is the exception. You see, Belgians don’t leave Belgium: the emigration rate is less than a percent. And Belgium is a small country, about the size of Maryland, so children “leave” (for college, or to live) to within at most a two hours’ drive away from their parents. In my family I was the third (out of four now) in the span of two generations to move abroad, which makes my family exceptionally migratory.
Let’s put this in context. The United Nations Commission on Population and Development concluded in 2006 that only 3% of the world population is an international migrant (with most migrants moving from developing to developed countries). The kind of mobility within the United States that makes for big moves, in contrast, is high: the Census of 2000 determined that, within 5 years, no less than 8.42% of its respondents had moved to another state and an additional 2.86% to a foreign country. That number has in all probability gone up in the last couple of years.
So let’s just say that my Amie is seeing a home very different from what I saw as a kid. We see family once or twice a year, not every weekend. Mama and Baba have strange accents – and so does she, insisting on “woh-T-er”. Mama and Baba can’t vote and they don’t know how to negotiate certain communal systems. So I am afraid that Amie will not know what “home” is, or that she will call “home” something that I would call but a weak version of my own rich childhood memory of home.
And so I must ask myself: can I, dare I, make this place my home? What if home means not just the core family of the three of us, not just lengthy visits (visits: that says it all) from grandparents and aunts and cousins, not just local traditions with good, good friends that we see often… but also the wider culture of a hometown?
The Training helped me realize that I should make this hometown happen, for myself, for Amie, and that it is possible. That this what a Transition Initiative could mean to me, my family, and the people in my community: not just becoming more resilient in the face of peak oil, climate change, and economic crisis, but first and foremost what our trainer called “becoming indigenous toyour place”: coming home.
I just watched a beautiful and well-paced BBC documentary called Farm for the Future. I’m totally re-energized by it. I wish I could find a permaculture course that’s nearby, affordable, and spread over a couple of weekends and evenings (not the luxury-resort two week intensive). In the meantime, I shall be hitting the books again. But first, let me peruse the plant catalog of the Agroforestry Research Trust.
And before that, let me share with you the one basic thing I learned (again) from this movie: peak oil is not “oil shortage”. It’s famine.
It’s been several weeks now that I have tended the fire.
From my studies and my research for my historical novel I know that for the Romans, the Greeks and all the cultures around and before them, the fire in the hearth was the heart of the home, of the city, of life. The fire was where God lived, and so every house was a temple. Or, I should say, it was where the Goddess lived, because the fire was a very female affair. For instance, it was the eldest daughter’s duty to keep it going. Consider also the Vestals, in charge of the Sacred Fire of that ancient goddess, Vesta or Hestia, burning perpetually at the center of Rome and Greece. And in the prehistoric, older-than-old religions the Goddess was present in the trees, the flame and the ashes…
Fascinating!
Our house is small at just one floor with 1500 sq.f., of which we shut off about 300 sq.f. during winter. I make it even smaller by closing the bedroom doors and, when I want the living room to warm up fast, I also close the doors to the small dining room and kitchen. Then warm life contracts to about 300 sq.f., filled with happy people, books, music, two comfy sofas, lots of art materials and toys. Around the fire, roaring in the stove.
I feel empowered having re-taken control of an essential aspect of our home and our family life. I also feel privileged to be the one who starts and keeps the fire going, to have a house with a wood stove, the wood to burn, and the family to warm.
Choose a minimum of 7 blogs to give this award to that you feel to be brilliant in content and design. That’s the toughest part.
Show the 7 winner’s links on your blog and leave them a comment informing them that they have been given the “Honest Scrap.” That’s the easiest part.
List 10 honest things about yourself that people may not know.
So here goes:
I was born in Congo (it was called Zaire back then), where my parents were doing missionary work – my dad taught math at a country high school. We left when I was one, so I don’t recall that adventure. I grew up in (Dutch-speaking) Antwerp, Belgium, the oldest of two. I moved to Boston in 1998. The idea was to stay for a year to do my Masters (in Philosophy) but I never, or at least haven’t, left. I haven’t been back to Belgium in over three years! We’re trying to make it work this winter.
I like being alone. DH will call it like it is and say I’m antisocial. True, if you let me I’ll just potter around here on my hill and be totally happy. But I do love the company of good friends and good friends-to-be and am never more thrilled than when they stay over for a meal or a sleep-over. Then I will molly-coddle them to make them come back more often.
If I didn’t have my wonderful family, I’d be a drifter. I’d live out of my car, on a dime, and travel this great continent seeking out nature. I discovered this about myself when I moved here. I traded my beloved medieval Europe for the adventure of America’s wide-open spaces, dense forests and mountain peaks…
I am obsessed with nuclear threat but am careful not to indulge myself too often. It goes back to when I saw The Day After on television as a young teen: it sent me into a tailspin of depression for months. Now I sometimes consciously seek it out, because in some ways it makes me feel more alive. But I’m careful. I know my limits.
I’m addicted to the written word. I must read and I must write, every day, or I go crazy. The most gruesome moment in Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was not the nuclear disaster or the cannibals or the dying world or the physical and emotional deterioration, etc. etc., but the scene where the protagonist looks at a sodden book and can’t remember what once attracted him so to reading and learning. Chilling.
I despair a lot, yet I go through life smiling and my smile is sincere. How do I do it? I don’t know, I just don’t see how a gloomy face could help… Same with my blog: it’s mostly chipper and the gloom only comes through once in a while. Whenever I write an entry about how scared and sad I am I over-write it and then it doesn’t feel right, so I nix it.
The stuff we do here (like the Riot and Freeze Yer Buns etc.) gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, as in it’s fun and makes for a healthier lifestyle, both physically and spiritually. But I don’t think any of it will help to make the future better, unless we start something like Transition in our towns.
I’m lousy at most homesteading things – you should see my needlework (cough) – but I don’t care. I’ll get better with practice.
I walk away from arguments. I’m the most non-confrontational person I know. If I stick with an argument I soon get upset to the point of tears and often feel physically sick. I think that’s why I walked away from an academic career: even arguing metaphysics was just not in me.
I’m a procrastinator but I have some ways of overcoming that. I’m big on making TO DO lists and will always include something I’ve already done, then will tick that off and that gets me going. And sometimes I will post something on the blog as having been accomplished, while it hasn’t yet, and then I’ll feel so guilty, I just have to do it!
Well, I wanted to make an upbeat list, but I guess many of these points seem rather negative and gloomy. What can I say: it’s honest scrap.
I was talking with a friend today and she mentioned my picture a while back of my canning pantry. She said she certainly understands the feeling of growing, harvesting, putting up and getting the firewood ready from her reading of the Little House on the Prairie books – which I admitted I have never read (all gasp), as it’s not quite part of the European schoolgirl’s library, and as I simply never felt the need to read it after my school years. She told me that especially the ritual of putting up always gave her a sense of security, and how had she lost that feeling?
I said when you live according to the seasons, you live according to the ever recurring year, with its waxings and wanings, its rituals of life and work, its periods of plenty and of less, and its ample pockets of security in rough times… A life, in short, that can count on certain comforts even if they’re not present, because the recurring rituals hold them in place in the future. This gives you a sense of security without however lulling you into a false sense of security. Because it is a whole year, it doesn’t get boring, and the periods and transitions within it cannot be taken for granted.
This unlike “modern life”, which lives not the recurring year, but the recurring day, over and over again the same day, with (as per usual at least) not a one big shift, whether gift or sacrifice, to make us feel alive and the passage of time.
This friend understands what I’m trying to do here, and I appreciate our conversations, however interrupted by kids and “modern life”, more than she knows. I hardly ever write about the emotional side of our endeavors and dreams on this blog, I don’t know why. Perhaps I fear of the dreaded “No Comments” under the entry headings. But most of the time, it is simple exhausting to try to get the maelstrom of emotions to stay still on paper/screen, in neat sentences let alone paragraphs. Easier to let it all come pouring out as a warbled stream of consciousness into the ear of a dear friend. And, later in the evening, to salvage a few choice thoughts.
Plant. Due to a miscalculation of the weather on my part – or the weatherman’s part? – I didn’t get to transplant the seedlings and sow more winter veggies today. Tomorrow, I hope. I did get to clean up the garden beds. Moved the pepper plants inside – but I will not call them houseplants, though, since houseplants invariably die on me.
Harvest. Swiss chard, kale, radishes (though maggots had already munched through most of them), green beans, carrots, peas, lima beans, last scallions, all the potatoes from the towers (Bintje) (made fries, not exactly the most ecological use of oil and electricity, I admit) and the last celery.
garlic for honey garlic pickles, Caribbean peach salsa and beloved canner in back
Preserve. Started honey garlic pickles: garlic cloves, apple cider vinegar, honey and 12 weeks of waiting (simplest of recipes here). Processed 1/2 bushel (25 lbs) of Farmers Market Cort apples into 9 quarts and 3 pints of unsweetened apple sauce (unsweetened because I want to use it as a replacement for oil and butter in cakes). Canned 12 half-pint jars of apple peel jelly. Froze 90 cubes of vegetable stock made from veg scraps. Made and froze more mirepoix with carrots and celery from the garden.
wood stash on porch
Waste Not. We pick up every stick that falls on our property for kindling, and we learned, with the help of Roz and www.woodheat.org (here and here – the acting is hilarious) how to most efficiently build and maintain a fire (our neighbor’s chimney constantly bellows thick, gray smoke, and we are determined not to do the same).
Want not. Bought 25 lbs of sugar and 20 lbs of all-purpose flour – time to fire up that little chest freezer – the over-the-fridge freezer was getting a bit too full anyway. Reorganized all my seed packets.
Build community food systems. Again not so much “built” as “supported”. I gave my last egg cartons to the egg guy at the Farmers Market and signed up for his raw milk and farm-fresh eggs club. It was the last Market in my town, but there is a bigger one in the next town over that will be going on for a couple more weeks: I might go check it out.
Eat the food. Minced meat out of the freezer with fresh mirepoix, fresh homemade veg stock, homegrown scallions and parsley and (store-bought) tomatoes that were going bad made a nice pasta sauce for a couple of days. Some of the frozen mirepoix went into our seafood stew feast for 10, and we opened the first jar of apple sauce and the first jar of blueberry jam, both of which Amie loved and we’re still alive.
