Power Down

What We Do button (c) Katrien Vander Straeten

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.

Bees

Well, yesterday evening was eventful. I heard a wild cat (or a fisher? – see the comments) in the street. Someone in a drive-by knocked our mailbox right off its perch. I saw the brake lights, heard the crash, the door slam and it speeding off, but it was too dark even to see the color of the car. And before that, I had my first class of Bee School – and this one’s about that.

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I take Rick Reault’s class at Codman Farm in Lincoln. About 35 people showed up; there was barely enough room to contain all of us. The instructor told us this matches the growing trend of the number of (small) beekeepers in our county and in New England.

He also told us that, these days, about 50% of the honey bee population (in hives) dies every year.

Half the bees!

Suppliers (growers) of bees cannot keep up with this rate. He didn’t want to go into the causes yet – that will be the third class, which is on diseases and stresses. But things are not going in the right direction.

I am keen on starting a hive. My neighbors gave us the thumbs up. There is no red tape to trip me up: no town rules and no need for permits in my town. Rick said there should be plenty of food for a hive in a New England suburb. He stressed beekeeping is challenging, in both senses of the word. He emphasized the need for honeybees. He gave us a sense of their plight, and I know about our plight, if we lose more honeybees.

If I want to get a hive this year (set up is in April), I would have to order by the end of February at the latest.

I need to decide soon!

A Bobcat?

So this happened half an hour ago, at 10 pm.

I’m sitting in my living room, working on the laptop. Suddenly there is a racket in the street. A small dog barking very, very loudly? Surely that’s not a dog? I go outside with my flashlight. It’s 10F and I’m wearing a skirt and a thin sweater and my breath is almost obscuring my vision, but the first new yowl I hear sets my whole body on fire. Hair-raising. Repelling, but oh so magnetic too…

I see two dark shapes moving across the street, about 40 yards away, down the hill in and out of the bushes. A large and a smaller shape. Cat like movements. And that cry: a short, repeated scream from one of them.

My street has no street lights, but there are some small porch lights – I wish it was one of those crystal clear full moon nights we had a couple of days ago. Then I see the eyes: two large yellow eyes sharply reflecting the light from the neighbor’s porch, and perhaps my own flashlight. A pair of smaller yellow (or was it white-bluish?) eyes right behind it.

By now, curious, drawn in, I’ve moved about 20 feet outside my door. The lit eyes disappear and I lose sight of their dark shapes. The screaming too has stopped. They’re invisible, who knows where, and I realize I’m easy prey – no really, that was my realization, here, in a Boston suburb!

I run inside and close the door.

It was this sound, the first one on that page. A lynx or bobcat, maybe a mother and her young.

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It was exactly around this time year that I heard the Great Horned Owls singing to each other behind my house. I’ve not heard them yet. The world is full of wild creatures, reminding us of what we are not. How good it feels, to be reminded!

In Other News

My first Beekeeping class this evening! I’m very excited and plan to report in full.

I realized that with all the soil (clay) we’ll be digging up to create the pond, we’ll be able to make an earth oven. There might even be enough to build a small adobe structure around the oven. We’ll just have to lug it all up the hill…

I also realized that I might have to hold off on buying the elderberry and blueberry shrubs, because chances are we won’t have their part of the garden (the flower garden up front) prepared by the time they are shipped. But I do have a wonderful space in mind for one or two hardy kiwi vines, and I’m sure I’ll be able to get that ready.

Be sure to scroll down to Part 7 of the Calcium in the Soil and Plant series.

Of Calcium in the Soil – Part 7

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This is already the seventh part in a series on how calcium and other nutrients get into the soil and then into plants. Here we finally meet the plant roots, and investigate how they take up water. Click to read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4, part 5 and part 6.

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7. Water uptake through osmosis, turgidity, root pressure and transpirational pull

I’ve given so much attention to the solubility of calcium in water because plant roots can take up nutrients only if they are dissolved in water. Let’s stick with the water for now and add nutrients in part 8. How do plants take up water?

The surface of root tips are made up of epidermal cells (epidermis = outer skin) and their extensions, called root hairs, which form a fuzzy band and increase the absorptive surface area and thus the rate of water uptake several hundredfold. These surface cells and hairs draw water from the soil by osmosis (Greek osmos = a push).

Osmosis happens when there is an unequal concentration of solutes in the water on either side of the epidermis. On the outside, the soil water consists mostly of water with a small amount of salts (any dissolved ions – see part 5). On the inside, the epidermal cells contain water with a much larger concentration of salts, sugars and other substances. The water in the soil seeks to dilute the water inside the epidermal cells, and it pushes, through the epidermis, into the root. The epidermal cell membranes allow this free movement, but only in this direction. If outward movement were allowed, this system would not work, and the root would lose its precious salts and sugars.

The water is stored in the vacuole of the cell, making it turgid or swollen. When the vacuole is fully inflated, the water uptake will slow down, because the internal pressure or turgor inside the cell will squeeze the water out to the next cell, and so up into the rest of the plant, to where it’s needed. You see this effect when you water a wilted plant: slowly all its deflated cells are filled with water through turgidity.

This explains what the problem is with excessively saline soils (see part 5). Even if there is enough water in the soil, it is not diluted enough, and so the inequality between it and the water in the root cells is not large enough, to achieve strong osmosis. Even worse, there might be less water content in the soil water than in the root cells, which reverses the direction of the osmotic flow. Deflated of their torgur pressure, the plant will wilt and, if this continues, die.

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Cross section of a plant root
(image from Capon, Brian, Botany for Gardeners, Timber Press, 1990, p.141)

Water constantly circulates into, through and out of the plant. This happens through two specialized vascular tissue systems that run up and down through the entire plant. One is the xylem tissue, which carries water and solutes, and the other is the phloem tissue, which carries mainly organic nutrients, like sucrose. We’re interested in the xylem, which is situated at the center of the root.

To get the water from the epidermis (outer skin) to the xylem, it has to cross another boundary, the endodermis (= inner skin). The endodermis is a second osmotic pump, adding to the pressure (but I’ll return to this one in part 8, because it has to do with how nutrients are taken up). The epidermal and the endodermal osmotic pumps together create root pressure, which moves water (and nutrients) from the root tips to the tips of the leaves, through the xylem.

But just root pressure is not be sufficient to pump water all the way up into the branches of high trees. A second system is necessary for this, called transpirational pull. As the terms suggest, root pressure is a pushing (up) force, from roots to leaves, whereas transpirational pull is a pulling (up) force, from leaves to roots.

Very simply, transpirational pull works like this. Water molecules cohere together, forming an unbroken string or column of water in the xylem, all the way from root tip to leaf tip. When one water molecule is lost at the surface of the leaf through transpiration, or evaporation, the next water molecule is pulled up, along with the whole string of molecules. At the bottom, the roots get to suck fresh water from the soil.

And not just water, of course, but also the nutrients that are dissolved in it. Plants are, however, selective in what nutrients they will allow in: they won’t take up what they don’t need. That in the next part.

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I foresee one more part (Part 8). Maybe two. But I keep an option on three.

Riot for Austerity – Month 15

Riot for Austerity fist with Thermometer

Last year’s averages (calculated here) are mentioned as a baseline. I use this calculator.

Gasoline. This is the usual: still too high. When the temperatures go up I’m really going to work on biking Amie to school and back.

9.52 gallons per person (pp) in cars + 10 miles pp on public transport

=  23 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 24.8%)

Electricity. This went up a little because of the confluence of four things: we’re using the space heater in the bathroom more often, our new fish tank requires heating and filtering, we’re using the humidifier in our bedroom at night, and we’re internet-backing up our humongous desktop computer, which we use only for data storage (it’ll take 2 weeks this first time around!).

445 KWH (all wind) = 12 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s early average: 18.2% – we only switched to wind in the middle of the year)

Heating Oil and Warm Water. It’s been cold. Again. We heat to 58F at night and most of the day. The wood stove goes on around 4 in the afternoon and goes till when we go to bed – seems like, as soon as the sun goes down, our tolerance for 58F comes to an end.  With the stove I try to keep it around 64F. Our first cord is finished now, so I’m adding that (it was used over the last three months or so). Our warm water too is heated with oil.

71.4 gallons = 116 % of the US National Average

add 1 cord of wood: 140 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 77%)

Trash. We’re holding steady on this one.

5 lbs pp = 4 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 7.3%)

Water. This went up by a bit from the usual (14 %). Don’t know why.

443.8 gallons of water pp = 15 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 16.5%)

Consumer Goods. We purchased next to nothing this month. All I can think of are four little fish ($1.25 each) and fish food. (I’m, as always, excluding seeds and growing supplies.)

$15 = 8 % of the US National Average

(Last year’s yearly average: 27.2%)

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It’s interesting to compare these last three months to the same months last year, to see what a difference our wood stove and the lowering of the thermostat are making in our consumption of heating oil (so I’m not reckoning in that finished cord):

Nov 2008- Jan 2009 (63F): 131.6 % vs. Nov 2009 – Jan 2010 (58F): 82.6 %

We had, of course, that crazy warm November in 2009… Still:

Dec 2008 – Jan 2009 (63F): 155 % vs. Dec 2009 – Jan 2010 (58F): 112.5%

It’ll make a noticable difference in the yearly average.  If only we could  eliminate the part of the oil that goes to heating our water, if only on warm days.

The Perfect Winter Meal

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This is one of my favorite meals, not just because it tastes great, warms you up on a cold winter day, and is healthy, but because, except for the salt and pepper, I can grow each and every ingredient myself.

Fry up 1/2 onion and all of the tough stalk of 4 large leaves of collard greens chopped into little pieces. Add 3 large carrots and the white of 1 leek, 1 celery stalk, the collard leaves, all chopped up, and 7-8 Brussels sprouts. Braise 30 minutes, until carrots are half done. Add 5 medium potatoes, cubed, and enough homemade chicken broth to just cover everything. Simmer till potatoes are done. Add salt and pepper to taste – pepper I could grow, but how to make salt?

I watched Food, Inc. yesterday – a bit late, I know – and was blown away and even cried quite a bit. Disgusting, that “cleaned” hamburger meat!

Of Calcium in the Soil – Part 6

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O, that egg again!

We’ve arrived at Part 6 if this extraordinary saga of how calcium arrives and behaves in the soil (if I’ve occasionally typed “soul” instead of “soil”,  is it really a typo?). Click to catch up on part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 and part 5.

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6. Soil base saturation and soil pH

The term “soil acidity” expresses the quantity (expressed in meq/100g) of the acidic cations (cf. part 3) that the soil can hold on to. The percent base saturation – another important term on your soil test results – is the percentage of the soil’s cation exchange capacity (CEC) occupied by the basic cations.

This is from our soil test:

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This means that calcium occupies 50.6% of the total exchange sites. In other words, in 100g of my soil, 15.6 meq can hold on to cations, both basic and acidic. Of that, 7.9 meq is occupied, or saturated, by calcium, 1.65 meq by magnesium, 0.64 meq by potassium. So, as far as I can learn from the test results (*), 10.19 meq/100g of soil, or 65.3% of the CEC, is saturated by bases. That leaves 35.3% of the CEC (*) for the acidic cations (hydrogen and aluminum).

(*) Sodium (also a base cation) is not listed on my test results, which means its levels are low, so I don’t have a sodic soil (cf. part 5).

Not surprisingly, the greater the percent base saturation, the higher the soil pH. Because calcium is normally the major cation, by virtue of its abundance taking up about half the CEC (as in our soil), we can say that there is less calcium in acid soils and more in alkaline soils.

But if the soil is very alkaline (pH > 7.0), the high levels of calcium may have negative effects. For one, more calcium taking up the CEC very simply means that there is less room on the colloid for everything else. Secondly, an excess of calcium can no longer be adsorbed onto the colloid. This “free” or unadsorbed calcium begins to accumulate in the soil water and goes on to react with what other nutrients are present.

For instance, the free calcium will readily attract soluble boron (B-), which is an an-ion (a negatively charged ion), and form a nearly insoluble compound with it, thus making the boron less available to plants.

Excess calcium will also tie up, or immobilize into insoluble compounds, cations like iron (Fe++), phosphorus (P+++) aluminum (Al+++), zinc (Zn2+), copper (Cu2+), cobalt (Co2+), and manganese (Mn2+), as well as magnesium (Mg ++) and potassium (K+).

Lastly, calcium also increases the pore space in the soil by flocculation, which, as we saw in part 5, is desirable. But when pore space exceeds 50% of the total soil volume, the soil can dry out much easier, like sand.

In short, too much calcium in your soil and many nutrients become insoluble and thus unavailable to plant roots, and the soil structure is damaged to boot.

But, on the other hand, if the soil is very acidic, and thus if there is not enough calcium, many of the other cations can become excessive and thus toxic. Then calcium applications with limestone are called for. The aim when attempting to adjust soil acidity is never so much to neutralize the pH as to replace lost cation nutrients, particularly calcium.

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Next time, in Part 7, I promise, we’ll finally meet the plants, and discover by what magical means they get the calcium out of the soul soil. 

Scary Weather

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It’s scary out there. First it snowed: big, heavy, sticky snow. I went out every two hours to clear the hoop house with the big broom. The bare trees are loaded with snow, the branches that have leaves or needles on them droop precipitously. Then it stopped snowing, the clouds blew away, and all that white fluff flash froze to a crunch. Then, wind. Loud too, like jets suddenly flying over low, and the rumble of large objects hitting and rolling around on the roof.

I went out one last time – it was already dark – and the tiny flying ice scratched up my face. I had to put large boulders on the two ends of the hoop house where the plastic had been jerked loose. I couldn’t go into the house to pull them into place because the two clips holding the door flap closed were frozen stuck.

Tomorrow and the day after it will be sunny and bitter cold: wind chill as low as -10, and gusts of wind as high as 41 mph.

If after those days the hoop house still stands, and no tree has fallen on our house or our electricity lines, I’ll be very grateful!