Inspiration Nation

It all started with a romp through my blog roll, trying to catch up on what other folks were doing. I tried to go through the list again this morning, to find out where I'd gotten the link, but couldn't find it. So the credit ends up going to Stan Cox himself, whose book Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) opened up yet another path of inquiry for The Farm.

I've actually dealt, obliquely, with the topic of air conditioning (or the lack thereof) on this blog in the past (there are some eleven posts that mention it; use the search field if you're interested). Always interested in folks who share my concerns, I bought the book for the iPad. Before I'd finished the first chapter, I'd decided on a new series of posts about civilization and its discontents, roughly organized around the four ancient elements: air, earth, fire, and water.

Before I begin the musings, however, I wanted to acknowledge the many bloggers and other writers whose work continues to fuel my own, and who provide me with philosophical support. Some of these, like Wendell Berry and Herrick Kimball are grounded in the Christian agrarian traditions associated so closely these days--accurately or not--with our Founding Fathers (only some of whom were farmers). I've been reading Berry for twenty-five years and make sure I buy his books in hard cover as much as possible because they get re-read frequently. He's decidedly not fond of digital technologies, so eschews the blogosphere--but that's fine with me. Kimball, however, whom I've only recently discovered, has a whole slew of blogs. My favorites of these are The Deliberate Agrarian and Agrarian Nation (which inspired the title of this post).

Reading Kimball's most recent articles on Agrarian Nation sent me back to the iPad, because one of the first things I did when I got it was to download all the old-timey cookery books and home-keeping volumes offered in the Free section (through Project Gutenberg). These include luscious stuff like Things Mother Used to Make: A Collection of Old Time Recipes, Some Nearly One Hundred Years Old and Never Published Before (1914); The Healthy Life Cook Book (second edition) by Florence Daniel (1915); Culture and Cooking, or Art in the Kitchen by Catherine Owen (1881)--and more. No doubt I'll be able to scare up even more on Free Books, but haven't yet taken the time, probably because I'm too busy reading interesting blogs where other people introduce me to even more old stuff.

I also read a considerable amount of material on Peak Oil (The Oil Drum, ASPO), including Sharon Astyk's blogs (Casaubon's Book and The Chatelaine's Keys) and books (Depletion and Abundance, A Nation of Farmers). The combination of technical discussion on what I really think is going to happen at some point in the not-too-distant, perhaps-even-before-I-die future, and Astyk's comments and advice (as well as the stuff she links to) is almost enough to keep me busy all of my waking life. Unlike Berry and Kimball (as much as I admire their work), Astyk's perspective resonates with me because she's Jewish, a woman, and unerringly practical.

While I'm on the topic of practical advice, I would be grievously remiss were I not to mention Ruth Stout (just Google her), and Helen and Scott Nearing. They are all, alas, dead now, but their legacies live on thanks to the digital universe--at least until the grid goes down.

No paean to self-reliant agrarianism would be complete without mention of The Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalog, both mainstays of my early leanings in this direction. You can now get almost the entire run of TMEN on CD (1970-2010), cheap (60 bucks). Somebody on eBay probably has the whole thing in paper. In an unpublished short story I wrote a few months ago, an entire community manages to survive after an EMP because somebody had squirreled away all her back issues.

Many years ago, in a graduate class called (I think) "The Future As Present," we were asked to give an oral "book report" on a publication we considered essential. One of my fellow students almost caused our instructor to enter a monastery (or at least to retire early) when she reviewed David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries. I didn't help matters when I chose the Whole Earth Catalog. The inspiration of this particular choice was a sort of vision of having a copy of the WEC on hand when the apocalypse came. See? I was thinking ahead even twenty some-odd years ago.

I'm looking forward to looking outward for a while. I've been so internally focused on my own discontent for far too long. And the weather has been great, my garden is beginning to flourish, and I'm getting way too comfortable. The first essay, on Air, will show up as soon as I finish Stan Cox's book and get my notes organized. Meanwhile, I heartily recommend his book, and the stuff I've linked above.

Image credit: I couldn't resist a bit of artistic nostalgia here. After searching on the Commons for historic agriculture photos, I found one of Carl Larson's sweet paintings of farming in Sweden.

Hybrid Driving

Not long after my post about the conversation in response to Derrick Jensen's article in the current issue of Orion Magazine on activism (Is Resistance Futile?), I had to take my nine-year-old Honda Civic into the dealer to get it fixed up enough to pass state inspection. As I waited for the bad news, I started lurking in the showroom, poring over brochures on new Civics and Insight hybrids. When the "counselor" (no lie; that's what she called herself) came in to tell me that they needed to do a $200 smoke test to determine what was wrong with my fuel line, and that it would take a couple of hours, I went outside to enjoy the weather and look around the lot.

After a surprisingly long time, a salesman came out to see what I was interested in, and proceeded to let me test drive the two models I was most interested in: the new Civic hybrid, and the Insight--Honda's answer to Toyota's Prius.

The Civic didn't drive much like mine, it was a bit larger, and considerably clunkier. The Insight, on the other hand, is a dream to drive, and its cockpit is almost identical to what I'm used to in the old Civic. The best part, though, is that this car acts very much like a mobile video game, with pretty lit-up displays (mostly blue and green, but with some red and amber) designed to teach one how get the best fuel economy possible.

By the time the counselor came back to give me the estimate ($2K, including the new timing belt I'd been warned about last year), I was signing papers. So the sales office paid for the smoke test, and I turned over the keys.

They gave me peanuts for the Civic, but sent me home in a loaner until the LX model I'd ordered in "Tango Red Pearl" arrived a couple of days later. Honda had some incentives going, but I didn't need them to convince me that I wanted this car. The EPA estimates on gas mileage run from 40-45 mpg, and the lower emissions alone would help me lessen my carbon footprint substantially--even though I had been getting between 35 and 38 mpg in the old car.

Although I'd been waffling about the need for a new car for several months, two additional components entered the mix when I read Jensen's article, and Sharon Astyk's new book, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front.

Astyk blogs on The Chatelaine’s Keys and Casaubon's Book about sustainability, peak oil, and community. As a matter of fact, I'm going to recommend to the Orion forum that folks who are looking for advice on how to resist the current state of economic short-sightedness order this book. Astyk practices what she preaches much better than I do, and offers an appendix chock full of practical ways in which we can survive the unrest we've only begun to see reflected in our current economic difficulties.

I haven't really been ignoring peak oil over the last forty years, but it had rather become background noise, grinding on below the din of everyday life. I heard M. King Hubbert speak at Penn back in the '70s (during the first of our many moments of oil hysteria), warning that at some point in the foreseeable future we'd reach the moment at which oil supplies would be half gone. But rather than weaning ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels, over the intervening four decades we've become ever more dependent--not only on our own supplies, but on what we buy from foreign sources.

In the meantime, peak oil concerns have become entwined with a variety of doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories, and most rational folk seem to have been ignoring the situation--even as our fuel costs roller coaster up and down the economic spectrum. The whole concept is getting harder to ignore, however, and books like Depletion and Abundance provide a sensible, constructive path toward forging communities that might be able to withstand whatever turmoil might ensue.

No longer very good at participating in any community beyond my classrooms, I have little time left over for the kinds of activism that Jensen and Astyk advocate. For as long as I've been writing this blog, I've nattered on and on about my small gestures at lessening my own dependence on various fuels, and my efforts to minimize any bruises I leave on the planet. Although I lack the physical and psychic energy to picket the bad guys or join anything, I have been trying to be a wise consumer, and buying a sensible car seemed like a decent thing to do; I consider it a little bit of an offset for the obscene number of Hummers I see on the highway. This will probably be the last car I ever own, so I thought it would be a prudent investment.

I also think it unwise to underplay the power of making sustainable economic decisions. For example, we've got an inefficient ten-year-old gas furnace that needs to be replaced, so we're looking into a geothermal heat pump. It's a costly change, but could well pay for itself within ten years in energy savings, and it doesn't use oil or gas. Solar panels are another possibility, although the number and location of trees on the property limits their efficacy. Upcoming necessary improvements to the house will all be made with sustainability and low environmental impact as primary considerations.

The fact that the entire state of Texas remains in denial about climate change and other environmental concerns doesn't help. But this particular town, at least, seems to be more and more open to "green" solutions, so it may be that moving to an old area of town full of recycled houses may not have been a bad idea in the end. And now that I can go 450 miles or more on a tank of gas, I won't feel quite so guilty about working thirty miles away from where I live.

Photo credits: I pinched the picture of the Insight from Treehugger; the opening "shot," Exxon Desert Tanker a "satirical image created in Photoshop to illustrate the concept of peak oil," was created by AZRainman and available through Wikimedia Commons and his Flickr Photostream.

Gardeners and Tailors and Cobblers, Oh My!

Today's news of record-setting stock-market plunging and the looming expectation of further financial crisis is enough to curdle the organic milk in one's sustainably-raised breakfast cereal.

But all the news that's fit to print isn't necessarily glum, and encouraging bits keep popping out at me. More and more people who think like I do (and are a great deal more vocal than I am) are coming to national attention--like our favorite local Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher, and writer/blogger Sharon Astyk (whom Dreher mentions in his piece in Sunday's Dallas Morning News).

Dreher argues for creating urban garden-friendly zoning laws to enable more folks to grow their own, even though nobody really expects suburbanites in gated communities to be able to feed themselves entirely. Kitchen gardens tucked away amongst the pricey landscaping (which some are probably already having to care for themselves, rather than hiring out the weekly grooming) probably don't need zoning laws. But raising a few chickens (I'd suggest guinea pigs, too, like Peruvians and Guatemalans, and the self-sustaining characters in Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home raise for food, but that would probably cause tears among the kiddos), at least for eggs, and expanding the food-garden into the front yard will require some political discussion.

Here in McKinney, on my half-acre lot, I'm allowed to keep no more than twelve chickens, rabbits, or guinea pigs (I guess the city actually recognizes their nutritional value)--but I can't keep ducks (unless they fly into my pond, should I ever build a pond) or geese or pea-fowl. I'm not sure why they exclude these, except that peacocks are noisy bloody animals. Geese make great watchdogs and, if you're bothered by cobras, their droppings keep those away. But I haven't seen a cobra in many years, and never around here, so I can live without geese, even though I've had very close geese-friends in the past. And since Biscuit died, we're actually down to the legal limit of cats and dogs. It's comforting to be on the correct side of the law at last--although I'd gladly continue to be a scofflaw if I could have him back.

I'm currently busy trying to convince Beloved Spouse to help me build a hen house--so far with no luck. When I was growing up in Taiwan, we always had baby chicks incubating or hopping around being cute, and I came to think of fresh eggs as my birthright. But it's less cute when the dogs get the chickens, which is what probably concerns Beloved Spouse. He's had to pry one too many cats and squirrels out of the mouths of the Guthrie brothers, Woody and Arlo, and their oversized "uncle" Homer.

We don't have a homeowners association here in the Historic District, partly because there's such a vast range of houses, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and we're governed by another set of rules. So as long as any gardening I do in front of the house doesn't offend anyone, I don't think I'll get in trouble for growing a few veg on the verge. I'm actually only thinking of mint species there, because people let their dogs poop on it, and even though they're getting better about picking up after their pooches, I'm not eating anything grown with that particular kind of organic fertilizer. But mint spreads fast, smells nice when you walk on it, and needs little care.

Up on the lawn, however, I'll be expanding my food growing area to some of the spaces adjacent to the driveway, because I need more sunlight for some of the stuff I want to grow. I'm thinking of a nice Japanese bamboo fence to screen part of it and to support tomato and bean plants, but I think this will be the last year for the iris collection I inherited from the previous owner. As soon as I'm up to heavy-duty gardening again, a large swath of the back yard will also become arable, and I'll transplant the St. Augustine grass to a shadier section. The Accidental Garden is well on its way to becoming the Purposeful Forest, and the only planted bits still growing in there are oregano and perhaps a little thyme (not yet visible). I'd rather that it be devoted to woodland plants that sneak in.

If more people could garden more of their yards, and even if more people learned how to keep up a few pots of tomatoes and peppers on the patio, I can't help but think that we'd become wiser about the way the world works. A couple of chickens (legal in many Dallas neighborhoods) would mean fresh eggs and nature lessons for children. Victory gardens really do need to make a comeback.

Another encouraging story appeared in today's News, and points to an alternative to the wasteful consumer-focused economy we've become used to. Mark Norris's article, "Forget New Threads, Let's Fix the Old Ones" (I'm assuming that he wasn't responsible for the comma splice--and anyway, the title on the link is different) notes that the old standby professions--tailors and cobblers, as well as alteration shops--are booming these days. As people decide that getting worn heels replaced (which we always did when I was young) costs much less than buying a new pair of shoes, perhaps they'll begin to understand that it's also much less wasteful and uses fewer resources. Just last week my five-year-old puppies decided that my new pair of comfy shoes were a chew toy and gnawed a hole in one of them. My daughter, thriftily-raised as she was, thought that I could patch the tear and add a matching patch on the other shoe rather than hustling down to Rack Room for yet another pair (I had previously melted the bottoms of identical shoes when I unwisely rested their soles on the edge of the copper fire-pit on the back patio one calm winter night when we were enjoying an outdoor fire). And so I will, even though I may have to consult a cobbler.

What's encouraging about these recession-driven instances of real economy is that traditional crafts seem to be making a comeback. Of course there have always been housewives (I can use this word because I really was a housewife at one time) who made their children's clothes, recovered their own sofas, and fabricated window coverings to keep their houses warm. But if gas prices rise again, and people stay home more, even working folk might find time to do for themselves and learn skills their grandparents--and maybe even their parents--were expected to know.

Perhaps we'll even reach a balance at some point: where old professions enjoy a renaissance in a new economy fueled less by greed and detachment from traditional activities (like cooking, gardening, and home-keeping) and more by appreciation for nature's gifts and the use of our hands as well as our brains. It's not that I want the computer age to go away; it's just that I want to see it tempered by an appreciation for what our bodies can do. I can't help but think we'll end up the wiser and the healthier for it.

Images: Tailor from Das Ständebuch (The Book of Trades), 1568, and a cobbler in old Beijing, from Peking Studies (1934) by Ellen Catleen. Both from Wikimedia Commons. The iris shot is from last spring, and has probably appeared on the Farm before.

The Reader in the Garden

There's currently something of a stew about the future of newspapers (and see this article in The Economist), but this morning I realized just what I would miss if even our local rag were to disappear.

Due to other preoccupations yesterday, I failed to read the "Points" section of the Sunday Dallas Morning News. But since I actually remembered that I'd forgotten to read it, I pulled it out of the recycle bin this morning to catch up, and took it out with me to the garden to enjoy in the unusually clement weather apparently caused by global warming. Since I've been blogging, this has been my favorite section of the paper, because it frequently brings me new items about which to get my dander up, and keeps me apprised of both local and national opinions on matters both great and small.

And so it is that I came upon an especially relevant essay, "Hard Compromise for a Rural Jew," and an even more relevant blog: Casaubon's Book. Mind you, I might well have tripped over the blog in my travels around the web, and been attracted by its intriguing title (George Eliot's Middlemarch is one of the books I read young and that literally--in the literary sense--changed my life), not even knowing about its focus: oikos. As its author, Sharon Astyk, notes,

The problem isn't just the economy, or our energy use, or global warming - or rather, they are all part of the same larger problem.

The overall content is focused on some of the same things that get ranted about here on the Farm (and occasionally on the Cabinet), but she's been at it a lot longer (since 2004), and she's a real farmer (in upstate New York), and a real Jew (as opposed to whatever I now am), and an actual published writer. Her aim, like mine, however, is tikkun olam, and she writes about how to do it.

In the article (an adaptation of a blog post) Astyk discusses the difficulties of being an observant Jew who lives in rural New York in order to farm. Now, since Jews are by nature community-bound folk (she points out that Jewish practice requires others--a minyan is needed for almost everything important), the fact that she has to drive thirty minutes on Shabbat to get to a synagogue requires a compromise she's not comfortable with. In fact, this is why it's harder to be Jewish than it is to be Amish, because the Amish are still a farming people, whereas Jews (who were once a farming people) have all moved to cities and suburbs. Over millennia, in fact, Jews have systematically been deprived of farms, making them especially leery of investing their wealth in land--either that or it has driven them to see owning land in Palestine as a divine right and causing a rather ironic set of problems.

Astyk's blog is erudite, wide-ranging, literate, and funny. The article reprinted in the News doesn't let on that she's also a Peak Oil activist--which might lead some readers to think she's some kind of apocalyptic nut. But she's no nuttier than Mormons who keep a year's supply of food in their pantries, or than anyone who wants to be as self-sufficient as possible, and her advice on gardening and storing food is fun to read and highly instructive. In fact, I plan on reading her garden design posts rather seriously to help me overcome some of the problems I've been wrestling with over the years. I don't have a farm, but I would really like to make the part of my garden that isn't consciously accidental (is that an oxymoron?) more productive than it has been in the past.

The trouble with reading the newspaper in the first place (and watching the increasingly pessimistic economic news on the telly) is that the Peak Oil people make more sense every day, especially as some of their predictions begin to pan out. I've been aware of oil reserve depletion since I heard King Hubbert speak to geology students at Penn back in the seventies, and have never been convinced that he was being overly pessimistic. Regardless of whether these folks are right or wrong, however, Astyk's discussions on how to preserve and store food, how to grow it in the first place, and how to preserve community at the very least offer an anodyne during times of economic confusion and discomfort. Her practical advice also makes a great deal more sense than the "ten things you can do to save the earth" remedies.

To top it off, she also considers the conundrum faced by print news, especially papers that also host free online editions: Why Buy the Cow When I’m Giving Milk Away for Free? The Problem of Newspapers (and includes in her consideration those of us who publish online for free).

In parting, I'll add to the problem by posting a link to the list of 2008's ten best online newspapers, according to the Bivings Report. The Dallas Morning News wasn't on the list (with good reason, since the Points section and the funnies are its best parts even in print, and the online version is difficult to navigate, to put it kindly)--but my other morning (online) paper was #1: The New York Times.