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by Scott
January 12th, 2012
Weird things happen when a whole way of life ends for an entire culture of people.
Like around the time when America drove the Golden Spike, connecting the railroad from sea to shining sea. That was when the entire Great Plains was a Buffalo Highway and all the tribes who lived there depended on buffalo for everything.
Bison were their source of food, housing, jobs, tools, clothing and spiritual meaning. The buffalo filled their lives and their lives were fulfilled around and within the Buffalo. You could say they lived in a Buffalo Bubble.
If you could have told those tribes that in a few short years the Buffalo would be gone, along with all the Buffalo jobs, housing and the rest, no one would have believed you. It was simply unimaginable.
Yet the unimaginable became the inevitable, the last pockets of Buffalo People dwindled, and these broken and diseased cultures clung to the fading remnants of their only known way of life. And right at that moment, between the time the Buffalo Highway disappeared and the previous notion that it could never possibly disappear, there arose among them an understandably desperate response: the Ghost Dance.
A very passionate and well-meaning guy named Wavoka went around to all the tribes with a very potent idea, and it flashed through the brittle tinder of those cultures like a dry wildfire across the plains:
All you have to do is dance the Ghost Dance. Wear the Ghost Shirt. Sing the Ghost Songs and Pray the Ghost Prayers. And if we all do that intently enough…
The bullets will not penetrate the Ghost Shirts. Our way of life will continue. The Buffalo will return. The whites will go away. Our ancestors will rejoin us, and all will be well.
Fast forward a few short years, and all of us in modern society today live in an Energy Bubble. Our whole way of life; food, housing, jobs, tools, clothing and spiritual meaning, all result from using vast amounts of energy. We are a Petroleum People, utterly enmeshed in the culture of machines that run on oil, coal, gasoline, diesel and electricity. Most of us are not even consciously aware of how much energy our modern lives require, how many hidden energy-machine slaves keep us warm, fed and mobile. It’s simply who we were born into being.
And now we’re running up against the planetary limits on the supplies of that energy. We’re waking up to find a world gone completely whack in any number of modern normalcies we take for granted every day.
And it’s a very scary thing to peer straight into the face of the demise of your entire way of life. It’s very difficult to even admit to, much less imagine, changes of that immensity. It’s much more likely for us to imagine ways to keep it all going. Somehow. Surely there’s something else in the wings that will save us in our darkest hour?
Of course there is: it’s called free energy. And all you have to do is oust the evil cabal of white men who rule the world, and then re-activate the potent relics of St. Nicolai, and you’ll have an unlimited supply of energy.
Obviously, this will once and for all bring harmony and peace to a troubled planet, because everyone will have what they need. What would we possibly fight over? This is the dawn of a new awakening that will change human nature like never before, and you don’t have to do a thing! It’s all those evil guys’ fault, remember?
Free energy is precisely a Ghost Dance in our times, promising the continuation of a way of life that is simply dying out. The prospect of an unlimited energy supply appeals to Petroleum Man precisely because He uses more energy to live His life than any human ever has. Ever.
It’s perfectly natural to not want all the Buffalo to disappear.
And it’s to be expected that our oil-saturated culture will collectively fantasize about all the previously impossible ways we can remain saturated. After all, regardless of denomination, we all worship the religion of technological advancement. Surely the Goddess of Progress Herself will maintain our status as the Darlings of All Creation? Please?
The psychology of previous investment is a powerful impediment to thinking clearly about your options. By the time you cut your losses, you’ve already lost your mind. Not meaning, necessarily, that you’ve gone crazy (although that should never be ruled out entirely). But that you’ve had to redefine for yourself who you really are under your particular circumstances.
Now, I don’t personally care if you want to believe in free energy, antibiotics, Santa Claus or vaccines. Knock yourself right out. But if you’re expecting me to enthusiastically embrace an un-demonstrated, unproven, unduplicated violation of the laws of physics, you might want to stop for a moment and ask yourself honestly, Why do I want to believe that? Do I believe it’s true because it’s really true, or because it would really suck if it wasn’t?
Desperately hoping for widespread and profitable techno-prophylactics between us and diminishing reserves is rather embarrassingly revealing, garishly displaying our private symptoms of cultural dysfunction for others to laugh at. Whenever we want something to be true more than it’s likely to be true, especially if it’s never happened to be true before… well, let’s say there’s a bit more to look at than whether or not it’s suddenly true.
But let’s say for a moment that free energy devices are bona fide. What if we actually bust open some dusty, diabolical Illuminati closet hiding the bones of Tesla. Or maybe a perpetually spinning gyro-gizmo emerges from behind the walls of some mythical Wozniak Basement of Wonders. Okay? Here they are. Now what?
How will free energy help your immediate life circumstances? How do you, personally, manufacture or distribute or purchase or maintain or for that matter, plug in your new device? How do you plug all of your devices into it? Would it drive your car to your new job? Would it grow all of your food for you? Would it make plastic for your year-round greenhouse? Would it generate some new medications for all the crazies? Pour you a martini and twist the lime? Where does it all end?
Where it begins. Far and away down the Road Not Taken.
The idea of free energy is detrimental regardless of whether or not such devices exist, actually or virtually. It’s a detour from any paths of effectiveness we might otherwise take, every day, you and me, and a distraction from any meaningful response to our true predicament. In short, it’s a setup for a major disappointment, as if losing your entire culture wasn’t a bummer enough.
Will it bring water to places without it? Will it dry out the places with too much? Will it help the topsoil organisms flourish? Will it benefit the worms? Will it mix more concrete to contain all the spent uranium from the decommissioned nukes?
Even if free energy became available to run all of our gadgets as they now exist, to keep all the machines running right now exactly as they are, would it really solve our true problems? No, it would not, because our true problems are not really problems in the sense that they can ever be solved.
We face instead a predicament, a set of planetary conditions that define the terms of life from here on out. How do we reconcile our daily lives within those terms? How do we mould our existence to the current imperatives of geology, geography and hydrology? These are the questions we ought to be asking of ourselves. They’re the only ones we can answer on our own, and whose answers will end up meaning anything.
When faced with acute energy shortages and profoundly deepening limitations in every sphere of daily life, every discussion about free energy prevents a discussion of how we simply might get along with less energy. Every fantasy of unlimited abundance actually blocks any movement toward the achievement of adapting to real planetary limitations like depleted aquifers and played-out topsoil.
There are things I can do every single day to mitigate the effects of a crumbling way of life all around me. And the truth is, I would rather do those things anyway, and not only because I know they’re actually effective. But because if I didn’t, I’d be bored out of my skull waiting around for another miracle product, more inspirational films, or a free ride out of this mess.
I do them simply because the space module fantasy doesn’t enchant me. I don’t see myself in it. I am enchanted by the idea of living in a modest place with a decent barn, tending garden, orchards, and hillsides of bees. Vineyards and animals, herbs and flowers… I know, cursed with limitation and drudgery. Clearly, it’s not for everyone.
I’d so much rather be enchanted by the very real work and risks of such a life, than be continually mesmerized by the endless droning murmurs of reassurance from Ghosts in the Machines.
Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments »
by Scott
August 16th, 2011
The collapse of our current industrial way of life is characterized by inversions and reversals. What was once up is now down, what was in is now out; the new green is old brown after all. Consider the following three vocations (although we now prefer job for one colored collar, career for the other) and remember that vocation comes from vocare, to call. These are ancient tasks one was called to serve, and many still are called to perform these basic human roles. Any of these folks in your contact list?
Midwives devote their lives to learning about birthing babies the healthiest way, and have been the way humans enter the world for uncounted generations. Characterized as unqualified quacks and dangerous to expectant mothers, midwives have been made into criminals by medical authorities. Midwives do not pursue their craft for purely personal gain, but because they love bringing babies into the world.
Herbalists spend countless years studying, learning, growing, identifying and dispersing the collected knowledge and wisdom of centuries around medicinal plants. Characterized as charlatans by the pharmaceutical authorities, herbalists are regularly criminalized and jailed. Herbalism is rarely a lucrative career path, and is pursued largely by those with a sincere desire to help others heal without harmful drugs.
Farmers pay themselves pennies per hour to work in the riskiest field with the least compensation, and display a level of personal devotion to their flocks required only of clergy. Small, independent farmers are being made into criminals by agribusiness authorities for providing real, raw, basic food to their neighbors in transactions made with mutual enthusiasm. Lives and farms are being destroyed and good people imprisoned.
Are any of these types of people really criminals? Are they disregarding the rights of others for personal gain or enriching themselves by harming others? Are they committing violent acts of malfeasance and destruction? Are they a danger to society?
No, they are birthing people, healing people, and feeding people, all because that’s exactly what they want to do with their lives. And in most cases, it’s what they want to do so much, that they do it despite the likelihood that they will never get rich by doing so. They will never commit any acts of violence to get what they want, nor do whatever criminals do for whatever criminal motivations may drive them.
And that’s because they’re not criminals. Really!
So what is a criminal? Someone who commits a crime, duh. And aren’t crimes merely the names we give to specific harms done to others? Harm specified describes our codes of law as the remedy for the harm. Also codified into law is the base assumption that breaking the law must automatically mean that harm has been done. Somewhere, somehow.
Yet each of these vast arenas of human activity, birthing, eating and healing, have been happening for eons of human experience. How can it be today that these people are regularly arrested and imprisoned, when not only have they not harmed anyone, they have in fact committed extraordinary acts of service on behalf of others? What gives?
Could it be that the laws of the land have become so twisted that many of them now protect those doing the harm, rather than those upon whom the harm is being done? Is it possible that the harm done by currently legal institutions could be considered criminal? I thought harm was the root of all crime. But of course, I’m not a lawyer.
This reversal of harm also presents itself in the phrase revolving door policy, the term that describes today’s standard practice where the captains of industry are appointed to the governmental agencies charged with protecting the rest of us from the captains of industry. (Strange, they wear different hats, but always the same suit and tie…)
Over time, the body of law has morphed so grotesquely that regulatory enforcement by one has become a strategy for market manipulation by the other. And that’s because they are no longer one or the other, but in fact, one in the same. Today we have so many of these systemic inversions of justice that people who are clearly not criminals have been forced over the line by those who have rewritten the lines.
It’s not much of a stretch to see that genuine criminals, those who seek personal gain at the disregard or expense of others, have been the ones who have infected the code of law and are making criminals out of good people. Dog-eat-dog has been legalized by the dogs! And now they’re turning the dogs on us.
So what’s a truly law-abiding citizen to do anymore? To abide is to endure, but how can we abide the absurdity of making a criminal out of a food grower? Who have we become that we accept the presence of midwives as an aberration to quality natal care? How can we tolerate the ongoing incarceration of people who work with plants?
Law-abiding citizens are being compelled to look at exactly what we are, in fact, abiding by. When criminals install the laws, then abiding by those laws becomes collusion. Whether complicit or illicit, the resulting harm continues to be done. The only question is, what are we going to do about it?
If there’s a calling in you, listen to it. It’s making sounds for a reason.
Heed it. Feed it.
Let it grow into who you really are.
Tags: agribusiness, authority, collapse, herbalism, midwifery
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
by Scott
August 8th, 2011
Once upon a time, the American Dream was 40 acres and a mule, just enough land to grow your own and get by. Thousands of people aspired to farming, not as a career choice, but as a way of life. The best form of freedom was bound to a sweet piece of ground. Today less than 4% of Americans are farmers.
Somewhere along the way, the American Dream morphed-out and moved to the city. Pretty soon the American dream meant going to college, becoming a businessman, and owning your own home in suburbia. By the time I was offered the prevailing palette of adult livelihood choices, farming was nowhere to be found. And of course, by then all farmers had been compelled to take up the yoke of business in addition to going about the (difficult enough) business of farming.
But as hard as it is to run a business and run a farm, it’s even harder to run a farm/business in a housing bubble. Look around, there used to be farms everywhere people live. Now there are vast areas of people with no farms among them, leaving the majority to conclude (hopefully not you, dear reader) that there are certain places simply better suited to farming than where most of us happen to live. Farming is… well, it’s done somewhere else now, don’t you know.
Yet far too many of us live directly on top of some of the best floodplain top-soil ever created by eons of weather and decomposed leaves. No, it’s not that there are better places for farming, it’s that all the best farming places have been eaten by the Development PacMan. The (so far) infallible expectation of modern Americans, that they will be able to sell off real estate for more than their purchase price, has driven local farms, once nearly everywhere, to exist hardly anywhere. How on earth can pennies per pound ever compete with dollars per square foot? Not as long as there’s a grocery store right down the road.
The housing bubble created a lot of false value while it buried the source of true value; good topsoil under tons of asphalt and countless ticky-tacky Make-a-Buck subdivisions, now sagging under the weight of bad mortgages and mold. Without including farmers in its Vision, the American Dream of owning your own home has condemned its sleepy children to wake up to the hardship of food insecurity.
So while the bigger bubble of fossil-fueled soil fertility created the food that allowed billions of humans to be born, here in United States, the housing bubble allowed millions of Americans to get rich on fake value while plundering the source of food for all future Americans.
Now both of these bubbles are eroding like the soils upon which they are built. Perhaps bubble isn’t the best term, because most bubbles, like soap bubbles say, simply pop when they cease to exist. The modern fertility and housing bubbles, though, deplete themselves gradually before our eyes. But forget about that, you deserve to be rich, so flip that repo and buy that boat!
Eventually, there’s no more money to be made. Eventually, food becomes scarce for the great number of American Dreamers adjusting their expectations from finding a job to simply finding something to eat. How many of us are currently aware of our position on this relentless trajectory of our nation?
Food security can only exist with farms in proximity. Farms will not return to where they once were, if they are required to make money in those same places. Lots of money has already been made there, which is why there’s sprawl there now, and not farms.
Somehow we have to wrap the next American Dream around some version of local food production, or else the old Dream tanks into a really bad Nightmare. There has to be another Dream besides riding the Equity Train, because when that engine pulls up short, the restaurant at the station’s going to be closed.
So the question is, do you treasure your home for the value of the topsoil upon which it sits? Or do you hope to make money by selling off your property someday? Dream or Nightmare?
That’s why we are no longer a nation of farmers but a nation of bubble-miners. There’s never been a boom without a bust, and our idea of inevitable progress is only derived from the freak sequence of bubbles we’ve been able to ride. Because it’s really easy to forget about the last bust when the next boom is on. Remember the Gold Rush? I didn’t think so…
Instead of chasing the next pseudo-boom, smart money is getting out of money entirely and investing in a much more diverse portfolio of stocks.
Seed stocks.
Tags: agribusiness, food supply, housing bubble, real estate, sustainable farming
Posted in Food Philosphy, sustainable farming | No Comments »
by Scott
August 2nd, 2011
Time was, a rose was a rose, and an apple was an apple. They came from someone’s plants long before money came along to insinuate itself into the deal. No labels, no sticker, no barcode; just plants.
So I’m wondering, when you picked a rose or plucked an apple, was it considered to be an economic activity? How on earth did buying and selling them become more respectable than growing and exchanging? Just because we call it produce, doesn’t mean it has to be a product. And probably better if it wasn’t. At least it would be nice to have a choice. To buy or not to buy, that is the question…
Food cannot really be considered part of the economy, even a so-called local economy, if that means some kind of necessary exchange of money for food. Food is more of a required condition for anything like an economy to become a recognized entity. Without a food supply, nothing resembling economic activity would ever become apparent. No one would be “there” for it to be apparent to.
Now with the global economy collapsing everywhere, commoditized food joins the list of endangered species. We will discover that an enduring food supply is one that has de-coupled from the money economy, one that has been de-commodified as a source of dollars. For a food supply to become ecologically endurable, for it to have any longevity into future generations, it must become once again something gifted and exchanged among neighbors.
And that can only happen when more neighbors are actual producers instead of consumers. But not producers for a market, not producers of something to sell. Neighbors can become the producers of sustenance, nutrition and fertility that stays close to home, because it’s what Home is really made of, after all. These kinds of Producers produce a hit show called Feed All the Babies and Put Them to Bed. Matinees daily.
And how do we go about de-commodifying food when buying food is the way food is done today? This is the genius seed that lies latent within the Community Supported Agriculture farm marketing system. Even though shares in a CSA farm are now largely purchased with dollars, that’s only because we are all currently stuck in a gambling house that only accepts house chips!
The core CSA idea of collecting a membership around a producing farm is the very nexus, the synaptic cross-over point where the transition from a dollar economy to a direct exchange economy can be nurtured, cultivated and grown to maturity. In this sense, even though it could be perceived as a loss of economic activity, the sooner that purchased food becomes obsolete, the better.
But won’t removing food from economic activity result in isolation, the destruction of markets and an absence of trade? Big Corporate AgBiz would like you to think so. But that would be as absurd as a complete, blind dependence on buying and marketing for every conceivable human need; now who could ever put up with that?
Less spending of dollars and more exchanging and barters; that’s the way food will be done now and into the future. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a scarcity of dollars or a scarcity of food that compels us there. Or both at once! One way or another, we’ll be back to feeding each other, so we might as well start now so we can remember how to do it before we really have to.
Because with food, believe it or not, there’s a direct correlation between distance traveled and quality. That is, the worst food comes from farthest away, and the best food comes from closest at hand. You’d think this would be obvious to folks who eat food every day. It’s not missed by those who grow it every day.
Likewise, a direct correlation in food exists between distance and its actual presence or absence. When food comes from nearby, it’s more likely to be regularly available, and more importantly, less likely to become completely unavailable. Whereas the opposite is equally true; the farther away one’s source of food, the less likely it is to be endlessly available, and far more likely to someday become unavailable.
Only a society of shoppers drunk on oil could possibly miss this. But gardeners don’t.
These perennial facts are obscured through our utter and complete reliance upon fragile refrigeration and our irrational faith in its enduring ubiquity. For without acre upon acre of warehoused cold storage, the industrial food machine sits and rots on the dock.
The dependability of interstate commerce as well as electrical power supply grids must be invincible, infallible and uninterruptible for the nutrients to flow down fluorescent aisles in the manner to which we are, unfortunately, accustomed to the point of addiction.
And we all know they are none of the above.
Tags: agribusiness, food supply, gardening, local economy
Posted in Food Philosphy, sustainable farming | No Comments »
by Scott
July 25th, 2011
Ponder for more than a moment any one of our current global predicaments, and you might well come to the conclusion that there are simply too many people on this planet, that over- copulation of the humans is one of the great causes of pollution, disease, turmoil and extinction of species.
And though we’ve caused an egregious amount of the above while ducking the latter (so far), this is indeed the cauldron within which we find ourselves a-boil.
Is there such a thing as too many people on the planet? Is there a limit, a carrying capacity, an ideal balanced number of humans that the biota can handle? How would we ever know?
Famine would be one reliable indicator, although we like to substitute the phrase “world hunger” to mean lots of starving people. But starving people happen because of drought and diabolical politics, right? And those who have more than enough food ought to send relief aid to those who are starving, should we not? Wouldn’t that at least do something to help solve the problem of starvation in the world?
Compassionate as it is laudable, nevertheless, all this type of thinking is devoid of ecological common-sense, lacking an understanding of how biological demographics play out on the planet. This one and only.
First of all, hunger is not a problem, it’s part of the human and animal condition. All life has a hunger to grow and live, so what is the problem? Every day, we all wake up hungry.
Every species on the planet can only grow its population as big as its food supply. In fact, availability of food is one of the things that caps any given population at its upper limit. When the rabbits find a meadow with no rabbits, they will eat and make more rabbits, until… yes, until the meadow shrinks. Meanwhile, the wolf population grows up because their food supply increased, too, which adds to the pressure on the rabbits. Who seek out new meadows…
And so it goes; hunger, fulfillment, starvation or predation, the very parameters of all earthly existence. And we modern humans are no different, ‘twas ever thus.
But since the so-called green revolution of hybrid plants and chemical fertilizers, all we’ve had for a few generations is a food supply made directly possible by cheap fossil fuels. Our calories are simply made of oil, our soil fertility is provided by oil, and when oil is no longer cheap and available (politically or geologically), neither shall be our food.
It’s not that there are too many people on the planet and not enough food. It’s more that there was too much food for too many people to have happened in the first place. Too much fake fertility, industrial nitrogen, blown-out soils, and pumped-out water tables. The only reason there are so many people on this planet is because somehow we all got something to eat. Until we don’t. Why is this in any way shocking?
For agricultural humans (everybody, now) a population explosion can only follow a soil-fertility explosion, and like any explosion, leaves a mess in its crater. A food supply founded on non-industrial fertility – animal manures and legumes – depends on plant and animal life cycles, a rather slow process. Far too many of us depend on this happening industrially, much faster than it can ever possibly occur naturally.
The human beings moved into a meadow called fossil-fueled-food-supply, and we tore it up and had a great party. And now as oil and natural gas and diesel run out their inevitable declines, so shall various flocks of humans, noses deep in the Astroturf, also look up to attend their own demise.
Yet despite our toxic assaults on our home soils, they can still be revitalized with what used to be common human care. We only need to revise our sustenance software, upgrade our life-support strategies, and reboot our asses into something that can endure beyond the driveway. ModAg version 20.12
Grasping our roles in the ecological drama of starvation and predation is essential to playing them well in any epoch, but especially this post-petroleum one. Not because we’re any different, but because our thinking has become so estranged from the simple interactive mechanics of life on Earth. Those who can figure out a food supply that is not off the truck, will be the ones who have a chance at continuing to play the earthbound game of life.
Human beings are not exempt from the miracle of life seeking balance, and we get no free lunch passes from the world itself. Which is to say that modern humans everywhere will somehow experience the contracting and constricting of their food supplies. Food safety, food variety, and food availability will all begin to waver and wobble before they crumble.
Where do you think we are right now along this relentless trajectory of the available food supply in our time?
The primacy of food supply in the affairs of humans is about to reassert its immediate priority within the lives of all of us today.
And modern humans aren’t the exception.
We’re the example.
Tags: food supply, population, resource depletion
Posted in Food Philosphy, sustainable farming | No Comments »
by Scott
June 28th, 2011
“He who fight and run away, live to fight another day…” -Bob Marley
Leadership sucks.
Of course, current political leadership sucks royally, whatever the stripe, but that’s not news and not what I’m talking about. I’m trying to understand why leadership itself has become a common ideal, a mark of good character, something you must demonstrate on a resume simply to put your face above the crowd.
I find it strange that folks who grew up reading Question Authority on the bumper of every other Volvo would ever want to grow up to become an authority. Isn’t the goal of leadership to arrive at an authority position? Is leadership just an ego-trip?
I just don’t get why so many people want to be leaders. It seems that so-called leadership abilities have become a requisite strand of good moral fiber. It’s no longer good enough to be your own personal version of a good person, you have to be able to show others how to be good people, too. Or whatever it is you want them to do…
Leadership is usually quite specific as to who or what is being led to where and why. Somebody who takes some folks on a nice ride somewhere, isn’t exactly a strong recommendation, so why are leadership abilities generally considered to be a generally good thing?
Leadership is not a thing, it’s an action. Much like relationship, which is also commonly mistaken for a noun, it’s a process between parties, far more of a verb than anything else. A relationship describes the action between two people (or issues around the lack of it, as the case may be). In the same way, leadership can’t be a static condition, a generic code of conduct. It’s more like an on-going dance with many motives in play, and too many partners to keep track of it all.
People sometimes confuse authority with exemplary. But if you do something well, you will eventually become recognized for it. If you do it too well, you’ll become recognized as an expert, and if you somehow have the misfortune to become exemplary among experts, then you’ll be called a leader in the field. Your opinions will be held in high esteem. You’ll be put on a pedestal, asked to speak at the conference, look into the camera, snip the ribbon, wave to the crowd, and then what? We all know what; that part just gets left out of the resume.
If you are a leader, you must have followers, and followers… well, they can be a pain in the ass, not thinking things through for themselves all the way, counting on the leaders to have it all figured out. And if you’re the lucky leader, everyone will be looking to you for answers, and no end to the pestering now. That is, until your answers become unacceptable, outdated, or simply wrong, then you will fulfill the definition of expert rendered by Utah Phillips: an ex is a has-been, and a spurt is a drip under pressure.
Being a leader is okay on the uptake. There’s respect, maybe admiration, perhaps applause. But then there’s the downside, and that would be the bull’s-eye, the focal point of attention when things go wrong, and sheep will demand to know who’s to blame. Uh, you.
The goal of leadership, per se, seems misapplied. Better to commit to be of service, in the capacity that is your destiny path, which of course includes the joy of following your bliss. But it also requires the willingness to accept the challenges of your karmic burden, the cross you bear, so to speak, the thing you’d rather not pay attention to, but that will bear much fruit within the tree of your lifetime, if you but tended to that Orchard.
And if that kind of service leads to a state of leadership, then so be it. Lord knows, when so many people are going so many wrong directions, there’s ample room to point out better places to go. And hopefully do so without standing in front of all the insane momentum.
Becoming a leader is like becoming a shaman; you don’t choose it, it chooses you. If you somehow possess enough skill, compassion and common sense to become recognized for it, leadership might well be thrust upon you. Then your grace and wisdom and all your coveted leadership qualities will be sorely needed to steer the ship and not step in the shit.
But in a time of rampant confusion within a society of sociopaths in every institution but the mental, the shadow side of leadership will be equally notorious, and not the exclusive club of the merely politically corrupt. More than a few nasty horsemen will become adept at driving the herd off some particular cliff of no return. And more than a few foolish leaders will be caught up riding point.
Leadership is not a merit badge to be earned quickly and worn lightly. It’s a serious commitment with serious consequences, not all of which can ever be foreseen. If it wasn’t new territory, we wouldn’t need scouts. And real scouts don’t need no stinking badges. But good leaders absolutely rely on their scouts.
I’ll leave leadership for the Boy Scouts who thrive on attention. I’d much rather be a Man Scout at this point; much mo’ bettah than hopping on the big white horse just to be the first one to charge down in there. You go, Kemosabe.
Not in charge, and not on the front pages. Working the edges, and rarely out in the open. Nor grazing placidly above the cliff, mindless of disaster edging closer, oblivious to all the hollering and hand-waving coming from those cowboys on the horizon.
But watching, invisible. Observing, undetected. Reporting, with accuracy.
No fuss, no fanfare. Eyes on the ground and a solid grip on reality.
As an antidote to any leadership track, it strikes me as a path worth considering…
Next: The Way of the Scout
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
-last lines of Mad Farmer Manifesto by Wendell Berry
Tags: authority, character, destiny, leadership
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
by Scott
June 5th, 2011
Listening to the soundtrack of modern life is an exercise in dissonance, cognitive and otherwise.
Everyone wants to go see the new musical The Fracktastics, because they’re desperate to be whistling a catchy new tune. But it’s just a remake by the same old tired producers, who only want everyone to keep on dancing to the petroleum piper. Of course, since that’s the background noise for all of us, the challenge is to compose something entirely new, to weave strands of a sustainable life, while perhaps hanging on by merely a thread in this one. Have you ever tried to recall a melody while the radio’s blasting out something else?
It’s not easy to prepare for a future that nobody wants to admit is happening already. For those of us taking a stab at sustainable living, it seems like we’re swimming in two worlds; making a living here and now, while also preparing for the afterlife: not in heaven, but here, after everyone’s done making a killing. Many of us are beginning to collect what we’ll need to really live a more localized life. But how can we possibly afford everything required while we’re caught up in the cultural insanity that subsidizes the absurd?
When folks ask me what tools they should own to live more sustainably, they think I’m going to say something like, “cross-cut saw” “scythe” and “donkey carts” and you should see the faces drop on the Prius purists when I say “chainsaw” “weed whacker” and “pick-up truck”. Huh? Well, of course, eventually we’re going to need the hand tools, and now’s a good time to collect them, perhaps practice a bit, but forget about actually using them to get any work (or income) done now. The game is still played for a while yet on oil-can rules.
Simply put, in order to have the time to both plant the garden AND bring home the bacon, we must use the time-saver tools while we can. When someone can thin the woodlot and buck rounds with the chainsaw, mow the cover crop quickly with the string trimmer, and haul yet another truckload of manure from the stable to the compost yard, then I consider them to be far more prepared for doing all of it with hand tools, than they would be by placing some antique object de art found at some yard sale on a basement shelf and calling it “ready”. No blisters, no progress. Or, uh, adaptability, that’s it.
But if you live in the woods and don’t heat with it, live next to horses and don’t collect the fertility, or insist on a manicured lawn with tight edges, then these (and you) are indeed tools of the industrial empire. Ultimately, any tool is only as good as the brain, heart and hands behind it (and that goes for guns, too, although that’s an entirely different discussion). “Environmentalists” hate the bulldozer as a symbol of rapacious destruction, and lord knows examples abound. But in the hands of an old master, it can carve a perfect pond, setting the stage for many years of reinhabitory wisdom to take root downstream.
I love how an old Indian guy framed it for me a long time ago; you’ve got to lash two canoes together for this ride. In one of them, you’ve got your car, your computer, your grid and grocery store, and how you figure on paying for all that modern lifestyle. And in the other canoe, your seeds, your hand tools, your skills at using them, and all the things you suspect might come in handy some day. Sooner or later.
And while it might be difficult and cumbersome to stock and navigate that craft, we’ll soon be dropping in to a wild set of rapids just before a fork in the river. That’s when you cut the lashings and hop in the “future canoe” and do your best to ride it out. Even the best paddler can flip their boat; no amount of any provision is a guarantee of safe arrival. But when the roar of the rapids is behind us, we’ll be well-prepared to make a decent camp. And that’s the best we can hope for.
Because plenty of folks will take the wrong fork, or end up with useless stuff in their boats.
And storage units.
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by Scott
May 29th, 2011
In a recent NY Times Opinion, Mark Bittman questioned whether sustainable farming practices have the ability to feed the present world’s population. Big agribusiness likes to point out that smaller scale farming cannot possibly feed everyone, and it’s true. But neither can the industrial food machine do so any longer, as the increasing price of fuels feeds the price increase of foods. Why is it so hard for us to admit is that NO system of agriculture will ever be able to feed everyone on earth right now?
You see, all these people got here by eating food grown by industrial agriculture with fertilizer made from natural gas, with oil required for every mile along the way. So essentially, the world’s food supply IS natural gas, which is depleting irreversibly. Manures and legumes will NOT replace these levels of nitrogen for uncounted billions of people. And global population levels show no sign of decreasing…yet.
Why do so many "under-developed" places exist? They all used to have a sustainable agriculture in their pre-colonial pasts, until they were forced to become agricultural exporters by the Big Economy. Even if the fertility question were solved (which is impossible) the NYT opinion ignores industrial agriculture’s erosion of topsoil by billions of tons a year, as well as the categorical depletions of water resources that fuel the energy-saturated food system.
The author’s "fun/depressing fact" that it takes 18 months for the earth to replenish one year’s "resources" is nothing but rank baloney. How do we replenish oil and natural gas and perpetually lowering water tables? There is no such thing as replacing combustible fuels turned into exhaust! Everyone is fed by this monstrous Food Machine that is now a treadmill running on eggshells: requiring more and more to get less and less, all the while becoming increasingly more fragile to the point of collapse. Many candidates for the last straw, so why are intellectuals reading about "one point five earths" when any six-year-old knows we’ve only got just one! Really!
This is where conceptualism goes completely mental! As in, ungrounded from practical reality. We’ve turned fossil stuff into foodstuffs for so long, it’s simply made too many people for any non-fossilized system to feed. In ecological terms, it’s called "carrying capacity" and is a concrete reality ignored by every esteemed pundit and economist and consumer who fantasizes about unlimited growth.
And that would be nearly everyone who opines for the Times. As well as everyone who dines in these times…
Humans are just another animal species on the planet that must adapt to a decreasing food supply, following the same laws of supply and demand as all the other creatures: when the food supply declines, so does the population. Humans are exceptional, however, by the levels of hubris and ignorance we display along our way down the slope. Sustainable farming practices sure won’t feed everybody, but it’s our best hope for feeding anybody, as the big ag machine rumbles into rust and the fields turn to dust (or mud).
Put a new farmer into business and buy your food from a neighbor. If none of your neighbors are growing food, either do it yourself, or move somewhere they are. And do it now; there are no more years left, only growing seasons. Nothing has ever fed everyone forever.
www.scottallenmcguire.com
Tags: agribusiness, resource depletion, sustainable farming
Posted in sustainable farming | 1 Comment »
by admin
May 7th, 2011
Sustainability, as a word, has been so over-used and mis-applied, as to have become diluted into near uselessness. And since so much of our current way of life is unsustainable, it’s no wonder we’re a bit confused about the whole idea. Most times, the word is slapped like a band-aid on some wildly unsustainable thing, so we’ll feel better about not thinking any more about that.
Sustainability, by my definition, should describe what works over time. It should be a word that describes actions, choices, real-world consequences. Sustainability is real work, not simply talk. If we don’t really walk the talk, we won’t arrive at a place called sustainable. Sustainable is simply what works. What doesn’t work, by definition, is more talk. And more talking without working doesn’t work for me.
The most sustainable food-system design, without implementation, is highly refined talk. There is not a sustainable design in existence that is truly sustainable, unless it is brought into greater existence than design form. Lovely shapes on paper don’t feed anyone. Especially if they merely pacify the urge to action, and not incite a desire for their completion into full form. It’s hard to define sustainability accurately in present time because its proof is evident only in hindsight. Kind of like Peak Oil.
Which is why proponents of anything sustainable must demonstrate confidence in foresight; we’ve inherited so few examples of true sustainability, it’s largely an educated guessing game. We don’t have many examples to draw from because we’ve never been here before, wallowing in our energy-saturated lifestyles. So it’s an arena where common sense and earth wisdom meet with intuition. Where is modern life taking us? Do we want to go there? Can we go somewhere different? What would that take? These are the types of questions we are not trained to ask, yet are prerequisite to arriving at any place livable for long.
There is no single thing that can ever be sustainable by definition. The only thing that can be accurately regarded as sustainable is a whole system. My goal is to move away from the vast inarticulate landscape strewn with “sustainable” objects, and discipline my thinking into realizing this truth of sustainability: it’s all or nothing. What is truly sustainable is a whole entire way of life. All the pieces have to fit together over a long period of time.
Right now, the whole system is so energy-addicted, it’s grasping at straws, walking on pins and hypodermic needles, and seizing on any little piece and calling it sustainable. Very few parts of our energy addiction lifestyle will ever be sustainable. But pieces of a potentially sustainable way of life are emerging, bubbling up within the beast, pockets of sanity rising to the surface of our addled awareness.
Mike Ruppert and friends at Collapsenet are right about “until we change the money, we change nothing". And yet I also believe its precursor: that until we change the way we eat, we are unable to change anything. We must change the way we do food source, the massive societal change that will create a different food supply; vital, local, nutritious, and yes, repeatable season after season, generation after generation. But society won’t do it. You and I will. With our neighbors.
That is the foundation of all that can truly, eventually, come to be called sustainable.
As long as "green" is something you purchase instead of plant, then it’s still just a band-aid.
www.scottallenmcguire.com
Tags: energy addiction, food supply, sustainablility
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
by Scott
April 22nd, 2011
http://www.greenfieldreporter.com/view/story/cfc3e7daee7141eca2b450ac9ca3cfc0/OR–Frozen-Orchards/
This article caught my eye last week, and highlights the predicament of our shared vulnerability to the climate (whatever its politics) and the disastrous, short-sighted way we currently feed ourselves. The situation reported here in eastern Oregon is repeating itself in various startling ways all across the common food-scape.
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency and Extension Service predicted high crop losses this year — as much as 80 percent loss for cherries, 40 percent loss for prunes and plums and 30 percent loss for apples and wine grapes.”
"People will — not if, will — lose their livelihood over this," Burks said.
Those people would be some of the farmers that feed the rest of us. If banks are too big to fail, don’t you think farmers would be too necessary to fail? Farmers going out of business has never been a very good economic indicator, but it’s never punched your average Joe in the wallet too badly. Farm feed-back loops take too long for most of us to notice; our observations seldom venture past the fluorescent aisle.
“The commissioners are asking the governor also to declare a state of emergency. That declaration will help growers apply for government relief.”
No government is ever going to declare it, but our entire food-system is in a state of emergency. Our food supply is incapable of providing remedy for its own death in our lifetime. There is no way to buy ourselves out of this mess, even if the money remained valuable. There simply isn’t time, on the time-scale that food comes into existence. That would be the growing season, and it’s a long time to wait until the next one. But not as long as waiting for trees to grow; assuming they don’t freeze again in the meantime.
The time-scales of modern industrial humans are synchronized to the just-in-time delivery we’ve all come to expect from Big Brown and the other patriotic trucks that deliver our junk and jewels alike every day. In back of every check-out line you’ve ever swiped, grocery shelves full of modern inventory would all be empty within three days, were anything to interrupt the cardiac necessity of truck-flow through the arteries of modern commerce. Like an earthquake. Like a flood. Like a chest-clutching freeze like this one.
“In even worse situations, growers have to uproot the whole orchard and start anew. Burks realized this earlier on, about a month ago. He ordered new trees right away and will replant one orchard next week. Other growers weren’t so lucky. With all the trees killed, Burks said nurseries are back-ordered for three seasons.”
Right. Three seasons. That would be three years, minimum. So even if we wanted to replant immediately (assuming we could afford to) there isn’t even the nursery stock available to do it! Not temporarily out of stock, but seriously non-existent for more than a few years. Oh well, we’ll just have to eat more bananas…
Now if transportation costs continue to rise (sorry, when) then those bananas will get pretty spendy, along with all the tropical fruits we know and love. So we’re much better off getting our own orchards in order right now, before imports go crazy and take us with them. I realize I AM comparing apples to oranges, and it’s about fricken time somebody did! Yaw!
But what’s an investor to DO with so much instability? Smart money gets out of Wall Street and into the backyard tree nursery business NOW. Learn how to use your little pocket knife for grafting fruit trees instead of sharpening pencils. What, no pencil, no pocket knife? Are you kidding me?
"As farmers, we may not see the end result until July," Burks said.”
As eaters, we may not see the end result until it’s too late for all of us.
www.scottallenmcguire.com
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