Sharon December 23rd, 2006
Yes, I know Chanukah is almost over, but I’m slow and overworked, and until today, I didn’t get to wish others a proper greeting. So Chanukah Sameach, everyone! And to the rest of you, Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, Good Diwali, and Happy New Year.
Here is my take on Chanukah and the environment. http://groovygreen.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=313&Itemid=57′
Sharon
Sharon December 21st, 2006
It almost doesn’t matter what you believe is the central problem of our present society, whether you are focused on economic instability, peak oil, climate change, poverty and inequity or just the decline of community and standards of behavior. When you filter out the details and get down to brass tacks, the answers to all of the above problems are this. Go home. Stay there. Cook your dinner instead of getting it out. Donate what you save. Talk to your neighbors. Buy local. Grow your own. Go to your town meeting, neighborhood council, or other public forum, and try and improve things. Vote. Make things instead of buying them. Share. Help those in need in your own neighborhood. Walk instead of driving. Play with you kids instead of buying them stuff. Turn down the heat and put on a sweater. Chase your kids or play soccer with your neighbors instead of going to the gym. Talk instead of watching tv. Plant trees. Learn permaculture. Barter. Raise some money for a good cause. Pare down. Live simply. Garden. Go home. Stay there.
Now the first and the last clauses here represent something of a problem for a lot of Americans – because you cannot build community, or develop a local society, or have an orchard, or depend on others for the things that you need, unless you actually stop moving around and stay somewhere. And most of us are not very good at that last – the average American moves every 5 years. Which doesn’t really give you enough time to pay off the mortgage, or see that standard apple tree grow to fruition, or get to know the local issues well enough to have an impact on your town. In five years, you can get a carpool together, and get some bartering going, but you’ll have to leave just as things get good. It gives you just enough time to begin acquiring that wonderful quality, “known-ness” in which you know your neighbors, and you understand how they are connected to other people (that the postman is the BIL of the woman in the third house down, and that the woman in the green house is worried about her mother, whose health is failing), and how you fit in (you are the weird one who composts and has chickens, right?). And then, most likely, you move – for the best of reasons – because this was a starter house and you need something bigger, or to get closer to your dream house, or to build your own passive solar place, to be closer to your elderly parents, or so the kids can walk to school, to be nearer a new job or in a safer neighborhood, or to downsize now that the kids are gone. And you start again with a new garden, and new soil, new trees and new neighbors, new friends for the kids and new everything.
Now I have a lot of natural sympathy for people who move a lot. I would be one of them, but I can’t be. My husband, Eric, feels about moving much the way I feel about toxic chemicals, only not so positively. If it were left to him, we would probably still be living in an apartment in Somerville. But now that he’s here, it has taken him the better part of six years to get used to being here, and he’s happy, so he’s never, ever moving. Add to that that this is the house we lived in with his beloved grandparents, and we’re here forever. On the other hand, if three months have passed since we moved here that I haven’t looked over the local real estate listings, I’d be shocked. Me, I’m a grass-is-greener kind of person. I’ve never been anywhere that I didn’t think (however briefly) “could I live here?” And often, when I’m most frustrated with my life, my first reaction is “we should move to where we could be carfree/have more land/be nearer X relative/be further away from other people/have a smaller house/build green/etc…”
It has been a long, long struggle for me to realize that I am staying here forever, if possible. I still fight against that reality sometimes. I do love my house, but like many of the people I love, I’m not always sure that I actually want to live with it. If you were to describe the ideal post-peak house, I suspect you would not choose a 4000 square foot rambly, under-insulated farmhouse with a bat collector (er, cupola space). It is a pain in the ass to keep clean (and I am an indifferent housekeeper at best), drafty, too big even for our four kids (we had hoped Eric’s grandparents would be with us much longer), because of its size, the taxes run high, and has a host of other things that make it much more difficult and annoying to make efficient than would a new, green-built home. It doesn’t come with an ocean (I grew up near the sea, and that bugs me), and it is in every way imperfect, even when I like it.
And in that sense, it is perfect, isn’t it? Because I’m going to bet that most of you live in the wrong house too. And in fact, no matter how hard we try, we’re not going to replace our 90 million dwellings with brand new, perfectly designed ones. We can’t, and think of what we’d waste in doing so. A few people will build new, green houses, but most of us will make do with what we’ve got, or, as most of us do, buy another house and another house, trying always to get to the point at which our house will fulfill its dream functions for us. But we never quite succeed. I once read that people who build their dream houses only live in them an average of 7 years. Because in 7 years, dreams change, I guess, and we get frustrated by the fact that houses, no matter how wonderful, are in the end, only houses, and go looking for the magic house that will be more.
And all that moving around exacts a price. First of all, there’s the economic price – the cost of realtors fees, and advertising, moving costs and buying new things at the other end – we lose an average of between 6 and 8% of the purchase price on each house. In a bubble market like the one we’ve been in, that’s no big deal – we get it back. But that’s not the norm, and we all know those days are over. So moving costs us economically. And it sets us back on every goal we have in creating local economies, local communities, local cultures. Every time we pick up and move, we lose a year or two of high quality work – because while we’re adapting to a new place, meeting people, finding out about local resources, getting used the new job, seeing where the sun falls in the yard and testing the soil, we’re spending time that could be gardening and working at the shelter and bartering with the neighbors. It also costs energy – moving our crap, buying new stuff, flying on airplanes, renting trucks, these are not low energy input activities. They raise our personal energy footprint.
Now sometimes we’re going to have to move. But over the coming decades, a lot more of us are
going to have to stay put. We are, as author and Post-Carbon Institute founder Julian Darley puts it, going to have to change to a foot economy, and “relocalize.” But you cannot relocalize if you are dreaming of the day you will move to your perfect house, that you will find the perfect community of people just like you. We can’t wait until we can all afford the perfect place. And some, perhaps many, of the places we’re in are going to have to become perfect because they are ours. With the crash of the housing market, it isn’t going to be economically feasible to trade up all the time. No matter how good your R value, the building materials in your perfect house come with a big energy footprint. No matter how annoying your neighbors, maybe it is time to share with them, rather than dreaming of the perfect community. Even if the house is too small, or too big, doesn’t have the garden space you dream of or is down the street from weird people, it might be the best place for you.
So I’m trying. We were fortunate enough to inherit some money from Eric’s grandparents. And we decided to put it into making the house more “ours” and I’ve stopped looking at the real estate ads. Last night I looked out at the stars and I tried to imagine that this, with its benefits and limitations, is our permanent world, the place where we will
always live. The only home my children will know. We are renovating the house to make ourselves more self-sufficient, and to set things up so that we can live comfortably without electricity or other fossil fuel inputs. I am trying to make it more beautiful, to pare down what we don’t need, and to make things prettier. And I am trying to believe that here is where I am supposed to be.
Sharon
Sharon December 12th, 2006
The kids and I ate about half a raw cabbage this afternoon. We had four heads left in the garden, marginally protected, and we’re going out of town this weekend, so we decided to harvest. The kids always have to eat what we pick, so off we went to get a knife, and nibble at slices of cabbage. And, of course, since we’ve gone through some heavy cold temperatures, the cabbage’s starches were all converted to sugars. I knew it happened, of course, but I rarely have cabbages in the garden so late, so I’d never tasted one quite this good. So we ate and ate until we were full of raw cabbage and happiness, partly from the sheer surprise of it.
We still have turnips and beets, parsnips, carrots and daikon mulched in the ground, and kale, mustard and spinach as well. It has been a mild year, of course, but even in the coldest winters here, with minimal effort I was able to winter-over leeks and kale.
I’ve heard people say, “I love to garden – I have to garden all year round, so I could never live where you do.” Well, I do garden all year round. By the time most of the garden is finished, in mid-December, I’m picking out seeds. Leeks and the earliest container tomatoes, some greens and pansies will be started in January. When the first thaw comes (it is a fake, of course, but we’ll take it) in February, we dig parsnips and check the cold frames for signs of life. The first protected greens are ready by the third week of March, by which time my house is exploding with seedlings, and at the beginning of April, the potatoes and onions go out, along with various greens and roots.
Global warming may have extended our season some (a pleasure not worth its price, of course), but even without it, gardening goes on forever.
Sharon
Sharon December 9th, 2006
On Running on Empty 2 and 3, I have been a fairly harsh critic of Toby Hemenway’s writing on peak oil (some of my criticisms have also been reprinted elsewhere). While I do like his book _Gaia’s Garden_ very much, I have found his analyses of the peak oil movement to be less impressive and helpful than his work on permaculture. For example, in his essay, “Apocalypse Not,” Hemenway made several significant errors in analysis, among them implying that demand destruction was an inevitability (Matthew Simmons has documented that it is not, at least in terms of gasoline), claiming that China was cash poor (in fact, China has very, very deep pockets indeed) and thus would be unable to compete for oil with us, and also using erroneous figures to say that world oil demand has grown only 0.75 percent annually in the last 25 years. In fact, the average annual growth has been 1.4%, and over the last decade it has been rougly 2%. Since much of his analysis is predicated on this figure, it undermines his arugments significantly.
Hemenway also goes on to claim, “Humanity has reached the stage, finally, where basic survival is not in doubt for many people.” (Hemenway, “Apocalypse Not” http://www.energybulletin.net/14695.html” I personally find the above statement, along with his consistent errors, to be frustrating, because it is so patently false. Not only does Hemenway ignore the reality that the struggle for survival is both urgent and present for an enormous percentage of the world’s population, but, as I wrote in my critique of his paper, “yes, in wealthy nations, the struggle for survival is over. It should be replaced with the struggle not to kill, enslave, poison and impoverish, ideally, but hasn’t been. But the fact that we have passed the struggle to survive on to others is no accident – it is a conscious choice on our part, and one that doesn’t bode well for our ability to transform ourselves. (Astyk http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty3/message/17329)” Hemenway’s figures about reductions in US oil consumption ignore, for example, the fact that we have moved much of our production offshore, and so many other nations “consume” the oil used to raise our food or produce consumer goods that arrive in our home.” Were we to consider the “shadow” oil we use, our consumption figures would rise dramatically. He claims to be debunking “errors and half truths” of peak oil catastrophism, but his own writting is riddled with both. The reality is that our struggle to survive is over because millions of other people have taken over that struggle for us – and we are deeply dependent upon the labor and wealth that they create for us.
In another essay, Hemenway wrote an explanation of his move out of a rural area and back an urban one, an advocated that others do the same. He recounts his that he made his move because he was unable to develop relationships or community with any of his neighbors in his rural area, and talked about how he knew he was back with his own sort of people when he spotted a Mercedes Benz with a leftist bumper sticker (Hemenway, http://www.patternliteracy.com/urban.html). I think that single statement may be the best possible indictment of the consistent limitations of Hemenway’s thinking – he simply cannot conceive the “view from below,” a less priveleged perspective which might lead to a darker viewpoint than his own.
So I approached Hemenway’s current article on the origins of peak oil apocalypticism (http://www.energybulletin.net/23386.html with some skepticism, particularly since he’s writing about a topic near and dear to my heart – the subject of the apocalyptic impulse, which was the focus of my uncompleted doctoral dissertation in English literature. And Hemenway has justified my every doubt – he’s written an extended attack on those who dare to criticize him, couched in the form of an analysis of the history of apocalyptic thought. It really is quite a creative way to discredit your critics, and for that, I’ll give him credit. It would be more creative if it were not essentially a duplication of or rehash of the arguments made in the essay _Imagine There’s No Oil: Scenes from a Liberal Apocalypse_ which appeared in the August 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. He covers pretty much precisely the same ground, and makes very similar arguments, without citing the article. I assume Hemenway hasn’t read it, but he ought to, since it renders his essay to a large degree redundant.
Hemenway begins speaking of peak oil “doomers,” a group of people he does not define, but implies, that it is anyone who doesn’t share the vision he laid out in the article “Apocalypse Not.” And much of the article represents a (carefully phrased in terms of an objective analysis of the issue of “doomerism,” of course) dismissal of his critics and anyone who believes that peak oil might result in a radical alteration in our society. He manages to mention many of the major public figures in the peak oil movement (Kenneth Deffeyes, Richard Heinberg, Thom Hartmann, among others) marking them all out as “doomers.” He is quick to claim that he is not arguing about whether or not peak oil doomers are right or wrong (sure, he’s not), saying, “Again, my point here is not that Peak Oil doomerism is wrong. The apocalypts may, for the first time in thousands of predictions, be right.”
So let us begin by considering that last statement. It is true that the ranks of American Mercedes-owning leftists have not been pruned in recent history, (although some might argue that a brisk culling is in order), so perhaps we can justify Hemenway’s assumption that all doomer predictions are wrong. But then again, perhaps not. For example, early Zionist Jews who spun out tales about the possible destruction of the Jewry by antisemites, were, if anything, unimaginative compared to the scale of the eventual apocalypse that befell European Jews under Hitler. Boccacio, who predicted that much Italy would see corpses choking their rivers unburied lived to see it during the Black Death. The Lakota religious leader, Wovoka was probably accused of doomerism in his claim that if the Lakota could not spiritually remove white folks, it would end in the death of the Lakota people, but Wounded Knee suggests that he may have been more on-target than not. Cassandras are not always wrong, and it is not always a bad idea for Noah to build an ark.
So it is perhaps not quite accurate to suggest that in thousands of predictions of human disaster, none of them have been right. In fact, quite a few have. Quite a number of peoples and populations have undergone dramatic, even apocalyptic changes, including the deaths of massive portions of their population, and in every case, some people who have used the available evidence to make predictions, even dark ones, have been right. So that contention doesn’t really hold up.
It might help to figure out what “doomerism” is. Is it the belief that the growth economy cannot and should not continue ? The belief that millions or even billions of people might die from hunger? The Olduvai Gorge hypothesis, in which we are reduced to a few primitives? Hemenway’s work offers very little suggestion for what he’s thinking as doomers, other than that doomers clearly disagree with him. Is doomsday a disaster only if it affects the whole planet equally, or could it fall unevenly on the shoulders of some? Because he offers no statistical grounds, I would only note doomers, who believe that millions or billions might starve have considerable evidence on their end. 24,000 people die each day worldwide, both from direct hunger and the illnesses related to the long term effects of starvation. That amounts to something less than 1 billion people per year. Die-off is not, in fact, (except in Hemenway’s upper middle class viewpoint) an imaginary thing that might happen someday, but a reality. The question is whether it will come to visit any individual community or nation. If, for example, one lived in South Africa and watched their families and communities decimated by AIDS
and related illnesses, one might be forgiven for believing that in fact, the apocalypse has come calling.
The clearest guess at what Hemenway believes it is comes at the end of the article, where Hemenway refers to Richard Heinberg’s recent paper entitled _50 Million Farmers_, and says of Heinberg’s analysis, “He and others envision a future with far fewer people, many of them living rurally and raising most of their own food using permaculture and bio-intensive gardening. Some argue that post-peak, only those with primitive skills such as tanning and flint-knapping will survive. Suburban drones will die. So after the collapse, we follow the myth’s final trajectory into the survival of an elect, and a rebirth in the Garden and simpler times.” Hemenway is getting ahead of himself – Heinberg proposes a return to small scale agriculture as a means of staving off the danger of becoming far fewer people. Now to be fair to Hemenway, Heinberg is on record as believing that the sustainable population of the earth is only 1-2 billion, and that peak oil could potentially be disastrous, but the focus of this paper is the avoidance of hunger, famine and disaster. Heinberg is arguing that we might potentially avoid hunger and the death of billions by re-ruralization. This is not the pattern of apocalypse and happy ending that Hemenway documents over the course of his article, but a series of acts human beings can engage in to improve their society and reduce the danger of famine, for everyone, including the “suburban drones.” Hemenway seems unclear on the difference.
Now the question of the apocalyptic impulse is, indeed an interesting one, and I think a complicated one. We cannot simply say, as Hemenway does, “The path to “end of the world” thinking is well trod, most heavily so in times of oppression, uncertainty, and corruption. But perhaps some of us can recognize how familiar is this dark road, resist the natural urge to repeat the story once more, and remember that there are many routes into the future other than the one toward the lowest common denominator,” because Hemenway is retooling the question into a way of dismissing apocalypticism. But there is more to say about it than that we have a cultural predisposition to imagine a disaster and rebirth. Because, of course, we do, perhaps in part for the reasons Hemenway lists, but also because thus far in human history, when disaster has befallen us, we’ve eventually picked up the pieces and gone on to rebirth. That narrative is inscribed in human consciousness not just because of our religious leanings (as Hemenway suggests), but because that describes the collective historical experience of human beings throughout human history. Things fall apart, and we repair, and those who survived go on to experience joy and relief. Yes, that describes most stories of religious ending. It also describes the actual realities of most bad things that happen to people.
It might be more useful, I think, to ask why we approach the apocalypse with such a combination of fear and fascination. I think it may be because our fears and our fantasies are so tightly linked to one another that in one sense, our fantasies are our fears, and vice versa? Or perhaps because the root experience of counting is so central to the operation of our minds? We instinctively count other people, and calculated them in an immensely complex analysis that allows others to both be “too many” – that is a threat to our privacy, or our resources, or our sense of self; and “not enough;” that is, too few of our own group in the face of the impingement of another tribe, not enough of the right sex with the right availability, or enough to carry on the name. It is possible that we long for numerical reductions to approximately the same degree we are terrified of them. Or perhaps that we as a people associate smaller numbers with smaller and more manageable social systems (correctly, actually, as Heinberg’s paper documents). Or perhaps some combination of these reasons and others not yet proposed. But regardless, Hemenway’s analysis stops short of the useful.
Despite his contrary claims, there is little doubt that Hemenway oversimplifies to get in a few good digs. For example, he says, “Rather, it’s an exploration into why, given an impending crisis or major challenge, many people in our culture spiral so quickly and automatically toward an “end of the world” vision rather than imagining any of the countless other options” Instead of granting those who disagree with him good faith that they have been led by their data, and that they are actually invested in a vision that is far from a cultural norm, Hemenway’s opponents are now “automatically” drawn towards an uncritical majority viewpoint by an irresistable cultural psychology. Hemenway, however, is nobly and wisely able to resist, and, according to him, so should the rest of us fear a path so well trodden. Apparently the psychological path of the person who thinks that things simply won’t get that bad because they haven’t before is more independent in some way I can’t identify.
I don’t consider myself a peak oil “doomer” in the sense that I believe massive casualties are an inevitable outcome of peak oil – I believe strongly in the capacity of human beings to change and rework their world. I do, however, believe that the world is simply more nuanced and the dangers are more complex than Hemenway seems able to acknowledge. I would suggest to him that it is at least as dangerous to apply the oversimple pattern of thought that leads one to believe that one’s personal perspective represents the perspective and realities of the world at large, and that is often not such a bad thing to take your critics seriously. Yet again, I think Hemenway takes the easy intellectual road, while chastizing others for doing the same.
Shalom,
Sharon
Sharon December 7th, 2006
I hope you will forgive me for going on about a technicality for a moment, but I’ve been getting a lot of queries on this subject lately. Rather than write the same explanations over and over again, I’m going to publish this here and anyone who asks me in email will get a link to save repetitions.
At the end of the summer, I wrote a paper to present at the Community Solutions Conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Among other things, I called for a massive return to small scale agriculture in America as a way of ameliorating the affects of both peak oil and climate change. I argued that doing so would end the disaster of industrial agriculture, and also act to renew our democracy, by reducing our dependence on corporate interests and leading us back towards the Jeffersonian ideal that the US should be “a nation of farmers.” In my paper I noted that in most of the 3rd world today, and through most of history, approximately 1/3 of the total populace has been involved in Agriculture, and for several reasons, knowing that the US population was about to reach 300 million (which it has since done), I chose to call for “100 Million New Farmers.”
I picked 100 million, rather than 50 million (a figure I considered) because while 50 million represents somewhere between 25 and 30% of the fully employed adults in the work world in America, agriculture is something that doesn’t actually work in the same ways as traditional employment. That is, when one member of a family farms, everyone farms. My concern about the 50 million figure was that it would imply that farming was a single breadwinner activity, and that the only farmers who “count” would be those who do it full time, on large acreage. I did not want to return to the “Farmer” and the “Farmer’s Wife” model, in which only the primary breadwinner’s work is calculated as farming. But on a farm, everyone works, including children, who do a good deal of the productive economic activity of many family farms. Women farmers are the fastest growing segment in agriculture. Retirees can and do farm for a small supplemental income. People who are employed to do agricultural work on farms, but do not own them, or farm on rented land are farmers. Many of this nation’s farmers at present are Chicano, Latino and Carribean migrant workers, who we should dignify with the name “farmer”. And many of the people who have traditionally been called “gardeners” can and should be re-named farmers, for what I think are important reasons.
Farming is not necessarily a full time economic activity – in fact, the majority of full-time professional farmers also either have an outside job or a spouse or family member who does. So even among the people we define as professional farmers, you don’t have to quit your day (or night) job. In fact, I think any smooth transition to small-scale agriculture must include people who are both farmers and shopkeepers, teachers, doctors, construction workers, at home parents, retirees, truck drivers, dancers, and everyone else. Farming, I believe, cannot be an exclusive club if we are not to face food shortages down the line.
A month or so after delivering my Community Solutions talk, I was immensely rewarded and flattered to discover that Richard Heinberg, who was also speaking there, went on to write a now-famous paper entitled “Fifty Million Farmers” http://energybulletin.net/22584.html which in some part derived from my analysis. I was still more flattered to be credited at the end of the paper thus,
(This lecture drew on certain ideas earlier put forward by
Knox, New York farmer Sharon Astyk in her remarks at
the 2006 Peak Oil and Community Solutions conference
in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and on others that emerged in
conversation with Pat Murphy of Community Service and
Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute.)
For those of you who read this blog who don’t know anything about peak oil (ie, some of the ones who are related to me), Heinberg is the GLF (Greatest Living Figure – although that makes him sound like he’s 100 years old and carved of stone, and he’s actually maybe mid-40sish, and is friendly enough) and I’m pretty excited to have had any impact on his thought at all.
I have recently published some material that refers to my own 100 million figure, and there has been some confusion, both as to whether I’m ripping Richard Heinberg off (I don’t think I am) and also why my numbers are so much bigger than his. So I thought I’d clarify as best I can. As far as I can tell (and this is interpellation from Heinberg’s paper, I don’t know for sure), there is very little difference between what we want to see. In fact, I don’t believe our numbers are very different in the end. Both of us chose a nice, functional, big wonking number based on numbers that are very rough estimates, but not, I think, wrong for all that. I suspect we are imagining a not-dissimilar number of total farming households in the US. I’ve sent a copy of this to him, and if he’d like to clarify beyond what is available in the paper, I’ll happily publish it.
If there is a significant distinction between our numbers, it is probably located here, where Heinberg writes,
“Indeed, we need perhaps to redefine the term farmer. We have
come to think of a farmer as someone with 500 acres and a big
tractor and other expensive machinery. But this is not what
farmers looked like a hundred years ago, and it’s not an accurate
picture of most current farmers in less-industrialized countries.
Nor does it coincide with what will be needed in the coming decades.
We should perhaps start thinking of a farmer as someone with 3 to
50 acres, who uses mostly hand labor and twice a year borrows a
small tractor that she or he fuels with ethanol or biodiesel produced
on-site.”
If I have any difference with Heinberg (and I’m not at all sure I do), it is that I believe that the word “farmer” is more elastic still, and should be expanded to include anyone who produces a food surplus for barter or sale, or who provides a significant portion of their own food (ie, subsistence farmers.) I think the word “farmer” can and should include not just people who have returned to rural areas and are growing food on 5 or 10 or 50 acres, but people who are growing food for sale and subsistence on existing suburban lots, people who have been described as gardeners in the past. Because if our cities and suburbs are to survive or thrive, these will be the people who feed them, from their 1/4 acre lots and 2 acre suburban spreads. And farmers, ultimately, are the people who feed us.
So I personally would not use the size of one’s land-base to narrow the definition of “farmer”. In fact, many farmers in the world farm on truly tiny lots – subsistence farmers worldwide average 4.5 acres, with many growing enormous amounts of food on much, much smaller acreage. What matters is that we, as a nation, give up on the enormously destructive and inefficient industrial model and turn towards small scale agriculture, and that those who do so are dignified with the correct term.
I believe in this very passionately. Indeed, my friend Aaron Newton and I are writing a book on just this subject. And I can’t begin to say how delighted I am that Richard Heinberg is also devoting his intellect and his considerable scholarly weight to this unbelievably urgent project. A New Yorker article a few months ago reports Bill Clinton describing in some detail how compelling he found Heinberg’s first book on peak oil, _The Party’s Over_. What Richard Heinberg writes on this subject has the potential to change the world. Having more than an average share of hubris, I have hopes that Aaron’s and my book will have a
n impact there too.
Here is an excerpt from my own talk, in the hopes of persuading other people to become one of the 50 million or 100 million, or whatever.
“Now I know this talk is supposed to be about “large scale gardening” but I keep speaking of farming. That’s because there’s an untenanted space between the word “gardener” and the word “farmer” that needs to be addressed. A gardener is usually someone who grows things for their pleasure, from the sheer joy of it. When we talk about farmers, we usually mean someone with a profession is growing food on a large scale. But somewhere in between them is the idea we need to grasp with language – that there could be someone who grows a lot of food to eat, but still takes pleasure in the act, who may sell food, but whose work cannot be traded on the commodities market.
Or perhaps we don’t need a new word, because we have one. In nearly every nation in the world small scale or subsistence agricultural producers are called “farmers“. In English, the word derives from the word for “earth,” as in “firmament” or “terra firma,” but it also shares its origin with the word “form” to mean “to shapes or creators.” . It occurs to me that right now, we need to become a nation of people who see themselves as creators rather than conquerors or consumers, people who see our central work as the maintenance and sustenance of the earth and human cultures. So I’d like to propose to you that for the purposes of this talk, we think of all our exercises in food production as a kind of farming. In fact, I’d be thrilled if you’d go on thinking of yourself as a farmer after we’re done here, because I think that habit of thought could be a powerful one for most of us.
Because it isn’t such an outrageous leap to imagine yourself as a farmer. It turns out that only in our highly commodified culture, which values only large scale agriculture at all, and even that not much, is a farmer defined as a big man with a big tractor who grows a thousand acres of corn and votes republican. In fact, he’s not a he at all – the average farmer, worldwide is a woman, and not a white woman at that. Even in the US, the only really fast growing segment of agriculture is that of independent women farmers. The average farmer in the world is a woman, farming 4 ½ acres, growing 15 different crops on them. They own no tractor and do most of their labor by hand, and their household has at least one outside source of income (that last part is the only thing that is true of most professional farmers as well – 70% of them must either hold a second job or have a spouse work outside the home to support themselves). And the average farmer world wide doesn’t look all that different from what American farmers used to look like. Because the average first settlers in the US farmed only 7 acres, and by the time that Thomas Jefferson was rhapsodizing about the democratic possibilities of a nation of farmers, the average farmer only had 10 acres.
What we are talking about, then, is a return to human norms, in which many people are involved in a subsistence economy, producing most of what they need, with enough to create a small outside income for the things they cannot grow or barter for. We have been conditioned by growth capitalism to see such work as endless drudgery, grinding poverty and misery. But in fact, as Veronika Bennholt-Thomsen and Marie Mies describe in their book _The Subsistence Perspective_ (a book I highly recommend, btw), most small polyculture producers value what they have, their independence and their strong cultural ties. We should think carefully before we assume that a subsistence lifestyle is a step down – because for many independent small farmers in the world, our dependence on the money economy, military and economic expansionism and outside things like fossil fuels look like a kind of vulnerability and dependence that would be intolerable.”
And if anyone out there knows what the correct form of citation is for the work of someone who was influenced by your work, but published first, and went on to influence your later work, please let me know. My brain hurts just thinking about it 
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Shalom,
Sharon