Archive for January 19th, 2007

The opposite of poor is not rich…

Sharon January 19th, 2007

…it is self-sufficient. That’s the observation of Jeremy Seabrook in _The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty_ (good book, btw). I think this is an important point, particularly because we’re very vulnerable to the traditional measure of self-sufficiency (that is, cash) being devalued. We all know how shaky American currency is right now – we’re being propped up economically by precisely the people that we’re competing with. That makes for some interesting possible scenarios. Lester Brown details one, in which China, which is on the verge of some major grain shortfalls, may end up competing for the food we grow with us – and winning. Another possibility is currency collapse. My friend Les, from Tennessee, who has a much stronger grasp of how markets work than I ever will, once explained it as we import 80% (actually a bit more now) of the savings of *EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD* to make up our deficit. That this situation is untenable, and probably can’t last, is really no shock. Les suggests one watch the hedge fund markets, and on the day the economy crashes, go out and buy a couple of pairs of boots from China – because you won’t see $75 boots again for a long, long, long time. More like $450. And when that comes up against our ability to buy oil…well…

Now most Americans have little or no savings, and those who do, many of whom are baby boomers like my parents planning to retire in a few years, are terribly vulnerable to an economic crisis. Everything is in the markets. If the markets are devalued, so is their future security.

Now I’m sure economists of all stripes will tell you I’m nuts, but if the opposite of poor is self-sufficient, it seems like there are some good and interesting ways to avoid being stripped if the currency collapses. Now maybe it will never happen, but then again, this falls in the category of things that can’t hurt you anyway. So here are six things that (IMHO) will contribute to your security.

1. Stay out of debt. Get out of consumer debt, and pay down your mortgage ASAP. Stop buying stuff you can’t afford, sell off extra things you don’t need if necessary to pare down your debt. If you carry a mortgage, the more of your property you own, the less likely you are to be foreclosed upon and the more likely it is that banks will negotiate. If you have a huge home loan, consider either paying it down by selling something or buying a cheaper house. Or consider consolidating with family members. If you are considering making housing changes, I would do it soon – most of the people I’ve read doubt we’ve seen the bottom of the housing market, and negative equity could kick in quite quickly, making it impossible for people to move.

2. Don’t need so much. Get good at repairing things, making do. Learn to avoid waste. Get good at stretching meals and mending clothes. Get over your anxieties about looking poor, and start cutting back everywhere you can. While there are essentials that everyone needs, no one can deprive you of your luxuries without your consenting to feel deprived.

3. Keep a reserve of both money and goods. Ideally, keep some of your money in something that isn’t subject to rapid devaluations. I’m no expert on this one – some people say gold, some people say, silver, some people say foreign currencies or treasury bonds, some people say cash under the bed. Look around and research the options and make your own decisions – I don’t really have a strong opinion on this one. What I do have a strong opinion on is this – that anything you buy now and reserve for later is probably going to help you economically. That includes a reserve of food, tools, clothing, basic goods, etc… So if you can do it without going into debt or stretching your reserves, I would strongly recommend a six month supply (at a minimum) of storable food, seeds and basic necessities, supplemented with a backup of other basic items – an extra pair of glasses, some extra blankets, boots, warm clothes, whatever you might need to replace within a few years. Worst comes to worst, and you are ahead of the game on your shopping.

4. Access to natural resources. Money is paper. It is often a nice kind of paper to have, but at its root, money depends on a stable economy. A really unstable economy often results in inflation, or deflation, or, if you’d rather, a lot of unpleasant crap where your money isn’t worth much. On the other hand, the things that money mostly gets traded for are useful, even if you don’t have money in many cases. Even if you can’t sell your potatoes, you can eat them, and trade them to your neighbors. Maybe you don’t have money, but you have trees, and other people need firewood. Even if you live in a city, grow some of your own food in pots. The soil in those pots may keep you together some day. You can cut out the middle person to some degree (they still don’t take tax payments in chickens anywhere I know of) by simply producing the things that money is a substitute for – soil, a good mine, a forest…these are good things to have. Just don’t waste or strip them – use them wisely and carefully.

5. A strong community and/or family (ideally both). Your tribe are the people you can pool resources with in hard times – the ones who will take you in if the bottom falls out from under you, or share what they have if things get difficult. A strong community means that the more vulnerable members – pregnant women, mothers of very young children, the elderly, the disabled, small children – can be secure and protected. A community is stronger than an individual or individual household. Make sure you have one, and that it will hold through hard times.

6. The ability to live in the unofficial economy as well as the real economy. Only 1/4-1/3 of the total work human beings do is part of the “official” economy. That is, counted in GDP figures, taxed, included in discussion. Almost 3/4 of what human beings engage in operates in the unofficial economy – the biological economy, from which subsistence farmers, foresters, hunters, and gatherers obtain food, fiber and heat, the household economy, in which the work of domestic labor and childrearing is specifically not considered as “counting,” the family economy in which members of biological or chosen families extend credit to one another and share resources, the criminal economy, where the Mafia, the guy who grows pot in his backyard and the Mom who pays the babysitter under the table operate, the barter economy where you trade goods for one another, and other permutations of the unofficial economy. This is where most of most human beings’s real work goes on. And the less dependent we are on the “official” economy, and official jobs, the more secure we are. In practical terms this doesn’t mean quitting your job, but it does mean having a skill set that will allow you to be, say, an handywoman or a home seamstress, a farmer or a childcare provider in the unofficial economy, able to subsist and earn a small amount of extra income through under-the-table or barter projects. Because no matter how few people are employed or how bad the economy is, the daily exchanges that are necessary for life will probably go on to some degree.

It isn’t that nothing can destroy even the most self-sufficient and prepared person’s preparations. That can happen in an instant. But by hedging your bets, we can make ourselves less vulnerable. We can retain our stake in the official economy, will still building our security and self-sufficience.

For those who have a hard time imagining that times could ever be that bad, or that hard, I strongly recommend two books. Timothy Egan’s _The Worst Hard Time_ is an account of the people who stayed and endured the dustbowl. His account of the man-made disaster, the dust storms that lasted for days and the droughts that endured for years is both acute and compelling. His most important observation is that people did it, unknowingly, to themselves – the dust storms that went on fo
r days, the death of virtually all the livestock on the prarie, children dying of dust-pneumonia, hunger, thirst, heat and drought. It is worth observing that right now the same areas are enduring an extended drought that has been called worse than the dustbowl. The other book is David Shannon’s older work, _The Great Depression_ – it uses primary source material to describe the lead up to the depression and the collapse that follows. The descriptions of the housing boom and bust, and the hunger that went hand in hand with farmers unable to sell their food is both disturbing and evocative.

In almost every way, the people who endured the depression and the dust-bowl were vastly more self-sufficient than we were. And for those who survived, that, not their savings or their planning, were what enabled them to go on. It is also worth observing that in many ways, the thing that brought us out of the great depression was cheap energy. I don’t think we should count on that happening again.

Sharon

Living Off the Waste of Industrial Society

Sharon January 19th, 2007

My friend, MEA, inspires me a lot with her attention to the moral details of conservation. She has written eloquently on various groups we’ve both on about the impact of deriving secondary benefits from industrial society, and thus enabling it. And I think her ideas are important ones. Because the more dependent we are on the consumption of others to allow us to live sustainably, the harder it will be to maintain in the long term.

What am I talking about? Well, there’s the fact that I’ve decided to cheat on my buy-nothing year this summer so that I can buy used clothing at yard sales for my children, particularly my oldest son. My reasoning is, of course, that it would be foolish to miss a whole season of yard saling and then have to buy retail in the fall to make sure he has enough clothes. Now this reasoning is absolutely correct – used items have a smaller environmental impact, by buying them we’re keeping things from being wasted, etc… But it is also a way of making me dependent upon other people buying lots of stuff. Someone has to buy new clothes, and lots of them, in order for me to have anything to pass down. There’s a whole movement, called “The Compact” in which people agree not to buy anything new. But how hard would that movement be if there weren’t so many used things to buy. Amy Dacyzyn, of the _Tightwad Gazette_ observed that once, yard sales tended only to carry battered, poor quality items, but now times have changed – that is, they’ve changed precisely in relation to our lack of commitment to making do, using things up, repairing them and not buying many new things.

Here’s another example – a recent paper came out of MIT, cautiously endorsing corn-based ethanol. The woman who ran the study pointed out that whether ethanol comes out as having any net energy benefit at all depends on how you define the product – that is, which energy inputs you count, and what value you give the co-product, that is, the fermented grain left over after ethanol is produced. Draw a small enough circle around what you’ll include and ethanol is a net positive. Expand the circle enough, and it turns out not to be. David Pimmental at Cornell and Ted Paczek at Berkeley have done a number of studies saying no, the USDA (surprise, surprise), says yes. But what Tiffany Groote’s MIT study did that was interesting was say, “you are both right.” Her cautious yes on whether ethanol is a net energy positive, and whether its pollution consequences are lower depends on using the coproduct of ethanol production to feed to industrially farmed animals. But guess what? It turns out that feedlot meat is a bigger contributor to global warming than SUVs are – because feedlot meat is to incredibly toxic to the environment and consumes such a crazy amount of energy, using ethanol by products to feed cows, which seems like a good use for waste, turns out to be just a way of propping up a disastrous system and doing more harm.

On another group I’m on, there was a discussion of the rise in price in pellets for wood stoves. It turns out that a combination of the rise in recycled plastic lumber (which uses sawdust as part of its materials) and the decline of the new house boom has meant that there isn’t as much sawdust around, and it is getting more and more costly to burn it in the form of pellets. Now this is kind of a problem for several reasons. First of all, that means people who have pellet stoves may burn more oil and natural gas instead. But second of all, it represents another way that the best of intentions (making good use of a waste product to reduce energy consumption), may come back to haunt us. Because when we’re dependent on the by product of industrial, cheap energy, wealthy societies, a reduction in wealth and or cheap energy, or a desire to limit the environmental consequences mean that we’re that much less able to shift over to a truly long-term system. If, for example, new home construction drops even further, there will be a whole lot of people with pellet stoves either paying more for pellets than they might have, or simply unable to maintain their backup heat system. And if it turns out that pellet stoves aren’t such a long term good deal, because many require electricity and because the price and availability of pellets depend on the housing market, we’ll all have wasted a lot of energy, and time and money on manufacturing, buying, using pellet stoves – and we’ll still have to find another heating alternative.

It isn’t that it is bad or wrong to make use of the by products of industrial society. The issue is that we have to start thinking more than 2 steps ahead, and our infrastructure needs to be adapted so that it is neither dependent on cheap energy, high carbon outputs and high consumption, but also so that it isn’t dependent on its waste. That is, there’s nothing wrong with me using other people’s outgrown clothes for my family, but I need to be thinking hard about what happens when the cost of clothing and the economy mean that most people are hanging on to their discards? What happens when more people need to rely on waste, and fewer people can afford to waste things?

Books like _Planet of Slums_ document the millions, even billions of people who are now living, to a large degree, off the garbage and waste of affluent people. In Asia, Africa and Central America, there are now millions of people who live their whole life on the edge of giant dumps, being slowly poisoned by the toxins therein, scavenging wire, or food, or bits of plastic from the things rich people simply throw away. Our own scavenging is usually cleaner and safer, but on some level, those of us who derive our security from the discards of cheap energy and lots of carbon are both enabling and vulnerable to the day when it begins to … stop. And we need to take care, both in a personal sense, that our security is not so dependent on waste that it collapses when waste lessons, but also that we are not enabling things to continue warming the planet and wasting our remaining resources. Because someday, unless we wish to make our livings from the dumps of the rich, it will indeed, have to… STOP.

Sharon