The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon June 25th, 2009

This post is going to get me in some trouble, I suspect, as it ignites the ever-present discussion of whether ordinary people who incurred debts should do anything in order to avoid default or not.  I’m sure I’ll get accused of encouraging people to default, although that’s not my primary intention here.  Instead, what I want to do is give people who are already facing default a rational way of approaching the issue – because I think this is increasingly the reality for many people, as they exhaust their unemployment benefits, use up their savings and still have no hope of a job or income. Yes, it would have been a lot better for those who lived profligately (and some of these people were never profligate, and are merely unlucky) not to buy houses, build up debt, etc… but having done so, they now are facing default or bankruptcy, and it might be wise to know how to navigate that situation.

The reality is that a study recently suggested that if you calculate debt interest payments into cost of living, there are 4 million new poor people just this year in the US, people who are experiencing debt poverty, and whose debt is preventing them from meeting basic needs. 

So let me be clear – I am not advising default, or encouraging you to run up debts and default -  I believe people should pay their bills.  I also live in the world as it is, not as it should be -   if you face an inability to pay your bills, there are ways to minimize the harm to your family. I have no ethical difficulty with minimizing that harm for most people - enormous investments are being made to soften the blows for banks, while nothing is done for ordinary people, many of whom took on these debts not because they were stupid or evil but because they were falsely promised things that were never delivered – I find it hard to blame 17 year olds who signed on for college debts they were told were their ticket away from poverty, or elderly folks whose retirement savings have vanished and medical costs skyrocketed.  If this also helps some jackass who was speculating in Las Vegas real estate, well, it isn’t my goal, I’d rather not, but I can live with it if it does some good to those who, through no fault of their own, are unable to meet their debts.

 The first question is “bankruptcy or default” – although for many poor people, this may not be a question at all.  Legal services are now overwhelmed with bankruptcy cases, and it can be almost impossible to get legal help to file, and many low income families can’t afford the fees to declare bankruptcy.  Moreover, many of the working poor already have trashed credit ratings – and the primary virtue of bankruptcy is that it allows you to obtain credit down the road – but if you have no hope of viable credit in the longer term, it may not be worth the price.  Bankruptcy now means paying creditors gradually – but even gradual payments may be infeasible for many people.  Finally, some debt can’t be vacated by bankruptcy proceedings – student loans among them.  If they are your primary problem, bankruptcy won’t help.  If you do want to declare bankruptcy, find a lawyer, since this is not a home project.  Bankruptcy is almost certainly the best choice for the formerly middle class, anyone with money and anyone with a business. If there’s no money at all, default may be the only choice.

If, however, you need to default, you should know the risks of defaulting on each kind of debt.  What you default on, and in what order if and when you must, depends on your circumstances.  The question is how to minimize harm.  Before I wrote this post I consulted with Stoneleigh and Ilargi over at The Automatic Earth www.theautomaticearth.blogspot.com, and got their advice as well, which I’ve included here.

The first thing every person should seriously consider dumping are luxury items – second cars (yes, I know, you need it, you absolutely need it – and that’s true of a very small percentage of the people who think they absolutely need it), second homes, boats, RVs that you don’t actually live in full time – if it costs a lot of money and you don’t absolutely need it, get rid of it.  Yes, it might be inconvenient, and the item will be repo’d.  But you are better off without it anyway.

This first point seems really obvious to me, but I think it escapes people – it is surprising how often the attempt to maintain some kind affluent norm leads to people losing more in the end than they had to – at first everyone rationalizes “oh, I’ll find another job, we’ll be fine…” – this trying to maintain the lifestyle ends in disaster all too often, as the cascade of problems hits harder than it would if all the extra luxuries were immediately jettisoned.  So dump them now.

After that, the question of what to default on first becomes more complex, and depends on your circumstances.  Are you applying for a job that requires official transcripts?  In that case, don’t default on your student loans, since you won’t be able to get them.  Did you buy your house at the peak, and does it require both you and a partner to have  full time jobs?  Consider getting rid of it by sales or if necessary walking away?  Do you have low payments and lots of equity?  Maybe it would be preferrable to get rid of everything else before the house.  I can’t choose for you, I can only tell you the consequences and advantages of each.

1. Student loans – the good part of defaulting on these is that no one can take away your education.  The bad part is this – you will never be able to get a transcript, your tax return will be taken away forever, and some federal and state jobs won’t hire you.  I admit, of all the ethical issues involved in default, I have the least difficulty with this one, since I think student loan purveyors prey upon very young people who simply don’t understand the implications of the choices they are making – they are told over and over again that they must have a college education at any price, and they then take on loans that keep them in debt slavery for decades.  When the credit card industry preys on teenagers, we complain – but not when the student loan industry does.

2. Medical debt – the bad news about this one is that they can take your house for this.  The good news is that once you have your health, they can’t repo it.  It is usually better to enter repayment plans, however difficult, than to default on medica debt, however.  If you can’t avoid it, and the debts are substantial enough, you will probably lose your house as well, if you have one, so you might want to make provision for moving to a rental before your credit rating is tanked.

3. Your house – for many people who bought from, say 2003 on, this might be the first thing to give up.  Most loans are non-recourse loans – that means if you send the keys back to the bank, you can’t be dunned for the rest.  You will see a cost on your credit rating – and since credit scores can be so essential to getting access to rental housing, you will need to have your rental apartment lined up before you do this. 

Ilargi, Stoneleigh and I disagree on this one somewhat – their general case is that housing prices will fall sufficiently that most people should sell or walk away now, relieve themselves of their debt burden, rent for a while and then buy later.  And they may have a point from a purely economic standpoint.  I tend to lean, if one has reasonable equity and low payments that can be made on one income, to moving more people in and otherwise making your house more sustainable, simply because the land itself, the stability and security have value to most people. I agree with them that we all ought to do a hard analysis of whether we will have a future in our homes, and it can be hard to be honest about this.  That said, however, built up soil, fruit trees and neighborhood community are tough to maintain if you keep moving.  Rental housing is also vulnerable to disruption – landlords lose their houses too, or want to move their relatives in.  My feeling is that if your home can be used to partially sustain you – to develop a cottage industry, to feed and otherwise meet your needs,  and if your costs aren’t too high, it is worth trying to keep it.

4. Your car.  This is a tough one for a lot of people in rural and exurban areas – and yet, far more people could live without cars than do.  Certainly, if you have any kind of viable public transportation system (and yes, buses count) in your area, or even if most people in your community commute to one or two central areas for work, you could probably live (not conveniently or easily) without a car, paying to share someone else’s for essentials and staying at home a lot more.  You’ll have to do the calculation on cost.  At a minimum, however, if you are paying a car loan and can do any car maintenence, get out of your loan immediately and buy a beater – if you are paying for pretty, or even mileage, you probably will do better with something cheaper and fewer trips.

5. Unsecured credit card debt.  Your credit rating will get trashed, but there’s not much that can be done about this – now.  Stoneleigh and Ilargi were both inclined to argue that if you are going to default on this, do it soon – that eventually the penalties for default will get higher and nastier, and I think I agree.  Right now, there’ s not much that can be done – whether it will stay that way is another question (and goes to all of these kinds of debt).

6. Your utility company.  My preference would be that all of us simply learn to get along without these people. I suspect that utility company defaults and shutoffs are going to mean many, many more people lack what we think of as basic resources like lighting, heat and refrigeration, and that it is wise to prepare now to live without them. This is more feasible for some people than others, but if you have invested a lot of energy and time into making your house power outage proof, and are in dire economic straits, letting the electric company turn you off is not the worst thing that could happen.  Other than shutting you off and trashing your credit rating, there’s not much they can do.

There’s another kind of debt I haven’t mentioned here, because I think default on that is completely unethical. In each of the above cases, the hurt from default (which is real and I do not minimize) either falls on many broad backs (ie the taxpayers, and yes,I agree they don’t need more on their backs, but I don’t see a lot of ways around it), or on corporations who can often write off  their losses, or at worst, who find themselves dissolved.  I think those kinds of hurts, while not-trivial, are less serious than direct personal debt.

If you continue to pay none of your debts, the one you should continue with is CHILD SUPPORT – let me be clear, I realize that it is often very difficult for people who have lost jobs, have other families, etc… to continue paying child support. I also realize that in some cases, the onus of child support is unfair in some measures.  But the truth is this – these are your kids.  If you can’t pay, go to court and get it refigured, or work it out with your ex.  But I know too many children whose ability to eat dinner depends on Mom or Dad coming up with the cash to have any respect for someone who shorts out on child support when there is any other possible avenue to survive. 

I would also strongly advocate paying local suppliers and anyone you have an actual relationship with that supplies you with credit – those are people you do not want to cut off.

There you have it.  Now the flames and debates about the justice and ethics of this will start, and I agree, default, if there are other choices, is usually unethical.  But unfortunately, so many people’s backs are against the wall that I don’t see a lot of viable other choices – and I also believe that so much of this situation has been mishandled by unethical leaders that the ethical failings of most ordinary people are reduced to peccadillos in comparison – and that deserves oure primary attention.

 I hope this provides some small help – it is little enough for those in desperate circumstances.

 Sharon

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Sharon June 24th, 2009

Note: This is the first in an intermittent series of posts on my bioregion, and how it might create sustainable industries and a viable long term economy.  All of us are going to have to figure out how to create local economies where we are – we’re going to need the jobs, we’re going to need the goods, we’re going to need to think about the long term as we do it.  These are my musings on how New England and Northern NY might begin to adapt.  I hope others will consider how this might work in their region, and link to their considerations in comments. 

In the early 19th century, the northeast was dotted with sheep farms.  In 1809, Thomas Jefferson appointed William Jarvis as ambassador to Spain, where Jarvis met the Merino.  For those of you who are not fiber-aware, Merino is the softest wool out there, often wearable by people who think they can’t wear wool – there is nothing scratchy about it. 

Jarvis imported 15,000 sheep into New England, and their wool sold at a shocking (inflation adjusted) $100lb.  The old stone walls that wander through second growth woodlands and along old homesteads in the Northeast often kept in flocks of sheep, and many of the old farmhouses were built with sheep money. 

In the late 1830s, however, the sheep industry began to collapse.  All animal agriculture has boom and bust cycles – the Merino sheep was the alpaca of its day, starting out selling for high prices, but the very reality that animals reproduce themselves means that those extremely high prices can never last.  Moreover, industrialization pushed back the wood industry – the railroad lines transported western wool back to the mills in the Northeast, coal heating made the need for woolen blankets fall and the industrialization meant more people working inside, in mills and offices, rather than outside.  Wool flooded the market, and since Merino sheep have a characteristic lanolin flavor to their meat which many people do not like, meat sales couldn’t keep the market up.  After that, there was a shift to dairy farming, and then to suburbanization – in many ways it was the beginning of the long collapse of New England agriculture, and the words “Go West Young Man” institutionalized the fall.

Well, I suspect that we’ll be hearing “Go north and east, young man” in the next decades.  Why?  Well, drought for one. The Goddard Institute of Space Science offers drought maps that show chronic drought affecting most of the West and Southwest US.  The pumping of rivers and aquifers and declining rainfall mean that predictions are increasingly clear – much of the agricultural production of the west may end in the coming decades.  The wettest part of the United States in most projections is the upper-midwest and the Northeast.  Because so much of US water use is used in agriculture, it is pretty accurate to say that water is agricultural destiny.  Thus, we can expect to see agricultural production returning to the wetter parts of the Southeast, remaining in the Midwest, and coming back to the Northeast.

And yet, I think we all realize that climate change would have to do a pretty awful number on things before most of, say, Vermont, became the place you’d want to grow wheat .  It simply makes sense to think in terms of the region’s agricultural strengths – and to strategies for agriculture that are adaptive, and sustainable. 

Now sheep have their issues from a sustainability perspective – in the early 1900s, most of what is now forest in the Northeast was cleared for farming, wood heating and, yes, pasturage.  80% of the great Eastern forest was missing – and we all know what happens when you cut down too many trees.  Sheep were a factor in this – as wool and meat prices fell, the pressure to raise more sheep, clear more land drove farmers.  When the prices collapsed altogether, that created the grounding of the forest that now allows Moose to travel down corridors of woodland from Northern Maine and the Adirondacks to Boston and New York City – that is, the great Eastern forest is to a large degree, a product of two things – the collapse of Northeastern agriculture, and the rise of first coal and then other fossil fueled methods of heating.

If Northeastern agriculture is coming back, and if fossil fuels for heating are likely to be expensive or eventually unavailable, the largest single forested biome in the US – the Great Eastern Forest – risks being deforested for home heating, turning into a new and treeless land, and, of course, accellerating our experience of global warming.  This must not be allowed to happen.  Hence the sheep – true, they are implicated in our history of deforestation, but in some measure, they may be the answer to it as well.  For much of our land is steep, rocky and grazable, and we may be able to use less of our forests if we carefully and wisely integrate small flocks of sheep into our work.

Woolen clothing has the enormous virtue of being extremely warm, warm even when wet.  Woolen blankets and down (also once a local crop) mean that one can reduce one’s wood heating to central areas – allowing people to remain cozily in bed in unheated rooms (I sleep this way myself, and strongly prefer it to sleeping in warm rooms – this was the Northeastern norm for many years, and it is not at all unpleasant, indeed, the contrary, when you are used to it).  Wool clothing allows one to be outside in snow and rain and still remain warm – it is actually warmer when it is wet. While we have replaced wool for the most part with space age petroleum based fabrics, few of these are manufactured in the US, and none of them are sustainable.  And most petroleum based fabrics do not breathe, as wool does – that is, shifting from outside chopping wood to inside in front of the fire is extremely uncomfortable in most fossil fuel clothes – wool is breathable, and comfortable in a good range of temperatures.

But there’s something else wool is good for – home insulation, and that’s a need that will only grow in the Northeast.  300 mm wool batt insulation has an R44 value, while also being non-toxic, non-outgassing, fire-retardant and requiring no use of fossil fuels, and being a good use of wool that is too coarse for clothing.  Right now there are only a few manufacturers of wool insulation in North America, mostly in Canada, but there is enormous potential for the industry to grow up where it is badly needed – here in the Northeast, where the oldest housing stock in the country exists, and where most of that housing is badly insulated.  Because of its small niche market, right now wool insulation is more expensive that toxic petro-insulations, but that could change over time – most likely will change.

The problem, of course, is getting the industry started.  Wool prices are, as they say, in the toilet.  The wool act of 1954 instituted price supports for US wool against foreign competition, but was phased out in the 1990s.  Wool production has been declining rapidly since the 1960s in the US, and is now only a 30 million dollar a year industry.  At usually well under a buck a pound, most sheep producers cannot support themselves on wool alone – and the lamb market in the US is still far smaller than the market for beef or other meats.  But there are good reasons to consider advocating and creating conditions for a regional shift, particularly to small flocks and local industries.  Multipurpose small livestock are suitable to very small acreage – that is, instead of a moderate number of sheep farmers with ever-bigger flocks, getting ever richer, sheep in the northeast are well suited to small acreage, rainy climates and mixed land. 

In the short term, I suspect the future of sheep in the northeast may be as sustainable landscapers, that also provide wool and meat.  That is, the largest single agricultural enterprise in the region is lawnscaping and lawn maintenence – as farming has been lost here, lawn production has expanded. Certainly, some of that land could be used for gardens and must be – but all the land will not disappear at once, and just as western farmers have found work with their goats as brush clearers and fire risk reducers, and beekeepers in providing pollination, I suspect there is a potentially successful industry in small scale localized sheep farmers moving their sheep around a network of parks and suburban lawns, providing “mowing” service.  At first, this might well provide the income stream for new sheep farmers while local wool industries are being redeveloped.

I hope we will not see sheep monocultures – because we need a diverse range of sheep breeds to make this a viable sheep producing region – one of the culprits in the Merino boom and bust was the overproduction of a particular breed.  We will need a range of dual purpose sheep that produce both meat and wool, lamb easily and have good parasite resistance (or as good as any sheep ), along with some merinos for long underwear and knitting, and meat sheep that do well on pasture alone.  Perhaps the single best argument for the reintroduction of sheep is their very minimal grain requirements, even in pregnancy and nursing. 

If the Northeast is to gradually transition to sustainable agriculture again, it will have to be done carefully, wisely and with an eye to the longer term.  That means drawing gently on our strengths – coppice wood for home heating, sugar maples (although with climate change I fear sugar maples may not be a multi-generational investment for most farms), dairy, potato and root production and other things that do well in our climate, with our soils.  Sheep, and a wood industry are potentially a part of this project – not all of it – I would not wish us to return to the boom and bust cycle of the 19th century.  But a piece of a larger, deeper project – bringing the farms back east.

Sharon

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Sharon June 23rd, 2009

For the last year or so, I’ve made a couple of mild stabs at finding someone to share our property with.  We’ve had inquiries, even taken some basic steps, but I’ve not pushed the situation hard, on the assumption that sooner or later the right arrangement might fall into my lap like a ripe fruit.  No such thing has happened, to it is time to get out the apple picker and try harder .

My family is seeking other people to share our home and land with.  We always have potential takers “if things get terrible” – but that’s not really what we’re looking for – we’re looking live with people who simply want community, family, friendship, company, shared work, and who want it whether the zombies come or not.  For us, this place has always been about community – from the first it was to be shared with Eric’s grandparents, and we feel their loss more acutely, not less, as time passes on – both the loss of them as beloved family members, but also the loss of companionship and the sense that our home was richer with more people in it. 

Our very large house has plenty of room for more people. Eric’s grandparents built a 1000 square foot, well insulated apartment that consists of one large bedroom, a bizarrely enormous bathroom, a large open living room/dining room and a small galley kitchen.  There are several very large closets and a porch, as well as shared laundry facilities.  The area has radiant floor heating, and is completely separate from the rest of the house, for privacy.

Down the hall, there are two medium-sized bedrooms, with a full bath in between them that could go along with the arrangement, or not.  We can comfortably move entirely upstairs for sleeping quarters, since there are three bedrooms there at present.  This part of the house is technically in what would be “our” section, so there would be less personal privacy, but the rooms can be shut off, and you don’t have to come out to pee .

Besides the in-house space, the property includes a fenced front yard (8 foot board fencing) with an enormous playset, plenty of garden space, a woodlot to cut heating wood from (and I have an older Baker’s choice wood cookstove that could be installed in the apartment), and about 6 acres of pasture and hayfield for livestock.  We are most interested in people interested in sharing the farm and making it more productive and sustainable, and are happy to enable your projects.

The housemates include me (I’m 36, mouthy and occasionally short tempered, but mostly good natured), Eric (39, incredibly easy to get along with and very funny), and four boys Eli, 9, Simon 7, Isaiah, 5 and Asher 3.  Eli is autistic, and all the kids are loud, so any serious candidates should be tolerant of young kids and noise, and also some tolerance for kids who aren’t developmentally typical (we have those things, if you have loudness, kids or special needs issues ).  We are early risers, just fyi, so expect the noise to begin early .  We are homeschoolers, so the younger three kids (Eli goes to school) are around most of the time, and we’re Jewish, so any shared meals must be kosher or vegetarian. 

We are slobs, so don’t expect a super-tidy house, although we try to keep it minimally under control.  If we add more people to the house, the chaos level will probably rise, so we’d probably try harder on that front, and it wouldn’t hurt for you to be tidier than me (which isn’t that hard ).

We live in the town of Knox, NY, on a rural street with 8 houses.  The local school district is pretty good, the culture is rural/exurban, with lots of small farms and lots of people who commute to Albany or Schenectady for employment. Both towns are between 1/2 hour and 45 minutes drive away, depending on which end of them you need to go to.  The economy here is better than many places, but still not perfect.  You do need a car to get most places, there is very minimal public transportation, although some carpooling and ride sharing. My husband commutes 3 days a week  There are lots of great local food options around here, but nothing walkable.  However, if you were somewhat flexible on diet, you could definitely eat really well entirely locally here – it is a great area, IMHO.  Winters, btw, just in case the words “upstate NY” don’t mean anything to you, are cold and snowy, and wintery .

We are seeking housemates who are truly interested in community – we don’t demand that you swear to move in forever, but we’re not really interested in people just passing through.  We would welcome people with kids – the place is pretty much a child’s paradise, with lots of animals, a creek, woods to roam in and the aforementioned giant playset.  We also welcome people without kids, but be sure you are accustomed to the sound of childish voices – and the pitter-patter (er…thunderous boom) of little feet. 

Pluses include people who are handy (we’re not, especially), friendly, easy going, Jewish (this is absolutely not at all necessary – and just fyi, you cannot walk to any shul from here, unfortunately- just pleasant, who play mah-jongg or scrabble, talk politics or like to make music, like dirt and like to share meals, gossip and time in the garden.  Must have some measure of commitment to keeping your ecological footprint low and to preparing for tougher times – you don’t have to share all our priorities, but some would be nice.  We are NOT interested in freeloaders – you know what I mean, the kind of people who don’t participate and are just looking for cheap accomodations or someone to do the preparing for them.  That does not mean that you have to be young, strong and able to pull the plow when the mule falls down – remember, our last housemates were 80 and 94, and we felt they were excellent contributors.  Sure, strong young farmers are great, but so are other folks – it is the compatibility and friendship that matters most.

Eric and I both have experience living in housemate situations and enjoy it – we would love people interested in sharing the work and pleasures of this piece of land and this place.  In the longer term, it may be possible to either renovate the house to create more privacy or to optimize space, or even to have some kind of shared ownership, but that would be after considerable time together.  Ideally, we’d have some communal meals and some private time for each family, as well as share some responsibilities, to be negotiated individually.

Rental cost – for the apartment alone $400 monthly, plus a share of the utilities and any shared food.  For the apartment plus two extra bedrooms and extra bath – $650 plus a fair share of utilities.  We could also negotiate for one bedroom.  We would be open to barter for some percentage (or possibly all, depending on what was offered and the quality of the match) of the rent in labor doing childcare, farmwork, home repairs or building or whatever else needs doing.  If we hit TEOTWAWKI, all bets are off, and we’ll probably happily take the rent in barter .

If you are interested, please send an inquiry, with details about yourself and your family (if any) to jewishfarmer@gmail.com.  All inquiries will be answered, although bear with me.  If they are successful, a period of “dating” involving correspondence and phone discussions with all involved parties and at least one visit will be required.   Rather like dating, if it doesn’t work out, it probably isn’t you, so please don’t be offended .

 Cheers,

 Sharon

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Sharon June 23rd, 2009

I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

Now, I don’t want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don’t want your pleasure yacht.
All I want’s just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back. 

We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You’ve stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.

Think me dumb if you wish, Mister,
Call me green, or blue, or red.
This one thing I sure know, Mister,
My hungry babies must be fed. – Jim Garland “All I Want”

Yesterday the UN announced that there are now more than 1 billion chronically hungry people in the world.  Think about that – one out of every 6 people in the world isn’t just poor, but chronically, constantly hungry, with all that implies about health, welfare and future.  One out of every six people goes hungry *ALL THE TIME.*  The increase last year was the single biggest on record, and those numbers are expected to rise by another 11% over just 2009.  11% means another 110 million people will be starving by the end of this year.

Already, one out of every 5 people in the world will not live to be 40.  In the poor world, one out of every five children born will die before they turn five years old.  Imagine that – life in a world where death is that ubiquitous, where childhood is so very short.  Those numbers are going up fast – hungry people die.

Today, we get from Agricultural Industry Forecast Don Coxe predicting widespread world starvation the next time we get a major crop failure.  I agree with his prediction – world consumption is banging hard against supply and prices are still extremely high – one major crisis will send that number skyrocketing even further.  Coxe says,

‘”When we have the first serious crop failure, which will happen, we will then have a full-blown food crisis, which we will not be able to get out of because we will still be struggling to catch up (as a result of diminished crop yields),” he told the publication.

He suggested that even could happen this year.”

He goes on to observe,

‘ “We’ve got complacency. So for those reasons I believe the next food crisis – when it comes – will be a bigger shock than $150 oil.”

Coxe, a leader of the Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund, said farms operations around the world also have cut back on expansion plans because of the worldwide economic crisis, calling into question whether production could meet demand.

Already, he suggested, demand for staples is moving beyond supply.

“During this decade, the annual increase in hectares of global cultivated farmland has been roughly 1.5 percent, at a time global demand for grains and soybeans has been growing at double that rate,” he told Commodities Online. “We will be dealing with mass starvation with the first serious crop failure. It could happen as early as this fall if for instance we have a killing freeze in Iowa in August.”

He said a reduction of just four weeks in the growing season would “dramatically reduce yields.”

Coxe said one only has to reach back 35 years to review an era when there were shortages because of poor crops. The surpluses that had existed suddenly were gone, he noted.

“In fact, the major inflation of the 1970s was driven more by food than by oil.”’

Whether it happens this year or next, or five years from now, we are on the cusp of a food crisis on a scale we’ve never seen before.  And that crisis is not limited to the poor world – while they are starving, the reverbations of their hunger affect us.  First of all, there’s the political destabilization that is a logical consequence of widespread hunger.  Second, there is the fact that while most poor Americans still have food, real hunger here is on the rise as well.  Finally, there is the fact that all of us will live in this world of people stunted by hunger and want, whose capacities will shape us endlessly. 

We have shifted the poor off our agenda – last year commitments poured in from the rich world to the poor.  Now most rich nations have declined to pay up – and after the rich worlds created dependencies on money and imported grain that can no longer be met in place, as the rich world warmed the world. 

What does this have to do with food storage, with food preservation and gardening?  The truth is this – our actions have helped impoverish others beyond the comprehension of most of us.  We consumed the resources, built with coal and oil and plastic.  We burned the fuel that warmed the world.  We fed our grain to cars and livestock, and drove up food prices.  We wanted avocadoes, shrimp, coffee and bananas, and thus poor farmers stopped growing staple foods and grew for us.  We helped corporations producing things for us drive 2 billion of the world’s poorest people onto marginal land.

I do not ask you to feel guilty – in fact, guilty is a pale and useless emotion, “I shouldn’t be eating this cookie…oops, ate it, but I really shouldn’t have another…”  I have no truck with guilt.  But I do ask you to do what you can to ameliorate the suffering of other people.  That means cutting back your own food budget if you have extra to spare – living more on basic foods, bought in bulk, without waste, as locally as you can.  I do ask you to eschew livestock raised on human foods – supermarket meats and feedlot products if you possibly can.  The extra can go to feed others, to soften this blow as much as each of us possibly can.  I do ask you to minimize food waste – children really are starving in India, and while you can’t possibly mail your extra sandwich to them, you can buy only what food you need, not wasting any, preserving what might otherwise spoil, so that food prices aren’t driven up. I do ask you to grow what food you can, to join in the project of collective self-provisioning, so that more people can go back to growing food for their families, rather than export.  I do ask you to urge your congresscritters (or other national government) to actually make good on the US’s commitments to the increasingly hungry world, and I ask you to do what you can to soften the blow of hunger in your own place.

It isn’t simple, or perfect, and it won’t fix everything.  The tide of hunger may not be fully stoppable. But I ask you to try.  In practice, there is enough food in the world to provide every single human being with 3500 calories a day, more than they could ever need.  It may seem a small thing to eat less and better meat, to preserve your own for winter or the dry season, to buy in bulk – but the actions of thousands, tens of thousands or millions doing just these small things would be vast. 

But more, it isn’t just your ability to give to charity or ask your nation to do so that matters – it is the capacity to create a more equitable world, in which our choices do less harm and more good.  The reality is that any one of us, walking by the side of the road, and seeing the suffering that is occurring now would stop, and give all we could to ameliorate it.  The hungry are in our towns and cities, and by the sides of our roads.  They are in other nations, but places we have tied ourselves to in our world.  When we know they are there, we must stop.

Sharon

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Sharon June 22nd, 2009

The area I live in, the Northeast US, has a particularly acute sensitivity to oil prices, because 82 percent of the households heating entirely or partially with oil are in this region.  Natural gas lines simply don’t go out to many exurban or rural areas in the Northeast, so in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Northern New York where I live, a disproportionate percentage of the population heats their homes with oil.

Last summer, when Eric and I were driving through New York on a short vacation, the subject that consumed most of the people we met in small cities and towns was this – how will we get through the winter.  Winter hunger is already a problem in this region – while food security is generally better than the rest of the country, hunger proliferates in the winter when poor families have to put hundreds of their hard-won dollars towards energy bills simply to keep warm.

Last winter was not an especially painful one in the Northeast – somewhat insulated from the economic crisis, the timing of the oil price collapse was perfect, if by perfect one means “causes the least immediate harm and of course, undercuts all incentives to shift to better solutions” – the winter heat crisis did not, in fact, materialize.

Now, we are back to summer, and seeing gasoline prices sneaking up above $3 gallon in some places, while heating oil costs are above $4.  No worries, those dependent on oil can wait, after all, summer just started and winter is a long way away.  But I have begun to hear some worry again – what if oil prices continue to rise.? After all, even here, job losses are beginning to accumulate, and wages to be cut. 

One of the things I’ve been telling people when I give talks lately is this – peak energy’s major feature is volatility – it was a mistake for anyone to call it ‘the end of cheap oil’ or to imply that we’d never seen price collapses, and I think the framing of this issue in those terms has hurt the peak oil cause in the shorter term.  Instead, we need to make apparent the full ramifications of price volatility in our work – that is, you will never know, from one season or month or year to the next, how much of your income you will pour into gasoline, heat and food.

After all, it is not just energy prices that are on the rise at the moment – so are food prices, which are tied to many of the factors of the long emergency in complex ways.  In 2008, average food costs rose 5.5 percent.  Retail food prices rose 9% in the past 3 months alone, including slightly over 2 percent in May.  That is, it isn’t just your perception that things are getting tight at the supermarket.

There is little doubt that we are now in a deflationary period – but it is important to remember that in an overall contraction of the money supply (yes, yes, the Fed is printing – but credit is contracting so fast it is overwhelming this), not all prices are going to fall.   Even if they do, the magic of deflation is such that even if food prices fall, your income falls faster, stripping you of purchasing power.  The volatility works two ways – it leaves those who need to eat or drive panicky, vulnerable, unable to plan for the future.  And it wildly undermines producers – we saw this in the dairy industry this year, when the bottom fell out of milk prices and dairy farmers slaughtered they herds en masse in many places.  The lingering high cost of last year’s feed, grown with fertilizers bought during the oil boom meant that farmers couldn’t afford to keep feeding their dairy cows, with milk prices dropping.  Later, this translated to price increases for consumers.

Uncertainty is the order of the day.  You will not know what your heating and cooling will cost you next year.  You will not know if it makes sense to stay put or look for a job closer to work – will the job stay? Gas prices rise?  You will not know whether food prices will go up or down, with climate change and input prices – only that it gets harder most years to keep food on the table.  We have had a period of unprecedented stability in the last decades – mostly declining food and energy costs have allowed us to live as we have.  That’s changed.  Now, we’ll never know.

Sharon

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