The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon June 16th, 2009

If I ever write a cookbook, I’m going to call it “Glut” – partly because I just love the word, and partly because I think there’s an actual need for a cookbook that helps people deal with the feast or famine realities of putting away food.  Whether you have just butchered a pig or bought a side of beef, whether you are dealing with the spring rush of eggs and milk, or with the steady stream of overflowing harvests all summer long and into autumn, food preservation, and sustainable eating, are both about how to deal with wretched, glorious, wondrous excess!

And obviously, the first tool for facing the glut is food preservation.  Food comes upon us in tiny dribbles, than in overflowing quantities, and then, the tap shuts off, and there will be no more cherries for a whole, long, dark year.  Unless, of course, you put the cherries away for the winter – unless you can capture summer’s excess. 

But even our best laid plans of preservation sometimes get overwhelmed by the truly excessive harvests.  Last year for me, it was cucumbers.  Now I normally try and time my cuke harvests for late in the season, when the heat of July and August is gone.  So I planted my cukes mostly late – but they boomed last year, and I brought in bushels, very early and very late.  I made pickles and more pickles, all of them wonderful, and I’m grateful for the jars full.  But after a while, I got tired of making pickles, and wondered, well, what else can I do with cucumbers. 

Of course I can slice them into salad, but how much salad can any family eat?  I can make quick pickles, japanese style, and that was good too.  But what else.  Well, it turns out that cucumber salad freezes pretty well, if the cukes are sliced very thin.  And curried cucumber yogurt soup freezes even better.  It also turns out that my children will eat lemon cucumbers straight up.  These are good things.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but her grandmother is excess, and the sense that one can’t bear to let good things go to waste.  How else did we get cornsilk tea, corncob jelly, watermelon rind pickles and other inventions to minimize waste and reduce drama.

And speaking of watermelon (which I just don’t get gluts of here – too high, too cool – I’m happy if I get a few) – I bet you didn’t know you could dehydrate it.  And it is pretty great that way!  Pureed, it makes a great juice for winter – mix it with water for the kids, or with vodka for Mom and Dad. 

Even zucchini gluts can be faced – small zucchini make excellent pickles, large zucchini, grated, drained and frozen make an excellent extender for ground beef or turkey.  Dried zucchini, coated with spices, make super chip substitutes.  What’s not to like?

The big issue of gluts is time – ok, you picked a bushel of tomatoes, and it is 87 degrees in your house.  Now, what do you do with them?  The freezer is full, and the idea of chopping and cooking and canning is overwhelming.  Well, how about the dehydrator – you can dry not just paste tomatoes, but the regular kind and cherries as well (sungold cherry tomatoes when dehydrated are fabulous, btw). Can you make the sauce today, and can it tomorrow?  Sure, life would be more perfect if you did it all on the same day, but so what?  Stick them in the freezer until you have time to deal with them? 

One solution to the glut is generosity – give your food away.  Bring it to the food pantry (and not just the giant zucchini, please – give people food that they would actually eat), or see if you can get a local school, scouts or church group to come gather your food.  If you’ve got a glut you just can’t handle, call your friends, call your family. 

Throw a party – historically, the butchering of a large animal was a day to throw a party.  Even if you are putting some away, invite everyone in for a feast – feasting is important.  Throw a tomato tasting, a “best zucchini recipe competition” or a pumpkin-cook off. 

Take a look in old cookbooks – what did people do with all those eggs, or with the flood of milk once upon a time before refrigeration?  Chocolate beet cake or Zucchini-caramel cake evolved for a reason.  Experiment – the worst thing that happens is that the worms or the chickens or the compost pile get your experimental “Chile-corn-zucchini muffins” – who knows, you might invent a prize.

Enjoy the gluts – recognize that “I’m sick of strawberries” feeling is the predecessor to a longing for them – no matter how many you dried or jammed or sauced or pied, there will come a moment when you wish only for a red, ripe, dripping strawberry straight from the dirt to bite – and it is still February.  The cure for the glut is action, commitment – and the recognition that too much is followed by too little, new gluts, and then the quiet of the season in which nothing overflows.

Sharon

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Sharon June 15th, 2009

This post actually did come to me in a dream – I dreamed last night, amidst wild thunderstorms, that I was writing this.  When I woke up, it still seemed to be a good idea – a, I thought it might amuse people, but b. I think a lot of us have very extreme versions of the world in our head – finding a way to balance our fears, hopes and anxieties with the ambiguous realities we actually encounter can’t be just my problem . 

Fantasy, 1977: When I grow up I am going to be a doctor and garbage collector by day, driving my super-cool garbage truck on rounds, and at night, will become Wonder Woman, complete with breasts and magic lasso – with or without invisible garbage truck.

Reality Check #1, 1978: Wonder Woman is not considered a viable career choice by anyone.  Wonder Woman has a stupid plane, not a garbage truck.  Mom won’t let me wear the Wonder Woman underoos to kindergarten, at least not without something on top of them.

Reality chec #2, 1983: Breasts finally arrive.  I no longer want to be wonder woman, and don’t want these either – they get in the way when I run.  They do not appear to be umm…made of steel like hers, nor do they point upwards.

Fantasy, 1982: I will grow up to be Joan Jett. 

Reality Check: Job of being Joan Jett already taken.  Oh, and I can’t play guitar.  Or sing.

Fantasy, 1986: Very, very soon, I will encounter the love of my fourteen year old life.  He will look rather like a young David Bowie (when not in femme mode), and will be deep, complex and angst-filled, and I, of course, will be the only one who understands him.  Ours will be one of the great love stories, and we will perfect each other.

Reality Check: Angst-filled guys not nearly as much fun in real life as in novels.  Boys, whether looking like David Bowie or not, don’t seem especially interested, and the ones that do seem to prefer things that really aren’t that complicated or introspective, things for which I am not yet prepared (in retrospect, thank G-d for that).  Achieving “the love of one’s life” at fourteen not really that impressive an accomplishment. 

Fantasy, 1991: I am preparing for a career as misunderstood genius, a writer, probably a poet, who will utterly transform the literary landscape.  I am the Stephen Daedalus of my generation, only not Irish, male, Catholic or living near a decent pub. 

Reality Check:  Besides not being male, Irish, Catholic or old enough to drink yet, I am also a. not misunderstood – and trying to be isn’t working – nearly everyone seems to understand me all too well, and be slightly amused, which is disheartening; and b. not a genius.  Back to garbage collecting, which at least seems like it pays better than poetry.

Fantasy 1997: Eric and I will achieve the perfect, egalitarian marrage, in which neither of us ever has to do anything we don’t enjoy.  Our two academic careers will mesh perfectly, and each of us will accomodate the other until we have achieved our dreams.  We will tend the household together, both of us doing the work we like best.  We will never have any conflict at all about careers or domestic life.

Reality check: Physicists makes about half again as much as English Lit types.  There are about 20,000 more jobs for physicists than Shakespeareans.  Neither of us like cleaning toilets or changing the cat litter, and yet, the cat begins peeing in random corners if someone doesn’t suck it up, and well, one wants to be able to let people come in the house.  We fight about whose turn it is to do stuff, all the time.

Reality check #2: Eventually we have children.  Guess which one of us gets pregnant and spends four months throwing up and the last two months not sleeping?  Guess which one of us came equipped with breasts (although the La Leche book claims that “given sufficient stimulation” 10% of all men can lactate, Eric firmly refuses to explore this option) which are now being sucked upon during all the best times for considering the effects of the black death of the writings of Ben Jonson.  So much for perfect egalitarianism.

Fantasy, 1999: Expecting our first child, Eric and I know with absolute certainty that we will be perfect parents, completely unlike pretty much all the real parents we know.  We don’t understand why so many smart people seem to be such inferior parents.  We will be kind, firm, consistent and never make any of the mistakes our parents made.  Our child will grow up in nature and away from consumer culture, will not eat sugar, will use only imaginative toys made of natural materials,  will be well behaved at all times, and we will continue our adult lives just as we had, only with cute baby in tow.  During my brief hiatus from the world of academe, I shall manage our child and our domestic lives with grace and elegance, while Eric keeps us in shoes and rent.  Eric will get to come home to a clean house, a cooked meal and to enjoy his child.  Soon after, we will switch, and I will maintain the same high expectations of my husband.

Reality, 2000: Within six months of Eli’s birth, most of which were characterized by extreme colic and six to eight hours of non-stop screaming every single day (people ask me how I manage four kids – my best answer is this – at no time in my life have my four children ever been as difficult as one colicky single infant), I would have been happy to do any of the things I’d sworn I would never, ever do, if only it would buy me five minutes of silence.  Sugar?  Sure, if only you could give it to an infant.  Tv?  For it, if it worked, which it doesn’t.  Sleeping with the baby, not sleeping with the baby, Ferber, Sears…who cares if it gets me some sleep.  Whiskey my breastmilk to make the baby sleep?  Don’t tempt me.   The only thing that calms him is the sound of the vacuum cleaner.  I plug the vacuum cleaner in and leave it running.  Environment be damned – I haven’t slept in four days and could give a flying… about the planet…  Needless to say, the house looks like it has been sacked by Huns and the Vietnamese takeout place around the corner no longer needs to ask who this is when we call. 

Reality check #2, 2000: Shortly after Eric returns to work, I realize something.  Work, which seemed so exhausting and stressful when I was doing it, is practically a vacation compared to life with a colicky infant.  Yes, he has to be there.  But he gets to pee all by himself.  No one screams there.  Meals are eaten with two hands, rather than one, while nursing.  There are no poop explosions in astrophysics.  Instantly, Eric’s job is demoted to “annoying hobby the husband has that allows him to escape the screaming.”  The moment he walks in the door, Eli is handed off and I disappear into the shower – touching family moments are limited to my kissing the two of them as I race out the door to be alone for five minutes.  Chances of us switching to Eric doing full time parenting disappearing rapidly as I fail to complete my Ph.d, and continue to be the one with the breasts.

Reality check #3, 2009: My children eat sugar.  They watch videos – no commercial tv, and not as much as most kids, but occasionally we use it as a babysitter to get other things done.  My children have more than their share of plastic superhero action figures garnered from yard sales, besides the natural ones – and the natural ones seem mostly to be sticks, used for sword fighting.  They are sometimes well behaved, and sometimes not.  We are sometimes consistent, but not consistently.  That is, we’re ordinarily mediocre parents, and I’m sure all proto-parents look at us and think how badly we’ve let our standards lapse.  Ah well.

Fantasy 2001: We are moving to a farm.  Within a year, we expect to have cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys, draft horses, an orchard, a greenhouse, rainwater cachement and produce all our food.  I will spin yarn and make all our clothing from our own sheep and flax.  My biggest worry is how we will grow tropical spices, but I have no doubt we’ll find a way, since we’re going to be doing everything else.

Reality check #1, 2001: Cows cost money.  Goats cost money.  Everything else costs money, especially old houses.  Draft horses on a farm of 27 acres, only 9 of which are open, would mostly, ummm…raise food for draft horses.   A balcony full of vegetables is a lot different than half an acre – oh, and gardens don’t grow that well over the foundation of an old stone barn, straight into solid rock.  Oh, and Eric and I have discovered something about ourselves, since Eli at 14 months, has begun to sleep through the night.  We like to sleep.  I mean we really, really, really like to sleep.  After not doing much of it for more than a year, we are like drug addicts suddenly given an unlimited supply of heroin about sleep.  Guess what happens to spinning, knitting and weaving all our clothes? We decide we can live with our old ones and Goodwill pickings, if we can catch a nap.

Reality check #2, 2009 – I still don’t have a cow.  The sheep belong to a friend – I’ve decided I don’t have to do everything myself. I do get free wool, and sometimes I even spin it into yarn.  I still don’t have draft horses, although I’m still fantasizing a little – there are 50 unused acres across the road that maybe someone would consider bartering for the use of.  But not this year.   I grow a lot of our food, but enjoy buying things from other people, and supporting the local economy.  I trust that if pepper has been transported around the world for 400 years, I’ll still be able to get some, or do without.

Fantasy 2003: While I’ve known about peak oil and climate change since college, it finally occurs to me to check the web for resources.  I find horrible, horrible things – people preparing for cannibalism and doom.  One day, probably in just a few years, we will wake up and everything will be gone, and the end of the world will be at hand. Many sites seem to suggest that the only possible solution is a completely isolated, perfectly self-sufficient homestead and lots and lots of automatic weapons.  Ok, well, I guess it is back to spinning, no sleep and cows.  If that’s what it takes, I’ll do it.  Of course, Eric’s grandparents aren’t really going to like the idea that we have to move to a mountaintop, and I have a hard time imagining being devoured by my neighbors. Which ones, the kind 80+ year olds who go rabbit hunting on our land, or the ones with the two boys approximately the age of our sons who play together? 

Reality check, 2003:  Eric firmly refuses to move to mountain top, as do Eric’s grandparents.  Neighbors still showing no signs of cannibalism, but come over often for chocolate chip cookies.   Perhaps stash of chocolate acts as cannibalism preventative.  Ultrasound says baby will be another boy – won’t we have to come out of the bunker at least once a generation to find them a partner or something?  Besides, so tired, with CSA, poultry, pregnancy – just one more nap before I build bunker.

Fantasy, 2007: OMG! OMG! Publisher just contacted me and wants me to write a book about peak oil and climate change for women and families.  Goes without saying that the book will be an early selection on Oprah’s book club, a New York Times bestseller, and universally acclaimed.  Too bad the Nobel prize in literature is for fiction, otherwise, I’m sure I’d be a shoe in.  I can’t wait to get started – this is going to be a breeze, after all, I already write a blog, when I think of it.

Reality check #1, 2007: Writing a book is a whole heck of a lot of work.  I hate my computer.  I hate sitting still for 8 hours a day.  When calculated by per hour work, am making .36 cents per hour for my work, and we’ve definitely lost money in the net, because I can’t keep up the CSA and write. 

Reality check #2, 2009: No word from Oprah.  Nobel committee has, unsurprisingly not called.  Book is number 32,000 odd most popular book on Amazon, with occasional jumps up to 28,000 – not bad for a first time writer, but not exactly in the “beyond your wildest dreams” (my wildest dreams are manifestly pretty wild).  There are plenty of rewards – praise from various people, the sense of accomplishment, etc…  Fame and fortune so far not among them.  Brief flirtation with fame (NY Times article) suggests that it might not be all it is cracked up to be.  Would still enjoy a flirtation with fortune, however, even if not as nice as expected, as we need a new roof.

Fantasy, 2006: There will be a single moment, in which I can say “today is the day’ that everything happened.  I will know that it is happening, in fact, with my high degree of awareness, I will be ready, and able to help others.  With any luck, my knowledge will also enable me to go shopping while they are still taking credit cards that I won’t have to ever pay off, because the world has now come to an end.  After all, that’s what happens to all the characters in the books.

Reality check, 2009: These are ongoing problems, and the world is not ending.  There will be moments of crisis, but they aren’t necessarily even the moments that matter most – JFK being shot wasn’t really definitive – it was merely the symbolic moment.  9/11 didn’t change everything, we just thought it did.  Even when there is a moment, it is only seen in retrospect most of the time – who actually thought “Franz Ferdinand was shot – this moment changes the entire world?”  Realistically, chances are that the credit cards collection agencies will exist for a very long time, and the chances are that I’ll be sitting around on my ass with no freakin’ idea that the world just changed.  That’s for science fiction novels.

Fantasy, 2007: My work and the work of committed others will be sufficient to arrest climate change, create a steady-state economy, and begin seriously addressing peak oil.  Of course their will be challenges, but nothing really bad will happen to anyone if I just write hard enough and fast enough.

Reality check, 2007: I get over myself.  By late fall 2007, the Climate Equity and other reports make it clear that climate change is happening  a lot faster than expected.  World is doing, well, what the world does – jack.  Speaking to a couple of hundred people at a time, most of whom already know the stuff I’m talking about, or even writing a reasonably popular blog is not a magic bullet.  I go through the worst period of depression I’ve had in a long time, and then realize that I’ve been guilty of a great deal of arrogance, of believing that I can fix the world.  Give myself a stern talking to, and then get back to work, remembering that this is a marathon, not a sprint.  I’m going to be doing this work the rest of my life, and that hubris is not a virtue.  I get on with it.

Fantasy, 2009: The economic crisis will wait long enough for us to do all the things we really, really need/want to get done before the crisis.  After that, it can go ahead.

Reality check, 2009: My husband works for the state of New York, and is not tenured.  For now, he has a job.  There is a real possibility that he might not for very long, and so I need to think seriously about what we really need – it isn’t all going to happen.  For cripes sake, physician, heal thyself – you teach adapting in place, you teach people to deal with the fact that the perfect solution isn’t going to come along.  Duh.

Fantasy 2010: I’m not really sure what I’ll be fantasizing about in 2010, but I do know that it will probably be extreme, probably have little to do with reality, and may involve magic bracelets.  Still pretty sure my breasts will never point upwards, though, so firmly grounded in reality.

Reality 2010+: Peak oil will come, and it won’t look exactly like I think it will.  Everyone’s experience of peak oil will be different, including mine.  Climate change will happen, hopefully not to its worst extremes, and it won’t look exactly like I think it will.  Economic problems will come and go and they won’t look exactly like I expect either. I will never be fully ready. I will never be able to fix it all, either for my family or for the world at large.  I am not in charge, and believing I am is foolish hubris and a waste of energy. 

I can’t be the only one whose mind sometimes runs off towards extremes.  What’s useful to me is to remember that the fantasies are part of the reality – that is, I don’t regret the time I spent dreaming of appearing on Oprah, or even the time I spent dreaming about making the perfect bunker/doomstead.  Everyone needs a fantasy life, and sometimes thinking about stupid ideas is what you need to get on to reality, or simply to figure out that those ideas are stupid.  The trick is simple – getting through the fantasy, and facing reality, with the lessons of fantasy behind us.

Sharon

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Sharon June 11th, 2009

Way back when Aaron and I were putting together our Garden Design class, I had a bunch of requests for a class on cool season gardening/season extension/fall gardening.  Several people said “I do fine at getting the garden planted in April and May, but what I always have trouble with is figuring out how to plant for fall, extend the season, etc…”  And so I swore up and down that I would teach a fall garden class.

 Well, gack!  Someone emailed me to remind me and I suddenly realized that getting ready for fall garden begins, well, really soon – I’m still getting the summer garden in, for cripes sake, and I completely forgot about this.  But fortunately, the reminder came in time and I’m going to run a short class. The good thing about my rotten memory is this – for people gardening in zones 3-7, this will, to a large extent, be a real time project – the class won’t take place in real time, it will be run online with a participate-as-you can format as usual, but because the class will take place in July, for most people in that zone range, it should actually help them do things they should be doing more or less when they should be doing them – ie, we’ll actually all be putting our fall gardens together.  There will be some variation, of course, and everyone will have to adjust for their zone and light levels, but what should be really great about this class is that we can say “ok, now is the time to start those seedlings” – and it really is .

 So if you’ve had trouble getting motivated, had trouble timing your crops to mature before the worst of the cold, never planted a fall garden or tried to extend your season or aren’t really sure what’s different about cool season gardening, this is the class for you.  We’ll talk about season extension techniques, about what to plant when and where and how to keep it going as long as possible, and basically cover everything we can about the process of keeping fresh veggies coming as long as possible, and also about ways to get prepared to start as soon as possible in the spring. Not all of us will be able to garden completely year-round, but we can get closer and closer.

The class will be a bit shorter than my other classes – the class will be run on Tuesdays for four weeks during July, from July 7-28.  As always the class is held entirely online, and you don’t have to be online at any particular time – I put up the week’s material and assignments on Tuesdays, but I’m also available by email at other times, and there’s an ongoing discussion group, so you can post at 3am on Friday night, and I’ll get back to you when I’m awake .  Dial up is fine – the class does not require high speed internet.

 I think it is going to be a really fun class – I really loved teaching Garden Design this spring, and I think this is a natural corrollary, focusing on an issue a lot of us have – how to keep the garden momentum going as long as possible.  Besides, fall and winter gardening are fun – the bugs are gone, the weather is crisp and you want to cook again – what’s not to love!

 Cost of the class is $100.  Send me an email to reserve a spot, and I’ll send you all the details.  As always, I have a limited number of free spots that I hold for low-income participants who need the information but can’t otherwise afford a spot, and sometimes someone is kind enough to donate additional spaces.  Please email me if you are interested in a low income spot, with a little information about why you think you’d be an appropriate candidate.

Update: BTW, I’ve gotten several emails asking whether I’m going to run Adaping-In-Place again – the answer is yes, and fairly soon - August-Sept.  But Aaron and I are still working out all the details, so watch for more details very soon! 

Sharon

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Sharon June 11th, 2009

Rock, meet hard place.  Hard place, meet rock.  Rock, over here is known as “the economy.”  Hard place, on the other side, can be described as “our energy situation.”  Because while green shoots might look awfully good to a lot of people who are desperate to have the economy go back to what it was, we should remind ourselves that “what it was” involved awfully high energy prices.  Sure, some of it was speculation, and some of it was the Chinese Olympics, and some of it was the falling dollar.  And of course, the good news is that none of those things will ever happen again…we don’t have speculators in the energy markets anymore, of course – we took care of that right off, nor does the dollar ever…oh, wait.  But I can promise that Beijing won’t host the Olympics again for a while, if that helps.   

 $70 isn’t that bad, you argue.  With the economy in recovery, we can afford our gas and heat bills, right?  People won’t decide that they have to save for next winter’s oil bill.  And this recovery is so solid that it won’t matter that tax burdens are headed up to compensate for falling revenues and increasing debt – people will have plenty of money to pay for gas and food and those higher taxes, now that new jobs are being…oh, wait.  It also won’t matter that at higher energy prices, the stimulus money buys less stuff – asphalt paving prices go up, and they hire two fewer guys.  The energy costs of all this highway work and other infrastructure investment goes up, the number of salaries goes down.  But we don’t need those jobs that bad, right?

Nor will the volatility of energy prices and debt servicing matter – a couple of years of people never knowing if they will have enough money for a summer’s a/c, or a winter’s heat, if they’ll be making enough to cover their commute and daycare costs, whether they can afford enough food to keep the pantry full, whether the unemployment benefits will run out or be extended… none of those measures of insecurity will affect consumer behavior at all.  We’re all going to go back to buying stuff.  Nor will the cutting of credit lines, and the addition of bad debt to the balance sheets of the banks, or rising interest rates. And we never did care about the trade deficit, right? 

Rock, you know Hard Place.  Now, let’s meet Immovable Object.  This is climate change – she’ll be with us all the time now.  Think of the current situation as you trapped, rock on one side, hard place on the other, and immovable object is now suspended very slightly above your head.  And oh, yeah, it can move after all – you can’t move it, but it can come crashing down and squash you like a bug. 

Now one of two things is going to happen in the next couple of years – in the climate talks occurring in Europe now, in the painful negotiations with China, in Congress in the US and in Copenhagen.  We’re either going to do something about climate change, or we’re not.  And one of two results is possible if we do something – either it will be sufficient, or it won’t. 

Now I won’t lay odds here on these two bets, although I think I could.  But let’s consider just our choices.  “Do something” on a scale that actually would matter, means that we face higher energy prices.  I realize that a lot of climate activists don’t like to talk about this part, but the truth is the truth – even if we attempt to offset those costs for lower income people with carbon trading revenues or whatever, energy prices will go up.  In general, I think this is wise – however, it will have an effect on the larger economy.  Yes, yes there are dozens of studies that presume that shifting to renewables will grow the economy.  Each of those studies assumes growth – assumes we’re going to be getting richer, not poorer as it happens.  None of those suggest that renewable energies can fix our economic crisis.  And, quite bluntly, a lot of those used energy reduction targets that were far lower than anything we have to actually deal with – the Yale study that showed growth across the board topped out emissions reductions at 40%. 

Unfortunately more likely is that we don’t do enough soon enough – the Waxman-Markey bill making its way through Congress right now is a good example – they keep trimming emissions targets.  Even though 80% by 2050 will, we know, absolutely not mitigate climate change, we’re now down to about 45% by 2050, as Charles Komanoff demonstrates.  In which case, we’ll probably see a drag on revenues and unmitigated climate change.  Goody.

Sir Nicholas Stern’s famed Stern report estimated that unchecked, climate change could cost every single world economy 20% of its GDP – that is, we’d be using one fifth of our GDP just to fix the damage climate change was causing (this was a world average – those people whose countries won’t be there anymore probably find it hard to create a GDP at all).  The statistics are probably higher for the US, which as Joseph Romm notes, has more wealth on its coastlines than almost any other nation.

In four years, two American cities have effectively been destroyed – New Orleans and Galveston.  What about the next one?  What happens when it is Miami or some other major city?  Besides the enormous human and communal costs, where will the money come from to rebuild, to evacuate, to deal with the economic costs?  Anyone want to bet that we won’t see any more major hurricanes?  Add on to that the little costs – the rising food prices from drought and flooding around the world, the costs of health care, of everything from new disease to increased low birth weight babies (yup, even that goes with climate change).  Are we all set to grow our way out of that?

But even in the best scenarios, where we do limit emissions and get back down to 350 ppm, we cannot expect economic growth and radical emissions reduction simultaneously – they are are not compatible.  Let’s say we do finally grasp how immovable this object is – and that we’re about to slam into it.  Actually addressing climate change will require us to reduce total emissions by nearly 100% worldwide.  We know that building out enough renewables just to keep up with basic needs will be a huge challenge, and may not be done fast enough to prevent a major energy bottleneck – moreover, as I keep pointing out, we may not be *able* to do this as fast as we’d like, even if we could build out renewables quickly – that is, since all our renewables are build with fossil fuels at every stage, we may not be able to do a massive buildout without risking crossing our tipping points – that is, we may have to say “ok, for the next decade we’re all going to do with a lot less energy, so that the future has some hope” and build out much more slowly.  And we’re not going to be growing our economy.

Not to mention that fact that in such a case, where we allocate much of our fossil fuel production to a renewable build out, because we’re facing peak oil, we’re going to have to take the energy *from* somewhere – that is, we’re going to have to get our energy by not using it elsewhere – probably in the consumer economy.  I’ve written much more about the fact that doing this would be a lot like WWII – no luxuries, no false usage, state controlled economy – than anyone has liked to admit.

I haven’t even talked about the ways that rock, our financial crisis, hits immovable object – because all of this requires enormous amounts of capital, and secure state economies.  In order for nations to take on the enormous indebtedness required to push through this massive shift in our economy, we would have to have the ability to service that debt (each American now owes an additional 155K, btw), and buyers for that debt.  Where is the money for this build out going to come from?

Rock, hard place and immovable object are going to continue to bang up against one another, and the space we’ve got to move in gets smaller and smaller – as does our hope of finding a way out.  Roughly, our financial crisis makes it harder to finance the renewable energy we so desperately need to address both climate change and peak oil.  Meanwhile, peak oil means that every time we start to climb out of the financial hole, we fall back in – we can’t grow without cheap oil, and we only have cheap oil when the economy is crashing.  And climate change comes ’round and says “oh, and some of what money you do have will be needed to deal with me now – don’t plan on using it for anything affirmative, you’ll want it for the next city, or the next drought, or the next…”  If we do address climate change, we push up energy prices, and create lots of ugly temptation for the government to take the revenues from cap and trade and spend them on debt servicing and bailing out rich people, rather than offsetting costs. High energy prices would be good – except that they come with high taxes, high price volatility for basic needs, high unemployment, high bankruptcy rates and declining credit, not to mention our energy intensive infrastructure.

Round and round and round she goes, and wherever she stops, we crash into something heavy and hard.  My husband once said “isn’t it ironic that we’re facing all these crises simultaneously?”  No, I don’t think it is ironic at all – I think it is inevitable – that is, as long as there was one way out of the hall of mirrors you could put off the crisis for a while, or at least, off thinking about it.  That is, it seemed perfectly feasible to convert, someday, when we got around to it, to renewables as long as we were flush with wealth.  It seemed perfectly possible to deal with the oil crisis as long as we were rich, and it was someday.  It seemed perfectly possible to take on debt and build a credit card economy as long as we had energy to make the economy go.  It seemed perfectly possible to address climate change, as long as we could switch to lower emissions natural gas and dig a little deeper… Again, I am reminded of the conclusions of the 30 year Update of The Limits to Growth – in most scenarios, the crisis point does not come because of one single thing, but because “the system runs out of the ability to cope.”

Our ability to cope has, to put it starkly, run out.  I don’t mean that the end of the world is now here – I mean that we can no longer put off our problems.  And we are stuck where we put ourselves.

Is there an out from this ugly trio?  The only one I can see is this.  If our ambitions became smaller, in proportion to our reality, we might be able to slip out of our trap in the cracks around our triple crisis.  That is, if we acknowledged now that we cannot, as the Rolling Stones put it, get what we want, that we must settle for what we need, and content ourselves with the hope that our actions now can enable a decent future, we might be able to go forward.

The first item on that agenda would be a realistic assessment of what we need to do for climate change.  The odds are this would be painful, and politically unpopular.  And we need to do it anyway – emissions targets must be set lower and sooner, and while we can all hope that economic growth will magically begin, we must begin from the assumption that it will not.  That is, we must cut much of our emissions simply by not making them.  That means a massive shift in our society – ideally with tradable rationing as George Monbiot has proposed, which is the sanest of a lot of mediocre options.  Thus, the poor who already make fewer emissions than the rich, get to trade off their emissions allotment, and get a little richer, if they are willing.  But there must be absolute, strict caps.

The bailing of the rich and its corporations must stop – if we accept that economic growth in any sustained way is manifestly unlikely in the coming years, we can’t keep borrowing.  So what money we spend has to be spent on protecting the people, and reviving the domestic and informal economy – because, after all, if people’s basic needs are met, growth itself isn’t as important – this doesn’t mean that such a contraction will be easy, but it can be far less painful than it will be.  And the political difficulties could be navigated by a leader powerful enough to make the case for self-sacrifice for a larger goal. I don’t claim this is easy – merely necessary.

Finally, we would simply need to use vastly less energy, while gradually allocating as many of our resources as humanly possible to renewables and infrastructure investments, not primarily for the short term, but for the long term.  We must begin from the assumption that all of our densest energy sources are in decline – we face peak oil, coal and natural gas, and that our supplies of all are uncertain – so reducing our reliance on these *and* preserving a supply of these valuable materials for the future is essential.

Most of us reading this blog have thought for a bit about the implications of needing less energy, and they realize that in and of itself, this need not be unmitigated suffering – that is, we are not going back to banging rocks together in caves.  But we must invest our resources in making this possible, both at the personal and at the national, state and regional levels.  And we need to make compelling the vision of the future that we are offering – hope for our children and grandchildren, vs. no hope; a simpler life, harder in some ways, better in others; an honest truth, with some good and some bad. 

All this would entail convincing the American public that at this point, the most important thing we can do is to protect our future.  We have done this in the past – in World War II, that was our narrative.  We asked millions to risk death, to be parted from their families. Hundreds of thousands actually died for this goal.  The story we were told is this – we face a vast and terrible threat, one that risks destroying everything we value, we must fight it with everything in our power- and your sacrifice now buys you a future.  As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1941,

“We are now in this war.  We are all in it all the way.  Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking in American history.  We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories – the changing fortunes of war.”

I do not claim that getting the American or the world’s people to share in this project would be easy. I do claim that it is possible - every time I mention this many observe that we are now lazier, softer, more selfish than our grandparents ever were.  And that may be true.  But more than our grandparents, even, I think we long for meaning and purpose, for a vision of the future,  even if it is difficult.  Nor are we as soft as we like to say – Americans are very much invested in their own image of themselves as tough, as willing, as courageous - so invested that I have little doubt that they will rise to the occasion. I have no doubt this would be very hard. I also have no doubt it is possible.

That said, I don’t find it probable, much as I would like to, that our present leadership will lead us there.   And there is a real chance that even if we made the shift, we might fail to mitigate climate change, we might fail to create a decent future – we’re pretty close to the edge here.  But then again, we might have failed in World War II as well – at the start, it seemed very unlikely that Britain would not fall to the Germans at the very least.  The fact that you might fail might not be as important as we think it is.  In the end, if we face up to our realities, and acknowledge them, the very best any of us can do is everything we can.

Our present position, is, to put it mildly, unenviable.  We are trapped, proverbially, between rock and hard place, with immovable object pressing down on top.  We have squandered our chance to find the easy ways out, and our best options aren’t that appealing to most of us. 

The only possible case for them is that they are real.  That is, that outside the world of fantasy, outside those invested in raising consumer confidence or denying our ecological predicament for their own purposes, we have the choices we have.  Nobody chose this.  Nobody wanted it, and yet, it happened, and we allowed it. And now, we go from where we are.  Or we do not, and we never go anywhere at all worth going – we spend the rest of our lives in a trap, with the walls slowly moving together. 

Sharon 

• climate , economy , global warming , peak oil
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Sharon June 10th, 2009

A while back, I mentioned that I had a proposal in for a book on social issues – family, sex, marriage, population, etc…. and how they are likely to be affected by the coming shift in energy issues.  Well, that book did not sell, unfortunately, and just as I was about to begin the work of actually finding an agent, and hunting around for another potential publisher (I’m both lazy and ignorant of the process, since instead of laboring in the garrett and sending out manuscripts, I actually had an editor approach me in a sort of a fairy-tale thing).  But while I was getting around to that, my editor sorta asked “well, what else ya got?”  (Ok, Ingrid, Goddess of the Red Pen, doesn’t actually say “ya” )  And I mentioned that I’d been doing Adapting in Place classes, and in the back of my head, thinking that there was a book in there about how to make a future where you are.

 Well, apparently that one hit the jackpot, and while all is not settled, it looks like yours truly and Aaron are back in the book saddle again, putting together an Adapting in Place book.  The working title (which I am less fond of since my husband pointed out that it evokes a John Denver song…ooops) is “Back Home Again.”  And it will cover how to make a life that is as integrated as possible – that is, one that responds both to our energy and ecological decline, but also to our need for beauty, to save money, to make our lives better now.  Aaron is going to illustrate it, since I think that it is so important that we have a literal vision of what comes next.

I’ll probably call on y’all for many suggestions and critiques in the coming months (insanely enough, the due date for the manuscript is going to be March, so a crazy winter is anticipated), but one of the things that most needs doing is a good Bibliography.  I included one in _Depletion and Abundance_ but in the couple of years since I wrote it, many more books have been published or come to my attention, and of course, I missed plenty of wonderful resources. 

So I want your help with this – I’m going to pick a subject every week, and ask for recommendations of books I might not know on the subject.  I’m also going to publish some more book reviews, as I read for this large project of telling people how to make a sustainable home where they are. 

This week, I thought we’d start with one of my favorite subjects – cookbooks!  I have a list of cookbooks, of course, but I want to update and expand it.  So please, tell me what your favorite cookbooks are in helping you live a sustainable life, eat sustainably and enjoy your food.  Please tell me the author, title and why you think these are the two or three cookbooks I really should look at! 

Thanks so much,

 Sharon

• books
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