The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon October 8th, 2009

“Sukey will you be my bride? Say yes if you please

For I have got a dun cow, and you can make good cheese.

I have got a little pig, and you have got a sty.

Sukey, will you marry me? 

Oh aye, by and by!” – Traditional Nursery Rhyme

When I started participating in peak oil and climate change discussions in 2003, let’s just say that the whole thing was much more of a boy’s club than it is now (and in some measure it still is).  And one of the laments I most often heard was “we men would be glad to change our lives, but our wives won’t let us – they still want all the trappings of affluence.”  Or “No woman will date a man who just wants to farm and grow food.”  Whenever I heard these claims, I would laugh and think about how much some women I knew were struggling to get their husbands to give up their creature comforts. 

But they keep recurring.  Recently Dmitry Orlov wrote about how hard it is to please a woman – in this case, his wife, who wants more creature comforts than a simpler life can provide – and he terms it not so much as how to please his particular wife, but women in general:

“I have thought about this long and hard, and came to the conclusion that it all comes down to a very basic question: “How to please a girl?” After all, any modern, progressive, educated and attractive person begins to scoff if you take away her flush toilet and substitute a bucket, or if she has to go shopping leading a donkey, or if, instead of a shower, she is invited to go and stoke a sauna. From time immemorial status in society has been determined by access to luxury goods. As society becomes richer, luxuries turn into necessities. And when society starts to grow poorer again, it turns out that there is no going back. That is, there is a way back, but it is blocked by the innate tendencies of our clever species. My wife and I spent two years living aboard a very attractive and practical yacht slightly less than 10 meters in length at the waterline, and although the wife understands everything very well, even she cannot stop herself from casting a sideways glance when a yacht like Abramovich’s walks past us, and from making some comment, like “Oh, now this I understand, this is the real thing!” And there is no point in explaining to her that what we have here on board is a very high level of civilization, while Abramovich is just an ordinary consumer. It is very hard, gentlemen, to change the lifestyle, but not change the woman! If someone succeeds in this, then he is a hero and a genius, and we should all learn from him. In the meantime, we are going to live in an apartment, and put the boat on the hard, and install all sorts of solar panels, water heaters, and other technological junk.”

 Orlov phrases this in much the same way that many men have phrased it – male attractiveness is tied up in their ability to provide, and women want to be provided with a lot more than men.  And that’s probably a fair analysis in some ways – male status is both more and less fungible than female status – female status tends to be heavily tied to physical beauty, and if you don’t have that, there aren’t a lot of ways of compensating.  Male status tends to offer a range – you can be extremely attractive, extremely bright, extremely competetive, physically extremely strong and aggressive, or drive a really nice car – but for men who are not affluent and not unusually competetive or attractive, the whole thing rather sucks (I once had a lengthy debate about whether you are most hosed if you are a tall, heavy, extremely bright woman or if you are a beta-male, short, bald male – I concluded in the end that both rather suck if you are looking for love – and that I won the lottery with Eric.) 

Now my readership is  more than half female, so this sort of thing only occasionally shows up in the comments here – although it still does now and again.  But recently I’ve seen this sort of lament elsewhere, and it seems, more frequently - and I’ve seen a new variant of this – people lamenting that more women aren’t like me!  I’ve seen it mentioned in several blog posts and essays, and have gotten a few emails from husbands complaining about their wives and comparing them to their (idealized) version of life with me and my canning kettle.

My husband’s comment on the question of whether all women should be like me was “It would serve the men who say that right if they were.” (This is why I am married to my husband, because always says the right – and funny –  thing.) 

 I admit, given that I spent most of my younger years wishing that I was like some other woman (someone beautiful and graceful, ideally), the idea that I’ve set up as anyone’s model partner is just plain funny to me.  But it is also a little troubling – it is one thing for someone – male or female – to wish that *they* had my farm life (preferrably without the loud herd of children and probably without a whole of other realities that come with it) or my skill set.  It is another thing for someone to wish that their *wife* was like me.

A compelling example comes from Greg Jeffer’s farm blog, in which he rants about the culture of femininity and divorce that keeps farm-wantin’ men in Boca in line.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the compliment, even if I don’t agree with a good portion of his commentary:

So I thought I’d ask the question – are women really more reluctant than men to take on a new way of life?  Are women more attracted to creature comforts and more afraid of  the future?  Is this a gender thing at all?  I should note that among me email collection on this subject, I have at least two emails from lesbians, complaining that other lesbians talk about sustainability but don’t really want to live it, and one from a gay man complaining that gay men are all mostly concerned with status and affluence, and don’t want to live sustainably. 

My own take on this is that while collapse as a whole, with its radical dislocation of male roles and providers, is probably scarier and more destructive to men than to women; volunteering to live a low energy life probably is more frightening to many women than to men – and for pretty good reasons.  Because there’s an excellent chance that the reality is likely to be that the practical burdens of hauling groceries home on a donkey, emptying the composting toilet bucket and stoking the sauna are likely to become the wife’s chores.  I don’t think it is an accident that in many cases (and from what I know of him I am explicitly exempting Orlov from this), that the men making these complaints tend to be traditional sorts who don’t share in the household labor equitably.  Nor do I think it is coincidental that many women married to more traditional men are unthrilled with the vision of a low energy future, and a return to the bad old days, in which “men may work from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done.”

There’s a very funny description of this idea in a 2008 essay in Brain, Child about Shannon Hayes and her forthcoming book on Radical Homemaking (full disclosure, Shannon contacted me about being interviewed for the book, but somehow it never happened – she lives and farms half an hour from me and I can’t believe we’ve never met ) that probably describes the nightmare vision (and a fair bit of the reality) that haunts most women who think about a sustainable life:

“You’re up before dawn.  The cow is giving birth in the barn, the turnips are rotting in their beds from all the rain this harvest season, your organic cotton tampon has given way in the night.  Your fourth child is teething, and the sourdough starter needs to be turned.  You haven’t worn makeup, earned a paycheck, contributed to a 401K or signaled the waiter for another round in five years or more – and you couldn’t be happier.  You’re a radical homemaker and loving every minute of it.” (Brain, Child p. 32 Fall 2008 – and thank you Cindy, for sending this to me!)

My laughter was the laughter of recognition, but how on earth would I blame any woman for the bark of laughter that ends with “as if!”  Even for a woman with a full partnership with their spouse (and the reality is that women still do a majority of childcare, domestic labor and household management, so radically upping the scale of those chores will, in most cases, fall on the backs of women), in many cases, there is the underlying fear of divorce or widowhood.   A society that encourages divorce esssentially requires them to have their own money.

This is where I find Jeffer’s analysis most troubling – and where I least want to be held up as a model for women.   Those women in Boca may just be concerned about their nails, but for most women who aren’t millionaires, the fear of adding domestic chores is this – there are only two ways to do it. First, you give up sleep, freedom, time off and do the work at night, after the kids are in bed, after you come home from your job.  Or two, if you can and have that luxury, you give up the job – and know that if your spouse is disabled, if they die or, most likely, if you get divorced, you will be radically impoverished, and often left with the kids, if any.  Women with children suffer more after divorce in terms of loss of fiscal security, and they recover more slowly, and to lower levels (do not get me wrong, I know that men often lose full access  to their children, and that the stakes are high on both sides).

The culture of divorce is dangerous for both sides of the coin – and a tough nut to crack.  No one wants people in abusive or destructive marriages trapped there – which is what you get when you stigmatize divorce, or make it more difficult.  But no one wants what we’ve got now, either – it isn’t good for men, for women, for children, for families, or for the hope of the kind of deep and stable communities that we need going forward.  I don’t disagree wholly with Jeffers on this point, but I don’t quite know what to say about it either. 

And this is why I don’t particularly take it as a compliment to hear people say “oh, I wish women were more like you.”  Because the only way it works to be more like me is to be more like me *AND* Eric.  Right now, I’m working, and today is Eric’s day off.  Tonight we’ll be having dinner guests, and this weekend we have more guests coming.  While I work, Eric got up, fed the kids, milked the goats, dressed the kids, did dishes.  Now he’s taking the three kids to Agway to buy goat vaccine and chicken feed, stopping by a farmstand to pick up brussels sprouts (mine are still small), coming home, reheating last night’s dinner (which he made early in the morning before going to work) for lunch, homeschooling, rebuilding the sukkah that blew down in the wind, grinding cornmeal and making cornbread for tonight’s dinner and sweeping and tidying the house, before taking all four kids to Hebrew school, and trying to sneak some paper grading in around all this.  Like me, the man has a full time job, and a farm, and four kids.

Now this is awfully impressive. I’m impressed with him, and very few people meet us without realizing that I’m no wonder woman - I have a wondrous husband and a very fortunate marriage. 

The work that he is doing,  I did yesterday, when it was my day for the farm and the kids with the kids – but the fact is that you cannot offer a call to arms to women to come back to the kitchen unless everyone else goes with them.  If all of this domestic labor were entirely my responsibility, there is no freakin’ way that I’d be able to do it alone – my husband is a full partner in our domestic arrangement – and not a traditional partner, who does the heavy “guy stuff” but isn’t there for the endless daily cycle of chores.  I’m not afraid of laundering the cloth diapers, because I know my husband will change the diapers and rinse them out first.  I’m not afraid of taking on canning, because I know he’ll be homeschooling the kids.

Moreover, I’m able to take on not-very lucrative jobs like farming and writing because I can trust my husband deeply – I know he’s not going to leave me for another woman, I know that I can trust and rely on him.  So if I don’t contribute to a retirement account or pay that much into Social Security, I know barring death or disability, he’ll be there with and for me.  He’s not going to pick a pretty face with an air conditioner or a nicer farm – this is a permanent marriage.  I can’t say how I know this, merely that I do.  But if I wasn’t sure, if I wasn’t really sure that I’d seen his worst parts and he mine and we could do this, I’d be afraid to give up more reliable sources of income and take risks.  And no matter how deeply I trust him, trust isn’t really the operative issue when it comes to death, illness or injury, which can happen to anyone.  I am taking a risk – and a lesser one than a woman who doesn’t write and doesn’t have a foot in the formal economy. 

I think any man or woman, but especially a man, who dreams of a homestead needs to ask himself who he thinks will be doing the canning, the washing of the chicken manure off the porch and laundering those cloth diapers.  I do not claim that all men dream of a homestead where the domestic work is magically taken care of by a perfect wife, just like someone’s insane fantasy about who I am (which bears little resemblance to the actual me), but it is worth making sure you don’t have that dream – and making sure that your spouse, male or female, feels absolutely sure that you have done everything you can to ensure that this life will be secure.

But while that gives a sense of why women might be less inclined to choose a low energy life, I’m not sure it really answers the larger question posed – are there more men out there who dream of living a low energy, sustainable life?  Are women more attached to their creature comforts, even adjusting for their perfectly reasonable fear of being stuck with all the work, or getting covered in dirt and then being dumped for some nice clean woman? 

I can’t run a statistical analysis here – my own readership tends slightly towards the female, and the stories I hear are much more about the trouble of getting husbands to change than wives, but I know it works the other way too.  It is certainly women who do the majority of the shopping and consumer culture – one study found that women either made or influenced 90% of all purchases – and not just the things stereotypes would assume, like food or clothing, but also cars, tools and homes and home repairs.   The culture of shopping is, in a large measure, a female culture.   In that sense, there’s certainly some truth in this. 

But so is the culture of making a stable home, of feeding people, of tending to basic needs.  For women, much of that has been integrated deeply into a consumer culture – you feed and clothe the people you love by shopping, perhaps by careful bargain shopping.  You make a home by buying products and researching good schools.  You tend needs by having the right things on hand.  But I think the reason this is so deeply tied to consumer culture is that the other, more traditional ways of doing these things have been taken from us – and disdained.  Retail therapy exists, of course, but I think it is worth asking to what extent it is a response to a gaping absence in our way of life, rather than an ingrained gender distinction.

The same might be worth asking about women’s preoccupation with male status and affluence – it is probably true that we see in affluence a measure of a man’s ability to supply stability and to provide for our family.  But do we see that in status symbols like cars and fancy houses because we are anthropologically cued to respond to any kind of flashy affluence, or because the traditional symbols of the ability to provide – a piece of land, a healthy body, gentleness with children, a goodly number of goats , facility with a spear, good mammoth barbecuing skills – are mostly gone, and we are using false cognates to substitute for something we could instinctively find superior?  That is, money is only status in a society that has discarded self-provisioning – will more women like men with dirt under their nails if self-provisioning makes a comeback?

What I do think is that male status markers change much more rapidly and fundamentally than female ones do – to use one example, think about the degree to which modern society largely eschews male violence.  Male physical prowess hasn’t been entirely overcome – but male aggressiveness has in some measures.  Instead of physical aggressiveness, status markers for men now emphasize economic aggressiveness, and domestic violence, while still a painful reality, is no longer as normative as it once was – in fact, most of the women I know believe that men who are gentle to women and children are more attractive than those who aren’t – something not up for discussion when violence between spouses and by parents was concealed as normative.  The rise of geek culture contains in it a truly radical overthrowing of masculine models – now some people may argue that this is emasculating, and certainly there are still plenty of women attracted to the physically aggressive alpha type.  But I still would argue that there is a fundamental shift under way – we are selecting for gentler men as a society.  This is non-trivial, if only partly underway.

Female status markers are much more fixed – standards of beauty have changed over time, but the fact of female beauty has tended to eclipse other factors  -  much as I’d love to see intellectual brillanc and the ability to make good cheese as major drawing factors for dating women, I’m not expecting it anytime soon. If there are to be changes, I think that it is more possible to change markers of male status – that is not to say that this is easy, merely that it is more viable. 

The really good thing is that we all exceed our genetic programming sometimes – witness the fact that I have an adorable, wonderful husband who thinks I’m beautiful, even though I’m not, and also really likes that I’m smart and mouthy.  I know a number of poor, short, bald men married to women who like them just that way, and find affluent guys with nice cars to be assholes.  A big part of the problem is finding the match – if you married on grounds other than your mutual taste for digging carrots, the discovery that digging carrots is part of the deal is going to be problematic.  Nor do we want this to be another unattainable standard – as in “Now I’ve got to be sexy, blond *and* milk a cow?”  Or “Now I’ve got to have ripped abs, provide her with a lovely home and get up at 5 am to pick rutabagas?”

Such a process will take a long time.  And since most of us didn’t pick our spouses on the grounds of their agrarian gifts (I have got a dun cow, and you can make good cheese), I suspect there will, for a long time, be men and women, each of them lamenting that men in general, or women in general, or the ones they meet or marry don’t seem to value the same things they do.

Sharon

• adapting in place , orlov , women
• Comments(80)

Sharon October 5th, 2009

There was nothing in the Washington Post article (three essays back) that I didn’t know.  There was nothing in the Washington Post article that shocked me.  The fact that we aren’t on track to address climate change is not news.  The fact that we probably won’t address climate change successfully is not news.  I still don’t enjoy hearing it.  Nor can I respond as my climate-change skeptic readers will – I understand the science well enough to know that it simply isn’t sufficient to say that we don’t have perfect models, or that the climate is always changing.  Both are true, and neither is sufficient – no, we don’t have perfect models, but waiting until we do is not a viable choice.  Yes, the climate has changed in the past – but of course – and the consequences of those changes make it imperative that we not encourage the process, as we are now. 

The reality is this – the odds are extremely poor that we are going to prevent massive climate change precipitated by human emissions.  We’re unwilling to endure short term suffering in order to prevent much deeper long term suffering – as I’ve said several times, part of the reason we’ve failed is that climate activists have chosen to come at this as an easy sell – we’ve been told that green jobs will keep us rich, that our lifestyle can continue powered by new technologies, that all will be well, when the language of sacrifice was the only one available to us.  Now that it is becoming blazingly evident that only the most draconian measures will possibly give us a chance of having a climate like the one we’ve had for most of human history, we’re stuck with all those old false promises.

I do not believe we are free to stop working on preventing unchecked climate change until the deal is done. Why not?  Because what’s at stake are the people and things we love, and you don’t give up on those until they are dead and you’ve seen the corpse.  Imagine your loved one facing death from an illness – and you know there’s a 50% chance he or she will die.  Do you stop trying for life?  What about 20%?  What about 10%?  5%?  2%?  As far as I can tell, you go on fighting as long as there’s hope, however faint.

But extending the illness metaphor, it is important to note that when someone is facing a severe or even fatal illess, there’s a too pronged approach you can take that may work better than a single-minded focus on fixing the problem – this involves integrating curative medicine with palliative care.  And this, I think, is what’s most necessary at this moment.

Palliative care is medical care that focuses on the relief of symptoms and the maintenence of quality of life.  Unlike hospice care, which focuses on cases where loss is inevitable, palliative care has the same basic focus on relief of suffering, but can exist simultaneously with curative medicine.  In some cases the patient will be cured.  In some cases, the patient will die.  Either way, the relief of pain and the improvement of quality of life is one central focus.

Our approach to climate change, to energy depletion and to our financial crisis could learn something from this medical analysis – that it is not sufficient to focus only on the cure.  It is, of course, tempting to do so, to say that we can’t afford to divert resources from solutions that might save us.  But the problem with this is that it leaves us nothing but mourning if our work fails.  I should be clear here – I don’t really believe that most of our problems can be “cured” in any sense – that is, I don’t think we can stop depletion.  But we could render them radically less severe, perhaps shift from acute to chronic in some cases.

What would palliative care for a dying industrial civilization, for an unstable climate, increasingly depleted resources and an economic crisis look like?  Like medical palliative care, it would focus on relieving pain and improving quality of life – on enabling people to do well with much less, on investment in the commons and public resources available to those who no longer have access to private ones.  It would involve accepting that the areas most vulnerable to climate change might have to have massive population relocations – and beginning them now.  It would involve focusing on caring for people’s needs, and enabling them to live their lives as they will have to.  Making sure that we prioritize food, shelter and water, basic safety and the comfort and emotional needs of people in difficult situations may be less shiny and exciting than building a giant dome to block out the sun or whatever, but it is more necessary.

This need not be in conflict with the project of trying to fix some of our most pressing projects – in fact, there’s a compelling case that in a world with too much to do and not enough resources, that the most important acts are the ones that provide both curative and palliative measures – for example moving people rapidly to a lower level of consumption of resources both reduces emissions and helps people get ready for their new lifestyle.  But both prongs are essential.

Sharon

• adapting in place
• Comments(16)

Sharon August 27th, 2009

Note: This is a re-run from last year, but I think it bears repeating – we’ve been talking about these issues in the AIP class and what always emerges is that at least as important as temperature itself is our attitude towards it.  As long as we believe we have to live in a particular way, at temperatures that simply haven’t been typical for most human beings through most of history, we will justify almost anything – including the burning of the very last forest to keep us warm, or the burning of the last scrap of coal to cool our bodies and heat the planet.  We’ve got to start thinking about this differently.

Today’s posts will focus on heating and cooling and how to deal with these issues.  If you live in the north, heating is probably a growing anxiety for you, because of the rapid rise in cost of nearly every method of heating.  When I wrote this piece last year, oil prices were now effectively prohibitive for poor and working families – with 100 or 125 gallon minimum deliveries and no credit extended, many households that rely on heating oil (disproportionately in the Northeast) were terrified they would not be able to afford to heat their houses at all with conventional methods. The collapse in oil prices came at a good time, but the problem isn’t over.  Meanwhile,  Gas prices are expected to rise steadily, and besides the rising cost of electricity, there’s the question of whether heavy reliance on electric space heaters to replace other heating methods may actualy result in power outages, leaving even more people in the cold.

And if you live where summer temperatures are regularly above 100 degrees, and every summer seems hotter than the last you are probably deeply concerned about what happens as the price of electricity spikes and air conditioning becomes prohibitive – or is shut off.  What do we do, short of abandon our homes?

 I’m going to talk about strategies for both of these things – first of all, how not to die from heat or cold – how to live without any heating or cooling, even in very cold or hot places, and then also how to cool and heat your house using fewer fossil fuels, but before we go there, I want to talk about how we *think* about heating and cooling overall.  Because that has at least as deep an effect on how we approach this as the actual method we use.

Now we all know that people have lived in very cold and very hot places in the world for most of human history, and most of them still have no central heating and no central air conditioning – and no one, not even the richest folks – had them until the last century or so.  So any discussion of heating or cooling has to begin from the recognition that our sense that we “have to” have certain temperatures, barring a few medical conditions – is really cultural, not physiological.  Human beings would not have survived in Northern climates, living in houses heated only by an open fire (and most of the heat goes up the fireplace) in uninsulated houses - or in more portable dwellings - for thousands of years if human beings couldn’t tolerate temperatures below 65 degrees inside. 

I realize this probably won’t make me anyone’s best friend, but the truth is that except for the ill, very elderly and underweight, you can regulate your body temperature in a house that is in the 40s or 50s – you won’t like it, but you can live that way  – in fact, you probably evolved to live that way.  If you dress very warmly, in layers, and move around a lot and have enough blankets, you will be fine – period. If you have an infant, the best strategy is to keep them against your body all the time – and they will be just fine. 

What is true is that people lived differently – they slept with another person, spent their days mostly together in the heated areas, or moving around and being active.  They often slept a lot more in the winter, and spent a lot of time when they were not being active in bed. 

The same is true of extremely high temperatures – while the world is manifestly warmer than it once was, it is also true that human beings have lived in very, very hot places for much of human history, and mostly lived.  But again, they lived differently – activity ceased in the heat of the day, life moved more into the night times, people spent more time in and near water - for example, in some parts of Southeast Asia, a shower (a bucket with holes in it) is a basic part of hospitality.

 It is true that most of us are physiologically better adapted to one kind of temperature than another – if you are from a hot place and move to a cold one, you will feel the cold more, and vice versa.  People raised in warm places actually do have more sweat glands, for example, than people from cold climates.  That said, however, our bodies also can adapt individually – someone who spends a lot of time working outdoors in a hot climate will build sweat glands, and someone who doesn’t over heat their house and goes out will acclimate to colder and colder temperatures.  The process of acclimation and adapting our lives is probably the most basic thing we can do to deal with heat and cold – and up until now, we’ve been using tools (central heating and cooling) that prevent acclimation – that is, we spend half our day in air conditioning, so our bodies don’t adapt to the heat.  Everyone who has ever worked outside on a bitterly cold day knows how *hot* even a lightly heated house feels when you go in.  This is acclimation, and we have to use it more than we have.

Now the odds are good our bosses probably won’t let us start siestaing, or give us the winter off to hibernate, and that we can’t totally change our lives to adapt to temperature.  But we can change our lives, and our ways of thinking to adapt to the weather, and we can work on acclimation.

One of the things that shifts in an era of cheap energy is the relationship we have to the idea of central heating or cooling.  When energy is cheap and widely available and perceived as having no major environmental consequences, we can afford to keep the whole house at a comfortable temperature – and central heating and cooling seem to have the advantage.  When costs go up and impact matters, central heating and cooling don’t work very well – the temperature your house is at goes up above what is comfortable or down below it, and localized heat or cooling starts to have the advantage.

 Why?  Well, we tend to think of heating or cooling as “keeping the house” at some temperature, but localized heating or cooling simply doesn’t work that way – over by my woodstove, there’s a spot that is often nearly 80 degrees – it feels great if I’ve been sitting at the computer in my 49 degree office, but far too hot to sit there all the time.  Out a bit further away, is an optimal temperature, and that’s where everyone will read or hang out.  Further still, it gets cooler, and the sleeping spaces (where we are warmed by heavy blankets and body heat) are the coolest of all).  Elderly people, or those who have been ill, or new babies can have the spot next to the fire, and be warm.  Those who need it less can have periods of comfort for quiet work, and less heat when they are up and moving.  And the same is true of cooling – if you need air conditioning, localizing it to the most urgent spot – perhaps the bedroom or living room- gives you comfortable sleep or a place to congregate and do your work.  This is less costly than trying to cool a whole house, but it also gets you adequate cooling in a localized space.  If you don’t use a/c, perhaps moving your bedroom to the shady north side of the house where the cross breeze comes, putting your mattress on the floor for summer, or sleeping outside (which is what people used to do) will be sufficient.

The most localized heating and cooling of all is the heating or cooling of your body – this could be as simple as dressing warmly, wearing a hat indoors, holding a cup of tea or coffee or even hot water, using a hot water bottle in bed or on the back of your chair, and putting your feet on a hot brick or other heated substance.  As I’ve mentioned, my office last year hovered in the high 40s, and I wrote a book that way, rather cozily, actually, with my fingerless gloves, my tea, my hot bricks and a bathrobe over my clothes.   For cooling, soaking a bandana or freezing it and putting it under your hat or over your hair, drinking copiously and sticking your feet in cool water are good strategies – it isn’t always necessary to cool your environment, just your body.

Heating and cooling are going to be serious strains on our society – we may first experience an “energy crisis” in a real sense this winter or in a coming one.  We’re going to have change our way of thinking – to start from acclimatization, and localized heat sources, rather than begin from the assumption that we all must live in 68 degrees.

Sharon

• adapting in place , heating
• Comments(22)

Sharon August 20th, 2009

Note: Ok, this is another repeat – I’m so head deep in the summer canning and stuff that my brain seems to have shut off for the duration. 

Like my title?  Never let it be said I’m not ambitious.

A student in my class asked me for a list of skills we need to get ready for peak oil, prioritized. I admit, it took me about a day after she asked to stop thinking “Holy Crap, how do I figure that all out!”  But it is an interesting question and I thought I’d take a shot at it. I will, of course, be relying on my fearless readership to point out gaps in my thinking.

 Now I’m not going to get everything, but it did occur to me that we could break it down a bit, and then subcategorize.  So what the heck, here goes.  In order of priority – the main categories are numbered, and the skills in each category are lettered.  I’m going to do this in several posts, so that I don’t go mad.  But here’s the beginnings of my list. 

 1. How not to panic. 

- This is probably the most important skill set – when stuff gets hard, you need to focus and do what needs doing.  In order to do this, you need:

a. To feel like you are able to handle things, because you have mental contigency plans and you have built trust in your own competence.  The best way to get this skill is to plan, to talk and think out scenarios so you would know what you would do, and to practice doing things until you are reasonably confident that not only can you do familiar things, but you can learn new ones as you go.

b. To have the skills to control your own reactions – these may be strong.  You need to be able to put your anger, or grief or fear to the side long enough to make everyone safe and to meet immediate needs.  Meditation, biofeedback or simple compartmentalizing may help with this.  It is also extremely useful to develop the ability to accept that sometimes you will make mistakes and fail at things, and that that isn’t the end of the world.

 c.  To help other people remain calm, respond appropriately, and find a role for themselves. Some kind of leadership training, Community Reponse training or just practice organizing people. Some folks are not good at this – if you can’t be a leader, that’s ok - maybe your job is to find someone who is totally losing it and help them stabilize.  Certainly, knowing how to help your immediate family and neighbors, thinking about how they may respond and how to help them.  For children, it might be helpful to give them some training, or plan out specific jobs for them to do to help them feel powerful and useful.

2. How to learn things – and how to teach them

You are never going to learn every useful skill.  It won’t happen.  It is very helpful, though if you figure out how you and members of your family learn, and think about how you might make it easy for you and your family to learn more things as you need to – if you are a book person, get books.  If you need diagrams, get diagrams.  If you learn best from people, find out who knows what in your area.  But the basic skills of learning things are all pretty much the same – most of us can learn to do almost anything.  So learning how to learn – how to research an issue, how to pick up a physical skill, how to help another person do that, how to analyze a problem and find a solution, how to avoid major errors of logic, and what the necessary basic tools are will really help you expand your skill set.

3. How to get along with everyone else.

I sometimes get emails from people telling me that everyone around them is an asshole, and that they can’t possibly get along with their neighbors. Now once in a while that is actually true – there are horrible places and circumstances in the world.  But if someone tells me that there’s no one in their whole town who they can be friends with, that everyone is ignorant or mean or self-centered – the most likely scenario is that the person talking isn’t very good at getting along with others.  Now I don’t mean that people who are content without a large community are necessarily bad at this – some people are just introverts.  And some people who are bad at getting along in the course of things either can do better in a crisis, can find one role they can fit into, or can be protected by their families, who can get along with them.  But if you aren’t great at getting along, learning to be tolerant, learning to listen, learning to like other people even when they seem weird, and perhaps most importantly, learning to judge them gently (and I am not the natural master of any of these skills either) is really, really important.  Do it now.  This is especially important if you have trouble getting along with your relatives, and might end up with them.

4. How to deal with an immediate medical crisis in an emergency.

a. Basic hygeine, safety, self care and nutrition.  How to make a balanced meal, and to provide a balanced diet, how to make a rehydration syrup, how to wash hands, how to sterilize things, how to cook safely, how to keep water from being contaminated, how to deal with contaminated water, how nutritional needs vary by age, sex and medical condition. How to care for teeth, skin, etc.. without commercial preparations.  How to prevent pregnancy and disease.  How to use tools, including any weapons safely and keep children and others safe in their presence. Sounds obvious, will kill people if you don’t know it.

b. Basic first aid and triage of a situation – everyone needs to know these things – period, no discussion.  Maybe you’ll never use it, but you should be able to stop bleeding, do CPR, help a choking victim, evaluate whether someone can be moved, help clear an airway, and decide whether medical treatment is necessary.  This comes up all the time regardless of whether there’s a crisis on.

c. More advanced medical care, when to use it, and when not to.  This is particularly likely to come up in a localized disaster, an epidemic, or a transport crisis.  If you can’t get someone to the hospital, if the emergency rooms are overflowing with people, if the hospitals are closed or evacuated, or if there’s no way to get someone somewhere because of a gas shortage, snowstorm, ice storm, hurricane, earthquake…  You need to be able to meet emergency medical needs – to observe a concussion victim, make a temporary splint for a broken bone, birth a baby, ease the pain of a dying person, etc…  At least one person and preferrably everyone old enough should get some or all these skills per household.

5. How to feed yourself.

a. How to cook simple foods, and make them tasty and appetizing. How to adapt your cooking to changing availability of ingredients. How to deal with special diets that you might likely encounter. 

b. How to grow and forage simple, easily accessible foods.  These vary a lot by climate and culture, but generally the indigenous foods of your region will give you a good idea of what grows well.  Includes how to save seeds of these plants, what kind of soil conditions they need, teh basics of soil science, and how to harvest and preserve them, as well as how to recognize safe wild foods and how to use them.  I will discuss foraging and gardening later in this, but even if you imagine you won’t have to garden, or you have very little land, learn these very basic skills.

c. How to store your food so that you will have minimal losses from predators, mold, bacteria, theft, etc…  Includes security, hygeine, good storage practices, rotating, maintaining, checking, managing stores. 

d. How to secure your food from predators, and if you are interested, how to be a predator – how to hunt, trap, fish and butcher wild and tame livestock.  Even vegetarians may want this skill set to feed their pets, if the cost of food or its availability becomes prohibitive. Includes understanding the rules of hunting, gun, bow, dog and trap safety and humane practices, when not to take animals, and the best strategies for predator removal.

6. How to have a sense of humor about stuff, and how to shake off your distress and go on.  How to be kind when you are pissed off and grumpy, but it isn’t anyone’s fault. 

7. How to wring the most out of everything.  Extreme thrift

a. How to minimize waste and minimize expenditures – reducing need, using care and good management skills.

b. How to take care of your stuff so it won’t break, how to repair and patch it if it does

c. Repurposing of now useless things, making do, creative compensating for things you lack.

8. How to have sex well .  Or rather, how to navigate, according to your values and your community, sexual ethics.

a. How to navigate sexual dynamics and power relationships so that everyone is safe, having fun and acting consensually.  Teaching children the same – when to, when not to, what consent means, how to stay safe physically and emotionally.

b. The risks of pregnancy (for them that this applies to), how not to get pregnant when you don’t want to, and the simple fact that no strategy is perfect if it involves heterosexuals and the most commonly used orifices, so - how to be prepared to have a child.  How to protect yourself from diseases, and that no protection is perfect.

c. How to make your partner happy, if you’ve got one – this will only help in tough times.

 9. How to Grow Stuff

a. How soil works, basic botany, plant identification, a general understanding of the conditions specific plants need and how to create them, a general understanding of plants that will do well in your conditions.

b. How to use basic tools – physical skills for gardening. Hoeing, shoveling – these can be done well or badly.

c. How to recognize diseases and pests, how to recognize when things are ready to harvest, how harvest correctly.

d. Seed saving and basic plant breeding and genetics.

e. Composting and maintaining soil fertility.

10. How to Handle Water

a. How store water, use it thriftily, reuse it safely and thriftily and not contaminate it

b. capturing water for use or reuse as many times as possible, and as efficiently as possible, using swales, run off, etc…

c. Source of contamination and how to purify water.

• adapting in place
• Comments(7)

Sharon August 13th, 2009

This is week two of the AIP course, and I’ve mostly covered, in past classes, the range of options for heating, cooking, water, toileting, etc…  One subject I haven’t written about is light – and I think it is one that bears some attention, because even though light isn’t necessary for life, you’ll be awfully sad, particularly if you live in extreme northern or southern latitudes, if you have to go to bed when it gets dark all year .  Not to mention that high cost in broken toes of tripping over things.

One of the funny things about generating light, unlike a lot of other non-fossil fueled alternatives, is that most of the homemade, seemingly lower impact models are actually *higher* impact – that is, the petroleum based candles you buy at the store are probably of greater impact than simply running a Compact Flourescent lightbulb.  So is your kerosene lamp.  Even beeswax candles may be a bigger impact, depending on where you are getting them from.  That’s because electricity isn’t a bad way to generate light.

That said, however, plastic and battery based things break.  I find that my best solutions are a mix of all of these – candles and kerosene lamps, solar lanterns and rechargeable batteries. 

 Now preparations need to have two functions – first, they meet your needs in a crisis.  But second, they allow you to live the kind of life you want even when you aren’t in crisis, and presuming that most of us want our light sources to be ethical ones, and to provide the most for the least, that means sorting out some options.  Let’s talk options. 

Actually, first, let’s talk not setting your house, child, cat or ferret on fire.  Many of these solutions involve open flames, or slightly enclosed flames.  If you are going to use them, use them very carefully.  Have a good smoke detector around and batteries, keep fire extinguishers and know how to use them, and never leave them unattended where kids or pets could get at them.  If you have children or pets, stable candles with solid bases are better than tall candles with candlesticks, and hurricanes or other containment, or wall sconces are safer than the table where the kids can reach or the dog can bump into things while hoping someone will drop something.  I have several wall sconces with hurricane glasses that I found at a yard sale.  Mirrored sconces will nearly double the amount of light in a room as as side benefit.

 If you really desperately needed light, and wanted to be outside, you could make rushlights or flaming torches – dip cattails in oil or set a stick on fire.  You do not want to do this in your house, just in case you were wondering .  But this is not the most carbon-efficient option, nor is it terrifically convenient (although flaming torches have their place in driving monsters out of the local ruined castle, I suppose).

You could also burn olive oil, in a homemade lamp, with a wick made from a shoelace (cotton only, pull off the plastic ends).  This is not cheap, but it is clean burning.  It won’t give tons of light, but if you have olives where you live, you can make a simple lamp. Here’s a variation that uses a mason jar: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/Make-Olive-Oil-Lamp.aspx

Next possibility are candles.  Most candles are petroleum based, and some have lead wicks, which are not good to breathe, so be careful when buying cheap candles.  I think scented candles are generally disgusting, and they can cause problems for people with allergies or scent sensitivities, so I avoid those as well (is there anyone who thinks those Yankee candle stores smell *good* ;-P).  Soy, beeswax and bayberry candles are much nicer and better for you.  Tallow candles don’t smell so hot when burning, and you really can’t buy them, but you could make them out of leftover animal fats.  If you plan to use candles, think about where your candles will come from – get to know your local beekeeper, plant some bayberry bushes if you’ve got sandy soil, or get your own hive and candle molds.

 Kerosene is not environmentally more sound, but lamp oil does store well, and kerosene lamps can provide a good backup lighting source.  Make sure you know how to use them, and how to trim wicks and clean them.  Lamp oil stores pretty much indefinitely, but make sure you store it in a fire proof container.  These oils are byproducts of coal production, so not likely to run entirely out, but also not real environmentally cool.

You can get lights that will run on propane or on natural gas – try www.lehmans.com - these are used by the Amish, and if, for example, you have a natural gas well or use propane for other things, are another possibility.  Again, they aren’t necessarily a huge improvement over grid electric (depending on how your electric is generated), but they may allow you to rely on more stable supplies.

Flashlights, battery powered lamps, booklights and headlamps make a lot of sense when combined with rechargeable batteries and solar powered battery chargers.  Set these in your window, have several sets of each battery type to rotate, and these can give excellent light for extended periods.  Headlamps are especially nice for a host of purposes – going out to the barn with stuff in your hands, washing dishes, etc…  Book lights clip to your book and allow you to read with tiny quantities of light.  These are also a great mix with LED nightlights for kids. 

If you are going to get flashlights, get at least one serious, heavy duty, police-officer style flashlight, or a floodlight LED type.  The reason is that sooner or later you are bound to have to help track the dog through the woods, find out what’s making that noise under the house, or otherwise do something with a light with *power* – little flashlights are adequate for most jobs, but once in a while, these are useful.  They are also an excellent security device – most people prowling about will stop, blinded when you shine one on them, and many pesty critters will run away .

Hand crank flashlights are good, but usually not super powerful.  Plus you might have something to do besides crank.  I have some, but I also recommend some battery powered ones, although the crank type are great for kids.   Although not at all sustainable, for bugout bags and such, I also see the value of chemical lightsticks for little kids, who need something to be secure.

Solar lights are also great – and the kind designed for gardens are very cheap these days.  Buy a bunch, plant them outside, and then simply stick one in a bucket of sand in rooms where you need light.  Unlike many of the other options here, they are quite pleasant to read by. I also have a couple of solar lanterns, which are very nice, especially when children and pets are about.  The lanterns are easy to carry about with you, as are the outdoor lights, if you keep buckets about.  Plus, the outdoor types can be used, well, outdoors .

You can, of course, put in a solar, wind or microhydro system and use it to power lights and a few other things.  A small system that can run your computer, your lights and your CD player won’t be too expensive.  I recommend this generally, however, only for people who either aren’t grid tied to begin with or who have done most of their other preps – because it is perfectly possible to run those things on rechargeable batteries for much lower cost.

The most important think you can do about alternate lighting is change your attitude towards it – that is, instead of assuming that everyone needs their own lighted room, you all congregate together.  One person can read alound near the light, or perhaps everyone can do something like handwork that is done in low light conditions, to conserve energy.  If you can keep things mostly in the same places, there’s no reason why lights are needed for basic things like trips to the bathroom at night or to latch on an infant.  You can get up earlier and go to bed earlier.  There are lots of ways to adapt to lower light conditions that are less about what you have than what you do.  Of course, that’s true for all of this.

 Sharon

• adapting in place
• Comments(31)