Archive for the 'home' Category

My Family’s Deep Breaths

Sharon April 24th, 2008

I thought it might be interesting to tell you how we’re stepping back a little from the thoughts of crisis today.  My boys and I are…inventing permaculture.  Shhh…don’t tell Simon and Isaiah this existed already.  They think it was their idea.

 You see, in his wonderful book _Gaia’s Garden_ Toby Hemenway mentions that three sisters gardens actually have a fourth sister, cleome serrulata, also known as Rocky Mountain bee plant.  We’ve been planning for some time to do a family 3 sisters garden - the kids have drawn pictures, helped me make a garden plan and chose varieties of corn, beans and squash.  When they heard that, of course we had to add a fourth sister, and while we don’t have that particular Cleome, we do have seeds of common spider flower, also a Cleome.  Will it work?  No freakin’ idea, but we’re going to experiment. 

Well yesterday, as we were out on the swings, Simon and Isaiah came running up with a new idea.  Could they make a Four Brothers Garden, one based on plants that were special to them and that would work together?  And…and…could they be plants that come back forever, so that they have them every year.  I swear - they thought of the whole thing themselves.

So we started to talk about what a Four Brothers Garden would look like.  We all agreed that Eli’s plant should be the biggest, and that it should be an apple tree.  Since Eli can eat a half bushel of apples in a weekend, this seemed important.  We have apple trees, but one more is always welcome.

Simon, being the next sized down kid wanted  a shrub, and I suggested a Goumi, since we don’t have any, they fix nitrogen and I want one.  And Simon likes the idea because birds like them and he likes to say “Goumi.”

Isaiah wanted to have the pollinator plant - he loves bees, bugs and humming birds, and wanted something red that would attract hummingbirds and other pollinators.  We picked some Bee Balm - good also because Isaiah loves to make salads with edible flowers.

Finally, Asher is the little guy, but with a big, pushy personality.  What could be better than comfrey, dynamic accumulator that it is, for its natural mulching pleasures.  Yes, it is a spreader and occasionally a PITA, but then again, so’s my kid ;-).

With just a little guidance from Mom, we’ve essentially reinvented the wheel.  But boy are the boys excited - and proud of themselves.  And it strikes me as remarkable what kids of four and six can accomplish when they put their minds to it.  Heck, permaculture summercamp - the next big thing!

BTW, http://green-phoenix.org/08-08-pdc.html I really wish I could go to this - I want to go to camp!  My relationship to permaculture is self teaching plus bugging some people I know to help me out - I’d love a chance to do a more formal program.  But I thought I would recommend it to those who don’t have four little tutors - and I’m told there’s some fundraising being done for those who can’t afford the full program.  

I’ve been invited to stop by and visit, and I might - although there are factors working against it.  First, there’ll be the goats to milk.  Second, there are the four kids and the lack of many people who really want us to dump them on them.  Third, there’s the driving miles - Rioting, y’know.  And finally there’s the real reason - I’m afraid Toby Hemenway will throw composting fruit at me ;-).  We had a little argument once, and I think he might be out for revenge - permaculturists are a rough bunch ;-).

Ok, must abandon the blog - the screaming in the yard suggests that it is now time for Mommy to encourage the children to reinvent non-violence.

 Sharon

What To Do With Your Appliances When You Get Over Them

Sharon April 8th, 2008

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.” - Henry David Thoreau

My kitchen is old fashioned.  I’m not talking about the wooden cabinets, the open shelving of grains and stored foods, the home canned jams, or the lack of a refrigerator in my main cooking space.  I’m talking about the electric stove and the fridge itself.  That is, these appliances are archaic residues of a life in which energy was cheap and abundant and our whole lifestyle was created around that abundance.  These energy sucking appliances may have a place in our future or they may not, but they are fundamentally a product of a day when energy sucking appliances with 5-10 year lifespans could be made, replaced and disposed of.  Those days are as over as the days of the Crimean War, and my kitchen has a growingly retro look to me - I bet yours does too.

A poll of her Crunchy Goodness’s got me thinking about the question of appliances, and the problems they solve - and create.  Her Poultriness  asked which of a host of appliances we felt like we couldn’t live without, and a number of people, me included, mentioned that we really could do without all of them.  Now of course, this was Crunchy’s point too - she was writing about the psychological hold our equipment has on us.  For example, she talked about Greenpa’s fridgelessness, and the way that idea eventually came to seem possible for her.  For us, it was a similar process - we first heard about the unnecessity of the fridge and thought it sounded crazy - but gradually we came over, seduced by the vision of hitting our electricity energy targets.   We honestly haven’t missed our fridge much (although unlike Greenpa, we’re still running a freezer, since we sell our poultry frozen).  It takes a bit, as I wrote in “The Familiarity of an Idea” (although about a different idea, one that Miss Crunch was ahead of me on), to get your mind wrapped around the fact that just because your house has something, it isn’t an inevitability. 

What struck me about this, however, was the number of people who truly were aware that they didn’t need their appliances.  This, I thought, is a heartening thing.  Perhaps even a growing movement.  As it becomes more and more necessary that we reduce our usage of fossil fuels and as more and more people want to live an environmentally sound lifestyle, perhaps we’ll change our kitchens.  But here’s a question - if we do get over the big psychological hump that tells us we desperately need a house full of energy sucking appliances, what do we do (or if we get to the rapidly approaching moment when we can’t afford to run them) what do we do with these houses, built for a world of cheap energy and accessible appliances?  What do we do with the appliances?

Getting to the point of not needing appliance can be hard if you have a cheap-energy house. The truth is that the appliances themselves often create their own necessity.  For example, the poll didn’t even mention the vacuum cleaner - the classic example of an appliance that actually creates more problems than it solves.  In _The Overworked American_ Juliet Schor observes that vacuum cleaners saved women exactly 0 minutes per day on cleaning floors - in fact, peak floor cleaning time was hit in the 1980s, when vacuums had made it to every house.  Because with vacuums came the possibility of wall to wall carpeting, and new, higher standards of floor cleanliness.  And now, if you have one of those houses filled with wall to wall, it really does seem impossible to get buy with a manual carpet cleaner.  And ripping out the carpet and replacing it with something else is vastly more expensive than leaving the nylon, outgassing crap in place and vacuuming it.  So when we say we need our vacuums, in some senses, we’re right - it is damned hard to turn a cheap energy house into a low energy house sometimes.

So while a bunch of us pedants pointed out that we technically could live without things, I understand the perspective that answers “umm…no way” to those questions.  When someone asks you whether you can live without your cooktop, which came with your house and which comes with an energy infrastructure that pipes right out of the wall, in order to change your mind, you have to go looking.  It takes time and research and thought - things we don’t often devote to our kitchens - to figure out how to get a kitchen that actually meets 21st century realities.  The solar oven is a mature technology and a wonderful thing - but people can be forgiven for not knowing they exist, or how to get a hold of one.

 Plus, if you ever finally do get to wanting to/having to live without all this stuff, what do you even do with it?  In a perfect world, we’d all have the money and not need to worry about waste, so we could pull it out and remake our kitchen in the image of the non-electric fantasy kitchens in our head.  In truth, however, by the time most of us get to that point, we’ll have either less money or or less time to worry about how the dishwasher goes with the outdoor masonry oven in the yard. 

But waste not, want not, and no environmentalist wants to haul those appliances to the dump.  So how do you turn the 20th century, cheap oil retro kitchen into a kitchen that meets modern, low energy needs?

Now you can sell your appliances to someone else, or if they are completely unsalvageable, send them to the dump.  But I’m going to assume that you want to do something else with them. 

Fortunately, my side job as the Design Consultant at the fine magazine _Better Homesteads and Rat Holes_ gives me every qualification to offer suggestions for how to make use of those old appliances, now that you’ve shaken off the past and moved on to the low-energy future.  So here are some suggestions for post-electric uses for common appliances. 

 Dryer: We actually bought one of these about 5 years ago, because my husband’s grandmother insisted.  And it was used, mostly by her, until her death, and once in a great while by me until we started Rioting.  Now it is sitting in my laundry room, waiting to be pulled out and put in the garage as permanent storage for apples or potatoes (pulling it out involves removing the washer and some other stuff, and I’m a slug).  With a small piece of wire over the dryer vent, it will be rodent proof, provide a nice surface to set things on, and a measure of insulation on the coldest nights.  Other possible uses: manual compost tumbler (would require a bit of adaptation, but I bet there are some handy folks out there with ideas).

Washer: I have heard several people mention the possibility of hooking a regular washing machine up to a bicycle to power it.  I’ve not found plans for this, but it is a compelling idea for me, since I’m still dealing with two kids using cloth diapers some of the time.  In the meantime, I have one of those small, no power washers that can handle a couple of shirts, and I do some laundry with the soak and hang method described in _The Plain Reader_.  If I couldn’t bicycle power my washer, I might still fill and hand agitate it for washing wool if/when we get sheep. I once met a small farmer who used his for washing large quantities of greens for sale.  But I’m leaning towards the bicycle method, if I can find a set of plans that are moron proof enough for me.

Electric/Gas Stove and Oven: If you already have a flat top cookstove, you’ve got a perfect counter, and it isn’t worth messing with.  For gas ranges, a piece of sheet metal or thick butcher block cut to fit would probably serve the same purpose. Most of us home cooks and gardeners never have enough counter space, so I’d keep the stovetop for that.  We have two electric stoves in our house - one was for the grandparents, and since we’re not using that kitchen, we’ve unplugged it.  The oven, it turns out, makes a large, superb bread box - it is airtight enough to keep baked goods remarkably fresh for a good long time.  So we use it for that. 

Dishwasher: Now there is a case to be made for not getting over the dishwasher.  People who hand wash generally use more water than a dishwasher will - and in water scarce areas, this is a real virtue.  Of course, they also use more electricity, since hand washers can usually use cold water.  Depending on where you live, it might be better to use the dishwasher to save water, or to hand wash to save electricity - for me, electricity is by far the bigger concern.  So what to do with the dishwasher -like the oven, the odds are you can’t take it out without creating an unsightly mess.

Well, you could do what we used to do with it - use it to hide the dirty dishes - most dishwashers are right next to the sink, and they work fine as mess concealment, even when you haven’t run it.  Or you could use the racks as storage for clean dishes, freeing up your cabinet to hold food or your collection of canning jars.  Or, use them for the canning jars. 

Refrigerator: Right now, we use our fridge about 7 months a year as an ice box.  Because we still have a freezer, what we do is freeze several large jugs of water and ice packs, and simply rotate them in the fridge. I put the jugs in, and when they are wholly melted, take them out and replace them with other ones and put them back in the freezer.  This keep us with a functional refrigerator, maybe not quite as cold as a regular fridge, but cold enough that you can feel it if you open the door.  Keeps food just fine.  The other 5 months a year, we don’t bother with this because we have natural refrigeration outside. 

So one possibility is simply to convert your fridge to an icebox, particularly if you were thinking of keeping a freezer.  They also make decent storage for jars and tools - those bins and things would work very well.  The most creative use I’ve seen for both old fridges and even better, chest freezers, is to dig a big hole in the ground, bury them, and use them as a root cellar.

Freezer: This is the next appliance we’re going to look into - the problem is that we do sell meat off the farm, and customers want it frozen.  And there are some foods we like to store in there - greens, for example, are better frozen than dehydrated. But they are better still season extended and fresh, and we’re planning on putting up a hoophouse in order to achieve that, so we may yet be able to lose the freezer.

Old freezers make great root cellars either buried as above, or simply set in a place that stays cold over winter.  The other possibility is that if you need a fridge, you could turn your chest freezer into one.  There are plans all over the web for converting chest freezers into low-energy fridges, and they work quite well.  My own take on this is that if I have to have one device (and I manifestly do not) I’d rather have the freezer, which effectively also gives me refrigeration.

Microwave: This is a point of some pride to me - I probably am not the first person ever to come up with this idea, but as far as I can find, I might be, and I am a little proud of it.   I turn black microwaves into solar ovens.  Now depending on your perspective, microwaves are either great energy saving tools or nutrient destroyers. I’m kind of agnostic on this subject - I’ve read some research for, some against, and I occasionally use the microwave we inherited from Eric’s grandmother to warm something up - once in a great while my kind MIL brings us take-out Thai from New York City, and the microwave has its uses for that.  But if you don’t want a microwave, or run into a cheapie old one at a yard sale, my best use for it is to hack the cord off, make a set of reflectors out of tinfoil and cardboard, cover up the vents, and point the thing at the sun.  It won’t heat up as well as a commercial oven, or even the best of the homemade ones, but it is perfectly adequate for heating water, cooking beans and rice, etc…

Vacuum Cleaner: Ok, you got me.  I have no idea what to do with this when you don’t need it anymore. 

I recently got a copy of this year’s _Old Farmer’s Almanac_ and it had a discussion of future technological advances that we can expect any day now in our houses.  My favorite was a toilet that umm…measures your output and tests it for health problems, then discusses it with  you.  Ignoring the larger question of who in the Holy Name of George Washington Carver would ever want such a thing, all I can say is that they clearly have no idea what the new hot appliance trends of the 21st century really are - composting toilets, hand pumps in the kitchen, and the hot new appliance - the wood cookstove ;-).  The other stuff is just so last century!

 Sharon

How Expensive is Food, Really?

Sharon February 24th, 2008

There is no doubt whatsoever that rising food costs are hurting people all over the world. More than half of the world’s population spends 50% of their income or more on food, and the massive rise in staple prices threatens to increase famine rates drastically.  We are already seeing the early signs of this in Haiti and in other poor nations.

 It is also undoubtably true that rising food prices are digging into the budgets of average people, including me.  And I’ve got it easy. The 35 million Americans who are food insecure (that is, they may or may not go hungry in any given month, but they aren’t sure there’s going to be food) are increasingly stretched.  Supportive resources like food pantries are increasingly tapped.  And regular folks are really finding that food and energy inflation are cutting into their budget substantially.  The rises in food and energy prices alone have eroded real wages by 1.2 percent.  The USDA chief economist has announced that overall food prices will probably rise by another 3-4% this year, and grain products will rise considerably more. 

But there’s another side to this coin.  Rising food prices are to some extent  good for farmers.   Certainly, large grain farmers in the US, Canada and many other rich world nations have been experiencing a well deserved boom.  And there are plenty of people, me included, who have been arguing for years that we don’t pay enough of the true costs of our food.  So who is right?  How do you balance the merits and demerits of food prices?

One way would be think historically, as Jim Webster does in an opinion piece in The Farmer’s Guardian.  He observes something that has long struck me, that historically, it is completely normal to spend a lot of your money on food:

“It probably took 150 years for our civilisation to swing from a man’s annual wage being the yield of one acre, to that same acre paying him for a week. I wonder how long it will take to swing back?

Obviously we can try and push for increased yields, but to match the scale of increase we have seen since they huddled in gloomy bars and decided the Egyptians were liars if they said they got over 400kg an acre, we would have to hit 20 tons an acre. GM is not going to deliver that.

So personally I don’t think that wheat is dear, I don’t think it is dear at all.”

High food prices are obviously a matter of perspective.  By long term historical analysis of agrarian socities, food prices are undoubtably low, despite their current rise.  But when we talk about low food prices we tend to be implying that we could and should spend more money on food.  That is undoubtably true of middle class and above rich world denizens (who constitute a tiny percentage of the world’s whole population).  Many of these people already voluntarily spend more on food than most people, for pleasure or as participants in food movements of various sorts - specific diets, high culture food preferences, or environmental reasons.   But can most of the world endure higher food prices? And are all high food prices created equal?  We already know that poor urbanites and small scale subsistence farmers who buy some of their food are likely to be badly hurt.  But what about everyone else?  And are rising food prices the best way to create agricultural justice? 

As Helena Norberg-Hodge, Todd Merrifield and Steven Gorelick argue in _Bringing the Food Economy Home_ that the supposed low price of food masks several other truths.  The first is that percentage of household income spent on food comparison is based, to a large degree, on concealed costs. 

 The first is the reality of the two worker household.  When we compare the decline in percentage of US income spent on food between 1949 and 1997, a decline from 22% to 11%, the difference seems stark indeed.  But in that same, the single earner household went from being a norm to an anomaly - that is, it now took two people to support the family.  So yes, the percentage has dropped, but that represents in most cases, the percentage of two people’s working wages. 

But more importantly, as Norberg-Hodge et al point out, as the percentage of income spent on food fell, the percentage spent on housing skyrocketed.  And these two things are entirely related.  As the authors write,

 This is a direct consequence of the same economic policy choices that supposedly lowered the cost of food.  Those policies have promoted urbanization by sucking jobs out of rural areas and centralizing them in a relative handful of cities and suburbs.  In those regions, the price of land skyrockets, taking the cost of homes and rentals with it.

Thus, the proportion of income spent on food today may be less, but since total income needed is so much higher, people pay much more for food now than the statistics would lead us to believe.” (Norberg-Hodge et al, 73)”

I think this point is especially important, because it means we cannot view food prices in isolation from the society as a whole. 

 The reality is that industrialization creates not just costs, but real dependencies.  It isn’t just the high price of concentrated housing (housing whose value is now utterly divorced from the productive value of the land itself), but also upon a host of other things - urbanization means increased dependencies on energy, because large populations in close proximity can’t meet their own heating and cooling needs with locally sourced solutions, and infrastructure must be created to handle outputs.  As areas become more tightly populated and work is centralized, transport to those regions (agrarians may need to transport to sell and shop, but they often don’t need to “go to work” in the sense of daily transport dependencies) starts creeping up in cost, whether public or private. 

The process of industrialization and urbanization then creates the need to compensate for the rise in price to meet needs that were not previously monetized.  One way is to take more labor from either a single breadwinner, or add more breadwinners.  Juliet Schor, in her book _The Overworked American_ has documented that 19th century industrialization represented the longest hours ever worked by any people, despite our overwhelming perception that farmwork is unnecessarily hard.  The next most overworked people in history are us - we come right after the 19th century factory workers and coal miners, and well before any agrarian society.  But the rising costs of meeting basic needs mean that we must work harder than many agrarian people have.

For example, in _1066: The Year of the Conquest_ historian David Howarth notes that the average 11th century British serf worked one day a week to pay for his house, the land that he fed himself off of, his access to his lord’s woodlot for heating fuel, and a host of other provisions, including a barrel of beer for him and his neighbor on each Saints day (and there were a lot of him).  How many of us can earn our mortgage payment, our heat, and our beer on a single day’s work? 

The long hours required by industrial society also have the further “benefit” of ensuring that it is extremely difficult for those embedded in it to meet their needs outside the money economy.  It is difficult (not impossible, just difficult) to feed yourself from a garden when economic policies supporting urbanization create incentives to build on every piece of land, and when one works long hours, or multiple jobs.  As we see now, it is difficult even to feed your family a home cooked meal, much less grow one. 

But demanding more labor to meet these needs is only one part of the coin of industrializing economic policies - it is also necessary to move people who would prefer to stay there off their land, and to reduce prices for food, so that those now paying much more of their income into housing and energy can afford to eat.  As George Kent exhaustively documents in _The Political Economy of Hunger_, the main beneficiaries of the Green Revolution were not the world’s poor, the supposed recipients of our help, but the food buying members of the urbanized rich world, who got increasing quantities of cheap meat and food products.  This study was backed up by a 1986 World Bank study that concluded that increased food production in itself does not reduce hunger. 

What it does do, however, is reduce food prices paid to farmers, thus meaning fewer people can make their living successfully in agriculture.  It does create surpluses to dump on markets, thus increasing market volatility, and it does create incentives to turn farmland into urban land, and to increase the size of cities and their suburbs.

 Moreover, the industrial economy that strips value from food shifts that value, and the health of the economy to other things - thus, the ability of consumers to stop buying plastic crap and entertainment and shift their dollars to food is extremely limited - their jobs often depend on the plastic crap, not the food economy.  So we create powerful incentives to keep food prices low. 

There’s a tendency to look at the world through progressive lenses, and the story that Jim Webster tells is part of that.  It is true that food was far more hard earned in the past than it is now.  It is also true that other things that were comparatively low cost in an agrarian society were buried in the cost of food - the cost of land was tied to what it could produce.  Thus the cost of land was constrained in ways it cannot be when those ties between land and what it produces are broken.

Thus, when we think about the distinction between what is good for farmers and what is good for the population as a whole, we need to shift our thinking from short term analysis to long term, societal thinking.  That is, a short term boom in ethanol is undoubtably good for some farmers, but booms are followed by busts in many cases - given that biofuels produce more greenhouse gasses than fossil fuels and risk creating famine, the bust is nigh-inevitable.  And what farmers do not need is a boom and bust cycle that leads them to invest in land and equipment, only to find the value of their dropping again.

It is true that farmers benefit from rising per bushel prices for grains - or at least some of them do.  Many struggle as land taxes rise, fertilizer costs rise and the price of livestock feed goes up faster than the prices for their products.  But some benefit.  But it is worth noting that this represents no real shift towards enriching farmers - we are still using the same agricultural policies that give farmers the tiniest percentage of the cost of a loaf of bread.  To put this in perspective, agricultural writer A.V. Krebs observes that the Philip Morris corporation alone receives 10% of every single dollar spent on food in the US.  ConAgra alone gets 6%.  All the farmers in the US put together get just over 4%. 

 It is true that we underpay farmers - but the biofuels boom does nothing in that regard.  In fact, it inserts farmers into another boom and  bust cycle.  What farmers need are stable food prices, probably slightly higher than they have been, and to receive a decent portion of the price of the food we grow. And that will only happen if we start cutting out the corporate middle man, and working with farmers - giving them incentives to sell directly to consumers (who have to start eating whole grains instead of processed crap) because they know that the consumers who buy from them will not stop eating when the ethanol plants have to close down. 

 More importantly, we cannot create an agrarian economy without shifting back, on some level, to land and housing prices that are tied to the value of the soil underneath it - that is, having artificially inflated the cost of housing, we must, in the devaluation of housing, shift value back to agriculture.  As we lose other jobs, we must concentrate on creating agricultural jobs - and pushing the economy towards efficiencies of land use, not a reduction of human labor.   The price of food here is only a small part of the massive retrofitting of our economy required to pay the real price of our agriculture - and receive the real value.

 Sharon

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Heat or Eat - An Expanding Crisis

Sharon February 12th, 2008

Well now, listen people let me tell you some news
I’ll sing a song called the crude oil blues
We’re low on heat .n all
We’re low on gas
And I’m so cold I’m about to freeze my A..self

We got the crude oil blues
Cause the winter time sure gets cold to the bottom of my shoes
Well my hands are shakin’ and my knees are weak
But it ain’t because of loveIt’s from lack of heat

I’m gonna tell you a story anout this drunk I know
He kept his basement full of homemade brew
But the winter got so bad it screwed up the boy’s thinkin
‘He got so cold he had to burn all his drinkin’

He’s got the crude oil blues
He said the wintertime can sure get cold to the bottom of your shoes
He said, burnin’ this booze just destroys my soul
But there’s one thing about it honey
When you’re cold, you’re cold - Jerry Reed “Crude Oil Blues”

If you’ve been following the situation in Tajikistan, you know that we’re seeing an acute variation on a crisis that is occurring in a number of cold places all over the world, including the US. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7239279.stm.

“The crisis has already gone far beyond power supplies, affecting every sphere of this impoverished and fragile society.

Humanitarian agencies say hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from severe food shortages.

“People are spending all they have on trying to keep warm, and they don’t have enough money to buy food,” says Zlatan Milisic, the country director for the UN’s World Food”

When it happens here in America (thankfully less often) we call it “Heat or Eat” and this fall the Boston Globe reported on rising cases of children suffering from malnutrition in winter because their parents cannot afford to feed them and keep them warm. Now this is nothing new, but the tripling of heating oil prices (the Northeast uses almost all the country’s heating oil) and rising natural gas prices have increased the severity of the problem: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/10/21/the_heat_or_eat_dilemma/

“Federal research shows that while both rich and poor families increase their expenditures on home fuel during the winter, poor families offset this cost through decreasing food purchases, with an average 10 percent decrease in caloric intake. Parents know that children can freeze to death more quickly than they starve to death, and so most decrease food purchases first to pay for heat. Many inevitably sacrifice on both fronts, living with food scarcity while heating their homes with cooking stoves and space heaters, both of which dramatically increase the risk of fires, burns, and carbon monoxide poisoning.

These untenable choices wreak havoc on the health of children. Babies and toddlers lose body heat more rapidly than older children and adults because of their higher surface area-to-mass ratio. When babies’ bodies have to divert already-scarce calories to maintain body heat, cold and hunger intertwine to jeopardize their health and growth as well as their future ability to learn and relate to others.

The health effects of energy insecurity surface in emergency rooms at hospitals like Boston Medical Center during the cold of winter. Medical researchers found a 30 percent increase in the number of underweight infants and toddlers in the BMC emergency room in the three months after the coldest months compared with the rest of the year.”

While thankfully America’s poor are not in the situation of the Takjiki people, it is also true that both parties are early victims of a dilemma that is likely to hit more and more of us, in both rich and poor nations - the conflict between meeting energy needs and food needs.

Thus far, biofuels have rightly drawn most of the attention in explorations of the link between energy and hunger, but they aren’t the only such link. And heating energy is likely to be a particularly acute such interface, as both natural gas and oil supplies destabilize and rise in price.

Richard Heinberg’s recent essay on the coming crisis over natural gas supplies that the US and Canada face http://www.energybulletin.net/40035.html suggests that a crisis point in heating energy could come upon us fairly quickly. The vast majority of Americans heat with natural gas, and a disruption in the Canadian supply is likely to send prices skyrocketing, and potentially, show up as actual shortages in some regions, although whether of the US or Canada is not clear:

“From a Canadian perspective there are some problems with the arrangement, though. First is the fact that Canada’s production of natural gas and conventional oil is declining. Second is that Canada uses lots of oil and gas domestically: 70 percent of Canadians heat their homes with gas, and Canadians drive cars more and further than just about anyone else. The problem is likely to come first with natural gas; as production declines, there will come a point when there isn’t enough to fill domestic needs and continue to export (roughly 60 percent of Canada’s gas now goes to the US).

That point is not decades in the future, it is fairly imminent.”

A recent article observed that because of global warming issues, more and more new electrical plants are turning to natural gas. Given that the North American (and many regions of the world) gas situation is quite acute, such a rush to natural gas is likely only to raise prices and push heating energy costs even higher, and possibly impact availability. http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/301621

It is hard not to come to the conclusion, then that we in Northern regions face a heating crisis, and probably within a few years. And since we live in a society that practices cost rationing even for the most basic needs, that means that poor people in cold places will be increasingly priced out of heating energy. Or they will be priced out of food, as they futily stop eating in order to try and keep warm.

Meanwhile, natural gas based fertilizer prices will continue to rise along with the commodity, as more and more competition for gas ensues, further boosting the price of food, and making the heat or eat problem even more acute.

And what choices do we have as an alternative? Wood heating could be a decent option in many places, although not in urban centers where particulate emissions costs would be greater than the benefits. There is just barely enough wood in the US to warm the northern houses without losing forests, if carefully and sustainably managed, we all get used to colder temperatures and if we insulate as best we can, but we’d find ourselves with virtually no wood for building or paper making or any other use. Anything other than absolutely perfect management would result in deforestation - and something less than perfect management is far more likely than the alternative. Rising wood prices could give us the absolute incentive to deforest the landscape of the US, vastly increasing the consequences of climate change, topsoil loss, desertification and turning our country into the blasted landscape of post-apocalyptic novels.

We could grow more corn, this time to be burned in corn stoves, further accellerating global warming with artificial nitrogen and further putting pressure on food prices, pushing more of the world’s population into hunger.

Electrification of heating is probably a necessity, particular in population centers, but right now, as we transfer more electric load to heating, that means more coal or nuclear plants, since no renewable build out can meet that need - we risk warming the planet more seriously in order to keep ourselves warm.

Or we can accept the current model, pricing people out and letting them starve and freeze - or see mass migration to already water stressed and overpopulated but warmer areas. The truth is that our energy problems *ARE* our food problems - the longer we view the two as distinct, the worse our problems will be. They cannot be seperated from one another.

We need some better choices than this - and the first step in such better choices would be taking up seriously the larger questions of where our heating fuel is going to come from. From there, we need to ask how our resources are best spent - and one of the ways in which they would be best spent would be in a massive reinsulation of American homes to require minimal heating fuel. If we’re going to build anything out, it should be this - or rather, we should build them in - new levels of insulation and warmth. This will be as necessary in the South as it is in the North, as rising heat waves and failing electrical supplies raise heat deaths.

The Community Solution is working on this http://www.communitysolution.org/. At this point, the plan is simply too expensive to be applied in many houses without massive national subsidies that are at this point unlikely to be forthcoming. So the other thing we need is a plan for ordinary, poor people to keep warm (or cool), without destroying the planet and without starving to death.

Sharon

It is Time for a New Victory Garden Movement!

Sharon February 10th, 2008

There is little question that it is time for us to create a new Victory Garden movement. That’s one of the central premises of Aaron’s and my book, and I don’t think there are very many people who understand what we’re facing who would deny that this is true.

In fact, there are quite a number of people in the Community Garden movement, and the blogging community who have supported the creation of a new Victory Garden movement. Some people doing this work include Bob Waldrop, whose call to action on local food systems has drawn considerable attention here (among other places):http://depletion-abundance.blogspot.com/2008/02/bob-waldrop.html , Foodshed Planet’s site has inspired others, http://www.victorygardendrive.blogspot.com/ and the group Revive the Victory Garden, who have called for 2 million new gardens to combat climate change in 2008: http://www.revivevictorygarden.org/, and there are literally too many others for me to list. But the movement is nascent, still beginning, and seems to need a little midwifing to get things moving along.

The reality is that interest in really, really local food is growing, and so is interest in food production, as food prices skyrocket and quality falls. And the best news is that this is a case where grassroots action not only can work, but it is the only thing that ever has worked - that is, in the US during both World Wars, in Cuba, in Russia - gardens for food security began and grew under the aegis of ordinary people acting to improve their world. While we can enable it from above, the creation of a victory garden movement is a person to person, blog to blog, neighbor to neighbor project. Why do it? A host of reasons, personal and political.

Victory Gardens Mean:

-Better Food - Fresher, better tasting, straight off the plant food money literally cannot buy!

- Better Health - More nutrition in just picked vegetables, grown without chemicals, while getting the kind of exercise many of us pay the gym for! Safety from industrial food contamination and toxic imports.

-Food Security - Food in your pots as prices get higher, supplies that can’t be disrupted by energy shortages, greater regional self-sufficiency. Millions of new gardeners can make sure that Americans don’t have to wait for distant food supplies to be trucked in - weeks after they are needed. Every gardener makes your region more secure.

-Higher Quality of Life - A more beautiful environment, stronger community, a better environment.

-More Money in your Pocket, More Time for What Matters - If you don’t need as much money for food, or to work as many hours to pay the grocery bills, you can use that money or take that time for what you really care about.

- The Chance to Serve Others and Create a More Just Society - Your Victory Garden can be a strike against hunger and poverty - you can have food to donate, and the ability to teach others to fish (ok, garden), and thus, eat for a lifetime.

- Reduce Corporate Power and Improve Democracy - We cannot simultaneously deplore the power corporations have in our society and depend on them to supply our most basic necessities. If we stop giving our hard earned money to the corporations who undermine our democracy, they will be less powerful!

-Protect Against Climate Change - Humus rich soils, full of organic matter can sequester tons of carbon, quite literally - and grow the best vegetables. We reduce our carbon emissions when we don’t have to drive to the store or buy fossil fuel grown food.

-Reduce our Energy Dependence - Fossil fuels are used in agriculture, both industrial and industrial organic at every step, from the fertilizer in the ground to the refrigerated truck to plastic bag they come in. We can eliminated fossil fuels from almost every step when we grow our own.

- Create Peace - We’re at war for oil right now. If we can cut back on our need for the stuff, we don’t have to kill or die for it.

-Hope for the Future - In a changing world, the ability to grow food, to share and enjoy it, and to live in a healthy world full of beautiful gardens may be the best legacy we can our children and grandchildren.

Ok, so we agree that we need Victory Gardens. How do we bring all the participants in this movement together, and create a real and national Victory Garden movement? How do we bring together professional farmers, with Victory Farms and city Gardeners, schools and community resources, and backyard advocates? How do we get Victory Gardening onto the national agenda? How do we teach millions of people how to grow, cook and eat their own, and why?

One part, of course, is the person to person work we’re doing now. The next step is to create a large-scale Victory Garden umbrella organization guided by people in every part of the Victory Garden movement - chefs and cooks helping people learn to eat, teachers helping children get involved, churches, corporations and community groups all putting gardens on public and private greenspaces, local “garden farmer markets” where very small scale producers can exchange or sell their extra in their neighborhoods, climate change and energy activists working on this simple way to cut our energy usage and reduce atmospheric carbon. That is, we need a movement - a real, serious movement. And we can do this.

And to get those new gardens and gardeners started. And for that, we need your help. We’ll be asking for more specific help as we go along, but getting started, we’d love all of you who blog to put out the Victory Garden idea, even if you usually write about other things. If you can, start a Victory Garden blog, and post a link in comments - I’ll put links up on this site and my other one.

And make the effort - reach out to one neighbor, at least, and help them get started gardening. Share seeds. Talk to your community, your synagogue, mosque, church, neighbors, school about gardening. Take a risk - for greater security later. Plant a front-yard garden, centered around a “V” for Victory (cabbages look great like this, particularly mixed with nasturtiums or calendula, but use your imagination). Be courageous - we need this Victory!

Shalom,

Sharon