Why Adapt In Place? And How?

Sharon August 5th, 2008

Welcome to the first day of my Adapting-In-Place class.  The course will focus on what I think may be the biggest question of all - how do we go on where we are with what we have in this new world?  I’m very excited about doing this class - because while I think there will be many relocations and radical changes, most people are going to make the best of the infrastructure we’ve created over the last years, simply because we have no choice. 

I personally think that there is insufficient time to remake our world dramatically.  Now there are people who would argue with me about this - and they may even have a case.  But I think there are compelling reasons to believe that we may not have enough time to take a world created for cheap energy and transform it into one that can handle expensive energy and replace much of that with renewable power.  The idea that we will be able to make a massive societal retrofit occur rapidly depends in large part on, I think, the idea that the current economic crisis is just an unpleasant coincidence that happens to be occurring just as peak oil and climate change are really hitting us.  This, I think is a radical error in reasoning - in fact, as nearly every serious analyst who really grasps peak oil gets, the economic limitations are part and parcel of our present crisis.  That is, our ability to do new things is going to be more and more constrained over time.

Which means that most of us aren’t going to be living in new urbanist walkable communities or in perfect ecovillages - we’re going to be living where we are.  Some projects will be done - but the idea that we’re going to do a full-scale overhaul of our society seems deeply wrong.  Which means that most of us are going to be limited to what we can accomplish ourselves, using our personal resources, what resources are available through family, friends, community and governments of various levels.  Much of our way of life may have been, as Kunstler refers to suburbia, the greatest-misallocation of resources in history, but is how we allocated the resources - we’ve done this build out, and we’re going to be living with the results.

While the current situation has created mobility for some people - those who have already lost jobs and homes, those who know they are in a situation that can’t possibly improve -on the other hand, for many people, the current situation works to keep them in place.  Nothing is selling in their area - so they can’t sell their house and move to another.  Or they are afraid to change jobs, because the loss of seniority would lead to making them easy targets for layoffs in this economy.  It may not be possible any longer to get back what they owe on their house - but it may still make sense to keep paying the mortgage, because they expect extended family to move in, or because they can grow food on the land.  They may be tied down by elderly or disabled family members who can’t be easily moved, by a shared custody agreement, or by need to access to certain kinds of medical care.  Family - biological or chosen - may tie them to an area, as may familiarity with the climate and region.  We may decide that strong community ties make an imperfect area (and all areas are imperfect) enough to keep us there.  Or we may lack the resources to move.

And staying in place isn’t always the best of a bad lot of options - sometimes it is simply the best option.  There’s been a tendency to rhetorically abandon areas we don’t know what to do with - inner cities, exurbs, suburbia - all of these are dismissed sometimes, as though this will magically vacate them.  The fact is that 300 million people in the US or 60 million in Britain cannot simply all go out to the countryside to their own bunkers, unless we wish to create a new suburbia, with barbed-wire, each bunker lined up in the countryside next to its neighbors ;-).  Nor can we move everyone into cities - there aren’t jobs enough, nor room enough to grow food.  Food alone will mean that the countryside and suburbs (near the city markets, often built on good farmland) will have to be populated - and the cities were usually cities for reasons long before oil - those reasons won’t go away.

More and more, I am advising people to stay put, or at most move to a place fairly near and like the one they live in now.  I don’t think there’s enough time to adapt to new climates and environmental conditions, to retrofit new homes and build communities - now that doesn’t mean some people won’t have to move.  But if you can stay put, I think there are some real advantages for most people - it takes *time* to build community, to build soil, to learn the bus lines, to get into the carpools, to find the cheap produce, to learn about pests and diseases and how to keep cool or warm.  Right now, I think time is in short supply.

That last, I think is the biggest reason I wanted to do this class - because even those who hadn’t planned to face hard times where they are may find themselves stuck there.  And there are a huge number of ways we can adapt and mitigate our situation - but it will be much easier to begin now.

 Sharon

What I Did this Weekend

Sharon August 4th, 2008

I know this is a P-A novel day, but I had to share with you all how I spent my weekend - Selene and Maia, our new dairy goats came home! 

Eric went to get them - now remember, we no longer have a van, so they rode in the back of our Ford Taurus, which only smells a little bit like goat since then ;-).  Selene is definitely the adventurous one - she was at home pretty much instantly, and just wanted to check everything out.  Maia is more nervous, and is much more skeptical about her new home, but she’s starting to get into a routine.  Maia is also a kick-ass milker - Selene is very good, but we’d been warned their production was down (their kids were sold off a few weeks ago, and Jamey and Carol who own them only milk once a day), but Maia is coming back like wildfire, while Selene is building a bit slower. 

Meanwhile, Eric and I are getting familiar with milking.  We bought a Maggidans Milker, a manual milker for a couple of reasons - first, their original owners had been milking with an EZ milker, which similar, but more expensive.  Second, I have wicked carpal tunnel syndrome and third, we’re going away in 2 weeks, and the primary milker will be a teenager - we wanted to give him something foolproof.  Oh, and we could use some idiot proofing ourselves.

 Because whether it is us or the milker, we’re not much liking the Maggidans Milker - when the vacuum is working, the suction often needs to be reset, sometimes the milker sticks (and doesn’t extract milk) and I keep ending up milking her out by hand anyway.  We’re not quite sure what to do - send it back?  Keep playing with it?  Spend more money and replace it with the EZ milker?  If anyone has advice, I’ll gladly take it - we can milk them just fine by hand, but the goats aren’t as accustomed to the slower manual method and get impatient and jumpy, and I’m concerned that our helper won’t be able to handle it. 

 We’re also getting used to fitting the routine of milking into our daily lives - it isn’t hard, just new - in the same way I once found it disorienting to have to remember to nurse, burp, etc.. the baby, now the milking is a new routine.  I’m still not sure how all of this is going to work with our energy reductions as well - there’s so much warm water involved ;-).  But I have reasonable confidence we’ll figure it out.  Any suggestions out there? 

 Still, things seem to be going well -  they are by far the most appealing and enjoyable animals we’ve ever raised.  And we’re getting the hang of the girls, and they are getting the hang of us.  I’m sure they’ll have us trained shortly ;-).

 Sharon

Post-Apocalyptic Book Club: Week 5 - Life As We Knew It

Sharon August 4th, 2008

Ok, before I post this, I wanted to just remind everyone to check out the new magazine www.henandharvest.com - there are more details in the next post down.  Also, I’ll be starting my Adapting In Place class tomorrow - I still have one registered participant whose email is bouncing and I can’t get in touch with.  If you are registered for class and not enrolled in the discussion group, PLEASE email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com.

Ok, on to month two, over-cutely named “The Girl’s Guide to the Apocalypse” - and this month, I really want to run books that are, I think, in many ways parallel to the two works we ran last month - that is, I’m not looking for the best books on the apocalypse by women, but the most representative.  And I really wanted to start this month with this particular book, written particularly for teenage girls and the same young adult audience for which Heinlein wrote much of his work. 

One of the reasons that I think this book is so representative is that it is, IMHO, the female version of the bunker scenario.  Oh, it happens in an ordinary home, and there are no guns (and no guns needed, no threats of any kind except the neighbors and the caricature of a minister) but I think if there were a single book to represent an apocalyptic *FANTASY* - one probably as unrealistic as the cannibal scenes in Lucifer’s Hammer, this would be the book.

First, there’s the shopping scene, which strikes me, with my concerns about food, as a kind of apocalyptic pornography (I’m sort of joking here, but only sort of) - that is, there’s about to be a massive starvation crisis, but here is a supermarket, ripe for the plucking, filled with everything you could want, no shortages, no depletion, the protaganists have all the cash they need, all the foresight, all the everything.  As someone who inherited various grandmother’s terror that sometime there might not be enough to go around, this is the dream scene - and as unrealistic as most porn. 

And then there’s the book’s rapid move inward, with only a little critique from our heroine.  The world the heroine lives in gets narrower and narrower - and she recognizes this - she fights her mother on it, wanting to donate blankets and goods to survivors in New York.  When it is time to close off her view and move the whole family into one room, she fights it.

But what undermines Miranda’s resistance is that her mother is always right, that the narrow view always is the safe one.  They do need every blanket.  And the price of altruism is suffering and death - Peter, the mother’s boyfriend dies from his altruism.  When the mother gives asprin to a sick family, she and the rest of the family become ill and nearly die.  The force of events constantly reinforces the mother’s viewpoint that they should huddle in their home, never interacting, not sharing.  The only thing that undermines this is Miranda’s final trek, where she discovers that food deliveries (along with electricity), resuming by some deus ex machina solution never detailed, have been going on for a few weeks, but they didn’t know about them.  They survive, in the end, because Miranda left the house - but she left not for help, not to reconnect with their community, but to find out the fate of her soon to be born sister - that is, to tighten the family circle.

 The book itself is clearly ambivalent about the kind of narrative it has written, but it also finally clearly affirms the centrality of the family, surviving on its own, a kind of suburbanized and domesticized Swiss Family Robinson, on an island, in a row of houses all alone.

 What do you think?

 Sharon

HEN AND HARVEST!!!

Sharon August 3rd, 2008

So I while back I mentioned that I was working on a new project - meet our new online Magazine, ”Hen and Harvest.”  Wanna take a look?  We’ve got Marie Antoinette’s cleavage, Gene Logsdon’s amazing voice, rich, lush, sexy pictures of food, container gardening, a never-before published excerpt from my book, backyard chickens and all sorts of cool stuff.  It is all at www.henandharvest.com 

We’re all about serious food production and food security on every scale from container to acreage, from personal to community.  And we’ve got food covered at every step of the process, from seed to table.  Oh, and we’ll have some sexy stuff (I mean, how could gardening and eating not be sexy?), reviews of useful human and animal powered technologies, great book reviews, recipes, livestock information and anything we deem of interest.   We’re still getting going, and I know some of you volunteered to write and I haven’t done much about it - but I am now submissions goddess for the site, so if you have an article you’d like to see reach millions (let’s shoot for the moon, shall we), send it along to my email address jewishfarmer@gmail.com.  We’d love articles about techniques you’ve used, new projects, gardening in special conditions.  We’d also love videos and garden porn - pictures of you and your veggies looking delectable, or just vegetables that make you feel all warm and sundrenched and edible.

Meanwhile don’t forget to check us out - and new stuff will be coming up all the time.   Already we’ve got tons of great stuff forthcoming. 

 Sharon

Peak Oil, Gender and Power

Sharon August 3rd, 2008

I made the National Post - pretty cool, huh?  And the author (the really cool Vanessa, of Green as a Thistle)  mentioned LimeSarah, and Crunchy’s blog - how cool is that!  And what, oh what was the author talking about?  But the whole peak oil gender thing.  How neat is it that that discussion made the paper?

“Of course, arguing that men and women have different, gender-specific responses to global warming or the looming oil crash is a broad generalization, and one that could very well prove unfounded.

However, there’s no question that the majority of women writing about peak oil are considerably more focused on what we can do now to make life better, not just what we may have to do at some point down the road.

Even if nothing happens — if the polar ice caps cease to melt, the smog in Beijing just disappears one day and endangered species begin multiplying in vast numbers — it hardly means all that tomato-canning and cycling to work was a waste of time.

Better, then, to keep track of all the peak oil news, but remind people like Savinar and Kunstler that we need to be acting, not just reacting.”

 To be fair though (and the author, of course, admits it), I’m not totally sure that the “men talk about doom, women act” stuff really quite covers the ground.  Kunstler has been yelling at everyone to design better landscapes, reinvigorate rail, get people the fuck out of their cars and integrate retail and housing for oh, 15 years, at least since _The Geography of Nowhere_.   Matt Savinar may be the Crown Prince of Doom, but he runs his forums full of lonely, cranky men ;-) with a heavy emphasis on gardening, tools and practicalities.  And, umm, the man sells food storage. 

You could also choose a completely different set of men to hold Deanna and me up against.  Set against Pat Murphy and Rob Hopkins, for example, what could you say about the difference in gender approaches, except that La Crunch and I are looking kinda butch and doomy these days - after all, she recently posted on adopting bunnies and killing and eating them, while I wrote that we were in the middle of a fast crash, heading down.   

There are differences between the men and the women here, but I think they are slightly subtler than one group announcing disaster and the other getting to work on it.  My observation is that in general (and there are plenty of exceptions) , men either place much more or much less faith in policy solutions than women do.  That is, they tend to focus a lot on big picture issues.  And because the big picture is so central to most men’s focus, if it seems impossible that institutions and structure can persist, the most common alternative is complete and utter collapse.  I don’t think women react this way to the idea that our society might not go on as it has been - and if I had to put a finger on why this is so, I’d say it is because women (and minorities and gay men) are often made aware of the fact that institutions weren’t necessarily their friends to begin with, and that powerful institutions are dangerous.  They learn this because sometimes the institutions are corrupt in obvious ways - for example, they institutionalize racism and sexism - think of the Driving While Black issue, for example.  And they learn this in more subtle ways - because the people within them often feel little qualm about translating institutional power into personal, even sexual power.  I suspect most women will know what I mean, and many men will not, at least viscerally.

My own feeling is that (and again, I am wildly overgeneralizing) women have had to be more skeptical of the power of institutions than men for a host of reasons - partly just because the reins tend to be held by the boys -  and partly because if you were raised female (and probably even more so if you were raised female and part of a religious, ethnic or racial minority) you get, in a visceral way, that power is a two edged thing.  It can be great - but it can be used against you. 

How many girls make it through their adolescence without feeling at least a few times, the ways that “power” “authority” and “strength” can be a fundamental threat, as well as a benefit?   How many women get to adulthood without a few moments of being told in a host of ways, explicit or not, that the power to do things means the power to do some very terrible things - I’ve been luckier than many women on this front, but I simply can’t think of a single woman I know who has never had a moment they walked away from that began as an ordinary exchange and changed into a moment that was very much one of terrible vulnerability.  I think the recognition that sexual violence, even the broad, general threat of sexual violence or intimidation often come from people who have power, and are comfortable with it, means that women have a harder time seeing institutionalized power (from which we have often been disenfranchised as well) as an unmitigated good, or at least, something to rely upon.

 So while we work with and in power institutions, I think women often have a more subtle relationship to what “collapse” might look like - it is fearful, and troubling - but it also represents possibilities and release from certain other kinds of threats. I think often men see the collapse of institutions, both institutions they’ve worked for or even those they’ve worked to change - as more disastrous, leaving a vast emptiness likely to be filled by chaos.  I think one of the truths about being female is that you know, on some level, that approaches to power, reliance on existing institutions is always a little risky - chaos never seems quite as far away.

Most rapes, most sexual abuse, most moments of sexual pressure, harassment and intimidation aren’t moments when strangers, unconstrained by powerful institutions attack us - oh, that happens to women too, but most of the times that sex and power get tied up in bad, scary ways happen among the men you know (and yes, I know that these things happen to boys and men too, and women do them to women too sometimes - I am again, overgeneralizing).  Most of the rapists are men women know and trust.  Most cases of sexual abuse aren’t stranger attacks, but fathers and brothers and uncles.  Most sexual harrassment happens in places where you’ve learned to trust people.  Most of those weird, queasy moments that don’t quite fall into any category, but where some man makes a woman know that they are only safe because the man chooses it to be that way - they happen with people you know, in quite ordinary places, in quite ordinary circumstances. 

I think for many women, and many people who are not white or fall into some minority group, and for many gay people - the idea that you can trust and rely on public structures is not something that comes naturally.  That’s not to say that many men also don’t understand that institutions are corrupt, but the truth is that those of us who are particularly vulnerable to power plays know that even when they aren’t corrupt, they are - that is, even when power in the hands of the powerful is mostly working as it should, at least on the surface, the powerful are very comfortable asserting their power.  The fact that on some level all women have to know that even the most secure of institutions and structures contain threats within them - that there are no places where they are not vulnerable, gives them a sense that one can function in a space that is ambiguous, uncertain, vulnerable and frightening.

Again, this is probably overstating all sorts of things.  But my own sense of the difference is this - everything falling apart is damned terrifying for many men - it makes them feel vulnerable, in ways that they don’t have to feel vulnerable most of the time.  That’s why the guns and spam so dominate the conversations - the language is about protecting “one’s own” but the truth is, I think that a lot of men are afraid also for themselves in a way that they have never experienced before, and that must be quite terrifying. 

 Their vulnerability, however, is a lot like a kind of vulnerability that most women, a lot of non-white folks, and gay men have had to get used to for a very long time.  It is a yucky feeling - one that none of us like.  For those who haven’t had to experience it before, the feeling is damned overwhelming.  For the rest of us, who have lived in that territory some time, we set to work minimizing our risks as best we can - but we don’t either fervently believe we can fix everything enough that we’ll never have to live in the ugly grey of domination and vulnerability, or believe that having to face that horrible, queasy feeling straight on is the same thing as the sign to go back to the bunker - because if we did, we’d have never come out.  We’re already living in grey areas, and they have become inhabitable - we know that deep vulnerability is something that can often be navigated, or at least survived.

It seems odd to think that this might be an advantage, as things collapse, but I suspect it actually might be.

 Sharon 

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