Situational and Social Awareness

I am continuing my discussion of skills that I think we will need in the future and today I will talk about two that we need to develop now if we don’t already possess them. They are situational and social awareness. Basically they are skills that let you be aware of what is happening around you and in your community.

If you are aware to what is happening in your immediate area then you are situational aware, if you spend time at any public place where people gather in reasonably large numbers like a mall, discount super store, college campus, you will notice that the majority of people are lost in their own world and are only vaguely aware of what is happening around them.

People are listening to their IPods, talking on their cell phones, texting on their blackberries or just wandering around like a zombie. You see this behavior on our roadways all of the time, drivers sitting at green lights, stops signs or in turning lanes completely oblivious that they can proceed until the people behind them start honking their horns. How many accidents (or accidents narrowly avoided) caused by inattentive drivers?

What is scary is that most people pay more attention to their surroundings when they are driving than when they are walking. I am not talking about being hyper-vigilant, but just being aware of what is happening around you. Noticing things that are out of the ordinary or seem peculiar, is someone paying particular attention to you, or is there a large number of police around inspecting the area are cues that you should pick up on. Muggers tend to avoid people who notice them and pick easier and more unaware targets, not that I am saying that there are muggers everywhere, but noticing insect eggs in your garden can help you protect your plants before the eggs hatch.

Practicing situational awareness in your daily life will have nothing but good results unless you become paranoid. I am not saying to only look for bad things, but also good things, like money lying on the ground, or edible wild plants etc… The point is that most people are lost in their own little world and not paying attention to the bigger (and more important) world that surrounds them. This oblivion can cause us to miss opportunities and perils in our environment. If we pay attention to what is going on around us we stand a better chance of taking the opportunities and avoiding the perils and we can make this a habit very easily.

The next point I want to make is not just paying attention to your immediate surroundings but to the happenings and attitudes in your community as a whole. I am meaning your local community but this can be expanded to larger communities as well.

This social awareness can let you see trends in your community, whether your neighborhood is going downhill or upscale. If you are socially aware then you can pick up on racial, ethnic and social tension that might be in your community. You begin to notice inequity and social injustice that can cause strife during tough times.

If you are socially attentive then will be able to realize that the nicer sit down restaurants are disappearing and only fast food places remain, or that the number of cash advance and pawn shops swell in your community. Try to tell how many rental versus owned homes that you have in your area, and what condition are they in.

Is your local community cutting down on services, for instance is your local library cutting hours or the civic infrastructure not being repaired. This could be that the city is no longer decorating for holidays or not as quick (or not at all) picking up roadside trash. You might be able to help organize a local citizens group to start providing the services that your local government can no longer afford to do. This could be decorating for a holiday parade, or forming a community watch.

You might realize that you need to move because of you religion, race, sexual persuasion, political outlook or any number of reasons. You might realize that things will be fine for you but will put your children or grand children at a huge disadvantage in the future. This could be a failing school system, degrading local economy, inadequate transportation infrastructure etc… You might realize that while you are fine the only future job prospects for your children are sharecropper or day laborer.

By using both of these skills you can in the short term be able to predict the future and have an increased influence on your environment. You can avoid trouble or at least be able to be better prepared for potential events (good or bad).

So pay attention to what’s around you, read the local newspaper, notice if buildings are no longer being maintained and talk to your neighbors. Listen to idle talk while in the checkout line at your grocery store, or what people are gossiping about at the farmers market. You will be able pickup on subtle signs of what is going on in your neighborhood and environment and hopefully this will help you adapt to the changes to come.

Compost Bin

This is a compost bin that my lovely and talented wife made.

materials for our compost bin: only the chicken wire was bought expressly for this project. Most of the wood is from a taken-apart boxspring, and the rest is scrap wood we had and taken-apart bean poles

here I am using some cross-pieces temporarily, to hold up the corner posts, so that I can wrap the chicken wire (unruly stuff!!!!) around them.

with chicken wire around 3 sides. The fourth side, facing front, is the opening/door

I decided to keep the temporary cross-pieces. Here I'm adding the side cross-pieces on the outside of the chicken wire.

 

as you can see, this "temporary" cross-piece is not square. I was going to keep it but the crookedness of it was annoying me so much that I scrapped it.

I put cross-pieces on the top and bottom, which I hadn't originally intended to do.

 

the door. A bit different than my original design, but well...

I had to install the door "inside out" since that is the way it fit best. Unfortunately, that means that the chicken wire ends (prickly) are on the outside of the door. I tried to fold them in. Here are the hinges (I had planned on 3 originally).

 

latches and eyeholes, and also an additional piece of wood on top of the prickly chicken wire at least on the side where you open the latches.

 

 ta-da! finished. My original design had diagonal reinforcement pieces on the 3 sides and door, but it is quite sturdy and doesn't need them. (I was also kind of tired/hot by this point)

A clean compost bin would be an ideal "time-out" box!

in its final location.

Regarding Meat

[aka: Kristina's first post,
with some apologies to my husband for changing the layout of his blog without his knowledge]

The debate over whether vegetarianism/veganism is better for people and/or the world will probably rage on forever.  I can see compelling arguments for both sides and I don’t believe one could say that either side is “right” or “wrong.”  Just different.  (oh why is it so hard for us to sometimes just accept difference and  Let.  It.  Be. ?)

So, I’m not going to even broach that whole issue.  Rather, I’m going to talk about MEAT.  If you have decided to remain/become a carnivore, then there are two ways to approach it, that I can see:

1. The CAFO way

CAFO stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, and it generally means you’ll get the most meat for your buck.  Animals are: corralled into unnaturally cramped confines with their peers, made to stand/sit in concentrated fecal matter, fed diets that their systems were not designed to be fed (e.g. corn-fed beef), given antibiotics and hormones liberally to ward off disease (induced by aforementioned conditions) and increase weight, and slaughtered in a manner ranging from acceptable (“humane”) to brutal.

Whether you consciously think about it when you buy meat or not, you have probably been made aware of CAFOs and the conditions under which their animals are raised, so I will not belabour the descriptions too much.  A plethora of books has been written on the subject and I’m sure a YouTube search will yield more videos of grueling intensity than you could possibly have imagined.  I do encourage you to further educate yourself on this topic, though, if it’s a new one for you, and to at least watch a few videos of CAFOs at work if you haven’t already.

In any case, there are reasons people may opt to follow the CAFO way:
 - limited income but desire to eat meat
 - ignorance of the origins of what they are consuming
 - apathy, when aware of the conditions of CAFO livestock
 - the view that animals as meat are commodities rather than living beings


2. The OTHER way

The OTHER way is a conscientious decision to do things “better”:  better for your family’s health, better for the planet, better for the animals involved.  These three, though intimately connected, are not mutually inclusive.  Let’s explore that issue:

The impetus behind my writing this little piece was a whole chicken that we recently bought at Earth Fare (“the healthy supermaket”), part of which my family greatly enjoyed eating last night for supper.  (You can see a photo of said chicken attached).

When one goes into a supermarket such as Earth Fare and reads its stated philosophies, which include “NO inhumane treatment of the animals providing us with dairy, meat and eggs,” one tends to get a warm, fuzzy feeling (or at least I do).  Indeed, it really is nice to be able to shop in a store where there is a higher regard for the origin of food and its constituent ingredients.  The problem is when the warm, fuzzy feeling makes us so comfortable that we cease to question some of the assumptions we may automatically make in a store called such as “Earth Fare.”

I know it is one of my failings, but I suspect that it holds true for others as well, that when I tend to think of “personal health” in conjunction with food, I automatically associate with it “health of planet,” and “health of animals” (in the case of meat).  And so I buy a whole chicken from Earth Fare and happily oven-roast it for my family, along with a selection of locally-grown and organic produce.  Except, not quite happily.

You see, I have come to the point where I can no longer delude myself entirely, much as I might like to.  The chicken I bought was raised on organic feed without animal by-products—check!  No antibiotics or hormones administered—check!  No seasonings or salt water added—check!  Probably slaughtered in a relatively humane way (we’ll never know for sure, but I can hope)—check!  Free-range—check!

Uh oh.  And here is where my trinity of “healths” starts to unravel each from the other.  I believe strongly that it is in an animal’s best interest (for mental and physical health) to live in a way whereby it can exhibit its natural behaviours.  For chickens, this means being given:  adequate clean space, a place to forage/scratch and dustbathe, a clean and dry place to perch and roost/nest, and access to nutritious food and clean water.  Having these requirements met is what one generally conjures up when one comes across the term “free-range”:  we picture an idyllic setting where chickens are free to roam through the vegetation, scratching at the ground and pecking at insects to supplement the high-quality grain they are fed, returning at night to a daily-cleaned dry coop to roost and rest.

But even as I happily picked the whole chicken out of Earth Fare’s refrigerated section (“happily” because we hadn’t eaten chicken for some time), I knew that the term “free-range” was not quite used here in the same way as in my ideal imaginings above.  Because, a chicken with this quantity of breast meat would scarcely be able to walk well, if at all.  So, even if given access to the outdoors (“free-range”--and that can mean a piddly little enclosed run that is devoid of grass, all vegetation having been scratched from the area), this bird may not have been able to make much use of it during the later weeks of its short life of about 8 weeks’ length.

This is but one example of how one must be truly aware of what one is buying.  If your purpose in buying non-CAFO meat is primarily for the personal health of your family (ie. decreasing your family’s direct exposure to potentially harmful chemicals), then this organic chicken from Earth Fare would fulfill that purpose admirably.  If your purpose in buying non-CAFO meat is generally geared towards lightening your environmental footprint on the Earth, then this chicken probably adequately fulfills that criterion (as its feed was organic and thus did not require pesticide use.  Here I would still question what exactly is done with the poultry waste products, though).  If your purpose in buying non-CAFO meat is to support the TRULY humane raising and slaughter of the animals you are planning to eat, then it would be my opinion that the Earth Fare chicken does not satisfactorily measure up, as it was bred to maximize quantity of muscle tissue at the expense of allowing the chicken to locomote in a normal fashion.

- - - -

Whether you decide to eat meat raised humanely, inhumanely, organically, locally, etc.,  my point is simply that you ought to be aware of what you are buying (and buying into).  Try to make the best choices that you are able to, with the information and resources you have.

- - - -


Just FYI:
The cost of cheap chicken:
http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/chicken.html

Sorry for the hiatus, between vacation and a cold this blog has fallen to the wayside.

I have been contemplating what to write for this post and have vacillated between warning of worker /social manipulation and the reemergence of popular movements from our own social past. So I will try both.

Not too long ago the vast majority of blue collar workers in the country worked under what would be best described as “sweatshop” conditions. My own Great Grandmother and Great-Great Uncle where sold to a textile mill at 8-10 years of age. They lived worked and ate at the mill, my Great Grandmother worked there until my Great Grandfather bought her contract when she was 15. My Grandfather worked for a sawmill, that provided you with a home, store, utilities and any other service that they chose to provide you, but they did not pay you enough that you could leave.

It was really only after World War II that conditions which most Americans worked in greatly improved. As the economy continues its downward journey, and U.S. companies face ever increasing competition from other countries that do not have to be concerned with workplace safety, the pressure will increase to decrease the regulations that have so greatly improved our work lives.

The people most vulnerable to this type of exploitation will be those with no marketable skills. Unfortunately most of us do not have marketable skills in what amounts to a 1930-50’s economy. We are not machinists, carpenters, architects, mechanics, woodworkers, or any other of the myriad of jobs our parents and grandparents had. I really don’t think that there will be a high demand for Laboratory Information Management Systems Administrators 20 years from now.

If your job is reliant on complex technology or have expensive infrastructure that is necessary for your workplace function, then you might want to start thinking about a hobby that will be useful in the future. You can also take steps to make you home more energy efficient, find a local food supply and prepare for rolling brown and blackouts that may come as energy demand outstrips energy supply.

I do fear my sons and grandchildren having to work under similar conditions that my great grandmother worked under. This is the main reason that I am endeavoring to have a farm for my sons to inherit. One of the reasons that my great grandfather was able to buy my great grandmother was the fact that he had 160 acres of productive farmland. He might have been cash poor but his farm was able to supply most of his wants and needs including providing him with a wife.

My father counts some of the happiest days of his childhood were the ones when he lived on his grandfather’s farm. And I would like to provide those same kinds of memories to my grandchildren as well as giving my family a means to support themselves that is independent of others (as much as that is possible).

The other factor is increased social/racial violence as the American concept of Manifest Destiny is defeated. We are already seeing this in those who do not believe that our first black President is a natural born citizen, and tougher laws against illegal immigrants and for legal immigration. As the American Southwest stops being dominated by White Anglo Saxons Protestants and whites across the nation loses their once dominate status, we will see more racial strife.

These social upheavals will become more pronounced as our economy and standard of living decreases. The best defense against this is to have a resilient community where neighbors know each other and work together. This will become ever more essential as local communities can no longer to pay for the maintenance of local infrastructure, like sewage and garbage pickup. It is only by working together can communities prevent the type of disease outbreaks (cholera, typhus etc...) that where once common.

We really need to pay attention to the social cues that are around us and that we ourselves give off. It is only by being socially aware that we can prevent much of the violence and oppression that haunted my great grandparents lives.

Giving up on the Future to save the Past

This week I gave up space travel, not just for me personally but for the entire human race for the foreseeable future. I realized that in the next twenty to forty years no country on Earth will be able to afford to waste their precious resources on manned space flight and that I might die being the last person living who can remember man walking on the moon. I was just a month shy of being 2 years old when my Mother took me and my brothers out to wave at the man on the moon. I remember her saying that this was very important and that I should remember it, I also remember not connecting that act with the actual fact that a man was on the moon.




You see for me space flight was the ultimate destination of Man; all of history was pointing to the time when the human race would leave the planet and colonize the stars. This came from growing up close enough to Marshall Space Flight center that we could hear the rocket engines being tested and watching Skylab missions on television (back in the days of 4 TV channels). I devoured science fiction books and fantasized about leading my on space crew on an interstellar flight to colonize some strange new world. But alas, I have to contend with the limitations of this one and not live in the dreams of exploring other planets.



Ironically the reason why I gave up on manned space flight was that I realized another one of my childhood dreams/fantasies had come true. You see I can also remember complaining to my Mother that I wanted to live in another time that was more exciting than my own, like the Roman Empire at its height. Well I don’t live in the Roman Empire but the American one and not at just the American Empire’s height but also at the peak of the Industrial Age. The problem with being at the peak of something is that once you are there you can only go down. Centuries from now historians probably will define the actual peak of the Industrial Age as the 1960’s and 70’s but when it actually reaches its peak doesn’t matter. All that matter’s is that we are within sight of it, and we will soon (if we aren’t already) travel down the downward slope of a collasping civilization.



I am not talking about a Mad Max type apocalypse, but something much worse a long, slow decline. You see if there was a sudden collapse then 20 to 40 years latter there would still operational modern technology and a few people left who knew how to operate it. Not only that most libraries would still contain readable books and most of our culture would be preserved. The problem with a slow decline is that no one realizes that something should be preserved until it is already lost.



I will give you an example, how many of you own a slide ruler much less knows how to do calculus with it? We are so dependent on our technology now that most of us do not remember how to get by without it. Vacuum tubes can be made with hand tools, and with vacuum tubes you can make radios, and large simple calculators, but does anyone know how to make a vacuum tube much less be able to pass own that knowledge in a meaningful way so that our great-great grandchildren can make them?



Our whole industrial society depends on cheap energy which comes in the form of fossil fuels. Petroleum which contains the most energy of all of the fossil fuels is already half used and the part that remains is harder to extract and refine. Soon both coal and natural gas will be past their peaks also, and with nothing to fuel our economies they will starve and the Industrial Age will die. Not in some big bang and flash of glory but in a slow whimper. You see we have nothing that can replace the energy that we get from fossil fuels, not nuclear, solar, hydro etc… nothing can keep our lifestyle going as it is now. As Richard Heinberg so aptly put it “The Party’s Over”.



I know what you are saying, that there is no way we can lose the accumulated knowledge that we have now, someone will think of something. Well 1800 years ago a Saxon king was buried in Britain with pottery that would have been considered poor quality even for a slave in Roman Briton just 200 years before and now it graced the table of a king. You see the Romanized Britons where so concerned about day to day survival that they did not think about learning or passing down their knowledge of ceramics and the same fate could await us.



But since history is linear and some Irish monks preserved much of what we know of the ancient world we can take precautions to preserve and pass down knowledge. First and foremost we can acquire a library of anything that we think is worth passing on to future generations. This can be do-it yourself books, philosophy, science fiction, the speeches of Winston Churchill…what ever you think is worth preserving. If you can get it on acid free paper so much the better, but get it anyway. Future generations will pass down what they think is useful or entertaining. You can also learn to play a musical instrument and pass on the ability to play tunes that you enjoy.



The knowledge that most needs to be passed to future generations is the same knowledge that our own grand and great grandparents had. How to knit, sew, spin wool, make shoes, butcher animals, tan leather they are skills that were common just 70 years ago but are quite uncommon now. We are lucky in that organic gardening is very advanced now, plus that it is common knowledge that germs cause disease, you get your water upstream from where you go potty and that personal hygiene can prevent illness. These will serve us well as the public health, food distribution and industrial agricultural systems breakdown.



One of the things that will be most helpful is the scientific method as it pertains to ecology. Understanding how to observe and model an ecosystem will be extremely helpful with food production when we do not have fossil fuels to rely on.



I will continue with technologies that need to be preserved and ways in which we can preserve them in the next post.

A To Do List for a Future of Austerity

My previous posts have stressed learning skills and the low energy future we face. This post we concentrate on what can do to prepare for a future of “Hard Times” and if I am wrong and the times aren’t so hard they will help you anyway so why not give them a try. I do know that oil is going to start to get expensive, I don’t know how fast the price will run up but I know of no other source that can replace our reliance of petroleum.




You can prepare yourself mentality and physically, you can become involved in your local government. You can start using alternative modes of transportation, buying local produce and products. Increase the energy efficiency of your house, have an alternative way to heat it. I hope you get the idea now, think about how $8.00 a gallon gasoline will affect you and think about everything that now uses oil will cost when oil hits $200 a barrel. I am going to expand on some of these ideas in the coming paragraphs.



If your sense of self-worth comes from material goods then you need to find something else to give your life meaning. Now most of you will say that material things are immaterial to me. Well if you talk about your TV, car, cell phone, look at the sales flyers in the paper, live in the Untied States or Canada then they probably do mean more to you then you realize. My generation (Generation X) has been bombarded by advertising since birth, and the geniuses of marketing have been very good at brain washing us. We have come to think that we need a new car every 3-4 years and if we do not have the extensive, extended, expanded, cable package then we will seem less in the eyes of our co-workers. We have been sold that the more gadgets and services that we buy the better that our life will be and the easier our children will have it.



To borrow from John Michael Greer, “There is no Brighter Future Ahead.” If we measure success on material goods then we are bound for disappointment. If we believe that our kids will have the jet packs (that we where promised) or that they will be able to jet set around the world, then we will experience a future full of frustration and stress. Prices are going to increase and material goods, especially the frivolous consumer goods that so many of us buy will become unaffordable luxuries.



Turn off the TV and stop the brainwashing rays from the advertising gurus for corrupting your children’s minds. Eat dinner together at a table without the TV on, and then do not turn the TV on but play a game, go for a bike ride, draw or color picture together, play with some toy that requires no batteries with your children. Try to do this at least once a week; it would be better if you did it all of the time but start with just Saturday. Start to reduce your consumption, don’t buy the new salad shooter, try to go for a week without buying anything but gas and unprocessed raw food (you know vegetables that you have to peel) play a game and see who can go without buying something the longest(no matter how big the “SALE” is or how much you will save).



Prepare yourself for a time when you can no longer buy new things, and get use to the idea of doing without. This is going to be a major cultural shift that we have to make, that no matter how hard we work there will be something that we just cannot afford to buy and that our children will have less access to material possessions than we had. I fear that for most of the population this will be the hardest thing to comprehend, because it goes against what we have been told by society for the last 50 years.



Next, get in shape. Exercise regularly, in the 1940’s the average American walked 5-7 miles a day, now we walk less than a mile a day. We are going to have to walk and bike more in the future so start now when you can do it for fun, rather than when you have too. Start a new diet, and not the Atkins diet or any other Hollywood fad diet either. Read Michael Pollan and eat “real food, not too much and mostly plants.” Cut your meat consumption back to one or two meals a week, eat non processed foods (you know vegetables that you have to clean, peel and cook), stop buying anything with corn syrup in it (no sodas) and make your own bread once a week.



With a natural diet and exercise you will find that you have more money because in a matter of months your cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar will return to healthy levels. You will lose weight and feel better than you have in years. You might even be able to convince your Doctor to take you off of all those medications that you are on (and save lots of money). Changing your diet back to a more traditional diet (if your grandmother couldn’t buy it in 1940 then you don’t buy it either) and increasing your physical activity will probably have the most beneficial effects on your life.



Get Local, become involved in your local politics, go to your city council meetings, and become informed on the local issues. Join local civic groups (the Rotary Club, Junior League, Boy Scouts, Elks Lodge) these groups will start to have more importance in your community has the civil authorities start having to cut their budgets.



Join a CSA and shop at your local farmers market, as fuel prices start to increase our current industrial agricultural system will start to break down. By supporting and encouraging your local farmers you will lessen the impact that you and your community will feel.



Know your neighborhood and neighbors, as you walk and bike ride for pleasure stop and talk to the people who live on your street. You will learn the best routes to get you places and form a valuable resource that can be used when police budgets force fewer officers to be hired and increase response times. Try to form a tool sharing bank so you can borrow each other tools, find out who is elderly and check in on them regularly. This will go a long way to increase both your security and your sense of self worth.



Encourage your city to become a walk-able and bike-able city. As we will not be able to drive everywhere encourage your city to have sidewalks and bike paths. Join any local organizations that promote these activities.



Start a garden, it doesn’t have to be big just a few potted tomato plants if that is all you have room for or plant fruit and nut trees instead of pine trees. You can still have a decorative landscape that can also produce food.



As you can see there is a plethora of things that you can do now to prepare yourself for a more difficult future. Most of these things are good for you and save you money even if I am wrong and someone invents a table top fusion reactor that anyone can have in their home that will meet all of our power needs cheaply and cleanly. I truly hope that I am wrong but I don’t think that I am wrong and perparing to have a more fulfilling life with less material goods.

Skills for the Future

When I talk to most people about Peak Oil they tend to get the impression that I am talking about oil running out overnight or in a few years at the longest. Oil will not just disappear but as we use the oil that is easy to get we have to search longer and harder to find what is left. The oil that we get from Texas or Saudi Arabia takes about 1 barrel’s worth of oil in energy to extract 100 barrels of oil or a 1:100 Energy Input: Energy Returned ratio (EIER). Deep Water Horizon only promised a 1:4 to a 1:8 EIER! They are drilling there because we are running out of places to drill. Even if we open up ANWAR it will only be a tiny drop on the price of oil in 10-15 years (the amount of time to get an average oil field into production). The point is that the oil we have left is going to steadily increase in price as the decade’s progress.


This means that our disposable society that depends on cheap petroleum based energy will have to transition to something else entirely. I will restate this: Our way of life is going to dramatically change in the coming decades. Yes this will take decades and it will be painful for most of the population who have been living in denial for most of their lives. To minimize the social upheaval that you feel it would be advisable to acquire some skills that our grandparents had and to rethink all of our purchases.

When we buy something we should try to buy the most durable, reliant, and energy efficient thing that you can. If you are buying a bathroom scale buy one that does not require batteries. If you buy a set of kitchen knives buy ones that you can sharpen. If you are buying frying pans buy a cast iron one over a Teflon coated frying pan, the cast iron one can be used by your grandchildren and the Teflon will become scarp in a decade when the Teflon starts to peel off. Buy quality now because quantity is not going to be cheap once it starts costing a lot of money to sail container ships from China. Things are going to start getting more expensive so if you can buy a high quality durable product now, do it now.

Learn to sharpen your own knives and tools, only a half century ago people made a living sharpening knives. Learn to sew and repair your clothes or even make some of your own cloths, towels etc… There will come a time when we will no longer be able to afford to go out and just buy a new shirt just because you lost a button on yours. We have out sourced most of our textile mills and it will be costly to move them back, they will move back but only when the cost of transportation is more expensive than what they have to pay Americans to make clothes again.

Learn small engine repair, gardening, electronic repair, plumbing, carpentry, learn to play a musical instrument or any countless things that your grandparents could do. A lot of our jobs that depend on federal spending (which is most of us) will start to disappear once our nation has to finally rein in its spending. Get out of debt and try to find a job close to you, because commuting will start costing more. Find alternative ways to heat and cool your home, start using clotheslines and most importantly learn to cook.

We spend less energy/time now to procure food then anytime in human history. Only 10% of our income is devoted to obtaining food for ourselves. As food prices increase the processed, precooked, heat and serve food so many Americans consume will become prohibitory expensive. It is amazing that most Americans do not know how to cook, they know how to warm things up but not cook from scratch. Learn to use and buy raw in season produce in your food preparation, because you will not be able to obtain asparagus from Argentina in January unless you are rich.

As we proceed down the petroleum curve the divide between the rich and the poor will increase and the number of people who are middle class will decrease. If you can start taking steps now you will help ease the burden on your children who are the ones that will feel the true brunt of the decline of the oil age. If you can switch to renewable energy sources even if it is only a solar hot water heater. Try to demand net metering from your utility company, or the creation of microgrids in your area.

Our world is going to change whether we like it or not. We can start to prepare now or we can be caught unprepared in the years to come. Our economy based on infinite growth is meeting the brick wall of a finite planet. No matter how much we shout “Drill Baby Drill” we cannot increase the amount of oil on this planet. We have to realize that just because we drill a hole does not mean that we will find oil in it. Some people will grow angry and blame everyone but themselves as our current concept of “the American Dream”, which is measured by the possession of material goods, becomes unobtainable. They will blame the government, foreigners and anyone who is different. They will not realize that it is their own overconsumption and reckless waste that has created the problem.

You have a chance to ease the pain that your children will feel in the future as they can no longer obtain the same lifestyle that they’re grandparents lived. Please take that chance and use it wisely, not for me, not for the planet but for your children and mine.

Heads in the Sand

In conversations with my fellow residents of Lower Alabama, I am almost always amazed at how uninformed and gullible they are. While talking about the oil spill (it is really a well blow-out not a spill) in the Gulf, I find it remarkable that a seemingly large number of people believe that environmental extremists committed some act of sabotage on Deepwater Horizon. They do not seem to realize how difficult it would be for someone to infiltrate an oil drilling platform 50 miles off of the coast of Louisiana, much less the technical expertise it would take for then to disguise the act to make it look just like a methane gas well blow-out. I do wonder why the more plausible and factual cause of the disaster, lax government oversight and deregulation coupled with cost cutting and unsafe work practices by the management on Deepwater Horizon seems to be so unbelievable.




Of course these are some of the same people who think that the military should use a nuclear bomb to stop the oil from gushing out of the well head. I have to admit that a nuclear bomb would stop the leak, but will point out that the radioactive tidal wave produced by it would probably poison the Gulf coast for much longer than the oil that is now coating the marshes and beaches. Now some people have the bright idea to drill a hole beside the well and place the nuclear bomb deep enough that most of the radiation is contained, and that it will not produce big of a tidal wave (probably 12ft or less). They fail to grasp that by the time you bore a hole big and deep enough to place the bomb in that the relief wells will already be finished.



Then there are the people who are mad at BP (and justly so) and are boycotting them. A boycott is well and good but if you are not willing to give up your SUV and decrease your energy usage then you are only going to hurt the local owners of the convinence store that is unlucky enough to have a BP sign on their gas pumps. This is because BP will just sell its gas to Chevron, Shell and all of the independent gas stations and continue to happily take our money. If we do not make the connection between this disaster, the economic crash of 2008, the invasion of Iraq, rising food prices in the developing world and or national debt with our consumption of oil and other raw materials then we are just paying lip service to our outrage and inviting these disasters or worse to happen again and again.



Here we are almost 2 years after the market crash of 2008 which was brought on in large part by oil reaching $147 a barrel. And the worlds demand for oil is about 3.5 times less now then it was then and oil is at $70 a barrel. What do you think is going to happen when demand starts to pick back up? If we keep failing to realize how much of our lives revolve around petroleum and keep using it at ever increasing rates we are going to come up very hard and fast to the wall of reality. Now some people will say that there is plenty of oil left in Saudi Arabia, to which I generally ask why the Saudi’s are spending so much money to build nuclear reactors if they have an unlimited supply of oil left in the ground. If there Ghawar oil field still has billions of barrels left in it then why are they drilling more wells off shore? The short answer is that they (and the world) have passed the peak of oil production.



We have a few years (or hopefully decades) to prepare for a new and harsher future without cheap oil. We need to become more local in not just our lives but also in our government. Actually our government is probably where we need to start the localization effort at. In this we are lucky because that was how our Constitution and government was conceived to work. We just need to get the federal government out of local government. This will mean to cut off the federal welfare that most states rely on. As simple as this sounds it will not be easy, as a matter of fact I think that it will be so onerous to do that no politician(s) will attempt it. Instead people will clamor for more government help and hand-outs. This includes the Tea Party which want lower taxes and less federal interference in their lives with the exception of Social Security, and Medicare, and unemployment insurance which they either receive or soon will receive.



We will be forced to take some very serious austerity measures in this country in the next few years if we want to survive as a country. And I fear that we will see rioting and civil unrest much worse than Europe has seen when people’s false idea of the American dream becomes a distance and unreachable reality. We have replaced our forefathers’ dreams of freedom with dreams of safety and material wealth. Our system of government was formed to protect us from exploitation and tyranny, which we have surrendered to in the name of economic growth and material possessions.



If we do not pull our collective heads out of the sand and from real local communities, then our collective asses will be handed to us. We have to find community solutions to problems such as food and transportation before the price of petroleum makes these unaffordable. Because there is nothing to take the place of our reliance on petroleum, no cold fusion power plants, national wind power grids or any other pipe dream that can realistically replace our national reliance on cheap oil. We need to develop micro power grids which will be much easier to maintain to produce and distribute electricity locally than it is to have a national grid. The same is true for local food and transportation systems. We need to quickly dispose of our disposable society now before it becomes to expensive to maintain, because now we have the energy and time to do it. If we wait until oil becomes to expensive we will not be able to afford a comfortable change and our society will collapse under its own weight.

Are you worried about the future? So am I!

Friends of mine from opposite ends of the political spectrum have expressed concerns about the future of this country and the world in general to me recently. They have very similar fears even though some trust government regulation to fix everything and some think that if the government was not involved in anything would be the most idea solution. They all have fears about the economy, crime, food stability and the future. Some understand about peak oil and climate change and some don’t, but they are worried about the future.


First of all I believe in climate change and peak oil and of the two I believe that peak oil will have a much greater impact on me and my son’s lives. Climate change will have more of an effect my grandchildren and future generations. It is not that climate change is not a worry, but it is not the topic of this post.

I believe that our current economic malaise is a result of peak oil and is a direct result of the oil shock that we experienced in 2008. Now world governments and the oil industry itself are starting to state that if new production is not found we could face a 10mbpd (million barrel a day) shortfall of oil in the next 5 years. 10mbpd is what Saudi Arabia produces, so unless we find another Saudi Arabia out there we are going to see a 10% drop in supply within the next 5-10 years. When oil got up to $147 barrel and gas above $4 a gallon there was just a 2% gap between supply and demand, just imagine what a 10% gap will look like. Add to this a world that is addicted to debt, oceans stripped of fish, water shortages, falling crop yields, over population and climate change and you have a recipe for disaster.

I will concentrate on the US since that is where I live. Our country has decided to base its economy (as has the whole world for that matter) on exponential growth. For some reason economist thought that the laws of the universe does not apply to them, you cannot have exponential growth on a finite planet. To sustain this growth we have went from one income households, to two income households, we have become reliant on personal debt as well as national debt. Since we have switched from production based economy to a consumer economy (to allow for more growth of course) we added to the absurdity of our situation by trying to sustain a society where we just sell each other stuff made someplace else. We have to cut back on our spending now and will have to more in the future, and our government will eventually too.

The US government has been relying on borrowed money since the 1960’s to help sustain economic growth and the harder it got to grow the economy the more money the fed borrowed and printed. We are expecting to owe more than we make in one year (we currently owe 88.9% of GDP) by 2012 and 130% by 2015. There will come a time that we can either borrow no more money or that our money is so abundant that it is worthless.

The economy is going to slow down as resources become scarce and prices rise, if we keep using government infusions of cash to try to keep it afloat we will eventually be printing so much money that you will rush to the grocery store after you get paid to try to get there before prices raise again. We will reach a point where cash is useless except for low quality toilet paper. The economy has collapsed and society can collapse at this point and services are curtailed or halted altogether. Roads are not paved, broken cell phone towers are not repaired, the barter system and other more stable currencies are used (gold, silver or another country’s money if it has a stable and predictable value).

For most of us who are use to our disposable society, in which we cannot cook using raw materials, mend our clothes, fix common household appliances our do the numerous other things that our grand (our great grand) parents could and did do to help them through the depression. The fact that we have outsourced our production capability and centralized our food production is going to hurt us in every aspect of society. To add to this the fact that gasoline will be unaffordable to the common middle-class (which will have become extinct) American and you might begin to sense the desperation that could lie ahead of us.

Now we could have a government that puts in some stiff austerity measures and balances the budget and pays down debt. This would mean no more Social Security, Medicare, Defense Spending, Food Stamps, Federal Highway dollars, etc… This would result in massive unemployment, which would eventually led to a similar scenario to hyper-inflation, but in my opinion it is better because it gives us a chance to focus our few resources on areas that matter most to us.

Now there are so many variables that could happen from resource wars, revolts, massive protests and civil unrest and the destruction of our constitutional government. But no matter the variables the ability to produce some of your own food, survive with less energy and resources, having some skills that are marketable in a new era of depletion. Skills like knife sharpening, sewing, carpentry, making shingles, repairing electronic appliances etc… Learning to reuse things and use less now will be a lot easier than it will be when you no longer have a choice.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union or Argentina people did not flood the country side because they did not have skills to survive in the country, they flocked to the cities where there were services that they where use to having. Crime sky-rocketed has police protection became either nonexistent or only for those who could afford it. Food became scarce and government soup lines formed, food riots started (they also started in Egypt in 2008) and people began growing gardens anywhere they could. If we are lucky we will follow Cuba’s example and localize food production and encourage cottage industries (of course Cuba is now trying to roll back those freedoms now that they are exiting their crisis) and this will help mitigate the worse effects of the coming resource shortage.

In short I will encourage you to start a garden and grow as much food as you can, learn to cook from scratch, try to cut back on your spending and energy usage, reuse items, buy durable reusable items instead of disposable ones, develop skills that your grandparents had. I would add to this to buy a gun and learn to use it, but I will caution you that if you do not learn to use it, it can be as dangerous to you and your family as it is to any potential aggressor. Just remember that owning a gun makes you now more prepared than owning a piano makes you a musician.

Garden update

As you can see our garden is doing pretty well our spinach didn't come up but we are getting plenty of beans. Our melons seem to be doing well but something besides boys are eating our blueberries!

Rattlesnake beans

tea plant

Blackberries

Lazy housewife beans

popcorn

echinacea

Tyranny, Exploitation and You

I often talk about being free and not being a slave to the ruling corporate elites and their political lackeys. My beautiful and incredibly intelligent wife pointed out that we are all slaves to something, which is true in a way. I am voluntarily a slave to my family, which in turn forces me to work and participate in the military industrial machine so I can provide health insurance for my sons.


I also often mention how we are trying to live without exploiting other people, mainly in developing countries. But last night Kristina (my beautiful and incredibly intelligent wife) mentioned about how the poor are exploited here in our country (and likely most other developed countries). That those who are living in poverty or close to poverty most often do not have the choice to eat organic or even non-processed foods, or avoid products that have potentially dangerous components or compounds. That those in poor areas often have to pay higher for goods and services than those that live in a more affluent area (take health insurance as an example). I can just imagine the pain of a parent who is unable to take a child to the dentist or must use the emergency room as their primary care physician.

This got me wondering how much of this was intentional, whether it was planned or just worked out that way. When the primary means of livelihood was agriculture the poor at least could produce their own food and much of their own needs even if they had to trade labor for land. Trading labor for land was a basis for both the feudal system and the sharecropping system of the old south. It was also used in a different form by the old factory system in industrial society where your employer provided you with housing, a company ran store to shop at and a company doctor to care for you.

Both of these systems were either broken or severely damage by the prosperity that followed the end of the Second World War. With the increase need for labor and resource extraction that happened during the World War II, the poor could choose to leave and go to an area that offered more freedom and less exploitation. It seems like Lyndon Johnson tried to correct this by concentrating poverty and creating a dependent class with his Great Society programs. The poor became concentrated in the inner cities while the middle class and the factories in which they were employed moved out to the suburbs. The services that use to serve the middle class in the cities followed them out to the suburbs leaving only small independent providers or exploitive enterprises to serve the new poorer inhabitants of the cities.

This was actually not a new development and the conditions that the modern poor face are much better than the tenement slums that populated so many of the major cities in the western world during the early industrial age, the inhabitants of these early slums worked as domestic servants, general laborers and other low wage low skill jobs. For the most part the rural poor fared better health wise than their urban counter parts. Of course many of the rural poor fled famine and harsh political oppression, but many also came at the promise of a better life (measured in luxury goods) than they had in the countryside.

What was new about the Great Society and its programs was that the Federal Government provided for the basic needs of the poor under the supposed idea that they would use the boost to improve their lives. How they were going to accomplish this when they had lower quality schools, less access to goods and services and little are no role models was apparently not thought of. This concentration of poverty, lack of opportunities and the absence of the traditional labor for services system lead to an increase in crime, poverty and decrease in education and opportunity. The fact that this system has lasted for so long and is still in place (although not as bad as it was during the 1980’s) leads me to believe that the effect of it was the desired one and the stated aim at improving the conditions of the poor was just so many platitudes.

Today in the United States you can tell the wealth of a community by how many title pawn shops, cash advance and rent to own business (which have some of the most exploitive usury rates) are located there. You can also tell the socio economic class that a person belongs to by looking at their teeth because dental care is still a privilege of the wealthier classes. I wonder why the poor so often buy inconsequential material possessions when their income can obliviously be better spent. Whether it is 42” chrome spinning rims for their car or a big screen HD TV with an extended cable package, instead of healthier food or saving their money for a medical emergency. I know that they are targeted heavily by advertising but I think that there is some desire for a display of wealth that some socio-economic classes express. Why certain parts of our society values displays of wealth over health, food and security is something that I cannot comprehend.

It is ironic that one of the reasons that small farmers and shop keepers where able to beat the largest industrial power of the time was the diversification of their agricultural and industrial system. The sheer number of cottage industries producing rifles, muskets, clothing etc…. made it very hard for the British to hurt the economy of the rebellion, even when they occupied the largest cities in America. This was due in part to the British Empire forcing raw materials to be sent to England’s industrial powers to be refined into finished goods which would be then be sold back to the colonies. Now we freely ship our raw materials to foreign countries to be manufactured into finished products. I feel that the out sourcing of our manufacturing capability will come back and hurt our country.

It is the small scale manufacturing capability that I feel is most important for us to have. Small textile mills, small shops making bicycles, blankets, dinner and cookware are what we need to survive the decline of petroleum. I think that this will happen but it will be much smoother if we can transition at a controlled pace instead of transition only when we have no further option. But our laws and government not only favors large scale manufacturing and agriculture that outsources jobs, it actually provides disincentives for small companies to thrive. This is namely because our large corporations write the regulations that govern our economy.

Not only is our economic system exploiting developing countries, it is exploiting our lower and middle class citizens. We face a tyranny of the wealth and power of large multi-national business’s and banks who seem to run our country. It is time that we elect politicians who represent the people and not the corporations. For the courts are no longer protectors of the people but enablers of big business.

Oil dependence and responsibility by Ginnie Becker

The following was written by my friend Ginnie Becker and she was kind enough to let me share it with you!

"The impending and inevitable arrival of the oil slick from the Deepwater Horizons oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last week has many watching in horror as it threatens fragile coastal ecosystems. The loss of marine life is set to be catastrophic, and the impact on the struggling coastal economy devastating for businesses, many of which are still recovering from both Hurricane Katrina and the global economic meltdown's effect on Gulf Coast tourism. Already there is palpable anger within the community toward British Petroleum who was leasing the deep sea oil rig at the time of the accident, and supposedly lobbied members of congress not to pass stricter safety rules in favor of self-policing. Yet this anger, while understandable, is somewhat misplaced. The responsibility for this oil spill rests squarely on the shoulders of consumers, who ultimately create the demand for BP's product. Without the demand, there would be no oil spill. BP did play a role without a doubt - they have reportedly been ignoring and actively working against tougher federal safety regulations. Yet all of us as consumers have played a significant role in the unfolding disaster.

In the last American presidential election, candidates frequently tossed around the phrase "reduce dependence on foreign oil" during debates, a noble goal given that the main sources for oil are countries that harbour hostility toward the US, and China's rise to economic power causing inflation in world oil prices as demand spiked. There were debates ad nauseum about the possibility of opening ANWAR for oil exploration, offshore drilling, and the use of alternative oil extraction technologies such as shale oil. Yet in all of that debate, there seemed to be one word too many in the main argument. Instead of "reduce our dependence on foreign oil", what the debate should have focused on was "reduce our dependence on oil."

With the looming Gulf of Mexico environmental disaster nearly upon the five states it will affect, the debate over offshore drilling will be renewed with vigor. Many are already calling for a moratorium on offshore drilling, and asking that the bill signed by President Obama earlier this year allowing offshore oil exploration be revoked, citing the irreparable damage to the ecosystems caused by this oil spill. Yet, given that every single person in the nation is an oil consumer, this ultimately turns us into a nation of arrogant NIMBYs. By saying Not In My Back Yard, and continuing to consume, we are effectively just shifting oil production elsewhere, so "they" can deal with the environmental destruction that we don't want. Another version of Chinese sweatshop labor in the oil sector if you will. If we wish to consume the oil, we have to be willing to suffer the consequences of that consumption, which includes environmental destruction. Yet having seen just how devastating an oil spill can be, given the experience of the Exxon Valdez accident in Prince William Sound in Alaska, and the current disaster in the gulf which threatens to be worse, can we really make that choice? Even if we do choose to allow offshore drilling, as many people agreed with during the presidential debates (with the hideous accompaniment of the "Drill baby, drill" chorus), production values come nowhere near meeting demand in the US as it currently stands, so the idea of independence of foreign oil while nice on the surface, is not based in reality. What must happen is a radical rethink of the way we live and consume, coupled with aggressive research into and implementation of renewable energy sources

As a species, we seem particularly enamoured with the idea of technology saving us, even from ourselves. The Deepwater Horizon oil platform had state of the art technology allowing it to pinpoint to within a foot the exact place for drilling - a mile down into the ocean. It used GPS systems and computer controlled jet propulsion to remain in the correct place in the ocean, to within three feet of coordinates, instead of using anchors. It contained several shutdown mechanisms intended to avoid exactly what is currently happening. This miraculous technology is required because we are drilling in progressively more difficult places as the oil thirsty world sucks dry the oil in more accessible places. Yet this technology is obviously not foolproof, and we should not kid ourselves that "they" will come up with ways we can obtain oil so we can continue to consume as we do, at the prices we expect. Technology also has not given us ways of rectifying this accident, and the human, plant and animal residents of the gulf coast will have to live with that for decades to come. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at the problem, money does not magically bring back completely ruined ecosystems. We have dispersants for the oil, yet they are likely to have consequences for the sea life that lives in the water. We have booms, but they do not defeat tides or wave action. We have skimmer boats to suck up what we can of the oil on the water, yet even tiny beads of oil will be washing up on the beaches and affecting wildlife for years to come. Technology is not the immediate answer. The answer lies with every single one of us reevaluating the way we live and consume in the short to medium term future, and significant research and development of alternative renewable energy sources for the long term. But reigning in our voracious appetite for more must happen first, and we need to tackle that with a sense of urgency.

The Deepwater Horizons accident and oil spills promises to be a potent reminder for decades to come that we all need to shoulder our share of individual responsibility for the environmental destruction it has caused, and be judicious with our choices as consumers rather than rely on outside technology to save us from ourselves." 

To my Sons

William and Ian, I want to leave you a better world than the one that was left for me, but I fear that is impossible and beyond my ability to control. I hope and pray that I am a Father that you can look up too and admire. I will try to be the kind of man that I want you to be, and I will tell you of my struggles and failings so that you will not have as hard of a time as I have.



I would like for you to say what you mean and more importantly mean what you say. That you treat people with respect, especially those that society doesn’t think deserves respect. Respect doesn’t mean being “nice” but treating someone with dignity.


All living things deserve to be treated with dignity no matter if they are a human, dog or plant. We should always remember that the breath of life that God breathed into us, he also blew into them. If we harvest a plant or animal for food we should honor it and give it the best life and least traumatic death that we possibly can. If we have to take a life because of necessity (whether weeding our garden or defending the life of another) we should mourn that life.


We should try to live our life without exploiting others, even if that causes us difficulty. We should be ashamed if our standard of living is only possible because we are abusing and using others. While we cannot change the world we can change the way we impact it and hope that our example convinces others to do the same.


You should never feel that you are better than someone because you have more knowledge, money, clothes etc…. One person’s life is not worth more than another; I say this even though I would gladly choose my Loved ones over anyone else and not feel guilty. Treat all people with respect, especially those who do not show you respect.


Try to think before you act, this will save you much grief and hardship. Remember that once something is done, it may be impossible to undo. So use as much forethought as time will allow. I will warn you that I have found that action is almost always better than inaction. I will endeavor to give you the tools you need to act wisely to the situations that life gives you and the experiences necessary to develop that wisdom. I hope this will enable you to think while you are acting and prevent you from the paralysis of indecision.


Violence never solves problems but only creates new ones. But you might encounter a time when violence is the only viable option that you have. When that is the case use as much as you can summon as quickly as possible, while this may seem counter intuitive it will save pain and suffering to all parties involved.


Try to leave every place you go better than when you found it. Help others when you can, but remember that often the best way to help others is to teach them to help themselves. Making someone dependent on your aid is not good for either your or their dignity. There will be those who try to take advantage of your kindness and willingness to help. This is a price you have to pay and you will become better at identifying those who would abuse your generosity as time goes on. Just remember that if you are in doubt about a person’s motivation it is better to ere on the side of giving until proven otherwise.


Success in life can only be measured by happiness and your sense of self worth. What is simple is not always easy, and the right thing to do often is hard and painful. Do not decide on an action just because it is easy or painless but try to do what is right and just. Try not to leave problems for others to solve if you can fix them now. When you are looking for a solution to a problem try to find a simple one, because simple usually works out better than complex.

I will always try to be the father that you deserve to have and give you the tools that you need to have a happy and successful life. I will fail at times, but I will never stop trying and I will never stop loving you. The two of you are the greatest blessings that God has ever bestowed upon me and I will try to always treat you as such.


I Love You Ian and William, and even though I wish that you could stay small forever, I also look forward into meeting the Men that you will become.


With all of my Love,

Daddy

Earth day?

It is earth day and the college campus where I work is having a celebration, were they are giving out free bottled water and hot dogs and hamburgers on Styrofoam plates, with napkins, plastic forks etc….. Why do people not understand that it is our over consumptive lifestyle that is causing not just our environmental problems but our financial problems as well.




We have lived in an era of abundance for so long that now that we have out grown our ability to extract resources from the earth at a pace that equals our consumption, we are experiencing price increases as a result of raw material scarcity. Not only is our demand out stripping our ability to extract resources but the resources themselves, whether it is fish in the ocean or oil in the ground. But most everyone seems to be in denial about what our problems are and the impact that we as individuals (in first world countries) have upon our environment.



We seem to believe that we can keep buying HD big screen TV’s, iPhones, discarding our last years (still functioning) electronics for new ones, trading our movies on VHS for the same movie on DVD. We do not even think about the conditions in which the people who made these items worked and lived. We tell ourselves lies like “you can live like a king on $5.00 a day in Indonesia” without us ever having been there or even knowing anyone who has lived there. We deny and lie to ourselves about these things because if we ever took the time to look and really think about our impacts we would feel guilty (if we have any empathy left), and we do not like feeling guilty. We do not want to admit that our standard of living is only possible by the exploitation of our fellow human beings, and the only reason that we tolerate this system is that we do not have to see the people we are exploiting.



Thanks to globalization we have moved the wage slavery jobs from our nation to developing countries, we even convince ourselves that building a T-shirt factory in Haiti is a development project and helps Haitians. We fail to simply look at Haiti and ask if they really need a T-shirt factory to increase the income of a few thousand Haitians or agricultural development so they can feed themselves. What we do is use cheap labor and no environmental regualtions or worker safety laws to make cheap t-shirts will flooding the Haitian market with cheap “Food Aid” grain which drives grain prices down causing more farmers to leave their farms and move to the city which lowers wages even more. To further increase the profit margin we “provide” the workers with company housing and a company commissary in which we deduct these costs from their paychecks. Even the cotton that is used in the t-shirts is grown here and exported to Haiti and priced under the local market value due to our very generous subsidies that we pay our farmers. All we have to do to realize this is ask ourselves why we can buy a 4 pack of t-shirts for $10 at Wal-Mart.



As our standard of living has become harder to maintain we have gone from single income families to dual income families, we have outsourced our production capacity to cheapen labor and production costs. We have been sold a bill of goods to consume even more, become more energy efficient by replacing your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs. You never hear that a better way to become energy efficient is to use less light bulbs and less energy. That if you really want to help the environment then don’t buy a new TV or cell phone if your old one still works. Life and business functioned just fine before Blackberries and HD TV’s. If you ask the average Western consumer what they would want more off most will say time. We buy all of types of “time saving” devices but spend the time if any that we gain from using them working to pay for them. We have completely lost touch not only with the earth but also with ourselves.

If you want to really do something to help the Earth, then turn off the TV and read a book, or play outside with your children.

Growing your own food

True security is being self sufficient in food, even though we are a long way from being able to produce enough food to feed our family; we have taken a big step to increasing our own food production.

Bean patch

Pole for Rattlesnake and Lazy Housewife and the little corn pacth in the background

little herb garden

Scarlet Runner beans, mango melons, turnip greens and some more herbs and flowers

We went from one raised bed to a couple of larger dug beds. Since we live in a historical district some of our beans are ornamental as well as food, we have concentrated on growing mainly beans because that is the hardest thing for us to find locally. We love dried beans and eat a lot of them, and have been searching for a source of local beans for a couple of years now and have had no luck.

So this year we planted Nance and Purple Queen bush beans, Scarlet Runner, Rattlesnake, and Lazy Housewife pole beans. We have also planted several herbs, mango melons, Cherokee Long Ear pop corn (we will see how out little patch does) and turnip greens and some more stuff that I am forgetting. Of course we have the Pecan tree, muskadine vine, blueberry, black berry and raspberry bushes as our perennials.



Next year we want to expand our garden a little more and if some of the beans and food producing plants are decorative too they will go in the front yard and a beehive (either top bar or traditional) and eventually maybe some bantam hens and a dog. I hope to disguise a lot of our food garden as a decorative garden and intersperse a lot of decorative plants in our food garden so we are foodscaping our yard for the next few years.

Extremists and Other Wacko’s

I have mentioned to Kristina many times in the past that one of the things that I fear living here in the south is how the general population will act when and if gas becomes unaffordable and the economy completely collapses.


The general population of Alabama has been sold on the fact that it is their birthright to have multiple HD flat screen TVs, cheap steaks, and be able to drive 40 miles to work each day. They do not realize and refuse to believe that this version of the American Dream has only existed since the late 1960’s and it has only existed for the whole population for the last 20-30 years. As they sit and mindlessly absorb what the marketing guru’s sell them on TV every night they believe that if they cannot afford a tricked out Cadillac Escalade and the gas that goes in it, that their country has failed them. The majority of them go to churches on most Sundays that encourages their lack of empathy and their xenophobia about all things that are different. They seem to skip over the parts of Christ’s teachings (they are “Christians”) were he loves the poor, disenfranchised, and protects and comforts sinners. Does not lend me hope for their ability to except others and help those who are different.

The fact that their race is losing its majority and dominant status is a simple fact that many of them cannot grasp. Their naked hatred for a President of a different race is expressed by their denying his religion and citizenship, despite all of the facts to the contrary. The most startling fact is that 24% of them believe that the President might be the antichrist (according to a Harris Poll Survey). The number of armed militia groups that are forming up to prevent a Federal declaration of Marshall Law (even though that the last administration restricted Constitutional freedoms much more than the current one) is very scary indeed. These armed groups like the “Oath Keepers” are being courted by not just fringe groups but also Fox News, and the Republican Party. How can we work together to solve or deal with the very real problems that we face, when almost a third of the country is preparing for a civil war?

The push by Fox news and a large part of the Republican Party to the far right has created a powder keg of hostility here in the south. I fear that if things do get really hard in the future that we will see violence and lynching’s like there was in the 1930’s.The general population of the South will seek out to blame others for their way of life collapsing, even though that their way of life was unsustainable and a very recent development. The fact that for most of Southern history the average person was very poor and lived at the whim of rich land owners and industrialists has been forgotten and written out of the history books by groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. When things return to how they traditionally were in the South the southern population will lash out and I fear that and want to get my sons as far away from it as I can. They insist that America is a Christian country yet fail to remember that our founders included the First Amendment to the Constitution (Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.)to prevent arguing over which branch of Christianity is the right one. The founding fathers still had fresh memories of the religious intolerance and hatred that prevailed in Europe during the 1500-1600’s and wanted to prevent that from happening again. Yet the Tea Party types seem hell bent on inciting that same violence.

I feel sad that the things that made America great have been replaced by greed and laziness. That we are too busy chasing luxuries that we cannot see the crises that are coming and refuse to deal with them. We have allowed for corporations and special interest groups to take over our government. We have dumb down our schools and education requirements to such an extent that our children no longer can think for themselves and can only memorize facts that are given to them.

America can recover and become great once again if we can escape from our creature comforts and realize that the freedoms that our ancestors sacrificed so much for have nothing to do with owning TV’s or cars, that cheap hamburgers and gas are not birthrights. I fear that we are going to have to lose these things before we face up to our complicity in the collapse of our empire and the fact that we should have never had an empire to begin with.