End of the World? Not As We Know It!

"The thrilling sensation of getting lost in a blizzard, of freezing to death in the woods and having to eat your friend's buttocks to stay alive. That is lost on many people."
--Michel Gerard, concierge and sometime foil of Lorelei Gilmore on The Gilmore Girls

Survivalists manage to weasel their way into the news on a semi-regular basis.  We’re never really sure why, except that fearful non-conformists exhibiting odd behavior are always seen as good filler on a slow news day.

We find, however, that our little experiment in urban homesteading is (with disturbing frequency) often confused with the aims and objectives of these sad little people.  We are asked by those who learn we are keeping a “Mormon pantry”, and that we distill our own drinking water, and that we grow as much food as we possibly can, whether we belong to such-and-such a survivalist listserv, or whether we have such-and-such caliber semi-automatic weapons, or how deeply our bomb shelter is dug, and where did we find the radiation-proof lead with which to line it.  That we would be more in sympathy with Michel Gerard, and less with James Wesley Rawles seems unimaginable to such folk, who either have all-too-clean fingernails, or all-too-black fearfulness.

Let us once and for all put these comparisons between our humble home and the encampments of the eschatologists-on-a-bender to rest:  we are not “survivalists” and we do not believe “the end of the world” or “the end times” or anything even remotely as childish and silly as that are upon us.  Apocalyptic thinking has a long history, which if you think about it, is rather ironic.  Apart from being puerile theology, however, it is also the exact antithesis of the driving force behind our attempt at urban homesteading.

There are several fundamental differences in our plans and designs which should make our philosophical differences self-evident, should any observers wish to discern said belief structures:

• Myrtle’s place is right smack dab in the middle of town.  Most survivalists choose to live well outside of city limits, beyond the reach of things like municipal planning commissions and city code enforcement officers.  They think they are safe from looters in such isolated locations.  Bully for them.
• Myrtle’s place is currently supplementing grid sources of water and energy, but has the eventual aim of lobbying for universal replacement of grid-based distribution of water and electricity.  Survivalists make most of their plans on the assumption that the grid will eventually fail, and everyone will be on it and dependent on it, and all heck will break loose as a result.
• Myrtle’s place eschews canned goods as much as possible, due in great measure to the dangers from chemical seepage into food.  Survivalists think c-rations are just peachy keen, and envision surviving a nuclear holocaust by holing themselves up in human-sized sardine cans.
• Myrtle’s place is a weapons-free zone.  We are mostly plant eaters, with the occasional fish finding its way onto our plates.  The last we heard, shooting catfish is not the most efficient means of harvesting them.  And anyone who wants to steal from us has clearly found the wrong address, because we haven’t got the newest, shiniest, most expensive of whatever it is thieves typically look for.  And if someone were here to steal food, the odds are pretty good that the residents of Myrtle’s place would have offered them some long before they had a chance to steal it.  Survivalists, of course, are armed to the teeth and live in constant fear of predatory theft.

We could go on, of course, because the number of differences between our approach to life and that taken by survivalists is a rather lengthy catalog.  We have no bomb shelter.  We have no problem with paying our taxes, getting licenses to drive, getting permits for our chickens, checking with the city code office on the acceptable height and location of our fence, or a whole host of other compromises with communal authority which drive survivalists to distraction.

The reason is because we actually like living in society.  The problems our species will face in the coming decades are very real, and very significant, but it is our belief at Myrtle’s place that either we all face them together, or we simply will not solve them in any way particularly helpful to anyone.  We would rather be right in the middle of town, showing a way forward for those who will observe, than be huddled on the outskirts, living in armored bunkers and (frankly) exhibiting a pathetic ethos not equalled in the history of homo sapiens.

Survivalists generally fall into one of three categories:

1)    Theological survivalists:  Usually some flavor of Protestant Christian – who believe that the second coming of Jesus, and the fire and plagues described in Revelations (a ridiculous book whose inclusion in the Christian canon has always puzzled us) are imminent, and who believe they might somehow survive these scary events unscathed if only they store enough canned goods and ammunition.  Why they believe the scary bits in Revelation and not any of the redeeming bits from the red-letter portions of the Gospels is a mystery best left to the study of psychiatry.
2)    Anarchist survivalists:  The most famous modern anarchist survivalist was Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, known more popularly as “The Unabomber”.  His manifesto is actually full of stunningly accurate insights into the dangers of technophilia on the part of society at large; however, his “solutions” to the problems of humans living together under increasingly difficult conditions and with increasing damage to the environment which sustains them involve, essentially, giving up, chucking the entire human experiment, and living in isolated shacks in the woods.  Oh, and killing people, mustn’t forget that last part.
3)    Paranoid survivalists:  We recognize that this description might include the other two categories, as well, but we reserve it for the various political perspectives used as justifications for survivalism – there are neo-nazi survivalists, white-supremacy survivalists, libertarian survivalists, politically-unaligned-except-we-really-hate-communism/socialism/monetarism/President Obama/the post office/census takers survivalists… again, we could go on forever.  The distinctions these people draw up to dilineate themselves from each other… we don’t understand, and we don’t want to understand.  Their unifying characteristic is that they do not trust other people.

The Myrtle experiment, conversely, can best be summarized as an attempt at good citizenship.

• We believe human beings are first and foremost social creatures, who do and should form collective units such as families, neighborhoods, towns and cities, counties, states, nations and global alliances, and as such we ought to do everything we can to contribute to the health and well-being of other people in each of those social units.
• We believe that there are limits to economic growth, and to the amount of natural resource use which our species can sustain, and that we are living in the decisive century for humanity to come to grips with those facts, but that the solutions to these respective crises is not hermit-like retreat, but rather a collective response.
• We believe there is less to fear from vagrants and criminals than there is to fear from isolation and loneliness.  Friendship and fellowship are more important in times of crisis than at any other time, and may best be found by living with other people, even people who have less than we do, than by living behind barricaded walls.

Mostly, though, we believe that there is almost definitely not an “end game” being played out – humanity will continue, in one form or another.  The right call, therefore, is to be good team players and try to make the future brighter for everybody.  Survivalism is all about the selfish desire to “protect me and mine”.  We want no part of that way of life.  Rather, we’re all about protecting “us and ours”; the happier folk we know are all of like mind.  We invite you to join the tribe, wherever you are. 

Pull up a lawn chair, grab a lemonade, and watch the chickens be silly.  Even if it is the year of the Mayan apocalypse, we’re still going to be making plans for the fall garden, next spring’s garden, and maybe even how we’ll build a bridge over the fish pond next summer, and add a decorative trellis or two, in addition to more permanent seating out under the arbor for the occasional party.  It just seems like more fun than contemplating life in a gopher hole.  And if history does, in fact, repeat itself, Myrtle’s optimism will more than likely be redemed, sooner rather than later.

Happy farming!

If You See the Buddha on the Road.... Peck Him!

“So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.”
--Ajahn Sumedho

On one level, the Buddhist injunction to simply accept the fact of our existence as an individual cell of awareness, lonely and immutably unsatisfied, holds a certain intellectual honesty which can be very appealing.  External gratification, in the form of a real and palpable knowledge that someone out there loves us, is at the core of 99% of what people have always done once their basic physical needs (food, shelter, health) have been met.

We are lonely, and we want to be loved, or at the very least accepted without judgment – wants which seem simple enough in the abstract, but which run smack into the brick wall of frustrating reality, when there are bills to pay, children to raise, employers to please, neighbors to appease, and a whole host of other pratfalls of living in society.  The Buddhist importation recognizes that we can be one with the universe, or we can be one apart from the universe, but we are most assuredly just one, either way.

So how does this relate to chickens? 

Glad you asked.  The pecking order of a flock of chickens provides endless food for thought; musings on the nature of loneliness and togetherness are perfectly natural in the context of a family of birds whose entire world consists of each other and their relatively small stomping grounds.  They are seldom “alone” in the sense that they are always around each other; however, it is very easy to spot a lonely chicken in the midst of a throng of hens.

To begin at the beginning, chickens are quite obviously not Buddhists, or at the least, they are very poor Buddhists.  The idea of eating a vegetarian diet would strike a chicken as an absurdity.  Sure, grass, veggies, grain, bread, weeds, roots, etc. are all tasty enough… but toss them a piece of fish, a bug, a worm, a frog, or even a wounded fellow chicken, and see how long their peaceful, fun-loving vegan outlook on life lasts.  These are the closest living relatives of Tyrannosaurus Rex, and despite their diminutive statures, they won’t let you forget it if you dangle red meat in their faces.

Chickens are not particularly peace-loving, either.  Certainly their default setting is to not raise a ruckus, because ruckus-raising heightens their evolutionary memory of jungle dangers.  In the wild woods of Indonesia, Gallus gallus runs the risk of being taken down by a wide variety of predators if interflock squabbles last too long.  However, just because they are not always fighting each other does not mean that they won’t fight each other.  Who gets to eat first, who gets to sleep first, who gets to lay eggs in the prime nesting spot, who gets to make fun of whom first, these are all questions settled by a good swift nip at the neck.  His holiness the Dalai Lama would never act this way.

This is to paint as ugly a picture of chicken society as you might wish to see, and we won’t blame you if you choose to ignore these uglier aspects of capon personalities.  Don’t worry, though, there is a happy side of the coop, an element of chickenhood which can serve as inspiration rather than as just so much more grist for our cynical mills.

Chickens are fundamentally social.  A lone chicken is a miserable chicken.  We have witnessed time and again how a chicken who is in any way separate from the flock simply will not thrive.  However, when that lone hen is incorporated into the flock, she not only thrives, she essentially swells.  (Yes, Myrtle, yes, there have been numerous examples of Homo sapiens swelling, too, we know; it was not meant to be insulting.) 

There are a wide variety of reasons why this social character evolved in Gallus gallus, and why it remains important for Gallus gallus domesticus, including but not limited to defense of the flock against predators and incursions of territory by other flocks, improved heat-retention for the flock during roosting time in the middle of winter, and (my personal favorite) an extension of health-self-monitoring – by observing the relative health of those above and below themselves in the pecking order, as determined by the brightness and size of their “red flappies”, a chicken is able to determine more or less how healthy they are.  Of course, we assume this is some kind of ingrained behavior, because, let’s face it, chicken brains are not particularly complicated…

Which brings us to a further consideration – an individual chicken is, and there is no polite way to say this, a dumb creature.  A flock of chickens, on the other hand, can be counted on to behave in a manner which is more or less beneficial for the whole. 

Oh, if only people were like that…

Still, this social cohesion on the part of the chicken comes from a necessity which humans, lonely as we may sometimes feel, do not necessarily share.  While we do not know precisely what degree of self-awareness our avian friends possess, we can be fairly certain it does not match that of a human being, at least a human being who is subsisting higher than the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

And precisely because chickens are not self-aware, they are allowed to more or less “step skip” on this hierarchy by means of being collectively aware.  Chickens respond more or less proportionately to real or perceived dangers – if a possum or a raccoon breaks into the coop, the lead hen makes a great deal of noisy fuss and bother, and either all (or most) of the hens escape, or the invader flees, or the farmer is awakened and comes out (albeit in bathrobe and flip flops) to groggily shoo away the unwanted guest.  Whatever the outcome of this decision tree, order is very quickly restored, and the event is completely forgotten.

Humans are different.  We hang on to irrational fears much, much longer.  We have observed many times in the last decade how disproportionately Americans have reacted to the terrorist activities on September 11, 2001.  In a nation of more than 300 million people, less than 3,000 were killed in an attack the nature of which made it unreplicatable for most of the population of the country – that is because of those 300 million people, very few actually work in high rise buildings in cities where terrorists would be likely to strike.

So, yes, the murder of many of our fellow citizens was an emotionally charged and tragic event, requiring a response.  But how long should fear of this event have taken hold in places like Laramie, Wyoming, or Llano, Texas, or Bangor, Maine, or Eau Claire, Wisconsin, or any of hundreds (nay, thousands) of communities all across the country, where visceral emotional responses to the attacks by a subset of fundamentalist Muslims (renounced time and again, by the way, by mainstream practitioners of Islam) still resound?

In some places, Islamophobia has actually gotten worse as the years go by, not better.  We could write a fairly long treatise on that subject, of course, but the point here is actually about something deeper – the isolated feeling that keeps individual people, in this case millions of individual Americans, stuck on the “safety” level of the needs pyramid.  The plain and simple truth is, we know several Muslim Americans who have been every bit as fearful of attacks on American soil by Islamic extremists as any dyed-in-the-wool White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant could be.  Sometimes difference is enough to ignite irrational fear; in this case, it is not the difference, it is the violent imagery which was timed perfectly to exploit pre-existing insecurity.

We suspect 9-11 might not have had such a lasting impact if it were not so vivid a symbol of more general fears – terrorism is something you can point at as a specific threat, however worries about our health, our jobs, our families, whether we will have housing, food on the table, or even clean air and water… these are things which Americans have grown accustomed in the last half century to not questioning.  But even before those four jets were hijacked, and we watched as 3,000 of our fellow citizens perished in a wanton act of violent murder, we were already fearful of creeping, nameless erosions of our feeling of safety.

If we were chickens, we would have been paying attention as those stout and healthy scientists and social observers with their bright red flappies were clucking significantly to warn us of degraded standards for our food, water, climate, social safety net, and financial controls.  Instead, though, we are dependent entirely upon the collective ability of each of us to individually navigate the sometimes overwhelming mountains of information necessary to evaluate what, exactly, is happening.  Little wonder we retreat to “reality” TV and turn to infotainment instead of actual news.  If we forget how to seem, we put on generic clothes (or opinions, as the case may be) and just hope for the best.

Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” ably westernizes several Buddhist concepts, but the best takeaway from the story is the idea that “Anybody can be a saint on a mountaintop.”  It takes coming down to the cities to prove that you are able to live among your flock and make everyone around you better off for your having achieved individual enlightenment.

Chickens don’t have that burden, but by watching them nip and peck at each other, we think maybe, just maybe, we humans can make our own version of flock behavior work out a little better than we have up ‘til now.  It’s worth a shot, anyway.

Happy farming!

It's Summer in Texas.... Again...

“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”
--General Phil Sheridan

The Climate Prediction Center has good news and bad news for the next several months, depending on your point of view.  And there is good news to read between the lines, if you are willing to make predictions which could possibly be wrong – something climatologists have become a little gun-shy about.

The La Niña event of last year, in large measure responsible for the brutally hot and dry summer which, given that you are reading this, you presumably survived along with us at Myrtle’s place, has definitely desolved into ENSO-neutral conditions.  The odds (according to CPC) of the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect trending towards El Niño or statying ENSO-neutral are about 50-50.

Of course, we at Myrtle’s place put a lot more faith in the notion that things tend to change, and that inertia is the dominant feature of the universe – meaning in context that because we have just come out of two consecutive La Niña events, and water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have been trending in the direction of an El Niño event, those temperatures are more likely than not to continue trending in that direction.

We could be wrong, of course, but we don’t think so.

We are more confident than the CPC, therefore, in predicting that the months of June and July will be brutal here in Texas, but that starting in August and September, that brutality should be replaced by more or less “normal” (by Texas standards) dog days.

Throughout much of the southern half of the country, and particularly here in Texas, temperatures will probably be well above average (both daytime highs and nighttime lows) for the next 8-12 weeks, and lingering effects from La Niña will keep the chances of precipitation fairly low during that time as well.  It may very well look and feel a lot like last year’s drought, frankly.

But there will be a couple of fundamental differences.

First, while the ground is still relatively dry, the fact that much of Texas has already received more rain in the first part of 2012 than it received in all of 2011 significantly reduces the chance for a repeat of last year’s self-perpetuating cycle.  The ground will not bake nearly so easily this year as it did last year, making it possible for scattered afternoon thunderstorms to develop in a pattern we remember fondly from yesteryear – and the cooling outflow from those storms mean even folk who don’t get rained on will at least get occasional relief from the heat.

Second, because La Niña has broken, the jet stream will not be so ridiculously absent from the Northern Plains during Summer 2012 as it was last year.  The infamous Butterfly Effect may be a bit too abstract for some to understand, but it should be easier to see that the lack of drought upstream from the Southern Plains makes it more likely that water will flow into the Southern Plains.  Further, on those occasions when the Jet Stream takes a slight detour southward from the Canadian border, it weakens – ever so slightly – the death grip that the summertime high pressure system which sits over the central United States exerts over our weather.

This anticyclone is the dominant feature of June-July-August forecasts, and is responsible in large measure for the fact that any storms which develop in these months are likely to be scattered and short-lived in nature.  Picture the region from Kansas south the the Gulf of Mexico as a giant crockpot (no, not “crackpot” though it is easy to see why you draw that connection); in the summertime this crockpot has a 10-ton elephant sitting on it.  That’s the summertime high pressure system.  Our pot of beans is not boiling over, no matter what.

Enter the third major difference between this year and last – if, as CPC hints, and we at Myrtle’s place firmly believe, El Niño makes an appearance starting in August of this year, that high pressure system which is usually huge (centered anywhere from Dallas to Topeka, and radiating outwards to include everything from Brownsville to Fargo) will shrink dramatically, and drift eastward.  That will mean instead of 105° August and September afternoons, we may be looking at a chilly 95° for the dog days.  Not much relief as far as a Yankee might be concerned, but danged if we Texans won’t be pulling out our long-sleeved shirts a few months early.

There will also, under this model, be increased chances for relieving rains during the August – September – October timeframe, though still not particularly high.  The real soaking rains from an El Niño don’t arrive until December and January.  So long as we get a repreive from the heat, we won’t be complaining.

Happy farming!