How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Frying Pan

"Be prepared to appreciate what you meet."
--Fremen proverb, Frank Herbert's 'Dune'

With very little fanfare last November, the International Energy Agency announced that by their calculations (which we at Myrtle’s place believe are conservative by an order of magnitude), the point of no return for avoiding a 2° Celcius increase in average global temperatures is coming in the next five years -- that we are on a collision course with having over 420 parts per million of the atmosphere, at all levels, comprised of carbon dioxide, and that due to qualities of persistence, at that point there will be nothing we can do to stop a host of negative consequences:

• Melting of all arctic sea ice every summer and possibly not completely freezing over in winter, either
• Sea level increases sufficient to swamp low-lying islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but also negatively affecting to one degree or another numerous low-lying cities in the developed world, including New York City; New Orleans; Houston; Miami, and on and on
• Persistent drought from which places like the American Southwest, and the central plains (particularly those areas fed by aquifers like the Ogallala) cannot recover, in any way
• Extreme events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, on a more regular basis and with more intensity when they do occur
• Shorter growing seasons in many locations due to extreme heat, particularly high nighttime low temperatures which thwart set of many different types of fruit and vegetable crops
• Reduced chilling hours required by many varieties of stone fruit and other plants requiring vernalization
• Extinction of many plants with narrow temperature tolerances… examples include coffee and chocolate trees
• Shortages of water not just in drought-prone areas, but also in coastal areas where rising sea levels also mean a rise in the salinity of the water table

We could go on, but, really, do you want us to?

While we are astonished on a regular basis that there are still folk out there too dense to pay attention to what is happening, the fact is, it really is too late to bother with trying to convince people about the danger of our addiction to fossil fuels – we can no longer prevent global warming, nor can we mitigate it all that effectively, either.

No, what we are left with is learning to adapt.

Fortunately, coming from a long line of Celtic forebears on both sides of our family tree, Myrtle Maintenance Personnel are that wonderful combination of foolhardy, optimistic, and stubborn.  We feel quite ready for the challenge, and on some twisted level, we are even looking forward to it.

So, what, exactly is the challenge, and why do we feel optimistic while going into it?

In a nutshell, the challenge is to adapt to a world in which the difficulty of several elements which we currently take for granted will constitute the rule and measure of personal and social success – and to globalize from that level, the success of our whole species.

What do we take for granted now that we will soon no longer be able to take for granted?

·    Availability of nutritious food
·    Availability of clean potable water
·    Ability to keep cool in summer and warm in winter
·    Ability to get from here to there in a reasonably affordable manner

Those are challenges enough to be going on.  There will be others, of course, related to the shifting of societies and economies northward, and away from our current form of resource consumption towards something new, but we’re thinking here on a micro level, the level of homeowners and families struggling to survive, rather than on the macro level of urban planners figuring out how to provide livable spaces for millions of people at once.

So… what are we prepared to do about these challenges?

Availability of nutritious food

This is probably the easiest challenge posed by climate change for most people in the developed world.  There are exceptions, of course, based on local variables, but in general it is possible to grow enough food for the typical family of four on as little as a quarter acre of ground.  In some places, even less space than that would be sufficient.

In addition to the typical vegetable and herb garden, use of spaces currently taken up by purely aesthetic plants or knick-knacks can be replaced by productive plants – citrus instead of decorative ficus on a porch or in an alcove; rather than a hanging pot of bouganvillia, a hanging industrial pickle bucket with holes cut in the side for tomatoes, peppers or cucumbers to descend; or (one of our favorites, popular in many African cities) a burlap sack with holes in the side for potato plants to poke out.  In short, on just the typical balcony, or in the typical urban window, there is enough light and moisture to grow a much larger percentage of the typical diet than is generally appreciated.

A relatively small chicken coop with a relatively small run (say, six feet by six feet) would give three or four hens far more space than their factory farmed compatriots ever dream of getting; three or four hens could supply the entire protein needs of a family of four without even counting in however much protein they might acquire from vegetable sources (which, frankly, typically exceeds the protein needs of practically anyone practically anywhere – protein deficiency is a vastly exaggerated nutritional problem).

And dwarf varieties of goat need less space than many of the dogs currently occupying so much space in our currently underutilized backyards.  We don’t know about you, but we’d much rather milk a goat than a dog.

In short, the availability of nutritious food will only be a problem for those who simply refuse to take advantage of their opportunities.

Availability of clean potable water

Water fit for human consumption may well be the greatest challenge faced by humanity in the coming decades.  Already, vast numbers of people in the developing world live without sanitary sources of water for drinking, cleaning and cooking.  The single greatest inducement for migration in the coming century of climate change will be the search for water.

In the developed world, we have come to take clean water coming out of our faucets so much for granted that it is difficult for many folk to fathom the possibility that even here, clean water is not a given.  However, the cold, hard facts are these:  many areas are served by water pumped from sources which cannot indefinitely support the demands currently placed upon them, let alone the increased demands which will be placed upon them by the joint pressures of increasing temperatures and increasing populations.

The two primary examples are the desert Southwest and the central plains served by the Ogallala aquifer – Nevada, Utah, Arizona and California all draw water from rivers and reservoirs which are shrinking even in wet years, and those years are becoming fewer and further between.  Northern Texas up through the Dakotas are served by pumps tapping into an aquifer which is only very very slowly refilled by rainfall, which is increasingly rare for the region.  When these sources are no longer available, these regions have no other sources to which they may turn.

Even areas with plentiful moisture, however, are not immune to the effects of climate change.  New York City, as one example, is served by sources of fresh water which are not likely to dry up any time in the next several tens of thousands of years – unfortunately, though, those sources are likely to be increasingly tainted and less and less fit for human consumption.  The entire Hudson River valley is slowly but surely increasing in salinity because even small changes in sea level create drastic changes in the chemistry of the water table, often tens or even hundreds of miles inland.  Houston, New Orleans, and many other Gulf Coast communities are also subject to this phenomenon.

So what can we do about this problem?

For one thing, collect rainwater.  The runoff from a ½” rainfall event on a 1,000 square foot roof (smaller than most American homes) will easily fill a 100 gallon tank.  Even in a relatively dry location such as West Texas, where rainfall is often in the 10” per year range, that means that the typical family (living in a 1500 square foot home) should be able to collect somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 gallons of rainwater to supplement whatever other sources are available (well or river water, most likely).

Bathing requirements might have to change, but not radically; most water usage would not need to change much, if at all.  Obviously, xeriscaping would be preferred to the planting of lawns in such a scheme… but that is true already, given how expensive lawn maintenance can be in areas where rates for city water supplies are high due to laws of supply and demand.  Industrial use of fresh water will have to be radically altered – cooling stations, for example, need to be re-engineered to make use of briny waters unfit for human or animal consumption (this is a difficult task, but not an impossible one, once the necessity for change forces us as a society to think seriously about it).

In places where rainfall is more hospitably reliable, rainwater can easily supply all needs potable and otherwise.  It is easier to filter or distill water for one family than it is to do so for an entire city; as a consequence, it just makes more sense to collect water from as local a source as possible – and nothing is more local than one’s home – and treat it there.  The salinity of the water table therefore ceases to be an issue.

Some places, of course, will still be impacted beyond help, but as most people do not live in Yemen, Turkmenistan or rural Arizona, we will have to merely sympathize from a distance and wait for those folk to migrate to relatively wetter climates.

Ability to keep cool in summer and warm in winter

In the Brazos Valley, we really don’t have too much to worry about in terms of keeping warm in winter – all three days of our typical winter are perfectly comfortable, provided one stays out of the wind.

Keeping cool in summer, though, is another matter altogether.

We have written before about the wisdom of painting one’s roof white as a means of reflecting heat-generating sunlight in summer.  Obviously sufficiently insulating one’s attic is another necessary bit of home maintenance in preparing for the brutally hot summers we will be facing in the decades to come.  Other forms of weatherization for both cold and hot weather should be looked into as well, such as adding good weather stripping to doors and windows, and replacing merely decorative curtains with more functional tapestries which keep heat inside in winter, and reflect heat back outside in summer.

Landscaping, too, can assist in temperature control – if you don’t have tall shade trees on the western exposure of your home, it’s a good idea to look into planting shade trees or a tall arbor of some kind on that side of the house.  A tall trellis, or even vines grown directly on a brick wall are exceptional heat barriers; the green leaves of an English Ivy, or of any variety of grape, or of a half-dozen other decorative or fruiting vine, can reduce the temperature in western-facing rooms by as much as 10-15° Fahrenheit.

Additionally, two different though related considerations of economy must be evaluated when planning for future cooling technologies.  We will likely see (and soon, at that) increasing stretches of consecutive 100°-plus days; it is simply not tenable for the very young, very old, sick, or disabled to survive in this sort of climate without some means of staying cool and hydrated; air-conditioning is the single most effective means of surviving extreme heat.  However, air-conditioning is likely to become increasingly expensive both in terms of personal economy and also in terms of ecological impact.

Both of these factors need to be resolved as we embark upon our future in the age of global warming.

The biggest cost savings are likely to come from changing our sources of electricity from our current emphasis on burning fossil fuels to wind, solar and geothermal sources of energy.  In particular, home cooling systems dependent upon geothermal energy are already increasing in popularity, and improvements to the technology mean that soon, over the lifetime of the components of the system are likely to be much less expensive than conventionally powered air conditioning systems.

Solar powered A/C units are also increasing in popularity, particularly because these units allow a homeowner to maintain most of their current electrical infrastructure, only changing out an isolated portion of their home grid (albeit the most expensive part!), thus avoiding complicated power load calculations.

For those whose homes are not so large (increasingly another good idea, by the way, since smaller homes are easier and cheaper to heat in winter and cool in summer), it might be possible to shut off a few rooms during the day, and only cool one or two rooms with either a window unit or a standalone A/C unit.  Many mainstream architects scoff at the notion… but that is because their frame of reference is the mainstream American desire for a large home.  One of the biggest benefits of the “microhome” revolution is not just that folk with tiny houses can take advantage of the best interior design ideas available at IKEA; it is that for just a tiny fraction of the cost of a central heating system, they can cool their entire houses with just a $100 window unit. 

It is entirely conceivable that a small home-built solar array smaller than the roof of a typical carport could be used to provide all the power necessary for such a small-scale A/C system, which means not only would all the comfort of 20th century American decadence still be available, but at an almost microscopic percentage of the historical cost of such comfort.

One thing is certain, however:  such comfort cannot be maintained with the status quo.  A 2,000 square foot home will no longer be within the purview of the average family’s budget simply because few will be able to afford to cool such a home in summer the way they have always been used to doing.

We at Myrtle’s place do not believe this is a bad thing.  It’s time to simplify anyway; this is just one more excuse to do so.  And, frankly, our European and Asian guests have always expressed quiet amusement that we describe our own 900 square foot home as “small”… because by comparison with what they are used to seeing, well, it might not be as gaudy as most American homes… but it’s still pretty big.

Ability to get from here to there in a reasonably affordable manner

One of the more amusing internet memes we have seen recently was a quote attributed only to “the Mayor of Bogota”; which mayor, we can only guess, but even if it was made up by some guy in Peoria, it’s still a pretty good slogan:  “A developed nation is not one in which the poor have cars; it is one in which the wealthy take public transportation.”

Barring the sudden onset of wisdom necessary for an immediate decision to build useful infrastructure, however, we foresee the need to rely on other trends to bring American transportation habits into line with future needs.  For several years now, the trend has been for the typical American driver to put fewer and fewer annual miles on their vehicles.

As petrochemical scarcity becomes a problem over the course of the next few decades, this trend is likely to continue, even with the advent of alternative fuel vehicles.  The dirty little secret of electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and liquefied natural gas vehicles is that even if the fuel is not petroleum, the components used in construction of the vehicle still require a lot of natural resources which are either scarce in and of themselves, or which require the use of increasingly scarce fuel sources in their acquisition.

There are several strategies to mitigating the high cost of getting from here to there, though, so we are not particularly worried about the fact that these costs will likely only continue to rise.  First and foremost… stop going from here to there.  A disturbingly large percentage of the travel we are currently addicted to undertaking is simply frivolous.  There is no reason other than vanity to buy a home thirty or forty miles away from our workplaces.  There is no reason other than vanity to vacation a thousand miles away from home.

Likewise, there is no reason to transport goods halfway around the world when they can be produced either at home, or only a few miles away from home.  We have already addressed the notion that self-sustenance vis-à-vis food security is a simple undertaking; in addition to providing  a source of fresh and healthy food, however, growing our own fruits and vegetables would go a long way to reducing transportation costs.  Currently, the average item of produce travels more than 1,000 miles from the farmer’s land to our kitchen table.  Little wonder, then, that the resources involved are the object of high demand, driving prices ever higher as the supply dwindles.

These costs, though, go away if we listen to the Buddhist maxim:  “Don’t just do something… Sit there!”

Cautiously optimistic for most folk

There are accidents of birth and station which are simply unfair, and have always been so; global warming will make the unfairness of the rich-poor divide even worse.  There is no sugar coating the fact that untold scores of people will suffer, and often die, as a direct result of the thoughtless consumption ethic which has dominated the industrialized world – indeed, predating industrialization, though only reaching its current nightmarish peak with the advent of centralized wealth which came on the heels of capitalism – and there is no escaping the negative consequences of the reckless behavior of our forebears, not to mention ourselves.

However, all is not doom and gloom.  The original strengths of our species are still with us – hominids were never the biggest, nor the strongest, nor the swiftest.  We have almost always been the most adaptable species on the block, however, and we will soon be facing a new test of that adaptability.

One would hope that learning from our mistakes would be one of the adaptations we adopt in the near future; necessity is sometimes a cruel teacher, but we at Myrtle’s place are hopeful that her lessons will be taken to heart.  We believe it is likely that most people around the globe will have the opportunity – and hopefully the wisdom – to move away from our historically destructive disregard of the world around us.

Now then… if you’ll excuse us, we’re going back outside.  It’s almost Spring planting time.

Happy farming!

Hot Times, Winter in the City....

"Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day."
--Anton Chekhov, 'Uncle Vanya' (1897)

For the better part of two months, ever since in late November/early December 2012 it was announced with great fanfare by the National Climatic Data Center that 2012 was officially the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States, right-wing conspiracy nuts went to great lengths to say “See?  It’s a hoax!  They talk about global warming, and then only produce local data!”

Well, brace yourselves.  Yes, the unexpected has happened.  The global data has been released, and sure enough, 2012 was not the warmest year on record for the entire Earth.  It was only the 10th warmest.  Aren’t we all feeling relieved now?

Snark intended.

Alarmingly, in addition to being a top 10 year for warm temperatures, 2012 was the warmest “La Niña year” on record.  Usually, La Niña cools global temperatures slightly, which suggests that if it were not for sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean, last year would have been even more of a scorcher than it already was.

Other highlights from the NCDC report:

• 2012 was the 36th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average.  “The last below-average annual temperature was 1976.”
• Most of North and South America, most of Europe and Africa, western, southern, and far northeastern Asia all experienced above average temperatures; Alaska, far western Canada, central Asia, and a few island nations experienced cooler than average temperatures.
• Ice melt in the Arctic was not only record breaking, it was record shattering; peak ice melt is usually measured in late September, but the record was broken by the 3rd week of August.
• The global annual average temperature was 0.90°C (1.62°F) above the 20th century average.  Contiguous U.S. temperatures were 1.0°C (1.8°F) above the long-term average, and we beat the old record for hottest year (1998) by 0.6°C (1.0°F).
• While precipitation averages were almost exactly statistically normal… extremes were more common, with some parts of the world experiencing extreme drought, and others experiencing record flooding.

The upshot, of course, is that global warming is real, and continuing.  Denialists will continue to spout nonsense every time a scientific survey is released, but we ought not to allow the background noise to drown out the cold (hot?) hard truth.

Meanwhile, there are numerous means of adapting to the warmer, more turbulent era upon which we are embarking, and this weekend we will elucidate on some of the reasons to be optimistic in the face of climate change.

Seriously, there are some reasons.  Unless you are from Vanuatu or Bangladesh, in which case, sorry, you’re fighting a losing battle, and will undoubtedly have to migrate soon.  Most of the world, though, can make some lifestyle changes, and live comfortable, productive, and even happy lives in the hot new world.

More on that later.  Anton Chekhov was not alone over a hundred years ago in seeing the danger of human disregard for the environment; unlike Russian novelists, though, it is our job to paint a picture of a more hopeful world, even if the facts are bleak.  We accept that challenge.  We’ll explain how after we finish our weekend chores.

Happy farming!

The Fine Line Between Blind Tradition... and Blind Innovation

"What was life like in the colonies? Probably the best word to describe it would be 'colonial'."
--Dave Barry

We tried to come up with a more polite way to say it, but there just isn’t one:  practically everyone (ourselves included) is a hypocrite when it comes to thinking about the past.  To be fair, it is rather difficult for anyone to escape an uncomfortable disjoint in perspectives about the past – a nostalgia for the mud embodied in talk of “The Good Old Days” juxtaposed with a belief that history is an arc of progress wherein things must necessarily be getting better and better.

Everyone is prone to one extreme or the other.  We at Myrtle’s place tend to get lumped into the former point of view rather than the latter, based on the fact that we are trying to restore some fairly traditional parts of daily family life to our own little corner of the world.  Growing as much of our own food as we can, raising chickens, even drying our clothes on a line outside instead of in an electric clothes dryer, these are things that some folk would point to in justifying their belief that we are “traditionalists”.

On the other hand, we have absolutely no desire to return to the living conditions of our forebears.  The last three to four decades or so have seen air pollution, noise pollution, water pollution, light pollution, etc. ad nauseum, coupled with atrocious dietary, sleep, work, and play habits in the industrialized world which have started to eat away at the improvements we made in personal health and hygiene in the 20th century, but make no mistake – those improvements were real, and they were impressive.

And “The Good Old Days” just weren’t all they are made out to be.  Around 1900 C.E., New York City was one of the filthiest places on Earth, with smoke and soot and grime everywhere, mounds of animal feces in the streets, no clean water, no clean food, half-hearted and occasionally absent sanitation workers, toxic fumes in every home, lead paint on every wall.  Even the wealthy were living amidst vermin, contagion, and grime.  And food?  It came carted in from the countryside, covered in flies, and of questionable origin and healthfulness.  Late night comedians notwithstanding, modern New York is spotless by comparison.

But that’s just the big city, right? 

Wrong.

Not only did every major municipal center suffer the ills aforementioned, but country life was pretty unpleasant, too.  Indoor plumbing was only just becoming possible, let alone popular, which meant that outhouses had to be built for every farmhouse dotting the countryside.  All too often, these buildings were constructed with convenience (particularly mid-winter convenience) in mind, rather than sanitation.  Frequently, well water was drawn far too close to barns or latrines – just imagine the number of wells placed in between the outhouse and the barn!  Little wonder, really, that so many folk died so young back then.

The more common (and less unpleasant) nostalgic picture of the idealized past does, however, point towards some important truths about how we ought to be trying to live our lives now, even if it does not provide an accurate blueprint on how to live up to those truths.

For one thing, nostalgia almost always focuses on small themes – home, community, friends and family – rather than grand themes such as arcs of history.  Outside of a few grandiloquent politicians, nobody really wants to spend all their time focused on Manifest Destiny, or the White Man’s Burden, or Noblesse Oblige, or any of the other big themes which in the past fueled American culture and caused so many boring debates at so many stuffy cocktail parties.

No, what most folk think of when they think of the past at all is rocking chairs, garden fresh watermelon, innocent romance, picnics in the park, family and friends, somebody strumming a guitar or a banjo in the background, and most of all, nothing disturbing to think about. 

It is far too easy for nostalgic persons to fall into the trap of never trying to solve problems simply because they refuse to recognize that those problems exist – it is equally true, though, that the healthiest, happiest people are those who find some kind of equanimity in their lives.  Remove turmoil, and we go a long way towards making things better, first for ourselves, and then for those around us.

In context of olde tymes and new epochs, what this means is that we ought not deny our problems exist, nor should we allow solving those problems to lead us to traumatically undo the fabric of those things we have decided we care about.  Translation?  When fixing systemic problems, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

An excellent example, and one which makes our point (and yes, we do have one) best, is the destruction of an entire small-town, agriculture-oriented way of life, which came as a result of a solution to a problem ironically based entirely on questions of agricultural efficiency.  How to feed a hungry planet has been – justifiably – one of the principle concerns of leaders everywhere, for all of recorded and most of unrecorded history.  And in the 20th century, the so-called “Green Revolution” appeared to  solve this problem in unprecedented fashion.

The advent of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides increased the scope of farming in our heartland by orders of magnitude.  Bushels-per-acre for everything from alfalfa to zucchini increased ten-and-twenty-fold.  And in the process, we created dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, where effluvium sucked all the oxygen out of the water, and fish and coral died off and are unlikely to ever return.  And we drove small family farmers out of business, and automated practically everything, increasing small town unemployment and unemployability.  And we created a massive healthcare headache with millions of immigrant farm laborers suffering from a lifetime of chemical exposure.  And by feeding the bones of discarded animals to their next of kin, we created new nightmares like bovine spongeiform encephalopathy (BCE), better known as “Mad Cow Disease”.

Much of the developing world viewed the good which came from the Green Revolution – and it is hard to argue that large surplus supplies of grain were not largely “good” – with understandable envy.  Hollywood melodramas aside, most of the world’s leaders are in their positions not because of a lust for power, but instead because of a genuine concern for the welfare of their people, however well or unwell their applications of those concerns may manifest themselves.  And leaders in places like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Chad, Eritrea, or Sudan, just to name a handful, would obviously want to bend over backwards in order to achieve the degree of food wealth which the United States has enjoyed for almost a century now.  Food security and water scarcity (a topic worthy of its own future posting, we promise) are more important to large portions of the world’s population than practically any other considerations.

We are hopeful, however, that they employ a more thoughtful and sustainable approach than the one our own country embarked upon in the wake of the Great Depression.  Squeezing the land for every ounce of nutrient content has filled our grocery shelves, but it has also made us fat, lazy, diseased, arrogant, and unconnected.  We talk on phones we would not have the first clue how to build on our own, drive in heavily computerized automobiles we can no longer fix ourselves, and eat food which comes from God only knows where, grown God only knows how.

It does not have to be this way.  Every year at Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza, we find that pretty much all of our visitors have their own chicken stories.  This is because until just two generations ago, practically everyone in this country had chickens.  The vast majority of folk also used to grow their own fruits and vegetables, too.

And not just country folk, and not just homeowners.   Most tenements in most big cities had rooftop vegetable gardens, though they were limited by the availability of water, and time (particularly before the Progressive Era, when thanks to labor unions, the average workday shrunk from as much as 12 to 16 hours down to a more manageable 8-10). 

The move completely away from self-sufficiency did not really begin until the post-World War II era, when the ideal home stopped being a place where food was produced, and started becoming a box in which goods could be stored.  When we moved to newly built suburbs, away from both the city center, and away from the countryside, we got rid of our chickens.  We spent our time driving to and from work, instead of kneeling in the garden, tending to our crops.

A lot more was lost in this transition, too.  Not only did we stop being responsible for our own food, we stopped spending as much time together as families and communities.  And while we had heretofore depended on shipped in food to supplement what we grew ourselves, we were suddenly depending on large agribusiness to provide all our nutrient needs.  Suddenly, farming had to be big business.  Which meant that even more people would move away from the countryside. 

Small town America is the essence of an idealized picture that cannot exist, given this vicious circle.  And ironically, those who champion the small town most are frequently part of the very industries and political movements which have doomed that lifestyle.

A move away from luxury and back towards subsistence is, in our view, the best solution to many of the problems we created in the last half of the 20th century.  The best part is, it isn’t even that hard to achieve.  We love our land here at Myrtle’s place, because we have a full half-acre to play with; not only do we have the chicken coop, but we also have roughly 2,500 square feet of garden – including the herb garden – and also not one, but two rainwater collection ponds, and a bunch of fruit trees and vines.  All that having been said, you don’t need any land in order to start transitioning to a simpler subsistence-based economy. 

In Nairobi, for instance, there are entire apartment buildings where you will see a huge potato sack hanging from every balcony, full of dirt, and with vegetables growing from slits in the sides.  Guerilla gardeners have laid claim to alleyways and any public patch of dirt, to grow corn, amaranth, and practically anything else they can think of to sell in inner city farmer’s markets.  One can prepare a year’s worth of meals there without buying anything that came from a traditional “farm”.

And really, when you think about it, all gardening is “container” gardening.  Whether your container is a 9” clay pot sitting on a windowsill, or a 5’x5’ raised bed in your backyard, or a 1,000,000 hectare wheat field in the countryside, there is a measurable quantity of soil to be maintained, which will yield a measurable amount of produce. 

Most of the problems related to poor soil tilth – including not only the failure of a given plot of ground to produce after it has been overfarmed, but also the problems for the neighboring environment related to runoff from the container – are actually much easier to handle when the scope and scale is smaller.  Raised beds in the backyard, much like the clay pots on a balcony, represent spaces in which the addition of nutritious compost is relatively easy, and the possibility of runoff into neighboring watersheds is also relatively simple to control.

What we are talking about, then, is scaling back the nature of “farming” to be less about feeding hordes of people on a few large, extensive plots of land, and instead feeding smaller groups of people on many more, but much smaller, containers of soil.  Change the scale, and the practices can be made healthier without damaging the communities involved.

Subsistence farming has traditionally gotten a bad rap – so much so that children’s history textbooks frequently speak of the “improvement” of moving away from subsistence based economies.  And in some palpable senses, there is truth to this prejudice.  Slash and burn techniques, for example, are contributing to deforestation in the Amazon; nomadic herding led to desertification in much of central Asia; the list of other ills encumbered by subsistence lifestyles throughout the world is lengthy.

However, what we are talking about is a new model for subsistence.  We are not talking about some 40-acres-and-a-mule government sponsored restructuring of society, whether American or otherwise.  We are talking about collectively taking individual responsibility for our own nutrient needs.  The Nairobi model, in particular, is inspiring, because Nairobi, Kenya, has so many other problems.  It is really one of the last places around the globe where you would expect folk to be blithely self-sufficient, and yet, many of them are. 

Faced with immense population density, and most of the troubles which face most of the other large cities in the developing world, a solution to this most basic of problems – how can I get enough to eat – has been propounded not by any international agency, but by a few hardy inner city pioneers.  In the face of global warming, air pollution, water scarcity, etc., however, they do not have enough wherewithal to solve even their own problems, let alone those of other people susceptible to want and hunger.  Everyone, everywhere, can do something, but no one, anywhere, can do everything.

Government must get involved at some point if in no other way than to clear obstacles to personal responsibility – laws such as those in some U.S. communities against growing vegetables in one’s front yard, for example.  Or restrictive ordinances on backyard chickens.  Subsidies for agribusiness, too, tend to depress the availability of resources for small-scale producers.  And protection of insidious organizations like Monsanto, whose patents on their invasive varieties of genetically modified crops, also tend to squeeze out smaller producers in favor of factory farms.

On the whole, though, it really is up to individuals, whether living in College Station, Texas, or Mt. Union, Pennsylvania, or Tokyo, Japan, to take back control of the production of what we consume.  In the Colonial era, North America was dotted with small towns and villages where virtually all needs were provided either by oneself or one’s neighbors.  Ships and wagons brought luxuries from other places; what went on one’s plate came from “out back” or “across the way”.  Much the same has historically been true everywhere in the world; and the solution to the ills created by getting away from that model is also the same pretty much everywhere.

Growing more of our own food, whether in garden plots, or in raised beds, or in containers on porches and window sills, increases food security, decreases pollution, improves personal economies, and improves nutrition.  We can get back to the ideal food production model without also bringing back cholera, witch burnings, and bad fashion.  Well, okay, maybe not without bringing back bad fashion.  But two out of three ain’t bad.

Happy farming!