Is that a cover crop in your garden, or are you just happy to see me?

We have written before about the importance of soil quality.  We are of an accord with a local horticulture personality who recently argued that Texas gardeners deserve some kind of medal for their heroic battles with nutrient poor soils; we are equally certain that if we are ever famous for anything, it will be for our advocacy of the universal benefit to be derived from spreading chicken-poop compost on anything you want to grow in the ground.

However, chicken poop and rotting leaves are not the only means of enriching one’s topsoil.  As part of our never ending quest to maximize our efficiency, we have begun researching the most effective possible cover crops for our little patch of heaven, and several candidates display the kinds of qualities we are looking for.

A good cover crop is like anything else – it is only “good” if it does what you want it to do.  We want cover crops to be a lot like everything else we put effort into.  They should do more than one thing.

• A cover crop should be a “green manure”.  A good cover crop ought to affix nutrients, particularly nitrogen, to the soil both to enhance the following crop, and also to prevent nitrate runoff, which is one of the more egregious forms of water pollution from agriculture and home lawn care.
• A cover crop ought to be aesthetically pleasing; a hay field may look attractive to the farmer who knows what he is looking at, but it may look like nothing but tall weeds to his neighbors, or more importantly in an urban setting, to the city code enforcement office.
• A cover crop ought to have some sort of production value – either as food, as herb or supplement, or even as animal feed.
• A cover crop ought to be a “companion plant”, adding proven value to other crops in your garden much like in the “3 Sisters” farming method.
• A cover crop ought to choke out the kinds of weeds which tend to persist from season to season so that, even if they reemerge later to compete with your follow crop, their success rate will be greatly diminished.
• A cover crop ought to blend with the general theme of your garden, providing a kind of segue from one area to the next.  Permaculturalists frequently talk about production values being highest “at the edges”; a cover crop is a way to transition from one edge to the next – from pasture to vineyard or orchard, for example.

We have found several potential covers which we will be testing over the next several planting seasons which fit these criteria to a Texas ‘T’.  Some are commonly used throughout Texas already; others, we hope to be part of making popular, if only for novelty’s sake.

Red clover is something we have been interested in growing for quite some time.  This is actually a fairly common cover crop throughout the northern tier of states, because it is not especially adapted to our hotter climate.  In fact, it is only advisable to grow in Texas in the fall and winter months.  Most cooperatives will stock crimson clover, but not the red, which we believe is a shame. 

Red clover is not all that different from crimson or other clovers in terms of its ability to affix nitrogen – pretty much any clover you plant will be excellent in this regard – however, the red variety has a tremendous advantage over many of its counterparts in its multifunctionality.  As an herbal supplement, red clover is used in the treatment of cancer, showing tremendous potential as a complementary tool in making traditional cancer protocols more effective.  Drinking an effusion of red clover tea has also been shown to be effective in a number of gynecological regimens, not only for breast cancer treatment, but also for cramping and as an aid in reducing the severity of symptoms resulting from uterine fibroids.  While the best evidence is anecdotal, there is reason to believe red clover even has benefit for some women with fertility problems, as well.

A summer crop we will be experimenting with next year is buckwheat.  Since we have decided to experiment with quinoa and amaranth, we are planning to call this the "year of going grainy"; buckwheat is perhaps most famous as a pancake ingredient, but it is also a useful cover crop.  It has a short growing season, is relatively drought and heat tolerant, and has a propensity to choke out the nutsedges and other noxious weeds which have free reign in most Texas gardens from late June through the end of the summer growing season – a season, we might point out, in which precious little is usually actually growing in a Texas garden.

In fact, in late July, it is a rare thing to find a Texas garden with much more than a few brave pepper plants, maybe a pumpkin vine or two, and a patch of okra.  For a gardener trying to maximize yields, a lot of the spring planting results in dead vines or stalks by the early part of July, and by then it is just too hot to plant anything else.  Buckwheat, however, is our hopeful answer.  If it works, it will solve a serious riddle for us – namely, what to do while waiting for the blast furnace to cool off enough to put our fall salsa plants back into production.

Winter rye is a fairly common cover, particularly for cattle ranchers, because it makes a pretty decent hay crop.  It is also fairly common for cotton or other cash crop farmers in Texas because, especially in areas where winter wheat is not a possibility, winter rye is the best fast-growing plant to choke out competitive weeds between the fall harvest and an early spring planting of a crop like corn or sorghum. 

In our garden, we are not going to use rye very often, but when we do, it will be partly with an eye to weed and pest control, and partly with an eye to having greens available for our chickens in the middle of the winter.  Kale, spinach and cabbage are all in production in the middle of January, but frankly we’d like to save that for ourselves – we appreciate all our hens do for us, but there just isn’t much to be harvested in the dark of winter, and we’d like to put as much of it on our own plates as we can.  Giving rye to the girls is one way to accomplish that.

Finally, we come to a novelty cover crop which we only recently discovered.  During the northern hemisphere winter, an inordinate percentage of our national tomato consumption comes from Florida; this has presented some interesting soil quality challenges in the Sunshine State, which have lately been answered by the use of a unique cover crop native to South America that goes by a variety of names:  “Cow Itch”, “Velvet Bean” or Mucuna pruriens.  The plant is a trailing bean vine, and like most beans, is enormously successful at affixing nitrogen in the soil; it is for this reason that Florida tomato farmers make extensive use of Mucuna pruriens in their year-round production schemes.

The seed-pods are unusual for beans, basically looking like small fuzzy pouches; the fuzz consists of fairly long, wiry hairs which poke fairly sharply, and cause extreme irritation.  Joke shop afficionados will recognize this irritation – the hairs are actually used as a key ingredient in manufactured itching powder formulations.

The beans are relatively small and look for all the world like black beans – turtle beans, as some folk know them.  We have not yet sampled them to see what they taste like, but we are fairly hopeful that, if the taste is not too overwhelming (and no anecdotal evidence so far uncovered has suggested that it will be) we will be able to use them in similar fashion. 

Black beans, for the uninitiated, form the basis for most bean-based recipes in the form of Tex-Mex associated with Austin, our de facto home.  We may be refugees living in College Station, but a corner table at Kerbey Lane or Mother’s Café is really where we would prefer to be, and if you order nachos in either location, they will come with black beans.

A more traditional use for Mucuna pruriens in its native habitat is as a hot beverage; several tribes in the Amazon basin roast the beans much like we roast either coffee or yaupon, and then brew a hot beverage with the ground up beans.

There is no caffeine in Mucuna pruriens, however.  The beverage is imbibed for an entirely different reason.  Mucuna pruriens is shockingly high in L-Dopa; consumption of velvet beans results in a dopamine “high” which elevates mood, as dopamine is the essential building block of that neurotransmitter miracle known as “happiness”, and it also has, um, other elevating effects.  We’ve never really been fans of raw oysters, and now we’ve discovered that we don’t need to be.  Of all purported aphrodisiacs in the literature, Mucuna pruriens is one of the few which has documented clinical studies to back it up; oysters won’t grow in the yard, but velvet beans will.

Of course, rest assured that we will only be growing it to keep the tomatoes happy.  Myrtle’s place is a family establishment, after all.

Happy farming!

There's a Certain Freedom in Being Completely Screwed...

Public debt is a hot button these days.  Most people have the impression that they personally have to balance their budgets, and are mystified that our government does not.  This of course is a gross oversimplification and, frankly, an expression of economic illiteracy, but it is fairly universal.  And it is understandable, given that debt this large cannot be paid back without serious pain.  However, it needs to be placed in context.

The United States ranks 47th in the world in terms of size of our public debt as a percentage of our gross domestic product (GDP), with our national debt standing at 52.9% of what we produce as a nation every year.  Our debt is large, but our production is monumentally huge, globally speaking, so we do okay – there is room for improvement, certainly, but we are not in the same ballpark as some other countries noted as fiscal basketcases.

Greece is the example most often noted lately, because they have undertaken extreme austerity measures to get their debt under control – their national debt currently amounts to 113.4% of their GDP.  This is high enough to rank them as the 7th most debt-laden economy in the world, and their austerity measures to correct this debt have led to riots and full-scale social upheaval.

The worst debt-offender is Zimbabwe, a nation which has struggled under the radar with a quasi-socialist dictatorship (emphasis on dictator, as philosophy really has nothing to do with Mr. Mugabe’s stranglehold on power -- he plays "Robin Hood" as a sometimes brilliant advertising campaign), and is now paying – or not paying, as the case may be – for their fiscal mismanagement to the tune of a debt equalling 282.6% of their GDP.

Numbers 2 and 6 on the list might surprise most observers, however, whose economic news comes from the front page of USA Today.  The 2nd biggest share of debt belongs to Japan, a nation most Americans think of as an economic powerhouse.  Number 6 is Italy, a nation in constant turmoil economically and politically, though not in our consciousness as a “troubled” nation in any real sense.  They have enormous personal savings in place, which offsets their national debt; personal responsibility, in other words, stabilizes their nationally irresponsible spending habits.

In fact, most of the list of debtor standouts are not countries undergoing any kind of major upheaval:  Iceland at number 9, Belgium 11, France 15, Portugal 17, Canada 18, Austria 21, England/Great Britain 22, Netherlands 27, Norway 29, Brazil 30, Ireland 36, United Arab Emirates 42, and Spain 45 are all nations with significantly more debt than the United States, none of which are under any kind of eminent collapse threat, at least as compared to their fellow nations.  They are all feeling the pinch, but not in danger of going under.

Interestingly, having mentioned Zimbabwe and post-Soviet communism, China is number 109; Venezuela is number 106; Cuba is number 75.  There are not a lot of communist or even communist leaning countries left in the world, but there are enough to spot a trend – although it is counterintuitive, they do not have large public debt burdens.  They all have better debt/GDP ratios than the United States.  They are also not nations where we would wish to live.  We would like to emphasize that we only included Venezuela in this list for the sake of argument; Hugo Chavez is belligerent, but he's no philosopher.

Maybe the size of a nation’s public debt vis-à-vis their GDP is not all that significant a measurement.  Fiscal conservatives rule the roost in nations which are mostly stagnant and bland, with no real growth, little standard of living, and no leadership on the important environmental or social issues of the coming century.  Maybe, just maybe, we ought to focus more on what that money is being spent on, and less and less on whether it is being spent at all.

The same is true for individual families.  We at Big Myrtle’s place are too cheap to spend a lot of money on frills and thrills, so we don’t own iPhones or drive a Prius, nor have we been to Disneyworld or even out of state for that matter in recent memory, but we conversely don’t believe that not going into debt is of itself a legitimate business plan.  Some time in the next couple of years we intend to borrow money, for example, to put up solar panels and convert our house from a grid drain to a grid provider.

This weekend we are going to track down cheap alternatives to new gutters for the roof, so as to collect water in the “gently used” rain barrels we recently had donated by friendly neighbors (Thanks, Brooke and Kathleen!), and while we would dearly love to get the gutters for free also, we recognize that we will probably have to pay for them.

It turns out the strongest measure of the strength of an economy may well be how much collectively the households in a nation spend.  The United States is measured as the world’s largest economy by GDP, and that is equalled by our rank in terms of household consumption.  At $10,010,111,000,000 in 2008, we spent a little more than three times as much as Japan who came in number two with $2,838,964,000,000.  For those of you trying to count the zeroes, U.S. Americans spend roughly $10 trillion a year; the Japanese spend roughly $3 trillion a year.

Equally telling, we spend as households roughly 71% of GDP; #2 Japan spends 58% of GDP; #3 Germany spends 56% of GDP; #4 Great Britain spends 64% of GDP; #5 France spends 57% of GDP.

Our economy, in other words, is driven by the sale of items, and items are only sold when there are people buying them.

The question, then, is not “should we spend” but rather “what should we spend on”?  Our vote at Myrtle’s place is for sustainable infrastructure, like solar panels, clotheslines, water collection systems, alternative fuel vehicles like an EV or a high-mileage hybrid, gardening equipment, insulation for your attic, etc.  And maybe some books.  Anything but a Snuggie.  Because lets face it, we should all really prefer a recession to collective materialistic dweebitude.  However, we assure you that personal spending can attain sufficiently impressive numbers to bolster our global standing while spending purely on goods and services which will make our planet a better place to live.

Our own purchasing decisions will be based largely on the production system we have placed on our “big board”.  We have a category for “On Order” items which must be either purchased or otherwise acquired, “Germinating” for things we have planted or started working on, “In Production” for currently fruiting plants and/or projects currently providing payoff, and “Dormant” for perennial plants or projects which are currently not “In Production” but which will be again.  While our board is not limited to just plants or chickens, we find gardening to be a good metaphor for everything else in our inventory of projects.  And our motto is to “Water what will grow,” a slogan we stole shamelessly from Rev. Dan De Leon from Friends Congregational Church, whose wit and wisdom make him a valuable Friend of Myrtle. 

We do track our debts, including mortgage, car payments, student loans, and a couple of other bills, and we do everything we can to avoid adding to this list.  Credit cards are an absolute no-no at our house, for example.  But our conversations about money are not debt-oriented – our focus is on productivity.  We suggest that this ought to be part of the larger sphere discussions about money, as well.  It will be all well and good if we get our national spending problems under control only to discover that we lack the requisite will to spend money on those things which will do the most good for our future sustainability in the coming decades of climate change and global workforce greying.  We’ll be doing our part; we hope you join us.

Happy farming!

No Coffee, No Cry

Coffee won’t grow in the Brazos Valley.  In spite of the fact that this is self-evident, we checked.  We had to do so – life without coffee is inconceivable, yet once we came to the conclusion that locally produced foods are superior in every possible way to foods shipped in from parts unknown, we felt obligated to see what we could replace on our grocery list with, as one of our more colorful friends puts it, “food shot in the yard”.

Coffee grows at high altitudes.  College Station may be high attitude, but it is severely lacking in altitude.  So, locally produced coffee is, sadly, an impossibility.  What might replace our morning cuppa joe, were we ever to make the environmentally responsible switch?

We moved on to investigate the possibility of growing tea in College Station, less enthusiastically on Mr. Myrtle Maintenance’s part, as Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is perfectly happy with tea, but her partner in this enterprise is somewhat grumpier without the higher doses of caffeine.

No good on tea, either.  The climate is actually very good for growing the Carmella sinensis plant, in terms of soil quality, temperature, and quantity of sunlight.  However, it requires about 50 inches of rain a year.  So, if we were willing to utilize every drop of our irrigation systems on growing a few tea shrubs, we could do it; everything else would fall by the wayside, though.  We have Oxford aspirations for our children, but we lack the fanaticism necessary for this degree of anglophilia; tea is a non-starter.  We may grow black currants, and we definitely still love biscuits and preserves, but ix-nay on the ea-tay.

What in the world is an aspiring locavore to do?  Stimulating beverages are something we are used to thinking of as simply growing on trees, but our national heritage is fraught with tales of woe related to the dependency we have formed on imported caffeine.  The Boston Tea Party is perhaps the most famous example of Americans gone mad over our enslavement to “the good stuff” and the economic power wielded by those who control its importation.

The blockade of the South during the Civil War led to trials and tribulations in the Confederacy, as well.  Numerous diarists wrote home from the front lines of the insufficiency of coffee; soldiers brewed a mish-mash of acorns and chicory, hoping that a hot and bitter beverage would fool their taste buds, even if it couldn’t fool their central nervous systems.  Americans lacking coffee or tea have despaired many times over the course of our nation’s history.

At Myrtle’s place, though, we don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit’.  (That may have something to do with the fact that we burned the ‘Q’ section of the dictionary during last winter’s freak snowstorm, but we digress…)

Given the near universal acclaim for caffeinated beverages like coffee, tea, cola, and “energy drinks” like Red Bull, etc., we started with the assumption that other cultures must surely have encountered some caffeine-rich plant which could then be converted to potable form via brewing, distilling, or some other means, which we would be able to duplicate in our back yard.

This turned out to be a perfectly reasonable assumption.  Many plants produce caffeine, not just the coffee or tea trees.  We knew, for example, that cacao, which produces the bean from which chocolate is manufactured, also has smaller amounts of caffeine.  Other plants also make use of this chemical, because it is a natural pesticide, and even slightly herbicidal.  The presence of caffeine protects, particularly young plants but also fruiting plants, from insects and from the encroachment of other trees.  It repels bugs and retards the growth of neighboring plants.

Two South American plants besides coffee and cacao which produce caffeine are Guarana (Paullinia cupana), which is a climbing plant in the maple family, native to the Amazon basin and especially common in Brazil, and also Yerba maté (Ilex paraguariensis), a species of holly native to Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Brazil.

Both of these plants are used by locals to make strong beverages; Guarana, in particular, is used in a variety of commercially available beverages, and is even the basis of numerous soft drinks which take considerable market share away from Coca-Cola and Pepsi in Brazil.

However, it was the Yerba which caught our attention.  Ilex paraguariensis?  We are much more familiar with another Ilex species, Ilex vomitoria, also known as Yaupon Holly.  Our land was overrun with the stuff when we bought it – the yaupon grew so thickly here that you couldn’t even tell there was a house on our property until we had cut it back.

Yaupon grows to about 10-12 feet tall, and for four or five months a year has bright red berries on it.  We had heard a rumor that Native American tribes had long ago made a beverage from yaupon which caused them to vomit.  In fact, that is how the latin name for the plant originated – Ilex vomitoria.

Juxtaposing the yerba story with the yaupon story, we decided maybe the yaupon related beverage required a little more investigation.

It turns out that a concoction known in English as “Black Drink” was, in fact, brewed from Ilex vomitoria in early America by a variety of peoples.  The leaves and twigs were harvested just prior to preparation – freshness evidently being vital – and then roasted, prior to grinding and brewing.  Colonists imitated the Native Americans and brewed this beverage as a replacement for coffee or tea, and called it “cassine” or “cassina”.

Caddo, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribes consumed this beverage in the belief that it purged the drinker of anger and deceit.  This made it a particularly attractive social beverage, as these qualities would obviously be detrimental in group environments – for evidence, try running a modern committee meeting without coffee or tea.

Because the consumption of the beverage was so often a social event, it naturally led to drinking vast quantities of the beverage, often in ritual manner, with special songs being sung as the large tureen was passed from person to person.  As part of these rituals, many tribes included a final act of purging themselves by vomiting.  This was not a biochemical necessity, it was a religious act, and not every tribe shared in this unfortunate ritual.  The Ais peoples of Florida, in fact, were often observed by European settlers to drink the stuff on a regular basis without ever suffering gastric distress.  To further illustrate the significance of the beverage, the ritual name Asi Yahola or Black Drink Singer is corrupted into English as Osceola.

Armed with all of these clues as to the potability of this beverage, sans the risk of (ahem!) unwanted emissions, the next question becomes whether this might be an acceptable substitute for coffee.  Clearly, early European settlers were willing to settle for Black Drink in the absense of coffee or tea, but just as clearly, they preferred to go back to the imported stuff as quickly as possible.

Chemically, we know yaupon has roughly six times as much caffeine as coffee.  This goes a long way to explaining the lack of groundcover underneath our yaupon stands; there are plenty of young tree shoots, but no grasses – not even very many weeds – underneath the Ilex vomitoria.  Naturally, this means the drink will be fairly bitter.  Too bitter to drink?  And could the bitterness be cut by the inclusion of some sweet herb or other?

There’s only one way to find out.  We made it ourselves.

The traditional way for at least the last 10,000 years in the Gulf Coast region has been to parch the leaves and twigs of yaupon in a ceramic container, so we did the same thing.  We then boiled the crushed leaves and twigs in our coffee pot, and strained them in our french press to make sure no extraneous leaves or twigs made it to the cup.

The resulting beverage had roughly the consistency of a very dark tea -- it even smelled a lot like a good orange pekoe, though the color was closer to that of a dark roasted arabica coffee bean.

The telling question, though, is naturally the question of taste.  What did it taste like?  It tasted like raisin-flavored tea.  There is no other way to describe it; it tasted like sweet raisins squeezed into a nice hot cup of tea.  The caffeine buzz was fairly intense, so much so that when our daughter asked to try it, we only gave her a small portion, which she drank with a heavy dose of sugar, and a qualified thumbs up.  She still prefers Earl Grey, but our parched yaupon tea will do in a pinch, she says.

We still prefer coffee, we must admit.  But we are mystified why this beverage is not at least as popular as many of the other forms of caffeine currently available on the market.  It actually tastes quite good, and it comes from a tree which grows like a weed throughout most of the Gulf region.  We chopped down a lot of yaupon to make room for vegetables and herbs; we aren't cutting down any more, though.  They put the "tea" in "Tea Shoppe".

Happy farming!

Small Farm Good, Big Farm Bad (Have we mentioned this before...?)

Non-renewable resources are, by definition, irreplaceable.  Once you have used them, they are not renewed.  The logical conclusion, therefore, is that you should not use them, but should instead opt for other resources.

In some cases, such as with fossil fuels, this is self-evident, and the solutions, though taking some effort, are obvious.  We need to take advantage of natural processes which will last as long as the planet does -- put solar panels on every home in the country, for example, and set up wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, and so on, instead of relying on oil and coal, the supplies of which are finite.

However, there are some other non-renewable resources we don’t usually think about as being non-renewable, and the solution to their overuse is not so obvious.  The best example is groundwater.

Agricultural water usage accounts for 80% of the fresh water consumption in the United States; 60% of that consumption comes from groundwater sources, with the other 40% coming from well water pumped out of aquifers.  The Ogallala Aquifer, for instance, which supports a good portion of the central and southwestern U.S., is being depleted at an annual rate anywhere from 130-160% of the rate of replenishment, meaning only about 2/3rd of what is taken out in a given year is returned via rainfall.

As industrial agricultural production becomes more intense due to population concerns, there is little reason to believe this rate of depletion will do anything but increase.  The models are not clear on how much longer the Ogallala will be able to provide water, but obviously you cannot take out more than is put in indefinitely – at some point, it will be empty.  When it is empty, the environment in which it sits dry and idle has a name:  “desert”.  That is a dry and dusty sounding moniker to hang on the breadbasket of the country.

This raises a serious question:  what do you use instead of water to water your crops?  What renewable alternative is there?

Even in areas where the primary water source is not a limited resource such as an aquifer, water use – and increasingly, water reuse – is a life-or-death question, because degradation of our water supplies due to chemical leaching from pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff, in addition to runoff from industrial sites, stormwater pollution from urban centers, and phosphate pollution from untreated greywater make what water is available less attractive as an agricultural resource.

The solution to these and other tricky problems lay in rephrasing the question. 

Rather than assuming we have to find ways to support the industrial agricultural model in a scenario in which resources are limited and collateral damage is unavoidable, a dramatic change in paradigm will make the whole class of worries disappear.  Rather than attempting large scale watering of industrial monoculture – ie, miles and miles of corn fields, wheat fields, etc. – we ought to decentralize, and instead focus on renewable and reusable water supplies for polycultural small plots. 

Places like small backyard gardens, for starters, are easier to supply with clean agricultural water.  But not just extensive backyard gardens – microfarms like Millican Farms, which require more water than does Myrtle’s place can almost as easily be watered in a renewable fashion.  It just takes a little planning and a little will and a lot of elbow grease.  At Millican Farms, they use a pond to irrigate greenhouses; the tomatoes are delicious, year round.

One of the chief criticisms of the permaculture movement and its related sustainable agriculture movements is that systems of no-till polyculture make industrial agricultural methods impossible and obviate mechanization.  We argue that this is not a weakness, but is, instead, one of the principle advantages of permaculture.  The chief disadvantage lay not in the inability of permaculture to generate yields sufficient to feed the world, but rather in the lack of will to provide consumers worldwide with the resources necessary to feed themselves.  Instead of using a tractor and a combine in Nebraska to feed a peasant in Thailand, why not use a shovel and a hoe in Thailand to help that peasant grow his own food?

The “Green Revolution” of the last half-century has, in fact, produced massive gains in crop yields, but far from eliminating starvation, as is often claimed as the brass ring to be grabbed by agritechnology, these incredible – one might even say ridiculous – increases in productivity as measured by quantity have been matched by stunning and monumental declines in quality, such that people whose primary problem used to be getting enough calories are now faced with an overabundance of empty calories.  By some estimates, the typical decline in nutritional value of produce over the last 50 years is on the order of 25-50 percent.

We are draining our water supplies in order to produce food no one should be forced to eat, and we are supporting a global economy in which people who should be given start-up loans to go to work are instead forced to sit idly accepting handouts of food whose quality could be surpassed by a hunter-gatherer’s diet.

Industrial agriculture is an evolutionary dead-end.

Small scale, local, organic production, on the other hand, produces crops generally acknowledged to be more flavorful, healthier, and easier on the environment.  And – more to the point – there is nowhere in the world where this type of production cannot be implemented.  There is no need for industrial agriculture; subsidized exports of wheat and other foodstuffs are an albatross around our necks, doing no good for the rest of the world, lining the pockets of a few corporate big wigs, and depleting our natural resources in the process.

The “starving peasants of Bangladesh” would be better served by the establishment of local cooperatives in Bengali communities, learning to grow sustainable crops there, than they are by the massive exploitation of lands in Kansas and Iowa to produce foods lacking the nutritional value of “home grown”, and contributing nothing to the Bengali economy.

Critics might argue that watering a hundred small farms would deplete just as much water as the process of watering one very large farm, but that is because the critics know nothing about the methods of permaculture, nor about the innovations inherent in small-scale sustainable production.  No-till practices by their very nature require heavy use of mulches which are almost always a form of “compost in place”, and which increase the moisture-retention abilities of topsoil by orders of magnitude.

Further, small-scale productions are much better adapted to water conservation methods like rainwater collection or greywater reclamation, and they have greater incentive to invest in these alternative procedures, given their relative size.

Then, too, small farms are more likely to practice polyculture, rather than monocropping.  As the coffee farmers of Central and South America have rediscovered in the last decade or so, “shade-grown” coffee, which is part of a multi-species ecosystem, rather than a single-crop field, requires far less water.  Yes, polyculture eliminates the ability to use mechanical harvesting methods, making it more labor intensive and therefore more expensive at market, but the reduction in water costs, fertilizer costs, pesticide and herbicide costs, transportation and fossil fuel costs, and improved quality and nutritional value and the associated reduction in future health care costs more than offset the labor costs. 

Ultimately, the accretion of risks involved in taking essentially natural processes and attempting to manufacture “improvements” is simply too great to bear.  The misuse of water resources by industrial agriculture is only one of its many malfeasances. 

Engineered solutions to biological problems are rife with unknown and unknowable risks.  The best possible example lay in supplemental nutrition for cattle – some time in the late 1970s, the practice of feeding meat and bone meal to cattle resulted in the evolution of a strain of protein molecules – not even an actual organism, just protein strands – into a prion capable of causing a new variant of Creutzfeld-Jakobs disease (nvCJD) known as Bovine Spongeiform Encephalopathy (BSE), aka “Mad Cow Disease”.

The assurances given to ranchers, and passed along to the general public, that bone meal was perfectly fine for cattle, were based on the best available scientific data, which was actually fairly considerable.  These were not careless scientists and bureaucrats who made the horribly tragic mistake of feeding animal products to herbivores – this was a well thought out plan, backed up by considerable data. 

It was also completely wrong.

This particular tragedy probably could not have been predicted; however, the fact of some sort of tragic consequences definitely could have been predicted.  A diet for a whole class of animals which evolved for very specific reasons cannot and could not be engineered, no matter how clever the researchers, to be so thoroughly and completely different from the diet naturally preferred by those animals without there being a swath of unforeseen consequences.

Feed lot biochemistry is just one area where we have been thumbing our noses at Mother Nature.  As Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “When we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the front door with a pitchfork.”  For many thousands of years now we have been planting fields with just one crop, depleting the nutrients in the soil and then moving on to new fields.  We have been taking water out of natural reservoirs, drying them up, and then moving on.  We have been burning down, bulldozing, turning under, planting something alien for a few years, and then moving on.

Maybe we shouldn’t keep moving on.  The original farmers were just tribes who found a place where what they wanted to eat seemed to be growing fairly well, and they stayed and protected those naturally occurring stands of wheat and figs, until they learned all they could about tending them and caring for them and propagating them.

We joke that we never want to move again – we want to be buried in the yard.  We haven't done the research, but if the product of the cremation process is at all compatible with the making of biochar, why the heck not?  We'll reside at Myrtle's forever.

Happy farming!

Cry Me a (Dry) River

“’tis an ill bird what fouls its ain nest.”
--Scottish proverb

The recent announcement by a group of intrepid researchers that they have created a substance they call “dry water” serves as a remarkable case study in unintended consequences, and it hasn’t even been used yet.

The stuff is not really “dry”, and in many ways, it is also not really “water”, but without getting too technical, we’ll let the contradiction stand, because we rather like contradictions – they are whimsical, and get one’s linguistic creativity flowing.

Powdered liquids have the ability to “store” a variety of substances, most notably carbon dioxide, in ways that prevent their escape into the atmosphere. The producers of “dry water” are touting this ability as a potential boon to production methods which have run into conflicts over the quantity of carbon dioxide they produce – having a way to trap the greenhouse gas means these industries can manufacture to their hearts content, without worrying about contributing to global climate change.

Or can they?

Touting the storage properties of “dry water” is all well and good, but where, pray tell, will the “dry water” be stored once it is super-carbonated?

This is the classic problem with nuclear energy, as well. Per kilowatt, assuming nothing goes wrong at the power plant (an assumption the residents of Three Mile Island or of Chernobyl are not likely to be prepared to make), the typical output of a nuclear power plant is more environmnetally friendly than that of practically any other production method available. Solar and wind power have fewer outputs, but per kilowatt, they have more costly inputs in the form of manufactured materials.

The problem with nuclear power, of course, is that unlike solar or wind or geothermal (or a host of other renewable production methods), nuclear power has a residual element in its production – nuclear waste. The detritus of a nuclear power plant is, similar to the carbon dioxide suspended in “dry water”, contained in lead lined barrels which do not allow any of the toxic radiation to leak into the environment.

But that’s not the end of the story. Those barrels store the nuclear waste… but where do we store those barrels? In 1957, the National Academy of Sciences first recommended that the best means of protecting the environment from spent nuclear materials would be to bury the waste in rock deep underground. The site selected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a geological feature located about 80 miles from Las Vegas.

Residents were not amused, and said so, so loudly that the project was put on hold. And now, 53 years later, this bad idea is still being pushed by those who want the government to change its mind, those who do not want to admit that hiding the problem does not make it disappear.

The phenomenon of “Not in my backyard!” (aka “NIMBY”) is as old as politics, and is especially poignant in the realm of waste disposal. Nuclear waste disposal in particular carries with it the specter of silent invisible “stuff” that could prove lethal should anything leak. It is small wonder that no one wants this stuff in their neighborhood, even with assurances that it is containerized, and nothing could go wrong. Particularly since there are so many readily available proofs that something can always go wrong.

The evidence that nuclear waste is not safe is so incontrovertible that no one disputes it. Rather, proponents of nuclear energy argue that it is not persistent, because it eventually becomes stable non-radioactive waste, and that putting it deep in a rocky hole means we can forget about it. It is “safe” there, and so we are “safe” out here.

The problem with this point of view is that it ignores what we know about how the universe really works. Unforeseen forces can – and do – always alter our present circumstances. Assurances that Yucca Mountain is not geologically active – meaning that there are no fault lines which have generated measurable earthquake activity in the past several millenia there – are utterly meaningless.

There are no places on Earth which are truly not geologically active. Everywhere there is surface, there is geologically active Earth; we live on a solid crust, which floats on a gooey liquid center; predicting what the Earth’s mantle will do next week is not always possible for the best geologists. Predicting what it will do fifty years from now is preposterous. It will probably continue to do nothing at Yucca Mountain. Given that if it does something improbable, it could kill everyone living within a several hundred mile radius, is it worth the risk?

And putting waste in a hole is quite literally just kicking the can down the road; how long until the hole fills up? Where will new waste go at that point? How many new holes in the ground will we have to find? How many new “geologically inert” locations will we need? There are currently 121 nuclear waste facilities throughout the country; it would be nice to reduce that number to just one, but wouldn’t it be better to not have any at all?

The sad history of landfills in this country ought to be an indicator of how infantile is the thinking that we can just bury anything in a hole and it will be alright. The death and destruction of cancer and malnutrition and slow environmental poisining caused by the leaching of toxic chemicals from every landfill in the country is not as sexy a news story as potential nuclear radiation poisining, but it is every bit as real.

Further, we have the sad story of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), most notably the “Dirty Dozen” chemicals proscribed by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, to which the United States is not a party. These are chemicals – like chlordane, or DDT, pesticides which, though now banned in this country, are persistent – they will not “go away” because they simply don’t break down. They will stay in our environment indefinitely, poisoning every plant or animal which comes into contact with them.

Several of the “Dirty Dozen” show up – in small quantities, naturally – in your city tap water. But don’t worry, there are standards, it’s “perfectly safe” to drink…. Oh, and Myrtle has this great investment opportunity, but you have to act now, before the regulators catch wind of the offer…

The fact that these chemicals cause endocrine damage and contribute to obesity, of course, is the least of your worries. Sterility? Cancer? ADHD? Autism? Hypothyroidism? Hypertension? Any of these things get your attention? All these conditions and more have been made much, much worse in recent decades by the accumulation of poisons in our air, our food, and our drinking water as a result of the type of thinking that says it is okay to use “just a little bit” of a given chemical, or to develop just a few acres of wetland, or to burn just a little bit of trash… or to bury our waste in a hole, whether we’re talking about home refuse in plastic sacks, or nuclear detritus in lead coffins.

So excuse us at Myrtle’s if we are a little suspicious of the notion of carbon capture, no matter how high-tech the material in which it is being captured.

Better than holding carbon dioxide in a powdery version of an emulsion, why not try a truly revolutionary approach to waste management – why not avoid creating the waste in the first place?  And if you can't come up with a production method sans carbon outputs, maybe you can... do without?

In the great list of manufactured items which produce carbon dioxide, which items on that menu are things we really need? There are not that many. Breathing is the only one that comes to mind which there’s just no way around – everything else, we ought to be looking at alternatives.

There is a thin line between clever and stupid. Bokonon would argue that “dry water” has obviously crossed that line. It may not be Ice-9, but if we all choke to death on our own waste, will it really matter how precise our literary analogies were?

We recommend a shift in perspective. The quest for sources of energy and resources “out there” drives the quest to make our processes for extraction, production, and consumption less noxious. We certainly applaud the desire to make things less noxious, but we recommend an end to the cynical assumption that we need things “out there” in order to achieve this end. Sustainability is more than just a buzzword; it is a valid description of systems which can perpetuate themselves with the pre-existing resources which form the starting point of your inquiry.

In the case of planet Earth, the only input we get is from the sun. There are a variety of inputs on a micro level – for example, wind flows across practically every patch of land on the planet; temperature differences between the surface and subsurface layers almost everywhere on Earth are also sufficient to provide energy; numerous other examples exist of resources which may be used without being diminished. Making use of these natural features does not require us to come up with any magical substances straight out of science fiction. A dry martini makes sense; dry water just doesn’t.

In fact, in the traditional schema of Carbon Storage and Sequestration (CSS) systems, increasingly, the push by proponents is for biochar systems. Biochar is the material left at the end of the pyrolysis process – the decomposition of organic material by heat in the absence of oxygen. This is typically non-toxic “stuff” which stores carbon dioxide and other gasses in such a way that as the materials decompose over time, the carbon dioxide reuptake process is much easier – biochar acts as a kind of replacement for the processes that take place naturally in rainforests, for example.

There are literally hundreds of different CSS schemes out there; unless someone demonstrates, however, that “dry water” fits the description of a sustainable variant – that is, that it processes carbon dioxide in a way that reduces the impact of production, use, and disposal of goods without increasing production and consumption of any other variables beyond their replenishable limits – we aren’t convinced. We’d rather avoid the pool-pah if we can at all help it.

Happy farming!

Theseus' Ship... Wherein Myrtle Wheedles Some Crazy Anarchists

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

--Plutarch, Theseus

The Paradox of Theseus’ Ship is a timeless exemplar of the French notion “plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose” – the more that things change, the more they stay the same.  However, in spite of finding reminders in every culture and during every epoch of history that change is the only real constant in human endeavors, people still have difficulty accepting it.

Worse still for many people is the uncomfortable implication in the theme of this paradox -- that identity is not so simple a question as we reducibly wish it to be.  “Who am I?”  “Why am I here?”  Practical minded folk don’t ask themselves these questions, in part because they do not want these questions to be asked at all, by anyone.

However, as rapidly as the world is changing, as we are overcome by events such as climate change, economic globalization, peak oil consumption, peak minerals consumption, genetically modified crops propagation, we may have reached a point at which not asking deeply philosophical questions may be less practical than emulating the ivory-tower eggheads who are unafraid of asking such questions.  It may be time to put down the hoe for just a second and put our heads in the clouds long enough to decide which way is up and which way is down.

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an excellent example of an attempt to conceptualize modern food consumption.  Pollan’s request is that we attempt a new degree of intentionality in our eating habits by stopping to consider how four different meals make their way to our plates.  This model is an intriguing starting point, but perhaps the most impressive part of this journey is that Pollan started at all.  He represents a practical point of view which is too rare; all too often, even those who recognize that something must be done simply inject a prefabricated answer and go merrily about their lives having assured themselves that prejudice is an adquate replacement for investigation.

Socrates’ injunction that “the unexamined life is not worth living” has never been so apropos as it is now, not only for those frustrated by increasing workloads rewarded by diminishing returns, but also by those who would throw out the baby of technical innovation with the bathwater of post-industrial dehumanization and oppression.  A claim that we have become “something less” is easily enough made; just scrawl a few angry lines and get printed in The Fifth Estate.  Substantiating such claims and then doing something productive as a consequence is an entirely different proposition.

As a point of reference, modern Anarcho-Primitivists like John Zerzan and Theodore Kaczynski (yes, that Theodore Kaczynski) take an unfounded assumption that hunter-gatherers have/had idyllic lives (supposedly having more leisure time than their civilized peers) and turn it into a philosophy/political agenda wherein anything humans have managed to accomplish since the advent of the bone scraper or flaked hand axe is the natural cause of all suffering, war, oppression, sexism, and possibly even flatulence.

Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin have been noted critics of this perspective, with Bookchin even penning a book entitled Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, which caused the so-called primitivists, ironically, to organize a remarkably complex social circling of the wagons.  Ranting and raving about how evil agriculture, language, and digital watches are and idealizing Homo habilis (while conveniently ignoring the fact that prior to technological advances, humanity might be better described as Purina Saber-Tooth Chow) doesn’t accomplish anything other than inspiring pathetic serial killers like Kaczynski, and selling a few books for hygeine-deficient narcissists like Zerzan.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that a rejection of all society or social institutions in response to the current slew of human crises, many if not most of which are self-inflicted, fails to recognize that whether maladaptive or not, our behaviors as a species have all evolved for a variety of reasons which will not simply go away just because we wish them to, or if we all go to live in shacks in the wood, or drink enough shots of wheatgrass juice while babbling back and forth at each other in highly technical jargon that has nothing to do with real survival, either of our species, or of our fellow species, or even of individuals, except perhaps individual proprietors of organic wheatgrass juice distributorships.

We have, in short, become something because we chose to respond to circumstances long ago.  Those choices led to other choices until our collective behavior, much like that of the caretakers of Theseus’ ship, has led to a complete replacement of our group persona.  Our identity is subsumed by the same paradox – are we still “human” in the same way that the people living in the Fertile Crescent just prior to the domestication of the fig and rye some 11,000 years ago were “human”?

Some cultures do not even view this as a paradox.  Taoists and Buddhists consider the idea of a thing to be its formal identity; this is very much in keeping with Aristotle’s division of four separate qualities of identity – the “is”ness of a thing differs with the slightest change in emphasis.  Getting bogged down in particulars misses the point, precisely because the particulars will never stay the same.  Theseus’ ship has different planks than it did when it was first built, but no matter. 

The very cells in Theseus’ body were different by the time he died than they were when he built the ship – did that make him no longer Theseus?  Of course not!  Western materialists and substantialists may not be able to make that philosophical leap, but there is really nothing mystical about it.  If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it isn’t a Kaczynski.

And being social creatures living in an unsustainable economy does not make us less human, either.  Instead, we are still very much human, but we have large problems with difficult solutions.  Whining that the solutions are impossible accomplishes nothing other than to make the solutions appear even more intractable than they really are.

Rather than chucking the whole enterprise, we ought to emulate those like Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver or a host of their contemporaries who, instead of asking “When does the Revolution start?” have chosen to ask “What’s for dinner?”  Theseus’ ship was not replaced by an exact duplicate; it was retrofitted a single plank at a time until every plank was new.  In a similar vein, humanity did not come to our current pass via one colossal social, economic or political decision.  We got here one decision at a time – how to get to work, what to wear, and what to eat.

All we can do is stop and think about what we are doing, and be a little more intentional about everything from getting dressed in the morning, to choosing how we entertain ourselves, to choosing what we eat.  After all, some ancient ancestral hominid risked his neck testing out that brand new spear he’d invented to scare off a saber-tooth, which gave us, his lucky descendants, some time to think and act.  Don’t we owe him our best efforts at getting it right?  And getting it right means replacing the ship one plank at a time.

Happy farming!

Grey Waters Run Deep

We have not done a comprehensive survey of municipal water regulations, but we suspect that most cities in the good ol’ U.S. of A. have a somewhat more progressive position vis-à-vis greywater reuse than Myrtle’s home, College Station, Texas.  College Station does not allow the reuse or recycling of greywater.  At all.  Period.

This places our fair city in direct opposition to the State of Texas, which allows residential greywater recycling, without a permit, provided less than 400 gallons a day are being used.  HB 2661, enacted in September 2003, was an amendment to the Texas State Water Code, and established the following paramaters for reusing water from sinks, bathtubs and washing machines:

• Graywater can be used in agricultural, domestic, commercial, and industrial situations, in accordance with applicable Health and Safety codes.
• A permit is not required for the domestic use of up to 400 gallons of graywater daily if the following criteria are met:

• Graywater originates from a private residence,
• Graywater is used by the occupants of that residence for gardening, composting, or landscaping at the residence,
• Graywater is collected with a system that overflows into a sewage or on-site waste treatment and disposal system,
• Graywater is stored in tanks that are clearly labeled as non-potable water, restrict access (especially to children), and eliminate habitat for mosquitoes and other pests,
• Graywater system uses piping that is clearly identified as non-potable water conduit,
• Collection of graywater does not generate ponds or pools,
• Collection system does not create runoff across property lines or onto impervious surfaces,
• Graywater is distributed by a surface or subsurface system that does not spray into the air.

• Builders are encouraged to install plumbing in all new houses in a manner that allows graywater collection and reuse.
• The installation of subsurface graywater systems around the foundations of new houses is encouraged so as to minimize foundation movement and cracking.

Some of these rules make more sense to us than others, though all are necessary to a greater or lesser degree.  The marking of water as ‘non-potable’ seems a little silly, given that, if the tanks and hoses are located near a garden, and the hoses are, in fact, soaker hoses, it should be obvious to any onlooker that the water is intended for the plants, not for human consumption.  Still, in a society where even toothpicks come with instructions, we suppose this is to be expected.

The use of collection systems probably deserves some attention.  We remember our grandfather (who lived just outside the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Llano, Texas, many years ago; if you aren’t familiar with Llano, it’s near Art and Casteel) running a line from his kitchen sink to the St. Augustine lawn growing under the huge oak trees in his back yard.  While we ordinarily despise lawns at Myrtle’s place, Grandaddy Mints’ lawn took up a small portion of his acreage, and in our memory, he never used well water to keep it green, opting instead for either greywater from the kitchen, or occasionally diverting water pumped from his stock pond, which was the primary source of water for his half-acre garden, as well.

Grandaddy Mints did not filter or treat his water before running it out to the grass; we know now that this was not right, given that the dishes in the kitchen sink were washed with commercially available soaps all of which were high in phosphates, a lot of nasty chemicals were getting leached into the groundwater when he let the water run straight into the ground.

There are two alternative solutions to this problem, now that we know what phosphates can do to the environment.  The institutional mindset, reflected in the State of Texas’ rules regarding greywater reuse, assumes that phosphates, nitrates, chlordates, and other nasty chemicals are necessarily going to be components of greywater, and therefore any use of greywater requires that the water first be run through a filtration system of some kind.

There are many such systems, some of which involve manufactured tubs full of artificially created filters a lot like what you get with those “reverse osmosis” water filtration systems at which we distillers scoff, and we at Myrtle’s place obviously do not recommend these systems.  The use of plastics, alone, suggests that these systems are not environmentally friendly.  Other systems make use of filtration through a planter with algal and other biological remediation systems – ie, plants which soak up the offending materials but not all of the water – before dripping out into final use.

We are intrigued by the bioremediation systems, but not enough to advocate them on a small-scale facility like, say, a backyard microfarm.  No, we think a paradigm shift is in order which makes filtration systems unnecessary.

The reason greywater systems require filtration, according to the government, is that they contain phosphates, etc.  So… why not remove the offending chemicals at the source?  There are plenty of soaps and cleansers available which do not pose any environmental dangers, some available as homemade solutions, others available at your local grocers.  Castile soaps (that is, soaps made with a vegetable oil base) pose virtually no risk of groundwater contamination.  Clean white sand as an abrasive works at least as well as chlorine based abrasives, and is what has been used from time immemorial until, oh, the 1950s anyway.  Organic toothpastes, shampoos, conditioners, etc. are all readily available.

In short, nothing noxious to your plants has to go in your sink, bathtub or washing machine.  While you will still want to review your local ordinances, we recommend a small stainless steel collection tank for greywater overflow, with a screen to filter out largish particles like the aforementioned scrubbing sand, with output running to soaker hoses running underneath loose mulch in your vegetable, herb, or flower beds, or around your fruit trees.

But don’t forget to print out a label for the overflow tank stating “Non-Potable Water”.  Wouldn’t want any innocent passersby to get the wrong impression!

Happy farming!

Get the Good Stuff... But Only a Little Bit

“We still think of air as free.  But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water.  The price tag on pollution control is high.  Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.”

--President Richard M. Nixon

Asking is the worst possible way to find out what someone values.  If you really want to know what someone believes, don’t ask them, watch them.  What you spend your time doing, what you spend your money buying, what you spend your energy daydreaming about, these are the things you cherish.  These are your values.  These are your Gods.  We all claim we have a certain set of principles, a certain theology, but what we say is invariably different in some fundamental ways from what we do, and it is not what we say, but what we do which reflects what we really believe.

This is as true of groups of people as it is for individuals. 

There are frequently political clamorings for government to have to balance its budget because “We have to live within our means, why shouldn’t the federal government?”  The disconnect in this statement never quite seems to percolate through to our cultural awareness… Do individuals really have to live within their means?  Are they doing so?  And what does “live within our means” really mean?  Is it as simple as a calculation of financial ways and means, or is there more to the equation? 

After all, the American obesity epidemic really comes down to people not living within our means, consuming far more calories in Big Macs than we are expending via getting out and exercising.   There are other debts besides monetary debts, and we are collectively running up huge deficits in more ways than we can possibly keep track of.

Do Americans simply not care about social inequality, ecological devastation, obesity, and impending economic devastation?  Expressions of concern are almost universal, crossing all party and philosophical lines – Ronald Reagan bowed to public sentiment and joined “Hands Across America” – clearly, though there are serious disagreements about methods, objectives are fairly universal – we all agree with the beauty pageant contestants who clamor for their one wish, world peace.

People do care about social inequity and natural resource iniquity; they simply don’t see.  Why not?  The inescapable conclusion when observing the sociological and ecological components of the American economy is that Americans do not value balance, because our collective actions have been so thoroughly unbalanced for so long.  So why the dissonance?  How can someone driving a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle, clearly oblivious to their economic, ecological and social budget busting, have the wisdom to say the federal government ought not spend more money than it possesses?

The best possible explanation is that a fallacy inherited from neoclassical economics dominates our collective consciousness.  The neoclassical Venn diagram for discussion of sustainability shows “Social”, “Environmental” and “Economic” components of development as top level spheres, with the union of the three being the shaded “Sustainable” area.  Where only “Social” and “Environmental” unite, you have “Bearable” conditions; where only “Social” and “Economic” unite, you have “Equitable” conditions, and where “Environmental” and “Economic” concerns unite, you have “Viable” conditions.  Thus, in the neoclassical model, the center, the united “Sustainable” area, represents a compromise between these three entities.

This model is tidy, which neoclassicists appreciate, but it is fundamentally flawed.  A more accurate picture shows that “Environment” is the top level sphere; “Society” is not a separate sphere, but a subset of “Environment”.  “Economy” is a subset of “Society”.  Talk of united concerns between any of these three aspects misses the point entirely – there are no economic concerns which do not impact society and the environment; neither are there any social concerns which do not impact the environment.

All economics are social; all economics are environmental; all social exchange is environmental.

The relevant question, then, is not whether social and environmental concerns should be part of our thinking about economic issues, but rather are we willing to accept that economics ought by order of precedence to be the lowest level concern?  Environmental and social issues take precedence because if either of those spheres collapse, they will by nature take the economy out with them. 

Witness what happens to local economies during environmental or social catastrophes – who can do business in the middle of a hurricane, wildfire, tornado or earthquake?  Who can do business in the middle of a riot?  Where is the free market during protests and counterprotests?

Acceptance of this basic tenet leads to a wholesale rejection of common wisdom on a host of contemporary concerns.  “We have to increase domestic production of oil,” for example, is a fallacy accepted by most of the philosophical spectrum in American politics.  The justifications for drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas come down to economic independence and security against instrusions of socially unacceptable foreign enemies – the hegemony of OPEC nations strikes most Americans as being more important than biodiversity or global warming.

We do not, however, have to increase domestic production of oil.  Economic growth is not our primary concern; environmental security is our primary concern, and the petrochemical industry has demonstrated quite clearly for the entirety of its existence that it is incapable of coexisting peacefully with the environment.

Pursuit of economic growth through energy consumption has lead to irreversible climate change, has polluted our water supplies, has killed off several ecospheres, has put carcinogenic hydrocarbons in the food chain and has, in short, drastically lessened the survivability of contemporary social structures based on a consumption-driven economy.

Drilling for more oil, in other words, doesn’t make us safer; it makes us immeasurably less safe, both in terms of the immediate environmental dangers inherent in climate change, etc., but also in terms of the social and economic strains which will become inevitable as the results of unsustainable consumption manifest themselves.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, in their 2008 “Living Planet Report” summarized the dangers:

“Humanity’s demand on the planet’s living resources, its Ecological Footprint, now exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by about 30 per cent.  This global overshoot is growing and, as a consequence, ecosystems are being run down and waste is accumulating in the air, land and water.  The resulting deforestation, water shortages, declining biodiversity and climate change are putting the well-being and development of all nations at increasing risk.”

“But we have to have oil, so it’s better if we have American oil,” the argument goes.  This is nothing more than saying we ought to only impale ourselves on hirikiri knives manufactured in Pennsylvania, because the steelworkers there should take precedence over Japanese knifemakers.  We’re just as dead regardless of where the knives (or oil) are produced.

An ecological economist looking at the initially described problem – insufficient energy exists in order to meet the demands of the economy –would ask several different questions:

• Can the energy demands be mitigated (ie, what energy conservation methods need to be tried first)?  
• What sustainable methods for delivering these energy needs can be substituted for the unsustainable method of burning fossil fuels?  
• Are there opportunities to localize energy production to the specific places where energy consumption will be occurring?  
• Can those primarily responsible for consuming the energy be made more directly invested in the creation of that energy so as to reduce impact on those who are not consumers?

“That doesn’t sound like economics to me,” say the more mathematically and statistically grounded critics.  “It sounds like philosophy or even theology.”

There is some merit to this argument; ecological economists make no secret of the need to inject values statements into economic writing.  However, they further point out that neoclassical economics may claim to be a “positive” (empirical or evidential) science, but it is inescapably “normative” (values laden), which goes a long way towards explaining how the same data set can be used to defend so vigorously diametrically opposed ideas such as laissez-faire capitalism and determinist Marxism. 

All economic theories with any sort of following have of necessity at some point demonstrated strong predictive abilities which have garnered intellectual agreement among various students and researchers; however, the diversity of theories can only be explained by means of a differentiating grid, and in the case of theoretical frameworks, that differentiation comes in the form of normative “ought” statements, not positive “is” statements.

Which leads us back to our original premise – we value that which we pursue.  Evelyn Waugh wrote in The Razor’s Edge that “anyone can be a saint on a mountaintop.”  The true test of ethical systems lay in which hard choices adherents are willing to make.  Paying a little extra for the organic fruits and vegetables raised with fair trade practices, for example, seems like a sacrifice, but it is a far more ethical decision than selecting the lower priced alternatives which really represent a subsidy for laziness and sloppiness, a subsidy paid by future generations. 

Your great-grandchildren, in other words, will be paying more for everything because you just had to have that gas-guzzling SUV, that extra Big Mac, that brand new iPhone, that vacation at Disney, and on and on.

Do we want to continue to pursue economic growth at all costs?  Or are we willing to start putting our money where our mouths are?  Because ultimately, ethical behavior will mean we must consciously decide we are going to be satisfied with less.  If we truly care about future generations, we will decide that quality of life is far more important than quantity of dollars produced.

Ultimately, we have to decide we will pursue development, but not growth.  This means investing in technologies which produce non-polluting outputs using significantly fewer resources, none of which are non-renewable, and doing so across all sectors of the economy.  “Smaller is better” needs to replace “supersize me” in every aspect of our lives.

Heck, Myrtle isn’t even our biggest chicken.  The meek shall inherit the Earth; let’s just make sure it’s worth inheriting, okay?

Happy farming!