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!

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!

The Next Great Thing to Kill Us All

We are both repulsed and fascinated by survivalists.  In Texas, we usually just call them "neighbor" but we do occasionally have to stop and shake our heads at some of the things they come up with.  We suspect the ascendancy of the survivalist meme has something to do with the geography, the lack of funding for public education, and the popularity of bad beer.  And let's face it, no news story can end well if it includes the phrase "just outside of Waco."

Those who follow Myrtle's musings are aware that we are fully willing to write about issues which lend themselves to apocalyptic thinking.  Things like oil spills, mass extinction, poisonous public water supplies, global warming, regressive educational policy, and so on.  On occasion this leads some persons to misconstrue our perspective; we are often asked, in response to the news that we are seeking to be self-sufficient, whether this is in preparation for "End Times".

We wish to unequivocally, once and for all time, put this to rest:  we are not delusional paranoiacs prone to magical thinking.  John of Patmos is credited with authoring the Book of Revelations; we believe co-credit should be given to an unknown ergot alkaloid.  And Nostradamus is a great name for a cat, but as a rule and measure for how to live one's life, we suggest looking forward, not backwards.  We raise chickens, grow our own herbs and vegetables, and are digging a fish pond not because we are trying to survive the final days of humanity, but because we wish to be healthier, and we don't believe mainstream commercial agriculture can be a part of that equation.  Crazy conspiracy theories or dreams of global disaster have nothing to do with it.

That having been said, we wish to now muse upon "The next great thing that's going to kill us all!"

The words "Carrington Event" will be percolating their way into the mainstream media over the course of the next two or three years, and accompanying those words will be the singsong cries of hysteria from the Tribulation crowd.

In 1859, English astronomer Richard Carrington observed the largest solar flare ever witnessed.  His astonishment was matched the following morning when aurora borealis, typically observed only in far northern reaches, were seen as far south as Cuba and Hawaii.  Most observers were merely astonished, or perhaps annoyed -- lights blaring like the noon-day sun waking you up well before dawn could be considered annoying regardless of how pretty or divine the poets may find them.

However, a footnote to the event has given modern observers pause -- the impact of Carrington's solar flare on the telegraph system was remarkable.  The recording paper in several stations caught fire; the lines were hypercharged by the energy pelting the Earth; even after the battery power to the telegraph machines was removed, they continued to operate.

What would happen in modern times if such an event were to occur?  By some estimates, the damage to electronic equipment could reach $2,000,000,000,000.  That's 2 trillion dollars, for those who lost track of the zeroes.  Roughly 20 times as much damage as was done by Hurricane Katrina.

There are others who argue that the damage would be far worse; the most recent NASA estimate quotes a fairly optimistic recovery timeline of several months to about a decade.  Others argue that there would be no recovery.

Why?  What kind of damage are we talking about here?

Actually, the apocalyptic thinkers have a point here.  One of the most vulnerable pieces of equipment in a Carrington Event would be the transformers you see up on power lines all throughout your local version of "the grid".  These boxes are fairly difficult to install, but on a planned basis, electrical engineers are able to keep up with demand.  In a Carrington Event, however, they would all have to be replaced.  All of them.  And there is just no quick way to do that.

Which means most people would be without power for several months at the very least.

Think about how many things we take for granted which rely on electricity.  Wow.

How likely is that, really?  Not very.  But... as recently as 1972, there was a solar flare event which knocked out communications worldwide for about 10 minutes.  The only major grid failure reported was in Quebec, Canada.  But that was in 1972.  Far fewer forms of communication existed then, and they were of less vulnerable kinds.  Land line phones, though they seem archaic now, were much less susceptible to the influence of solar weather.

Were the 1972 event to be repeated today?

In that 10 minutes, would you want to be on an airplane making an approach to a busy and crowded airport?  Would you want to be on an operating table having open heart surgery?  Would you want to be on a ship, or on the dock, during the docking operation of a multi-ton cargo vessel?

Neither would we.

And a Carrington Event would be much bigger.  On the plus side, solar activity is cyclical, and the Carrington Event seems to have been a once-in-a-millenium event.  However, there is tremendous uncertainty in the cycles; we are coming out of the "solar minimum", which has lasted now far longer than astrophysicists had predicted when it began earlier this decade.  The consensus seems to be that by May, 2013, we should be out of it again.

We haven't even discussed the impact of Space Weather on climate change, or how the global warming denialists step all over themselves trying to find new ways to contradict their own a priori presumptions; perhaps another time.  What we at Myrtle's place wish to do now is let you know that the world is not going to end any time soon -- to paraphrase our favorite Michael Crighton line, "The world is going to be perfectly fine.  We're the ones in trouble!"

So, what can we do as individuals about the coming solar apocalypse?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

The theories which suggest that solar interference with all-things-electrical will lead to the collapse of society depend on a couple of related propositions.  First, people are connected solely by electrical and electronic equipment, or things dependent upon such equipment, and second, people are incapable of working together in the absence of such equipment.  There are several layers of independence which, ironically, would function to unite our communities were they to be more widely adopted.

Food independence.  We have written before about the need to start shopping locally, in addition to growing as much of your own food as possible.  There are a variety of reasons for this; the most important relate to health, as local food is more likely to be organic food, and thus free of poisonous pesticides and herbicides.  However, at present, the average comestible travels over 1,000 miles before it gets to your plate.

That needs to change now.  If you can garden, do so.  If you can't, buy or barter with those who can.  Even in the Solar Armageddon, if you have a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) agreement, you are far more likely to get help from a friendly farmer than are those who depend solely on the goodwill of national chain grocery stores.

Also, get some chickens.  There's nothing like fresh eggs from happy chickens, anyway, so even if the disaster never happens, you'll be glad you got the birds.

In addition, we suggest you look into a Mormon Pantry.  Yes, yes, we know, the Latter Day Saints don't exactly fit the description of non-apocalyptic thinkers, but remember, we said such thinkers both revulse and intrigue us.  We don't agree with them on much, but preparedness is one area where we are in accord.  A two year supply of dry goods in your pantry does not strike us as a bad idea, although you probably want to exercise some discretion.  Pumpkin pie mix and lima beans would be as unappealing at the End of Days as they are on a typical Saturday evening.

Water independence.  Given how many times Myrtle has pontficated about pollutants in our drinking water, it should come as no surprise to you that we recommend doing everything in your power not to be dependent upon others for clean potables.  Rainwater collection is step one; after you are sure that you will have sufficient water on hand, step two is some method of purification.  Provided you have the power, we recommend distilling the water; this not only gets rid of microbial infestations, it also removes chemical pollutants, which will be just as big a problem if the grid goes down as they are now.

Energy independence.  In the absence of electricity from the grid, where can you get electrical power?  For those who do not generate their own electricity, there is the obvious alternative--a generator.  However, what would happen if you were not on the grid when it went down?  There is reason to believe that not all home solar panel installations would be as adversely affected as others -- you would need to take proper precautions when installing your system, but it is highly possible that given enough lead time for a warning, you could protect your home solar installation from the total blowout the city power is likely to experience.

If enough homes were independently solar by the time the Carrington Event took place, there would be a hub in every city in America of completely unaffected neighborhoods.  We aren't sure how many it would take to make a tipping point, but just one out of every ten households would be more than enough to power distillers for clean water for everyone.

Getting enough people off the grid before catastrophe strikes would also enable a quicker recovery for the energy utilities; fewer users would mean fewer blown transformers, etc.  Which would mean a quicker overall recovery time.

Social interdependence.  Here is the biggest place in which we diverge from the survivalists.  While they would have you watch your neighbors suspicously and arm yourselves with Kalashnikovs and tear gas, we would have you take them poundcake, and invite them over for lemonade and fried catfish.

Get to know your neighbors; this is ultimately the best defense against any catastrophe.  The powers of paranoia revel in gated communities with huge St. Augustine lawns, but this is madness.  Our species is a social species; we only survived against saber toothed tigers because we banded together.  A bunch of puny, weak, bipedal apes threw dirt clods at our much bigger predators until they went away.  And now, even the most steroidally enhanced of us is still puny when compared to the forces of nature against which we find ourselves aligned.  If we are to have any chance at all, whether facing hurricanes, or oil spills, or solar flares, it is by caring about what goes on in each other's lives.  And not as a nosy means of self-promotion, but as a genuine expression of interest. 

So, next Saturday afternoon, when you had been planning on hand-washing all your camo long johns, why don't you instead trow a block party and learn the name of all those people you have so studiously ignored all these years?

The likelihood of a Carrington Event in our lifetimes is extremely remote; there will soon be a lot of sound and fury which we predict will signify nothing.  But that doesn't change the fact that in the face of potential disaster, humanity really only has two choices:  we can be delusional fanatics who run around like chickens with our heads cut off, or else we can roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Happy Apocalypse!  And....

Happy farming!

Recycling? Or hoarding?

We are fascinated by the A&E show 'Hoarders'.  Partly it's because this lifestyle is so antithetical to our own, and partly it's because we have a neighbor who is, herself, a hoarder.

At our house, the rule is, if you aren't wearing it or using it, it's likely to get thrown out.  This presents a few problems:

• We don't believe in sending things unnecessarily to the landfill
• We believe strongly in reusing or recycling whenever possible
• We don't like having trash or things that look like trash lying around
• We like to barter

So, the question becomes 'What to do with this leftover stuff?'  We have odds and ends from various construction projects which are a perfect example.  The area of our house which would be a back porch if we weren't too cheap to actually construct a porch is graded pretty steeply.  We could have built a deck, but that is too costly, too labor intensive, just too much.  However, as an easier approach, we built what for lack of a better word could be called a retaining wall out of scrap lumber bits (none longer than a foot and a half) left over from building rooms for our kids and from the treehouse.  Most of this was donated lumber to start with, so it has now been recycled twice.

We filled in the graded area behind this wall with dirt from the pond dig, and with leaves from our mighty oaks.  Come spring, after we have built a table and chairs (hopefully with recycled lumber), we will mulch the entire area with cedar chips, and voila!  An inexpensive porch made out of old stuff nobody wanted!

To make it even better, it is surrounded by a post-and-wire trellis on which wild grapes are growing; if they do half as well as the wild grapes in our faerie ring area, they should reach the roof next summer.

All of which leads to a request; for those of you living in the Brazos Valley, if you have leftover lumber, leftover cement, leftover bricks, etc., consider a trade:  eggs for your stuff.  Drop us a line and let us know what you have in trade, and we'll see if we can't work out an arrangement to keep your place and Myrtle's place both looking ship-shape.

Happy farming!