Paul D. Sonntag

A Letter to my Eldest Daughter

2010-06-03T22:13:00.001-07:00

Samantha,

Almost since you were born you’ve had a deep love of animals. Before you could talk you gestured desperately at the ducks that settled into the tiny pond in the park where you and I would go for walks (you in the carrier, holding onto my thumbs like handlebars), and crane your little head around to watch squirrels bounding up trees in mad rodent panic as we passed. When you were three, you and your mother rescued a stricken pigeon from the mouth of a neighbor’s cat and took the animal to the wildlife center, where it recovered, so far as I know. Later you were fishing bumble bees from standing water, building bridges for ants, and proclaiming yourself an “animal rescuer.” You wept bitterly at the death of one of our hens, the guinea pig we lost earlier this year, and the little (frankly already dead) crab you found at the beach and tried to save. You’ve always seen the beauty of the world and the creatures that inhabit it, and you overflow with compassion for them all.

But right now, several thousand miles south of here, a broken oil well disastrously sited in over a mile of marine water has been pouring thousands of barrels of oil and natural gas into the ocean while the imbeciles who built it try to plug it up with old tires, golf balls and mud. I’m not going to show you the pictures of sea birds hopelessly struggling under thick blankets of crude oil on beaches and inland marshes that make up their normal habitat and seasonal breeding grounds, because the sight would break your heart. And sweetheart, you don’t deserve to have your heart broken by seeing your world poisoned and destroyed before you’ve had a chance to properly explore it, because none of this is your fault.

Whose fault is it? There’s a lot of blame to go around. The rapacious crypto-human swine that run the oil companies own a lot of that guilt, as do the weak and corrupt government regulatory organizations charged with enforcing what few laws actually exist to constrain the oil companies’ actions. We can feel justified in pointing accusatory fingers at the “media,” auto manufacturers, airlines, various American presidents and anyone else in power who ever had a chance to do something constructive about our slavish addiction to petroleum-based energy and everything that comes with it, but didn’t. Reagan earned for himself a special place in hell when he pulled Carter’s solar panels off the White House, and he was only one of many.

But Samantha, it’s also my fault. And it’s your mother’s fault. And damn near every adult living in an industrialized society is at fault, too. Our generation and the generation before us have known for a very long time that a house in the suburbs, countless car trips to satisfy every whim, want and need, and lives based on non-stop consumption and unchecked energy use together constitute a guaranteed outcome of environmental degradation and probable collapse. To that we can add a more recently-acquired understanding of the immediately finite nature of our favorite energy source and the degree to which its depletion will impact just about every identifiable feature of our economy, culture and way of life.

And still we burn it, as fast as we can get our mitts on it. We burn it because we’ve always done so—at least in recent memory—and because our way of life makes it extremely difficult to do otherwise. My job takes me 26.5 miles one-way every day during the week. And as much as I enjoy my work, I could still choose not to go, and I could indulge in flippant rhetoric about the need for small, walkable communities, public transit and all the other wonderful New Urbanist touchstones, but the fact is that if I could find a job paying enough to cover the mortgage on our home that was close enough to walk or ride my bike, I would already have taken it. And the other options which require us to radically reduce our income are volcanic in scope, and involve selling the house, moving the family… somewhere… changing almost everything about our lives in ways that many people would not only fail to understand but would condemn as being primitive, crazy, un-American, and possibly abusive. And that’s very hard—harder, in fact, than driving diagonally back and forth across the entire city every day and looking at the hideous pictorial evidence of the environmental payback in the evening while trying hard not to connect the dots relating my choices to the obvious global consequences.

So I’m sorry, Samantha. Sorry about what we’re doing to your world. Sorry is all I can say.

Screw Hope, I Want Accountability: An Open Letter to President Obama

2010-03-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. President,

You ran on a campaign promising hope and change, and the nation bought into it, heart and soul, because frankly we needed hope and we needed change. Through the eight dark years of the Bush presidency, we saw our economic prosperity drain away, our civil rights trampled, our national security eroded, our friends and children dying every day in never-ending wars in the Middle East, and the wholesale destruction of the middle class in favor of the wealthy and powerful corporations. So badly did we need change that not only did we elect you the highest office in government, but we did so in a landslide, and we handed the Democratic party a majority in both houses of Congress—the mandate and all the tools you could reasonable want or need to get the job done were given to you on a silver platter along with the best wishes of the electorate (and the world) to go along with. My wife and I have a photograph of our two year-old grinning in front of the television as the election results scroll by. It was an incredible moment.

And with your election, the world’s good will for America came flooding back after having been atrociously abused by your predecessor. The BBC World Service ran page after page of congratulations from world leaders all over the globe. To cap it off, you were even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before you had so much as unpacked your socks at the White House—that’s how high expectations were running for the Obama presidency.

So what have you accomplished to date? Let’s see...

Patriot Act still on the books? Check!
Guantanamo Bay still open? Check!
American troops still getting their butts shot off in Iraq and Afghanistan with no end or exit plan in sight? Check!
Bush-era economic players still in firmly power (Bernanke, Geithner, et. al.)? Check!
Federal deficit still skyrocketing? Check!
Truckloads of cheap loans and perquisites still flowing to wealthy banks while the middle class bleeds out? Check!
Bank management largely responsible for the economic crisis still evading accountability and meaningful regulation? Check!
America still on the wrong end of global climate change agreements? Check!
Insurance and Big Pharma lobbies still dictating health care policy, ensuring that many Americans suffer third-world-level access to health care? Check!
Republicans, after their ideology and policies were firmly repudiated in the last election, still somehow running the show? Check!

Mr. President, if you don’t mind my asking, what the hell is going on? Why, precisely, are you not accomplishing anything you were sent to D.C. to do? We gave you the White House with a large margin and a strong political mandate. We gave your party both houses of Congress, particularly the Senate. The whole world gave you a toothy grin and a big thumbs-up. So what’s the problem? In my thinking, there are three possibilities:

You’re weak, incompetent, or cowardly.
You know exactly what you’re doing and you’re doing it, it’s just that you baldly lied to us about your intentions.
The democratic experiment in America is well and truly over, and we can dispense with the pleasant fiction that we aren’t living in a corporate plutocracy.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s number three, although I firmly believe we’re heading in that direction; there isn’t enough data yet to firmly pin number two on you, so let’s call it number one.

Let me lay it down for you: it was you and your party that prevailed in the last national elections, not the Republicans. There are a number of reasons for this. First, yes, your polished rhetorical style and obvious intelligence appealed to a citizenry weary of smirking, knuckle-dragging orangutans in positions of authority. But this wasn’t just about style. The Republicans had simply gone too far in just about every conceivable way. The Patriot Acts and the slough of offensive presidential edicts destroyed American civil rights and made a mockery of the Constitution. The war in Iraq was an obvious attempt to exchange the blood of lower and middle class children for access to oil and the attendant wealth, and the Bush administration’s bungling of the entire process left America caught in an expensive and bloody mess from which there still is no obvious graceful exit (and China locked up the oil contracts). The economy was a smoking wreck, and the banks that caused the mess in the first place were securing mountains of public cash and dirt-cheap loans to cover their losses with no accountability for their actions or any hint of oversight while the middle class faced job loss and financial ruin. Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, institutionalized suppression of climate change science and his obvious contempt for anything other than the short-term financial interests of wealthy polluting industries over the needs of future generations disgusted anyone who cares about the environment in this country and all over the world. The Republicans had their way for eight years, Mr. President, and they blew it, blew it, and blew it some more. So deeply-seated was the public dissatisfaction with Republican rule that you and the Democrats carried the election not only with strong support from the blue states, but also by plucking a number of formerly solid-red states from the Republican support base. Understand? So: stop with the endless conciliation with the Republicans. They lost the election not because of bad marketing, but because people were sick to death of their policies. The Democrats need to get serious about passing legislation that aligns with what the citizenry actually wants. Look at the polls: We want health care with a single-payer option. We want meaningful action on climate change. We want the endless grinding military adventures to end. We want the banks to be held accountable for their actions and to get off the public dole. We want our civil rights back. What we don’t want—and let me make this absolutely sparkling clear—we don’t want the kind of legislation that the Republicans are going to enthusiastically support. And frankly, we though we’d already made this clear. We gave you and the Democrats a mandate and a Congressional majority. Use it.

Mr. President, I understand that your job is exceedingly complex, and I know there are pressures on you from every conceivable angle, that the non-governmental power structures in place during the Bush years are still in place today, and that they lean on you to support their needs over the larger needs of the citizenry. I’m not so naive as to believe that we can simply waltz out of the Middle East without making an even bigger mess than we’re making by staying. I understand our economy and the near-term stability of our civilization relies on our relationship with oil, our transportation infrastructure and the strength of our industrial activities as they’re currently constituted. But I knew these things before I checked the box next to your name on the ballot, and my expectations are no different because of this. You’re the President of the United States. It’s not supposed to be an easy job, but you are expected to lead, not follow, and not placate every whim and fancy of the opposition. You know why the People sent you to Washington D.C., Mr. President. Pursue the People’s business.

And while we’re on that subject, Mr. President, you should know if you don’t already that public patience with you and the Democrats is wearing exceedingly thin. Your popularity is dropping, progressives are getting tired of making excuses for you, and public sentiment is, frankly, getting pretty rough. The door through which those red states passed to support you in the last national election swings both ways. Recall that the good people of Massachusetts, one of the bluest states in the Union, recently elected a Tea Party Republican to replace Ted Kennedy. Again: Massachusetts elected a Republican to replace Ted Kennedy. That can happen to you, too, Mr. President. From where I’m sitting it’s extremely hard to imagine that you would garner nearly the same level of support you once enjoyed if the election were to be re-run tomorrow, and things are looking very ugly for a number of Democrats hoping to remain in Congress after the next election cycle.

But there’s still a lot of faith out there, and you still have time to do the right thing. But I’m done hoping, Mr. President, and I think the nation is getting a little tired of it too. It’s time for you to start leading.

Sincerely, and all my best to your lovely family,

Paul Sonntag
Shoreline, Washington

And Now for the Actual Spring

2010-01-29T14:17:00.000-08:00

Against all odds, it’s genuinely starting to look like spring here in the Pacific Northwest. And I mean the whole deal: everything is budding out (with the notable exception of the new fuscias I planted in the fall (looks like that vicious cold snap we had in early December took them out), the yarrow is starting to reveal its new front against the azaleas in the back bed, two of the hens are laying, the wild mint and bittercress are coming everywhere they’re not wanted, and it’s occasionally warm enough to send the girls out into the backyard to play without fear of drowning or hypothermia. And it’s still January.

There are a couple of ways to look at this. First of all, there’s the obvious question: what happened to our winter? Here in the PNW we should still be seeing a lot of rain and dark, miserable days, but word has it that that El Nino has driven our usual precipitation down into California, where its presence is abnormal. This is precisely the sort of weather volatility we’re expecting with climate change—short, cold, dry winters in the Pacific Northwest, the sudden crushing ice storm in the Midwest, unseasonable rain in California, broader temperature spreads everywhere, and so on. We can (and should) look at this as a harbinger of more strange meteorological behavior to come, and generally it’s going to play out poorly for humanity.

All that said, there’s nothing to be done about it on the ground. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the results of COP15 tell the story of humanity’s intentions on climate change. Although the debate continues, there will be no action. We’re stuck with this outcome, and energy spent on this line of thought is energy wasted.

So as a gardener I have to consider the full implications of the changing rules on my gardens. I can probably count on reduced rainfall during the winter, which might have a positive impact on nutrient leaching and fertility in the soil (always a problem in this part of the country). Earlier springs make for a longer summer growing season. That means that certain types of plants that are currently a challenge here—thinking tomatoes and their ilk—might be easier. In fact I’m thinking this might be another killer year for tomatoes, and I’m planning my gardens with that in mind.

On the negative side, shorter and colder winters will be hard on tender annuals that can’t handle sustained cold temperatures. My late, lamented fuscias are a good example of that, and there are some species of fruit trees that were marginal in this region before and that may be non-viable in years to come such as some varieties of banana. Also, late frosts mean that slugs and other pests will live longer into the year, creating problems for winter greens and making for larger slug populations in general. Of course, that might be good news for grazing chickens.

The takeaway? If you’re a gardener or someone who works in or around the natural environment, understand that changes are underway and more are in the queue. Accept that there’s nothing you can do about this, but also recognize that no matter how idyllic your growing conditions might have been a few years ago, there were still challenges; pests you had to control, plants that were reliably successful, plants that seemed to have been created for no better reason than to die, and that generally the new normal will be no less flawed, but may provide new opportunities. Some of the news will be bad, some of it dire, but some of it may be decidedly pleasant. Surviving change, as with any of life’s challenges, means cultivating a resilient attitude and a way of plucking advantages out of whatever confronts you.

Spring in the Dead of Winter

2010-01-01T13:16:00.001-08:00

The arrival of the spring Territorial Seed catalog is a big deal for me. It typically shows up a week or so after the winter solstice, when the days here in the Pacific Northwest are short, dark, damp and glum, bringing with it images of spring and summer bounty, lush foliage, bright flowers and the chance to interact with distant spring, getting your hands dirty right away by making lists, planning gardens and ordering seeds.

Psychologically this is an important activity, because although Territorial doesn’t ship spring orders until mid-March or so, actively thinking about what you’re going to be planting and setting things in motion by completing your seed order and getting it in the pipe brings spring closer, because you’re effectively working on the garden, even though the soil is still cracking cold and lumpy with frost heaving.

Now, the news today is reporting all the usual highlights: more rot and rattle about an incompetent terrorist setting his pants on fire and Obama’s posturing about security failures that allowed it to happen, U.S. unemployment is in the 10% range (if you believe those comically conservative numbers) and climbing, the housing market is circling the drain, more American personnel are dead in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s political situation is bad and getting worse and—this just in—Michael Jackson is apparently still dead.

But, from where I’m sitting I can see spring. And what I can see is rhubarb, which I’ve never planted before. There are three different kinds of shelling beans (Yin Yang, Bingo and Black Coco) that will line up against the back of the three new raised beds on the west side, along with the runners, Golden Sunshine and Sunset. I’m putting in some okra, which is gutsy in the short, cool summers of the PNW, but I’m going to have a go of it anyway. Last year’s three double-dug beds are getting carrots this year, lots of carrots, including Red Samurais, a new variety for me. I’m starting two different varieties of broccoli—Thompson, an open-pollinated variety, and Veronica, a funky broccoli/cauliflower hybrid that looks more like a 3D fractal than a vegetable. I’m putting in Brussels sprouts, because they’re actually quite tasty when fresh off the plant. I’m going to try a variety of basil called Pesto Perpetuo, because it has a cool columnar growing pattern and because it will apparently behave as a perennial in the PNW if you keep it in a container and bring it in during the winter. And to top it off, because I’m feeling especially frisky, I’m going to attempt bell peppers in containers against the east wall of the house, which reflects a lot of heat in the summer and just might make a decent little pepper-friendly microclimate.

The message is that Nature doesn’t really care about the details of human endeavor. The things that humanity has painstakingly constructed grow and crumble, fake money evaporates, as it can always be counted on to do, the careers of useless celebrities expand, explode and are ultimately forgotten. But while all that is going on, the days will still get warm in the spring, seed will still germinate, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get peppers.

Predictions and Resolutions for 2010

2009-12-29T15:27:00.001-08:00

‘Tis the season for prognostications, professional and amateur alike, to hit the air. Kunstler has his out, with all optimism he traditionally brings to the table. Sharon Astyk’s are promised, The Oil Drum is and will continue to provide, as will countless others.

I’m not going to make an enumerated list of predictions, because that’s not really my strong suit. Plus what resulted from the Bear Stearns blowup in 2008 was so savage and bizarre that any attempts to predict the details of 2009 before would have been hopeless. I’ll just say this: thought 2009 was bad? 2009 was a warm-up for 2010. The economic recovery we keep hearing about is the result of the accounting time bomb known as the dollar-carry trade, and has nothing to do with a resumption of healthy economic activity. The housing bubble, like every other bubble in the history of currency, will not magically re-inflate. Paper capital that was vaporized with the collapse of the mortgage-backed paper trade will not be discovered intact under the nation’s Couch or in the back pocket of the nation’s Other Pants. We are, simply put, insolvent. What will that mean in practical terms for 2010? I won’t hazard to guess, except that it won’t be pretty for lower and middle class folks. Also, I can predict that the government isn’t going to exert any more effort trying to resolve the problems the lower and middle classes face in 2010 than it did in 2009. We were on our own then, and we’ll be on our own next year.

While taking out the trash this afternoon, I ran into Michael, our neighbor from across the street. Michael’s a great guy and good neighbor. He’s watched after our hens and kept the strawberries watered when we were away this summer. A landscaper by trade, Michael is developing a keen interest in vegetable gardening and local food production, because he knows the score and understands as well as I do that unless you’re running cattle, sheep or goats, grass doesn’t do a thing for you. And he’s not the only one of this mindset in the neighborhood. A few doors down, we have new neighbors who ripped out the lavish landscaping the previous owners (erstwhile property flippers) put in place for the sale, and I know there’s a coop in that house’s backyard as well, though I can’t say if they have chickens now or not.

This is foundation for a community microfarming co-op. So, while I won’t commit to making any predictions for the coming year, I will make the following resolutions:

Meet with everyone on the block that I know or suspect is starting to grow vegetables or otherwise produce their own food.
Set up a big potluck at our place to talk about coordinating efforts. That means everything from going in together to buy bulk compost to watching each other’s gardens during vacation times to coordinating planning so that we can compliment each other’s planting and share the produce. I’m already trading eggs for Michael’s plums, for example. There’s a lot of room to expand this, particularly if we can pull more families into the mix.
At the end of Summer, host a massive canning party. Neither Michael nor I know a great deal about canning or food preservation, but that’s a key skill we’ll need to cultivate in the coming months. And many hands make light work, as the saying goes.

My first piece of advice for 2010 for my readers would be not to sweat the details of what 2010 is likely to bring, just accept the notion that bad times are upon us. Your neighbors are likely to be a better source of help than the fools spending your tax money, so get to know the people who surround you, do them a good turn and find out how you can work together in the new year. They’re a lot closer to you than your state rep or congress-critter, and they’re a lot more likely to be in the same boat.

The Henhouse: Part 2

2009-12-27T21:09:00.000-08:00

Site and Foundation
Finding the right spot for the henhouse took some thought. I wanted the open screens to have fresh air without becoming a giant wind scoop for cold northern winds during the winter, but I was also up against the topography of the yard. The property sits on the edge of a long ridge, so the entire back yard slopes gently away from the house to the West. This is great for planting, because everything can be arranged for plenty of western and southern sun and is blessed with just the right amount of drainage, but it's not so steep as to cause erosion problems. However when setting up outbuildings, getting a level foundation means digging or balancing the thing on top of tall piers. Unfortunately the shed is already sitting on the best spot, so the coop ended up being next to it to the east.

The lovely site:

A side note on the property: when we bought the house in '06 I was excited by the potential the enormous back yard represented, but daunted by its unkempt condition. A 120 square foot chunk in the SW corner of the property was completely overrun by Himalayan Blackberry, and my efforts clear the area yielded a wall of junk and trash big enough to fill the back of a 30' truck--the previous owners had apparently gotten in to the habit of using this corner as a garbage dump. I'll tell that story later, but suffice it to say the yard yielded some of the pier blocks pictured here, thus saving me some cash.

Lesson Learned: Salvage what you find around you. There are three reasons for this: First, it's cheaper. If you can pick something up off the ground and make use of it (assuming, of course, that it doesn't belong to someone else--there's a hard line between salvage and larceny), you've saved yourself the cost of buying new, and maybe the time needed to go shopping for the thing. Second, everything we manufacture has an embodied cost of materials, energy and emitted carbon. If you make use of existing materials, you're reducing the overall environmental impact of your project. Third, we are likely entering a period of history in which when we won't always be able to thoughtlessly motor off to the big box for a hinge or a brick, and if you get into the habit of scrounging now, your instincts for the potential hidden in found objects will be just that much sharper.

I briefly considered pouring a concrete foundation for the coop, but decided against it. While the concrete would have been much easier to maintain and infinitely more resistant to rot and rodent damage, there just wasn’t a sufficiently level spot to pour without a great deal of digging. As you see from the next image, there's over a full foot of drop at this site even over the 8' length of the foundation. I would have either had to pour a very deep slab--wasteful of materials and extremely expensive--or I would have had to dig the whole thing in, which would have had the level of the foundation at or below the ground level, making water seepage an issue from the slope.

After a great deal of fiddling, digging, and cursing later, I finally had the basic framework of the foundation built. The three cross members are treated 4x4s, with treated 2x4s on the end. I filled in with additional 2x4s on steel hanger brackets to give the floor some stability, but these aren't pictured here.

And finally, the completed floor. The floor is comprised of two sheets of 3/4" ply, with a heavy coat of exterior latex on the ground-facing side. It's worth mentioning that this took a lot longer than I anticipated, which would be an omen for the rest of the project.

Next up, decidedly amateur framing, walls and more scrounging!

Revisit: Part 1

Bring on the Weeds!

2009-12-23T16:10:00.000-08:00

Note: this is a repost from the original blog, lost until now. Remember, technology is like fire: it's a shifty ally, not a friend or a servant...

Behold, Cardamine oligosperma, also known in some circles as western bittercress:

You can find out all many people care to know about this humble and hardy little member of the mustard family in any of a number of books about annual weeds, including typical control and management techniques. It's easy to pull up with your fingers when it's young, and I'm sure it also responds to most herbicides that target broadleaf plants. Simple natural selection has determined that bittercress will be the ground cover of choice in the unmulched areas around our kitchen garden beds. It's also giving the plantain a run for its money over in the old berry pit, my "zone 5" for those of you with a predilection for permaculture chatter.

Now, as weeds go bittercress is reasonably benign, particularly compared to hardcases like horsetail and scotch broom, although once it hits its stride in early spring it can cover a lot of territory pretty quickly. If you're trying to keep the space between your cabbages clear while they put on size, these little plants can and will be an irritant if you don't get on top of them early. But as the saying goes, "a weed is just a plant in the wrong place," meaning that weed management, like so many things in life, is as much a question of perspective as anything else.

As I mentioned, I have bittercress coming up by the bushel, but it hasn't really gotten a toehold anywhere I genuinely don't want it, and for this reason: two fistfuls of bittercress tossed into the henhouse will set off a chicken brawl over who gets her beak into the bundle first. Same thing with dandelions (roots included), plantain, clover, and even yard grass. That's right: hens eat common weeds and cluck and scold viciously for the privilege. Which raises the question of whether these plants can be considered "weeds" if they constitute medium-quality chicken food? I say no. And whenever I head out for my daily coop run to feed and water the birds and to collect the eggs, I always swing by the cress patch and pull up a pot-full of it on my way.

We've grown very accustomed to relegating things that have value versus things that do not into a very narrow set of definitions. Part of this is no doubt driven by the fundamental requirements of a consumer culture: new is better, because buying new powers the economic infrastructure that keeps the consumer processes functioning, and used, old or even broken things are seen as useless and perhaps even embarrassing to own, because that's what the consumer society needs. But as easy and satisfying as it is to blame Madison Avenue and Walmart and shopping malls and all the rest for our superficial attitudes toward the stuff that surround us (and believe me, I'm not apologizing for these grasping, sucking parasites), the fact is that we've let them set those expectations for us. As a result we've become very disinvested in our environment. And when I use the word 'environment', I'm not just talking about the big 'E' Environment that we're currently choking with cheap plastic rubbish and carbon-rich smoke, though that's certainly a part of it. I thinking mainly of the personal environments we've created for ourselves, including what James Howard Kunstler likes to call "the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl" to the empty manufactured spaces in which we live; our cluttered homes, our cheap IKEA furniture, our electricity-hungry refrigerators filled with flavorless processed foods. We're so busy working to buy and maintain our plastic junk that we've become numb to just how lousy we've let our lives become, and how expensive all that Walmart crap really is once you figure in the full cost of what we've sacrificed to stack it up.

One of the unexpected revelations I've had since beginning serious work on urban sustainability, gardening, chickening, etc., is that working with natural processes is not a buy-it-stack-it sort of situation. Not I ever expected to buy a garden at Home Depot, slap the dust off my soft, pink hands and have done with it. But one of the key lessons you take from the endeavor is that Nature wastes nothing. Every output of a natural process is an input into another. Compost is an easily understood example of this, as is the sight of a couple of hens eating your weeds, pestivorous insects, and vegetable cuttings from your kitchen. But the concept scales beautifully to include decidedly human processes as well, encompassing rebuilt used bicycles, scrap lumber in the frames of your raised beds and an old pair of slacks cut up into oil rags. Sometimes these inputs can lead to delightful and unexpected outputs. The people door on the back of my henhouse a very old, very large medicine cabinet that I framed into the back wall before knocking out the tin backing. The backing became roof flashing. It started off as a discarded bit of junk from a demolished building, and is now serving very well as a compact door with a pre-built frame and latch. Easy, and something I like to brag about. Would I have been that pleased to buy a pre-hung door at a big box home improvement center, and would the building have been improved by my having done so? Doubtful.

As we move further down the slope of energy depletion, we'll have to think very carefully about what we buy new and what we repurpose, and this is not bad news. With a little cunning we can work less for the things we need and take some pleasure from those things for what they are, rather than where they came from or what they cost. The chickens don't care that I pulled the bittercress up from a dusty space between the kitchen garden and the patio rather than buying it for top-dollar at the grocery store, and they don't care that it's highly unfashionable in the better class of yard or that some people go after it with Roundup. To them it's fresh and green and tasty, and who's the happier for it all?

Failure in Copenhagen and the Ratcheting Burger King Sickness

2009-12-18T14:46:00.000-08:00

I had lunch from Burger King yesterday. Heading back from the feed store I was overcome with a powerful, irrational fast food craving, so I hit a drive-through that was approximately on the way home and bought a sack of the stuff. You know what? It was terrible: flaccid, bland, salty, and it made my entire body feel poisoned and sick, in exactly the way I would have predicted if I had spent three seconds in honest thought before taking the plunge. It was a well-deserved misery.

So I took my gut full of roiling muck out back to clean out the chicken coop and finish building the long sheet mulch where next year's blueberry bushes will go. I like catching up on the news while working in the garden, so I took the opportunity to listen to Democracy Now's coverage of the miasmic obscenity currently unfolding in Copenhagen, and realized, again, the essential hypocrisy of my position. On a very superficial level, I was adhering to my values around sustainability and low-impact living in the act of caring for our hens and recycling their nitrogen-rich, dropping-laden bedding to build out the new blueberry beds. Fine. But I was doing this while some untold number of largely empty calories were rotting in my stomach, calories derived from a key symbol of everything that is wrong with America's approach to the environment, to food, to health, to life itself.

The sins of the fast food industry and its products are numerous and well-documented. They're a key factor in the American (and increasingly global) obesity pandemic. They entrench the worst of corporate agriculture and feed-lot food production. They muscle into every conceivable market, ranging from poor neighborhoods to schools to global markets where they're largely unwelcome, wrecking health, local economies and cuisine every step of the way, leaving a swath of sickness, environmental damage, cultural decay and who knows what else in their path. And as a final bonus, the food itself is disgusting.

Meanwhile at the COP15 conference, Africa has just been consigned to the bin. The wealthy nations--of which the U.S. is among the guiltiest of the guilty parties--are busily scuttling any agreement that doesn't allow a 2C global temperature increase or that includes any serious global enforcement or monitoring framework. A secret document from the U.N. Secretariat was leaked yesterday, concluding that all the pledges and targets submitted thus far from the COP15 participants are together insufficient to meet even the pointlessly high 2C constraint, so even the gutless agreement currently taking shape is a sham. And then finally President Obama descends from the heavens and tells the world that the time for talk is over, that the U.S. is committed to fighting climate change, and so on and so forth, to an fairly unimpressed audience. Nobody who has been paying attention to this circus believes him in these matters, and if you watch the video of the address, you get the impression that he doesn't really believe it either. So with global disaster staring us in the face, our leaders have, again and as expected, completely blown it. Combine this with the stories of how previously accredited NGOs have been run out of the conference by the Danish police and U.N. security officials while oil company officials roam the halls unimpeded, and it's clear that any chance for serious work on the climate change issue is dead in the water, and probably always was. I've been saying for years that we as a people were never going to do anything about climate change, not really. And the results of COP15 bear me out. There's nothing further discuss on that point.

Which brings me back to my lunch. Personally, I can't fix the environment. I can't take any single action or collection of actions to cut carbon emissions to a point that will reduce atmospheric carbon to a sufficient degree to avoid the damage heading our way. I can't convince our leaders to do the right thing. I can't change our culture to push back the intrusion of corporate interests and the gross consumerism that largely created these problems in the first place.

But at the same time, I don't have the right to be angry about any of this if I don't take personal accountability for my actions that contribute to the problem. When I drive the truck to the post office instead of walking, I'm vomiting carbon into the air for no good reason other than sheer laziness. When I buy hybrid seed developed under a Monsanto patent I'm working to destroy the livelihoods of organic and subsistence farmers here and abroad. When I stuff my gob with a lousy whopper and a bucket of sugar water, I'm personally participating in the final elimination of everything that I want to see preserved, and that is my duty to pass onto my children. So as much as I am disgusted with the short-sighted, self-absorbed fools that have worked so hard to preserve the status quo, protect corporate wealth and enshrine the principles of short-term profit over long-term environmental viability, I really can't complain about them too vociferously. Because today I am one of them.

Why I'm Doing This

2009-06-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

I think at some point I committed to not writing on this particular subject, but I think it's time. This is because I tend to field a lot of questions about my world view, and I've drawn from a lot of source material to get to this point, making the background a bit long-winded. Also, it's a useful exercise to touch gloves with whatever drives your thinking from time to time.

I took me years to come to terms with the fact that I don't like modern culture very much. This manifested as an instinctive distrust with anything that was designed to be disposable (pens, flashlights, little things), or anything that was built in a such way it couldn't be used or maintained without direct support from the manufacturer. It wasn't terribly long before that smoldering disgust broadened from specific things to the crush of things in general. In college and in my early years after school I had fantasies about my house burning down, not because I love fire and ruin but because I could feel the psychic weight of all the crap I had stacked up and I didn't yet have the mental tools in place to just get rid of it all. The lesson there is that your stuff owns you, not the other way around.

And as much as the spiritual cost of stuff was bogging me down as an individual, the cost of being stuff-centric has weighed down western culture. Whatever the philosophical foundations of the American experience might once have been, the commercial component has neatly replaced it. There's an insidious connection between our junk, the idea of success, personal worth, moral worth and divine sanction that make up the concept of "American exceptionalism." In other words, we are who we are because God approves of us, and that's manifest in our material success. Question the material, and you question the success. Question the value of material success, and you hate America. Hate America, and you're on the wrong side of the Almighty. Then you're boned.

The first problem here is that the sheer mountains of crap required to sustain this illusion can itself only be sustained by the constant consumption of our finite resources. If you think about it in economic terms, resource consumption at our current scale is the act of taking a loan from Mother Nature. By burning irreplaceable fossil fuels, we are consuming more energy per year (by a wide margin) than we receive from the sun over the same amount of time. We're living well beyond our means, energy- and resource-wise, a bit like running up our credit cards as a species. Same thing with mining minerals, our habit of logging forests faster than they can regrow, harvesting fisheries past the point of collapse, and so on. But Mother Nature's spreadsheets always balance. Always. There will come a time when we will live within our solar endowment, whether we like it or not, because there simply won't be any more economically recoverable energy-dense oil to burn. And as global oil production peaked at about 85.5 billion bpd in or around September of 2005, we don't have long to contemplate that sober truth.

The second problem is that we're making such a mess of our ecology that it will eventually stop feeding us, and will start killing us off instead. In fact, it's already made a pretty good start the job. Climate change is proceeding at a higher rate than even the most terrifying models predicted a few years ago. China is starting to desertify at a sickening pace, putting that heavily-populated country on track to being unable to feed itself within the next twenty years. The American bread basket is going the same way. In addition to being over-harvested, our fisheries are under pressure from acidification as the oceans continue to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, making it inhospitable for many species. Jellyfish & chips anyone? And Australia... well, Australia might be largely uninhabitable before long the way things are going there now.

The final problem is that even though we generally have the ability to understand all this, we're just not going to do one damned thing about it, not really. There's a lot of talk about "energy independence," carbon cap-and-trade, governmental and industrial commitments to reduce carbon output by incremental amounts over the next century or two, but nothing of substance is really happening. Because what we need to do is pretty radical. We need to cut our personal carbon output by 60% or better. Now. Everyone. Second, we need to use a commensurately lower level of energy. Now. Everyone. We need to start producing our food locally instead of shipping it thousands upon thousands of miles in diesel trucks and aircraft. We need to relocalize industry and commerce. We need to get our communities working again. We need to make our culture be about something other than making and buying stuff, because that's no longer viable. In short, we need to be different people than we are now. But history offers very few examples of societies that voluntarily reorganized themselves to suit the demands of environmental constraints. A more typical model is to add layers of complexity to deal with stresses until there are insufficient resources to support the additional complexity, and then the whole thing starts to come apart.

Can this really happen in the U.S.? Of course, and it's already well underway. Again, global oil production peaked in 2005. The dawn of our current economic troubles started with a sudden spike in energy prices. Now, the economy and its outsized financial sector had already reached an unsustainable level of complexity a few years prior to the energy shock, responding as it was to the need to maintain a reasonably high level of economic growth in the absence of a viable manufacturing sector, and a good energy crisis was just the thing to knock it all over. The energy situation itself was a simple supply/demand thing, with consumption rates bumping up against production rates. Speculation made the problem worse, but it was fundamentally geological in nature. Nature doesn't run deficits.

But despite all the obvious pressures, we're not going to change who we are, at least not in a single generation's time. We're going to borrow and spend right up to the bloody end, trying to hold off the inevitable with wind turbines, cars running on fryer grease, soaking up more loans from the increasingly recalcitrant Chinese to feed to our zombie banks. But we're just buying time, and at a pretty high price.

So, why I'm doing all this? Because there's nothing I can do about our culture. Sure, I could join the ranks of environmental and political activists to try to affect Change. I can lobby my state & local reps to outlaw plastic grocery store bags. Or I can accept the fact that the choice to rise or fall as a people was made years before I was born, and the chance for a graceful decline has probably already passed.

What I can accomplish is pretty simple: I can preserve skills and attitudes from the times when we did live sustainably and pass them onto my children and to anyone else who wants to learn with me. I can teach my daughters to live frugally, to grow, preserve and cook their own food and to rely on themselves rather than consume services. I know I won't live to see the whole thing wind down; that's going to be the work of a couple of generations. But my legacy will be one of preparation, an acceptance of the practical aspects of the situation, and the effort to find a way to live with less that in the end is more fulfilling and genuine than the one we're about to lose.

The Henhouse: Part 1

2009-03-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

Up front I'll admit to a strong bias towards chickens in the urban garden. Chickens literally bring a lot to the table as small livestock go: they don't need a lot of space, eat fairly low-cost food (particularly if feed them select chicken scraps and let them freerange to find their own forage), and they pay you back with high-quality eggs and high-nitrogen compost stock. And of course their bodies are made out of chicken meat, so they're ultimately recyclable, if you have the desire and heart for the job. However you look at it, chickens rank high on the cost vs. benefit scale, and increasingly, keeping a few hens in a backyard coop is perfectly legal in some municipalities. If you're lucky enough to live in such a place, I highly encourage you to take the plunge.

Chickens themselves are pretty cheap. I think I paid something like US$2.50 each for our little Ameracana chicks last April. You can lay out more cash for the posh accessories, such as feeders and watering stations, and each have their pros and cons. But the biggest potential outlay is in housing, and here your options and potential expenses are limitless. On this subject, biddies aren't really picky. Their hard requirements are safety from predators, protection from inclement weather and cold drafts, a roost to sleep on and a private place to lay their eggs. Beyond that, a broad range of structures will serve the purpose of housing. On one ends of the scale, a friend of mine kept a couple of Leghorns in a heavy tent he constructed out of tarps and PVC pipe, and birds were perfectly happy for nearly two years until they were murdered in the night by marauding raccoons. On the other end are the truly plush coops that cost as much as a good used car and are festooned with enough gingerbread, window boxes and other ornamental gimcrackery to embarrass even the most enthusiastic doll house builder.

I took the middle ground with our coop. I wanted something that I could build myself, that would be sturdy enough to keep the birds safe from raccoons and other predators, and would give them fresh air and sun without including a run. Also, we were going to have look at the thing, so I wanted it to be fairly attractive (within my modest abilities), without going over the top, design-wise. The final result:

The building is 8'x8', which at 64 square feet is small enough not to require a building permit where we live. It's divided into two 4'x8' sections, one inner section toward the back which includes the roost, the water/food stations and nest boxes, and the outer section with a screened front where I throw supplementary food and generally let the birds show themselves off. I chose not to build a run for two reasons: I wanted the birds to be able to move from inside to outside in safety without my intervention, and I didn't want to deal with mud and chicken-specific pathogens building up in the soil. I may have overthought this part, but the design is built to accommodate a run if I change my mind in the future.

In upcoming posts I'll walk through the construction of the building, and try to pass on some lessons learned in the process.

A Little Background

2009-03-07T09:00:00.000-08:00

The idea that our culture is deeply threatened on many fronts isn't mine and it isn't new, but recent high-profile stresses relating to energy and the global economic collapse has brought these ideas out of the shadows and closer to mainstream thought. There is a perception in middle and upper class America that a high level of comfort and security is an unchanging part of the landscape, that hunger and crushing poverty are abstractions or at worst something that afflicts unfortunates in poorer countries, and that "hard times" means a wee bit less and a poorly-performing 401(k). The poor in this country know this assumption to be a fiction (though they, too, currently have it a better than their counterparts in other countries), as do the remaining survivors of the genuine hard times that hit this country back in the Great Depression.

Here in the West we're very adept at doing virtually everything absolutely wrong. We abuse our once world-class topsoil with agricultural practices designed around narrow agricultural subsidies rather than a need to maintain the soil as a long-term asset, then apply fertilizer at the end of season when it's cheap, allowing most of the nitrogen to leach out into our fragile waterways before planting in the spring. We spend countless billions incrementally extending the lives of rich old men while neglecting basic wellness care for expecting mothers and children. We close our schools while investing in sports arenas. We drive our cars to the gym to ride stationary bicycles, and pay through the nose for the privilege. This goes well beyond mere inefficiency and dips into the realm of pathological stupidity. What's more, we're really not even enjoying ourselves all that much in the process. We have whole categories of things to worry about now that our ancestors from even two generations ago wouldn't have recognized.

But all this insanity is predicated on the assumption of limitless, cheap, high-quality energy, and that each of us can consume as much of it as he or she desires. That assumption has held true mostly without significant disruption for the last fifty years or so. But there's plenty of evidence that this is about to change. Global oil production hit a peak at about 85.5 mbpd back in 2005, and while demand has continued to climb since that time, no significant new capacity has come online or is projected to come online. The illusion of stability in the energy market has been maintained by a combination of poorer countries dropping out of the bidding altogether and the recent global economic downturn with the drop in energy consumption across all market segments that came with it. But it is just an illusion. What's more, the problems associated with Climate Change are already upon us, and even the best-funded of the skeptics are finding it hard to maintain their arguments. So not only are we running out of oil, we have to consider the reality that every use of it is mildly (and cumulatively) suicidal.

There will come a time when humanity will live in a sustainable manner on the Earth. It won't be because we've suddenly become enlightened, or that a technological singularity will emerge to solve all our problems, or that aliens and/or angels will drop from the ether and deliver us from our folly. It will be because we'll finally burn through our existing natural endowments of minerals, topsoil, and high-density energy sources, then die back to a population level compatible with the environment's carrying capacity--we simply won't have any choice. Arguing otherwise ultimately is arguing against the laws of thermodynamics, which is a losing position. The only thing to be decided at this point is whether we will ignore our constraints until circumstances force a sharp collapse (and yes, this can happen: history is littered with collapsed and ruined societies), or start making intelligent choices about how we want our future to look while we still have the resources and the knowledge to avoid the worst possible outcomes.

It's not my intention to use this blog as a means of preaching about Peak Oil, Climate Change and all their respective social, political and economic courtiers. If you really want to get into the details, you can do the homework on your own--the Web provides in mind-numbing abundance, and you can find a few good starting points in this site's link lists. I've been studying these topics since 2004, and now take them largely as a given. What interests me now is what happens next. I'm not a survivalist: I'm not going to be talking about building weapons caches and running through the woods like a Neanderthal. Nor am I preaching the end of the world: I don't foresee a time coming when the U.S. will collapse into anarchy and food riots, and muscled-up hormone cases with blue mohawks jousting and killing each other on the freeways over the last few gallons of gas and cans of tuna. What I do believe is that we will be returning to a low-energy lifestyle of the sort my great-grandparents would likely have recognized. The transition has already begun in a hundred subtle ways, and while I don't think my wife and I will see the nadir of it, my children probably will. My great-grandparents weren't unhappy in the absence of modern technology, the fruits of the "Green Revolution" and all the ways that our lifestyles differed from theirs, however they did have skills and expectations we don't have today. Gardening, livestock husbandry, general homesteading and all the little things that go along with it have nearly disappeared at the individual level in less than two generations. What I am trying to do here is to find a way to bring these things back into our lives, so that my children will go out into the world with the knowledge and the self-reliance to live happy, fulfilling lives in a world that will be retreating from the norm in which they were born to something very different.