Horizons

This morning the full moon rode along on my rural commute. I saw it out the passenger side window. It tugged smiles from me as it ducked behind building and jumped out again. There’s definitely something about a full moon, and when it comes in December in Oregon it feels like a delightful gift.

Not only did I get a morning full moon, but the clear skies, unusual in Oregon in winter, gave me an evening circle of moon last night and tonight. I wonder about our modern sensibilities mysteriously connecting with millennia of humans who knew they relied on the natural cycles. Is that why I smile at the big, round moon?

I’m lucky (or I made my own luck) to live in the country where horizons are visible, rather than where people rub up against each other and block the view to moonrise and moonset. Horizons help us know where we are, both geographically and seasonally, and when cities block the horizon, it limits the citizens’ ability to relate to the movement of the cosmos.

The sun’s rise and set move so dramatically, when you can see it, that it is hard for me to remember when I didn’t know where the yearly northernmost and southernmost spots are for the sun’s coming and going. Maybe those with elite views can connect like their country cousins, but the city insulates our psyche, making it appear that the quick, glamorous, noisy city is more real than the distant, comparatively empty, and unfamiliar rural horizons.

That is too bad in a lot of ways. Rural is where the whole race came from, where our ancestors’ choices turned into success of the species, where food was an immediate, seasonal, urgent part of life, not a stroll down the grocery aisle with a debit card in our pocket.

The full moon meant that hunting humans could see fairly well during  dawn and dusk, the times of day when their prey might be most active. They could also see to attack or defend in case of conflicts. When the early humans lived in hot climates, the moonlight offered a cool respite from the broiling heat of day, when they might spend their time in shelters or caves.

There’s a lot more to a moon than rhyming with swoon. It’s the gentler of the two orbs near enough to dominate earth’s skies. Its cycles pulls menses, tides, and tree sap. These days we may all be wondering what’s over our next horizon? Best to be able to see it.

What’s That Thumping On Thanksgiving Day?

We stayed home with nasty colds this year, so we had a very quiet Thanksgiving. Quiet, except for the thumping I heard outside. Since we’ve lived on this farm for nearly twenty years, I knew I had heard that thumping before.

It was a helicopter lifting huge bundles of Christmas trees from where they were cut to the truck loading area. Not only were the pilot and tree cutters working on Thanksgiving, but they were also working in the near dark of late afternoon. The whole day had been rainy and heavily overcast, so the darkening of evening came early, but trees had to be cut.

Like a lot of agricultural products, Christmas trees have a short season. The grower either finds buyers, cuts the trees and ships them out when workers and helicopters are available, or, as I was shocked to see, they pile up the cut trees, wait for them to dry out, and set them on fire.

The days following Thanksgiving were thumped by more helicopter harvesting, perhaps working for growers who had reserved the pilot and copter early enough to keep Thanksgiving open for family.

Our county grows enough Christmas trees to supply most of the country’s needs, so although the harvesting happens only once a year, it goes on all around us. Every year my mixed feelings about Christmas tree get trotted out for review.

• Is it terrible to chop down small forests for this holiday?
• Too bad all those trees don’t get composted or chipped.
• Is it better to buy trees on their own roots, and plant them after the holiday?
• Is Christmas tree growing actually good for the environment? With small trees getting planted to soak up CO2, maybe so. But there’s all the long distance hauling, helicopter fuel, and electricity to light up all those trees.
• How much worse – or better – are the reusable plastic trees?

Part of me feels like the whole chop-buy-decorate-discard routine is part of our over-consuming culture, another part sees all agriculture as harvesting and using up – in one way or another – what was grown.

If we could just get the used trees chipped and back to the soil, at least part of the waste would be eliminated. Just like my annual turkey broth-making after Thanksgiving takes the last useful morsel from the carcass and turns it into another meal.

The Pleasures of Late Season Fruits

A passing comment by a friend opened a new way of seeing the farm my husband and I live on. What the friend said was, “Everyone else is done with harvest, but here we still have so much going!”

We have put in twenty years of work to develop a place that has well cared for soil, great diversity of food crops, lots of perennial crops, habitat for wildlife, and the ability to produce food with minimal tillage. Right now what that means is at the end of October we still have some apples hanging on trees, hardy almonds are falling, ready to harvest, second fig crops are ripe, the last of the late grapes have just been harvested, and late Asian pears just went to market last Tuesday. Oh, yes, and hardy kiwis are still on the vine – tasty little grape-sized fruit without the fuzz of their bigger cousins.

Maybe when I say “late” some readers will wonder what that means. Any crop has a ‘typical’ time for harvest. Our vision of a sustainable food system relied heavily on perennial plants, and we wanted a long season of fresh food, rather than just the ‘typical’ harvest times. You can extend your season either early or late by selecting varieties that ripen before or after the ‘typical’ time, or you can plant species that either come on before most food crops or linger after frost hits.

When we began selecting varieties to plant, we paid particular attention to harvest dates, and selected a wide range of early, mid-season, and late varieties of crops like grapes and apples. Both these fruits have zillions of varieties. Some fruits don’t have so many varieties, but the whole species ripens late, like quince and medlar, for instance.

By planting to maximize the fresh fruit season we have enlisted Mother Nature to avoid having to find a way to store for later eating. This longer season also makes it easier to find small markets for a long season of crop rather than flooding a market with one big harvest.

What’s still to come is digging horseradish, burdock root, and Jerusalem artichokes, and harvesting quince, persimmons, and medlars. We also have chestnut and black walnut trees dropping nuts, but in small quantities. It takes about a decade to go from planting a nut tree to getting a harvest, and much longer to get a big harvest from a full-sized tree.

I get discouraged sometimes because it seems the world around us hasn’t changed much and doesn’t appreciate the kind of work we (and lots of other people with similar values) have done to bring a long season of fresh local food back to our towns. Then, with a chance comment, I can see that the years of effort have begun to pay off and there are people around who get what sustainability might look like. They even know what a medlar is.

Thanks!

Reading About Africa

I’m reading Thom Hartmann’s latest book, Threshold, and was moved by his story about refuge camp conditions. He talks about the results of colonial actions that broke the connection with thousands of years of cultural tradition that allowed people to live in the harsh Sudan plains, making these refugees so dependent on aid. What he describes is so stark, but peppered with glimpses of familiar humanity, that I wanted to do something. This is a start, just sending my reflection into the ether.

It’s tough to comprehend the scale of Africa. I’ve seldom seen such a simple, effective graphic as this outline of Africa with other countries overlaid, showing relatives sizes. Check out this great graphic shown in the Syracuse Collective’s latest catalog:

http://syracuseculturalworkers.com/poster-how-big-africa

I’ve started checking out aid organizations and am looking for ways to help – things I can either do or afford. It stuck in my mind that Hartmann said the camp he was in was 500 miles from electricity, with one water pump for many hundreds of people, no sanitation, no shelter, and so on. And we bailed out Wall Street. Wow.

Worried About Mandated Coverage

As one of 60 million uninsured Americans, I worry about how I (or many of the rest of us) will afford the premiums of the “mandated” coverage. How in the devil is this an improvement? If the insurance companies are my only choice, and if they can set premiums for maximum profit, I won’t be able to afford the cost of the new system any better than I could under the prior one. Isn’t this insane? I never thought I’d be one to oppose health care reform, but now I’m definitely worried. I’ve written letters, but I don’t feel heard. Guess I’ll cross my fingers.

Luck Turns

This morning I drove a wheel off the tractor while mowing the pasture. Earlier this week my husband broke his wrist while working on cleaning out the barn. The reason the barn needed attention was the beetles found infesting the wood the barn is made of. And why, you ask, were we rooting around in the barn? It was to pull out some excess siding we had stored there so we could hire someone to repair the siding on our house. The siding repair and the exterminator’s treatment of the barn and the siding rang up a total of over $6,000. We are clinging to our sense of humor. We’re hoping this is the point our luck turns the corner and things start smoothing out. Please.

There apparently is no such thing as sustainable luck.

Here’s a REAL Pro-Life Policy

One of my hot buttons was pushed in a big way back when McCain’s anti-abortion running mate was selected. Since then I’ve wrestled with the issue, concerned about the shallow heartlessness of what is called Pro Life. 

 

Over the intervening months I’ve realized just how ardently pro-life I am, just not the right wing version. My version of pro-life is far more life affirming than the forced completion of unwanted pregnancy, which, after all, is just one sad little slice of what life is about.

 

One piece of sanity from another country helped me clarify what pro life program I would support. I read about Sweden’s social programs which, among other benefits, makes sure that parents of disabled children not only have support while they are caring for the child, but assures parents that the care will continue after the parents have died or can no longer care for the child. Now I call that pro life.

 

Why couldn’t we have that kind of care in the US? If those in the US who oppose abortion really wanted to support life, they would adopt the following policies:

 

• Offer cradle to grave social support for anyone who needs it
• Make sure that every person in the US has access to affordable health care (health insurance is not health care)
• Offer pregnant women counseling and support in selecting options for themselves and their babies plus universal pre-natal and well baby care
• Offer voluntary fertility management for men and women starting at age twelve
• Tax ourselves to pay for these programs (with the richest paying the highest percentage) 
• Start government PR programs (like the much less beneficial digital TV conversion process) to change values from our current lifestyle of consuming and wasting to one emphasizing conserving energy, spending less, wasting less, caring for each other more, and living more simply, thus affording the higher taxes.

 

This is how we could create a better society – we envision it, teach people about it, and pay for it.

Cute Little Scooter

I’ve looked at scooters before, but I’ve now seen the cutest one ever. The Jonway company imports them from China, where everything is now manufactured, and had one in their parking lot to draw people in with its unusual design.

How unusual, you ask? It has a roof. The driver sits in what could be called the donut hole, with the roof arching overhead and the 3-wheeled scooter on the ground. The salesman said they’re very popular around the world – they’re used as taxis (clearly just one passenger) and commuter vehicles.

They have a 150 cc engine, cost around $3,500, and get 70 mpg. Limitations include no real room for the groceries and not being recommended for freeway travel. Apparently the roof, while narrow, does deflect a lot of wind and rain, keeping the driver relatively comfortable. Still, in Oregon these little guys would be in the garage in the rainy season, which is a big part of the year. I’ll put in a link soon.

Notes on California’s Eco-Plans

On 1/20/09 I saw California’s Governor on a public tv program explaining his state’s new eco-plans. Not only is California already the most energy efficient state in the country, but now they plan to go further. Here’s what I scribbled while listening.

Climate change in California is likely to include heat waves, very high tides, coastal flooding, and declining mountain snow pack. In addition to ecological trouble, the state is in a fiscal emergency and has seen half a million home foreclosures.

They are pioneering a plan that they believe all states will need to adopt. The plan includes a goal of a 30% reduction in CO2 by 2020. Apparently the plan is drawing a lot of ‘watch and see’ attention from other states. Too bad other states aren’t jumping into a competitive stance, taking on California and setting their own challenging goals for reducing their impact on the environment.

Simple improvements in homes can significantly reduce energy use: compact fluorescent bulbs, sealing leaky doors and windows, and improving weatherstripping. But with 12 million low income citizens, how will they be able to join the program? The Governor plans to subsidize their improvements. The program also talked about upgrading business properties.  He estimates it will take $50 billion to get CA upgraded.

Since coal is the highest carbon fuel, producing electricity from alternative sources is a key part of the plan. They plan to increase alternatively produced power from 12% to 20% (33% increase) by 2020.

Energy is the lifeblood of economies. Blackouts have plagued CA for years. The energy storage problem, meaning better battery technology, must be solved.

Hybrid cars and plug ins will be needed in the millions to meet the new goals. Developing a green economy may pay off in future prosperity (but I wonder about this).

The Gov. said “This country has no more time…” to wait and see if CA succeeds.

I agree with him on the lack of time, but I think there is an elephant in our nation’s living room that no elected official wants to talk about, and that is the need to completely rethink our way of life, to change our values, to consume far less, to waste nothing, and to begin yesterday to create ways to live decent lives with far less material consumption. So far the green movement seems to have embraced a ’no pain’ model, making minor changes like light bulbs and driving a few less miles. Sure, there’s lots of tinkering and tweaking going on, but people are still talking about growth, profit, and life as usual, which I believe is ultimately unlikely to save our collective bacon.

I say ‘good for you, California!’ But I also wonder about that elephant. Maybe we need a non-elected green prophet, crying out the truth. Trouble is, people don’t want to hear bad news, do they?

India’s Success Has Dark Side

I recently heard an NPR program about India’s rising middle class and it led me to ponder how India’s economic growth will impact global sustainability. Albert Bartlett has written pursuasviely about how any growth rate is unsustainable – we simply can’t keep growing our populations, GNPs, and energy use - so it seems that the ‘need’ for growth will overwhelm attempts to conserve and live more frugally.

From one standpoint the 7% annual growth of India’s economy is good, allowing millions of Indian citizens to get jobs, earn money, and buy the affluent lifestyle the Western nations have enjoyed for decades (OK, not everyone in the West has become affluent and some of us are actively not enjoying watching friends and family consume so avidly.)

The report said that India needed a 9% growth rate to produce jobs for the 9 million young people entering the workforce every year. Yikes!  We have helped to create a consumption monster without a conscience. It just sucks up resources and spits out debt and pollution. I have dim hopes that we can come up with a more eco-responsible model for quality of life anytime soon. Even though “green” has become popular in the US, I don’t see much truly systemic change and the expectation that we will “restart the economy” sounds like we expect to go back the same old same old.

NPR noted that the affluence that has come to India has made no improvement in the life of the farmers and rural population. About 25% of harvests  rot on the farm due to lack of refrigeration. I’ll bet there are solar refrigeration units that could help solve this problem but it takes someone with money, vision, and awareness to initiate rural improvements. The US hasn’t done so well on this front either.

The model of success we helped promote focuses on profits, excessive consumption, and city lifestyles. I guess the Western lifestyle hasn’t really changed, so why should I expect that developing countries would aim at something with less bling and cha-ching?