spring forward

We have eggs. We have, in the past, managed to maintain egg laying through the winter, but not this year. And not last year either. We were really only successful at it when we had very few hens. Maybe we should go with that.

There are also seeds in the ground, things sprouting. Coltsfoot is blooming. Goat is getting big but only beginning to bag up . . . and she is ancient. Between the bear and a neurological incident, we've only got the one female left and I hate that. She's the daughter of our first milk goat too. We'll know about the cow only later.

The potatoes from the garden are sweet -- full of sugar as they think about sprouting. It is getting warm enough that I'm beginning to think of how much I will miss cooking on the wood stove. I'm thinking about doing bread again, building a bread oven, an outside kitchen essentially. It has always been on the list.

We had a couple of deluges of water and the road is seriously bad in a couple of places. I find it interesting how that moves. At one time it was the steep part that was difficult, and given the chance it would be again but for now, the water is channeled off of it. This time a culvert was overwhelmed and water came down a place that has never washed before. We think we'll leave that part as a new ditch and just move the road over a bit.

Which might illustrate an important thing to homesteading: not having one way it has to look like but looking instead for what works. That works in parenting too. But you know, the road only needs to work, not necessarily be in the same place; or the kid needs to eat some veggies, not necessarily those veggies.

I am once again trying to find a place. It is tough to have a foot in two paradigms honestly. Maybe I can find a way to step out of that other paradigm and yet remain in horses. I know how to step out of the paradigm, and I know how to remain in horses -- it is the combining that I'm not sure of.

I do love daylight saving time. And St. Patty's day!

what I wish the President would say

I can always pick out a thing or two in his speeches that I really like, that I agree with, that I think the nation needs to hear. This last time, in the non-State of the Union speech, it was that this latest ‘crisis” was not unforeseen -- that we knew about the energy crisis in the 1970s and we as a nation did not respond in any responsible way to it.

I would continue that to say that we know and knew that not everyone can invest in the stock market and “make money” year after year because the stock market is basically a bet and you really cannot invest in it money that you cannot afford to lose. We know that when you buy a house, you should have 20% down payment at least and the payment should be less than 30% of your income. We know that more people cannot be consumers than are producers, takers than are leavers.

Yes, there is not any part of this crisis that sensible, sensitive, awake people did not foresee.

Here is what else, what else he didn't even come close to saying but needs to say. There is only so much sunlight that hits the earth and that is the maximum amount of energy that we can use. We’ve cheated with fossil fuels. We can cheat only so much longer.

The lifestyles that fossil fuel use has provided are as bankrupt as the housing market and as empty as the capped oil wells. We need to build new lifestyles, not attempt to resurrect dying industries and prop up ponzi scheme false ideas of security. We do not need the government to create “good paying jobs”. We need to see our way to a life that doesn’t take so much money and doesn’t involve so much fakery. Manual labor is not enslavement and abundance is not stuff. We need as humans the satisfaction of creating real things, and really useful things.

It is not a bad thing to live smaller, to let the world be a bigger place and to more fully inhabit our little piece of it. It is, in fact, a good thing, a thing to be embraced, celebrated even.

We no longer expect the free lunch or respect the workaholic. Rather we expect that all people will work, and work rather hard, all their lives . . . but they will always have the time to sit and have a piece of pie with a neighbor. We will not honor idleness and fakery or seek what is false.

Our hope is not the hope of seeking the status quo, is not the hope of the ever-expanding middle class, it not the hope of the growthgrowthgrowth (cancer) economy, is not the hope of what we have come to know and expect, but the hope of moving into a new paradigm: A paradigm where, simply, less is more.

I’d like him to acknowledge that real freedom, real liberty, begins with securing food because if you don’t have food, you are a slave. So the victory garden becomes the liberty garden. Arbor day becomes orchard day. Every household and every community ought be challenged to grow more and more if its own food.

Sustainability is about being willing, and being able, to do things every day, every year, forever. It isn’t about looking for retirement or living for “one day”. It isn’t about sacrificing for a bit now in order to get something in the future. It is about living now the way we can live forever. Embracing. What we need to do now is not to sacrifice but to embrace a way of being that we can keep up forever.

That’s some of what I with the President would articulate.

The Calculus it is a-Changing

aka CG as Benign Dictator

aka Stop and Pick the Berries

I listened to W’s talk on energy today (thus “the calculus is changing” -- it was my favorite line), as oil shoots up to another new high, as does corn. I’ve also listened to our candidates vying to replace W. None of them, none, speaks the truth, or anywhere near to the truth.

Here I give you my plan for energy and the future of the US.

• Stop all, that is ALL, subsidies. None to energy, none to agriculture, no more EIC, none to green anything, none to big business, no highways to nowhere, no around the bend mountain cooperatives, nothing.
• Re-start government stockpiling of commodities, including energy but mostly food. You may be unaware that there are nigh unto no stockpiles currently. Last source I saw for it said there was enough wheat for ½ loaf of bread per person in the US and that’s all.
• Once we have some commodities in, stop food stamps and start commodities. At a minimal level measured in calories. And make people work for them. Everyone can do something useful.
  
• Stop the freaking mowing. And road building.
• Ok, I’m going to try to not say “stop” anymore. Just assume stop everything.
• By executive order I allow any direct consumer of anything (that is not otherwise illegal) to buy it from the direct producer. So milk and cheese and meat and such is legal, period, on a direct level. Buyer beware, but the buyer only need beware his neighbor, not a multinational corporation trying to stick it to him.
• So is all health care legal and non-regulated on a direct level. If you want to see a quack and can afford to, go for it. But government needn’t pay for your high tech stuff either -- it is as much quackery as the other. And besides, we have to die of something.
  
• But vaccinations and teeth cleaning, toothbrushes and soap are government provided.
• As are “funeral home” fans -- cardboard on a wooden paddle. This replaces the “cooling assistance” program. That is a joke. The fans will once again be advertisement for funeral homes and churches, no doubt. Government should not do anything that can be done privately.

You get the idea. Don’t encourage anything except personal responsibility, and thus community responsibility.

What individual people have to do is, one, garden. Two, use less energy. Three, start seeing the possibilities.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that this will wreck our economy. Yes it will, so long as we are talking about the economy powered by oil in particular, and fossil fuels in general. But (and this is where “see the possibilities” comes in), it doesn’t have to be that way. People could take the economy and turn it to subsistence , manual labor based, human scaled, stable, community based economy, choosing to make things of real value. They could choose to stay home and pick the berries.

'Tis a Gift to be Disillusioned

My intention with this blog has been to write about life on the farm, and so you’ve had tutorials on making cheese and butchering hogs, descriptions trying to capture what it is like to milk a cow every morning and every evening for five years, vignettes of what is happening at various times of the year, and a slew of whatever life on the farm had me thinking about that day. This still seems a little off subject but it is what I’m thinking about.

There is no green energy.

Ok. Get that? Energy is not green. None of it. Technologies that use energy are not green.

I first think of my midwife who not only protested nuclear energy when that was the popular thing to do, she got thrown in jail for it, and then wrote a book about being thrown in jail for it. But nuclear energy may come the closest to being green. Not that there aren’t serious drawbacks to it -- there are and they are obvious. We have NFS in these parts, having some pretty serious “hot” spills and keeping silent about it

Wind energy isn’t green, just ask the Kennedy’s. Or the folks fighting to keep turbines off the ridges of the mountains in NC. Seriously. Do you want it in your backyard, and do you know anything at all about the drawbacks of it? The noise? The death? What about the fact that a wind turbine doesn’t produce as much energy in its lifetime as it consumes in its birth?

They just flooded the Grand Canyon trying to mitigate a few of the deleterious effects of damming the great river to produce hydroelectric. I have a thing for the Grand Canyon. I hiked across her and rafted through her some years ago and it is was magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. Then, after I’d spent a month being in all these places, on the three day drive home I read Abby’s The Monkey Wrench Gang and knew something about what he was talking about.

I also live in a place with TVA dams, in a place where they confiscated people’s homes and farms and businesses and in one case an entire town and I’ll tell you, more than fifty years later people are still sore about it. And Aswan Dam in Egypt has just about killed the fertile Nile Valley.

I don’t want to go through every possible alternative energy, or all the boondoggles like ethanol and hybrids and hydrogen either. But I could.

And I live with coal and coal fired electric plants and strip mining and mountain top removal, so I know about that too. First hand, not in theory.

There is no green energy.

Except that of muscle and most efficiently of human muscle work. It is green to work, it is freeing to work, it is sustaining to work.

LOOK!

Our very own black helicopter "landed" near here. Very near. Other helicopters were sent in to "secure" the site, and there was mention of weapons. hmmm.