tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80446482024-03-13T14:31:02.471-05:00Chuck Masterson’s Actual Blog“What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!” —ThoreauChuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.comBlogger387125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-58428738318009047532017-02-08T05:07:00.000-06:002017-02-08T05:11:10.571-06:00Moving<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I know, I haven't written a blog post in about two months. But I've actually, secretly, been putting in more work on the blog than I ever have before. It's just that it's all programming work. Because I've moved the blog off of Blogger.<br />
Why? Well, I'll have a whole big post about that, but the short story is that Blogger is just completely terrible. But I'm not going to go into that; in fact I'm not going to go into much of anything at all right now, because it's a preposterous hour of the night, and words cannot describe* how ready I am to be done with this project and make chuckmasterson.com a real thing. This is the both the last post in Blogger and the first regular post on the new Chuck Masterson's Actual Blog. (And really it's only on Blogger for the benefit of anyone who might be subscribed to Blogger somehow or another, so you see that a new post is here.)<br />
I'm looking forward to writing a bunch of stuff, but it'll have to wait another little while until I've had enough of a break from the blog; until then, have a look around and enjoy. And let me know what you think.<br />
<br />
*Well, actually, I think they could, but not words that I currently have the ability to assemble.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-32169448473644440422016-12-21T12:31:00.002-06:002016-12-21T15:30:55.856-06:00Colors<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I bike through the University of Minnesota on my regular commute. The commute has gotten noticeably more fun since I realized something about the U’s school colors.<br />
Now when I ride through campus, past students in their red and gold scarves, I shout (privately to myself, and in the voice of the Sorting Hat), “<span class="small-caps">Gryffindor</span>!!”</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-78935056983159989562016-11-29T23:26:00.000-06:002016-11-29T23:26:02.969-06:00For Standing Rock<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Since I've been writing a bit about Standing Rock on here, and since I'm planning on going out there myself at some point, I thought I'd put this up—it seems topical.<br />
What Standing Rock is most in need of to get through the winter is firewood. If you're in Ohio or somewhere else far away, you probably aren't in position to send a cord up to North Dakota. But you can donate to this fundraiser my housemate Erica made: <a href="https://www.crowdrise.com/standing-rock-wood-processing-equipment/fundraiser/ericaseltzer-schultz" target="_blank">Standing Rock Wood Processing Equipment</a>. I'm a few days tardy putting this up and they've already met their $1500 goal, but I know for sure that if you were to give beyond that threshold it'd still go to the cause and do good things. I've been chopping wood for the group that this fundraiser is associated with, and they're good people.<br />
No guilt, no pressure; I don't link to requests for money very often (never?) but I thought I'd make an exception for one that I know well, that's small, and that's going to something I can definitely believe in.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-10845437130102469792016-11-20T01:20:00.001-06:002016-11-21T10:33:12.306-06:00The Awful President America Needed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>(I hope you guys like ten-page essays. That seems to be all I’m capable of writing these days.)</i> <br />
<br />
So: Trump, huh?<br />
You’ve probably noticed, but I’ve been mentioning for a while on this blog, implicitly and explicitly, that I’m pretty confident the US will at some point collapse. Perhaps those of you who have been skeptical might now be a bit more willing to consider my assertion?<br />
If you consider yourself progressive, a Democrat, or even just a decent human being, it may very well feel like it’s the end of the world right now. Get some marshmallows while you still can, and when it comes time for it, spend the last few days you have left of life in a decent world roasting them while you watch it all burn. The day after the election I overheard housemates saying, “It’s not okay. I’m not okay.” A friend of mine wrote on the internet that hearing the news of Trump sent her into a form of panic attack, a real and all-encompassing physical reaction akin to a war flashback. I read that <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/11/13/election-results-cause-spike-calls-suicide-prevention-hotlines/">suicide hotlines are seeing two to eight times their usual call volume</a>.<br />
I hope feelings like these haven’t seized you. Because it’s <i>not</i> the end of the world. No, it really isn’t. I promise.<br />
For one, I stand by the post I wrote a few days before the election—where I said that, whether Clinton or Trump got elected, the net direct effect to your everyday life would probably have been roughly equal. After all, it’s our everyday lives that really matter to us. What happens in Washington is, on most days, no real material concern to us.<br />
This is of course not always true, nor equally true for everyone. Some days you’re forced right up face-to-face with the workings of Obamacare. Some day in the future a loved one of yours may go off to war because of the machinations in the capital. If you’re from another country and living here, an ICE raid may someday make your life and your family’s lives a lot more miserable. All of these are real things. My point, though, is that for most of us, most of the time, if we clear our minds and let our preoccupation with the DC drama fall away like so many autumn leaves, we can focus in on the present moment and appreciate what we have that is good.<br />
This, of course, is nothing more than a beginning Buddhist could tell you. Moreover, it’s not helpful on the days when the government does matter to you in a big way. But to close that gap, there’s something else I want to say: I believe there are some real, solid reasons for hope in this time, reasons that are far more tangible than the Buddha’s philosophy. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible, even probable, that we’re going to end up better off than we would have been if Clinton had been elected.<br />
Now that I’ve just pissed off a sizeable number of the people who read this, I had better explain.<br />
First, I need to tell you some good things about Trump. Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty bad to say later on, too. If you’ve just experienced an immediate impulse to dismiss the rest of this post as Trump apologetics and click away, please resist it. It’s important. For now, just bear in mind that this is all coming from me, and I, at least I hope to think, am a generally decent and empathetic person.<br />
I have to back up a little bit further before I can say these good things, though, because there’s some context that’s necessary. That context is that the vast preponderance of Trump’s voters did not, in fact, vote him in because they’re bigots. Really they didn’t. At first, if you’re liberal like most people I know, it’s hard to accept that this might be true. Aside from how it was constantly stated by most news outlets that Trump was going after the bigot vote, there also seems to be straightforward logic: “Trump is clearly bigoted. I’m against him because he’s bigoted. So the people who are for him must be for him because he’s bigoted just like them.” If you reason like this, you have created a very scary world for yourself indeed, as well as committing a grave logical error. What’s much closer to the truth, in this case, is one of the logical possibilities overlooked here: Trump’s supporters are, for the most part, not particularly bigoted, and they voted for him <i>even though</i> he says bigoted things.<br />
The numbers support this interpretation:<br />
<blockquote>
Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.<br />
Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.</blockquote>
This is from an excellent <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/">article by a writer named Scott Alexander</a>. The article also goes into great detail about how repetitively and singlemindedly the press kept itself stuck on the “Trump is racist” story. It was a story, interestingly, that never had that much to go on, though I don’t hope to convince you of that here; you’ll have to read that article, and I hope the idea that Trump might not actually be all that racist is interesting and provoking enough to make you read it, because it’s an extremely good article and a breath of fresh air. (And don’t skip it because you suspect it’s full of Trump puffing: Alexander’s big takeaway is that the racism angle was a “a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him.”)<br />
Well, if they weren’t racists, who were they? Now, I’m not going to write an article trying to answer that question; it’s been done, and done well. (Since I’m sure it’s also been done poorly, here’s a link to an article that I consider to have gotten it pretty much on the money: <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/11/11/23174/">“Trump and the Revolt of the Rust Belt”</a>.) Really the answer is pretty simple: they were mostly poor people from small towns and the country.<br />
Yes, those people still exist. It’s easy to forget about them if you live in a city. (And believe me, they’re well aware of that.) And these people, for the last several decades, have been getting bled dryer and dryer every passing year, as factories pull up stakes and move to China, as global trade drives down the price of grain and drives up the price of the machinery a farm needs to stay competitive, as the nation moves itself into the cities. I live in a city, and I don’t see any of this stuff: life looks fine to me. But to these people, life hasn’t been fine for a long time.<br />
Another thing I’m not going to try to do here is describe these people’s lives, for similar reasons: because I don’t know what it’s like first-hand, and because it’s already been done well. Just before the election, I linked to <a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/">“How Half of America Lost Its F**king Mind”</a>, a bawdy humor article peppered with middle-schooler dick jokes, but which also happens, underneath that, to be one of the best introductions to the desperation of the country that you’re likely to find on the internet. If you’ve never lived in a small town that’s gasping for air, you should read it.<br />
And these people aren’t stupid. They have a very good idea of what the cause is: mechanization, trade agreements, involvement in foreign wars—all the consequences of <i>globalization</i>. Which is also exactly what Hillary Clinton and the rest of the neoliberals have been telling us all should be humanity’s highest goal.<br />
But to give you one more piece of this puzzle, consider John Michael Greer’s <a href="http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/11/when-shouting-stops.html">observations</a> in his solid-Trump town in Maryland. He evidently made a point of talking politics to a lot of people this election season, and what he found was that Trump supporters were casting their vote for these reasons:<br />
<ul>
<li>The risk of war. People in poor areas, where the military is a big employer, would rather not see their sons come home from a desert in a body bag.</li>
<li>“The Obamacare disaster.” People out there are in the magical middle land of income brackets, where they don’t get much subsidy but they sure have to pay (and even then their deductibles are too high for them to manage).</li>
<li>Bringing back jobs. Like I mentioned: it’s depressed out there.</li>
<li>Punishing the Democratic party. This one coming from a different demographic—Bernie Sanders supporters who are now fed up with the Democratic party.</li>
</ul>
Reasons that <i>no one</i> mentioned, he says, included “the email server business, the on-again-off-again FBI investigation, … hatred toward women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the like.”<br />
Simply put, Trump’s support was <i>never about race</i>. Not in any meaningful numerical sense. It was about people electing someone who <i>might</i>, just <i>might</i>, help them stop living in squalor.<br />
With that cleared up—and if you don’t consider it cleared up yet, please read some of the articles I linked to, chew on them a bit, and come back, after which please feel free to disagree—I can get back to how I was going to tell you something good about Trump. It’s this: a lot of the policies that he (claims that he) intends to put in place would actually be quite good steps toward reversing the trends that have drained the lifeblood out of the hinterlands (and also, by the way, caused middle-class wages in both city and country to slump and stagnate steadily since at least the Reagan era).<br />
I’ll give you the policies in the man’s own words. It’s helpful to read what he’s been saying to his followers directly, instead of relying on the news to filter what’s important to hear. It’s great that we have a free press and all, but since they were able to be so consistently wrong for so long on this election, I have to question their accuracy when they try to do a post-mortem on it.<br />
So let’s start off with a few gimmes that I think nearly anyone could agree with: fixing our government’s problem of too many people who get into office, stay there, and do practically nothing but get themselves wealthy and re-elected.<br />
<blockquote>
What follows is my 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again. …<br />
<ul>
<li>FIRST, propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress;</li>
<li>SECOND, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health);</li>
<li>THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated;</li>
<li>FOURTH, a 5 year-ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service;</li>
<li>FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government;</li>
<li>SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Okay, the hiring freeze is perhaps a bit dodgy, especially because he tosses in several loopholes later in his list for things like law enforcement (aren’t we policed plenty?). The rest, well, I have to say they seem, strangely enough, pretty reasonable. Fewer lobbyists? More turnover in Congress? Well alright!<br />
Then, more relevantly to what I’ve been talking about, there’s this;<br />
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>FIRST, I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205</li>
<li>SECOND, I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership</li>
<li>THIRD, I will direct my Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator</li>
<li>FOURTH, I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Aside from the one about China (which I’m not really sure what to make of), I’m pretty sure I like all of these. These are motions in the direction of <i>shrinking</i> the US’s influence. They’re ways of decreasing globalization. And that’s a <i>good</i> thing.<br />
The world’s governments have been integrating and centralizing a lot for the last seventy or so years. The European Union is the most famous example. There’s also ASEAN in Asia, and NATO and NAFTA closer to home. The US has also undergone its own internal process of centralization, and is now far from its original conception as a series of loosely federated, fairly sovereign nation-<i>states</i>. And we’ve mostly taken that as a good thing; after all, it allows us to have strawberries flown in from Chile in January. But that’s the superficial benefit that allows a massive iceberg of problems to grow.<br />
Globalization can be seen as a process of removing the baffles that keep wealth from concentrating. If you live in a village of a thousand people with a subsistence economy and not much trade, the wealth you can aspire to is on the level of a very well-built homestead with good harvests. If you live in an semi-isolated city-state like Ur or Athens, you may manage to become the opulent king, though it’s more likely you’ll be a peon. A global society can produce someone who is globally wealthy, indeed many such people. But the larger the pyramid, the more stones are in its base—and the more thoroughly they’re crushed. To support the lifestyle of those Americans who can afford to buy nice cars and each new iPhone, our economic systems wreak devastation on the people and land of other countries and our own, and the amount of damage is commensurate with the wealth we gain by it. <i>Everything you have comes from somewhere.</i><br />
A country’s size and degree of centralization, as I see it, are not a side concern. They are perhaps the most important factor in determining its citizens’ quality of life and the population’s relationship with the planet. Likely the book I should be citing here is E.F. Schumacher’s <i>Small Is Beautiful</i>, but unfortunately I haven’t read that; I have, though, read <i>The Overdeveloped Nations</i>, by Schumacher’s forerunner, Leopold Kohr. It is a simply and elegantly reasoned argument that the more a country is centralized, the worse things get, in not-so-obvious ways that run from bureaucratic gridlock all the way down to individual quality of life, and I recommend it.<br />
Kohr looked very closely at the <i>effects</i> of globalization but, to my memory, didn’t really look at the <i>causes</i>. Once we look at those, we see that backing down from the frenzied race to centralization that we’ve been playing is not just a nice idea, it’s absolutely necessary in order for us to start creating the culture we’re going to need desperately very soon.<br />
Because the cause of globalization is: cheap energy. And that’s exactly what the world is starting to run short of.<br />
It takes energy to globalize. With each new layer of governance, you have that many more middlemen to pay. But if you suddenly find that you don’t have the energy to extract the resources that feed and clothe and warm these people, things get ugly fast. And that’s the point we’re reaching. That’s why it’s important to decentralize. If Trump follows through on that, it may be looked back on a hundred years from now as the most important thing for the US to have done at this time.<br />
Now, whether or not he’s going to do any of what’s in his list is an open question. And that’s what’s going to make these next four years—and their reverberations through the decades to come—ve-e-e-ry interesting.<br />
So I’ve gotten through the good things I wanted to say about Trump. Now we get to the bad. And let’s be clear: there’s plenty of bad. Again, let’s just go to the most direct source to find it: what Trump said himself. Here are a few more of his bullet points.<br />
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.</li>
<li>SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward</li>
<li>SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
This said while there are thousands of people, both immigrants to this continent (like you and me) and Natives from most of the tribes on Turtle Island, gathered in tepees and tents on Dakota land at Sacred Stone Reservation, where the Cannonball River flows into the Mississippi and either peculiarities of hydrology or spirits tumble the rocks into spheres. The people are there to stop the continent’s pillagers from sending their black snake of a pipeline to burrow through hallowed land that <a href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/11/63154.html">one observer</a> has described as the Dakota equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, as well as under the Missouri River where its toxic blood would one day poison the water for thousands of miles downstream.<br />
Or take this:<br />
<blockquote>
8. Restoring Community Safety Act. Reduces surging crime, drugs and violence by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars.</blockquote>
So, in the midst of public outrage at how many people are getting shot by cops, the solution is to double down on having the cops treat everyone as violent criminals, and to hire more of them.<br />
And that’s just to look at a few of the things he said explicitly he’d like to do. It’s impossible to predict what else he’s likely to do, but one possible way to guess is to assume that he wants to be re-elected, so as to really prove beyond any doubt how great he is. If he wants that, then he’s going to have to make things happen for those people out in the country and the small towns. That’s the message of his entire “100 days” list that I’ve been quoting; if you <a href="http://www.npr.org/2016/11/09/501451368/here-is-what-donald-trump-wants-to-do-in-his-first-100-days" target="_blank">read it straight through</a> it sounds less like a coherent list of policies and more like a compilation of everything that anyone who’s been called “white trash” would put on their Christmas list if it suddenly turned out Santa was real. If they win big from that list, who loses?<br />
Well, for starters, undocumented immigrants. A lot of them are already living in fear that ICE will raid their houses at five in the morning and haul them off with all their children. Now Trump says he wants to cancel all federal funding to the Sanctuary Cities, a group of cities where the cops aren’t allowed to do that, and wants to step up deportations drastically.<br />
Relatedly, there’s anyone who wants to immigrate to the US from, well, most places that are likely to have people who want to move to the US. Say for example Syria. Your apartment in Aleppo is now smithereens, and even if there’s a ceasefire there, the city is still going to be a ruined hull for years. You have no home and no prospects of one. Greece has closed its borders. Maybe, maybe, an aid organization will fly you to America. Nope, not while Trump’s president. It would be hard not to give up on life.<br />
Closer to home, another interesting loser is the urban middle class; if Trump succeeds in stopping all the offshoring, those iPhones are going to get a lot more expensive—as will everything else that’s made in China (<i>i.e.</i> over half of what you own). I’m not so sure I count it as a bad thing if the price of consumer electronics goes up, though, being as how that might mean that some people who work to assemble them in a factory might actually get something closer to a living wage, and be able to eat more than just rice.<br />
Less trivially, there are the people who benefit from Obamacare. There are many people who have gotten coverage for treatment that they couldn’t have gotten before, and may not get afterward. There are people who will literally die if Obamacare is discontinued.<br />
This list is partial because I’m not a soothsayer. The bottom line is that the policies Trump is proposing would be unequivocally awful for a lot of people (human and non-).<br />
But even <i>that</i> gives me cause for optimism. And for a reason that, I think, has the potential to bring more positive change than any of the other things I’ve discussed.<br />
Here’s the thing: all of those bad things that I just listed? All of them are <i>already happening</i>. Chew on this fact for a moment: Obama has had <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661">more people deported than <i>any other president</i></a>. More than all the presidents of the twentieth century added together, in fact: two and a half million of them. And all these civil rights abuses by cops that we’re protesting against right now? They’re happening under Obama’s aegis. Obama has also welcomed in a whole new form of killing innocent people: unmanned drone strikes. And remember how much he talked in 2008 about closing down Guantánamo? Now that I’ve mentioned it you do, but you let yourself forget for eight years. Don’t take that too hard; I think most of us who claim to be progressive have too. Because we had a Good President in office. He has a big smile and a mellifluous voice and he plays basketball. And have you noticed he’s black, which means it’s impossible for any minority individual to be treated unfairly by his administration?<br />
In the words of an <a href="http://www.indigenousaction.org/anti-colonial-anti-fascist-action/"><i>Indigenous Action Media</i> columnist</a>: “For those of you surprised at the results of this tumultuous spectacle, welcome to the ‘America’ that we have always known.”<br />
The vast majority of us—I should probably include myself—decided to pay functionally no attention to these issues. Or to any issues, really. We didn’t need to. Obama had our backs. He was up there making the good decisions so we could live our lives.<br />
It took something unthinkable to make any of us sit up and pay attention. It took the election of Donald Trump. Suddenly, shit is <i>real</i>.<br />
But you know what? Even though it’s absurd that it took this bad of a president to make us wake up, <i>people are sure as hell waking up now.</i> Last week I asked Misty how they were doing, and they said, “Well, I was slipping into my usual fall depression.” (This usually involves several months of heavy Netflix usage, in my experience.) “But then after I found out about the election, I suddenly had a <i>rush</i> of energy. ‘I have something to <i>fight</i> against! I have something to <span class="small-caps">live</span> for!!’ ” My housemate Emily says that the more she reads about Trump the worse it seems, and she realizes that the only sane response is to start fighting. “I really just want to do <i>something</i> every day.” My inbox has been filling up with letters from every organization whose newsletters I’ve been tolerating, all of them headlined with some variation on “This is what we have to do now: we’re going to fight like never before.”<br />
Earlier this week Misty and I were inside in the morning when we heard drumbeats coming down the street. We ran outside and found a hundred people filling up the big street outside our house and marching down it. An indigenous Mexican dance troupe headed the procession, spinning around in their enormous quetzal-feather headdresses and their rattling pants. Behind them were people announcing that enough was enough, the Dakota Access Pipeline cannot go through, the treaties need to be honored. We walked with them to the end of the march at the Minneapolis American Indian Center and listened to people with spirit letting their spirit speak. And as we walked home, we spotted first one, then another, and finally three bald eagles low overhead, flying straight toward the people.<br />
People: remember this feeling. Remember this passion. Remember that the fight is not over. Because it’s actually only just beginning. Don’t let the feeling fade away into nothing, like the people who profit from the status quo hope you will. We’ve finally grasped that there are important things worth fighting for in the world. The election of Trump may be what it takes to tear us away from our blipping bleeping devices and start doing things that will actually change the world.<br />
This is the most important thing to keep in mind. Remember to fight, and if you do, Donald Trump will not determine the shape of the future, you will. Because politics doesn’t shape culture; politics follows culture (or isolates itself from culture—until the culture stops letting it). Create a culture that’s worth following.<br />
Lastly I want to say a couple things about what this could look like.<br />
If Trump actually does begin de-globalizing this country, we’re going to be in for something of a shock. The US is the world’s number one exporter of problems. We here can imagine that the world is free from want, but that’s because we’ve exported all our want, in the form of extractive industries that bring us resources from the ruined lands of ruined people abroad, and in the form of pennies-per-day wages for the people who make practically everything in our lives. Something that Trump may not realize is that the process of de-globalizing is going to involve bringing those problems back home where we can see them.<br />
But this, like so many things I’ve mentioned, is also counterintuitively a good thing. First, it means that in a lot of countries we rarely think about, foreign-run sweatshops and plantations would have a good chance of gradually turning back into farms run by locals. Second, it means that we would be forced to see what our way of life does to the Earth, and we would be appalled. I read an anecdote once, and I forget where, about a first-worlder who was visiting some much poorer country. He noticed that there was trash all over on the streets, and pointed it out to his host to ask why they didn’t clean it up. His host said that it seemed that in his own country, people lived more honestly: if we’re generating all this garbage, shouldn’t we live among it so we realize what we’re doing?<br />
Only if you live with the consequences of your actions will you start to take responsibility for them. The US has created the most elaborate and effective systems in the world for moving the consequences of its actions somewhere else so we Americans (or the ones of us who are important) can have a well-decorated house for entertaining the neighbors and a Nice Place to Raise a Family. It’s worked out well for us, but it’s been the shits for much of the rest of the world; that’s why there <i>is</i> a third world.<br />
So if Trump tells the Saudis to pack sand and tries to bring home all our oil production to the US shale fields, people are going to actually notice. It’s easy to ignore rainforests being destroyed for our beef and soy in Brazil, or banana plantation workers enslaved to companies across Latin America, but if <i>our</i> problems are here in <i>our</i> home, we’re going to see them, and we’re going to be motivated to do something about them.<br />
The other thing I want to note is that it’s important to realize that you don’t win a chess game by only reacting to your opponent’s moves. That means your opponent controls the game, and it’s almost a certainty that all your moves that seem brilliant to you are playing directly into their hands.<br />
Trump probably doesn’t play chess, but the same thing applies. Over these next four or—dare we breathe the word—eight years, don’t let your actions to make the world better be limited to holding up signs that say NO. When you hold up that sign, your opponent has already won. Holding protest marches is fun but it’s questionable what it achieves. Several of my housemates have been involved with the Coalition for Justice for Jamar—Jamar being Jamar Clark, who was shot dead by cops a year ago in Minneapolis for no adequate reason. The Coalition has organized some marches, but to my mind its true strength lies in how its members have come together, people of all different colors, and ages from middle school to our elders, and become allies and good friends.<br />
If you want to create a society that respects all races, by all means insist that police be held accountable. But at least as important as legislating racism out is erasing racism from the ground up by introducing people of different races to each other. The concept of gay marriage went from inconceivable to obviously fine in no small part because so many people knew someone who was gay, and that person was fine. Racism has somewhat more of an uphill battle because so many of us are still so geographically and socially separated from people of other colors—but if we keep moving the way we have been, it’s well down the right track.<br />
Similarly, if you want to help out the environment, for fuck’s sake don’t do what Al Gore did. Al Gore gave a PowerPoint presentation that amounted to a sign saying NO, but meanwhile all his actions said OH HELL YES, from the private jets to the multiple luxury homes. The environment doesn’t care about symbolic actions. It cares about the <i>amount of carbon</i> you put into the air; it cares about <i>the amount of rainforest</i> leveled on your behalf. Lead by example: like I said last week, grow your own food. Turn your heat down, or even better, install a super-efficient woodburning rocket stove mass heater.<br />
To me, actions like these are not only more useful but also immensely more satisfying than walking around with a sign. Because they have an effect! Your governor is absolutely free to ignore the signs you wave. The environment can thank you immediately for cooking your rice with a haybox or a <a href="http://www.wonderbag.co.za/">Wonderbag</a> instead of leaving a burner on, and when you make friends with someone you wouldn’t normally talk to, you both benefit immediately by having a new friend. Today I helped chop and chuck an enormous pile of firewood that’s going to go to warm the tents at Sacred Stone, and I knew that I was helping in a real, material way.<br />
So the only thing left for me to do is to challenge you, and challenge myself: what real-world, tangible actions can you take that make the world a better place? Misty came up with an answer last week: they’ve taken to going out of their way to say hi to people who are a different color than them. Already one person has been surprised to hear Misty say hi, and when the two of them talked politics a little, the person said, “I thought all white people <i>loved</i> Trump!” Imagine if everyone did that: it would be a start. Imagine if a few people did that the first week, then thought of something else to do the second week and did both things, and at the same time introduced this idea to a few new people they’d never talked to before, and went on to do something new each new week. The momentum would be practically unstoppable. Getting to that point isn’t nearly as simple or straightforward as the pyramid-scheme way I just described it, but it is possible—especially if, instead of focusing on the whole country, you focus on your community first, and let the rest work its way up. But it’s only possible if you take the first step. If you stay at home and post your outrage on Facebook, your spark falls onto bare concrete. If you do take that step, the next one will be revealed to you before you know it, and your flame will kindle.<br />
And let me know, in comments here or on Facebook (whichever works for you), what you’re going to do. I’ll let you know what I’m going to do. And then we’ll both <i>do it.</i><br />
<br /></div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-30857569395741655102016-11-04T12:51:00.004-05:002016-11-04T14:41:31.727-05:00Avoid Psychic Damage This Election Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A couple weeks ago, a little after the breaking of the news about Donald Trump’s frank discussion on strategies for pursuing women, I was having dinner with my housemates Erica and Carrie. Erica mentioned, along the way to a different point, that the news had devastated Trump in the polls, and that he was basically out at this point. Carrie, who hadn’t been following the story very closely, picked up that Trump was a dead prospect, and couldn’t contain herself: her face lit up, and she got up from the table and ran several laps around the room, screaming, “WOOOOOO-HOOOOOOOO!!”<br />
There’s something about this election. Carrie’s not the first or the only person I’ve noticed who’s clearly hanging a lot on its result. I haven’t been around for all that many elections, but I’ve talked to enough people that I feel pretty confident saying that this level of anxiety and panic isn’t normal. It’s a visceral fear: it’s graduated from the usual sense that “That politician is going to do some bad things that a politician ought not do,” and into something more like the fear of ghosts.<br />
Here in blue Minnesota, for instance, people are flat-out terrified of Donald Trump. I’ve been around some discussions of voting for a third-party candidate, and it seems that people are in favor of the idea in an abstract way, but almost unanimously feel that it’s unconscionable to do it this election. Because if you don’t help Hillary Clinton get into the White House, you’re helping Donald Trump, and that’s basically the same as helping Satan himself. If Trump gets in, he’ll waste no time bringing about one of various apocalypse scenarios, like Soviet-style pogroms of all immigrants, or the complete defunding of the education system. It’s also subconsciously, and sometimes consciously, assumed that he’ll preside over the normalization of sexual assault, the transformation of the US into a place where no woman is safe. Not to mention the re-institutionalization of racism.<br />
I visited red Wisconsin last weekend and I was assured that pro-Trump people have parallel fears about Hillary Clinton: for example, that she’ll finally give the order to consolidate all citizens into the concentration camps that the government has been building. Or that she’ll finally make good on the old Democrat threat of taking away everyone’s guns. Or, more prosaically, that she’ll keep on passing tax laws that bleed more and more vitality out of the country and help the rich get ever richer. That one, at least, is easy to imagine for people outside the city, because it’s just an extrapolation from the present—the country already has double the suicide rate of the cities in this nation. I can’t tell you much about the other fears that surround the idea of her getting elected, since I haven’t had my ear to the ground in that particular direction. (It’s too far away geographically.) But they’re there, and they’re real.<br />
And to be fair, this election probably is a bit more of a turning point than most of the ones we’ve had lately. That’s because, unlike the rest, there’s actually an important issue that looks like it might get decided on. If we look at them honestly, all the last several elections have fairly well been immaterial. In each one, the candidates made themselves appear as different as possible while saying things that were at least 80% the same: America is a great nation, I want everyone to have a chance at a good life, we should do that by encouraging progress and innovation along the prescribed blueprint that we’ve been working from for the last few presidencies. Obama has ordered more drone strikes than George W. Bush, and while he got the presidency based on a lot of people who assumed he cares about the environment, he’s dragged his heels on, for example, disapproving pipelines about as much as any Republican could be expected to.<br />
This year, though, we have what amounts to a sloppy referendum on whether we should keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. The way we’ve been doing things, to make it explicit, is by throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into global trade, with the result that corporations from big to small offshore their jobs and shutter their factories, and all the material objects of our lives are made not by a craftsman in a nearby town, or even by a factory in Toledo, but by the lowest-bidding factory worldwide, out of the cheapest grade of plastic possible. Donald Trump represents the position of “Let’s do things differently”, and Hillary Clinton the position of “No, let’s do more of the same”. It’s very sloppy, I have to stress, because while Clinton can be counted on to do exactly what she implicitly promises—more of the same—it’s not clear at all that Trump will do any different from her if he finds himself clear of the electoral race with the presidency in hand and no further need to make promises to the little people.<br />
But even so, I wanted to put a voice out there to say: I really don’t think either candidate should strike that much more fear in your heart than the other. No matter who gets elected… things will be substantially the same. Yes, certainly some things will be different depending on who wins. But most things will be more the same than you might think.<br />
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have any fear about anything at all. The shockingly poor quality of both candidates, for example, is plenty good reason to be distraught. And even more so, the material future of the United States, which is in a pretty fragile state, with no one willing or able to spearhead an earnest effort to buckle down and work on making the future less painful. The difference in our future based on our response to these things—and many other big issues that we’re so far trying to ignore—is a big difference. Responding skillfully means a future where people have enough to eat. Responding unskillfully means social disintegration, lots of hard times, and a jeopardized future of the union itself. The difference between those two scenarios just dwarfs the difference between a future that starts with Clinton and one that starts with Trump. That difference is comparatively very small potatoes. Really.<br />
You might be skeptical on that point. Trump and Clinton seem very different. But I really believe that with either one, we’ll still have approximately the same balance of bad and good things. On the bad side, we’ll still have bad things happening apace to the environment, a widening income inequality, increasing fragility as a culture and a nation, and increasing illegitimacy as a world power. Trump <i>might</i> increase the illegitimacy a little faster—but then again so might Clinton, who for all her years of experience in diplomacy seems awfully keen on provoking Russia (while Trump actually seems to want to make buddies).<br />
And on the other hand, let’s not forget, no matter who gets elected, we’ll still have: the same holidays with our families, the same moments of joy with our friends, and about the same number of nice places to take a walk.<br />
I want to draw your attention to this, in case you’ve lost sight of it. Politicians really affect very little of what matters most to us in life. Suppose that, starting on January twentieth next year, you were to start keeping a log of all your personal highs and lows. Then, much later, when you’re old and gray (or, if you already are, older and grayer), look back at that log. Find which things in it you remember best, the ones that affected you for years deep down, for good or for bad. Now total up how many of them were directly attributable to which president got elected in the most recent election. How does Hillary Clinton’s tax hike compare with, say, when your old friend died, or even with when you had to get your dented car door repaired?<br />
I think this is true. You still might not. It may seem to you that one of the candidates this election will lead the country down the path to ruin, while the other has the power to save it. It’s easy to believe that, given the cataclysmic rhetoric that people from all corners of the political scene have been using to describe whichever candidate they take to be the devil. Surely the right choice of president is the only thing standing between the present moment and the descent of the US into total chaos. But I don’t buy it. Step back a moment and forget completely about both candidates, and then look at the question again: What would lead this country into ruin, and what would save it?<br />
Things that could ignite ruin: More unpopular wars, especially if the US loses. A worsening crisis of legitimacy. Widespread famine, arriving with or without the help of global warming, terrorists, or drought. On all these matters, there is no sizeable difference between Clinton and Trump.<br />
Things that could help keep the country whole: Encouragement of a rapid growth in the number of farmers to offset the ageing population of the rural US—through, for example, free land and cancellation of student loan debts for anyone who starts a farm. A moratorium on offshoring and automating jobs away. A strategic withdrawal from most of the US’s worldwide imperial outposts, so we can start keeping what wealth we still have in the country instead of spending it on a massive military that polices the world. None of these are on the table in this election; even if any of them were mentioned, they’d be considered non-starters for a variety of reasons ranging from bad to very bad.<br />
Which is to say, whatever track we’re on, this election doesn’t look like it’s going to change it.<br />
I don’t want to say that there’s no difference whatsoever between the candidates. Certainly one will cause different bad things to happen to different people than the other. Donald Trump may make a lot of immigrants miserable; Hillary Clinton may make a lot of Iraqis, Syrians, or Russians miserable. Both of them may even make some people happy, and, if we’re really lucky, some of them may be people with a net worth under $1,000,000.<br />
You may find that the goods or bads of one outweigh the other, and that’s a good reason to vote for the person who seems to add up to something better. But for goodness’ sake, don’t get yourself sick to your stomach thinking about what horrible things will happen if the wrong one wins. It’s not going to be as bad as you think—not on account of this election, anyway.<br />
I realize that, for a blog post that’s meant to encourage you not to feel so worried, I’ve put a lot in here to worry about. Famine and the decline of the US and a grab bag full of other bad things that could happen. But despite it all, I still really don’t think you should feel anxious. For one thing, I could be wrong about all those bad things. But more importantly, we can do something besides sit back and passively accept it all.<br />
That is to say: if the country is heading to ruin, what can you do to stop it? If your answer is “vote for the candidate who’ll stop it”, it’s time to stop what you’re doing, take a walk, and convince yourself to stop relying on hope.<br />
Hope is what you do if you can’t change something. When you hope, you’re abdicating your power to the whims of fate. Hoping is what you do when you’ve decided you can’t do anything else. But there’s almost never a time when there’s really <i>nothing</i> you can do. If you vote, you’re doing something, but it’s just the barest of somethings—the sum total of your effort to improve the world consists of an hour once every year, or even just once every four years, followed by relinquishing the rest of the burden and power to the goodness of the politicians you’ve chosen.<br />
Take some power. Are you voting for Clinton because she’ll do better things for the environment? Then go ahead and vote, but then <i>don’t stop.</i> Dust off your bicycle, invest in a good series of winter layers, and start biking to places you drive to. Grow some vegetables. Go to a farmers’ market. Are you voting for Trump because he’ll make it easier for small businesses to get a foothold? Then go ahead and vote, but <i>don’t stop</i>—boycott all the large chain stores you buy from and start buying from all the small businesses you know of, even if it is more expensive. (And by the way, if either of those is your actual reason for supporting your chosen candidate, well, you’ve swallowed a huge lie.) Afraid of racism taking over? Go make friends with some people of different colors. Afraid of the collapse of morality because of the decline of religion? Go to church more often and share it with people you know and don’t know, in a way they can hear.<br />
I think that’s all I really that’s all I really want to say. This election isn’t the end of the world. If the wrong candidate gets elected, don’t have a nervous breakdown. Don’t start wondering whether you have to be constantly looking over your shoulder.<br />
Take a deep breath. Stay safe out there this Tuesday.<br />
<br />
Also, further reading:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/" target="_blank">“How Half of America Lost its F**king Mind: 6 Reasons for Trump's Rise that No One Talks About”</a> — an astute analysis of why people are voting for Trump, disguised as a profanity-laden humor article. This article also doubles as a very revealing virtual trip to the huge swaths of the US where, with barely anyone to tell about it, millions have been getting poorer and poorer for decades and can’t see any good way out.</li>
</ul>
</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-6652738234893354602016-10-19T18:47:00.002-05:002016-10-20T11:40:21.428-05:00Further, Exhaustive Thoughts on Meat<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Again a <b>note to people who aren’t Sean Upton:</b> I’ve been having a bit of back-and-forth with Sean, a good friend of mine from my Korea days who’s recently gone vegan. He started it with a post called <a href="https://seanuptonblogs.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/why-do-you-eat-meat/" target="_blank">“Why Do You Eat Meat?”</a>, and then I wrote my previous post, <a href="http://chuckmasterson.blogspot.com/2016/08/why-i-eat-meat.html" target="_blank">“Why I Eat Meat”</a>; Sean came back with <a href="https://seanuptonblogs.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/why-i-still-dont-eat-meat-a-reply/" target="_blank">“Why I Still Don’t Eat Meat”</a>—and that brings us to here.</i><br />
<br />
Hello again Sean,<br />
<br />
I’ve put off blogging for the last month and a half or so, and I must admit that it’s not because I’ve been taking all that time formulating a response to you but because I was avoiding it, since I knew I’d have to do some real thinking, and some figuring out how to express things. But I’ve finally put aside the time, so here we are, back on the question of meat. I didn’t quite expect it to turn into this novel-length missive, but, well, that’s what happened. You asked for it, you got it, I suppose.<br />
This new post of yours embraces considerably more depth and nuance than the first one. But it still seems to me that you’ve gotten yourself stuck looking at the present moment, and forget that a solution that solves this moment’s problems won’t necessarily solve the problems of the future. I agree that veganism is a brilliant solution for the problem you seem to have posited as the world’s problem <i>ne plus ultra</i>: that is, how to feed the current world population of seven billion with less of the devastating environmental impact that humanity currently wreaks. But I have much less faith that it’s the long-term solution that you see it as.<br />
Something that I try to keep in mind whenever I’m trying to predict the future (or to understand the present and the past, for that matter) is that everything is systems. I’m talking about systems in the sense of systems theory or Donella Meadows’ book <i>Thinking in Systems</i> (which, I should note, I haven’t actually read yet, though I’ve learned about systems theory in a piecemeal way from many other sources). A system is an organized group of interacting parts that come together to form a coherent whole. A cell is a system, and a lake is a system, and a human is a system, and an ecosystem is, rather obviously, a system. Almost any system you care to name, any system that’s larger than subatomic, is made of a nested series of other systems, each of which plays their part in making up the whole: the system of you is made up of your circulatory system, your nervous system, your digestive system, and so on. One of the big things that systems do is interact in complicated ways that give their components roles and interdependencies that are far from obvious if you look at them on their own.<br />
It’s in this sense that I try to understand the global food system. At this point it’s fair for you to wonder how this differs from your own way of seeing all this, since of course you understand that actions have consequences. The difference is this: the way you’re trying to understand the global food system focuses on the value of one or just a few variables. In this case you’re looking at two variables that could be seen as different ways of looking at the same thing—the amount of resources that go into feeding the world, and how much of the world’s population successfully gets fed. In your analysis, minimizing the resources and maximizing the number of people who aren’t hungry is the criterion by which you judge whether your plan is successful.<br />
In the way I look at it, on the other hand, minimizing the resources and maximizing the number of people fed are not the goals. If it were, veganism would fall unacceptably short of perfect, and I would settle for nothing less than an all-potato diet for the world, with liberal use of vitamin supplements. In my view the goal, to borrow from Wendell Berry’s indispensable essay <a href="http://www.seedbed.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Berry_Solving_for_Pattern.pdf">“Solving for Pattern”</a>, is the <i>health of the system</i>.<br />
Berry contrasts two approaches to making agriculture the best it can be. In the reductionist approach, the agronomist works out ingenious new ways of increasing the yield of grain crops, and keeping them free of pests. When the agronomist has enough resources at their disposal, we end up with a system like today’s vast expanses of monocrops, which are extremely successful at getting more calories per acre, at the cost of destroying the ecosystem. Meanwhile, the farmer who takes the health of the farm and of its community to be the highest good will behave very differently. Since integrity and independence are a big part of the health of the system, the farmer will focus on meeting their own needs with minimal borrowing from the outside.<br />
I want to clarify with an example, and then I promise I’ll start moving a little more perceptibly toward the point.<br />
Imagine there is an island, a little island somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean a dozen or so degrees north of Antarctica. There are people here, and their only source of food is an endemic species of holdout woolly mammoths. The only plants that grow on the island are eucalyptuses and grasses, both inedible to the humans but delicious to the mammoths.<br />
One day, a traveler arrives from a distant land, bearing strange items they’ve never seen before, and one of these is a packet of corn seeds. The stranger explains that the seeds grow into a plant that can be eaten by humans—no, not mammoths, humans, a point she must explain several times—and eventually the island people accept her gift and begin to cultivate it.<br />
Well, whereas before everyone had just enough to eat and no more, and it was important not to waste a single part of the mammoth, now there’s plenty of food for everyone and to spare. Corn gives ten times the calories per acre that mammoths do. People celebrate. Corn is life.<br />
Forty years later the traveler’s grandson comes back and finds that there are ten times as many islanders. And, strangely, finds that now they are back to having just enough to eat. No corn is wasted. The same amount of the island’s land is dedicated to food, but where before it was mammoth grazing land, now it’s carefully gardened corn.<br />
So: <i>what has actually changed on the island?</i> Can we say that things on the island are <i>better</i> because more people are being fed for less land per person?<br />
Mammoth Island shows us that the <i>amount of resources</i> and the <i>number of people fed </i>are not the point. Never were. The point is all the other details of how the islanders live. Now that there are ten times as many of them, are they building too many houses for the eucalyptus forests to grow back? Are they using up the island’s supply of freshwater faster than the rains replenish it? Are they letting their fields lie fallow long enough for mammoth droppings to give back the fertility that the corn took up? (Probably not, to be honest. They’ve never farmed before—they have no clue what they’re doing.)<br />
This is why I tried to point out last time, and why I’m going to keep stressing, that our ability to feed the world is not the point. Rather, the point is: <i>how</i> do we feed the world, and <i>how</i> does the world then live?<br />
Veganism has, if I remember right, been estimated to be able to feed at least ten billion people. The thing about that is: if veganism were embraced by the whole world, it <i>would</i> feed ten billion people. And then we would have ten billion people. Does the world have enough resources to deal with ten billion people? Feeding them is only the beginning. If veganism feeds ten billion, how do we house ten billion with forests already getting cut down? How do they get around if oil scarcity is already playing havoc with the global economy? How do we dispose of their waste when cities’ sewer systems worldwide are already overloaded and exporting more toxic waste than can be dealt with?<br />
And that’s if we ignore the issues that come with changing the world’s food system over to a vegan mode. At first less land will be used, but as on Mammoth Island, it won’t be long before we’re using as much land as we were before, or pretty close to it if we discount the rocky places that tractors can’t reach. If we’re only growing vegetable crops on all that land, where is the fertilizer coming from? The Haber-Bosch process guzzles up a lot of fuel, and world potassium is expected to peak in not too many decades. Among other issues that come from the transition itself.<br />
It’s quite fair for you to point out that it’s not as though we’re avoiding these issues right now, either. We’re gaily polluting our waterways, poisoning and eutrophying the oceans, and feller-bunchering down old-growth forests worldwide to maintain the world’s current range of lifestyles, and we’ve got other food system problems besides—manure buildup at CAFOs, overfishing, and all the rest.<br />
But those problems, I’m pretty sure, would be outmatched handily by the problems of a world with ten billion vegans. As Wendell Berry articulated, the one-variable approach to “improving” a complex system is the kind of solution that leads to a “ramifying series of new problems,” and the only thing that these problems have in common is that all of them have spread to be outside the system they arose from. Whereas a holistic approach to solving a system’s problem, when based on a deep enough knowledge of the land and executed by someone who’s living on the land to receive its feedback, leads to a “ramifying series of solutions” and you end up with a system that is healthier for all humans and animals involved.<br />
So far, though (as you may be shouting), I haven’t offered much to tell you why I’m so confident that including animal products does work to improve the health of the food system, besides “It’s a systems thing, you wouldn’t understand.” (If one of the big lessons of systems theory is that systems are almost impossible to describe accurately from first principles, then these thought experiments I keep throwing out are no more useful than a bunch of statistics.) Well, here’s my reasoning: history. More specifically, because the food systems of practically every human culture known to exist or to have existed, through history and prehistory, included meat. There are vanishingly few possible exceptions. You could argue that some sections of present-day India are an exception, but it’s an exception riddled with caveats and even after all those, they eat loads of yogurt and paneer.<br />
When you come across a fact like this, you have to stop and wonder: Why? If veganism is the ideal food system, allowing the most nutrition per person from the least land and with the added benefit that you never once have to think about pig shit or get your hands bloody disemboweling anything, then why have so many human cultures been so eager to ruin the whole idyllic arrangement with meat? Have poor Eastern European subsistence farmers taken the time and money to build themselves barns just because it’s a long-lasting fad? Do Papua New Guinean families build pens for pigs outside their huts because they think it’s important to get their youngsters accustomed to killing in case they need to go to war?<br />
Obviously not. They raise animals because it makes more sense somehow than eating a vegan diet. But if veganism offers so many more calories per acre, what makes meat more attractive anyhow?<br />
Because we’re talking about a complex system, the answer, perhaps a bit frustratingly, is “There are a lot of reasons of various importance.” But let me try to point out some of the big ones.<br />
Perhaps first and foremost, there’s nutrition. Now at this point I’m going to have to contradict the dietitians you’ve been reading, or at least your interpretation of them, and this is an interesting enough point that I’ll go into some detail. Basically: animal-based foods have every bit as much place in a healthy diet as plant-based ones. We all know that plants are important for health. There are a lot of vitamins and minerals and fiber and other goodies in there that we can’t be healthy without. And plants are pretty much the only game in town for your daily carbohydrates.<br />
But meat and dairy... compare the fat and protein to plant-based foods, and there’s a clear winner. Beans are the best option for plant proteins, but they have a lot of carbohydrates in them that get turned right into glucose by your body, as if we needed more sugar in our diets. They also have a lot of defensive chemicals in them that the plants put in there to stop you from eating them; this is why beans give you gas and make you feel bloated. That is not a clue that they are doing good things to your body. Most cultures that eat beans have worked out that you need to ferment them to make your body accept them, but that still leaves the carbs. And as for fats, well, try eating both local and vegan, and you’ll find that your options for fats dwindle pretty quickly, which is a problem because your body needs fats. You’re down to corn oil, soy oil, and canola oil (I’m not actually sure that the crops for all of these are grown in meaningful amounts over there in England)—all three of which are not remotely healthy: all of them invented within the last fifty years, produced exclusively in big factories via alarming industrial processes, and abounding in the omega-6 and polyunsaturated fatty acids that make your digestive processes choke up. If you’re fine with imports, there are olive oil and coconut oil, which are decent replacements for some of your animal fat, but are pretty resource-intensive to produce. There’s a reason ancient Jews used olive oil to anoint the blessed: the stuff is precious if you’re making it yourself.<br />
I should briefly address the article you linked me to, <a href="http://www.viva.org.uk/resources/campaign-materials/guides/wheat-eaters-or-meat-eaters">“Wheat Eaters or Meat Eaters”</a>. Its science and rhetoric are both pretty dodgy, and it derives most of its punch from showing all the differences between humans and obligate carnivores. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are a lot of differences, because humans aren’t obligate carnivores, we’re omnivores, as any grade-schooler can tell you. Woodvine does point out some ways that we’re different from some other omnivores; I seem to recall seeing charts that cut the other way in other books, but that’s not what I want to focus on right now. I want to look at this argument that because most of the great apes are vegetarian, we should be too. This is much like saying that because all of the panda’s ancestors were meat-eating bears, the panda’s bamboo diet is clearly not healthy for it. Humans have been hunting for a long time—two million years. There’s a well-supported theory that the human brain could only evolve into what it is because we were able to eat meat: high-energy-density, fatty foods.<br />
One of the more laughable things in Woodvine’s article is the suggestion that we have a natural revulsion to meat, as opposed to our natural affinity for sugar. (I can assure you, I have an affinity for both.) If our body is really primed to seek out carbohydrates exclusively, why does eating them exclusively make us so sick? Excess carbs are the elephant in the room as diets are concerned; everyone knows they’re unhealthy, but we keep blaming fats anyhow. There’s fascinating history behind why that happened (the processed-food industry was heavily at play, especially in this country), and there’s also very good evidence to suggest that our carb-heavy diets are the source of a very large portion of the ailments that afflict industrialized humans, from heart disease to cavities. <br />
Anyhow, that’s the food angle, and I’ve only filed off the tip of that iceberg. For more information and to corroborate some of what I just said about carbs and health, you can pick up practically any book that has to do with the paleo diet, but some are better researched than others. Nora Gedgaudas’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9571633-primal-body-primal-mind" target="_blank"><i>Primal Body, Primal Mind</i></a> is pretty deep if sometimes a bit alarmist; one that’s possibly better if not as broadly focused is Natasha Campbell-McBride’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/978904.Gut_and_Psychology_Syndrome" target="_blank"><i>Gut and Psychology Syndrome</i></a>, and there’s also the classic <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117835.Nourishing_Traditions" target="_blank"><i>Nourishing Traditions</i></a>, which is quite good and not saddled with some of the ridiculousness that’s gotten caked onto the paleo movement since it became big. Probably the most vivid of them all, though, is the section of Lierre Keith’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6396542-the-vegetarian-myth?from_search=true" target="_blank"><i>The Vegetarian Myth</i></a> that deals with nutrition and health. I recommend the entire book.<br />
The other ways that meat fits into a healthy food system and human culture are numerous. Sheep give wool, pigs till the soil for free when they root, chickens control pests in your garden and fertilize it with highly nitrogenous poop, cow manure is still a coveted fertilizer, goats can get rid of those invasive rosebushes that you can’t keep under control, and on and on. A healthy farm acts a lot like a natural ecosystem, and animals, if you’ll allow me to state the obvious, are a part of natural ecosystems.<br />
Now this point makes it possible to open the door to what you said about farms: that on a farm like the one I’m describing (a “cool, organic” one), “[e]ssentially you’re still keeping thinking and feeling creatures in captivity for the sake of nuggets and burgers,” and that “this is still unnatural.” On the contrary, I would say that giving animals a place to do all the things that I described just a moment ago is as close as a human can get to living with nature and letting it do as it pleases. What does a grassland goat do in the wild that it can’t do on a farm plot? What does a bison do in the wild that a bull can’t do on an open range? And animals die in the wild too, by predation. In the case of the farm, the difference is simply that the human is the predator.<br />
A farm that lets nature do its thing with minimal interference is an example not of subjugation but of symbiosis. Without the animals, the humans would starve after the first potato crop failure (that resulted from lack of fertilizer) and have to relocate to the city; without the humans, the animals would starve come winter because they didn’t put up any hay because they can’t work a pitchfork with those hooves.<br />
Michael Pollan had a similar insight in <i>The Botany of Desire</i>, where he pointed out that, though we think of the endless cornfields of, say, Iowa, as a human-dominated space, you could equally well think of it as a <i>corn</i>-dominated space; he makes a good argument that as much as we domesticated corn, it has also domesticated us. It’s a well-worked-out analogy, though only covered in a single chapter. But I have a book in mind that examines this interdependency between humans, plants, and animals in spectacular detail, and not only explains that meat makes sense on a global scale, but runs the numbers, and the numbers behind the numbers, to show <i>how</i> it makes sense. It’s called <i>Meat: A Benign Extravagance</i> by Simon Fairlie, and I’ll link you to <a href="https://www.blogger.com/www.campaignforrealfarming.org/2011/02/%E2%80%9Cmeat-a-benign-extravagance%E2%80%9D/" target="_blank">this review</a><a href="http://www.campaignforrealfarming.org/2011/02/%E2%80%9Cmeat-a-benign-extravagance%E2%80%9D/" target="_blank"> of it</a> because I can hope to do no better job of introducing the book to you. If you want your mental picture of how the food system works on a whole-system level, and why it is the way it is, to be expanded, this is the book to read. (And as a bonus, it’ll probably be even a little bit more relevant for you than it was for me, because Fairlie is English and writes a lot about England’s food system.)<br />
So, when you have small farms with closed loops, you fairly well have to use animals to complete those loops, even if you don’t eventually eat them (but what will you do with all those extra eggs? Feed them to the local foxes? And how about the proliferating piglets?). Hence a “series of ramifying solutions”: from the extensive monocropped grain farm where biodiversity and diversity of human cultural practices are alike banished (a cornfield is cultivated much the same way in any nation, excluding a traditional Mayan <i>milpa</i>), to a series of farms where an orchestra of species work together for the goal of life for all of them.<br />
Spectacular! But how do we get there?<br />
This is the last point of yours that I want to address. A lot of why veganism looks like the best solution to you is that it’s the only apparent way that we can feed, without cruelty, all the people currently in the world. I’m willing to grant that point, more or less. But the thing is, I think feeding everyone in the world is a doomed proposition.<br />
The world population currently stands at somewhere around seven billion. In 1900 that number was around 1.6 billion. Why do we have all those extra people now? Not a very hard question: it’s because we were able to farm more. And we were able to farm more, mostly, because of fossil fuels. Tractors, grain silos, railroads (which made more far-flung land arable because you no longer had to pack out the crop via horses), motorized tillers, all of it. This also allowed us to use up our land’s fertility to dangerous levels, but luckily we also figured out a way to eat oil: that’s the Haber-Bosch process that I mentioned earlier, fixing atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer with the help of very hot gas-powered flames.<br />
Now we’re at a point where most of the 7 billion people we feed are fed thanks to oil. And peak oil has already arrived. So something needs to change. But vegan farming requires inputs of fertility from Elsewhere, and while it may be less fossil-fuel-intensive than a CAFO, vegan farms are never going to be both fossil-fuel-free and as productive as claimed by their advocates. Either you put over a lot of the area to animals who help you with the fertility, or you buy fertilizer.<br />
So if the current system doesn’t work, and the vegan system doesn’t work, what then? Hunting is out, as you noted; not enough deer in the forest to keep us fed for long. Free-range farming like I’ve been describing? It’s good, but without oil it’s only going to feed as many people as it was feeding in 1900.<br />
Well shit, then, we’re out of options, aren’t we?<br />
The only option left is the one that no one wants to talk about: the population going down, code for “lots of people die”.<br />
But I think we need to start talking about it, because I think it’s going to happen. I don’t look <i>forward</i> to it happening, because it looks like it’s not going to happen gracefully, but I think it’s <i>going</i> to happen. And if we start talking about it, well, then maybe we’ll discover something interesting: that even though lots of people are going to die, that won’t necessarily be as ghastly as people imagine. Or, to quote John Michael Greer’s <a href="http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/08/dark-age-america-population-implosion.html">excellent essay on the subject</a>, “Just as it didn’t take vast public orgies of copulation and childbirth to double the planet’s population over the last half-century, it wouldn’t take equivalent exercises in mass death to halve the planet’s population in the same time frame.” (I encourage anyone to read that essay to get a good picture of what a population decline of that magnitude could look like to a person living through it.)<br />
So to answer the original question of “How do we get there from here?”, the hard part is going to happen whether we like it or not. The less hard part is where a huge number of people have to start learning to farm, especially in the most industrialized countries. And how we get <i>there</i> is by learning to grow our own food, as many of us as possibly can. If it’s at all possible, get out into the country and start growing there, because the countryside needs more young people who can learn the wisdom of the old people who remain, and take up their mantle.<br />
Only by looking at the whole system, and living inside our solutions until we solve the problems inside the solutions, and understanding more deeply, can we hope to create a food system that works. Veganism is a simple solution—but food is a complicated problem that doesn’t admit of a simple solution. And thus it does what most simple solutions do when you apply them to a complicated problem: it creates more problems. Some problems are foreseeable, some would take us by surprise. But all in all, though it’s important to eat plenty of vegetables, it seems clear to me that a globally vegan future would lead us down a road paved with good intentions into a situation even more precarious and unsustainable than the one we’re in right now. And that’s saying something.<br />
<br />
<i>(By the way, I’m going to leave the subject of meat alone for a while, as I’ve pretty much had my fill of writing about it for the next several months. (This post kept me up until 5 in the morning last night. I just barely got to bed before sunrise.) I’d like to write about some other stuff. But I’ll still answer comments on this post, and there’s always video chatting. For now, I just hope you’ve found this useful, and that anyone else who reads this does too.) </i></div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-67678413356292910512016-08-30T01:53:00.001-05:002016-08-30T11:29:17.186-05:00Why I Eat Meat<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i><b>Note to people who are not Sean Upton:</b> My good friend Sean Upton from my Korea days has started up a new blog, and a recent post, “<a href="https://seanuptonblogs.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/why-do-you-eat-meat/" target="_blank">Why Do You Eat Meat?</a>”, was a little about his recent decision to be vegan, and a lot about asking meat-eaters why they </i>aren’t<i> vegan. He wrote it two weeks ago, but I’ve finally gotten around to answering.</i><br />
<i> Oh, also, this is the second new post this week, in case you didn’t see the previous one.</i><br />
<br />
Hey Sean,<br />
I’ve actually been wanting to answer your question for a while now. It’s just that I wanted to give it the amount of answer that it really requires. You’ve thrown just about every facet of this very large question into your one post, which means that any answer that’s not going to be just a glib thoughtstopper really has to be more like a blog post. (This may be why I’m the only person to answer you so far.)<br />
You started with (and didn’t move far from) ethics. I’d like to start with the environment, though, because I have to set up some dominoes here before I get to ethics. Let’s start with a little thought experiment.<br />
Grant for the sake of argument that, in a little internship program set up by God so He can take some divine vacation time, you have been chosen to be Most Supreme Ruler of the People of the Entire Earth for a day. The first thing you do, of course (besides the naughty stuff, which you’re probably too terrified to do anyhow, what with the possibility of unintended consequences), is to make the world a better place by decreeing that everyone is to be, henceforth, entirely vegan. Let’s go ahead and also say that you alter everyone’s digestive systems so that we can survive with no problems on a diet without animal products, and that every livestock farm is transformed instantaneously into a vegetable or grain farm that produces the same number of calories.<br />
The world rejoices in a surplus of food. First World countries ship their excess to the starving masses in poorer nations. Scientists note a slight downtick in global warming from the elimination of cow-butt methane. Fisheries the world over make comebacks. You’re hailed as an unalloyed hero, at least by everyone who’s not bitter about not being able to eat bacon anymore.<br />
So far so good. But what happens a few years down the line? At first humankind, in the aggregate, eats less food. A percentage of the world’s farms shut down and appear to be left to turn into parkland for people and animals to enjoy freely. But soon, people, well, they start having more babies. You didn’t decree they shouldn’t, so humans behaved like every other species in the world, and responded to an abundance of food by increasing our population. The farms that shut down are brought back online. In fact, because population growth has inertia, we end up needing more calories than we did when we started. And now they’re almost all being provided by broadacre monocultures. There used to be polycultures where humans still welcomed diversity of species. Especially in poor places, because that’s where people couldn’t afford fertilizers and equipment, so they used, say, chickens to till their soil a little, eat their pests, and fertilize with manure, plus provide the protein that the people used to need. But now there’s no point in a polyculture.<br />
This is a form of Jevons’ Paradox. If you decrease how much people need something, they respond, reliably, by using more of it. Likewise, if you decrease how many acres’ worth of food people need, they’ll respond by eating more food until we’re back to the same acreage, even if they need to make more people to do it.<br />
So eating less meat, while it seems to be a simple solution to a slew of huge world problems, turns out to just kick the can a little further down the road, and result in starvation again, only this time it’s starvation of a somewhat higher world population. That raises the obvious question of how we got in the unsustainable fix we’re in right now, where humanity requires so much food. The answer is not that we have some peculiarly human moral failing that gives us a bloodlust, nor is it that the inexorability of technological progress has given us a power to wreck up the environment that we haven’t yet learned the wisdom to control. In fact technological progress isn’t happening because of some innate inexorability at all; it’s happening because it’s linked inextricably with <i>energy consumption</i>. The same energy consumption is what allows us to inflict so much suffering on animals, plants, and all the other kingdoms of nature alike.<br />
Over the last few hundred years, humanity has tapped into heretofore undreamt-of amounts of energy—first coal, then petroleum—and the result has been a mushrooming of the human population. With each new increment of amount of energy, the result will be more food and more people. First we create motorized tillers and harvesters. Then we expand into previously unfarmable land using gas-powered machines. Then we build transportation networks to feed people in places like Phoenix and Dubai where they would normally have scarce options and scarce populations—ultimately increasing demand. Then we start to synthesize fertilizers and pesticides. And so on.<br />
Which is to say: the amount of damage that humans do to the environment is not a result of their dietary choices. Those choices are just a detail of how it’s done. The amount of damage is instead a direct result of how much energy we have to burn.<br />
Now I think we can start talking about ethics. Let’s simplify a broad range of ethical options into two brackets. You can live with nature, or you can live despite nature.<br />
Living with nature means accepting that nature knows better than you. (Nature, after all, is getting on for four billion years old, and you, if you’re a human, are at maximum about a hundred.) It means living within the limitations it sets, and not trying to tell it, “Yeah, but what if—?” It means, most fundamentally, accepting that you are a part of nature. If you aspire to ecological virtue in this kind of society, you don’t need to go too far: much like most people you know, you spread seeds, help tend the forest like a garden (which results in more biodiversity and more biomass), and use every part of the animals and plants you eat, returning the remainder to the land. This is how most humans have lived throughout human history.<br />
Living despite nature means believing that you are wiser than nature, and that you can improve on its designs. It means you think the human brain, and human brains banded together to create culture, have such limitless capacity for ingenuity that we can solve every problem that exists if we just think hard enough about it to figure out The Solution. It means, again most fundamentally, not believing that humans are really a part of nature, but instead separate beings, living in separate places—cities, generally. If you aspire to ecological virtue in this way of thinking, your best hope is to <i>minimize your negative impact</i>—which, taken to the logical extreme, implies you should kill yourself. This way of living came into fashion ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, but really got kicked into gear when the Industrial Revolution started in the 1600s.<br />
Now let’s examine the track record of these ways of thinking. Societies that favor the first one have been, by and large, egalitarian, peaceful, and non-destructive. They have their suffering and their wars, but so do ant colonies. Societies that favor the second one are marked by a tendency to grow bigger and bigger until suddenly they find that they have nothing left to consume, and then crash hard; they also tend to do a lot of destruction to their surroundings in the process. They are hierarchical, authoritarian, and warlike (you have to get those resources somehow, and your neighbors are a good place to start). They have a happy minority in their higher echelons—<i>psst, that’s you and me, we’re middle-class and live in some of the most prosperous countries on Earth</i>—and just hordes and hordes of unhappy, starving people supporting that minority.<br />
Veganism seems decidedly to fall into the second way of thinking, and the consequences from God’s internship earlier bear it out. Veganism supposes that the way to fix our system is to transcend our primitive reliance on meat and become a more enlightened form of humanity that’s just that one step closer to perfection. It’s a nice image, but when you look at the details, it’s not much more than an image. It’s based on a simplified equation: <i>meat = death = bad</i> (and you can multiply all terms by –1 to attain <i>veganism = no death = good</i>). Nature is considerably more complicated than that equation. Nature is not an obedient machine. When you push on one part of nature, it pushes back in other places, and it’s to our repeated and embarrassing peril that we forget this.<br />
Replace a cow with a field of soy: kill many more mice than you would have. In the comments on the “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151229124224/https://stonybrookfarm.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/the-grapple-of-ethics/" target="_blank">Honest Pig Farmer</a>” article that you linked (which is available, like most defunct links, on <a href="http://archive.org/">archive.org</a>), a bright person called GCW crunches numbers and finds that killing more mice than the pasture-raised cows you replace is an inescapable fact of broadacre tilled farming. <i>Veganism ≠ no death</i>.<br />
Keep more animals alive: population explosions lead to worse catastrophes down the line. There’s a memorable thought experiment in environmental activist Lierre Keith’s <i>The Vegetarian Myth</i>. A naive vegan commented to Lierre once that Africa would be so much more peaceful for all the giraffes and hippos and lions if people would build a big fence, then put the predators on one side and the prey animals on the other. Lierre was in too much shock at the ignorance to respond to the person’s face, but in the book she explained how this would play out: the predators would all eat each other until there were none left to eat, and then they’d starve to death; the prey animals would overgraze their whole food supply, then starve to death. <i>No death ≠ good</i> (and incidentally, <i>no death ≠ no death</i>).<br />
Similar, though less dramatic, dynamics play out when you remove animals from farming altogether and put them in game reserves. And, let’s not fail to mention, also when you remove them from old-style polyculture farms and sequester them in CAFOs, which I do not in any way condone, and which I monetarily boycott. The way out of this problem is to move <i>toward</i> nature, not away from it, and that means: pastured hogs in working polyculture or permaculture farms, especially if they’ve gotten to graze in an orchard; catching and eating fish that were able to participate in an ecosystem (catch a pike and you remove an apex predator—more little fish!); and yes, grass-raised cattle, which, if I understand right, you unaccountably seem to think are a bookkeeping trick and are raised in CAFOs after all.<br />
That’s because death is a part of nature, and accepting that you participate in nature means accepting that death will result from your human life. Refusing to accept that you participate in nature doesn’t exempt you from participating, but it does ensure that you’ll do so more clumsily and leave a broader swath of destruction. And I think this gets to the crux of what you were driving at in your post. You asked over and over again: Why, meat-eaters, why do you support this killing, if you know it’s wrong?<br />
Asking like this, you appeal to ethics that, you assume, are already settled, in a debate where you have identified and gotten on board with the side that has the correct answer, while the rest of us are still in denial or haven’t figured it out yet. (That tack, by the way, also gives your post a dose of the sanctimonious tone that is one of the things lots of people hate about vegans, and which stops them from listening to whatever good points you do have: something to bear in mind if you decide to continue trying to convince people to go vegan.) What you don’t seem to have allowed room for, or perhaps even conceived of, is the possibility of a coherent system of ethics where killing animals <i>is</i> a moral action, where you can kill an animal and not feel, deep down, that you are doing something indefensible. I have such a system of ethics, and I’ve ended up in it not because I needed some way to justify the unjustifiable act of eating meat, but because I try at all times possible to predicate my ethics on nature, not on human ideals.<br />
I have killed and helped eat a deer. I have killed and eaten many fish. I have been party to the killing and eating of a rabbit. And not only do I not feel like a murderer, I <i>treasure</i> those real, intimate connections to the ecosystem that gives life to all of humanity (while most of us do our best to ignore it and mechanize it). I dream of a time when I can get <i>more</i> of my food from animals and plants whose lives I’ve witnessed, whether briefly or closely. This means enough to me that I intend to live most of my life on a permaculture homestead learning how to do it with skill.<br />
Since I’m not on that homestead yet, I live day-to-day through a combination of mimicking it where I can (by buying from farms that raise their livestock in a way that improves the environment); not supporting the factory-farming industry monetarily (that is, I go dumpster-diving a lot, and my house has a pretty good freezerful of dumpstered meat); and, on the rare occasions when I get a chance, going hunting myself.<br />
Of course, maybe I’m not a typical case. Much of your audience, quite likely, really is still in denial or hasn’t figured it out yet. For those people, I hope for awareness of the ecosystems that support them and how they can live with those ecosystems rather than trying to deny their existence. I hope that, for those who care about the environment, they can move away from the self-defeating mindset of “do less harm”—the one that logically leads to suicide—and into the much more useful mindset of “do more good”. The society that we live in is going to fall, one way or another; that much is inescapable. But as it does, someone is going to have to pick up the pieces and go on living in the ruins, and the more people who are “doing more good” instead of “doing less harm”, the better off our descendants and the societies they live in will be. Really, authentically doing more good requires a lot of work, far more work than going vegan, a lifetime’s worth of work. But it’s better for the person who does it, better for the people who live with them, and better for the planet we live from. So let’s do that. </div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-48413662481333656512016-08-28T02:47:00.001-05:002016-08-30T09:09:02.673-05:00The Trip That Really Happened<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div>
We’ve
been talking about having a house trip to the Boundary Waters, I
believe, for almost as long as this house has been around (which, to
be fair, isn’t really all that long—we’re coming up on our
three-year anniversary). It’s a well-known fact that you can’t
really claim to be a proper dweller of Minnesota until you’ve gone
to the Boundary Waters, and all things considered, it’s also to
your great benefit if you re-up with another trip there whenever
reasonably possible. It took us a while mostly, I think, because none
of us had ever organized such a trip all on our own before. That’s
one of those things that parents always do. How were we supposed to
know how it works?</div>
<div>
Eventually
our need to be in the wilderness overcame our inability to conceive
of how a group of mere twenty-somethings could possibly organize an
entire vacation all by themselves, and five of us—me, Misty,
Carrie, Peter, and Emily—committed to figuring it out. As such, I
can now let you in on a secret: it’s really not so hard. (It
certainly helps if your group has a few people who’ve been on
multi-day canoeing trips before: between two former summer camp
workers and a seasoned veteran of family and friend canoe trips, we
didn’t have too hard of a time.) It’s just a matter of putting
some time into a small number of prosaic things: picking an entry
point, creating a menu, finding an outfitter, buying food and other
supplies, getting together to organize it all from a heap on the
living room floor into a stack of reasonably well-packed bags. You
can even do it if you’re a poor millennial. Averaged out across the
five of us, we only spent a total of $172, even though we bought most
of our food at the nice grocery store.</div>
<div>
So
we found, one day earlier this August, that we had somehow reached
the day to leave and also had our stuff together enough that it was
actually going to happen. And then there we were. In a van full of
Duluth packs. Heading up north. Boundary Waters ho.</div>
<div>
This
is the kind of drive that would probably feel very nostalgic to me if
I had grown up watching it go by every year from the back seat. As it
was, it still felt a little nostalgic to me even though I’d never
been there before. After we passed through Duluth, everything along
the road was the sort of stuff that makes itself into the fondest
memories. All along the right side of the road, to begin with, all
there was was Lake Superior, light blue sweetwater all the way to the
horizon; this was the North Shore road, never more than a few miles
from the shore. Then, periodically, there would appear in front of us
some little shop, kitschy yet still somehow completely endearing: the
restaurant with the world-famous pies, an old ice cream parlor, some
maritime museum dedicated to the century of freighters.</div>
<div>
In
Lutsen, our outfitter tied canoes to the roof of the van, and we
drove off with them down roads that plunged away from Gichi-Gami into
deep, dense, evergreen woods, first on pavement and then on gravel:
into a realm that seemed, despite being the country’s most-visited
Wilderness Area, still forgotten.</div>
<div>
Our
canoes first touched the water this year at entry point No. 41, Brule
Lake (bearing the name of the much-sung French explorer Étienne
Brûlé, the first <i>wemitigoozhii</i>
to pass through these parts and make reports in a European tongue
about the strange, exotic land that the Anishinaabe had
considered friendly and homey
for centuries—though most people I heard disregarded
Étienne’s fancé diacritics and just called it “Brool”). We
were tired and cranky after far too many hours in a box-on-wheels and
all we really wanted that evening was to be in a working campsite,
eat something, and be able to sit and relax. That meant putting the
boats in the water, even at this late hour (four o’clock counts as
late in the Boundary Waters). I hadn’t done a stroke of paddling in
at least a year, and although some of the group got a bit of the
grumbles about having to be on the water, I felt like a duck
returning to water. We threaded through a series of little islands
and found, with merciful luck, that the second-closest site to us was
empty. We moved in for the night.</div>
<div>
Tents
up, fire built. I had put together the menu and, at a brilliant
suggestion from (perhaps) Misty, I gave us a splurge to welcome us on
our first night: steaks and mashed potatoes. Once we’d all eaten
and there was nothing else we needed to do, we were finally able to
sit quietly for a bit and pay attention to where were.
</div>
<div>
Minnesota
has in theory ten thousand lakes and in fact something closer to
fourteen thousand. Most of them have been, to some degree or another,
tamed and circumscribed. Minneapolis’s Chain of Lakes—Lake
Harriet, Bdé Maka Ska, Lake of the Isles—are tidily bordered by
bike paths and studded with marinas and bandshells. Outside the city,
the lakes haven’t been subjected to such domestication but are
still plagued with motorboaters and vacation homes, clustering on
them like mosquitoes. But the lakes of the Boundary Waters will
remind you, if you have forgotten, that the lakes are still,
fundamentally, their own places, owned by no one but themselves. On
Brule Lake there are many miles of shoreline, dozens of little
islands (most with no place to beach a canoe and, even if you did, no
inviting patch of neat grass to picnic on), and broad stretches of
deep water where, on a difficult day, winds funneled through the old
straight-line Ice Age valley stir up whitecaps that will quickly
remind you how small a canoe really is. Among all that expanse, the
impact of people is constrained to a few barely visible portage
trails, a single put-in, and ten or fifteen campsites that amount to
little more than living-room-sized clearings surrounded by expanses
of indifferent forest.</div>
<div>
And
being surrounded by all that does wonders for the spirit, of course.
We were in bed too early to appreciate the stars, but I listened to
the loons calling over the still dusky water, and remembered that the
world where all this happens—where nature talks to us—is all
around us and is where I want to live.</div>
<div>
The
next morning our trip, thus far not any particular “type” of
trip, got the infusion of flavor that would define it. This was going
to be a wacky, comedy-of-errors type of trip. Not too bad, but, well,
before we got breakfast started, Emily told us all that she’d
forgotten a very important medicine that she was very much not
supposed to do without. After some weighing of the options, we
figured out our plan: Misty would stay in camp, Peter and I would
scout out a new site, and Carrie and Emily would paddle back to the
put-in, drive back to town, and get a backup supply of the stuff.
</div>
<div>
And
you know, with all the possible opportunities for that to go terribly
askew, the plan actually went off without a hitch. Peter and I
paddled around for a few hours and found a much nicer site down in a
little bay (which for unexplained reasons is called Jock Mock Bay),
and we got back to the put-in at the scheduled meeting time, just a
little after Emily and Carrie got back from town with the goods. We
picked up Misty, who had packed all our stuff, and headed off across
the lake. We reached the new site, which Peter and I had thoughtfully
marked by hanging Emily’s hot pink pair of shorts in a tree, and
got ourselves situated. Everything, really, was totally fine, and we
knew it: and we also now knew that we should make sure to take our
trip with a dose of humor and humility. Food followed, and stories
about the day, since we had a bunch to catch each other up on. And
eventually, the ceremonial hanging of the bear bag and the going to
sleep.</div>
<div>
There’d
been a debate, back in Minneapolis, about how much we should try to
shoot for distance. One party was in favor of a nice modest loop, and
another party would much rather stay in one campsite most of the time
and make a few day trips. Well, we ended up staying at that same
campsite for the entire trip. And we had reason to make more use of
that sense of humor and humility we’d found. The next morning
before breakfast, Emily told us, “Guys, I think I have a bullseye
rash.” Classic sign of Lyme disease. The sore looked the part, more
or less. Peter, who’s had Lyme disease, concluded that we should
probably take this seriously and… take Emily into town again. This
time Peter went with her. Emily! Will you never get to enjoy this
trip?</div>
<div>
Carrie,
Misty, and I stayed in camp and talked. Besides the obvious benefit
that everyone gets reminded what nature feels like, a trip to the
Boundary Waters also has the nice side effect that you really get to
know people. Misty and I have lived with Carrie for well over a year,
but she often keeps to herself, painting pictures in her room and
going to bed early. We spent the day catching each other up on the
bits of our lives that hadn’t gotten relayed through our little
chats in the living room here and there.
</div>
<div>
Come
evening, Peter and Emily still weren’t back. <i>Information:</i>
Our friends appear to be sleeping somewhere else. <i>Question:</i>
Can we do anything about that? <i>Answer:</i>
No, we really can’t, because we can’t get all our stuff and the
three of us back to the put-in in one canoe. <i>Proposal:</i>
So we should just stay here. We were a little uneasy, but trusted
that Peter and Emily were real adults who could take care of
themselves, and went to sleep.</div>
<div>
At
breakfast we discussed how long to wait before thinking of something
to do, but then I spied a tiny silvern dot on the horizon of
lake-surface visibility, and soon enough it turned into a canoe with
two people, and finally into Peter and Emily landing at our campsite.
Did they have a story to tell. First off, by the time they got to the
hospital in Grand Marais, the rash had faded, and the people there
were able to confirm through a blood test that she didn’t have
Lyme. Emily was almost disappointed, and Peter had to remind her,
“This is a <i>good</i>
thing. You don’t have Lyme disease. You don’t want Lyme disease.”
They drove back to the put-in and got in the water, but discovered
quickly that Brule had started living up to its reputation for brutal
west winds (a reputation that none of us had been aware of when we
chose it). They paddled for an hour to reach a little island less
than halfway back, where they hunkered in the boat for a moment,
battered by foot-high waves,
and then decided that they just weren’t going to be
able to make it, and turned around. They drove back to town and tried
to find a motel but couldn’t, and then finally came back to the
put-in one last time and spent a cold, miserable night in the van.
They found better conditions in the morning, just good enough for
them to get back. But on the plus side: no Lyme disease.</div>
<div>
Everyone
was inclined to let them just rest the next day. A small party of us
went across the bay to another campsite where there were blueberries
and bunchberries. We went swimming a lot. We chilled out. We ate and
played cards and let Emily have her first full day in the Boundary
Waters.
</div>
<div>
Misty
and I went on a hike and discovered the depth of the deep woods. It
may be because this area burned within the last decade or so, but the
forest here is so thick you can’t even walk. It’s one step,
followed by a lengthy decision-making process about whether to crash
through the web
of branches to your left or try to hop over the decaying log to your
right (into deep moss that may or may not have solid ground
underneath), and finally another step. But there are berries out
there, and fun to be had.
</div>
<div>
And
finally we had our last day, where everyone who’d been a bit
itchy-footed the last few days got to go out paddling and actually
see some places outside of Jock Mock Bay. We ended up splitting in
two again, and I took the canoe with Emily and Misty. While Carrie
and Peter headed off to the far end of Brule to portage for a peek
into lakes called North and South Temperance, the three of us went
just around the corner to a short little portage that brought us to
Juno Lake. Juno is a long, narrow lake, one of several that the
glaciers dug up, all lined up next to each other like a team of
skinny clay
snakes. And it turns out that long skinny lakes are pretty fun. For
one thing, you can stay pretty close to shore all the time, and get
to see the trees, the cliffs, the land go by. Also, a little way down
from the portage, this one had a towering rock in the center, and we
climbed up to its tip-top
to look out at the whole lake and test its echo. There’s
a kind of serenity you find in a campsite, where you’re ensconced
in a little nest of trees and bushes with a campfire and a tent; then
there’s another kind that you find when you’re in a place where
you can see around you for miles, and to the furthest reaches of the
eye you see nothing but green and blue, a panorama that would’ve
been the same five thousand years ago. None of us had gotten much of
the second one.</div>
<div>
At
the far end of Juno the reward is a portage that leads to Vern Lake,
another clay snake whose tail almost touches Juno’s. The portage to
Vern winds around a tiny pond and through a little meadow, and
blueberries surround the path. At the end of it a tiny outflow creek
from Juno tumbles into Vern through a cascade of jumbled rocks, the
perfect size for rockhopping, and there next to the stream, after
letting down the canoe, I also found a little blue fishing lure left
behind in someone’s forgetful moment.
</div>
<div>
We’d
managed to avoid seeing another human for the duration of the trip to
Juno, and Vern was nearly as empty of our kind, though we caught a
glimpse of someone’s boat beached at a campsite. We paddled down
most of the lake and drew up at one last portage take-out, but this
time we left the boat behind and took only ourselves. We were going
to the last lake—Whack Lake—just to say hello, and let it lap
onto our calves. It didn’t seem to me an especially whack lake, but
it did have a thick bed of
moss a few yards away from the put-in, which made an unbeatable place
to lie down.
</div>
<div>
After
being quiet and still for a long time, eventually we were all
satisfied, and walked back to Vern. The trip back to camp went faster
than the trip in; we’d done our discovering, and now only
backtracking remained. We managed to get into camp exactly as Peter
and Carrie were coming back. They told us the Temperances were nice.
We had some dinner. We stayed up late enough to get very silly while
playing a long round of hearts in the bigger tent. And finally we
nestled up into our sleeping bags for the last time in the Boundary
Waters this year.</div>
<div>
Paddling
back to the put-in caused us all to wonder how long you can stay
there. Do people pack in with enough supplies to last the summer? Do
people live there, under the
radar? When you apply for an entry permit the only things the Forest
Service wants to know are how many people you’ve got and what day
you’re going in. They don’t seem to care when you leave.
</div>
<div>
But
we had the annoyingly practical concerns of having places to be the
next day and not having enough food to sustain us another day. So we
pulled the canoes out and, after reacquainting ourselves with this
strange thing we call a vehicle, and the concepts of “roads” and
“other people”, we packed up and left. For this year. Whether in
some incarnation of this same group or not, I’ll be back. I’m
also planning on getting myself a canoe. The lakes are my friends.
I’ll spend time with them whenever I can.</div>
</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-76587871260239331002016-07-27T00:05:00.000-05:002016-07-27T12:23:22.327-05:00Let's Catch Up: Feral Futures<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You’d think that after two months of writing nothing more than a tongue twister, I’d be spilling over with things I wanted to tell about. But it’s actually been sort of hard to pick out any one thing that I’d like to write on. Lately, for the blog, I’ve felt less interested in writing the narrative details of my life, and more interested in laying out a few of the cool directions I’ve been thinking in recently. That’s probably because, as long as I’m spending most of the days of my life occupied with a full-time desk job, there doesn’t seem to really be much narrative-of-my-life to get into; meanwhile, I’ve been reading such interesting books and putting together some of the puzzle pieces of the world.<br />
But I’ll get into those things later, and hopefully they’ll actually be interesting to you. Over these two months when I didn’t write, there actually has been some narrative building up. I haven’t been behind the computer over at the office nearly as much as usual, because I’ve been out and about, and one of the places I’ve been is somewhere I remember a lot of people asking questions about.<br />
This year is the second year I’ve gone out to Colorado to meet the summer solstice from up on a mountain at Wild Roots Feral Futures. Misty, Currant, and I got up at four in the morning one day in the middle of June and spent the entire day and some of the night burning through Iowa and Nebraska on the old US Routes. Though it’s not strictly part of the event, I think there’s something to be said for the ride out there. There is a highway, US-30, that parallels Interstate 80 a few miles to its north. It’s slower, dustier, and more pockmarked than its four-lane little brother, but traveling on US-30 is much better for the soul. It allows you to discover that Nebraska actually has towns, and people, and character. Driving on I-80, you could be forgiven for thinking that the built environment of Nebraska consists entirely of Kwik-Trips, McDonald’ses, and Burger Kings. On US-30 grain elevators reach over the road to make each town a gateway deeper into real Nebraska, and you’re required to slow down for broad-streeted downtowns and ramshackle family restaurants and grocery stores.<br />
We ended that day sleeping in a park a few dozen miles outside Denver, and the next morning we funneled ourselves into the city, where Currant had to stay a couple days for a cousin’s wedding. Misty and I weren’t invited to the wedding, so after some food and a nap and a ride out to an onramp, we continued on our own. That’s right, we did our first couples hitchhiking, and I’m happy to report that it went fantastically. We waited less than five minutes for our first ride, which came from a big-wheel pickup driven by a guy our age who grows weed. Our second ride took less than a minute: at a stop light, we got picked up in a huge camper truck plastered with cow decals—the Moothership. The guy behind the wheel, RT, somewhere in his 30s or 40s, explained that he sells farmers what’s more or less a vibrator for mother cows. After cows calve, they get listless and stop eating and get health problems. but a little bit of vibration to the base of the tail triggers them to get up and do something, which usually ends up as going out to graze. Rides came pretty easy all day, and everyone liked us and we liked them.<br />
So, from my limited experience, I have to conclude that couples hitchhiking is awesome. Misty likes it too, and we might do a bunch more. After a few more rides and a night sleeping next to a river in a town park, we got driven directly to the trailhead for 2016’s Feral Futures, at the end of a gravel road that took us through a long, green, winding valley at least 8,000 feet above sea level.<br />
You have to walk to Feral Futures. Each year it’s in a different place, closer to or farther from the trailhead, always somewhere in the National Forest in southwest Colorado. Down out of the mountains, this corner of the state is a hot, shadeless land. But up here, cold brooks crash down from the snowcaps, and the walls of the valleys are carpeted with aspens, pines, willows, and meadows full of cinquefoil and dandelion and yarrow. The air is thin and dry, and fallen trees don’t rot as often as they desiccate into kindling, but there’s life and green. We walked a mile and a half or so along the side of the valley, and emerged into a long, broad meadow, where a painted sheet hung up in some trees welcomed us to Wild Roots Feral Futures.<br />
This year was the eighth Feral since the beginning. Currant has been to three of them and says each year has a noticeably different vibe to it. There’s a core in common to all of them, though—a sort of ethic or philosophy that brings people out here in the first place. You come to Feral if you’ve been raised in the good old Western civilized way but somehow it just never took. You may have been given all the philosophical and material furnishings of a middle-class US life, or maybe you haven’t and you’ve spent some of your life working to get them, but in any case, once surrounded by them, you took to knocking on them one by one, and discovered to your dismay that they were all completely hollow. And you couldn’t just grin and bear it and live with them. You have realized something that only a minority ever really grasps: that though a lot of people believe in such large, floating abstractions as “The United States of America” and “the global economy”, and though that belief gives those abstractions some power of their own, they are, at the root, made out of nothing but what nature gives us, and the more abstractions you put between yourself and nature, the more problems arise (whether the problems bite you or faraway strangers).<br />
In the US, where we have a culture farther removed from nature than perhaps any other in the history of the world, such a realization leaves you simultaneously unmoored and grounded. Unmoored from all the people and systems you probably grew up with, who are content to ignore the fragility and disjointedness of that kind of life—but grounded in nature, which continues to be the source from which all our sustenance, symbols, and world come.<br />
What that means in more concrete terms is that Feral is populated by a lot of thoughtful anarchists. Which is not a contradiction in terms. There are a lot of different kinds of anarchists in the world, and it’s to anarchists’ enduring frustration that so many people insist on believing that the only kind is high-school anarchists. You know: the kind who skateboard everywhere, wear black hoodies, and resent everyone who has any kind of power over them, especially school administration. Theirs is a rebellion with no direction; if you sat down with one of them and asked how exactly society should be arranged, the most coherent thing they might be able to tell you is that there should be no school principals, or that everyone is trying to brainwash us.<br />
Most of them grow out of it eventually, but not always into upstanding valedictorians or, later, business-casual patriots. There’s far more diversity of the human soul than that. Some of them grow from impetuous high-school anarchists into mature, engaged, adult anarchists. There’s a whole greenhouse of different kinds of anarchism, most of them coherent, logically consistent worldviews that can take your average naive knee-jerk rebuttal—“But there will always be people who are better at some things, and become leaders, and then the whole system starts over again!”—and turn it to sorry soggy shreds, then keep going and build entire new, exciting worlds.<br />
These are the kinds of people who end up at Feral. Perhaps some of them wouldn’t call themselves anarchists. It might be because they don’t like to be classified as anything-<i>ists</i>, or because they’re early in the journey and that word feels loaded still, or because they disagree with the <i>is</i> of identity that says you can describe a human with a word, or because they favor something a little different from anarchy, but that something is almost certainly not modern-style nation-states. All of them share the principle of insisting on determining their own lives.<br />
When Misty and I arrived at the shady edge of the meadow where the main fire ring was built this year, there weren’t very many people yet. The main organizer was there, and a few people we didn’t know. We spent the afternoon and evening getting our camp set up and then sitting where we could see what was around us so we could let it soak in. We had come a long way and left a lot of city noise and grime behind, and we still needed to really arrive. That requires sitting and allowing the outside to come inside you. After dusk the forest’s warmth all bled off through the thin air and cloudless sky right into space, and we were surrounded, at long last, by real quiet. Not silence; the quiet is inhabited by wind and mice, toads and water. But quiet: the absence of the thrumming, arrhythmic, inescapable pulse that pervades the city.<br />
The next morning we helped get the rest of the camp set up. At Feral, of course, there is no real leader who directs everything. There’s a core group of organizers, but what they mainly do is decide where the camp should be and offer suggestions based on their years of experience with successful gatherings. They won’t tell you to do stuff; they’ll write the stuff that needs to be done on a list on some cardboard and stick it on a tree, and then let everyone know at morning circle that there’s a list of things that need to be done. And everyone in camp will pitch in and do them, from people who are here for the first time up to the organizers. I went out into the forest and collected some firewood. Misty set up water to purify, or maybe helped cook a meal.<br />
Eventually, morning circle began. When the time is right each day, morning circle coalesces almost on its own: some people confer, then all call out “CIRCLE!” And everyone comes and forms a big circle in the main area.<br />
First everyone goes around introducing themselves with name and pronoun. I’d say a minority of us used our birth names, and at least a quarter of everyone asked to be mentioned using pronouns that don’t match their sex assigned at birth. (Most were <i>they</i>, <i>she</i>, and <i>he</i>, but another one popped up that was new to me: <i>fey–fem–feir</i>, which apparently comes from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Faeries" target="_blank">Radical Faeries</a> movement—something I’d never heard of. A few people gave it as an option but allowed <i>they</i> too.) Currant decided to take a trial run of changing their name to Willow, so we used that name all week, and it stuck, so now that’s their name.<br />
Next there’s an orientation. Someone explains how to filter water. Someone else explains the use of the shitter, which is a trench dug in an out-of-the-way place and managed well for odor using wood ash. Another person asks for volunteers for cooking and dishes.<br />
Finally we get around to people telling what workshops or conversations they’d like to facilitate that day. These could be as formal as a several-hour-long workshop on felting, or as freeform as a single question followed by some brainstorming and conversation from everyone around. Last year there were a lot of hard-skills workshops: tanning a hide, practicing archery, learning the names and uses of the plants around the area (like osha and potentilla).<br />
This year we tended more toward the conversations. The first event on the schedule all week was someone who came in to speak: Danny Blackgoat, a Diné (Navaho) elder who’s been spending a lot of time at Black Mesa. Black Mesa is a place in the Diné Nation where the government has been trying, for many years, to evict all the local inhabitants so they can allow a coal mining company to start digging there. For just as many years, the Diné have been resisting. They’ve had to fight on all fronts at once: public awareness, politics, legal challenges, and perhaps most importantly direct resistance—which is to say, people staying right there on Black Mesa herding their sheep and refusing to leave when the strongarms come and say they have to. And if they get pulled off, then they go right back as soon as it’s possible.<br />
For a while there it’s been a standoff, thanks to determined Diné as well as help they’re getting from non-Native folks like the ones at Feral. Feral-type people will go down to Black Mesa, stay with a shepherd, and help them herd sheep. They’ll just listen and do what the elder says. It’s one small way you can give back if you and your ancestors have been party to the massive land theft and genocide that’s still playing out on this continent. And it’s a way to be connected to a tradition that actually makes sense and is a part of its land—to learn from elders who have something deep to teach in a time when far too few people are there to hear. Danny told us about what it’s like at Black Mesa, and about his life history, in a series of interconnected, rambling stories that, perhaps, didn’t explicitly make a point, but still somehow told us just what we needed to know.<br />
A lot of other conversations through the week centered around this same kind of direct action. Things like going to a proposed fracking site and occupying it with tents so the company can’t drill. One person revealed that there’s a rule on fracking sites that no operations can take place if there are non-employees around—which activists exploited by running around in there, whooping it up, shutting down operations, and forcing the police to come in and arrest them. Some people came to Feral who had been on the road doing direct action for years. There was a lot of advice, and the underlying theme that if you call yourself an environmental activist but you don’t go out and help stop the land from being exploited directly, your activism is pretty cheap indeed. (Mine has been pretty cheap. Eventually I intend to correct that.)<br />
A conversation might look like this. Monsoon mentioned around morning circle that she’d like to talk about Hoop rewilding. In the afternoon, when it looks like the last activity has wound down, she gets a few people who’ve been waiting nearby to all yell together: “HOOP REWILDING!” A few more people straggle over, and Monsoon starts talking.<br />
She tells us that the Hoop is a name for the old nomadic circle that used to be traced out unfailingly, year after year, by the Native nations of the Great Basin. They would stay for a while in an area where a good edible root, like coush, was growing. They’d collect a bunch, eat some, and bring some along with them to the next place, where they’d collect a different plant and plant the coush—and so on through the year and the land until they ended up back where they started. They ate, the plants spread, and they all lived happily. But now, the hoop is broken; the nations that used to live there have been fragmented too much to walk the hoop. Now a new subculture, with roots in transgender communities and a catalyst who calls herself Tranny Granny, has been taking on some of the duties of the Hoop—using cars and titanium digging sticks while these things are available, but trying as hard as possible to keep the old traditions alive through the planet’s current turmoil.<br />
There were a few workshops on harder skills, too; for example, a quiet but intense and knowledgeable person named Tomlyn led the felting workshop I mentioned, where Misty and I both made really cool hats, and got our hands cleaner than they’d been all week, because felting involves a lot of soap. There was also a workshop on how to resist riot police, which featured a series of exhilarating role-plays where some people were the activists and others were the cops trying to separate us as we linked arms.<br />
But above all, besides all the “formal” workshops and conversations, there was a kind of community: an ability to chat and just <i>be</i> with other people who could see the world as we did. We could have the conversations we’ve been craving all year. During the rest of the year, each of us has ideas that simmer below the surface. We’d love to talk about these ideas with someone, because one of the ways ideas mature best is through talking, through putting together different viewpoints. But the kind of ideas we have are born from a way of seeing the world that most people we know don’t share. If I were to try to have a chat with someone in my family, or even someone in Sprout House, about a question like “What kind of ancestor do you want to be remembered as?” the conversation would be likely to get hung up on first axioms. I think the future and its people will look one way—energy-scarce, full of people slowly building up a culture that knows how to live with the Earth on the Earth’s terms—and the other person thinks, perhaps, that the future will look a lot like today, only with slimmer iPhones and legalized gay marriage worldwide.<br />
That kind of community may sound like a small thing, but it’s not. It’s a force strong enough to draw us in from all the way on the other side of Nebraska’s grain elevators and the car-vanquishing mountains of Colorado, year after year. It’s not just community and friendship, it’s freedom. A freedom of the mind and spirit both, the kind of freedom to roam far and wide with your favorite ideas that’s otherwise only available, dimly, in dreams.<br />
During Feral I gave tattoos to three different people. I ate food around a fire three times a day. I learned about places and events that I always hoped existed. I took meditating hikes out on the trails, and personally thanked an aspen for being an aspen. I got reacquainted with an old college friend who lives near Denver and loves to write constantly and make pancakes. I talked with an anthropology Ph.D. student about many different ways of returning to something like a natural way of living. I received encouragement from Danny Blackgoat to learn a Native language. (Misty asked: “What do you think about non-Native people learning a Native language?” Danny said: “The more the better!”) I spent time with people utterly unlike me in many ways—transgender, nomadic, repeatedly in trouble with the law, desert-dwelling—yet with the same core values.<br />
At nights, we kept the dinner fire burning, and usually ended up with some people playing guitars or games. On the night of the solstice there was a huge fire in the field where they could make it burn bright and tall, and most of the camp celebrated the shortest night of the year with music and revelry (some of us slept—I did). We looked up at the stars and took walks, and we listened to the world around us in a way we usually either can’t or just forget to. Being able to do that, and being around so many other people who are doing it too, is what—far beyond any simple workshops or speakers—makes Feral such an irreplaceable week of the year. We’re working on making our entire world like Feral, but that’s a long project; for the time being, we’ll have to make sure we get out there whenever we can. </div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-63292137379891193382016-05-16T15:32:00.003-05:002016-05-16T15:32:20.223-05:00The Problem with American Culture<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The mainstream meme strain drains steam and stains dreams.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-5179474327086866332016-05-07T17:35:00.002-05:002016-05-10T13:19:33.995-05:00Vroooom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I’ve noticed a curious transformation recently. I’m afraid of cars. But really, shouldn’t everyone be?<br />
I’ve always been pretty minimal on car usage, and even since I first learned to drive I’ve dreamt of giving up cars. But since I moved here, and especially in the year and a half since I got my current regular job 3½ miles away from home, cars have almost completely stopped being a part of my day-to-day life. Aside from a current one-day-a-week landscaping side gig that Misty got me into, I ride in a car maybe once every week or two, and it’s been that way for a long time.<br />
A few months ago I zoned out while a housemate was driving some of us down the interstate. In a mental soft focus, I noticed headlights and other lights whipping around us on all sides; g-forces shuffling us from side to side and front to back; huge metal forms only a few feet away from us in any direction I looked. And I found enough lucidity to muse out loud: “Isn’t it weird how we treat it as completely normal to do something as dangerous as driving on the interstate?” Everyone in the car agreed—though that may have had more to do with that particular driver than it did with the inherent danger of driving itself. Since that night I’ve noticed more and more that when I’m in a car, especially on the Twin Cities’ twisty-turny interstates with their tight lane spacing and frequent construction surprises, I find myself a little white-knuckled and tense. I’m not constantly on the verge of a panic attack (panic attacks aren’t a thing that happens to me), but when the car stops and I get out, I always notice that the world seems safer, I can breathe deeper, and my vision is less tunneled.<br />
I could probably desensitize myself to all that, but I’m actually not interested. I think a fear of cars is healthy. In fact, I still believe what I said that night on the highway: it really is bizarre that so many people, many of them every single day, willingly drive cars and don’t think they’re doing anything particularly hazardous.<br />
Let’s be clear about the danger involved. Outside of driving, what are the most dangerous things most of us do? For a lot of us, there’s actually nothing even remotely in the same league. But there are people who use heavy machinery, or who do construction work in high places, or who go thrillseeking on their mountain bikes. Picture a dangerous situation: we’re hiking out in the mountains and there are some steep drop-offs beside this trail. There is, right here, a clear and present danger of actual death, if you misstep and slide down the rocks into the chasm below. But fortunately for us, the danger only lasts for as long as it takes to walk a few dozen yards, and then the trail veers back onto safer territory (if it’s anything like the wilderness trails I’m used to, anyhow). Also, notice what your mental reaction was. You thought, consciously or not, “This is dangerous—I’d better be especially careful right here.” You focused carefully on your footing for each step.<br />
When you’re driving, there is every bit as much danger of death or dismemberment; one of the biggest differences is that the danger <i>never ends</i>. If you’re going down the highway at 70 mph, you have to be paying absolute attention at virtually every moment. A lapse in attention of even a single second can cause you to not notice the car in front of you that suddenly changes lanes, the piece of debris that’s just appeared in front of you, or any of a thousand other unpredictabilities. And because of your incredible amount of momentum, odds are very good that the price of that second of attention will be something like: your ability to walk, the possibility of living without shooting back pain, or your life itself.<br />
That danger isn’t just rhetorical trickery or exaggeration, either. Every year, in the world, an average of <i>1.3 million people </i>are<i> killed</i> in car accidents. [<a href="http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics" target="_blank">Cited</a>.] One million three hundred thousand people do not represent a negligible risk or a statistical curiosity. Pol Pot’s regime took five years and a concentrated country-wide eradication program to kill 1.5 million Cambodians, and left a national trauma that’s still known worldwide and won’t heal for generations. The same number of people die every 14 months in car crashes and our only reaction is a sense that such things, while sad, are inevitable and part of the world we live in. And everyone who made it through to the next year keeps on driving.<br />
And somehow, we’re comfortable doing it. While we were hiking along that cliff, your pulse pounded, and you embraced the clarity and focus that a shot of adrenaline gave you. When you’re driving, by contrast, your world feels more or less normal; you may even feel comfortable enough to make some phone calls or trust your ability to predict ten or fifteen seconds of normality while you take off a jacket. It might not even occur to you that, at any moment, you are only one uncontrollable sneezing fit away from a painful exit from this mortal coil.<br />
So while I could start spending more time riding and driving and get myself used to the inherent hazard of it all, my approach to this new fear will be to embrace it, to take it as a valuable signal from my evolutionary lineage that driving is something hazardous and I should act like it. For a mammal such as me, the usual reaction to something life-threatening is to avoid it or, if it’s unavoidable, to approach it on alert. Which means that I’m going to keep avoiding driving. When I have to drive, I’ll use the smaller, slower roads, whenever it’s possible. In California once, I met someone who asked me for thoughts on how it might be possible to get to Missouri without going over 20 mph (besides bicycling, which I believe wasn’t an option for some reason). She’d been trying to live her life with a 20-mph speed limit, and had been rewarded with a sense of grounding and safety. Earlier this year I toyed with the decidedly more modest life step of boycotting highways in the city in favor of surface streets, though I soon found that having other passengers in the car (as I usually did) made me very likely to cave and avoid driving them crazy. Soon I may reassert that idea and tell my housemates (the people I’m most likely to drive around) that, if they’re riding with me, they should expect to take the long way.<br />
Doing this goes against the opposite urge that seems to drive a lot of people when they’re behind the wheel: to go fast fast fast. It seems like that urge should never have developed in the psyche of us soft, blood-filled animals, with our bodies that are hard to repair and impossible to replace. But yet it’s undeniably there and, in a lot of people, plenty powerful enough to override the old survival instinct. Where did it come from? Undoubtedly each person has a different subconscious list of reasons, but I’d like to put one out there that I think may be high up on a lot of those lists.<br />
Several years ago, and I don’t remember quite where, I read someone’s speculations on being in mortal danger. People who describe near-death experiences, he wrote, often talk about a feeling of absolute clarity, and tell that after they were out of danger, some of that clarity remained and seemed to point toward the universal unsolvable question of the meaning of life. It seems, he said, that putting your life at risk is one of the most reliable ways of feeling truly alive. It would explain vision quests, the several-day trips to isolated spots that are traditions in close-to-the-land cultures all over the world. John Fire Lame Deer, the famous Lakota holy man, described sitting for four days in absolute isolation with no food. As life became more tenuous, his perceptions sharpened and something of deeper meaning seemed to find its way in. Those four days and the visions that came from them changed Lame Deer’s entire life and set him on the course to become the holy man he was.<br />
The author I’ve been talking about went on to wonder whether we might be able to experience something like that ourselves, in our world-made-safe: some kind of thing that risk-averse Westerners could do that would feel life-threatening, but with little actual danger of dying. If you found yourself feeling every day as though you were somehow indescribably anesthetized, as though life was somewhat devoid of color in an inexplicable way, you could go do this thing, and clarity would force its way in.<br />
He missed the obvious answer, it seems—though on second glance it turns out it’s not actually all that obvious that it’s the answer. For one thing, if we’re all getting our shot of life endangerment practically every day on our commute, then why hasn’t the intended effect come about, why aren’t we all now shamans or bodhisattvas? If you compare a drive down the highway to a four-day meditation and deprivation in the wilderness, it’s clear that the drive is missing some pieces that would make it as meaningful an experience as the vision quest. For one thing, a sense of deep purpose. Not a lot of people go on a drive with the expectation that they’ll come back having found their totem. Also, you don’t get the ability to surrender completely; you have to be conscious and able to read signs. You or I could come up with a long list of more ways that driving is deficient from a spiritual-questing perspective, but it’s not really necessary, because it’s fairly obvious if you’ve ever driven that it doesn’t feel life-changing, and also because of the results (Exhibit A, the existence of road rage).<br />
But I do think that the analogy does explain the need for speed that drives people to push a hundred down that long desert straightaway. When I was hitchhiking, I got rides a few times from people who weren’t going anywhere; they were just out driving. I also got rides on the German Autobahn, one of them in a car of young people whose driver took us over 120 mph, apparently for the thrill. The main character of <i>Gravity</i>, Dr Ryan Stone, was driving when she got the call where they told her her four-year-old daughter had died, and ever since then, she would just drive all day—and though that’s fiction, it’s fiction that works, because it makes some kind of intuitive sense to us in the audience. Driving, and particularly driving fast, may be the closest some of us get to a spiritual experience, and whether we think we want one or not, it may be what we’re seeking.<br />
With that recognition, I can consciously decide that I’m not interested in using that defective means of feeling a deeper connection to life. I’ll seek out meaning in different ways, thank you very much.<br />
Perhaps I’ve lost you with that last bit, the part that glanced with the spiritual. Let’s boil it down to this: going fast makes some people feel good, whether from the simple adrenaline or from something deeper, but it doesn’t do that for me any more. And I’ve also lost the ability to mute the feeling of danger that comes with it. I’ll still ride in a car with you, but I’ll always be conscious of what we’re really doing. Underneath the normal-sounding word “driving” there lies (no matter how good a driver you are) a complex reality full of speeding metal, fallible components and even more fallible humans, and one of the most unrelenting series of split-second decisions the human mind can handle. We let ourselves forget that. I don’t think we should.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-32870573720923534632016-04-12T16:45:00.000-05:002016-04-12T16:45:29.818-05:00Psych!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Last month I did some arithmetic and asked Misty, “Did you realize we only have three months left here before we leave?” We both got sad. Sprout House is as close as we’ve ever had to a perfect living situation. But we’d already decided that it was time to get moving in the direction of our dreams. “I feel like a wart in the city,” Misty had once said: useless and just consuming, rather than making any positive difference. Before we decided not to wait until 2017 to leave, I’d been looking at the upcoming year as a time for us to teach ourselves basic land skills in order to have a foundation for the big ones to rest on when we would get out to the land itself. But I saw Misty’s point: you have to learn sometime, and jumping in headfirst is usually the most effective possible way to learn.<br />
Lately, though, both of us have been eyeing our June 15 move-out date and feeling more and more melancholy. Misty felt like they couldn’t really participate in anything or make any commitments or connections to people around, because they would all evaporate soon anyhow. I felt like I was leaving things unfinished, getting up in the middle of a big project that I would never get back to: a general feeling about everything in life, but especially the house, where we’ve just started an awesome meal share, we’ve finally started banding together as activists (more about both of those shortly), we’re going to get chickens soon, I’ve started working with Peter on web design things, and I’ve been forging deeper and more meaningful bonds with everyone there.<br />
A couple days ago Misty realized it didn’t feel right to leave right now. It felt like running away. Running away had seemed like a great idea when the thing we were running from was The City, a concept we (especially Misty) had built up of an unsalvageable environment that enforced radically wrong lifeways we couldn’t endorse. But the other day Misty realized, and I agreed, that we’d also be running from the best manifestation of community life that either of us have experienced.<br />
So we’re going to stay here another year. We’re still going to do a bunch of traveling this summer, but instead of segueing into a bunch of traveling through fall and winter, we’re going to come back here and put together the chicken enclosure and harvest wild edibles (for real this time) and build stuff like solar cookers and composting toilets.<br />
<br />
I mentioned our meal share. We’re only a few weeks into this, but everyone who’s in it agrees that it’s one of the best things we’ve done. It’s pretty simple: there are six of us in it, and each evening, one of us cooks a meal for everyone. (That leaves one night that’s no one’s; currently we stop by the store and get a baked chicken that night.) So we only have to cook one dinner a week, and yet we get a fresh hot meal every night. It’s one of the most elegant examples of the great possibilities community life has to offer, I think. It makes you wonder why it’s not <i>normal everywhere</i> to do this. And also why it took so long for us to get this going.<br />
<br />
I also mentioned banding together as activists. A few months ago, we had a meeting where we realized that we kind of had our community life in order, and it was about time we started spreading our inward-pointed life out into the wider world to make the difference we all want to make.<br />
Three people who especially jumped on that impulse were Peter, Erica, and Annabelle, who had already been pretty heavily involved with the Justice 4 Jamar movement, and then came up with an idea to combine their skills. Peter is a web designer, Annabelle is a photographer, and Erica is an oral historian, which has meant she interviews people about their life stories and packages up the transcripts for them and their descendants to keep and remember.<br />
So the project: they’d been meeting more and more people who’d been brutalized by police, and it became clear to all of them that, if you’re brown, getting roughed up or beaten or even killed by the police is not at all an uncommon thing. It’s the rule, and yet we middle-class white people assume that it’s the exception, because we only hear occasional news stories, not stories from people we know and love. So they decided to spread the stories. They would get in touch with a brutality survivor; Annabelle would take a portrait right where it happened (yes, these things happen in the real world, not in exotic “bad neighborhoods”), and Erica would interview them for as long as it took to tell their story. And Peter put together a website where anyone can listen to them and read them.<br />
Here it is: <a href="http://www.bluelinemn.org/" target="_blank">Behind the Blue Line</a>. Spend some time with it. It’s important for everyone to know that these things are happening, and that means you, especially if you’ve never been arrested or had a cop pick you up off the street for no reason. It needs to be known.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-56426942158519622242016-03-22T16:31:00.003-05:002016-06-02T15:38:03.631-05:00New Hobby<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Time was, if you were good at calligraphy and lettering, you could use that skill to get a job as a signpainter or a scribe or a wedding invitation maker, or something. Nowadays computers get to have all the fun. I designed fonts for a few years, but after finishing three, I realized that there’s very little joy down that path. Designing a font for computer use, like the ones I made, involves a few awesome days of sketching and refining the font on paper, followed by months and months of twiddling pixels and making minute changes to sidebearings and kerning.<br />
I realized that there is one domain of lettering left that has yet to be fully taken over by computers: tattoos. But there’s a lot involved in finding a job in a tattoo shop. Before you can be a tattoo artist in a shop, you more or less need to decide that that’s what you want your life to be all about. You also need to get lots of tattoos yourself. Meanwhile I’m so indecisive that I have little hope of ever deciding on a tattoo that I like enough to be confident I’ll always be happy it’s there.<br />
But did you know you don’t <i>have</i> to work at a tattoo shop to do tattoos? You can just <i>buy</i> ink and needles! You don’t even need a tattoo machine.<a href="#20160322n1" id="20160322n1s">*</a> Before those were invented, people did it the old-fashioned way: stick-and-poke.<br />
It all started with Misty’s idea for a tattoo: <span class="small-caps">Be the change you want to see.</span> I had heard of stick-and-poke, but once Misty asked if I could do that, I got interested in whether I could actually do it. In November I got ink and a needle (for Misty’s birthday), and after a while, we decided to figure out how the whole thing works.<br />
First I did a little practice tattoo; Misty wanted to see if the ink would get rejected or anything. It didn’t! I didn’t have the lettering ready for “Be the change”, but Misty had another idea they’d been waiting to use, and one night we sat down at the kitchen table with an ink cup and started this:<br />
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It actually took three nights (one for each color of ink) to finish. But we finished, and it’s still there. (Somehow I keep expecting tattoos to wear off after a while if I’m the one who makes them. Seems like there’s no way I actually have the power to make a permanent mark on someone.)<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ajs2ZsHRd-U/VvGuAjseKaI/AAAAAAAADKQ/8WviI853DC4cIEZHyl7enX9-IaowqqBAg/s1600/IMG_1808.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ajs2ZsHRd-U/VvGuAjseKaI/AAAAAAAADKQ/8WviI853DC4cIEZHyl7enX9-IaowqqBAg/s640/IMG_1808.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“I’ve always wanted to wear my heart on my sleeve.”</td></tr>
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Word got out, and I have a few friends waiting for possible tattoos, though strangely enough, none of them have involved lettering yet. A few days ago I covered up an old tattoo my friend Maddy had of a tiny sprout on her ankle. She wanted a beet instead. I used all the artistic muscles I had, and in a four-hour marathon session, we got a beet to appear. We’re going to touch up bits here and there, and the pictures are poorly lit and blurry, and suffer a bit from the tattoo not being healed, but I believe it’s a beet indeed. At a tattoo shop they might’ve insisted on bright red ink, but one of the things Maddy loves about beets is their dark purplish color, so we made it deeper.<br />
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So far, I’ve learned that doing tattoos is <i>fun</i>. Doing them stick-and-poke makes them take a lot longer, but it’s also very personal. I haven’t been present to see a shop tattoo being given, but it seems more mediated by rubber gloves and electric machines. How it works with stick-and-poke is basically this:<br />
1. Get your supplies: Proper ink and sterile tattooing needles.<br />
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2. Secure the needle to something you can grip. I use a pencil.<br />
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3. Pour the ink into a little container of some sort, and dip the needle in.<br />
4. Start poking. It won’t take long to figure out how much force to use. Too little, and you’ll be able to tell easily that you’re not breaking the skin. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to use too much, because your instinct is always going to be to poke someone less hard. When it’s just right, you’ll hear a <i>tip tip tip tip</i> sound as the needle goes in and out of the skin.<br />
The needle won’t hold a lot of ink on its own, but it doesn’t need to. A thin layer of ink will build up on your friend’s skin, and you just poke through that layer; the ink from the layer seeps down into the hole you’ve made.<br />
5. Encourage proper care. That means keeping it clean (to avoid infections in what, as far as your body is concerned, is thousands of tiny open wounds), and not picking at it (which would make parts of it not stay).<br />
6. Throughout, be sanitary. Tattoo shops take this to a science, and go through hundreds of rubber gloves a day, I’m sure, just like restaurants do. The basics are simple and common-sensical, though. Don’t let the needle touch anything that isn’t ink, your friend, or clean water or rubbing alcohol. Don’t get stuff on the tattoo. Wash your hands. I anticipate that this is the part where anyone who’s in favor of professional tattoos only will jump on me. Yes, clearly, a tattoo shop is probably going to be a little bit cleaner. But that tattoo is going to meet the open air sooner or later, so being completely sterile in every step of the process is, I think, overkill. As long as you take all the sensible precautions, things will almost certainly turn out just as well as they would in a shop.<br />
<br />
So that’s how it works. And if you want to get a tattoo, and you have patience and it’s not too huge, and you like the idea of getting it from a friend instead of a stranger in a shop, now you know someone you can call.<br />
<br />
<hr />
<span id="20160322n1" class="footnote">*Don’t call it a tattoo gun. Tattoo artists <i>hate</i> that. <a href="#20160322n1s">^</a></span></div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-20405717568338845452016-02-24T23:28:00.004-06:002016-02-24T23:28:50.480-06:00haiku (a true story)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: center;">
streetlights on old snow </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
my shadow reached the rabbit</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
pop!—frightened kernel!</div>
</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-33277494555264073972016-02-13T02:10:00.000-06:002016-02-13T02:44:53.480-06:00The Thing about Them<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h5 style="text-align: left;">
I. Introducing <i>them</i></h5>
<i>(This may be information you already know, if you’ve been using non-binary pronouns for a while. If you’re not looking for a long read, you might skip down to section II.)</i><br />
<br />
Singular <i>they</i> has been declared the Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. That’s when you use <i>they</i> to mean just one person, of unspecified gender: “If someone shows up, tell them I’ll be back in just a minute.” Depending on how close a friend you are with <i>they</i>, and how prescriptive you like your grammar, your reaction to that declaration could be anywhere from “That’s a travesty against English grammar and practically against all logic!” to “About damn time we had a pronoun that doesn’t force everyone to decide whether they’re all-or-nothing female <span class="small-caps"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or" target="_blank">xor</a></span> male!” to “Whatever, so I guess that means now I can use that instead of ‘he or she’?”<br />
The acceptance of <i>they </i>is actually a big deal for a lot of people. The last ten years or so of gender politics have been very full of progress. Within the last generation, more or less, our societal attitude (at least in most of the Global North) toward people who aren’t straight, gender-conforming, “normal” people has gone from “Those freaks had better keep it in San Francisco and not try to come near my good American community” to “Fine by me if people get married to any adult they want; they’re not hurting anyone and they’re just ordinary people.” Within that context, this last decade or so, people who <i>aren’t</i> straight and/or gender-conforming have felt a quickly growing courage to explore the huge variety of ways to be human outside those lines. And a lot of them have found that, when they really take a deep look at their own gender, the thought of choosing one of the exactly two classic options feels plain-and-simple wrong. It can feel wrong in a lot of different ways, probably as many ways as there are people who experience them, or even more—but in the end it comes down to the same thing: “I don’t feel like a man, and I don’t feel like a woman. I’m someone else. Myself.”<br />
<i>(Before I go much further, I should mention that I myself am a cisman, which, as I heard it excellently explained once, means that when I came out, the doctors said, ‘It’s a boy!’ and I’ve been pretty fine with that assessment ever since. Being a cisman means that I’ve never experienced first-hand a lot of the things I’m going to talk about here. That means, functionally, that I have to stay somewhere behind the front lines of any cultural shift on gender issues; I can’t demand, I can only suggest. Those more extreme might say that a cisman should refrain from trying to say anything about gender, because society’s heard enough from cismen. I disagree: I may not be the most directly affected by gender issues, but with a sizeable number of close friends who are on those front lines, I’m still indirectly affected, which makes me think a lot about these things, and as long as I’m respectful and avoid trying to dictate anything or thinking I’m more right than anyone, I believe my thoughts can matter.)</i><br />
Lately this idea, the simple idea that a person can exist outside the binary, has snowballed through our culture into a critical mass. It’s following the trajectory that any change in the consciousness of the culture does, starting as a weird idea on the fringes, and then, because the moment is right and society is ready for it, going from unheard-of to inevitable. Every new idea needs time to percolate out to where everyone knows it, and this one has only recently come to a boil, but it’s on track to go, in its time, the same way as LGBT rights, women’s equality, or the theory of evolution.<br />
That’s why the rise of <i>they</i> is a story for right now, the Word of the Year. Once you decide that what your identity feels like is neither male nor female, it becomes very awkward when someone uses the word <i>he</i> or <i>she</i> for you. Imagine, if you will, that you’ve just moved to a new city and you find that everyone there consistently uses the wrong pronoun when they’re talking about you. “This is my new roommate Maria—he just moved here last month.” Or: “That sandwich is for Jason. She ordered the vegetarian option.” You would feel adrift, misunderstood, not fully seen, maybe constantly insulted. And now imagine that there’s not even a pronoun that you can ask people to use for you, because neither standard option feels better. What could you do?<br />
A few years ago I remember seeing a fair amount of discussion on alternative pronouns. Groups that included people who needed a new pronoun started hashing out brand new ones to use. The ones I remember seeing most were: <i>ze</i>, or variations on it—spelled <i>xe</i>, <i>zie</i>, or <i>sie</i> but generally pronounced /zee/, and usually declined as <i>zir–zirself</i> or <i>hir</i>–<i>hirself</i> (/heer/, /heer·self/); and <i>e</i> or <i>ey</i>, declined as <i>em–eir–emself</i>.<br />
Then, last year, after being away from much discussion on the issue for a while, I went to a gathering in Colorado where it was high on everyone’s minds, and discovered that apparently, while I wasn’t looking, a sort of consensus had been reached. There were quite a few people there who didn’t identify with either of the she/he dichotomous options, and those who expressed that in use of a neutral pronoun nearly all used <i>they</i>. And so, over the course of the week I was there, I got used to using <i>they</i> to refer to a single person: “Where’s Charlie? I wanted to ask them a question.” It’s jarring at first, but you get more used to it. Later, back at home, first a housemate, then a friend, then my sweetheart, stepped up to ask their friends for the same thing: Please use gender-neutral pronouns for me. And I do. It’s a matter, I think, of respect.<br />
<br />
<h5 style="text-align: left;">
II: The thing is</h5>
But there’s still always been something bugging me about the <i>de facto</i> choice of <i>they </i>as the winning gender neutral pronoun. When I’ve used it for friends, it’s never really felt right to me; it can feel vaguely like I’m insulting them, even. Now, I know that <i>I’m</i> not the one we’re trying to make comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns. This new word usage exists for the sake of people who are gender-neutral themselves, so they can <i>feel </i>like themselves. But if it doesn’t feel quite right to me, I wonder if there are other people, people more directly affected, who feel the same way and haven’t been able to put their fingers on it. On the chance that there are, I’m going to try to get at the root of it and point toward something that might work better and feel better. And I’m going to do it with the help of an imaginary person who’s non-binary and proud to use <i>they </i>pronouns. Let’s see where we can get.<br />
<br />
<b>Q: </b><i>So what’s your issue with </i>they<i>? Is it a grammatical thing—are you one of the people who says that </i>they<i> is a somehow inherently plural sequence of sounds, and must never be allowed to bleed over into the singular, or else English will inevitably collapse into a mishmash of confused muttering and grunting?</i><br />
<b>A:</b> No, I’m well aware that people have been using <i>they</i> in a singular way pretty much since there’s been an English language. Like Chaucer in the “Pardoner’s Prologue”:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,<br />
<b>They </b>wol come up and offre in Goddes name,<br />
And I assoille <b>hem </b>by the auctoritee [<i>hem</i> is an old form of <i>them</i>]<br />
Which that by bulle ygraunted was to me.</blockquote>
Shakespeare, Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis, and plenty other big names have used it similarly, and English has yet to disintegrate from that.<br />
But on the other hand, I do have to say that these writers were almost always using it in a fairly different situation than your own <i>they</i> pronouns. Let me illustrate with that sentence from earlier: “If someone shows up, tell them I’ll be back in just a minute.” The two big differences are: (1) This sentence’s <i>they</i> refers to someone of <i>unknown</i> gender—could be male, female, genderqueer, anything, because the person who’s the antecedent here is completely hypothetical so far. (2) It’s also used in conjunction with a clearly singular word, <i>someone</i>. As soon as you see the word <i>someone</i>, you’re primed for this <i>them</i> to be singular. The first one is emotionally weird to me, and the second one leads to confusion.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Q:</b> <i>Emotionally weird, and confusing? How so?</i><br />
<b>A: </b>The emotional weirdness comes because when I refer to you as <i>they</i>, I have that unknown-gender use in mind, and it feels like I’m saying you have no knowable gender identity, or I don’t know who you are. There’s another weird feeling less related to grammar: we also use <i>they</i> to talk about huge faceless entities like the FBI and Monsanto, and sometimes unknown horrors. <i>They</i>’re out to get me. <i>They</i>’re coming. I don’t want to associate that with my friends.<br />
The confusion is this: when you use <i>they</i> on its own, with nothing to mark it as singular, it gets disorienting. If I say, “They’re going to get here in about half an hour,” the people who hear me don’t have much to go on to figure out whether I mean one person or a few. It’s pretty easy to clear it up, but if you use <i>they</i> a lot, you end up doing a lot of clarifying.<br />
<br />
<b>Q: </b><i>Let’s tackle those one at a time. The first one: You could get over the emotional weirdness.</i><br />
<b>A:</b> You’re right. That one is pretty minor. It’s not a far leap from “unknown gender” to “non-binary gender”, and I’m already fairly used to that.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>And we could reclaim </i>them<i> from the horror movie monsters and government agencies.</i><br />
<b>A:</b> Hang on with the word <i>reclaim</i>—I’m all for groups reclaiming words that have been used to oppress them, like <i>queer</i> and even <i>nigga</i>, but I’ve got to point out that <i>they</i> isn’t really one of those oppressing words. It’s usually been pretty much as neutral as a word can get.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>Well anyhow, let’s move on to the second point, about being confusing. Isn’t that singular-plural ambiguity the same thing we have already with </i>you<i>, which is singular and plural at the same time? People don’t get confused about that, and I don’t see anyone trying to go back to the days of distinguishing </i>thou <i>and </i>ye<i>. Eventually, singular </i>they<i> would be more understood and people would get the hang of figuring out the grammatical number from context given earlier in the conversation.</i><br />
<b>A:</b> Well, one minor point: people <i>are </i>distinguishing singular and plural <i>you</i> more and more, lately, with words like <i>y’all</i> and <i>you guys</i>. But your point stands, because that’s somewhat recent and English chugged along for a long time without much use of those. I think <i>they</i> has a little more potential for confusion than <i>you</i>, because it shares more semantic territory:<br />
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; display: block; margin: 0 auto; text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">I</td>
<td rowspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">you</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">he</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">she</td>
<td style="border-bottom: none; border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">they</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">it</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">we</td>
<td colspan="4" style="border-top: none; border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">they</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
It has to share with the plural not just of itself but also of all the other first-person singular pronouns. Clearly, that doesn’t make it impossible to use. A lot of people get by with it day by day.<br />
However, let’s look at what would happen if <i>they</i> got carried through to its logical endpoint and victory: it supplants both <i>he</i> and <i>she</i> (and who knows, maybe <i>it</i> too), so that it’s the only third-person singular pronoun for people, like the Hungarian word <i>ő</i>, which subsumes our <i>he</i> and <i>she</i>. Then we could live in a world inhabited not by <i>men</i> and <i>women</i> but by just <i>people</i>, and you wouldn’t have to make any assumptions about someone from what they look like and how they dress, and you wouldn’t have to ask anyone their pronouns because we’d use the same ones for everyone. I know some people who already use <i>they</i> like this, not quite to the exclusion of <i>he</i> and <i>she</i>, but at least as a frequent replacement. If it took over completely, then the chart above would look like this:<br />
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; display: block; margin: 0 auto; text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">I</td>
<td rowspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">you</td>
<td style="border-bottom: hidden; border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">they</td>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">it</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">we</td>
<td colspan="2" style="border-top: hidden; border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">they</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
Or maybe even:<br />
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; display: block; margin: 0 auto; text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">I</td>
<td rowspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">you</td>
<td rowspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">they</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #abc; padding: 10px;">we</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
I can’t actually guarantee it, but I have a gut feeling that <i>they </i>in this situation would be way more confusing than <i>you</i> is now. Now, of course, languages are organic systems, and if English’s pronoun system got too confusing for its speakers, a new pronoun would evolve to fill the gap. But I don’t think we’d get that far. I think <i>they</i> would get stalled on the way to this egalitarian future by a resistance on the part of English speakers to use it in so many situations, and it would be permanently relegated to a minority usage, with much less potential to erase boundaries.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>Alright, interesting theory. But we both know that trying to foretell the future of anything as complicated as humans and language is a recipe for embarrassment. Forty years ago no one could have predicted that </i>they<i> would be getting used the way it is now; they’d probably call it an insane idea—and yet, here we are. If we stick to the present, it sounds like you have a lot of minor quibbles that don’t add up to a reason to change anything.</i><br />
<div>
<b>A:</b> Fair point. Well, maybe none of them on their own are major issues. But taken together, they make <i>they</i> feel like a second-class pronoun. And I think that’s what my reluctance about it boils down to: <b>Using <i>they</i> feels like a compromise,</b> like settling for what the English-speaking community is willing to kick down to you. It feels like you demanded, “We need a pronoun that shows us respect!” and the English language said, “Well . . . we’ve got this pronoun that we use already for something <i>kinda</i> like what you’re talking about. . . . Tell you what, you can have that—and you’d better like it, because that’s as far as we’re willing to go.” Both the mainstream genders get their own pronoun, but you have to share yours with other concepts, and just put up with all the ambiguity.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>So what do you propose?</i><br />
<b>A:</b> I think something along the lines of the <i>ze</i> or <i>ey</i> pronouns I mentioned earlier would do the job with more dignity.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>We tried that.</i><br />
<b>A:</b> And it didn’t fail. People are still using those new pronouns in big sections of the genderqueer community. When I was in Colorado at the gathering I mentioned, some people introduced themselves with, “My name is My-Name-Here, and I use <i>ze–zir–zey</i> or <i>they–them–their</i> pronouns.” I’ve heard similar things in a few places.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>Yeah, but </i>they<i> is much more widely used than any of those.</i><br />
<b>A:</b> There doesn’t have to be just one winner that takes all. Unmaking the global patriarchal hegemony, which is a goal that I have to guess you’re on board with, is going to involve a lot of re-localizing and strengthening small communities; local networks of friends are the most effective (and probably the only) way to create alternatives to the top-down, centralized kind of culture we get from mass media and marketing. Each pocket of people can have its own norms and its own ways of speaking, and when they get together, they can work things out between them; we’ll end up with a patchwork of different places with different words, the same way that the word for <i>crawdad</i> or <i>soda-pop </i>seems to change every few states already. That’s dissensus, and it’s how dialects—and diversity in general—arise.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>So you’re in favor of people not just defaulting to </i>they<i>, but giving </i>ze<i> another shot instead?</i><br />
<b>A:</b> Sure, although I want to toss in something here that’s decidedly an opinion. I personally don’t like the words <i>ze</i> or <i>ey</i>.<br />
In the case of <i>ey</i> (or <i>e</i>) it’s because it’s awkward and too close to words that already exist. I believe a really good pronoun to fill this gap should be easy to tell apart in speech from <i>he</i>, <i>she</i>, and <i>they</i>. I’ve tried using <i>e</i> in real life and the first thing I noticed is that we hardly ever say <i>he</i> and <i>him</i> when we actually talk—we say <i>’e</i> and <i>’im</i>, and also <i>’em</i> for <i>them</i>. The forms of <i>e/ey</i> sound like <i>he</i> or <i>them</i> and that’s no good, because we want something that’s unequivocally different.<br />
For <i>ze</i>, I just don’t think it feels enough like an English word. It originated in German with <i>sie</i>, and the addition of a sci-fi-esque <i>z</i> didn’t help it any. Its declension <i>hir</i> is the most awkward of all the widespread gender-neutral words, because it looks like it should just be pronounced /her/, and the approved pronunciation /heer/ can’t be casually slurred like pronouns always are in real conversations. <i>Zir</i> (/zer/) is a vast improvement but still feels like it’s from a ’70s sci-fi novel.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>So what pronoun </i>do<i> you like?</i><br />
<b>A:</b> Someone named “Shino”, the basically anonymous author of the <a href="https://genderneutralpronoun.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog</a> (which has exactly one post), has collected some good information on shots people have taken at creating a new one, including a link to <a href="http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm" target="_blank">this long digest</a> of calls for a gender-neutral pronoun dating back to the early 1800s. A lot have been proposed, like <i>thon</i> (/<strike>th</strike>ən/, contracted from <i>that one</i>), <i>co–cos–coself</i> (created and still used in the intentional community Twin Oaks, in Virginia), and a 1912 schoolteacher’s awkward <i>he’er</i>. Shino singles out a few good ones to rate and comment on. I like the one that comes out on top, <i>ne–nem–nir–nemself</i>, for most of the same reasons Shino does—see the post for more, but: It’s reasonably distinct from the existing pronouns; it sounds pretty close to halfway between them instead of listing toward one or the other; it sounds singular (by virtue of sounding like the other singular pronouns); it uses some of the most common sounds in the English language, which makes it sound natural; and as a bonus the <i>n</i> can evoke the word <i>neutral</i>. (If it sounds goofy to you, keep in mind that practically any unfamiliar pronoun would, because pronouns are so deeply ingrained into our mental language pathways that it’s very noticeable when something seems askew. And anyway, try saying <i>her</i> over and over with a straight face.) This is one that I’d like to try, and I’ll probably use it on this blog if and when a situation arises.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> <i>And you think that might catch on?</i><br />
<b>A:</b> It’s worth a try. Any new pronoun is going to face a huge uphill battle, because pronouns are what linguists call a <i>closed lexical class</i>, a set of words that’s small, very conservative to change, and very hard to add to. That’s why <i>they</i> has gotten popular—it’s already in that exclusive club, so the battle there is won, but only via the path of least resistance (which, I should make sure to point out, still involved a lot of resistance). New pronouns <i>have</i> caught on before (if in a limited scope), like the ones I mentioned in the last answer, so it’s obviously not an impossibility. It just requires hard work and persistence. But I believe it’s worth it.<br />
But: since I’m cisgender, I’m not going to be asking people to use <i>ne</i> or any of the others for myself, and I’m not going to try to impose a specific one on anyone who does use non-binary pronouns. All I can really ethically do is bring up the issue and suggest that we take another look at some of the possibilities we’ve sort of abandoned. And that’s what I’ve done here.<br />
<br />
I’m well aware that this is a contentious issue and that pronouns are an intensely personal matter for a lot of people. I’ve tried hard not to set myself up as the Pronoun Authority here, and not to impose my ideas on people who have a much greater stake in this than I do.<br />
And I’m really curious to know what you think about all this stuff I just said. I have a few specific questions:<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>Have you used <i>they</i> as a non-binary pronoun like this? To what extent?</li>
<li>Does it make you uneasy in any of the ways I mentioned it does for me (or in any other ways)?</li>
<li>If it does, does it seem like a different neutral pronoun would be any better on those accounts?</li>
<li>If you couldn’t use <i>they</i> (or <i>he </i>or <i>she</i>), what pronoun would you use?</li>
<li>Should I mind my own cisgendered business?</li>
</ol>
<div>
I’m really interested in the comments on this. If you’ve never been to this blog before, there’s a comment form below that you can use without signing up for anything or even leaving a name. (The comments are delayed in publishing because they have to get approved manually by me, but that’s only for technical reasons, and I publish everything that isn’t automated spam.) </div>
<div>
I’ve said my bit for now—let’s talk. </div>
</div>
</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-84678189262110756622016-01-25T12:47:00.000-06:002016-01-25T13:18:57.984-06:00Oil is cheap • But everyone’s still poor • And our jobs might vanish • But I’d have fun<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
2016 has been, so far, what I would describe as “bracing”, and I mean for that to apply on a range of scales from global on down to personal. My favorite soothsayer, John Michael Greer of the Archdruid Report, has put up <a href="http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/01/down-ratholes-of-future.html">his annual round of predictions</a> for this year that awaits us. They include a couple of collapses that would open up gaping sinkholes beneath the frail global economy: the popping of the current tech bubble (did you know that Twitter, for all its ubiquity and air of invincibility, has run losses of over $100 million per quarter practically since it was founded?) and the fall of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (which can no longer fund its totalitarianism at these oil prices).<br />
It’s been said that the last person who really understood the world died in about 1890, but I’ve come to think lately, while reading his voluminous writings, that Greer may just have taken up that mantle. But that’s not the only reason I have to put at least a little stock in his particular predictions among a world of prognosticators who usually turn out to be not just wrong but idiotically so. I’ve also been noticing on my own that the world seems very much to be heading in the directions he’s been pointing.<br />
I live under a rock to some extent, so I’m not the best person to talk about what the average person’s outlook is on the state of the world and where it’s likely to be heading. It seems to me, though, that most people, in the US at least, are still cautiously optimistic that we’ll keep getting more of what we’ve been getting lately: technological innovation, scientific fixes to our various problems, and the general appearance of increasing quality of life. The caution in the cautious optimism has been getting more and more dominant since 2008, especially among millennials, who emerged from childhood into a smoldering wreck of an economy and were promised a swift return to prosperity for everyone, but are still waiting for that to come true in full. But for the time being, people by and large are willing to take it on faith for a little bit longer that incremental new iPhone models are necessary baby steps on the way to inventing the holodeck and probably eliminating world hunger, somehow.<br />
From under my rock, though, something I do have a view of is the industrial sector of the economy, and the mood in that realm is, I think, considerably grimmer than on the street. The company I work for sells to a few different sectors of the economy: factories of various kinds, heavy equipment distributors and manufacturers, research departments, and so on. We’re good at what we do, so my boss has been trying to figure out why our phones have been quiet, and the answer, an unwelcome one, turned out to be that the entire industrial sector of the US economy has been immobile in a hospital bed for most of the past year.<br />
The main exception, for a while, was the unconventional-oil industry, the one sector that actually appeared to be making a lot of profit. A lot of hopes and dreams got pinned on the frackers, all across the US and Canada, including our company’s, because we invented something they needed. It seemed they had tapped into a vast, nearly inexhaustible resource, and they had money to fling to everyone—the working poor willing to relocate to North Dakota or northern Alberta; the companies that would invent new machines for them to use to frack more efficiently; the entire economy, really, since North American energy independence would lead to a new era of abundance, a “Saudi America”. Five years down the line, and you can see the companies’ corpses floating in the water.<br />
What happened is still a source of complete bewilderment or misconception to most people, so I’m going to try to clear it up based on what I’ve been reading lately. This is going to be long and go all over the world, but stick with me.<br />
<br />
Let’s start at the beginning. Geologists have known about the principle of fracking for about two hundred years, but for most of that time it’s been more of a curiosity than anything. The gist is that a lot of the Carboniferous era’s trees and algae turned into crude oil, but a lot more turned into waxy stuff called kerogen, which can turn into oil in two situations: One, you wait a few geological eras, and the Earth’s heat and pressure do it. Two, you make it yourself, the hard and expensive way. That’s something about fracking that doesn’t get mentioned much—most people know it’s harder than sinking a well and getting a gusher, but I don’t think most people know <i>why</i> it’s expensive, or what the process involves. It’s expensive because it’s a fantastically inefficient way of getting oil.<br />
First, drill a hole about a thousand feet deep. Be very careful and use the very best equipment. Now, get yourself some water. You’re going to want a lot—get yourself a farm of giant water tanks, and you’d better be near a river. Add chemicals and clay into the water until you’ve got some highly refined and specific mud, and now it’s time to start pumping: get that water down in there, and catch it when it comes back up full of kerogen-impregnated sand. Okay, that was the cheap part, especially if you were near a river. Now you have to take all that wet sand, dry it off, and then burn spectacular amounts of fuel to fire it in a hot oven until the kerogen melts off. Only then do you have crude oil, which you still have to send to a refinery before it’s any good to anyone. Also, you have a whole bunch of extremely toxic water, which you can use to give cancer to some towns nearby.<br />
Extraction of conventional oil, the good old-fashioned liquid black gold, reached its peak in 2005 and has been clawing down the other side of the mountain ever since then. After a delay of a few years, and aided by the US’s housing bubble, the <i>price </i>of oil finally responded to that situation by shooting up, to a momentary high of $140 a barrel and a steadier level around $100. That made fracking suddenly just profitable enough to persuade people to go to all the trouble. So companies big and small showed the numbers to some loan officers, and got almost unconditional cash, to sink wells into the ground in a manic state all over the Bakken Shale and the Athabasca Tar Sands.<br />
Meanwhile, though, everyone else was still reeling from the high prices. Companies’ budgets had tightened around the world, people had gotten laid off, production had been offshored to cheaper and cheaper places, companies had cut on wages by automating, and the economy got itself running pretty close to the theoretical maximum of efficiency: fewer employees, lower wages (and let’s hope nothing goes wrong). Working people, a lot of whom had either gotten laid off or had their hours slashed, got poorer and poorer and bought less and less. New working people, the millennials I was talking about earlier, realized that their normal might be different from the last generation’s, and a lot of them have declined to buy cars and suburban houses. In general, everyone started holding their purses tightly closed and very close to their chests.<br />
And that’s why oil is so cheap now: we’ve started using less. The market theory says that should mean the producers start producing less, but it turns out that oil doesn’t work like that—once you’ve drilled a well, you let that sucker gush no matter what the price, because it’s cheaper than furloughing your wellmen, and that means that oil companies are stuck pumping as much oil as they <i>thought</i> we’d use, while we’re <i>actually</i> using a lot less, and now they’re running out of tanks to store all the extra in. Cushing, Oklahoma, is the country’s stockpile of oil, and they’re full there, with tankers idling off the coast of Texas waiting for their turn to offload.<br />
Seems like this cheap oil should reverse all the purse-tightening, but that’s another thing that doesn’t work like you’d think. Once you’ve laid a bunch of people off and you’re still in business, you, the CEO, are kind of inclined to just keep these new profits, rather than hiring a bunch of new people or building another factory. So the poor are staying poor.<br />
Alright, but surely that effect will fade as wells slowly go offline, and the price will go up again, and the frackers will come back? Well, they’ll try, but by then there might not be enough spare cash in the banks to fund them all (and the banks will be once bitten twice shy)—and even if there is, the frackers will run into some more trouble, because they’ve already dug all the easiest wells, and they just get harder and less profitable from here. Plus, where a conventional well might give you oil for 30 years, a fracking well is completely tapped after two, so you always have to be drilling more. At first, the fracking industry’s breakeven point might be $60 a barrel, but it will creep up and up, and meanwhile, our entire civilization, which grew up on oil at $20, will find that it can’t catch its breath. Fracking takes a lot of money, a considerable fraction of the US’s <i>total amount</i> of money, and as it takes more and more, there’ll be less and less available for everyone else, until no one can buy the oil anymore anyhow. And at that point, everything will change. Economies will implode, countries will fracture, factories will close, stores will vanish, and it will become clear to everyone, worldwide, that the future isn’t going to look like all the futurists told us it would.<br />
That’s not preventable. It’s already in motion. Most people either haven’t noticed or are trying to tell themselves that they haven’t noticed. But I think, looking back, we’re going to see 2015 as the year when the last hurrah of the global economy crested and the fracking bubble popped, and 2016 will be the year when people started really noticing that something had happened.<br />
China has already been taking the lead on ensuring that, with a cratering stock market and persistent rumors of government interference in all its figures. On a much smaller scale, it’s thrown itself under a spotlight in my own life. My company, at the beginning of last year, was looking at a very promising-looking year, because we’d figured out how to make new heavy machinery work in the cold: when the EPA put out new regulations, the engine makers just slapped on little doohickies to stop some of the gunk from going into the air, but these doohickies are very liable to getting frozen up, which makes your bulldozer’s engine either refuse to turn on or, in some cases, explode. North Dakota and Alberta are, well, cold, and all these companies were having to stop drilling on cold days, and here we were with the promise of solving that problem.<br />
And now none of those companies are buying any of the things we invented for them, because they can barely afford to keep the wells pumping. (Something like forty unconventional oil companies have gone bankrupt since 2015 started, and counting.) It takes a lot of money to invent something, even something simple, and now we’re kind of stuck with all our money sunk into widgets that maybe no one will ever buy. And the rest of the industrial economy is in nearly as bad a shape, so we’re not selling our mainstays either. The upshot is that, at the annual company luncheon last week, we all had pizza and then got a grim, sobering picture from our boss of how difficult it might be for the company to stay afloat, and he asked most of us to start working only four days a week.<br />
<br />
Don’t worry about me. I’m actually kind of excited. I started taking a day off per week last year just to have more free time, but then I forgot and fell out of the habit. Now I’m guaranteed to have an extra day per week, and I live so far below my means that I’m not going to be hurting for cash. At least for now, I’m doing fine. The tricky part, of course, comes if my extra day off per week turns into five. But even that, I think, wouldn’t faze me too much, and in fact, it would probably give me a much-needed kick in the pants toward doing things that have been on my long list of good intentions for almost as long as I can remember.<br />
Financially, I have enough saved, and our rent here is so cheap, that I could live for at least year in this house off of savings and dumpster-diving. Of course, I would be looking for ways to send a little stream of income into the pot from web design or something else. I now actually have marketable skills, and it’d be nice to use those to maintain the grubstake I’ve been counting on for building supplies when (in all likelihood) Misty and I build a house.<br />
But to look at it from another angle, if my job evaporated, I think the result for me wouldn’t be the traditional depression, it would be a de-stagnation. For the time that I’ve been at this job, I’ve spent forty hours a week doing one specific kind of work. I’ve gotten really good at it, but I’ve also been constantly aware that it’s more than likely not going to be useful very far into the future. Meanwhile, there are all these things that I <i>want</i> to be learning to do that <i>would</i> be useful as far into the future as I can imagine—everything that falls under the permaculture umbrella, basically. To boil it down, if I lost my job, what would happen would just be a realignment of what I’m trying to achieve with my time. Current alignment: make money to build a house. Projected alignment: practice how I want to live my life (and how to do it with minimal money).<br />
The second one actually sounds a lot more fulfilling (especially if you know me), doesn’t it? So much so that you might wonder why I haven’t quit my job and dropped out of the system already. There are a few reasons, but the main one is that I know money is going to be useful for a few things, while we wait for a barter or gift economy, but I still haven’t saved up quite as much as I’d like to have to achieve those things, so I’m holding out a little longer.<br />
Another is that I’m still transitioning from the way I’ve been taught to live, which is money-based. This transition is also the reason that Misty and I are possibly going to stay at Sprout House for another year.<br />
At last count, I was telling people that we might drop off the grid this summer, and start living up by Lake Superior next spring. Since then, we’ve had a bit of a possible change of heart. Not that we don’t want to do that—but we think it might be good to figure out <i>who we are</i> in the context of living off the land first. Every homesteader has their own unique viewpoint and style. If we moved onto an existing homestead, though, with established practices, we might not develop our own—the same way that someone who’s been in relationships her entire life might suddenly realize, in a panic years down the line, that she doesn’t know who <i>she </i>is.<br />
That’s why we’ve been thinking we might like to stay in Sprout House through 2017. That would give us a chance to do a lot of land-based things that the house has been very slowly gearing up for. We’d get to take part in actually raising the chickens we prepared for. I’ve been thinking about building a wood-burning cookstove out back from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)">cob</a> or something else that would allow for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove">rocket stove</a> principles. Also, a solar cooker; also, a composting toilet. Not to mention learning more about gardening. There’s so much to figure out.<br />
As of a few days ago, that plan was fairly well set, but then Misty, Currant, and I spent the weekend at The Draw, and on the drive back home last night, Misty and Currant both found themselves catalyzed into wanting to go go go. Here’s the thing: there are a lot of places we want to visit. We’ve already been planning to go to several in a row this summer: that Colorado gathering, Crowduck, Portland, and Currant’s brother’s homestead in northern California. In the one-year plan, we’d spend a little longer at some of those places, and we’d go to several others, like the Possibility Alliance (an incredible permaculture homestead in Missouri that largely boycotts money), somewhere we could learn alternative building skills, the Boundary Waters, and perhaps even Latin America. (Those of you who thought I’d completely sated my wanderlust are going to have to reconsider. Besides, I owe Misty a trainhopping trip.)<br />
What we’re still trying to decide is whether it’d be simplest to just do all of that in one long swath, and whether we want to leave Sprout House (and fragment it with the departure of a lot of its housemates) just when it was feeling especially like a really nice place where we could be comfortable and learn a lot from each other. We’ll be turning all these considerations around for a while. Knowing us, we might not even have a final decision until we’re actually on the road at the beginning of it, but I think we can do at least a little better than that.<br />
In any case, we’ve had our second taste of homestead life up at The Draw; while we were there, we got past the haze of amazement at how great it is to live off the land and got plunked into the hard-work aspect of it, splitting logs and mucking out the sheep barn and hand-churning butter. Working for a day on that stuff in the deep snow made my citified muscles ache to a memorable depth, but rather than turning me off to the whole idea, it just made me look forward to a time in my life when I’d be fit enough to do this kind of stuff and barely blink. Misty and I have been starting to do more rock climbing, and we’re generally getting more physical, after allowing ourselves to become soft and slothful. This also serves as one of our next big steps on where we want to be in life.<br />
We’re trying to make most of the stuff we do serve as one of those. Like I said in a post last year, there’s no time to lose. The continuing long collapse that’s been going on for years now is reaching critical points that will soon make it a lot more difficult to live in the old American style where you can just solve all your problems by throwing money at them. We’re entering a new era where wits and land skills are going to get a lot more important. And for our part, we’re learning all we can about how to live in that era. </div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-65711987506586603392016-01-01T17:50:00.003-06:002016-01-02T12:35:53.699-06:00Six Kinds of Back-to-the-Landers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Moving out to the country. It’s a very simple concept—what I mean to say is, there’s really nothing implied in it besides the bare fact of leaving the city and living where there aren’t so many buildings. But, if you mention “moving out to the country” to every person you meet, each person will translate that one simple idea into a complicated vision that’s fleshed out into a degree of detail that was never implied at all by the original idea. And the strange thing is, it seems like almost everyone slips automatically into imagining that their own very specific vision is, more or less, the one and only way of moving back to the land.<br />
I’ve noticed a lot of these visions over the last year or so as I’ve been talking more and more about moving out to the country, and it seems to me that you could sort most people’s visions into a few broad archetypes—each one based on how that person thinks <i>they</i> would live in the country. Which one are you?<br />
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The vacationer</h4>
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If you’re the vacationer you’re really, at heart, a city person, or at least a suburb person. You can easily picture going out to the country for a week, maybe two weeks at a stretch. In fact, you might treasure that—it’s an amazing annual way to unwind and wash off some of the stress of the daily grind. You can go out and spend a while fishing or canoeing in lake country, or hike in the mountains, or take an annual trip out to the forest and hunt some deer. But to spend any stretch of time longer than a couple weeks is almost inconceivable. You’re aware that some people actually do live out in the country their entire lives, but you feel somehow that those people must be missing something fundamental in life that you get from living in the city, where the people are. Your version of “moving out to the country”, if you had unlimited money, would be to buy forty acres out on the lakeshore or in the woods or the foothills, where you could have a cabin built. Then you could take off to it whenever you want. And since that doesn’t really constitute moving, you’d also buy a house in an outer-ring suburb or a nice medium-sized town, where it’d be at least a little peaceful, and maybe deer would visit your yard, but there’d still be a grocery store and some good restaurants.</div>
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The hobby farmer</h4>
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You may have grown up on a farm, or maybe you just always thought it seemed like a nice way to live. In any case, you’ve spent enough time in the city and if you had the chance and the disposable income, you’d be done with it and just move out to start a little farm in the country. You’d grow some of your own vegetables, have a chicken coop—maybe even a little flock of goats. You have no interest in selling at a farmers’ market, because you’re just in this for the lifestyle, not to start a business. You might have an abstract ideal of growing <i>most</i> or <i>all</i> of your own food, but you’re not really planning on that too much: there’s a sweet spot between hard work and relaxation. You’ll send canned vegetables to your family out of town and trade some with your neighbors, but you’ll never sell or turn a profit, and you’ll always depend on the grocery store, whether it’s only your fallback option for the cold season, or whether it’s where you get your “real” food, the staples and the day-to-day meat.<br />
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The doomsteader</h4>
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You’ve seen the handwriting on the wall. The system we all live in is dying, and it won’t be long at all before it falls apart in a very big way. When that happens, the city will be a great place to get killed quick: as soon as the grocery store shelves start getting bare and the fuel pumps are all empty, the city will turn into one big, seething riot. You could buy a lot of guns and take your chances, but your odds with those guns are a lot better in the country. If you had unlimited money, you’d buy land somewhere far away from everyone, lots of it, and you’d build a bunker underground stocked with ten years’ worth of canned meat, vegetables, sacks of flour, sacks of beans, gas masks, guns, and ammo. You’d make sure there was enough room for your family and maybe a carefully chosen cadre of friends, but you’re suspicious of letting too many people know your plans, because if your location is known when the SHTF,<a href="#160101n1" id="160101n1-ast">*</a> that’s the first place all the roving hordes of cannibals will go. When you mention roving hordes of cannibals, you’re sort of joking, but only halfway.<br />
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The organic farmer</h4>
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You’ve read every book Michael Pollan has written, and you know that America desperately needs a generation of new farmers—and they need to be ones who will respect the land itself, who won’t degrade it the way fifty years of industrialized agribusiness has, washing away an inch of topsoil every year, dousing the entire country with billions of pounds of poison, creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that keeps getting bigger each season. You’re probably young, and probably college-educated, but when everyone tried to tell you to get a career in industry, you knew that wasn’t your real calling, so you’re walking the talk by joining the movement of young people going out to farm. </div>
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You have a few acres of vegetables and you work incessantly, from dawn to dusk at the very least, through the whole warm season: tilling, planting, weeding, continuing to weed, weeding again, weeding some more, harvesting, selling to affluent people at the farmers’ market for meager profits. You curse Monsanto and Archer Daniel Midland and all the other agribusiness multinationals that use their billions in profit to keep small organic farms from becoming anything but a small niche market. But you hold out hope, deep inside, that Americans will slowly realize that they need to eat real food, and that something bad will happen the megacorporations, or the government will force them to stop.</div>
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
The dropout</h4>
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Fuck the system! You’ve lived your entire life doing what’s expected of you, from elementary school to high school to getting prodded into college (whether you’ve gone or not), and the prospect of working a 9-to-5 job for forty years until you can finally spend some time on cruise ships in your sixties and seventies is, non-negotiably, not an option. Laws and the government are even worse than all these societal expectations, and you dream of going somewhere where none of those things can touch you. You want to get away, you want to live in the country with other people who’ve seen through the American Dream the way you have. The hippie communes of the ’70s are where your forerunners went when they figured it out. Out there you can do what you want, you can smoke and walk around naked and never have to work. The land offers abundance and you’ll be able to grow your own food and drop off the grid, to sunder your dependence on the system once and for all, and live in harmony and community with your brothers and sisters in the only real sane way to live.<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
The permaculturalist</h4>
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Most of the things that people talk about doing out in the country ring hollow to you; they sound like continuations, with just slight changes, of the way of life that’s gotten the planet into its current mess. Organic farming is attractive, but it doesn’t go far enough. Instead of repairing the land, it settles for not doing (much) harm; it relies on the capitalist profit motive that leads to hierarchicalization and depletion of resources. (And it’s fighting a losing battle against agribusiness: organic farming sustains itself by making money, but agribusiness is far more persistent and ruthless in its pursuit of that money, so organic farming is basically hamstringing itself by having morals.)</div>
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You’d rather make the world <i>better,</i> rather than just stop making it worse—rebuild the topsoil, reforest the clearcuts, let plants grow to take the carbon out of the air. And you believe that learning how to do these things is the best way to get humanity through the future, which will be marked by oil shortage and shrinking economies. The solution is permaculture, with its small, simple solutions that encourage everyone to re-localize and rediscover their neighbors (human and—especially—nonhuman), and don’t depend on massive infrastructures and centralization. We have to learn how to depend not on the system, and not on our individual selves, but on our communities.</div>
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I’ve made no secret of being a permaculturalist, the last one. When I describe what I want to do, though, I’m sometimes perplexed at how people hear it. Often it’s not that they think I’m doing a completely different thing, it’s just that they assume that the part that resembles their vision is the main point. Yes, I’ll be growing some vegetables and raising some animals, but I’m not just doing that because I have a Protestant work ethic, or because I want to be self-reliant, or because that’s what you have to do if you’re living where the cops won’t bother you. It’s because I want to learn new ways of doing all those things with less energy while improving the soil and the water around me, and then I want to spread those ideas as far as I can. I want to help build a new society that works with nature instead of against it.<br />
I’m not saying (at least here) that people with a different focus are all wrong, I’m just saying that that’s not my focus. That’s why I wrote this: so that, in the future, when I talk about moving back to the land, I can show people this and maybe they’ll understand what I’m <i>actually </i>talking about, instead of how it’s a little bit like their own vision.<br />
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<div class="footnote" id="160101n1">*Shit Hits the Fan. This is a very common abbreviation among doomsteaders. (<a href="#160101n1-ast">Back to asterisk</a>)</div>
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Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-9199875753037663722015-12-23T01:46:00.005-06:002016-01-02T12:39:35.374-06:00Land Search #2: The Draw<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When I wrote about going to visit Lyndell’s land, I said: “We realized that it was ridiculous to expect that we’d find a place so perfect that it would take only an evening for us to unequivocally fall in love with it.” Lately I’ve been reassessing that statement.<br />
I’ve known, in a peripheral kind of way, about the Draw for nearly as long as I’ve lived in Minneapolis. When I was moving into Sprout House, I met the guy whose departure had opened up a space for me, and he was leaving because he’d discovered the Draw and decided to move there.<br />
I feel like it’s impossible to mention this without pointing out that the guy I’m talking about is Benjamin, who has something close to universal fame in the South Minneapolis constellation of community houses on account of being suffused with the purest manifestation of childlike ethusiasm and joy that any of us has seen in a person older than 10. Once you get to know Benjamin, every time he sees you—sometimes even if it’s only been a few hours—he’ll let out an uncontrollable shout of joy from across the room or the street and come running up to give you a long, heartfelt hug. So when he told me about the Draw, it was in the most glowing terms: he said it was a permaculture community in Bayfield, and it was beautiful, and he was deeply inspired by it, and he practically shouted about how excited he was to go live there. And that sounded great to me. But I also, knowing him, sort of guessed that his enthusiasm for it was more than most people might have, and it might just be a rather standard sort of homestead project that he discovered while he was in the right state of mind, so I kind of filed it away under second-tier information, which might be brought up a tier someday if I heard more about it or a moment arose.<br />
Recently a moment arose and I heard more about it. Another of our old housemates, Makai, mentioned it to me and Misty, and I recalled some of the things I’d heard, so I decided to see what I could find out about it. <a href="http://www.thedraw.org/" target="_blank">They have a website</a>, I discovered, and though it’s pretty basic, what I did find got me excited: They raise fruit and nut trees, and they in fact think nuts should be a staple crop (an idea I’d gotten excited about when Mark Shepard, the Wisconsin permaculture trailblazer, wrote about its plausibility with chestnuts in <i>Restoration Agriculture</i>—and also because I love chestnuts). They were at least deeply enough interested in permaculture to offer workshops about it on their land. I shuffled the Draw over from the mental category of “obscure and faraway” to “real and highly promising”, and decided we should visit as soon as possible. Misty didn’t take a lot of convincing, and that’s how we ended up, one day in early December, driving up to the northern tip of Wisconsin.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IGx3Vq5CeWk/VnnDWLSzlVI/AAAAAAAADHQ/wO3LFmaGKD0/s1600/allpurposetemp.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="488" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IGx3Vq5CeWk/VnnDWLSzlVI/AAAAAAAADHQ/wO3LFmaGKD0/s640/allpurposetemp.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Up toward that little gray pushpin in a circle.</td></tr>
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It was a 4½-hour drive, and we’d gotten up early, and the heater didn’t work very well, and I scraped the car against a guardrail on a sharp turn while both of us were at least a quarter asleep. The car was largely fine, and got us there, but we arrived in a strange frame of mind: a combination of understimulation and overstimulation. We found their driveway several miles down a narrow, hilly, wet, old highway, narrowed further sometimes with snow that hadn’t melted yet from their nine-inch storm last week. We pulled over next to their gate, with its signpost stacked with different handmade signs (<span class="small-caps">The Draw / Permaculture Sanctuary / Waters Edge / Nursery / Garden</span>), and discovered to our mild shock that we could actually stand and walk. I don’t remember any other occasions when I’ve been quite so thankful to get out of a car.<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u5NYMo90cZQ/VnoKa3SSbUI/AAAAAAAADHk/MYo6qQZqUTk/s1600/IMG_1698.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a> We walked in through the gate, and on the short walk to the house we still passed by a huge garden (not growing), a cold frame with lettuce thriving under it, and a chicken enclosure. The lettuce and the chickens both looked happy. The house, meanwhile, looked better and better as I got closer.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u5NYMo90cZQ/VnoKa3SSbUI/AAAAAAAADHk/MYo6qQZqUTk/s1600/IMG_1698.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u5NYMo90cZQ/VnoKa3SSbUI/AAAAAAAADHk/MYo6qQZqUTk/s640/IMG_1698.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(We approached from the front left, though. This picture being from the front right.)</td></tr>
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From a distance, I could see the solar panel and solar water heaters on the south peak. I noticed the window shutters—real, functional ones with thick quilted insulation. And when we rounded the corner I got a better look at the greenhouse, which envelops the front of the house. The walls themselves were sculpted of soft, friendly cob. This house had been built with love.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vKFQO_Lqmt0/VnoLajUgCeI/AAAAAAAADHw/GjGTUSYWlsg/s1600/IMG_1699.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vKFQO_Lqmt0/VnoLajUgCeI/AAAAAAAADHw/GjGTUSYWlsg/s640/IMG_1699.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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So early indications were good that we had found a place we’d like. We couldn’t find a doorbell to ring, so we stepped inside the greenhouse and tried to get someone’s attention through the front door or windows. As you’d expect for somewhere three miles from Lake Superior and on the same latitude as Duluth, it was cold outside, but in the greenhouse it was <i>tropical</i>—humid and warm, with a scent of loam and growth. A few times we saw children running around inside, and eventually one of them saw us and opened the door—a girl about five years old who offered to go get her mom, at the same time that her mom caught sight of us through the window. </div>
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Her mom was Shyam,<a id="151223n1-ast" href="#151223n1">*</a> and Misty and I had both talked to her on the phone before coming. Shyam welcomed us inside and then we all realized we hardly knew anything about each other, so we kind of launched into the stories of who we were and why we were there. Our story of why we were there was fairly simple and brief. Shyam’s was much more interesting. She laid down a broom she’d been using and started telling us.</div>
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Shyam and Nat have been together for about ten years. In their early days they learned about permaculture together off the coast of Washington state, at a permaculture <a href="http://www.permacultureportal.com/" target="_blank">homestead</a> on Orcas Island, a place that’s had permaculture going on since barely after the word was coined. They were both full of the kind of energy that motivates young malcontents, an animadversion for The System, and they decided that founding a permaculture homestead of their own would be a way to manifest that in a way they really believed in. They had the resources to buy some land; this would be how they showed it was possible to live a different way. </div>
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Nat was the one who decided that the homestead should be located near freshwater, and decided that the best way to do that would be to put it within a few miles of the largest body of freshwater on the entire continent. Some searching turned up a parcel that had been rejected by speculators and developers and had its price slashed, all because it was chewed up with gullies and you could never build a good driveway or ATV trail through it. That, of course, made it even better: this would be a no-cars, walking-only zone enforced by Nature itself. And so they ended up with 265 acres between Old County K and the lakeshore.</div>
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Starting a homestead is, in case you wouldn’t have guessed, a big project. They focused at first on planting trees and building their house. The trees were the top priority, because if you want to eat from them before you’re old, you’ve got to get them in the ground as soon as you can. A Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” (I should point out that a Greek proverb also says, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in.” No one’s excused on grounds of age.) There were also the earthworks—all the digging and piling that needed to be done to keep the water in the ground where it could enliven as many plants as possible before either trickling through Raspberry River into the depths of Lake Superior or evaporating up to rejoin the clouds it came from. </div>
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As you might imagine, all this took several years. They had help, though. They put out word about what they were doing, and people have come in smaller or larger numbers every summer since then, to learn by doing and to revel in being able to help a community live a life that’s profoundly human. Some helped build houses, some helped plant trees or tend gardens, some helped with chickens or the livestock in the barn. Would we like, Shyam asked, to have some lunch and then go see all this stuff she was talking about? At this point, I don’t think you could’ve stopped us. </div>
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We’d been in the kitchen the whole time, while Shyam’s friend Laura from Washington helped her do a deep-clean of the house. They put some finishing touches on some cabbage and chicken and called the guys in. These were Jeff (Laura’s husband) and Nat, who’d just come back from gleaning firewood from a small clearcut down the road. (By the way, it’s not as if cooking and cleaning are women’s work at the Draw while hauling heavy shit around is men’s work, it’s that Shyam was several months pregnant, which made it wise to avoid grunting and straining and chucking logs around.) The kids came too, of course: Shyam and Nat’s daughters Ophelia and Alma (five and eight) and Jeff and Laura’s son Cole (eight too). </div>
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Besides what Shyam had been cooking, there was also a jar of kimchi and a huge wheel of homemade Manchego cheese, taken from a stock of them coated in wax on shelves. (The whole kitchen was permeated with a warm, homey, dairy smell. They’d been heating up a giant pot of whey, for reasons that escape me now.) On the first bite, I instantly remembered the food I’d eaten when I stayed for a few days with Ken Keppers, the biodynamic farmer on Highway 8, just before I went to the Twin Cities for the first time. Everything had a flavor that was deeper and <i>fuller</i> than anything you can find outside of a really good farm.</div>
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After a little relaxing and chatting, Nat and Jeff went out to feed some animals, and Shyam led us out the greenhouse and around the corner, explaining everything we went past. The entire area was shockingly dense with stuff going on, even to the eyes of those who’d never seen it during summer. We walked past the chicken enclosure, with dozens of chickens, and Shyam showed us that the garden we’d seen on the way in was only one, and there were two more huge ones directly behind the house, another off to the side, and more that I didn’t memorize. Each one has a name and a different principle governing how it was put together. In one they’ve put in chinampas, for example, a system of gardening on half-submerged hillocks of soil that was hit on by the Aztecs and is one of the highest-yielding systems of cropping ever studied. Another garden is gradually being given over from annual lettuces that require reseeding every year to perennial greens, bushes with names I’d never heard of whose leaves you can eat year after year. Their biggest salad green during the salad season, she explained, is basswood, a tree that Misty and I both know, that offers you leaves that stay green and tasty until they drop, with no refrigeration or pesticides required. </div>
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At the back porch we had a view of these gardens, as well as the skinned carcasses hanging up to freeze from the porch roof, and the woodshed. Shyam stopped there and told us about how their vision of the homestead involves a slow transition from very little to subsist on, to a lot of annual crops grown sustainably, and eventually to almost exclusively perennial crops, all grown in “guilds” to benefit each other, with a little bit of intensive garden space for those plants that are really tasty but just aren’t perennials. That mirrors the transition that, all of us agreed, humanity will have to make—back to a perennial-centered system of polyculture that was what pre-agricultural people around the world relied on for most of their food. To become something like hunter-gatherers, that is: to stop forcing nature to do what we want by tilling it year after year, and start just gently guiding it to do what it wants in a way that allows us to eat while it does that. </div>
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We talked for a long time about that. Misty and I could already tell that their Shyam and Nat had their heads in the right place, but now we could tell that their philosophy was a distillation of all the things we’d been both thinking and trying to think. <i>They’d basically done everything we would do if we started up our own homestead,</i> from philosophical principles all the way up to fine details. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shyam explains something awesome to Misty; Lou the dog provides fluffiness.</td></tr>
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And the tour had just barely started. Shyam took us into the woods behind the house and showed us where they’d planted entire groves of trees. Chestnuts, apples, peaches, stone pines (for the pine nuts), hickories, pears, quinces, even a variety of pawpaws that can survive northern winters. They were growing trees that I would’ve guessed impossible. And in communities of untold numbers of species—all planted in careful chaos, just the way nature would want.</div>
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Back further the land sloped down in a series of “draws”—stormwater gullies—that flowed down eventually into the Raspberry River, which once ran muddy but is now clear thanks to the soil-gripping bushes they’ve planted in the erodible soil there. Around the bend a bit, we came to a tiny little porch-thing: an outdoor bedroom, nothing more than a platform with a bed and a little walking space, screened in against mosquitoes, where people sleep during the summer. In fact, when it’s warm, hardly anyone sleeps in the big house; it’s just a respite from the heat, or a place for the occasional project that can’t handle a breeze. At the end of fall, coming in is a big adjustment. There are a few of these outdoor bedrooms scattered around the land, some of them right next to the swimming hole (which they dug themselves). Also, Shyam pointed out, Nat’s in the middle of building a vertiginously high treehouse for the kids in one of the trees next to this bedroom, and has considered running a zipline from one side of the wide Raspberry River valley to the other. </div>
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Misty and I kept exchanging excited glances. <i>They live outside all summer! They want their kids to take risks and do fun stuff! Can we move in now?</i> And there was still even more to see; Shyam took us to the barn next, and introduced us to the animals. They have two cows now, one ornery one getting milked, the other allowed to feed her calf. Cows have astonishingly big eyes, or actually just giant heads in general. We petted them to the extent they’d let us. Back behind them, through a corridor of towering haybales, there were a dozen or so sheep, and a small gaggle of piglets that ran away when they saw us. We greeted the draft horse, a mare as sturdy as four trees, and her little friend, a pony the size of a big dog. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Astute observers will note that the sheep in this photo is not the pony I mentioned.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The pony does exist, though.</td></tr>
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Once we’d satisfied ourselves with animal time, Shyam took us up and around to see the swamp where the cattails and other edible swamp plants grow,</div>
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and the swimming hole and the other outdoor bedrooms, as well as an entire house that had been built by people who’d stayed in previous years. (They started out calling these people “interns”, but that sounds like something a Fortune 500 company has, so they started calling them “co-creators”, which makes it clear that they don’t want to be the royalty of the Draw, issuing edicts; they want it to be a real egalitarian community.)</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Basketball, Shyam says, is like meditation for Nat.</td></tr>
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This naturally brought us to the question of community, which we’d actually been talking about here and there since we got past our hellos. The short version is that a community is exactly what they want, it just hasn’t come together yet. They came to this place nine years ago figuring that if they built it, people would come, and soon there would be a flourishing permaculture community with ten or twenty people. They built the big house with that explicitly in mind—the kitchen is designed to have room to cook for twenty people, and she said they could probably feed ten all winter long with what they’d harvested that year with just their own selves and a couple summer co-creators.</div>
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And people have come to stay for a while—it’s just that something or other always seems to drag them back out into America-at-large. Benjamin stayed for just one warm season before realizing that to follow his true passion of massaging and healing he just needed to be around more people. A few years ago there were a man and woman who stayed for two years (and helped build that house); the man would’ve stayed longer, but the woman couldn’t deal with being so completely off-grid. </div>
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Faced with these false starts, Shyam and Nat have sort of decided that “if you can’t attract a community, make one,” whence Alma, Ophelia, and the new kid she was carrying around under her coat. <i>Hey, we’ll be your community!</i> Misty and I both thought variations of that, and we could see it in each other’s sparkling eyes. We all but said it out loud, but stopped short because, of course, that’s basically tantamount to asking someone to marry you on your first date. </div>
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But our decision was clear without even asking each other. By this point, though, all of us were a little cold, so we walked through the nursery—where they grow the trees they sell for their main income stream—and over a footbridge that crosses a waterway they made, and went back inside. </div>
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There wasn’t a whole lot left to say, but we said it anyhow. In particular, it was nice to have everyone in one place to talk about stuff we hadn’t quite grasped, and Nat was there to break a taciturnity he’d kept while he was working; he told us about all the different kinds of chestnuts there are, and recommended books on how to read the landscape, and just generally overflowed with knowledge. They talked about the old days back on Orcas Island and about raising babies on an off-grid homestead.</div>
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Eventually, they started talking more among each other, and we took our cue. We told them we’d get in touch about sometime when we can come back for a whole weekend, and we said a long goodbye—which is a Minnesota thing, but was mainly my fault, because I was just too excited. We had a long drive ahead of us (in a busted-up car), and a lot to think about. </div>
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And that we did. I was going to blog about what we’ve been thinking about since then, but this got long enough already, and that’s a whole big new thing of its own—so I’m going to put it in another post sometime. For now, I think it’s enough to say that we’re entirely prepared for the possibility that Land Search #2 is the last one we’ll need to do. There’s a lot to do before packing it in and moving off-grid, but that’s for the post I’m going to write about what Misty and I have been plotting for the next year and onward. A lot is still up in the air, but I’ve rediscovered a deep well of excitement about the future, and I’m pretty sure it’s deeper than any other time I’ve visited it.</div>
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<div class="footnote" id="151223n1">* Pronounced like <i>Sean</i> but with an <i>m</i> at the end. It’s a name from India. (<a href="#151223n1-ast">Back to asterisk)</a></div></div>
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Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-71724955560855895052015-12-11T10:59:00.002-06:002015-12-14T12:54:32.586-06:00What’s New<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The New River in West Virginia is one of the oldest rivers in the world, at least 260 million years old (you can tell because it crosses the immensely ancient Appalachians, which means it was there first). The New Bridge (Pont Neuf) in Paris is the oldest bridge in the city. It was new once, but now all the bridges it was newer than have been replaced.<br />
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Just thought you might like to know.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-76990585440189810162015-11-28T17:39:00.000-06:002015-11-28T18:13:13.752-06:00Land Search #1: Lyndell and the Driftless Zone<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A newsletter was mistakenly delivered to our mailbox because a previous Sprout House dweller had forgotten to change his address. It was the <i>Land Stewardship Letter</i>, from the <a href="http://landstewardshipproject.org/" target="_blank">Land Stewardship Project</a>—a project whose name I knew already. For a while this summer, I’d been asking everyone I knew who was involved with farming or the country in any way whether they knew of some way for poor young people to find land they could live on. Our former housemate Maddy works on a farm, run by a guy a little older than us who grew up in Mexico, named Eduardo, and at a picnic with everyone from Eduardo’s farm this summer, I asked her about finding land. Eduardo had found his farm through the Land Stewardship Project. And that’s how I heard about it.<br />
Misty, though, was the one who looked through the <i>Land Stewardship Letter</i> and found the ad. In the middle of the newsletter was a section called “Land Wanted/Land for Sale”, and in amid the listings for big giant farms and places in the several-hundred-thousand-dollar range, she found this:<br />
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Lyndell [<i>last name left out</i>] is seeking a farmer to join a 22-acre operation in Southwestern Wisconsin’s Sauk County. Lyndell is looking for someone to buy into this produce, herb, certified kitchen and free-range chicken operation. [...] The arrangement is 50/50 shares for five years—after that the new farmer can take over complete ownership. </blockquote>
At first it sounds a bit bland and standard. But what’s this about taking over the farm after five years? And Sauk County—that’s in the Driftless Region. Currant’s brother has started a permaculture project in California, but he told Currant that if you’re going to stay in the Midwest, the Driftless Region is the place to go, because there are good people there, who genuinely care about community, and farming well and ethically, and caring for the land. At the pig butchering, I asked about the Driftless Region, and a woman there confirmed everything Currant’s brother had said.<br />
Misty called up Lyndell a couple weeks ago, and when I came home later that day, she told me that after talking to him, the only reservation she had was that nothing is supposed to work out as perfectly as Lyndell’s arrangement looked like it would. He’s in his fifties and very interested in permaculture and more natural ways of living, and when Misty brought up our plan for a community, he didn’t do what you might expect of an older Midwestern farmer and immediately shrink back and tell us hippies to look somewhere else—in fact, he seemed interested. The reason he’s looking for some younger farmers, he says, isn’t so much monetary; it’s that, although he has the stamina of a thirty-year-old, he knows that won’t always be true, so it’d be best to find a succeeding generation of farmers sooner rather than later. Succeeding generation of farmers? Hey, we could be that! So we arranged to go out and visit and see if everything was as good as it seemed. And this is the story of our visit.<br />
The Driftless Region is an island of hilly country in a Midwest mostly flattened by ice during the last glaciation. The various vicissitudes and shapes of the glaciers ended up leaving a lobe of land uncovered in what we now call the Wisconsin–Minnesota–Iowa tristate, and now it’s full of pocket valleys covered with forest and dotted with little towns that time and agribusiness forgot. When we drove through the towns later that night, we may have seen more Amish buggies than cars.<br />
Lyndell’s land is one hillside of a pocket valley, with three acres of field sloping down to the bottomland and a little creek, through Lyndell’s rows of beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, kale, and other things that I never did ask him to list. You come into the valley on a gravel road that sprouts off from an unlined, narrow, paved road, and then hook around to the right, to look back out into the opening of the valley from a flat clearing on the hillside where Lyndell has been building himself a house.<br />
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He welcomed me and Misty to the house and poured us cups of milky-oat tea. There are two houses, he explained; he started building the first one, and then his neighbor called the county inspector on him because it wasn’t up to code. He decided to just start a second building to be the house, and transform the second one into a general-purpose other-building, with a produce-cleaning station, a kitchen for baking things to sell at the Dane County Farmers’ Market (seventy miles away in Madison), an accounting and computer-using office, and a vast root cellar. The first building is banked into the hill; the house, a sturdy, concrete-walled structure, is perched on the hillside. It’s perfectly tuned to Lyndell’s life: a thick, rubber roof to keep out radio waves because he’s electrosensitive; a roof with a ventilated attic for drying out milky oats, which he grows for the health benefits from the tea; thick walls well suited to a zodiacal Ox like him who values what’s long-lasting. We drank the milky-oat tea, clear and green, and it not only tasted great, but also just <i>felt</i> healthy.<br />
Once he’d shown us around the buildings, he took us up on the hill for a tour of the land.<br />
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Just above the house and into the woods, there’s an old abandoned wagon road that takes you past a few apple trees that Lyndell’s planning to graft with new stock, and leads you to this old cabin. He didn’t build it, but when he had a twenty-something couple stay on the land this summer, this is where they lived. He found them through one of those sites that lets people find farms to spend some time on, WWOOF or WorkAway or HelpX, and had high hopes that they’d stay on with him and steward the land into the future. But they turned out to prefer lounging in a hammock-chair and drinking liquor over growing crops and helping build houses, and they left after a month. Lyndell doesn’t know how the old school bus got there, but it’s clearly been there for a long time and not going anywhere soon.<br />
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We climbed up past the bed of the old road onto the higher reaches of the hill.</div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">The forest is young and full of skinny, teenage trees of all sorts, </span></div>
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watched over by a few older sentinels like this venerable white oak. There are also stands of shagbark hickories that have been feeding the squirrels; birches; a couple dozen sugar maples ripe for the tapping; and unnumbered trees of other kinds. The whole forest is broadleaf trees, with no evergreens in sight despite the cold winters. </div>
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We reached a plateau on the ridgeline at the top of the hill, and stopped to look around and dream about what trees and plants we could invite to grow there. It could be a wonderful place for a chestnut grove, perhaps first made up of Korean chestnuts, then replaced slowly by the new blight-resistant American strains that the <a href="http://www.acf.org/" target="_blank">American Chestnut Foundation</a> has finally, after generations of hybridizing and breeding in North Carolina, nearly gotten to the point that they can be spread around the country. Underneath them could be hazelnuts and apples and other fruits and nuts. Lyndell used to belong to the <a href="http://www.northernnutgrowers.org/" target="_blank">Northern Nut Growers Association</a>, and knows a thing or two about raising nuts; he told us about the neighbors’ project in the next valley over to grow black walnuts, and how they haven’t gotten many because they put the trees too close together. Years back, he was with a group that found a pecan tree growing along the Mississippi near St Louis, and they had high hopes back then of growing pecans even farther north than that, perhaps in the form of “hickcans”, half-hickory, half-pecan. The ground on this hill could someday be swimming in mast.<br />
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At the edge of the plateau, we found a place that, it seems to me, can’t <i>not</i> be named Meditation Rock. We stood and talked and looked out through the opening of this valley into the land around, and listened to the distant echoing bellows of cows. This is a place I could get used to.<br />
Evening comes on early in a valley when the next ridge over gets between you and the sun. We hiked back down to the house and realized we hadn’t asked to be shown around the field.<br />
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In the dusk, during the blurry-photos hours, Lyndell showed us the rows, up on the hill,<br />
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and the hoop houses he’s made out of rebar and plastic pipe, a few thousand dollars cheaper than the kits you can buy. They’re still overflowing with kale, as well as a crowd of plants I didn’t know well that he uses for making teas and tinctures.<br />
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And off to the side, the foundations for the henhouse, where the first of the humans’ animal invitees to the land would take up residence. After them would follow goats to turn the hill’s invasion of multiflora roses into milk and cheese, and rabbits who would turn our unused produce and grass into hasenpfeffer and slippers.<br />
Done with this first shot at getting to know the land, we went back to the courtyard between the houses and talked for a long time. Lyndell is a talker, and told us a lot of stories. He’s been farming since his dad set aside a patch for him to grow strawberries when he was ten years old. He’s always felt a need to have a place that feels like home, but over the last dozen years or so he’s had a hard time finding that place. In the last few years he’s lived on a couple different intentional communities and poured a lot of energy into building and farming for them, only to discover that at both places, the motives of the people at the helm were less than noble, and centered more around profit than wanting to create a new way of life. He left disillusioned and now he’s cautious of anything that calls itself an intentional community, but he didn’t seem too fazed by our plan that was exactly that, maybe because we’re pretty clearly not just in it for the money.<br />
Two years ago, he found this land and immediately decided it would be a perfect place to live for many years to come. He and another person bought it together, and later he bought her share after she decided country life wasn’t for her, which is how he comes to be in a driftless little Wisconsin valley all on his own. He’s worked hard and tirelessly since he came here, and that’s how he’s managed to not only grow enough veggies to sell in Madison but also build most of two houses. He always works hard: you have to out on the land, and people who don’t realize that have found it easy to let him take up the slack when they get tired and lazy.<br />
We assured him that we wouldn’t do that, and we told him we want to build our lives around a lot of the same values he’d been talking about: caring for the land, not letting profits take over the driver’s seat, doing the work that needs to be done rather than pushing it off on someone else (because someone needs to take the responsibility and put in the dirt time to learn about the land). Across the generations and the city–country divide, we discovered we had a lot of commonalities. And that was one of the greatest things we brought home from the visit: there are people in the country with a vision like ours, and moving out there doesn’t mean moving out into the midst of monocropping, feed-capped, Monsanto farmers with no interest in our project of bringing humans and the Earth closer together. We could live there with Lyndell. A genuine human of the country, living in the land, not on top of it. And we could be that ourselves.<br />
Misty and I agreed that it would clearly be rash to decide we’re building the whole community here after a single evening’s visit from just two people. So we want to come back a few times. And as it happens, Lyndell told us he was planning to build a rocket stove soon. We offered to help out, and he said that would be great as soon as he has enough of the house finished that it’s legally fit for dwelling. (Otherwise his neighbor might call the inspector on him again if there are guests. This guy wishes he had bought the land when it was for sale, so he’s being nitpicky and trying to annoy Lyndell away. Not going to happen—and the inspector’s sick of his calls too.) I’ve always wanted to build a rocket stove: they’re an amazing piece of low-tech ingenuity, a perfect way to maybe halve the amount of wood you need to gather for each winter. Misty and I are both looking forward to it.<br />
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We all could’ve pushed ourselves to talk for hours longer, but we were getting tired, and Misty and I wanted to get home at a reasonable hour. So we packed up, put a gift of beets in the car, said goodbye, and drove back to the Cities, excited and chattering. We’d seen a lot to love, and we also had lingering questions that will have to be answered by more visits. (How much astrology do we want in our lives? Are we interested in making and selling baked goods that we know aren’t good for people? Are we sure Lyndell’s standards for hard work can be met by us, or even by anyone?) We realized that it was ridiculous to expect that we’d find a place so perfect that it would take only an evening for us to unequivocally fall in love with it and have zero questions or misgivings—especially on the first try. And we realized that we’ll need to look at a lot of different places before we can say that one of them is where we’d like to spend decades, create a community, and grow old. </div>
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With those things figured out, it seemed like our visit to Lyndell and his land had gone about as well as it could. Next is visiting more places. We’ve already got one lined up: tomorrow we’re heading out to an already-started permaculture community near Duluth on the Lake Superior shore. With each new visit, the country becomes more real and a more conceivable place to live. In case you didn’t notice, this is exciting.</div>
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Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-72819576858540592022015-11-28T17:35:00.000-06:002015-11-28T19:47:07.592-06:00Upcoming Plans • Christmas List<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
So besides the land search, there’s some other information that I should mention. Yesterday I bought my tickets to Cincinnati for Christmas. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I’ll be coming in on the Greyhound at 10:25pm on Saturday the 19th, and leaving on the late train on Monday the 28th. That gives me a solid weekend and a half in town. My plan is to stay with Dad until he leaves for vacation on the 22nd, then mostly stay with Mom and the folks.<br />
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I also thought of a list of my material desires for anyone who really wants to get me a Christmas present but is totally lost for ideas.<br />
I always feel a little weird about making a Christmas list. It’s like, “Hey, give me all this stuff!” But people buy/make each other Christmas gifts one way or another, and if you happen to want to give one to me, I feel like it’s nice if you have a general idea of the things I could use in my life. I live far away from a lot of people and that makes it hard for you to know what I’ve already got and what I wish I had, since I’m not talking about it around you all the time. I do not expect to get everything I ask for. Actually I don’t want to say I’m <i>asking</i> for these things. Feels like I’m making demands. It’s just a list of ideas.<br />
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<li>A little insulated drink bottle, like <a href="http://www.kleankanteen.com/products/wide-mouth-insulated-16oz?variant=1605384643" target="_blank">this one</a>. <i>What I like about this one:</i> it’s got a loop for carrying, no plastic touches the drink (plastic-flavored coffee is gross), and it’s easy to clean the lid because it doesn’t have one of those sippy-straws. I prefer opening a lid over sipping through a plasticky hard-to-clean spout.</li>
<li>Maybe an external hard drive? I dunno, I’m not really dead-set on this, but if you know of one that’s not pricey, I could back stuff up with it, and I’ve been thinking I should back stuff up, since you never know what’ll happen to a computer.</li>
<li>I’ve reached a time in my life where I would actually welcome more cool T-shirts. I never thought that would happen, but here we are. Funny stuff, or ones with great designs. The truest test of whether it’s a great shirt: when you look at it, can you imagine thinking it’s funny/awesome over and over, or is it worth one chuckle and then you’re done? The internet is good at T-shirts, although I don’t actually pay that much attention to that section of the internet, so I only know of a few websites. Those ones are <a href="http://fullbleed.org/collections/t-shirts">FullBleed</a>, <a href="http://www.bustedtees.com/">Busted Tees</a>, and <a href="https://www.threadless.com/catalog/style,tees/type,guys">Threadless</a>. There are others too. Or homemade ones. I wear a L.</li>
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I put the duplicatable ones (the bottle and the hard drive) into <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Blcs3wvFzJK3a0I75Li2fuTXtwT3R35BUpJzPTdg1zI/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">this checkoff list</a> sort of like I did last year, so you don’t have to wonder whether you’re getting something that someone else already got. If you get one of the things on the list, just type an <i>x</i> into the box next to it. It’s saved instantly. Anyone can edit it, and I won’t look at it.</div>
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Okay, materialism over! I’m looking forward to getting back to Ohio for family time. If that means you, I can hardly wait to see you. Let’s have some fun.</div>
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Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-39291893406816127142015-11-12T01:19:00.000-06:002015-11-12T01:44:33.194-06:00Taking Apart Animals<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Preamble (Preramble)</h5>
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Ultimately, the phase of humanity’s history where it’s possible to eat meat your entire life without ever once seeing an animal get butchered will be an anomalous, transient one. Less than a century ago, only really rich city-dwellers, and maybe sultans and kings, could count on having all their meat delivered in clean-looking packages or already cooked on a platter. For everyone else, there would always be times when, at the very least, you went to the butcher shop and there was a pig hanging from a meathook, and for a pretty healthy chunk of the world, it was even more direct than that, because you or someone you knew was a hunter. </div>
I’m not anywhere close to the first person to point out that supermarket meat is built on a basic dishonesty: refusing to acknowledge that the meat you eat was alive once, and mooed or oinked or clucked, ate and drank and pissed and shat. And as the petroleum-based, just-in-time, high-precision infrastructure that gets our meat to us becomes more brittle and overstressed, supermarkets will stop being able to count on refrigerated trucks to bring in cuts of meat packaged in plastic, and butchers will start popping up like in olden days, with meathooks in their shops and maybe pens behind, in order to take advantage of nature’s way of keeping meat fresh: life. Country folks will once again all know how to gut a rabbit, because when McDonald’s fails you, there will always be rabbits.<br />
That trend is on the uptick already, but it’s at the bottom of the upward curve, and there are a lot of people who still need to learn these basic skills. Misty and I are two of them. Pretty soon, I think we’ll be able to say we <i>were</i>.<br />
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The Squirrel</h5>
A few weeks ago, Misty—fresh off of reading <i>Unlearn, Rewild</i>, a book full of primitive skills that I bought and read years ago, then mostly forgot—noticed a dead squirrel in the street next to our driveway, looking almost as if it were just asleep. We weren’t sure what its cause of death was, but it wasn’t squashed or pulped. We usually would’ve let it alone, but because of that book, Misty picked it up and put it in the cool shade next to our driveway. In there, she’d read that meat can and will keep for several days outside of a fridge, so we weren’t worried.<br />
A couple days later, Misty finally grabbed a knife and took the squirrel down to a tarp she laid down next to the front porch. I went down with her to watch and help out wherever a third hand would be useful. It lay there placidly, the way dead things do, and Misty poked her knife through its belly. From there she got a slit all the way up and down the belly, and slowly opened the squirrel up. She cut through its ribs—they were unexpectedly fragile—and pulled out its organs; we saved the heart and the liver. When we got to the pelvis, we discovered it was shattered, and the squirrel probably died from getting its back half crushed by the tire of a (not-very-heavy) car. Misty’s goal beforehand was to make a candle from squirrel tallow, so she piled up the litle bits of fat that the squirrel had put on for the winter.<br />
I helped with a little knifework, and together we eventually got the whole skin off for tanning later, even around the eyes and nose. We set the pelt to dry; it was a beautiful, fine fur, which Misty hopes to use to make one of a pair of squirrel-skin moccasins. She was planning to just use that and the fat, since this was a city squirrel and who knew what it’d been eating. But I pointed out that we’d opened up its stomach and inside we found only what looked like chewed-up acorns, and nothing that looked like plastic or cigarette butts. She agreed, so I cut off its legs and backstrap, and we took them inside for a squirrel lunch.<br />
I fried the legs up whole with salt and pepper in a little lard left over in the skillet from something. Misty put together some beets and cabbage, and we ate it very slowly and contemplatively. This was my first time eating squirrel, and also my first time butchering roadkill. I liked Misty’s assessment of it: tastes like steak, feels like chicken. It was amazing. Misty also said that it made her body say, “Hey, this is good food!”—probably owing to the free life it had.<br />
Later, we found out from Grandpa that squirrel is usually really tough, not tender like ours, and you have to steam them for hours. Miles Olson, the author of <i>Unlearn, Rewild</i>, says leaving the meat out for a few days isn’t just convenient for the back-to-the-lander with a busy schedule, it also serves to let the meat tenderize itself with enzymes that are already in it. So, by being lazy, we also ended up with some incredibly delicious squirrel.<br />
We both found ourselves eating with what Sam Thayer, the wild edible plant wizard, calls “skimpy meal syndrome”. This is the phenomenon where people who are eating a food they’ve never tried will find it totally delicious, but they’ll still only eat a third of what they might normally eat at a meal, because their body is going, “Whoa there, hold on, are you sure this stuff is safe? You want to maybe be a little more cautious here?” And then they’ll go off and sneak in some snacks later on. But I’m looking forward to eating more, until it becomes normal to my body’s reflexive programming.<br />
The next day, we walked to the local cafe, and on the way we saw squirrels running around, gathering nuts, climbing on people’s houses. I felt like I knew them on a much deeper level than I had before. Now that I’d seen one up close, and I’d felt its fur and seen its four big teeth—just four!—and even checked what it was eating, I could imagine <i>being </i>these squirrels. Jumping around, finding acorns, grinding them up, just the way my mouth is built to do. I looked at them and saw through their eyes.<br />
And that’s the unexpected thing I got from this whole project. I had done it out of an impulse to get closer to nature, but I’d only really expected to feel more like a real predator, and here I ended up feeling like the prey too, and learning even more from that.<br />
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The Pig</h5>
Road trip!<br />
Last year I wanted to make Korean blood sausage, 순대 <i>soondae</i>. I’d had this notion before I even left Cincinnati, but it turned out that no one but no one sells pig’s blood. Something something lawsuits something. I thought about it again my first fall in Minneapolis, and realized I knew someone I could ask: the family who sold pork at the farmers’ market—two parents and occasionally a shy daughter. I’d gotten samples from them of breakfast sausage and vegetables, but I’d never quite struck up a conversation. One day in October, I did.<br />
It turned out they farm and live at the Lake City Catholic Worker farm. That’s part of the Catholic Worker Movement, which is a quietly revolutionary movement that started with Catholics who noticed that the parts of the Bible that mention charity toward the poor are pretty roundly neglected these days, and thought that seemed very wrong. There are a bunch of cities where you can find a Catholic Worker House, offering up a meal and a place to sleep for the poor and homeless and disadvantaged. I almost stayed at one in Vancouver, in fact, but I had a friend to stay with instead. They’re one of a small number of Christian organizations these days that genuinely practice Christ’s teachings, which, despite the earnest attempts of centuries of church leaders to pervert his words in favor of colonialism, domination, and bigotry, are still right there in black and red and white saying a lot of good, necessary things to anyone who cares to actually read them.<br />
Paul and Sarah were living at a Catholic Worker House in Winona, and decided to split off and form a rural house, which is a bit out of the usual but was calling them. Eight years later, they’ve built an entire house, learned the coarser and then the finer points of raising pastured pork, and had two daughters, and another friend has moved in. It’s fair to say they’ve made it happen and gotten it done.<br />
Now, because the US food system is petty, nonsensical, and horrendous, farmers aren’t actually allowed to butcher the pork they sell in their own barn, unless they spend a good $100,000 on upgrades to make it a USDA certified slaughterhouse. On Paul and Sarah’s scale, that’s not going to happen, so they send their pigs to a butchering factory. But you are allowed to butcher pigs for personal use, and for five years they’ve been doing that every November with pride and a party.<br />
I got my pork blood last year, but much more importantly, I got out of the city and spent some time in a genuine community with genuinely good folks, all the farm’s dwellers and their friends, out for a rousing day of butchering in brisk early-November weather, followed by a blazing bonfire and a pork barbecue that couldn’t possibly be fresher.<br />
This year I wanted to get down there again, for another dose of rural community, and I knew Misty would too. So we drove an hour and a half down the St Croix and the Mississippi, through Prescott with its picturesque highway liftbridge and other little towns, and up and down in the driftless bluffs of the rivers, and ended up at the farm again this last Saturday morning. The scene was just like last year: out in the yard, a dead pig suspended snout-down, on hooks through its shanks, from the scoop on the farm’s bulldozer, and a group of people standing around it. Paul was there, and he greeted me like an old friend; he and Misty introduced themselves to each other, and we were on the farm.<br />
We spent the morning in the barn, where a bunch of folks in knit caps were helping cut up and put away the pork from the four pigs they’d killed yesterday. Friday night is when all the serious butchering gets done, and Saturday was there for us who don’t quite know what we’re doing or where to find a tenderloin or a pork chop. Misty and I both bustled around and helped, packing cuts fresh off a side of hog into freezer paper, pulling apart big pieces of pig while other people sawed through them, getting our hands generally bloody. But through all of it, I (having forgotten way more than I’d like to admit since last year) had no real clear idea of where everything fit into the big picture.<br />
Luckily, after a nice warm lunch inside the house, everything got demonstrated. Paul gathered a group around the pig hanging from the scoop, and showed us all how you eviscerate it, and where you find the precious caul fat, and he put aside the heart and liver and some other organs. We teamed up to skin the pig, and then he drove the bulldozer over to the barn, where two guys used a Skilsaw to cut the pig neatly down its spine into two halves, even going directly down the center of the skull to make it easier to get at the jowl fat, the tongue, and possibly the brain, though I’m not sure if anyone wanted that this year.<br />
We started with one side and left the other hanging. Two guys hoisted it onto one of the big stainless steel tables they have, and we divided it into three sections—shoulder, belly, rump—and one of the guys, a competent butcher whose name I’ve forgotten but whose town (St Louis) I remember, showed us where to find all those cuts that most people these days only know from labels stuck to cellophane. Thus I learned that the pig’s “loin” is for some reason in its back. The hams, of course, are from about where it keeps its butt, and the pork chops are all along the spine. We cut the belly up and freed thick, heavy slabs of what would become bacon. It all came together (by coming apart).<br />
Later, Sarah gave a demonstration of how to make maple syrup bacon, which I’m planning to try. In fact, I’ve been thinking lately that I should take up charcuterie. That’s definitely a homesteading, olden-days skill that’ll be useful in a low-energy future, because everyone who eats meat needs to preserve meat, and those who raise meat doubly so. Soon people will start reconciling themselves to eating stuff made from organ meats too, and well-seasoned charcuterie seems to be the way that most people prefer that stuff. (I brought a liver home: braunschweiger time.) Besides all that, it’s tasty.<br />
We finished cutting up the other side of the pig, and when we were done it was all in freezer bags, in the sausage-meat bin, or in the lard bin waiting to get rendered. And that evening Paul and a crew of helpers cooked some of the belly, and we all ate it as part of the night’s feast—from walking around to hanging on a bulldozer to cut up on a table to our plates, all in the same day, and we’d been there for every part of it.<br />
The day finished out in the dark around the bonfire, with a little band teaching us all songs about local produce and people in community and bats that fly in your face. I sat with Misty and our housemate Annabelle, who’d shown up by surprise in the morning because she knows the people at this farm, and we sang until we were too tired to do anything but lay out our sleeping bag and wriggle into it. (Misty and I had to share one sleeping bag, and there were so many people staying the night that we slept in the greenhouse. It was not the most comfortable night, shall we say.)<br />
Annabelle, by the way, is a photographer, and so far you can look at <a href="https://instagram.com/p/94N-31wME3/" target="_blank">one of the photos she took</a>, with more to follow. She told me it’s going to be odd writing the text for these photos, because she’s drawn to take photos of the goriest, most macabre scenes, being a bit of a Wednesday Addams, but she actually feels really good about the butchering event and how it’s a part of a real small-farm culture that makes sense, and she doesn’t want to portray it in a negative light. When she’s done figuring out that contradiction, I’ll post a link here. For now, I’m heading to bed—indoors and with more than half a sleeping bag’s worth of space.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-33127953277922642252015-10-27T12:28:00.003-05:002015-10-27T12:30:58.340-05:00Chickens! Chickens!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I mentioned a few blogs ago that one of our first baby steps toward living off the land will be learning to keep chickens. After we decided that, the housemates who are interested—me, Misty, Currant, and especially Peter, who's gardened in spent a few days dreaming up what kind of chicken coop we could build this winter in our garage while the yard is frozen solid and covered in snow. And then, realizing that we needed some direction, Misty and I took the Twin Cities Coop Tour.<br />
There's a local urban-farming supply store called <a href="http://eggplantsupply.com/" target="_blank">Egg|plant</a> (it shows up admirably on the <a href="http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/behold-the-ultimate-crowdsourced-map-of-punny-businesses-in-america" target="_blank">internet's definitive map of punny business names</a>, because they sell you supplies for your laying hens <i>and</i> your garden!), and they put together a big old list of people in the cities with chicken coops who would be willing to take a day to show some strangers what sorts of fun stuff they've done with their chicken setup. On that day in September, we biked down a few blocks to our south and found three different houses with chickens running around in their yards, and in each house one or two enthusiastic chickeneers who told us about how chickens are great. The second house, though, turned out to be the one we got the most from, because that's where we met Nancie. Every inch of her backyard that wasn't chicken coop was covered with garden of some kind, and she had beautiful butternut squashes tanning in the sun. Today, she was giving away her five chickens, because after about seven years, she'd decided to hang up her mucking rake and plant more garden where her coop was. The chickens were already spoken for (in fact, they were down to three when we got there), but it's not as if we had a place for them yet. Misty, though, noticed that Nancie would soon have a surplus chicken coop that we just happened to have a place for....<br />
Nancie thought it sounded like a fine idea for the coop to find a home with us, especially since we were offering to take it down for her. It was a big, sky blue beauty that had apparently housed fifteen chickens at once at some point; it was built by Nancie's former housemate, who also started a chicken feed company, but then moved to New Zealand, as sometimes happens to people. A week or so after the Coop Tour, Misty, Peter, and I, plus a neighbor of Nancie's and a surly but sturdy Norwegian stranger we'd hired, came back to Nancie's house and took the whole works apart.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k-vuWq1Aj7w/Vi79x8qiQlI/AAAAAAAADEA/7fGnvRedMaA/s1600/20150925_103105.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="360" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k-vuWq1Aj7w/Vi79x8qiQlI/AAAAAAAADEA/7fGnvRedMaA/s640/20150925_103105.jpg" title="Peter and I start searching for the screws holding this thing together." width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Peter and I start searching for the screws holding this thing together.</td></tr>
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The chicken run came apart without too much effort, just a lot of unfastening staples from two-by-fours and gradually pulling beams and fence sections apart.</div>
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The coop itself, though, turned out to be considerably more daunting. For one thing, it was stuck pretty snugly underneath the eaves of Nancie's garage. For another, it weighed about five hundred pounds and wasn't built with thoughtfully placed handles and disassembly instructions.</div>
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First we raked out all the straw left over from the last tenants.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2E_63TK2y-s/Vi8BNJnXMkI/AAAAAAAADEg/TjimKBOkK7s/s1600/20150925_115214.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2E_63TK2y-s/Vi8BNJnXMkI/AAAAAAAADEg/TjimKBOkK7s/s640/20150925_115214.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Check out the nest boxes in the back, and the heater on the roof, which Nancie included with our package deal.</td></tr>
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Then we pulled up the floor looking for how to detach the coop from the platform it was on.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I still rep Ray Harris, even if Edward Prindle beat him for the title of jailer of Boone County, Kentucky, in 2002.</td></tr>
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But it turned out that it was actually just resting on the platform, and gravity was doing all the work. We thought on this for a while. We tried lifting the coop, and determined conclusively that it was really damn heavy. </div>
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Eventually, we decided it wasn't going to get less heavy, so we'd better just detach all the detachments we could find, and horse it out of there with whatever effort it took, because this was the only day that there was a pickup truck we could borrow. And that's what we did. We were all too busy grunting, herniating, and panicking to get any pictures, but rest assured, they would be hilarious.<br />
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The coop landed on Erica's brother's truck safe and sound, and we limped the whole mess over eight blocks to our house, where we gracelessly plopped it down in our driveway, and there it remains, waiting for us to patch its roof and put its platform back together so we can fill it again with the sounds of clucking and fluttering. Our plan is to conscript a bunch of people to move it into place at our next big house party, and then get the fencing put in place around it. And when all that happens, I'll show you. </div>
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Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-84952585145460345162015-09-18T22:39:00.003-05:002015-09-18T23:02:06.148-05:00Ten and a Half Songs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Well, the wild rice thing didn’t pan out, because the guy who was going to take me was too busy building a workshed. But to make up for not having any pictures of what it looks like to go ricing, I’ve got another random little thing.<br />
My cousin Katie keeps a <a href="http://www.alwayskatie.com/" target="_blank">blog</a> (and may in fact be the only other person I know who’s still using a trusty old Blogspot blog even though the technology behind it is an unholy sixteen-year-old mess of unmodernizable code), and has somewhere stumbled upon the “Blogtember Challenge”, put on by another blogger named Bailey: Bailey posts a prompt for each day of September, and people who are doing the challenge respond to it, and there you go, a month full of blog posts. But I’m really only interested in one, because I thought it sounded fun:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Put your iTunes/music player on shuffle and share the first 10 songs that play.”</blockquote>
It turns out that I have a lot of music I haven’t gotten around to listening to yet, so I decided it’d make more sense to share the first ten songs I actually recognize, whether or not they're embarrassing.<br />
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<h5>
Number One</h5>
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<b>The Mariner’s Revenge Song</b><br />
The Decemberists, from <i>Picaresque</i></div>
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Well, we’re off to a good start: an 8½-minute long ballad of revenge on the high seas in the olden days, told with Colin Meloy’s classic slightly overblown but incredibly satisfying lyrics.<br />
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<h5>
</h5>
<h5>
Number Two</h5>
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<b>Suo </b>(or <b>Marshland</b>)<br />
Loituma, from <i>Things of Beauty</i><br />
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From the same people who brought you the infamous “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4om1rQKPijI" target="_blank">Ieva’s Polka</a>” that I memorized during the hours I was bored in freshman high school biology, it’s a much calmer, more mysterious, even ominous song.<br />
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<h5>
Number Three</h5>
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<b>Fortune Plango Vulnera</b></div>
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Carl Orff, from <i>Carmina Burana</i><br />
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Whether or not you know it, you’ve heard the first song in this opera, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNWpZ-Y_KvU" target="_blank">O Fortuna</a>”. What you might not know is that it’s only one of twenty-five straight songs that all kick nearly as much ass. If you’ve never listened to the whole opera, do it; it will make your life permanently and measurably better.<br />
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<h5>
Number Four</h5>
<b>Cuba</b><br />
Isaac Albéniz, from <i>Suite española</i><br />
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I don’t know nearly as much about this one as the others. Someone gave me the entire <i>Suite española</i> once, and I’ve listened to it occasionally since then, and I like it. That’s all I’ve got for you.<br />
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<h5>
Number Five</h5>
<b>cock/ver10</b><br />
Aphex Twin, from <i>drukqs</i><br />
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I’ve only just listened to my first bit of Aphex Twin. It’s disorienting, chaotic stuff, and thus I love it. I also really appreciate that every song on this album is named with Welsh-esque semi-nonsense. Others include: “jynweythek ylow”, “kladfvgbung micshk”, “54 cymru beats”, “prep gwarlek 36”, and “hy a scullyas lyf adhagrow”.<br />
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<h5>
Number Six</h5>
<b>Even the Good Wood Gone</b><br />
Why?, from <i>Eskimo Snow</i><br />
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Not a lot of bands would think of writing a song told from the viewpoint of a mummified pharaoh. Why? has some of my favorite lyrics ever, and their alliteration and assonance is awesome, like in “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx_BfRa3Vko" target="_blank">The Fall of Mr. Fifths</a>”:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[...] this Christmas, is this twisted?<br />
Why be upset?<br />
I never said I didn’t have syphilis, Miss Listless<br />
Hard like the bricks that I pound my fists with<br />
I mean she's hard like the bricks that I pound with my fists.</blockquote>
<br />
<h5>
Number Seven</h5>
<b>Variation No. 23</b><br />
Rachmaninoff, from <i>Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini</i><br />
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<i>(at 21:40)</i></div>
You can’t really separate this variation from the other 23 that make up the rhapsody, but that’s how it is in the recording I have. I don’t know much about Rachmaninoff in general, but one fun fact is this: Eric Carmen based “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3j_fdSpkmE">All by Myself</a>” heavily on Rachmaninoff’s <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGOihjqO9w">Piano Concerto No. 2</a></i> (especially the second movement, starting 11:23). He thought it was in the public domain, but after he released it he got a call from the estate of Rachmaninoff, and had to pay up big-time.<br />
<br />
<h5>
Number Seven and a Half</h5>
<b>In This Temple, As in the Hearts of Man for Whom He Saved the Earth</b><br />
Sufjan Stevens, from <i>Illinois</i><br />
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A 35-second transition song can hardly count as a whole song, even if it comes from a seriously fun album.<br />
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<h5>
Number Eight</h5>
<b>Drinking Song of a Germinating Seed</b><br />
Jayber Crow, from <i>Two Short Stories</i><br />
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These two guys came to play a little show at my college in a little town in Iowa, and if they hadn’t, I would never have heard of them. They belonged in a little town in Iowa more than any other band I saw there. They sing songs about the Midwest—the farms struggling to find a new generation of farmers, the Rust Belt cities, the forests and fields—and a lot of their songs are like nature itself pointing out little moments.<br />
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<h5>
Number Nine</h5>
<b>Orange Sky</b><br />
Alexi Murdoch, from <i>Time without Consequence</i><br />
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I never took that much of a shine to this one, for no really good reason. I think it’s just too clean and smooth for me.<br />
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<h5>
Number Ten (and the last)</h5>
<b>Color in Your Cheeks</b><br />
The Mountain Goats, from <i>All Hail West Texas</i><br />
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Yes! The Mountain Goats made it onto the list! John Darnielle looks like a respectable, normal, middle-aged guy, but he has some stories that you don’t tell to children. He’s been addicted to meth, worked in a psychiatric hospital, and had an abusive stepfather, and he came out the other end of all that writing songs with the most consistently intense lyrics of any songwriter I know of. This one doesn’t get deep into hard life, but in a flophouse like the one he’s telling about, those realms are never far off, and you can tell. I recommend the Mountain Goats unequivocally.
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<br />
So there you go. They actually turned out to be mostly awesome, and in fact they’re a pretty good representation of the kinds of stuff I like to listen to. So I hope you listen to them, and maybe even like them. I don’t have a concluding thought here except that I just think that would be swell.</div>
Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8044648.post-51250518467876107372015-09-10T23:20:00.003-05:002015-09-10T23:24:37.789-05:00Why Would They Do That<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On today’s edition of “Why Would They Do That”, something I found while looking up directions for a bike trip I’m doing tomorrow. The town of Lakeland, Minnesota, a little outside the Twin Cities, does not have many streets—but the city planners have chosen to make all of them impossible to remember by naming nearly half of them with something that starts with Q. Working our way from west to east, we get:<br />
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<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Quality Ave.</li>
<li>Quamwell Ave.</li>
<li>Quant Ave.</li>
<li>Quant Ct.</li>
<li>Queenan Ave.</li>
<li>Quehl Ave.</li>
<li>Quentin Ave.</li>
<li>Quinlan Ave.</li>
<li>Quinmore Ave.</li>
<li>Quinnell Ave. <i>(That’s three in a row that start with “Quin”!)</i></li>
<li>Quixote Ave.</li>
</ul>
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I’m sure it seemed cute and funny at the time.</div>
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Chuckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03918675492238901083noreply@blogger.com2