peaknix

The Transition Initiative continues to expand across the US and the world, gaining popularity, great thing to see.

I read some of the Transition dispatches from Copenhagen 15 and was glad to see that they gave some presentations there.

Naresh (who I met at the Cambridge, MA T4T training in 2008) did a good write up worth reading at A Copenhagen Christmas Present from Naresh Giangrande.

I am profoundly UN-hopeful about any sort of effective climate catastrophe mitigation.

For me Transition is not about mitigation of climate change. Mitigation is absolutely not possible, full stop.

Why? Let me show this “Venn Diagram” I just whipped up, to illustrate my viewpoint:

Do you get my meaning? Our countries are incapable of functioning as if there were core overlaps between us. (there are all sorts of interdependencies that exist, the critical importance of those dependencies is what is not acknowledged nor appreciated)

We live in a capitalistic world, our cultures and our states derive their life blood from commerce and the power that is created through commerce.

Capitalism requires Infinite Growth.

Infinite growth is an oxymoron and a pernicious construct. It has very effectively broken the real venn diagram of interdependencies into a global fantasy of primacy of the individual state in domination over all others and absolutely over Gaia.

This is a sick, broken, malignant system and it will continue to consume mother earth until resources fall below a critical threshold, after which capitalism and the myth of money and value collapses on our heads.

You can bet the farm that even with the collapse, corporations (real state) will continue to grind until the very last scrap of coal has been burned.

You can take that to the bank Delilah.

So, back to Transition.

For me, a person of no means and a product of an American Debt Society, rational Transition is about adapting in place.

Climate change IS happening and the weather chaos we are already living means added complexity to adapting in place.

For us here in the northeast, this means extending our season. I wrote a bit about my greenhouse dreams at our homestead blog, Humble Garden, in this post: Greenhouse with poultry.

Its my goal this year to get a greenhouse in place so that my garden doesnt need to look like this for a good part of the year!!!

Instead, imagine something like this little sketch, though likely the greenhouse will be taller. It will also roll up on the sides in the summer. The top will stay in place to cope with the extensive COLD wet rainy springs we get now.

[I have cross posted this to Humble Garden]

As a proponent of the global Transition Initiative and having been “Trained for Transition” in November 2008 in Cambridge, MA I have a certain worldview. (see Food for Hope: DeGlobalizing – ReLocalizing)

Transition is really about bringing permacultural principles to bear on the current and coming crises around the decreasing natural resources that are in our future. This includes Peak Oil and pretty much peak everything as wealth and societal energies go towards the resource wars and skirmishes and agonies as governments jostle for position in the bread lines for energy, water, food, and diminishing rare materials.

This downward slope is called the energy descent and the Transition Initiative seeks to PLAN for rational energy descent in a way that flows power and resources back to localities where people LIVE (called relocalization).

Its a HUGE thing, deglobalizing. When I first learned about Transition Towns back in 2007 it was this amazing idea happening in real life but in far away England. Transition in England is profoundly different in terms of challenges to here but it took a while for me to be able to articulate why.

Social safety nets. Thats the key. In the US, we dont have much and those we have are failing now or will be failing as the full brunt of the baby boom aging bomb hits it.

Ok, thats a huge topic, huge. I bring it up for one reason today!

Relocalization of food and jobs is a primary concern to anyone serious about making headway during this financial crisis.

Obviously, we personally have relocalized a lot of food in our back yard. Lots of you have also.

This past year was not a good gardening year and it wasnt the year that I thought it would be in terms of working with local community gardening.

We live in a “sparsely” settled area (for this region) and as such have not gotten to know our neighbors well, yet.

I think its important to, once you have gotten your backyard homesteading rolling, you should begin to get the food vibe radiating out and use it to make connections with neighbors so that food resiliency is about more than your own food.

To these ends, I have started a project with our neighbors.

As you can see in the google map photo below, our land is on the right (see box) and then the neighbors across the street, who have lovely pasture (which we do not, we have lovely cliffs!).

I proposed to our amazing neighbors to share a dairy cow (am aiming for a jersey cow – high butter fat) where we put a cow and her baby on their pasture and we tend and milk her. Both families will share in the milk and cream!

This knits us together as a group, working in concert for relocalized food of extremely high quality (we will drink it raw, neighbors will do with it as they wish).
The neighbors thought on it and then said yes!

I am looking forward to this project, will mean work but its so worth it.

We will reskill ourselves and the neighbors will also, as is appropriate for them.

I hope, also, that the idea inspires others locally to do the same. They might start with communal chickens or goats or perhaps cows.

I am positive that most of us can learn these things, its not rocket science.

Helping to mentor others doing this would be an amazing yield!

(I have been debating with myself about which blog to post this at, my homesteading blog Humble Garden or this blog. I decided to cross post it to catch both audiences)

Over at Kathy Harrison’s wonderful The Just In Case Book Blog, (Kathy wrote “The Just In Case” book on the practical aspects of preparedness in the home) a post today “How much is too much?” has some great comments (all of her posts do).

One of the commenters wonders about how to chose the “right” meat to store. Should one focus on low cost “low quality” meats grown in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) so as to maximize the ability to buy a lot of meat on a limited budget or buy and store organic pastured meats. Its an important question and one that will impact your health. One can ask the same about any part of their food storage.

Meat, thinking about it makes me wax philosophical, angry, perplexed, confused, hungry.

It will require several hands too.

On the one hand meat is what we in the US are raised to eat, lots of it too. Its the main attraction. It means satiety. It defines it.

Without meat, your snacking, your nibbling, your waiting for supper.

For lots of us, that goes a step further and its a meat/starch combo that really signifies a filling meal. I was raised on rice and meat (rice being hugely important to Colombian cuisine, pork being THE meat).

On the other hand, in terms of climate change, meat is a curse to our ecosystems in MANY ways and it endangers the futures of our children.

On the other hand, thanks to swine flu, pork has NEVER been cheaper and when you are on the financial edge, that is deeply welcomed.

On the other hand, the low prices are killing the US pork industry.

On the other hand, we are talking CAFOs here, and they really are the infectious disease problem in terms of being GINORMOUS viral bioreactors.

Its at least 2 fold:

• massive use of antibiotics and growth hormones to make it possible to grow pork flesh in the CAFO setting – that inevitably leads to the breeding of antibiotic resistant strains and meat doped with hormones that ruin our metabolism
• then there is the issue that porcine genetics and anatomy are such that their lungs represent a unique environment where flu viral particles from MANY species can be harbored (and without significant lethality for the pig), side by side, leading to what is called reassortment. The viral genes are swapped back and forth such that new strains arise that can be pandemic in nature, case in point – this is EXACTLY how H1N1 Swine Flu arose in the Smithfield CAFOs in Mexico.

By not supporting this industry through buying their meat products, you the consumer vote against the many dangers that this sort of capitalism generates. Its very simple.

I know that people’s livelihoods depend on CAFOs. Things change and change can be painful. Take for example, my grandfather who used to farm and raise pigs for market in Illinois. He left farming in the 1950s or 60s exactly because of these CAFOs. I have a certain perspective, if you will. After leaving the farm, he never again found a job and sank into alcoholism and died at 61 from congestive heart failure and untreated diabetes.

On the other hand, even just FINDING pastured healthy meats can be quite difficult. It will also be more expensive.

Being raised in a natural setting their immune systems will be INTACT and thus will not require 24/7 vets to pump them full of antibiotics.

More importantly to this discussion – living this way means that the pigs do NOT ingest GMO and species inappropriate feeds that leads to meat and fats literally poisoned with the transfats you thought you were avoiding.

You can eat the fat of pastured animals (beef, pig, lamb, chicken) and receive health benefits. You will not when eating CAFO meats, the reverse is true, you will be eating toxic fats.

Thats just the basic truth of the matter.

(This little guy is a CSA tamworth pig, sold by the Many Hands Organic farm in Barre, MA. See more photos about Many Hands at this flickr set link.)

Now, after all that, I have really run out of hands.

I have a certain bias after thinking on all of this for a while. I do not ascribe to simply storing away a few months or years worth of store bought dried foods. I have never had the money to do that and I dont think I could feed my kids that either.

My sort of preparing is building self-sufficiency so that these skills are passed on to my kids (as this blog has covered at length!) and part of that has been about growing and raising protein.

As The Smiths and the runner duck on “Babe” say, Meat is Murder. Meat requires the death of an animal. Until you have killed your own chickens or pigs for you to eat, you simply do not understand meat.

Now, I am not saying to not eat meat.

I am saying that long term self sufficiency requires serious thought about meat. The health issues mentioned above will ebb away as one raises and butchers their meat. This will be a Good Thing.

The need for meat to be the starring attraction on the dinner plate will likely also change to a more vegetable diet that is accented by proteins that meet the needs of the body not just the corpulent mindset.

I know from personal experience that if I have to go out and kill a chicken to have meat my worldview shifts. My mind runs a calculation – does my body really need the meat or can more vegetable do the trick. If I had no children I would likely be 100% ovo-lacto vegetarian because my calculation really is weighted more to the NO side in terms of an answer.

But when I think about the bodies of my kids, meat gets a big thumbs up! I know that is absolutely my own bias and that many people raise their kids as vegetarians. To each his own, especially in this aspect.

None of us asked to be born in such complex, conflicting, and confounding times. Its not our fault that our world is filled with about 5 billion too many people (WELL over its carrying capacity). Its also not our fault that a guy at the beginning of the previous century figured out a way to use the technology created to make chemical bombs in the first world war and apply it to the making of artificial fertilizer – leading to the profound shift in our food production systems and a mortal link to non-renewable fossil fuels that has a significant impact on the global climate.

It is said that without that innovation, making artificial fertilizer from fossil fuels, 3/5ths of the people alive today would not have been born.

These are all facts of our modern world. How we weather the changes or how we prepare our children to weather the changes will be important, even if its a small choice between CAFO meat or organic pastured meat (supporting small farms who value their land) or if it means eating less or no meat at all.

My being caught in the economic collapse last fall, was laid off in December, has submerged me into a internally reflective world. I have oscillated through the anxieties you might imagine and fully felt and processed the depression that comes with being unemployed during such a malignantly depressed job market.

No job in sight.

I have had my homesteading life to distract me.

I spent the early winter ordering seed catalogs, I spent the mid winter starting seeds (we have such a small growing season here have to give the plants a head start indoors), I spent the very cold early spring trying to build semi-warm environments in my garden for some of my starts and then spent mid spring lamenting the fiercely rainy and cold weather.

During that early spring (snow, ice) we experienced our first kidding season so I was also busy being a midwife doing on the job training. We lost one momma goat and gained 10 baby goats, whew. I wish these animals didnt do this when its still frozen solid outside.

We are now milking with a mechanical milker and getting between 2 and 3 gallons of fresh goat milk a day. I am starting to make all sorts of cheese and we are sharing these with friends who appreciate raw goat milk cheese and other products.

We are now dreaming of the possibility of a dairy to make raw goat milk cheese for sale. We dont have the money for this but, who knows, perhaps there are people who love our goats milk who might want to help us out.

Still no job in sight. Our unemployment benefits are running perilously close to out for both my husband and I (did I mention that we were both laid off?).

There is this massive cognitive dissonance – we have built a fantastic homestead that gets better every day but it seems we could easily lose it all if we dont find some gainful employment soon!

Most of the time I shut all of these thoughts out. Today, I decided to spill them out there for you to read.

I feel like am at the bottom of the curve in terms of fiscal and emotional resilience. I know that its not helpful to feel hopeless but you dont really have much of a choice, when you do or do not feel hopeless. There are so many external factors that I am not able to beat into shape.

I know I am talented in MANY different ways but I still find myself unemployed. Many of my talents and passions lie outside of my schooling so my resume is rather toxic when I try for jobs that do not require a PhD.

It really doesnt matter how smart you are but rather the types of connections you have and my network is as brown and shriveled as you might find at the end of the growing season after a few frosts and storms.

I am not asking for sympathy, just opening a window into my world at the moment. Who knows. Maybe I will win the lottery or, gasp, actually get a job (lottery seems more likely) and my next story will be about starting my dream – a self-sustaining life boat community in a far away land.

Took this video out in our goat shed in our backyard the other day.

Enjoy!

Its funny how a massive and scary idea like Peak Oil can wrap it’s tentacles around the mind and nudge thoughts in particular directions. There is certainly the whole grief dynamic that one must cycle through, of necessity it is a loop and no resolution because we live within the moment of collapse, not the other side.

But Peak Oil was a specific concept that my scientific mind gravitated toward, it seemed like the most likely candidate for the next event horizon.

Its been a somewhat confusing time these past few months because the price shock of 2008 and then the collapse came sooner than PO estimates suggested. It was a non-intuitive dynamic with a non-linear trajectory.

Hindsight that tells us that CDSs and the whole Ponzi nature of the American and global financial system was manifestly unwholesome doesn’t help people like me who didn’t create it, participate in it, profit from it, nor can do even a single thing about it (then or now).

This hindsight only serves to make one feel small, angry, and foolish for buying into the claptrap of the middle class American Dream.

Like any religion, I didn’t have much choice in that indoctrination but that doesn’t lessen the hurt you feel when you learn that there is no santa claus, that what your parents told you to work hard for would in the end not result in a life that improves or equals one’s own upbringing. That would not be such an issue for me except that it took me so long to figure out and here I am fully invested in the middle class nightmare of being excessively educated, well endowed with educational debt, further endowed with the massive debt of a mortgage and with 3 innocent kids. If I were single and childless, all this would be so much less heavy man.

Because of the dogmatic thinking that panic and fear can induce, I have not felt as prepared for this collapse as you might imagine. I feel that my resilience was impaired because I was watching out for one sort of collapse and then was surprised by another. It is a personality flaw of mine, to abhor this sort of surprise. I am still scrambling for footing and that means lack of resilience, sense of perspective and humor, lack of conviction.

It was a whole lot easier last fall when I had a job. It was frustrating because I could not be at home doing things but at least we had income. Even so, we could not use that income for many nifty projects because we were paying down debt that refused to be ignored.

Now that we both remain unemployed, the panic and fear is easier to feel and its quite easy to fall into a malaise of cold sweats, little sleep, dithering fretting and wishful thinking.

One might think that all this free time would translate into homestead related productivity but there are only so many things we could do in the depths of Massachusetts’ winter. I have many seeds started, I have cleaned the raised beds, several times, I have built some cold frames. I am ready to grow. Where we live, the last hard freeze date is MAY 15th so there is a limit as to how early I can get started. No matter how early you start seeds, there is still transplant shock and delay – the growing season is only so long here.

Biology itself is pulling us out of the house into the backyard homestead though. Our dairy goats have been kidding like crazy. It has not all been sweetness and light though. Our first doe to kid was a horrific tragedy (you can read about it at my other homesteading specific blog Humble Garden in this post – RIP Wheatie, our sweet goat girl).

Since that horrible day, we have had 4 easy peasy deliveries and we have 7 precious little LaMancha goat kids.

Our chickens and duck are well and ramping up their egg production. Things are moving forward here, as biology has an inevitable nature and will to live.

On dry days, I stand in the hay/milking shed watching the momma goats nursing their babies and I feel immense contentment. The smell of hay seems to relax me, sending me into rather amorphous thoughts of simple times when this sort of homestead was viable, made sense.

Other times, I stand with the goats and look back at the house and garden and force myself to really get in touch with how we are NOT a closed system and that we have MANY external inputs that make us profoundly vulnerable.

We are MUCH more prepared than many in the US but it serves to reveal the giant gaps between a self-sufficient life/future and the extensively fenestrated lives we live; we are interlinked with incomprehensively complex and vast global networks of technology, energy, politics, and inertia that are infinitely non-intuitive on the ground and intentionally hidden from we consumers.

Going off the grid from that is an almost overwhelming task. For me, its not about electricity or even warmth.

No its about how we will find a way to feed the goats, llama, chickens if the supply chains fall or if we default on the mortgage.

I would say that our almost total lack of resilience is leagues more resilient than your average American but that only serves to scare me even more.

Apart from being the sworn enemies of public education and science, Republicans have reveled in the hate that is best personified by Grover Norquist who famously proclaimed:

“Cutting the government in half in one generation is both an ambitious and reasonable goal,” Norquist stated in May 2000. “If we work hard we will accomplish this and more by 2025. Then the conservative movement can set a new goal. I have a recommendation: To cut government in half again by 2050″. (source) “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” primary source, secondary source

Obviously, this was just a front, to be consumed by the GOoper grunts who finance the GOP ops. Behind the scenes, Bush and Company have promulgated the most pernicious, ambitious, and far-reaching looting of the American Treasury of any generation since the beginning of our republic.

I have embeded several videos from YouTube in the post for you to see the various Bushville tent cities popping up across America.

Grover must feel replete with satisfaction. The American Dream is circling the drain and rushing out of the bathtub.

If you have not lived in the deep south (in the USA) then you may not know the charms of kudzu. When you first come across it, you wonder why someone never trims their ivy then you realize its absolutely everywhere and consuming just about anything that is not tended on a regular basis.

Coming from your typical American suburban background where we dedicate our free time to vast tracts of inedible grasses, pouring toxic waste and precious water on this piggish crop to prove our neighborly worth, we might mistake kudzu as a plant that is all about rude infinite unsustainable growth.

Kudzu laughs at us for our blind zeal for order and complete willful ignorance of complex systems.

It is able to grow so fantastically because it doesn’t take from it’s environment so much as enhance it. It is a legume which means it fixes or captures nitrogen from the air (something our industrial mono-agriculture – other than soy beans – doesn’t do). It doesn’t suck the nitrogen from the ground, it gives it back.

It grows roots deep into the soil, bringing up water and minerals from way down, making it available to more surface dwelling organisms.

I could sing the praises of kudzu all day but its the way we DON’T appreciate it that is illustrative of our dysfunctional culture.

We don’t harvest it like the Japanese do, for food like kuzu starch and tofu. We don’t use it as a nitrogen amending cover crop. We don’t seriously develop it for cellulosic ethanol biofuels.

We emulate it’s prodigious growth without caring to understand it’s real nature.

We would, if we had our own misguided monkey brain ways, have a Kudzu Economy.

We built an economy these past 100 years based on infinite growth. We were lazy because, with liquid fossil fuels, the illusion of infinite growth is easily maintained.

Our consensus culture formed our minds to not ask where the power comes from or what to do if it stops. That is dangerous thinking when you are driving the bus on the very edge of a cliff.

No, we sip at the teat of fossil fuel even as it lies supurating in the morgue.

We suck ever harder as we close our eyes to a global economy that has ceased its expansion, inevitably resulting in disastrous immediate contraction.

We want our economy, our individual supremacy, our global domionism to grow on for ever, like kudzu growing greedily across a wasteland of broken down cars, moldering tires, burbling barrels of toxic waste, all the wages of that explosive growth, without ever once paying the dues, without ever once fixing the nitrogen for true and honest growth that requires a willful and respectful understanding of the complexity and limits to a system that may one day be sustainable.

No, I state the obvious when I say that we, as a nation, are snuggling up tight to that corpse in that cold morgue, sipping ever more ferverently.

We are closing our eyes and our ears tightly, living in a matrix-like construct where economic depressions get fixed, gutted banks pass their stress tests, deeper oil deposits are just waiting to be found, and a huge preponderance of hard data showing how we have committed climaticide and have overshot the tipping point quite completely are all utterly wrong.

(This was cross posted to two of my other blogs Nika’s Culinaria and Humble Garden)

Recently, I came across a solar cooking wiki and a whole group of YouTube videos about how Africans are adopting parabolic solar cookers in their villages. The importance of this didn’t really sink in for me until I saw how women walk hours through elephant infested nature preserves to find wood that they poach unsustainably. They get chased by angry elephants (its THEIR home after all) and the women spend ALL DAY finding dwindling resources, leaving behind unattended or poorly attended babies and small children.

In particular, there is the Zambian Mfuwe Solar Cooker Project initiated by Manda Chisanga, a guide in South Luangwa National Park who had won a guiding award and decided to spend his prize money on Solar Cookers.

“The documentary covers the installation of five SunFire14 Parabolic Dishes – the project has been expanded to 15 and we are looking at ways to get 500 Parabolic Dishes into the community to cover 6000 families.” source

With a parabolic solar cooker, all of these risky and ecologically unsustainable practices are stopped immediately. The women can stay with their kids, young girls can go to school instead of watching babies or collecting wood all day themselves.

If that doesn’t sound radical and revolutionary, you are not thinking it through.

You can learn all about the basic principles of solar cooking and see plans for building your own DIY cooker at the Solar Cooking Wiki. Give it a whirl and see what you think.

I have been wanting to make our own DIY solar oven for ages and have finally scraped together some found objects that we have used to make our first winter relevant solar cooker. No cooking is happening yet because I am still testing it and there was no sun to speak of today! We do this in part as a homeschooling project too so the testing is an important part of it.

If you do this, share! Let me hear about how it is going for you.

Found materials and also some high heat enamel spray (which I bought for this project)

Cut to fit insulation on bottom of the oven

Crafting, with duct tape, the interior box

Need to trim height of the box

Trimmed and taped and ready to be sprayed with enamel

Sprayed, dried, inside larger box, found insulation in place

Next step is to make all manner of reflectors to sculpt the photons into the oven

Materials for reflectors

Two reflectors made. I rigged up a tape slide holder on the backs so that the reflectors are placed without taping them onto the oven part.

Slide holder rig

One reflector rigged up

Black covered pot and temperature probes

Solar oven set up inside as we test it out

Made a third reflector and started testing positioning (which isn’t really intuitive, more experiential)

I know I could buy a solar oven but what fun is that?! Not terribly frugal either

Once we get a good sunny day I will test it properly and share back here!

If you read my garden blog – Humble Garden – you would know that I am already planning the 2009 garden. I have already gotten the first batch of seeds and am gearing up to start seedlings soon.

I started gardening seriously as a foodie and a scientist who was worried about the toxic nature of industrial food. I would never claim to be able to grow enough food for this whole family and all the animals we feed, that’s a VERY advanced topic. It is a goal though but it takes planning and I need to find more arable land.

While I do not condone their religious dogmas and practices (not my place, all their own business), I admire the hard work that the Mormon church has done to make it easy for people to store away food for hard times. They have quite a lot of free information on how to determine how much food a certain sized family needs to have on hand for a year and also how to keep it in a safe and effective manner. Visit their site on Family Home Storage to start your journey.

Another resource is Sharon Astyk’s blog posts and classes on food storage at her Casaubon’s Book blog. She is much more comprehensive than the Mormon site and she is more engaging, check it out.

I have started my food storage – though do not take my example 100% gospel, I am sure I am doing all sorts of things less than perfectly!

The photos here show some of what we are doing, storage wise.

Below you can see some of the things I canned last summer. Last spring the tomatoes came in late so I was only able to put up a few 8 or so jars of tomato sauce.

I also had to take down some badly behaved roosters and some past-their-prime broilers so I made a large batch of chicken stock with meat and canned that too. Let me tell you, this broth makes freakishly delicious soups.

In terms of staples that I do not grow and which I can buy in bulk, I figured I need about 100 pounds of dried beans for the year to feed our family in times of poor cash flow and possibly during food scarcities. Below you can see a 50 pound bag of pinto beans and then after I have put it into gallon sized bags.

Beans and rice make complete protein and they store VERY easily. Add a little bit of fat and some homegrown greens such as kale, collards, or lettuces or spinach and you need nothing else.

I am also stocking up on my favorite masa harina to make Colombian empanadas and arepas. I need this for mental health issues!

I have some less than nutritious meat products and mixes that would be REALLLLY easy to make happen should we lose power for long periods of time – better than making french toast!

I use this fabric remnant that I got as a photography background as a way of masking the grocery store look a bit.

This is just a small amount of food storage. I have a lot more rice you do not see here. That bulk rice and other grains will be stored in big plastic light tight tubs in a cool location.

These shelves you see above is right next to a very drafty window (AC unit there) so these foods will be kept cool. I plan on using those canned items soon, otherwise, they would stay in the dark cool pantry you see below.

What I would really love is a set up like you see below built in our basement. The issue with the basement is the fact that we have 5 cats and their litter box is down there.

Please share what you are doing to stock up on food or what you plan to do!