peaknix

Sharon Astyk recently wrote a blog post entitled “Practice Losing Farther, Losing Faster: Everyday History in a Crashing Economy” at her blog Casaubon’s book where she asked her readers how recent financial gymnastics are effecting their lives. The comments are now up to 71 as of this writing and there are so many different stories being told. I left a ginormous comment there (sorry!) and then thought perhaps I should also share it here.

The spectrum of stories there is simply amazing. Here is my little contribution and response.

As you likely know, if you have read my “about me” page, I am a scientist and did not participate in any of the recent financial festivities (as in the dot com boom).. I have not experienced personal wealth in any way – only personal debt (school debts, house, car, all while living frugally – our family has never been on a vacation, period, we do not go out to eat – its ok, we have each other) .. we have had a mortgage since 1995 so I have been living with the implications of that these past 13 years.

I think I need to get one thing off my chest.

Whether things are booming or not, losing your job and then losing your house has been a real possibility for most of us for many years. We middle class have been living on that edge all our lives.

Don’t imagine that this is something new. Its important to not ascribe this sort of scenario only to the collapse paradigm.

Why? Because if you get all wrapped up in it that way you will lose any chance at resilience.

I guess its about waking up.

Part of waking up to peak oil is to realize that our consensus reality has been holding us back. That middle class consensus reality masked the edge-nature of our existence. We chose to believe that we were entitled.

We are not.

– Repeat after me –

We. Are. Entitled. To. Nothing.

Our gift right now is of time but its not really about bunkering down.

Its about releasing the entitlement mentality and embracing change and then understanding resilience and cultivating some level of optimism.

I am a mom of three – last winter, when I GOT peak oil on an intuitive level, the first thing I mourned was peak education.

I had to realize that there is simply no way that I could afford to put even one child through college (I went to school on Pell Grants and scholarships, my parents didn’t pay for the core costs tho they did cover food and dorm – never cheap – don’t know what Pell Grants are? Ask the republicans and Reagan specifically).

I panicked and then did that V-8 head-bonk thing .. I have known this for a long time but was never able to articulate it. It was freeing in some ways to realize that the cost of education has become CRIMINALLY expensive.

Not only do we homeschool, I intend to steer my children into organic farming internships and agricultural sciences. Not so much because that is how we will survive but because those activities will make SENSE. My job .. it doesn’t make SENSE in the transition. That’s ok, I have learned one important thing in grad school – how to learn.

I am not saying that things are peachy or that it’s the apocalypse nor am I saying that you should not prepare.

I am getting ready to buy a year or two’s worth of bulk white rice (228.1 pounds/year) that will shore up our food budget. Our protein comes from our laying chickens; our dairy comes from our dairy goats. We will be picking up our three breeding pigs in a couple of weeks. We need to lay in bulk purchases of feed for these animals and I need to get an agreement squared away with neighboring fields to plant mangels and greens in the spring for the animals (perhaps some wheat too).

We JUST installed our high efficiency Seton wood fired boiler in our basement. We are now 100% oil free (we live in rural MA – it gets a bit cold here – you will be hearing a about the north east this winter and you might ask yourself – why didn’t the states do anything? Yeah, so will we. If we have to, we will shelter neighbors who cant afford heat). Word has gotten around the surrounding towns about our new fangled boiler – people are asking my husband about it at town meetings. Seems they are all waiting to see how it goes. Not sure what their metric will be but I think that there will be a demand especially because the state will be changing the rules to NOT allowing outside polluting wood boilers that have proliferated here recently. Our set up is as expensive or less and much more efficient.

I will update about all this here soon – if you are interested in learning about Mr. Seton’s fantastic wood fired boiler that takes unsplit 4 foot long tree logs and is so efficient that it just goes in your basement and no real smoke out the top – drop me a note here. Here is a link to some pics of the boiler before it was hooked up to the system – will be shooting the boiler this weekend now that its installed.

I feel like we are all squirreling away our little nuts and getting our little spreadsheets balanced.

What I don’t feel yet is that whole community thing and I don’t think that will happen while we are still, as a class, waiting for the housing market to come back, our money market funds to rally back, the oil prices to come down, the interest rates to drop, etc etc.

If you live in the MA region and would like to learn about some Transition Town stuff going on – Rob Riman has been working really hard in Cambridge to bring TT training going in the Boston area – here is some info on that:

The events currently scheduled for the Northeast are as follows:

Tues. Sept. 16th – GreenPort Forum: Transition Towns Intro (Cambridge, MA)

Sat./Sun. Oct. 4th/5th – Training for Transition course (Cambridge, MA)
Sat./Sun. Nov. 1st/2nd – Training for Transition course (Cambridge, MA)
Sat/Sun. Nov. 22nd/23rd – Training for Transition course (Cambridge, MA)

To learn more and to register visit this link

If any of you all choose to do this please let me know so we can meet up and network!

Resilience. Hope. No Entitlements. Transition. Action.