[After somewhat of a hiatus I am going to try to get back to blogging here again.]

Its been some time since I have blogged here on peaknix and in some ways its because of the chaos thats been going on in our lives that completely mirrors whats been going on in the US economy and the world.

Like so many people, I had some clue something was up. I mean, you couldnt NOT know, watching the news throughout 2007 – 2008. When it came time for my experience of being laid off I was prepared on some levels and not on others. Writing about all that here didnt really seem to do it for me because I didnt want to sound like I was complaining – who does. So much of it is really personal, like it is for everyone, and some of it is that, you can spend all sorts of time processing it and it still doesnt matter whether you talk about it or not. Until you actually get a job, the problems wont be solved. Its an on or off, black and white kind of thing – if you have a job, things are ok, you cook along.

If you dont have a job then things come to a screeching halt in a disconcerting way, like after an accident. If you have ever had a car accident its like you go from moving to complete stop and your brain, maybe its shock, but your brain is still moving, still has those ideas and maybe illusions of going forward but you not moving any more and you are in the same place. Only now you have problems that you didnt have literally a minute before. A certain amount of planning, car insurance, unemployment or whatever, can be there for you when you get laid off or have an accident, but depending on how long your job loss lasts your planning can only buffer you against so much. Relative to this blog, there is only so much I can write about that without getting really repetitive.

I am not an economic whiz and I am not going to tell you why this or that happened, I dont have the technicals. A lot of people have done that over the years and it turns out much of that speculation was just distraction or marginally related to the core issues.

Some times its very hard to tell what the core issues are. This mortgage morass is an example of a situation where its clear that this is the next stage of the collapse – but what exactly IS going on. Is it it simply the collapse of the mortgage market? Or is it some kind of engineered emergency to push for further TARP-like “investments” in the banking industry as corporations go to any and all lengths to make a profit for themselves.

Before it was about making widgets, now its about grabbing the hand-out.

I look at this latest mortgage “crisis” and I wonder exactly what IS the base nature of this situation. Its hard for me, someone who doesnt have a PhD in mortgages, something you practically need to understand just basic mortgages let alone all the derivative layers above. Its hard for me to characterize the illusion that we are being given, from the critical core issues.

This blog is about writing about living the Peak and what comes after. I am marginally at peace now, since 2008 (a sort of Peak moment for me), with not finding full time traditional employment. That sort of “peace” is certainly not as easy as you might imagine. It still sucks that I am not doing what I was trained for.

If you are a longer term reader you know we have started building a food production system on our land – a homestead is what I call it, its certainly not a farm. I see it as a long term project and while I havent wanted to get too scientific about the production of food, I think I am going to get more rigorous in the coming years so that I can put some of our land into use more intensively. I am also going to be putting some more thought into how to use food output more effectively on our homestead.

As you might imagine, my thoughts on what this homestead means to me and my kids have matured over time. Its not the ultimate answer, its not the only way, or THE way to get through collapse, we have many external inputs that are required and make us dependent on others. If I could set up my land so that we could grow the feed for our animals then I would feel a lot better about that but we dont live on land suitable for growing feed grain crops. We are still trying to find the balance between the number of dairy animals (goats), how much we put into them (the feed costs – the dependence on externally sourced feed and hay) vs the milk we get. For now its about high quality nutrition and re-skilling vs self sufficiency.

I have a strong desire for my kids to not be “zombies” and I dont want to be a “zombie” – I know its not simply earning/putting away enough money to build the perfect self-sufficient lifestyle/compound.

Its more about what goes on in your mind than whats going on in the backyard.

That can be taken away from you. You could spend a lot of time on your backyard paradise but a flood could come and wash all your work away – exactly like what happened at the Quail Springs permaculture farm in the US southwest – they had spent decades building a wonderful permacultural site and they lost it all in a flood (I guess they built everything on a flood plain). Or you could lose your paradise to fire or to a job loss.

Its more about building in your children’s minds a worldview of Resilience and that is certainly something I have always been aware of but have never been able to do for myself. On the deep child-self level, I have always tended toward some dogmatic solution, for someone that assures me that its going to be ok, for someone to ride in on a white horse – saving the day – somewhere deep inside I seem to need that. Its not like I am waiting but its still there – some resentment about the fact that I have to find all the solutions. Some people thrive on that but I feel stress that to be the provider is some how not the job that I necessarily want and now that I am no longer in that position – I am no longer the main breadwinner – I am feeling a little more free to explore what the next steps are on this homestead are and how to build that resilient worldview for me and my children.

Just because you know how to grow a garden or how to raise goats or chickens, how to grow them for meat or eggs, how to milk goats, how to midwife them in the kidding season, these things – they are not the answer to building Resilience because that is only the answer to working well within the environment in our backyard.

Does Resilience mean understanding how to eat in the wild and to be able to camp rough and to like it and not feel stressed out? That is a kind of knowledge that provides a certain kind of Resilience when you are living in an uncertain world where you may be forced to leave what you built for yourself. This sort of world seems possible in the future as climate change and economic collapse forces population upheaval.

What will it be for my children? Can I really expect to be able to prepare them to be resilient to this? Whereas a parent used to strive to build a farm and then give it to the kids when they were gone, or parents worked to make enough money to give to the kids when they are gone, or parents worked to make enough money to give the kids an education for financial independence, or assisting the kids in taking out loans for their own education (the most recent and least self-sufficient way of doing things).

But now, its about getting your kids ready to face any possible change whatsoever because the future represents a huge vista of potential outcomes, great uncertainty that seems more vast than what I grew up with. That is something that I was not necessarily socialized to cope with. I do not have the answer to these things. It might be enough at the moment that I am thinking of it in this way.

If you have any wisdom to offer relating to Resilience, creating a Resilient mindset for our kids in the face of such massive uncertainty, cultivating not only curiosity about the world but the ability to consume that uncertainty in a way that doesn’t cause an identity crisis, cause insecurity, cause so much stress such that they would want to completely withdraw from the world, how to build an internal structure to cope with those types of uncertainties – how do you do that? For yourself or your children?

Because it is that kind of resiliency that will be necessary to cope with what is coming.

Amongst so much negative scary personal collapse going on here in my life (ridiculously long term unemployment for my husband and I and that we both no longer have unemployment benefits) it can be really quite difficult to muster a hopeful thought.

If you read here, you know I did some training for Transition and that we homestead to build our self-sufficiency but its all always (and always HAS been) on the edge due to the mortgage.

The video above isnt a solution to my current problems but its the beginning of a long series of videos articulating a well developed urban planning concept called Urbalism.

You can visit their site here and you will find the following description:

Urbal = Urban + Rural – but in the opposite direction to Rurban

THE URBAL INSTITUTE

A horizontal, trans-disciplinary lobbying, research, teaching, groundwork and social change engine for cost-effective urban sustainability via ‘top-down,’ bottom-up’ and ‘centre-out’ r/evolution.

THE URBAL FIX

An inspirational and practical online film which suggests a new holistic approach to urban sustainability, through innovative planning theory, productive green links (food, bio-diversity, bio-sequestration, water, soil and amenity) in a steady-state / co-operative context, via engagement-led partnerships between professionals, corporates, public bodies and community groups.

Essentially its a call to align human settlements, especially mid size cities, to a mode that supports zero growth wherein especially food production is relocalized within the city boundaries.

The breadth of this video series will hold you engrossed for quite a while, you might want to take it in parts.

It is a hopeful, well articulated, and holistic (realistic in many ways) proposal of hope for our future.

Let me know what you think.

I hope that you can see the above video – it is a simply wonderful graphical representation (that is so darn clever) of an amazing talk by David Harvey, described as follows:

In this RSA Animate, radical sociologist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?

This is based on a lecture at the RSA (www.theRSA.org).

(Link to video page)

Applying systemic thought and a reductionist approach to understanding our world is impossible without going to First Principles.

This video is a good place to start.

As Carol points out in the comments, this video may not be universally accessible to all, I am sorry about that.

I will attempt to give a synopsis of this important documentary from an important book.

Upfront, let me share the link to the author’s site “The Corporation.com 2.0” which has some interesting content and showcases their latest work.

MOST importantly, you can get transcripts, for free, of the above documentary at this link on their site.

So from that site we have the following blurb:

THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis. Taking its status as a legal “person” to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist’s couch to ask “What kind of person is it?” The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics – including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore – plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

Along with the groundbreaking 145-minute theatrical version of the film, the two-disc DVD has eight hours of never-before-seen footage. In addition to two commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and Q’s-and-A’s, 165 new clips and updates are sorted “by person” and “by topic.” Get the details you want to know on the issues you care about. Then, check out the web links for follow-up research and action.

I hope this helps!

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!

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.