Wednesday, August 26, 2009

What is the Point of Ascent?

According to Bill McKibben in Deep Economy, there was a period of time in which economic growth made everybody wealthier.  That was a big part of the purpose of the growth.  The standard of living went up for everyone as businesses expanded.  McKibben argues that we hit a point where we should have stopped focusing on growing our economies because of limits in resources.  Our economic gauges are recognize health only when they see increased economic activity.  To have the same amount of activity as last quarter is unhealthy. 

 A less important gauge is the average wealth of the people of an economy. McKibben thinks that the Business As Usual model of growth is now geared to centralize the wealth rather than make everybody wealthier. In fact, “though our economy has been growing, most of us have relatively little to show for it.  The median wage in the U.S. is the same as it was thirty years ago.  The real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers has declined steadily: they earned $27,060 in real dollars in 1979, $25,646 in 2005.”  Where did that growth go??  Well, the top one percent in the U.S. in this 30 year period perennially “captured more of the real national gain in income than the bottom 50 percent.” 

 What is the point of all of it?  We are not wealthier and we certainly are not happier. The richest Americans are as happy as the Pennsylvania Amish.  The G8 + 5 is not some bliss club.  Costa Ricans are happier than the Japanese, says McKibben.  The French are about as happy as Venezuelans.  Homeless people in Calcutta get some of the lowest happiness scores in the world, but their score doubled when they moved into a slum.  That new score was equal to a sampling of college students from 47 countries!

What is a society that does not seek economic growth as a central focus of progress?  Is it happier than this current paradigm of human existence?   

Peak Oil?

The NY Times proves to provide a corporate, business as usual perspective in an op-ed today about peak oil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Read the comments on the op-ed for more educated perspectives on the issue.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Let the Light Shine Down

I built this lamp last week as a gift to my girlfriend who wanted to redecorate.  In a small apartment with only a drill and a wrench, I had to get creative with the materials.  The base is a old classroom chair I found on the street.  The small shelf is a cutting board that supports a baby lemon tree planted from a seed inside a lemon I bought.



 

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Midwestern Wind

The NY Times blog Green Inc. posted a blurb about wind farms in Missouri. 

And an online discussion took place.

I live in central Missouri and my electricity comes from a rural co-op. I’m in my third year of purchasing eight units a month of wind energy at $3/unit. It’s not much, and it’s (i think) coming from of state (Kansas) but for $24 a month I am weaning myself from coal. It will be really nice when that same wind energy is being generated in Missouri.

— Vanessa

#2 Vanessa’s post is hopeful. The renewable energy industry can change the power dynamics of one of our most important resources. Large corporations control citizen access to all major resources, but this has always been an exploitive, extractive, and destructive system.

Creating rural co-ops, where the energy is produced and controlled by the citizens, for the citizens, we develop a resource stream that empowers the people who both produce and depend on it. Do not let large corporations come into our towns and try to steal what is rightfully ours and then sell it back to us!

As we power-down our societies, let us empower our communities. Join the discussion at…

http://descentculture.blogspot.com/

Samuel

Samuel Kraft (#5),

The romance of the co-op concept is deceptive, at least from a clean energy perspective - rural co-ops are far more regressive when it comes to green energy than either regulated private utilities or independent generators. Granted regulated utilities have in most cases been driven by legislation and regulation to do what they’ve done, but in some ways that’s the point, and it’s been for-profit, competitive independent producers who have led in development of new clean energy sources. In most cases the last bastions of new coal-fired plant construction are rural co-ops, and those same co-ops have used their taxpayer-subsidized cost of capital to freeze out the independent generators who are innovating new clean sources of generation. In most states with renewable portfolio standards, co-ops have successfully fought to be excluded from them, and they’ve in most cases they’ve used that exclusion to continue with business-as-usual. You need to revisit your romantic notion of the inherent virtues of rural co-ops.

— Michael HoganIt seems as though I do not really know what I am talking about when I spoke about rural co-ops.  This guy Michael dropped some authoritative sounding jargon on me.  But he did not sound all preachy like I did, which is the more important part of my post anyways.  I can't believe he did not start his post with a compliment...that is rude.


Saturday, August 8, 2009

The Military will save us, right?


The NY Times published an article today titled, "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security."

Through statements from people in the military, the article tells us that more extreme weather patterns will create unlivable conditions in the already poor parts of the world, causing conflict. Because of the one dimensional quotes, the reader is left to wonder if the U.S. should provide aid with our military, or protect our right to resources and borders.   Forget that our current levels of resource consumption are causing the problems in the first place, we need to hang to our lifestyles with every bullet we've got! 

They published this on a Saturday.  Nobody reads the paper on Saturday!  As Richard Heinberg says in Powerdown, articles about the impending crises ahead caused by systematic fossil fuel consumption and resource depletion appear periodically in major news sources but do not remain part of a news cycle and do not appear often enough to become regularly discussed issues.  It is too frightening, too complex, too destructive to the way we have come to understand our world and our lifestyles.  It is also too long term.  We do not base our actions on their consequences decades from now...but we can if we try.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Eat it, Monsanto!

In early May, I planted some seeds in containers on our balcony from produce I bought at the supermarket .  I was fearful that these industrial hybrid seeds probably owned by DuPont or Monsanto would either grow surveillance cameras and eventually explode, or just not fruit.

But my illegal tomatoes have responded well to my love and attention. 

   


And my pepper plants are flowering too.  Seems like they take a little bit longer than tomatoes.



In other balcony news, I have to give my compost away today!  Despite the anaerobic environment of the buckets, I managed to maintain a little bit of integrity with the material. The left bin has been resting for about 2 months, while the right bin our active one.


I am moving to Seattle in a week, so I am giving my compost to the Lower East Side Ecology Center.  They set up a compost collection booth at the Union Square Farmer's Market 4 times a week.  My urban experiment is over, but I found an organization in Seattle that offers workshops in urban composting, container gardening, urban chicken husbandry, and other great topics.  Most of the workshops are free!  

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

From Magnificent Maize to Clever Corn

Corn has been food science since its invention in southern Mexico more than 6,000 years ago.  All the other major cereals--wheat, rice, millet, and barley--had wild ancestors or even have wild analogues today, and all of them can propagate themselves if left untended.  Corn, called maize in most countries because of its species name Zea mays, cannot reproduce without human intervention.  This shows that in order to create the corn species, it required some hybridization from existing wild species.  Thus, it is an invention, not a domestication.

Today, corn is the world's most important crop in terms of annual harvest weight.  It has been put on a pedestal by the Green Revolution following WWII, not to be confused with the amorphous, nameless, grassroots movement happening worldwide today.  The Green Revolution transformed agriculture worldwide to depend on monocultures of hybrid seeds created in research laboratories and inputs of increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.  These transformations mechanized agriculture, which increased yields and provided cheap food all over the world.  But the system was powered by cheap fossil fuels and took the knowledge and resources of farming out of the hands of farmers and centralized them in the hands of corporations or universities largely funded by corporations. 

The Green Revolution made traditional agricultural practices evolved over hundreds or thousands of years obsolete because the hybrids and fertilizers could boost yields to create unheard of amounts of food per acre.  In Mexico, the Green Revolution almost entirely eliminated the ancient farming practice called the milpa, which is a field interplanted with corn, beans, squash, avocados, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna.  Milpas are regarded by scholars in many academic fields as the most intelligent farming in human history.  Here is a passage from 1491 by Charles Mann that describes the milpa. 

"In nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, [an extinct, ancient relative of corn possibly used in combination with other species to create corn] the beans using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans' nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by the teosinte.  The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes.
Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary.  Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin; diets with too much maize can lead to protein deficiency and pellagra, a disease caused by lack of niacin. Beans have both lysine and tryptophan, but not the amino acids cysteine and methionin, which are provided by the maize...Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats." (p. 198)  

The milpa, which has been adopted by Permaculture, also naturally replenishes the soil with the nutrients to continually replant in the same soil.  When interplanted as a guild, each species has certain qualities that take advantage of existing natural systems to provide nutrients to humans permanently, thus Permaculture.  When Europeans arrived to the Americas, there were milpas that grew uninterrupted for thousands of acres year after year.  Government and business powers proved that this holistic approach to farming, nutrition, and land use management was obsolete in a post WWII planet with increasing urbanization, population pressures, and access to cheap fossil fuels.  

Today, just a few massive corporations own all of the hybrid seeds used by farmers today.  The crop that benefited the most from this transformation was corn, especially in America.  American agriculture and food corporations rely on government subsidies and cheap oil to turn corn into thousands of "clever variations" as Michael Pollan puts it in Omnivore's Dilemma.  Most corn is processed into odd forms of feed for cattle, chickens, and pigs.  A large portion is also turned into high fructose corn syrup, glucose, partially hydrogenated oil, and so many other hard to pronounce and frightening variations.  In an average grocery store, more than 95 percent of the products on the shelves contain some form of corn.  

Why corn?  Corn growing and harvesting works well with mechanization, it is easy to store, and it grows well in lots of different soils and a wide range of warm and cool climates.  Thus, it was a source of wealth for America.  We could export and store surpluses.  We could trade it globally for oil at a ratio of 1 to 1 until the early 1970s.  Then America hit peak oil in 1970, OPEC staged an embargo in 1973, and the ratio has shot up ever since, and not in our favor. Current prices are at a ratio of about 14:1.  

So what the hell do we do with an agricultural infrastructure set up for corn?  Turn everything we depend on into some manipulation of the crop.  Now we hear elected officials and spokespeople for Chevron talking about using corn to make ethanol for our cars!  America's corn based foods are responsible for our obesity epidemic.  We are overfed, but undernourished.  According to Food Inc., 1 in 3 children born in the U.S. today will have childhood diabetes, for children of color the epidemic jumps to 1 in 2.  Like Majora Carter says, our current sustainability problems are fundamentally linked to poverty, and thus linked to race.  Although all of us cannot avoid eating products of industrial agriculture, our mobility to opt into a sustainable food system is linked to our wealth, our education, and our skin color.       
There were more than 100 million people living in the Americas before Columbus, far more than lived in Europe, who had consumed corn as the centerpiece of their diet.  However, they did not have United States health, soil, and water issues because they developed the milpa.  In addition, indians cooked corn with lime (the mineral, not the fruit), which unlocked the niacin in the corn to allow the human body to absorb it.  Recognizing the intelligence of traditional practices is a key component of Descent Culture.  Wisdom is held in evolution, in gradual developments implemented in response to natural conditions.  Descent does not promote some false sense of nostalgia to get back to an ancient, "natural" way of life the way the Business-As-Usual ascent culture promotes growth and technology blindly.  Plant a regionally adapted version of a milpa in your garden to work toward sustainable sources of food that can exist after cheap fossil fuels.