Category Archives: Peak Oil

Killing Rabbits While Reading Poetry

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All men kill the thing they love

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

                                    —Oscar Wilde

 

I came around the corner in my farm truck and there it was. The rabbit ran almost all the way across the road, but an oncoming truck sent it back into my path. Then it was over — a couple of thrashes and it lay still, carrion for any nearby buzzard. Around the next corner I braked, stopped, and moved a box turtle to the other side of the road. Such is the state of small mercies on a small East Tennessee highway.

This particular trip, I was dashing into Sweetwater, after a nap, to pick up some diesel, in the truck, for my tractor. Because more fuel was needed to cut the hay, to feed our sheep over the next winter. While driving over rabbits I listened to “Crazy Town,” a new podcast from the Post Carbon Institute decrying the absurdity of our faith in a pro-growth, fossil fuel­­–dependent future on a planet of finite resources (even if partially powered by “sustainable” energy). I shook my head sagely in agreement as I listened, earning an indulgence against the sins of this life. Fortunately, these indulgences are for now only $2.49 each a gallon.

Earlier in the week a post on eating lamb fries resulted in a couple of vegetarians unfriending me on Facebook. They can handle my omnivorish ways but not my nose-to-tail (or should I say, cheek-to-balls) culinary choices. For in our modern hierarchy of privilege and separation from our sins against nature, consuming testicles apparently ranks as a much more serious crime than devouring steak.

Last weekend, after helping me replace the expansion bolts on the sickle bar mower, some friends stayed to dine with us. One of them defended the Green New Deal as we ate farm-raised catfish from Mississippi that had been conveniently delivered to our nearby Walmart. We all agreed that the plan and the deal were next to useless, having been predicated on the same notion that growth is both sustainable and desirable. “But still,” one of them said, “it is better than nothing.”

Last month one million-plus students around the world went on strike against our inability or unwillingness to do anything about climate change. They caught rides, drove, and used mass transit to attend rallies; they posted on social media and waved signs. Reporters jetted to far-flung locations to catch the latest soundbites of sincere Scandinavians and city dwellers in 125 countries in order to rebroadcast the urgent message to an aging and dwindling audience of people who still watch TV.

Between April 2017 and April 2018, Tennessee beekeepers lost 75 percent of their colonies.

We each kill rabbits.

All men kill the thing they love

By all let this be heard….

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Reading this weekend: Nathan Coulter (Berry), Rocket Men (Kurson)

Listening to this weekend: Crazy Town podcast

Thoughts of a Modern-day Slaveholder   

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For all intents and purposes, we are the beneficiaries of a slave economy. We may have exchanged human chattel for the energy slaves contained in a barrel of oil and the machines that consume it, but the economics work out the same and we can’t walk away without giving up status and wealth.

Thomas Jefferson well understood the conflict between the words “all men are created equal” and the reality of being part of a slaveholding economy. He called slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” on our country. He asserted that all had the right to personal freedom. And yet, he did not free his slaves.

This life we all live, powered by fossil fuel slaves, is certainly not a system based on the indentured misery of human slavery. It does, however, produce the same relationship between we the slaveholders and our property, a destruction of life, a high moral cost, and dependency on an unsustainable system. In this system, our slaves labor tirelessly to provide us with a level of grand living that would not be attainable if we relied on our own two hands. These units of stored sunlight, the busy hands of eons past, they slave away, providing comforts, doing the hard work, making clothes, shipping wine to the table, toiling in the fields, building us roads to leave by and planes to fly —at a resource cost that dooms ours, as all such slave empires, to the dusty midden of history.

Some think that in this established order there is no need to change: We are the rightful masters. God declared our right to make all subordinate to our needs. There is no moral depravity in looting this world. Our modern slaves exist to make our lives ones of comfort and ease, of mint juleps taken on the veranda. This is the “natural” world, the natural order.

Others (and I am one of them) sip on juleps and read, discuss, and try to understand the horrifying consequences of using up a limited resource. We are the self-styled enlightened. The knowledge that our privileged place is built on the lashed back of a ruined planet does not escape the grip of our soft thinking and our softer hands. We know the machines can’t keep working for us without being fed. We see the warning signs that the land is being worn out, the animals disappearing in a great new extinction, the endless offspring of our own species displacing the native flora and fauna, the waterways and the oceans soiled and empty of life.

And so we act as the planters of old acted. We make deals with our moral depravity. We use our blood money to buy “green” machinery that we hope exempts us from exploitation of the slave economy. We pledge not to buy more slaves. We put the old slaves on the block to be sold for new ones that, we tell ourselves, don’t need to be fed: sustainable slavery. All the while we conveniently ignore the huge numbers of the old order that will always be needed to build and maintain the new.

We think that if we use the profits of this hideous trade wisely, it will be for the betterment of the planet. But blood money is always blood money, and the game comes to the same end: a ruined planet. Meanwhile, wed to our Faustian bargain, we defer abolition for another generation, for our comfort is our birthright on this poor enslaved planet.

Someday, perhaps in our lifetime, the starving slaves will disappear in the middle of the night — the planet in revolt. Weeping, we will step out on the veranda of our mighty homes, calling out in vain for another julep, a sumptuous plate of food. Weak and alone, we will stumble into the fields and take unfamiliar tools into our hands, only to find the land bled dry, exhausted by our profligacy, refusing and unable to extend a hand of help.

We will then walk out the gates and begin a life of wandering through a shattered landscape. We will gather around a fire at night and tell stories to skinny offspring of the grand days when we lived in the big house.

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Reading this weekend:The Forgiveness of Nature, the story of grass by Graham Harvey.

Landfall

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Approaching storm

Growing up on the Gulf Coast, where life was measured by the big storms, your given name could serve as a handy marker of your age. Post-1957, Audrey disappeared from the lists of incoming elementary pupils almost entirely. After ’69, no one named their child Camille.

In the hallway of our home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, hung a map. On it we plotted the latitude and longitude of each new disturbance as it sprang to life off the African coast or in Mexico’s Gulf of Campeche. My older brother, always a bit of a weather nut, actively tracked the storms. He would often plot an apocalyptic path to our door, then erase the hoped-for trajectory with a “there is always next year” shrug when the storm petered out or went off to blight someone else’s life. It’s not that he ever wished harm on anyone. There’s just something seductive about the destructive power of a hurricane. It’s like watching a Powerball lottery grow, except that the payoff is something that no one really wishes to win.

This past week it was my extended family in Beaumont and Houston who won that lottery, and recipients of the winning tickets will still be dealing with the aftermath in years to come. Harvey is just one in a long list of tropical storms and hurricanes that have recently resulted in 500-to-1,000-year floods in the South: Houston (2010, 2015), Baton Rouge (2016), Columbia, South Carolina (2015), the Carolinas (2016). Sadly, epic floods account for only a handful of the extreme events now occurring with increasing frequency across the globe, and it looks as if this nasty-weather lottery will only keep building to a stronger payout with each daily contribution made to the fund of planetary climate change.

As the waves of Harvey hit the Texas shoreline, likewise a predictable wave of finger-pointing washed ashore. Seems that a certain segment of the population confused the larger community of devastated coastal residents with the lesser community that had voted for Donald Trump, and proceeded to say that they had gotten what they deserved —blaming the whole of Gomorrah on just its naughty residents.

This holier-than-thou attitude rankles me. Because, let’s face it, whether we fall into the camp of climate-change deniers, with their heads buried firmly in the sand, or climate-change acknowledgers, staring in awe as the storm approaches, virtually none of us is doing anything significant to change the planet’s trajectory of catastrophe or to prepare for its impact.

Both camps, by and large, are still active participants in the consumer-industrial machine. Unless we have gone Amish or medieval, we depend on the people of the Gulf Coast for our cushy life. Our great collective illusion of progress is that we can continue to enjoy our current lifestyle simply by making the correct purchasing choices or pulling a lever in the voting booth, that we can use magic or tweak our way out of this mess. We can’t. That life is no longer sustainable.

According to that map hanging in the world’s hallway, the potentially cataclysmic future — for earth and, consequently, for humanity — has now passed the Leeward Islands and is picking up speed and strength. No wiping the grease board when a fantasy destructive track changes its course.

We all have bought into this lottery, and we all are at risk of winning it. So, if there is to be finger-pointing, let’s do it facing the mirror. And in the meantime, fill your bathtub with water, stock your larder, and prepare for landfall.

Peak Local

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Doing the sexy work of farming

We were sexy once, back in the heady days of 2009. Courted by all, admired, imitated, and flattered. Yes, we were your local small farmers. Tho­se were the days of Food, Inc.; Omnivore’s Dilemma; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, all released in a three-year span, exploding the world’s interest in all things small-farmy. We were, for a brief moment, in the zeitgeist.

That was the moment when the American consumers got it, realized that their health and their economy could be shaped for the better, and that they could make it happen. That was the moment when a friend in Nashville could sell all the $7-a-dozen eggs his hens could produce. Farmer’s markets were the place to be on Saturday mornings. The great recession provided a steady stream of new customers and people learning to do for themselves. In a fragile world economy, local was the anchor. Local had become hip.

But, Mr. Zeitgeist is both a capricious master and himself a servant to larger forces. If anyone thinks farming is hard work, try being an American consumer. A la Bakunin-turned-beer brand, capitalism was quick to pick up on a good thing: small farms became the darling for ad campaigns, commodified, eye candy for the machine. And social media played their role. The iphone, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram were all loosed on the land between 2004 and 2010, and all began carving a chunk out of our mental landscape. Instead of “eyes to acres,” we lost the battle to “eyes to screens.”

Sure, there were an expanding number of farmer markets, where friends could sit all day on a Saturday to sell $25 worth of peppers. But, the real question, behind the hype of buying local and keeping your dollar in the community, was: how much of that average dollar spent on food was truly spent on locally grown meat and produce? Precious little (at most, maybe 5 percent, according to the little research out there). It is just not culturally relevant, expedient, or, most important, convenient in our global economy for most Americans to think outside the grocery box-store.

Already, the voices of protest rise up against this message that local has lost the battle for the consumer. “Why, just last week, Huffington Post had a series on a local farm,” you say. “My mother and I went to a farmer’s market on vacation.” “Here is an article on restaurants supporting local farms.” “I like my favorite farms on Facebook.” “My ‘Where is a farmer’s market?’ app works great when I visit New York City.”

It is that very clutter of modern life that works against our efforts. We are irrelevant, not because of what we do but because we are a small, tinny voice, lost in the great Babel of the running of a great machine. Yes, we small farms still have our loyal customers who go out of their way to support us, and we thank them for their unwavering support. And yes, the press, social media, and even advertisers have made the education of the customer easy, allowing we small farmers to partially pay our way in this life we have chosen.

But that good press allows us collectively to think inside a bubble. We see the Tweet, the post, the like, the ad, the book, the movie, and we assume that there is a major change underway. Yet, the average grocery bill has an ever-diminishing content of locally produced food. The decline has been going on for a very long time: Even a short 40 years ago, many grocery stores still routinely bought the bulk of their produce from area and regional farms. Farm stands and farmers selling from their cars and trucks along the roadside were commonplace. The resurgence of local today is merely an upward blip on a declining trend line that mirrors another rising line, one of global supply chains.

So, it should not surprise my readers that I am not sanguine about the success of the local food movement. Yes, I support it, work in it, and encourage everyone to do the same. Because by doing so we preserve a functioning framework of what was and could be again. Yet, I have come to believe that a truly successful local food movement will come at the expense of the collapse of the global.

Local is the obverse of global. It’s not just a good soundbite to say that we cannot have both a dominant global economy and a thriving local economy. For one is the master and the other the servant. And this master doesn’t give a shit about the local. It is a destroyer of worlds, and it won’t stop until the fuel, both metaphorically and literally, runs out.

When that happens, if we are all very, very lucky, we will get the local economy we need to survive. And, we will all be sexy again.

To That End

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We try. But I won’t declare that we do the best job of caring for our land. You see, I know where the bodies are buried: the troublesome bits of erosion, the areas of overuse, diseased trees, and neglected infrastructure. Yet, I won’t underestimate our hard work and successes at stewarding this small farm of seventy acres, a stewardship that, hopefully, leaves the land, upon our departure, in better shape than when we took up this way of life.

Nonetheless, we are both aware of the potential futility of these efforts in a world overburdened by population, climate change, resource depletion, and the general collapse of good behavior. Even as I type these words I can view the neighboring hills, a mile in distance, denuded of trees from a poorly executed clearcut, a process that is repeated up and down our small valley.

At times our farm seems an island in a sea of abuse. Small farms or small land ownership is no more immune to poor practice than large farms and tracts of land. Perhaps the small farm has a bit more flexibility; it is closer to the root of a problem and so can respond in real time. Like a small motor boat compared to an ocean liner, it is more maneuverable. But it is no nobler, for its small size.

Orwell, in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier, makes a reference to small landlords being worse than a large landlord, based on their limited resources to improve their investments. Similarly, the small farm is just as subject to those market forces, the same drive to wring every bit of profit from the resources at hand, as the large farm. A sad play that has us repeating our role in the original sin, where we short the future for a bite of an apple today.

That all leaves me, looking from my window on this Sunday, thinking that this island, which is our farm, is already being lapped by those rising waters of our future.

Yet, we make our small efforts to stake a claim to an imaginable future that has room for well cared for small farms, families, and community on a healthy planet. To that end we gathered last night with other area small farmers for an evening of fellowship, food, and conversation. To that end, today, we plant a new vineyard of wine grapes. And, to that end, our sow, Delores, farrowed last night.

To that end, that is the present and future as best as we can manage, for today.