Tag Archives: Climate Change

A Fever In The Night

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There’s no measurable rain in the forecast through the end of the year, and a pall of smoke hangs over the valley from wildfires. Firefighters have been flying in from all over the country to help overloaded volunteer fire departments cope with the size and number of blazes flaring up.

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Round bales of hay stored on our farm

I spent much of yesterday hauling and stacking square bales of hay purchased from a farmer two valleys over. With each bend in the road coming and going,­ another dry pond, dead pasture, or dying hardwood came into view. There is a bit of the post-apocalyptic look to this land. The verdant Southeast has been laid low by two years of below normal rainfall. Wells are beginning to run dry; farmers are selling off livestock. The pasture rootstock is at or beyond any quick recovery.

The tried-and-true strategies of rotation, permaculture, and old-fashioned conservation help mitigate the worst effects. Or perhaps “mitigate” isn’t the right word. Defer? Yes, the tried-and-true strategies help defer the worst effects. Mid-south agriculture is based on, depends on, plentiful rainfall, not irrigation — the result of a cornucopia of happy geographic coordinates.

Is this drought a direct result of climate change? It’s impossible to know for sure. Grazing and growing practices are based on the faith that things will continue long term much as they always have. But will our happy coordinates no longer contribute to our abundance? With exceptional droughts and 1,000-year deluges occurring with the regularity of the rising sun, I’m inclined to sound the ram’s horn. I’ve discussed with other area farmers how to prepare for a warmer climate. But what has only become clear in the past few years is that we have to prepare for an unstable climate.

For those who live in the city and buy their meat and veggies at the grocery store or at The Olive Garden, drought and heavy rain are an inconvenience. For those who produce a measure of food for the public, climate instability can be ruinous. For the average rural household of South Roane County, which earns a paltry third of the income of East and West coast city dwellers (low-$20,000s vs. $60,000s), the ability to grow at least some of their own food can mean the difference in surviving and not.

My concerns for the future lie in the intersection of community and self-sufficiency. Thinking of all the rural communities devastated this year by floods in places like the Carolinas and Louisiana, I wonder if those communities will ever come back: the foundations of neighborliness foundering on economic dissolution and post-growth politics. My gut tells me that no one left or right in the political elites really gives a shit. Which in the past has been okay because the rural folks traditionally have made do.

That is, they were able to make do based on the old model. It is this new climate model about which I’m not so sanguine. Sure, we can stockpile our hay, pull our livestock off sensitive hill pastures, nurse our orchards, vines, and gardens with a careful tonic of water (provided it is not stolen by cities at war with us and each other over water stocks). We can make these changes for the short term. But those are actions based on a hope that this is just an aberration, that things won’t get really bad, that the worst imaginings of our mind are like a fever in the night that passes before waking.

My worst imaginings are for uncertainties for which you can’t model an outcome.

Your Basic Essentials

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“Dish-washing is my balm and poultice.”—Robert Mifflin in The Haunted Bookshop

The wind is up outside the windows of my cozy study this morning. I hear tin tumbling across the ground near the wood yard. Something has come loose during the night, hopefully not a roof.Hauling Firewood with Ginger 019

A well-attached roof is an essential for living comfortably. But other than competent shelter, what else is really essential to a good life? The New York Times recently ran a lengthy article on a young couple’s travails in finding an apartment within their budget ($3000 a month) that had a dishwasher. The unchallenged assumption was that a dishwasher in an apartment was one of those essentials. Anything less, the writer implied, and the couple might as well return to medieval times.

One landlord told the couple that they didn’t need a dishwasher because New Yorkers liked to eat out. That a couple would choose to eat at home and hand-wash their dishes was a non-starter, perhaps even inconceivable, for this spoiled and entitled young couple.

More than a hundred years of consumer capitalism and the free labor of fossil fuels have left most of us ill-equipped to contemplate the essentials of life and the value of work. We as a society have used the largesse of cheap fuel to devalue community and extol the individual, warping in the process our relationship to the daily rhythms of work, to the degree that simple hygiene gets farmed out to an appliance.

Is the struggle to wash dishes really such an onerous chore? In the days when we owned a dishwasher, we put almost the same amount of energy into loading and unloading the machine as into hand-washing the dirty dishes ourselves. Doing dishes together, we have found 15 years into living sans dishwasher, is a great way to catch up on the day, to reconnect over a shared task.

As moderns, our definition of what is truly essential includes computers and smartphones and dishwashers. What is truly essential is now defined as anything that helps us avoid what we perceive as work. And adhering to that definition clouds our understanding of what we need, unsettles fundamentally our ability to truly know what we can do ourselves, promotes our abdication of control and authentic participation in exchange for accessories to purchase, whether labor or goods.

Our journey, living on a small farm, is not unusual; it is one on a well-worn path of reasserting some measure of control over production and community. During these past 16 years, we have learned to do more for ourselves and to more fully embrace the life that as a friend who grew up on a farm described as “Do it yourself or do without.”

This life on the farm has taught us to be more thoughtful on what is essential, to value more dearly the help of a neighbor and recognize the need to cultivate those relationships. We’ve discovered that physically building fences enhances the metaphorical sense of the same: it indeed makes good neighbors.

I dare say that the generations to come, in dealing with the decline of fossil fuels and the ravages of climate change, will not find the struggle to wash dishes nightly a mighty inconvenience. Indeed, they may find that the essentials of a satisfying life come from shared toil, the fulfillment of building something with their hands, or the freedom of doing without.

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Reading this weekend: Resilient Agriculture: cultivating food systems for a changing climate by Laura Lengnick

A Drive on New Year’s Day

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A few raised beds

Raised beds in winter

Whitehorse is singing about “busting unions in Wisconsin, drinking mojitos by the pool” out of my truck speaker as I pass the second ugliest house south of the river in Roane County, Tennessee (random brick color and nary a scrap of landscaping). I’m driving over to some good friends’ house to pick up two more large wooden boxes to use as raised beds for our gardens.

Beyond their small farm is a pseudo-Blackberry Farm resort for the religiously devout. To get there, count either four Rebel flags down on the right or five farms with fighting cocks, depending upon how you measure distance. One of those houses belongs to our former farrier. On the 10-acre plot sit a hundred or more huts, roosters staked to each one. Staked to keep them from killing each other before their designated time.

In Harriman, on the far end of Roane, is a store where you can buy the razors to attach to the cocks’ spurs. They’re either a quaint rural item or something to horrify your inner Peter Singer, all depending on what century your sensibilities respond to. The store is also the best source for anything needed in a homestead household, so we tend to overlook any failure to adapt to the kinder, gentler modern mores — a moral failing on our part, no doubt.

After picking up the boxes and a short visit, I take a long looping pass back through our end of the county and the cost of the recent rains adds up. The toll is modest damage compared to other parts of the country, but no less dear to the person whose home access across a creek has been washed away in the floods. Get used to it, I think, because climate change is gonna bite you where it hurts, and often.

Turning down Salem Valley I smile as I pass the remains of an old satellite dish. One fine Sunday I watched as a grown man blasted it beyond repair with buckshot. Shell after shell pumped into the dish as I drove cautiously past, making me wonder what the TV had done to piss him off so royally.

That same Sunday, ‘round the bend, I spied a woman in leather miniskirt and pink fluffy sweater outside her church. She had a bible bigger than her head in one hand and a phone planted against her ear in the other. She stood out for many reasons on that cold morning.  But the Whitehorse in me wanted to imagine the man shot his satellite dish over her lost love: “Annie Lu, Annie Lu, won’t you save me from you.”

A couple of ridge loops later and the ugliest house south of the river, Roane County, Tennessee, comes into view (black and white brick, no landscaping and a blue mansard roof, which sounds way better in print than in reality). I get a giddy pleasure out of contemplating the sheer awfulness of that structure each time I pass it. I would go out of my way, and do often, just to gaze upon it. Who built it and who lives there? And if architecture shapes the soul, then what Dorian Gray-esque artwork lurks in the attic?

I pull back onto our gravel drive and arrive home to discover a friend has gifted me four pounds of elderberries, enough to make six bottles of wine. A good start to 2016.

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Reading this weekend: An Unlikely Vineyard: the education of a farmer and her quest for terroir by Deirdre Heekin

Slow Farming and Climate Change Talks

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As our betters jet back from Paris, with bellies full of artisanal French food and exciting business contacts that allow them to both profit and “save” the world, our thoughts on the farm have been on Delores. She of the wandering tribe of swine that seldom saw a fence without seeing an opportunity. She who after a gallant effort to artificially inseminate and an arranged marriage of four weeks to a neighbor’s boar is still not pregnant.

We are now faced with a classic small farm dilemma: do we keep her for another try at motherhood or convert her to sausage? Back in August, during her matrimonial date with Old Red, Delores was what is euphemistically described as “pleasingly plump.” She has now been on an owner-imposed diet and slimmed down to what we hope is a good breeding weight. (Yes, hogs, as well as other livestock, can be too fat to conceive.)

There are so many small farm models to follow in this world. And we do not offer ours up to any but ourselves: a three-way contest between profits, sufficiency, and fulfillment. Last week’s post on taking time out from the first two to sit in the woods and do nothing but meditate and smoke a cigar spurred one online reader to call me a slacker.

The conclusion I drew was that, in his mind, the monetary profits of the farm stood superior to sufficiency and fulfillment. An imbalance, if applied mindlessly, that has contributed greatly to this world of rapidly diminishing resources and a climate rollercoaster. Which reminded me of a another recent commenter who seemed to take issue with the notion that achieving sufficiency was anything other than a weigh-station toward profitability or a path down the road to abject poverty.

So, as we watched the old classic set in the Scottish Hebrides, “I Know Where I’m Going,” last night, I chuckled when one of the characters took umbrage at being told that the villagers were poor because they had no money. What poverty of imagination, she said, that would imagine us as poor because we lack money.

Hers was an outlook actively at odds with the modern mindset, the one that devalues the wealth derived from family, community, and being a part of the earth, the one that feeds on the acquisitive and that can, if not moderated, create a life out of balance.

It is this mindset, I think, that led to conditions that energized our betters — a convening of corporations, governments, and nonprofit agencies — to spend a week dining in Paris. Now, with their bellies bloated and their backs sore from congratulatory pats, I have the sneaking suspicion that all of their grubbing around for money will result in a climate plan for more of the same.

We, meanwhile, spent our weekend on the farm. We dined on produce from our gardens and meat we raised. We worked hard, relaxed, and gave a favored sow another chance.

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Reading this weekend: Animate Earth by Stephan Harding

Methane Plumes Vs. Root Beer Floats!

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I took an accidental overdose of climate science writings this week. After wallowing in descriptions of positive feedback loops of methane gas, ocean acidification and general ways in which we have screwed the planet I reached a level requiring a detoxification program. A twelve-step program to restore balance, sometimes described as sticking ones head in the sand, was required.Mushrooms July 2015 004

So after a hard day’s work on Saturday we retired to a neighboring farm for a nice potluck of lasagna, salad, homemade bread, plenty of wine and abundant laughter. We watched one of our hosts ride her horse before turning him out for the night, admired healthy cattle, sipped bourbon and shook our heads at the plight of their tomatoes.

The two native Southerners (out of seven) made conversation about the recent flag controversy. Their significant others wisely refrained from voicing opinions and the conversation moved onto other topics of personal interest. As the summer sun set the dinner dishes were removed and dessert, coffee and that nice bourbon finished off the evening.

We left late, for us country folk, drove down the valley to our farm. We said goodnight to a friend who had ridden along to the dinner with us. And then retired to bed.

This morning we had an early breakfast, loaded up the kayaks and spent a pleasant hour paddling about the still waters of the Tennessee River. Trying not to recall the warnings not to eat fish from the river we admired the herons fishing. And glided past largemouth bass laying up in the shadows.

I fixed us root beer floats in early afternoon. Then after a much needed nap, a productive afternoon hunting chanterelle mushrooms was on the agenda, netting about a pound. I also harvested a nice batch of hen-of-the-woods. So a nice cream and mushroom sauce over a choice bit of lamb or mutton is on the menu sometime in the next few days.

I may still have a bit of sand in the ears. But it wasn’t a bad place to keep my head this weekend.