Are You Ready for the Present?

For the last few years, I’ve been introducing my classes on climate change with a line like, “You know how you’ve spent your whole lives hearing that climate change is really going to be a problem for our children, and so we should really do something about it?  Well, it’s been 20 years.  You ARE those children, and this is the world that everyone was worried about.”  Poor students take a few weeks to adjust to that new reality!

I’ve spent a few days weirded out by my own adjustment to the new reality this week.  Since the middle of 2014, I’ve been waiting for the repeat of 2008/9; not with any specific deadline in mind, just knowing that the economy was going to crash again before the “recovery” was complete.  Sure enough, in the second half of 2014, oil prices started dropping.  Then the Albertan, Canadian and other oil economies started to feel the pain.  How long would it take before the stock market collapsed and the recession began?  As long as the powers that be can keep it going, apparently (not a coordinated conspiracy, just that the 1% that benefits so much from keeping the ship afloat that it keeps the money circulating as long as possible).

So the world economy is teetering on the edge, and the edge gets closer every day.  Greece is bankrupt and headed to default, Puerto Rico is bankrupt, China’s bubble is bursting.

In the meantime, we’re in the hottest year ever, both globally and locally here on the West Coast.  In my area, we’ve had the driest spring on record, leading into the warmest May and June on record.  July and August are normally hot, drought months, and in recent years that’s been true for September and often October as well.  We’re irrigating our lush, vibrant veggies and fruit, strategically watering the rest where we want to keep something alive, and letting some things die.  We had a terrible broody hen hatch, with only one surviving chick, which I’m blaming on the heat.  All the heat and dry ground is bringing constant fires.  On the news, our provincial fire service reported that they expect 30 new fires to start each day…indefinitely.

Our land is literally burning up.  The skies are a strange, surreal shade of rosy grey; our air quality as bad as Beijing.  At least the smoke is keeping the temperature down a little, though!  And living by the water, we’re starting to get enough wind to have the grey skies turn slightly toward blue from their creepy red…

Adaptation’s a bitch.  Preparing for the future is one thing.  Experiencing the reality is something else all together.  There’s this attitude among doomers and preppers (I try not to count myself among these, although the line blurs sometimes) that we just have to get our food storage ready, make our gardens productive, stock up on gas and propane, and we’ll be an island of calm in the middle of everyone else’s chaos.  It’s the Rapture fantasy, you know–we’ll be rescued by God because of our virtue while everyone else burns in hell.  But it doesn’t really work that way, of course.

Psychologically, it’s a very strange feeling to watch a slow, global collapse while also going about your daily life as normal.  Chop wood, carry water while the world crumbles around you.  I don’t live in Greece…yet.  The economic crises are at a distance, until the construction work dries up around here for the Skipper, which I expect to happen over the next year.  And even through 2009, he managed to keep working, more or less steadily, so that could still happen again.  My job is secure until we become like Greece, which I don’t expect to be in the short term.  We continue to make plans to reduce our housing costs and increase our security of access to land.

The ecological collapse is another story.  I feel a bit queasy already about buying and eating fish this year; in theory we’re getting ready for our bulk Sockeye purchase.  But the rivers are so low, the oceans so warm…our stocks aren’t going to hold up much longer, and it feels wrong to fish them now.  We’ll have enough water to get through our veggie growing season (I hope), but then it’s all about how much rain we get this winter.  And all the ash in the air?  It’s ok for the soil–maybe even good for the soil.  Not good for anyone’s respiratory systems (including the animals).  All food prices will be going up, and even the local supply is more vulnerable.

I’m doing my best to be stoic, to be Zen, to be flexible, and I try to remind myself of my MANY blessings each day.  But living through interesting times is a very strange feeling.  Nothing seems reliable or predictable, there’s a disconnect between what’s going on in the wider world and what’s going on in my local community.  Everything seems a mix of joy and fear.  I’m nervous.  And aware that there’s only so much adapting and preparing that’s possible; that one day it might well be me that’s joining the line of refugees leaving a home that’s no longer inhabitable.

The Homestead Bank Yields Dividends

As it seems most months are around here, May was interesting.  A family health emergency came up and the Skipper was needed; he ended up being away for three weeks and away from work for almost a month.  Then, as May wound down and June ramped up, work at his employer went through a quiet phase (as sometimes happens as projects complete and new ones haven’t begun yet).  He’s ended up home more often than at work over the last six weeks.  Although he’s using up some vacation time, and we’re tweaking to accommodate the smaller paychecks, and though we know it’s a temporary lull, there have been moments where I’ve looked at the bills and wondered how all this was going to work.

I have a distinct memory of attending an introduction to Permaculture workshop some years back, when we were new to this community and the idea of the homestead project.  During a Q and A session, a participant put up his hand and asked the Permaculture teacher, “is there a point at which this all pays off?  I mean lately it feels like all the money is going out—irrigation, seeds, building supplies, soil amendments–is there a point at which we start to see some financial savings?!”

I’m sure the answer was some version of “Yes”, but I actually only remember the question and how it spoke to likely what so many people were anxious about.  Over the years, I’ve participated in lots of discussions about whether growing food or raising chickens saves you money; mostly the answers look something like “Yes, but not if you compare it to the cheapest food you can buy;” “Yes, if you don’t factor in the cost of the original infrastructure, only the ongoing costs of maintenance;” “Yes, if you consider this a hobby/entertainment and don’t think of your time invested as something that should also have a $ value;” “Yes, if you factor in the health care savings of a healthier diet/lifestyle.” You know.  It does save you money, sort of, in the abstract.

I don’t track and quantify our homestead outputs.  For me, this homestead work is part resilience project for possible decline scenarios, and partly just how we want to live, how we want to spend our time.  We have the luxury of two “off-farm” incomes and don’t worry too much about “breaking even” with our products; for me the community-building social capital of sharing our surplus has become as important a part of the fun and resilience-building as any financial gain would be.

That said, there is no question that we save money thanks to our homestead production.  I don’t know about where you live, but around here food prices have noticeably increased over even the last year, and that’s only expected to continue.  The homestead keeps me out of the grocery store enough that I suffer sticker shock periodically when I do need something.  This past winter/early spring I remember balking at an $8 organic cauliflower and it’s $5 conventionally grown counterpart and wondering how on earth other people are coping!

So, over the last year or two, as I have backed away from the goal of self-sufficiency, I have nonetheless been regularly grateful for the way our homestead acts as a financial buffer.  Our stored foods and ongoing production have meant that the things that we still need to buy–and there are many–are still *supplementary* to our comfortable lives; they are not essentials.  Sharon Astyk talked about this in one of her books (Depletion and Abundance I think?): that it’s important to do whatever you can to make your home a productive one, in whatever circumstances you find yourself in, because every bit you can do for yourself *extends* the ability of your income to stretch further than it otherwise would.  Word.

Anyway, payday came and went last week, with Skipper’s cheque much reduced again.  I looked at the bills, paid what I could, shifted and strategized some other bits, and realized that, for the next two weeks, we needed to get by on…$125.  Ouch!  Now don’t worry, we do have a variety of safety nets, but I don’t like to draw on them if I don’t have to.  And because we don’t like to, I wasn’t thinking about them in that moment, I was just thinking about our bottom line.  Which looked depressing.

I stepped away from the computer and started to putter around the house, talking myself down from the panic of that moment.  I started to tidy and move through the fear, reminding myself where the money had gone, that this was temporary, that we were fine.  I thought about what we might need to buy over this next week or two.

And then it hit me.  We didn’t need to buy anything.  We had enough food stored and coming in from the garden to last us for months.  Neither one of us needed to drive anywhere, and both vehicles were full because Skipper was rotating through some stored gas and had just emptied the stored fuel into the truck.  There are two months worth of chicken feed in the shed, stores of homemade soap in the bathroom, I even just bought 2 large packages of toilet paper that was on sale, lol.

It suddenly sunk in that so much of the disconnect that I have often felt between watching the bank account shrink and yet knowing that we’re not spending money on anything frivolous was because this was where all of our money is going: into the homestead bank.  We ARE saving and investing.  It’s just that the savings don’t tally up on numbers on a spreadsheet.  They’re outside in the garden, in the soil, in the berries and the fruit trees, in the chicken run, in the stocked pantry, in the piles of wood on their way into the woodshed, transformed into the butter, pork and fish in the freezer (and whose purchase had in turn gone into the savings accounts of the friends and colleagues who had provided us with them).

Without really paying attention, we have taken significant steps out of the money economy.  Not by eliminating money, but by using it to invest in a real, tangible savings bank, rather than investing it in financial vehicles that are intended to grow more money.

Isn’t this what resilience actually means?  We’ve spent years building up this savings account.  Now, when the money economy is more fragile for us during this particular time in our particular circumstances, it’s time to draw on that account.  Rather than spending money on continuing to build our infrastructure and pantry over these next few weeks, we can coast on our savings for a little while.

So this is the answer to that question from years ago.  Yes, setting up a homestead takes money (though as with all things, the spectrum of how much is needed is vast).  But at some point, magically and mysteriously, the homestead reaches a point of dynamic stability (I know that’s an oxymoron, but it’s true!) and becomes a bank of stored value.  And then it really starts to yield dividends.

So I think I’m Back

So, ummm….yeah.  Hi!  It’s been a while.  Almost 2 years!  That went by fast.

From the outside, not much has changed.  Skipper and I are still here on our small homestead.  We are still growing food, still raising chickens.  I’m still teaching; he’s still building.  But on the inside…well.  Did I mention that I turned 40?  I told a friend the other day, “I’m not exactly sure what happened, but somehow, between the years of 39 and 42, I feel like I’ve become a totally different person!”  Ok, not really.  I’ve read through some of my old posts in preparation for coming back online, and I was pleasantly surprised that I am actually quite consistent in my values and voice.  Kinda neat to see.

But the last couple of years have felt like both a huge and deep process of re-learning who am I in the world (and who I would like to be) and a huge, deeply satisfying shedding of beliefs, fears, and habits that I’ve been carrying for the last 20 years.  I’ve questioned and wrestled with life, death, and Everything over the past few years.  And, of course, the journey isn’t over.  But I’m feeling like I’m ready to embrace my voice as it is now, to really step forward.  And blogging again feels like the right way to do that.

When last I was writing, I was also still wrestling with the implications of my research into serious climate change and resource scarcity.  I taught my course on these issues for 3 years, and worked through the issues again and again alongside my students.  It feels like it’s taken these last years to really work through my fear, the implications, more fear and grief, practical considerations…and to some degree, come out the other side.  That’s not a process that’s over either, of course, but I feel like I’ve regained my footing in the world as it is, and I have some conclusions to share in the weeks and years to come.

I’ve also, in these last years, spent a huge amount of time online, reading other people’s blogs.  It’s been sad to see some favorite blogs go dormant and wonderful to discover some new ones.  I feel like I was part of an explosion of women’s voices online in the blogosphere there for a while.  And then, I suspect, many of us had to face the blogging crossroads: maintaining an active, well-produced, beautifully photographed, regularly contributed to blog is equivalent to a part-time (at least!) job.  So for some, it became one.  For others, it had to end.  But I’m also seeing a new, middle ground open up, and I’m hoping that’s where this will take me now: a spontaneously contributed to (we’ll see if a pattern emerges 🙂 ), occasionally photographed, but still read and valued comfortable space.  I do so much reading of other people’s blogs that it seems only fair I start contributing again.

And, all of that reading and thinking has helped me to feel a little more concrete about my purpose here.  When I started the blog, I was under-employed and interested in free-lance writing, particularly about food and our local food movement.  Then I started thinking seriously about farming and other career possibilities.  Then my job stabilized, then I started going more deeply into sustainability…

But now I see a new need, a space that needs more voices.  It’s the space I’m in right now: inhabiting and embracing the messy balancing act of life on the so-called “undulating plateau” of this Transition time on the domestic front lines.  It’s the space that women traditionally occupy: the home, the garden, the home economics, our relationships and emotions.  But I’m (possibly like you) navigating all these through the deeply conflicted pull between environmental sustainability and the requirements of daily life in the industrial economy.  I think we need more women online talking about what this life really looks like, in all of its untidy, stretched-thin, emotional, financial, and time challenges.  It would be great to feel more solidarity around the trade-offs and the imperfections, while continuing to find the beauty and the creativity and to celebrate the resourcefulness.  I’ve decided that if I would like to see more of this online, then I’d better start by sharing my own stuff.  Here goes!

Just Contemplating…

I don’t know where the last few months have gone.  I feel like I’ve blinked, and now it’s almost June!

I’m not being flippant, though.  We’ve been working hard.  I put in another intensive 4 months teaching one semester, and I’m halfway through another one.  Around the homestead, we’ve made soap, renovated the pantry, built a second chicken run, started seeds, planted, hauled topsoil and mulch, cleaned, cooked, eaten our way through the winter food stores, and built fire after fire in the woodstove.  We’ve bought a bigger sailboat!

I would love to have been blogging about it all along the way.  I did, in my head.  But I never seemed to have the energy to take the photos, edit the photos, load the photos, and then write.

And true to myself, through it all, I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking.

I told a friend recently that one reason the Skipper and I get on so well is that we stress out over the opposite things.  The small stuff never bothers me.  Day to day, I am calm as anything; feathers rarely ruffled.  Skipper?  He trips over his computer cord and the wrath erupts.  When I met him, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” was on his bedside table. 🙂

I sweat the big stuff.  I am constantly working through The Implications of things, making Plans, wondering about the Repercussions for my Identity and my Future.  I remember the inner turmoil I felt at 15 when my mother suggested I get a job at the local corner drugstore.  Working at the drugstore was not what I was Meant to Do with My Life!  I’ve been a bit of a drama queen in my day.

So I have spent the last 5 months Contemplating.  Life, The Universe, and Everything.  The blog.  The homestead.  I turn 40 next week, and Skipper turns 50 in the fall.  We are talking about what we want to do when we Grow Up.  You know, sometime over the next 10 years.  What’s most important to us?

I started my career late.  I’ve been working at it for a long time (finished my PhD 5 years ago! Been teaching…ummm…wow, almost 12 years, I think!), but only at the end of this year have I really felt the shift into actual career mode, as in, I should be dedicated to contributing to my field, not just putting in my time teaching as the job that pays the bills.  But the people I have watched with professional careers really just work and then have a hobby or two that they enjoy during their downtime or when they get a short vacation.  The career is really the primary focus.  Creating a productive homestead farm?  That’s another full-time job.  That never ends.

Having a sustainable life–emotionally, spiritually, physically, creatively–has always been a primary value of mine.  I’ve been through burnout more than once (have been teetering on the edge of it again this month), and I structure my life to have balance and sanity.  I’m not the “work hard/ play hard” type.  But I don’t see a lot of balance around me at the moment.  I have other colleagues who are full-time professors and trying to farm.  The models seem to be either professional sacrifices to farm, or emotional/health sacrifices to do both.  So I’m contemplating my priorities.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about fear.

Spiritually, I have come to understand that in any given moment, any given decision, there is only Love or Fear.  Either I feel grounded, free, expansive–in alignment with Life’s energy–or I feel afraid: constricted, alone, small, and disconnected.

I have spent months then trying to make peace with my fear of the future in the face of coming crises.  Wrestling my mind, because if I don’t fear death, if I believe that the way forward is to listen to Nature’s voices and to de-industrialize over time; if I believe that transformation of our current civilization is absolutely necessary, then what is there to fear?

And yet fear has largely driven my homesteading goals; fear has been the source of my energy to learn more, build more resiliency, more infrastructure, more security.  If I disconnect from my fear of change, of transformation, where does that leave me?  I don’t know yet.  I’m contemplating.  Do I want to keep blogging?  I don’t know.  I’m thinking.

Anyone who knows me well hears me go around in circles of ways I imagine my future.  Maybe I will travel! Maybe I will farm!  Maybe I will write!  Maybe we will move!  Maybe we will Liveaboard!  Around and around.

But I said to a close friend a couple of years ago, that’s just my mind, just my words and my thoughts.  When you look at my actions, I’m very steady; very predictable.  I took almost 8 years to do my PhD, and dreamed in all kinds of different directions over those years.  But I also just kept plugging away, month after month, doing what needed to be done.

And though I still tell Skipper each day about a new direction we Could take, we still just make plans and buy supplies and start the projects that need to be done.  Finish the painting, put siding on the shop, plant the seeds, grow the food, make plans to take out the dead plants from last year and put in the new ones.  Chop wood, carry water.

So thank you, if you’ve still been checking in, wondering if I’m still here, and wondering if there will ever be another update.  I think so.  I’m hoping this post is breaking back in to writing, that teaching is winding down and that there is a flood of creativity ready to flow again.  I’m tired though, and also need to go slow and take many breaks.  So I’m contemplating.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

Moving Towards the Light: Goals for 2013

Technically, it’s the winter solstice that marks the longest night.  But around here, it takes a little while longer before the days themselves actually get longer.  Yesterday, Skipper began the ritual that tells us we are moving towards towards the increasing light of the new year:  he adjusted the timer on the automatic chicken coop door up 10 minutes!

I know lots of people scoff at new year’s resolutions, and I think it’s because often making them feels like making an abstract list of things one should do, usually in order to become a “better” person by society’s standards in some way.  It becomes a list of socially acknowledged flaws that one is supposed to overcome in order to more acceptable and therefore, instantly happier.

So, I’m long over that!  I’m sure my list of social flaws is long, but most of the time, it doesn’t cross my mind to care.  It’s AWESOME not being 20 any more! 🙂

Instead, I feel the ancient sense of reflection and rebirth that this time of year brings.  I was telling a friend over the holidays that there’s something special about the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  It’s the only time of year that the Skipper and I get holidays at the same time, unless we plan and schedule them to do something specific.  The week at the end of the year, if you don’t fill it with shopping, is an odd kind of limbo space, neither the old year over nor the new year yet begun; an in-between, threshold time.  It seems to me that to honour this time between cycles by reflecting on the year that’s been and making decisions that will impact the year-yet-to-be is worth doing.

I don’t know about you, but for all the debate about the significance of 2012, the year was intense!  It was a year of huge growth, awakenings, and emotional shifts for me and those around me.  I spent much of the year studying climate change and peak oil research, and then trying to learn how to be in despair and move through life in a functioning way at the same time.  The good news?  I’m getting the hang of it, I think!

Despite the despair, I’m happy with how the homestead evolved in 2012.  We have a really good supply of winter food this year, which was one of my major goals.  We expanded the vegetable beds, and learned a lot more about raising a small flock of chickens, including processing and eating the roosters.  We started officially eating meat as a staple of our diet, including our first side of pork from a local farm.  I canned with determination this year, and we have a stocked pantry to show for it.  I’m feeling like I’ve got a handle on the vegetable production after 3 years, and I’m ready to take on some modest new projects.

So in 2013, my goals are about taking more baby steps toward resiliency.  I mean baby steps, though.  After the year that was, I’m not up for major projects…rainwater harvesting in a big way, for instance, will likely wait for another year.

My gardening goals are to renovate 3-4 small flower beds to include more medicinal and culinary herbs, as well as pollinator-attratcting flowers.  In the last few years we’ve been taking out ornamentals to make room for vegetables, but it’s time to put some of the flowers back into the ecosystem.

I want to get a handle on using green manures and cover crops this year, and get a good supply of winter greens in the greenhouse for those frosty and snowy days when the crops under cover are frozen.  Always hard to do in the heat of the summer, but would be so nice to have right now!! I’ll also be slowly building up the soil in the places where a few more future beds will go, but I’m not going to worry about planting them yet.

My last gardening goal is to start getting serious about seed saving.  Buy a book, start with the easy plants (beans, peas, lettuce, tomatoes), where you don’t have to worry about cross-pollination, and actually select for the traits I want.  In other words, start saving seeds from the first tomato that ripens, instead of the last straggler, which is the one we don’t want to eat! 🙂

Beyond the garden, I’d like to build a simple solar oven and learn to use it.  When the summer days are too hot to cook, I want this to be my go-to option.   I’m hoping that the Skipper also finds time this summer to build us a simple solar dehydrator.  We have a few other small infrastructure building projects to work away on, so those 2 additions to our food production system seem reasonable.

Lastly, I’m feeling ready to take on the biggest step towards building more security in uncertain times.  No, it’s not learning to hunt, or buying MRE’s to stash in the basement!  It’s being willing to come OUT of my homestead, and start joining with others to build stronger community and social networks.

I’ve intellectually given this idea lip service for some time, and have certainly found like-minded friends and recognized the vital importance of their support.  But too often, given an intensely social job, I have spent my off-time hiding, and in my moments of panic for the future, have busied myself in worrying only about my immediate family.  But after some emotional processing and deep thinking, I am ready to embrace the fact that in my relationships with others lies not only my security, but also my well-being and release from panic.  I’ll write more about this in another post, but here are my social goals for 2013.

I’m going to actively join and participate when possible two local groups working hard at resiliency: the Cowichan Green Community and Transition Cowichan.

I’m going to make sure that Skipper and I host at least one party for our immediate neighbours so that we can all meet and get to know each other better.  And we’d also like to host at least one other gathering for all of those friends we have made across the local area.  These are both things that we have talked about doing since we moved in, but it’s time to make them a reality.  The key for me is to see them as joyfully celebratory, community-building fun, rather than another task I don’t have time for!  If you’re reading this locally and would like to come, let me know!

To find the down-time to myself that I need in order to balance the extroverted job, I am also going to make a conscious effort this year to wean myself off of pointless internet surfing.  I’m feeling conflicted about my screen-time these days; truly, the internet is a source of amazing information, community, and entertainment.  We don’t have tv, don’t buy music, and love to learn.  However, I spend a LOT of time at a computer for work, and I’m wary of the creep that happens between work hours and off-hours when I’m online in my off time.  I also feel like the internet is another industrial grid-system that it isn’t good to be dependent on, which right now, it feels like we are.  Clearly, this is totally out of habit and not necessity; the Skipper and I are both old enough to remember life without it very clearly!

I’m really aware, too, though, that the internet-suck is preventing me from having time to work on other, creative projects, to procrastinate less, housekeep more, and to build community with the actual people around me, instead of the virtual people in other places–wonderful though you are and as much as I learn from you!  Interestingly, I’m actually feeling like I want to blog more–that doesn’t count as an internet time-waste, LOL.

And the last thing that I want to free up time for by decreasing internet time is meditation.  I don’t have a specific goal around this, although perhaps I should set one.  I just know that some regular meditiation time keeps me calm, keeps my fears for the future in perspective, keeps me focused on the joys of my life as it is now, and reminds me that there are mysteries of the universe that I do not understand that may be working in ways that I cannot see.  I know all of this keeps me much saner and healthier.

With all of this to look forward too, I’m ready to move into 2013 with excitement and anticipation.  Here’s to sunny skies ahead for all of us!

 

Cooking a Heritage Turkey

We’re having a slightly different sort of Christmas this year.

A few months back, close friends called and said, “we’re coming for Christmas!”  “Great!” We replied.  A few weeks ago, as we started to make preparations, we thought, “What the heck.  Let’s see if our favorite farmer down the road has any turkeys left.”

Adele and Michael Gelling raise heritage livestock and garlic.  What could be better?  We LOVE watching their beautiful Narragansett turkeys grow up; they’re such mellow, friendly, and stunning birds.  We’ve often come home from a visit scouring our yard for a spot we could tuck a few.  No luck so far.

This year, we were in luck; there were a couple of turkeys left, though the smallest she could do was 15lbs.  We thought we’d be 5 adults, and would be able to make a suitable dent in that much meat.

A week or two later, we got the text–our dear friends couldn’t get away and weren’t going to be able to make it down after all.  So sad.  And slightly daunting–what would we do with our big bird?

Last week, we got a text from another friend, who was travelling with his blended family of 6 across the island for Christmas.  Could they stop in on their travels for a quick visit?  “Great!”  We said.  “How about a turkey dinner?!”

So yesterday, December 23rd, we had a fabulous Christmas dinner.  We went all out: our potatoes and rutabagas from the garden, stuffing made with our potatoes, apples, onion and bacon.  Brussel sprouts, gravy, Skipper made a pumpkin and an apple pie (both from our garden), and of course, the bird.

First things first: It was the best turkey we’ve ever eaten.

Second things second: we were incredibly confused about how to cook it, based on all the contradictory information on the interwebs and other various sources.  So we took a deep breath, combined some of the better tips and instincts based on cooking our roosters over the last year, and dove in.  Because it turned out SO well, I thought I’d share, and because we likely cooked our turkey days before anyone else, I thought it might be helpful to get the recipe out now!

Roasting a Heritage Turkey

The big goal is to end up with crispy roasted skin, a cooked-though bird, and super-moist meat.  Not an easy balancing act.  The trick with non-supermarket poultry, according to my new bible, The River Cottage Meat Book, is to do a hot initial sear, and then a longer, low-temperature roast.

We started with a very fresh, never frozen turkey (15.6 lbs).  Obviously not everyone can do this, but I’m sure it made a difference!

Chefs roast a bird that is dry and at room temperature.  After our bird sat in the fridge for more than 24 hrs (which also makes a difference with a fresh bird), we took it out of the fridge, dried it off, and let it sit on the counter for an hour or so to warm up.

The next key thing is to add fat to the bird which helps to crisp the skin and to retain the moisture.  So the Skipper buttered the dry bird, and then added salt, pepper, and herbs.  We also quartered a couple of our apples and stuck them in the cavity (my father always used to do this with oranges, which is also delicious).   Butter inside and out.

Then we realized that our turkey wouldn’t fit in our roasting pan.  Luckily, because it wasn’t actually Christmas yet, the neighbours had something we made work.

The turkey then went into a preheated, 400 degree, hot oven for 20 minutes.  Then, to the hot pan, we added a half-cup or so of white wine, and on went the roasting pan lid, tightly.  We turned the oven down to 325.

Recipes had varied as to how long to roast a turkey, from 20-30 minutes per pound.  With 15 lbs, though, that’s a huge range!  There’s also some debate about what the final temperature of the turkey should be, with the USDA guidelines at 180, but many cooks saying this is WAY too hot, and a guaranteed way to get a dried-out (though safe to eat!!) roast.  Chefs argued for 160-165, especially if you were comfortable with the provenance of the bird, which we were.

We decided to go with 20 mins per pound, and aim for 165, and see what we ended up with.  That math would have given us 5 hours, and we were expecting our guests at 5pm.  So we put the bird in at 12pm, and then decided we’d check on things at 3pm or so, to see if the turkey needed basting, uncovering to crisp or brown, etc.

At three o’clock, we pulled the bird out and uncovered it.  It was stunning!  The skin was crispy and had pulled away from meat in places.  The meat looked juicy, and there was lots of yummy smelling juice at the bottom of the pan.  We stuck the thermometer into the thickest parts of the meat–it was off the charts!  The bird was way over 180.  Ummm, that meant it was done.  2 hours early.

We crossed our fingers that the high temperature didn’t mean a dry bird, texted our friends to see if they could come a little sooner, and left the bird covered in the pan to rest while we pulled together the side dishes.

An hour later, our friends were here, and we had 8 hungry people to do justice to the most succulent, moist, flavourful turkey any of us had ever tasted.  And today, as Skipper and I nibbled on leftovers, we can report that even after a day in the fridge, the meat is STILL MOIST.  Amazing.

So tips we’ve learned about cooking heritage turkey:

Free-range, heritage birds have less meat and more bone for their weight compared to their fattened counterparts.  This throws the cooking times off.  Be warned!

Next time, we will again do the hot initial sear, and we will again cover the bird for the rest of the cooking, after adding a little liquid to the pan.  But Skipper says next time he would lower the heat even more, down to 315 or so.  We’d still use 20 mins per pound as a general guideline, just in case (especially at a lower heat), but again, we’d plan to check the bird early, after 10-15 minutes per pound.  Our bird took 3.5 hours for 15.6 lbs.  But the point is that there is a lot more variation in the heritage, free-range birds, and you can’t just plug in a formula.

We did not brine our bird, and opinions on this for heritage birds varied.  But given that our bird was so fresh, and so potentially tasty, we were worried about over saturating the turkey with water and salt.  After all, in theory a good quality, traditional turkey shouldn’t need to be altered too much to add flavour where there might not be any…We have no regrets.  We think that keeping the bird covered while roasting with extra liquid took the place of brining, and was much simpler.

So there you go!  Hope that helps someone else have a very merry turkey-mas, and whether you’re having a turkey feast, or, as we’re doing tonight, a Ukrainian wheat-free vegan Christmas even dinner, have a wonderful holiday.  On to the garden goals of 2013!

Taking Stock and Stocking Up

It’s no coincidence that I’ve been AWOL between Labour Day weekend and the first week of December this year.  Can you say “School semester?!”  Sadly, this was one of those semesters that just didn’t leave me 2 hours free to put a post together.  I’ve considered dropping the blog altogether, but that doesn’t feel right either.  So my goal is to post once a month or so and see where that takes me.

The fact is, there’s been lots going on around here, and I want to share it.  It’s been a busy and productive fall, and all the reading and grappling with the transitions underway have had some transformative impacts on our lives.  There are also still many things that I remain unsettled and anxious about.  I continue to swing regularly between despair and acceptance about what’s happening in the world, and my homestead work calms me to some degree.  But I also recognize that the real work needs to happen at the community level, and I’m reflecting on how I want to participate in that broader picture.

In the meantime, I thought I should report a bit on what we accomplished this fall!  One of my goals after last summer’s chicken-ravaging of my winter garden was to do a better job of extending our garden’s production for as long as possible.  About halfway through the season, I also got serious about preserving and stocking up the pantry, even if that meant buying some local produce from off the property.  The results have been so heartening–and a giant leap forward!

The Well-Stocked Larder

This fall, we are looking at a pantry with

• 48 pints of thick tomato sauce, plus some stewed tomatoes and salsa
• almost 100 lbs of potatoes stored–enough to get us to spring, if I can keep them from sprouting!
• umpteen jars of assorted pickles: cucumber, zucchini, beets
• canned cherries and peaches, frozen berries, and umpteen jars of jam
• a decent supply of onions, as well as a garden full of leeks, some garlic
• a garden bed full of huge rutabagas and parsnips
• a successful patch of cabbage and (hopefully!) brussel sprouts–enough cabbage til May
• 40 lbs of winter squash
• a few lbs of stored dry pinto and fava beans
• a covered bed of salad greens that we should be able to eat from for another month or so
• a solid patch of healthy chard also covered to pull from for another month or two
• a decent bed of winter kale
• a freezer full of corn, green beans, chicken (ours and some heritage roosters bartered with a friend)
• eggs and…a half-side of pork raised by a farming colleague!

And…from a half-dozen espaliered and dwarf apple trees: 450 lbs of apples!!

The bulk of the apple harvest with the last of the fall tomatoes

These have been taken off to the local u-brew to make cider (we don’t yet have a press/grinder), frozen for deserts, and made into apple sauce.  We’re still working our way through the last of the processing; I’d also like to try drying some slices by the wood stove.

In other words, we’ve got enough of our home-produced food to keep us going for a number of months yet, supplemented by a few basic grocery staples: rice, oats, pasta, bread, milk, cheese, etc.   I have accepted that our homestead (for now!) will not produce grains and dairy.  But I’m so impressed that we’ve produced so much else, and very curious to see how long it lasts!

As the December break rolls around, I’m setting new garden goals and getting ready to order seeds.  I want to improve my carrot and beet production, and continue to clear brush and ornamentals to make room for more food.  I got an expanded strawberry patch and an asparagus bed set up last year, but I killed off most of the blueberry starts 😦 .   And I’m planning next year to make a concerted effort to save seeds.  We managed a few beans and sunflower seeds this year, but I want to start settling on my favourite varieties of my crops and starting to strategically and systematically save seeds from those where viable.  Right now we just save a few once the plants are done and the harvest over, but that isn’t actually selecting for the best traits!

Beyond the garden, we’re also starting to think more strategically about our overall homestead and its sustainability and resilience.  We continue to count our woodstove as one of our biggest blessings, and with its help, we’re trying to reduce our energy use even more.  The Skipper has decided that using the dishwasher–though a high efficiency model–can’t possibly be as energy-efficient as heating water on the woodstove to handwash dishes.  We’ve bought some cast-iron enameled pots to experiment with cooking on the woodstove.  In BC, we have a two-tiered billing system for our electricity, and the Skipper has set us the challenge of trying to get our consumption down to the first tier: about 22 kwhrs per day.  We bought a bigger freezer to accommodate the food storage, and with a new energy-star model, we got rid of an older extra fridge and the small freezer and are now using less energy with more space. Win!

Also on the priority list is some rainwater catchment.  We’re on a good well here, but resilience is about redundancy, and at the moment we are completely reliant on our well and it’s electric pump.  There are manual pumps available, and we might also look into one, but rainwater storage makes a lot more sense as low-hanging fruit.  I’ve been angling for this for months now, but the push came last night, when the Skipper said a colleague of his is stuck at the moment because his pump went, and it’s (of course) thousands of dollars and a huge hassle to have someone come with a machine to pull out the pump (!), repair or replace it and put it back in.  That’s the kind of personal emergency that Sharon Astyk reminds us about.  I don’t know how we would pay for that kind of problem at the moment, and of course, while all of that decision-making and work is in progress, you have no water!!  There’s a strong case for a back-up plan!

There’s lots more to share, but I’ll stop there for now.  Hope you are also looking forward to a winter with a full woodshed, a warm fire, and tasty food shared with good company.

The Emotional Process of Transition

Back in May, a colleague and I were talking about how we could revamp our courses to reflect our ecological and other global concerns.  I was reading like crazy, and was really taken by Carolyn Baker‘s approach–the need to mentor and guide people through the psychological and emotional shift that accompanies really dealing with the challenges to come.  It became my goal to design a course that would allow (mostly younger) students to face the realities of their potential futures, align their expectations, and get them thinking about how best to contribute to that future.  I recognized that this meant taking students on an emotional journey, and I’ve been working at structuring the course to do that in the months since.

Ironically, though, what I didn’t know was that I had only begun MY emotional journey with this transition!  Imagine thinking I could hold space for others to go through a process that I hadn’t been through myself! Hah!

As I’ve mentioned, I spent the larger part of the summer in despair and grief.  I have (I think!) grasped the scope and magnitude of what we’re facing.  I have recognized that there are no easy answers.  Climate change is running away from us very quickly, if we were ever in control.  Peak oil transitions are not being dealt with, and so are likely to be dramatic rather than gently mitigated.  The economy may stabilize, as it is now where I live, but even here the indications that we are in for radical transformations of our expectations and standards of living are many.  Everything looks very insecure, very tenuous, and very uncertain.  We are headed into unfamiliar territory, and I am scared.

My last post, about our financial situation, was written from that place of fear.  In the midst of all of the uncertainty, getting control of some aspects of our lives seemed imperative.  I spent weeks driving my husband crazy; every few HOURS I would state dramatically and with great doom:  “We HAVE to move.”  Followed by a few hours later, “We HAVE to stay.”  Followed a few hours later by, “Maybe we should sell everything and go live on a boat.  No wait–let’s buy an RV, park it on a small property and catch rainwater and compost EVERYTHING.  It’s our ONLY HOPE!”  He’s a patient man.

Now, many weeks back, John Michael Greer joined those who have suggested that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 Stages of Grief might resonate with our stages of emotional transition, both at the individual and potentially at the community level too.  These stages have been added to and tweaked over the decades, but her essential stages were Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

When I read about these stages in this context, I thought, well, I don’t remember being in Denial, but I can see where I’ve been in Anger and in Depression.  I knew that I wasn’t yet at Acceptance!  But after writing out all the scenarios and worrying about our finances and seeing no clear way out, I suddenly had an epiphany: I was Bargaining!

You see, in all of my fear about all of the uncertainty, and in the midst of grieving for the suffering that I could see happening now and coming down the (Enbridge) pipe(line), I could see Collapse-a-coming.  What was my response?  To bargain obsessively over the details of my life to try to keep OUR lives from collapsing while the changes rolled in.

It was SO helpful to see that that’s what I was doing.  I took a deep breath, and here’s what I was able to see on the other side of my fear.

• I cannot keep us from feeling the impact of the changes to come.  No matter how I fuss over the details, the whole point of the the collapse (and the reason for my fear) is that it is unpredictable and will affect every aspect of our lives.  We WILL adapt, one way or another, as we already are, trying to make the best decisions for ourselves at each crossroads.
• There are few, if any, winners in the current system.  A part of me DOES want it to collapse, as the system itself is the problem.  In my estimation, from the research that I’ve been doing, there is nothing to save the system: it’s broke, and it will be the cause of its own demise.  So given that, why on earth would I want to hold on to the parts of our lives that are a part of that system?!  My bargaining was only to try and grasp some stability, hold onto the familiar, no matter how ugly.
• It’s time–at an emotional level–to step into the changes, and stop fighting them.  I’m not suggesting we stop protesting politically or not try to change our communities to mitigate coming disasters.  But it’s also time to embrace the fact that things ARE changing, and, at one level, that’s what we need.

In my core beliefs, I believe that when I am experiencing great anxiety and turmoil, it’s because my mind hasn’t caught up with where the energy of the universe (or however you’d like to define it) is undeniably pulling me.  Right now, the one thing that’s clear is that the world is transforming.  So it’s time to let go of trying to hold on to anything; time to once again grapple with the Buddhist tenet that life is only impermanence, and that our attachment to the belief that there is anything else causes us great suffering.

Accepting that there is only change ahead, though, opens great emotional and mental space for me.  It distills what is truly important in life, and it’s not necessarily our home, our garden, our safety.  Millions today have been displaced by climate change, millions have left their homes, millions have died.  I may yet be one of those millions, and that will have to be ok.  That reality brings me back to my spiritual beliefs, and those are comforting.

Understanding that I am not special in the changes to come brings me the great peace of solidarity and compassion.  When all of society and culture is stripped away, we are simply left with each other.  And that’s often a richly meaningful place to be.  After all, I teach in my literature courses that one reason to read fiction and poetry from other times and places is that it demonstrates so vividly, so reassuringly, that others have passed through the great mysteries of life before us.  There is community and human connection to be had across history, as well as potential guidance.  I’ll be working on a new course: Literature for Transition.

The last space that is opening up for me as I stop holding on to my current life circumstances is the opportunity for vision.  There are myriad conversations going on right now about Adaptation.  Those are incredibly important, and I’ll be having them myself.  But Adaptation is the logical next step that is consistent with our current thinking, our current paradigms.  But those of us who have long dreamed of a different way of being in the world have been imagining a life outside of those paradigms entirely.  I’ve often dismissed my own such visions as lovely, but unrealistic and impractical;  or possible, but so far down the road as to be not even worth pursuing.

But here’s the thing.  Any vision of life and community that will replace what we have now can ONLY seem crazy, because it’s outside of all of the systems that keep us where we are.  But the systems that keep us where we are are collapsing and will not hold.  So we NEED visions of life that don’t relate to those old paradigms at all.  The realization of this paradox is liberating–it’s time to stop worrying whether “people” will think I’m a little odd, because anything that will seem “normal” is by definition unsustainable and doomed! 🙂

So where am I going?  Not somewhere too crazy, I don’t think.  Not somewhere totally detached from our human history.  Just back to understandings of life systems that have proven to be possible to sustain in an ecological system for millenia at a time.  And nowhere too specific as yet.  Somewhere deep in our human indigenous roots all over the world, where all of the earth is alive, where we are a part of the ever shape-shifting manifestations of Life.  Where Life speaks to us through the plants, through the animals, through the creation stories and Trickster tales of our archetypal mythologies.  Into old stories about mystery, that honour and uphold grief and despair as appropriate and desperately important emotions that take us into the deep self and spiritual knowledge of our interdependence.  And that lead to visions and guidance from places that we cannot see but know in our deepest levels of consciousness to be true.

I’m going off to talk to the trees.

(Note–I’m not actually GOING anywhere.  Don’t worry! 🙂 )

Resources:

In case anyone is interested, here are some of the readings I’m working my way through these days, and which are offering me lots to contemplate:

The Permaculture Handbook  This is a brilliant, practical guide to how to set up our lives in ways that will build resilience and be ecologically regenerative.  I’m a ways from a review, but I have found it deeply heartening so far.

Carolyn Baker’s work–I’ve been looking forward to diving into these for a couple of months now

Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul  A book about developing beyond our societies pathological adolescence into the wisdom of elderhood; a process that Plotkin argues can only be accomplished through relationship with Nature

David Abrahms, Joanna Macy, Thomas Berry and others working in the Deep Ecology movement

Sharon Astyk, Making Home is now out, hurray! (About learning to Adapt in Place)

“Waking Up Syndrome” Sarah Anne Edwards and Linda Buzzell.  A quick article with lots of resources by two therapists about the emotional stages that we cycle through as we grapple with our understanding of the changing world.

Post-Peak Living: Our Homestead Economics

As I read and pay attention to both the predictions about what post-peak like might look like over the coming decades and to what’s happening already, the one message that stands out is that it is time to get used to being poorer.

Under the pressures of extreme weather events and disruptions to normal weather patterns, increasing oil prices, and a no-growth/all-debt global economic system, two things seem guaranteed:  everything will cost more, and our wages will not keep pace with that inflation.

The truth is, this has been the case for a long time.  I’ve been working in public service for more than a decade, and I don’t remember the last time a normal, cost-of-living raise was negotiated in a collective agreement I’ve been a part of.  Purchasing power in our neck of the woods has been declining since the 1970s, despite the availability of more cheap stuff.  After all, perhaps the biggest change in purchasing power since the 1970s, the aspect that has kept our western economies afloat for all this time, is really the massive increase in credit available.  Remember how in the 1970s you needed 25% down to buy a house?  And there was no such thing as credit cards?

So the value of our income is going down.  Prices on everything are going up.  And we’re likely to continue in a global economy that is debt-ridden and has run out of ways to grow its way out of recession, which means public–government–spending will also continue to be scaled back, along with our support services.  It’s time to start embracing poverty.

So I’ve been considering the question as I assess the resilience of our lives: How do I want to be poor?  Poverty is usually associated with people who have few choices and live on the desperate edges of survival, and no doubt this will describe more and more of us as the years go by.  But as someone who spent MANY years as a university student working part-time, I know that poverty can also mean living simply but joyfully on not very much money.  At this moment, our household has options, and my goal is to use this time of relative luxury to set up systems that will allow us to live on a much smaller relative income with dignity and little sense of deprivation or despair.

In 15 years, the Skipper will be ready to retire–at least that’s the goal.  At that point, if the economy allows, I could still work at high-ish wages for another decade.  But during that transition, I would like to be as little dependent on working incomes as possible.  And if one or both of us loses a job or we have our incomes go down (or hyperinflation kicks in), it would be nice to be able to continue a reasonable life without ending up on the street.  So we want to start making the wider economy redundant to us, before it makes us redundant to it!

Taking a hard look at our home economics in this light, though, is sobering.  We have been on the “simple living” bandwagon for many years.  The old rhetorics about getting rich by cutting out lattes and investing in mutual funds definitely don’t apply to us!  We don’t “go shopping”, we brown bag it everyday, and we value quality over quantity.  No keeping up with the Joneses here!

But our situation is by no means secure.  We have some debt, and we have used credit to do some of our home and garden infrastructure improvements.  We have a mortgage on a 30 year amortization that I don’t want to take 30 years to pay off; the sooner we OWN land, the better.  I have a small student loan that I previously put in the category of “good” debt, but now don’t see that way.

If the essentials of life are food, shelter, and water (not necessarily in that order!), right now shelter is costing us a LOT.  The mortgage, property taxes, home maintenance, required insurance, and the electricity that runs our basic water and septic functions add up to the biggest chunk of our budget.  Other debt payments are another big chunk, if we include a vehicle, student loans, and credit cards (because we’re paying them aggressively).  We live at the halfway point between 2 small cities: Skipper commutes south, I commute north.  Commuting is environmentally toxic, but also expensive: gas, maintenance, insurance, and a vehicle payment also take a big bite out of our incomes.

Food is complicated.  On the one hand, eating out of the garden is WAY cheaper than buying all those fruits and vegetables (especially organically) at the supermarket.  The garden does save us some money, and I will continue to push toward growing all of our vegetables and most of our fruit for the year.  I do spend money, though, on seeds, organic bulk fertilizer ingredients, and in the last 2 years, building more raised beds.  We provide our own eggs and some chicken and crab/fish, but there are background costs to these as well–feed costs for instance are dramatically on the rise, and that’s before this year’s drought affects them.

There are still all kinds of food items that we will continue to need to buy: grains and dairy seem the most obvious.  I’ll definitely be doing some research about how to mitigate these costs.  We’re in the middle of the year’s provisioning, and I’ll be tracking the math more carefully than usual, and will share what I find.

Here’s the puzzle for us in a nutshell.  We’re getting by, and if all things were going to stay the same for the next 20-30 years, there would be no issue.  We’ve been playing by the popular culture’s economic rules, and by the normal account of things, we’re doing fine.  But if I look a little deeper, our security is more tenous.  We also have projects that we want to undertake to improve our resiliency–a new roof, hardwood flooring, wood storage, etc etc.  At the moment I’m not sure where the money for these things will come from.

My goal is to massively decrease our need for incomes over the next 15 years.  But given the major expenses that we have right now, we have to think hard about how to do that.

Here are the options I’m considering:

Plan A: We will be spending some time over the next few months paying close attention to our spending, to see just how we might be able to cut back on whatever luxuries we have.  There’s not a lot of fat to trim, but I’m sure there is some.  The sad part is, though, that some of those luxuries are ways in which we support important local economies.  For instance, instead of making our own bread, which would be cheaper, we buy it from our extraordinary local bakery.  Although we’ve made our bread often over the years, the bakery we support is investing in local grain production, which benefits our whole region.  So part of this exercise will be thinking through the security of our purchases.  The usual frugal rule of finding the “cheapest” option is a false frugality, because it *increases* dependence on the tenuous global supply chain.

Plan B: Depending on how much we’re able to refine our current spending habits, we may have to look at more radical changes to our lifestyle to free up the cash to pay off the debts, own land, and have a system set up on our land to support a less cash-dependent lifestyle down the road.  Here’s where things get tricky.

We can try to decrease our mortgage.  The real estate trade-offs that affect price are the condition of the house, the size of the house, the size of the property, and the location.  To decrease our mortgage substantially, I’m willing to decrease the size of the house and property, but those two have to remain practical for reasonable food production, processing and storage.  Changing location may be an option, but moving closer to town, where prices are cheaper, also means higher property taxes and more rules–chickens aren’t yet permitted in town, for instance.  Skipper is a carpenter, and in theory fixing up a cheaper house is an option.  But we’d have to make sure that the costs of renovating and retrofitting don’t outweigh the savings in the mortgage.

I’ve considered even more radical options: selling the house, paying off the debts, saving the rest and moving on to a boat or into a trailer for a few years to build up some cash reserves before re-entering the housing market.  But these mean that we lose our capacity for food production, at least in the short term.

Another option is to try to cut down the cost of our commutes.  We’re making some choices about this already; we’ve decided not to replace my fuel-efficent beater, which we think will still keep going for another few years with some money put into maintenance.  It also looks like down the road I might have an opportunity to work closer to home (or more from home), and I’ll focus on that in my project decisions.  If we’re looking at the 15 year mark, and Skipper retiring, then that also takes care of a commute.  However, depending on where gas prices go, we could also consider making a more radical decision to move closer to one job and have the other person find a job in that community.  We both have very good reasons to hold on to the jobs we have, though!

Moving has the potential to make our lives more financially secure, and may prove to be the best option as time goes on.  But it has some big downsides too.  We’re in a house now that needs little retro-fitting.  We’ve replaced almost all of the appliances and toilets with efficient, low-water ones.  We have done a lot of work to the garden to get it producing well, and there’s lots more we could do.  And we’re in a community that has a lot to offer, including the kind of barter and exchange that is so necessary to replace the dependence on outsourcing-for-money.

Plan C:  Plan C is to continue as we are, doing our best, and using short-term credit as necessary.  Then, if things really do get difficult, we consider renting out a room, taking on extra work, etc to make up the difference.  This goes against my pro-active nature and my gut response to the stories on the news every day, but it is a totally valid option which many will pursue out of necessity.

Those are some of the tough decisions that post-peak life has us considering.  How about you?

Surviving the Age of Transition

Yesterday’s top news stories:

In Eastern British Columbia, a toxic mining tailings pond threatens to spill its waste in a small community, potentially contaminating everything in its path including rivers and drinking water.  The cause? Record rains straining the dam.

Extreme heat..well, you know..everywhere (except the PNW), and still almost 100,000 without power almost a week after an extreme weather event on the East coast.  And, of course, forest fires burning up Colorado and neighbouring states.

In BC and Washington, the shellfish industry is scrambling.  Ocean acidification means that shellfish hatcheries’ seed stock cannot form shells.  They are now rearing the seed stock in places like Hawaii, where, for the moment, the acid levels are still tolerable.  The companies then ship the young shellfish back to grow in local waters when they are older and can tolerate the conditions.  The commercial industry is adapting.  Unfortunately, wild stocks don’t have that option.  Mussel beds are not reproducing.

Ocean acidification happens because the oceans absorb 30% of our atmospheric carbon.  Unfortunately, the acidification that we’re experiencing now is from C02 absorbed 30-40 years ago.  So even if there was no atmospheric carbon left to absorb, we still have 30-40 years worth of absorbed carbon on its way.  Goodbye marine food.

The global economy is still flailing 4 years after the major collapse in 2008.  No sign of recovery in sight.  Canada was one of the least affected nations in the world, and we are an energy exporter.  But in this global economic climate, the best we’re seeing is flat “growth.”  Guess what one of the major causes of the meltdown was?  According to the Wall Street Journal, the 2008 spike in oil prices may have been the tipping point.

…To recap: massive species die-off, extreme weather events straining our infrastructure, rising cost of living and flat wages, long economic recessions (when does this qualify as a Depression?)…

Umm, folks?  All those scary scif-fi-like predictions of a world affected by peak oil and climate change?  We’re already living it.  And there’s a concensus building that the tipping points that scientists have spent the last decades warning us about are now visible in the rear-view mirror.

I know I haven’t been posting much over the last few months, and this is one of the reasons why.  I’ve been immersed in the latest research into Peak Oil and climate change in preparation for a course I’ll be teaching in the fall, and the conclusions I’m coming to are leaving me in a thinly veiled panic.  In a nutshell?  We’re screwed, and it’s time to start thinking about how we’re going to survive.

Now, I am not a survivalist.  I am a skeptical academic who is suspicious of fear mongering and who has a sunny, optimistic personality.  And part of what is troubling me right now is just how difficult it is to predict the future.  There are experts out there warning us about the apocalyptic collapse of civilization, and there are others who take the long view of history and suggest a slow, grinding, decline is more likely.  After all, as John Michael Greer points out, after suffering two devastating world wars and a great depression, Europe still did not collapse entirely.

However.

We are looking ahead to a very different future.  Every country in the world is holding massive debt, which in theory falls on its taxpayers to repay.  Money that used to be in government trust has been funneled into and centralized in corporations, and is therefore unavailable.  Each extreme weather event that requires massive emergency funding sucks money out of the public coffers, and thus out of the rest of the economy.  With oil prices staying high (even allowing for modest fluctuation), rebuilding and maintaining our infrastructure gets harder and harder.  Food production is threatened by the double whammy of extreme and unpredictable weather coupled with high fuel costs that impact the cost of fertilizers, pesticides, running farm equipment, and distribution.  The cost of every consumer good continues to rise with the rising costs of production.

In the meantime, at the community level, my provincial government has started to sue its local municipalities to try to recoup healthcare costs.  Umm, fighting over scraps anyone?  I used to look to the natural landscape and systems to help supplement my attempts at self-sufficiency–hunting and fishing–to provide the protein that my small homestead cannot produce.  But those natural support systems–if the ocean acidification example is any indication–can not be counted on for much longer.

The burning question for me at the moment is: how long do we have?  And of course, that’s an impossible question to answer.  Way too many variables.  And this makes planning and preparing and adapting tough.

Right now, in this moment, everything is great.  Skipper and I have good jobs, we can afford our mortgage even if costs increase or wages go down in moderation.  The garden is in full swing, and happy, adorable chicks are racing around exclaiming over every new leaf they find.  We and our families are healthy, and our network of wonderful friends continues to grow.  I count our blessings every day.

But I’m looking around our homestead and lifestyle with fresh eyes.  If the economy (globally and locally) continues to shrink and prioritize, we will need to become increasingly self-reliant.  Right now, all of our water and septic needs require electricity.  Rain catchment is moving up the list of priorities, as is the “pizza” oven, which I initially considered a luxury.  But wood-fired ovens need small, hot fires from small brush, of which we have lots from our prunings.

I’m going to be experimenting with dehydrating in the greenhouse, which is otherwise too hot and dry to use in the height of summer.  Dehydrating is less power intensive than freezing or even canning, although I’ll still do that too.  I’ll be working at building my capacity to keep us in food year-round, but I won’t be investing in grow-lights.  As one friend put it: you can replace heat cables.  You can’t create light without power.  A small solar panel won’t power even a cfl grow-light at this point (and covering the greenhouse roof with solar panels defeats the purpose! 🙂 ).  But YMMV–depends what happens to our sunshine over the years to come.

Oh and permaculture?  I’ve been reading and admiring for a few years, integrating a technique here and there.  But I’ve been stuck in the idea that there’s little that’s “natural” about permaculture–you’re basically trying to imitate a natural system with imported plants in order to create something productive for humans.  But now I get it–permaculture is essential, and I will be picking up the new Garden Farming for Town and Country asap.  Because although working WITH natural systems is the only way to be productive without oil, climate change means that the ecosystems that we’re used to integrating into will be changing dramaticallly.  So we need to work with more resilient perennials, maximizing diversity, and creating food systems (even basic ones with annuals to supplement) that require few if any inputs in the future, when it counts.  In the long term, we will need to go back to living off the surplus of the land, but the land as it is is too degraded to support us.  Permaculture is the way to rebuild that support system.

I’m also reflecting on our chickens.  Our flock is very productive and useful; they will stay.  But the backyard chickens movement has really focused on dual-purpose birds, and I’m starting to question that.  Dual-purpose birds are calm, don’t fly much, and produce both eggs and meat.  Awesome!  But they were really bred for the integrated farm, to live off the farm wastes and surpluses, like grains.  They could also often forage over the whole farm property, which could provide lots of food.  Neither of these scenarios describes our situation.

The vegan argument around livestock has long revolved around the feed conversion ratio: even the most hybridized birds eat 2 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of meat, which is a waste of grain that could be feeding people directly.  Now there are lots of reasons why this is not a useful argument, but the core principle remains: if grain prices continue to rise and my forage space is limited, are dual-purpose chickens the right livestock for us?  I will be investigating the Mediterranean breeds and the Euskal Oiloa to see if the more traditional third-world backyard bird–the scrawny egg producer that needs much less feed–is a more viable option.

Over the coming months, I’ll be considering every aspect of our lifestyles for their resiliency, and I’m prepared to make some radical changes if necessary.  After all, our family has a window in which to get better prepared, and I want to make the most of it.