Going Local

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Tiny Energies

by Mary and Todd Logan

Anchorage in general is in a sulk. Three or nine inches of snow fell yesterday and today, depending on where you live in the Anchorage bowl. This snowfall gives Anchorage a new record for the longest snow season on record, 232 days long. Bike to Work Day on Friday was rainy and then snowy. Gardeners are frustrated, and even the skiers are tired of winter. We seem to be experiencing a cooling trend for Alaska due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and changes in the winter ice patterns–more in the Bering Sea and less in the Arctic. Alex DeMarban at Alaska Dispatch summarizes the study:

BTW Day Anchorage AK May 17, 2013 photo by Loren Holmes

“The state’s overall temperature dipped 2.4 degrees during the first decade of the new century, a notable shift from the previous 100 years, which had generally trended warmer, according to a study published last summer by the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The authors suggested that growing winter ice in the Bering Sea — the result of cooler surface temperatures — led to lower temperatures across nearly all of Alaska. Meanwhile, thinning ice in the Arctic Ocean led to warming in one slice of the state: the North Slope atop Alaska. Those trends are continuing, according to follow-up papers released by Wendler, Blake Moore and Kevin Galloway” (DeMarban, 2013).

Arctic Entries

An earlier post on community storytelling described Arctic Entries, a storytelling organization which is not only still going strong, but is now dealing with capacity issues. Arctic Entries has expanded this month yet again to Anchorage’s Performing Arts Center, and it still sold out in less than two hours with new online ticket sales. Todd even told a story this month, about an outing that “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Here are some recent 7-minute audio files from Arctic Entries, beginning with Saskia Esslinger’s permaculture talk on Eating Local in Alaska.

And here is Bree Kessler, who is pursuing a degree in environmental psychology, talking about going really local, in Bettles, Alaska, in I’m an Urbanist.

Here is Kyle Stevens on the adventures of just doing your job in Living the Dream is Chasing the Dream.

And Angela Gonzales on Growing Up in Fish Camp.

And SJ Klein on Building a House is a Neighborhood Affair.

We had a lot of trees fall in several sequential storms last fall. Here’s Todd storing wood for future winters.

Our chickens suffered through the long winter we’ve just had, henpecking each others’ feathers in a neurotic attempt to deal with their frustrations. Here’s Todd, or should I say Chicken Van Gogh, painting their rumps so that they’ll stop.

Growing things

Our vegetable garden and greenhouse are evolving. This is year number two for our greenhouse. Lesson learned from year one–don’t over-plant! We warmed up the greenhouse to 50F mid-March, put in lettuce starts, and began enjoying nightly fresh salads on April 25. In mid-April we set the thermostat to 60 degrees and added tomato plants, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and egg-plant. All are doing well. This year we are especially grateful for the greenhouse, and I’ve noticed many hits on the website from Alaskans and Canadians curious about how to build one.

Here in Anchorage our average “last frost” date is May 4, and our “safe planting” date – when there is a 90 percent chance of no more frosts – is May 15. Traditional knowledge dictates waiting until Memorial Day. And here we sit on May 19 with 3″ of snow on the ground and a temperature of 26F. Fortunately, this cold snap and snow was forecast a week ago, so the garden was not planted last week as originally planned. Next week we should be good to go.

Alaskan garden pest

While we haven’t planted the garden yet, we have gotten it ready. This began by shoveling and snow-blowing 18″ of snow off of the raised beds and big garden (1200 sq. ft) on April 22 so that the sun could start thawing the soil. The anti-moose electric fence had to be restrung. Last fall a young bull moose apparently discovered that he could break the wires with his antlers and not get shocked. He and a friend browsed garden residue repeatedly late fall.

This will be year number three for our main garden, and we are transitioning from full-till to minimum-till. We rented a tiller and deeply tilled our raw rocky/sandy/clay soil the first two years to loosen it up, remove rocks, and add organic material and nutrients. A soil test last fall was quite revealing. We had achieved a good pH balance, good organic matter content, and best levels of phosphorous and potassium. We now lack only nitrogen for good growing. Previous seasons we fertilized with locally produced fish bone meal (5-6-1) and then added ash from the wood furnace for potassium. This year we just hand tilled in some blood meal (12-0-0) and we should now be good to go. Minimum till reduces disturbance of the amazing ecosystem of healthy soil. We will rotate crops from last year’s locations, though it will be less than perfect in that so much of what we grow are Brassica (cabbage family) – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, and turnips.

Anchorage summers, at least at times, can be sunny and warm. Gardens do need some watering. In years past we’ve put our garden sprinklers on a timer. This works great when it’s sunny and warm, but you over water if you are not around and cool, cloudy rainy weather settles in. Over watering has many downsides: it leaches away nutrients, it encourages one of our few garden pests – slugs, it wastes energy, and it slows growth by chilling both plants and soil (our well water is 42F). So as a pre-gardening season project, Todd assembled a more sophisticated timer system that includes a wireless moisture sensor. With this new set-up, we’ll set the timer for warm-sunny conditions. A moisture sensor, with probes in the garden soil, measures moisture and cancels scheduled watering when moisture is good. We expect this will be a better watering system. Time will tell.

Adding and removing complexity

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Tiny Energies

By Mary Logan

An article on the difficulty of building truly green buildings and recent discussions about the healthcare system triggered thoughts about a major transition problem that is occurring over and over again—the problem of a complex hierarchy that demands feeding with extra energy. Previous posts about the added complexity that digitization brings are pertinent here, but this post is about the general problem of how we respond to limits by adding complexity, and what it might take to remove complexity at the top of the hierarchy without collapse.

Green buildings within a growth economy

The article that triggered this post was Mehaffy and Salingaros’ article on why green often isn’t and their observation that attempts to build green often results in energy and material-wasting buildings for several reasons. The authors ask, “What’s going on? How can the desire to increase sustainability actually result in its opposite?” First, green components are “bolted-on” to existing wasteful 21^st century structures, resulting in even more energy and material use. Second, the buildings exist within a larger system, with goals and rules that they are subject to. Those rules are part of the feedback that promotes the goals of the existing system. The main goal in the US system is promotion of growth and profit for existing powerful players. Codes and existing contractors make new ways of thinking and doing difficult in many ways. This goal of profit is inescapable, so any building must first address the existing profit incentive of powerful players. The authors appropriately blame the unsustainable nature of high density fossil fuel-designed buildings operating:

“. . . almost entirely within the industrial assumptions and engineering methodologies of the ‘oil interval’. . . . The eye-catching novelties of one era will become the abandoned eyesores of the next, an inevitability lost on a self-absorbed elite fixated on today’s fashions. Meanwhile the humble, humane criteria of resilient design are being pushed aside, in the rush to embrace the most attention-getting new technological approaches — which then produce a disastrous wave of unintended failures. This is clearly no way to prepare for a ‘sustainable’ future in any sense” (Mehaffy & Salingaros, April 2013).

Instead what is needed is buildings at a lower level of hierarchy, buildings that do not rely on consistent electricity, water plumbed from hundreds of miles away, and density that can only be supported with an energy basis of high quality fossil fuels. Once fossil fuels become expensive or unavailable, we will need a different form of construction, that is supported instead by passive, renewable energies and local materials, with less density to allow for human-powered transport needs.

Both major principles of transformity and autocatalysis are in play here. In many parts of the economy, as energy inputs plateau and start to recede, bureaucratic responses to energy scarcity and resulting economic problems are to add complexity rather than remove it. People do not see the added cumulative energy and materials that are required to sustain what is already there, and then to add even more technology. This is the principle of transformity–adding complexity on top of what is already there requires more energy and materials through transformations. The only way to cut the inputs is to move back down the hierarchy in design to a more ecological approach that works with nature instead of fighting nature through added technology. But backing down the hierarchy is difficult, because of autocatalysis, or the positive feedback loops that feed the complexity, which are solidly in place. In Mehaffy and Salingaros’ example of green building above, the idea of components being bolted on is an example of the principle of transformity, while the inability to run outside of the rules of the construction system is an example of how autocatalysis sometimes traps us into systems that respond poorly to the need to change, resulting in overshoot.

Wasserman, 3-13, in ADN.com, 3-25

The players that are now attached to the system and making a profit demand and protect the system as it is. The financial system at this point acts as a voracious funnel to continue to funnel profits upwards towards profit. As the financial power at the top expands, it promotes further inequities and further resistance to change. So any change must come by adding added complexity, rather than removing rigid, powerful vested interests such as insurance companies, corporations, the legal system, and so on. The policy arena becomes resistant, and then atherosclerotic. Finally it ruptures. The choice is to try to create local experiments or demonstration projects in some of these more fossilized profit-centers in anticipation of failure of the system, or just wait until it collapses and begin again. Waiting for collapse doesn’t seem to be an ideal solution, so how do we approach doing things differently?

Healthcare’s death grip on the current system

http://www.gilbert-garcin.com L’ obstination

The healthcare system is another example of unsustainability and resistance to change. Our western healthcare subsystem is part of the economy at the very top of the hierarchy, with many transformations required to build its complexity. Because of the strong profit incentives, creating change by backing down from complexity is difficult. Attempts to limit extreme over-treatment such as intensive care at the end of life are hard to avoid, due to embedded ethical and legal rules and the systemic goals that drive diagnostics and treatment. Basic preventive care and health promotion are basic assumptions of a functional complex, high-energy economy, while the emphasis in healthcare has shifted to extreme, life-prolonging treatments for covered or wealthy clients, with inadequate care for the uninsured or inadequately insured. Those assumptions of basic health provision, including clean food and water, adequate plumbing, healthy immunity within the population, and other assumptions are being hollowed out as populations grow, energy inputs wane, and health maintenance of the population diminishes. Much like the construction example above, healthcare’s existence at the top of a hierarchy but still operating within the current oil-interval makes it almost immune to change. Medical ethics advocate maximum testing and treatment, while the legal system solidifies the status quo, and the insurance system promotes whatever increases its own profits—more insured people getting inappropriate, excess, expensive care that allows skimming. Physicians and well-paid healthcare managers have expensive debt such as large home mortgages to pay, which requires maintenance of the status quo. This autocatalysis promotes perpetuation of the system, even when everyone agrees that the system is broken.

Attempts to change the system result in incremental changes that do not disturb the status quo, for the most part. Powerful insurance companies that skim profit from the beginning of the money pipeline are allowed to stay and to set prices–they are even promoted through laws that mandate that everyone must pay these private, wealthy companies. The rest of the healthcare system must struggle with the leftovers after profits are skimmed, with hospitals and consumers getting the dregs. As long as the financial system stays afloat, the insurance companies will keep their grip on the system, with prices for consumers and other weak players becoming higher or even out of reach.

What might green healthcare look like?

Any new experiments in descent will have to arise organically out of descent, either through local collapses in the healthcare and/or economic system (Fuchs, 2010). Attempts to begin something new in healthcare outside of the insurance and legal systems will not work. The financial system at this point acts as a voracious funnel to continue to funnel profits upwards towards profit. So how do we remove the profit motive and dodge the corporatocracy, abandoning the premise that more is better that has fostered our careers, forming the basis for our society?

I’ve highlighted construction and healthcare here, but other subsystems of the economy are similarly entrenched in the goals of a high-energy growth economy. Education is increasingly relying on technology, expansion of bureaucracy and testing, and encroachment of the profit-motive. Government relies increasingly on corporations and other organizations that promote profits for one group of lobbyists or another. Everyone promotes digitization as a solution for problems, at a time when consistent operation of electronic information systems is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up.

So barring collapse, how do we work outside the current system to develop demonstration projects for buildings, for healthcare, for renewable energy, and other sustainability goals? I think we have to answer that question first, to change some of the really rigid profit-making systems in capitalist society such as government, education, and healthcare. If we’re not going to wait until everything collapses before we pick up the pieces, how do we describe and carry out a demonstration project such as a health care clinic that operates outside the limits and constraints of America’s extreme healthcare system, that are not subject to the rules and ethics of the current system? Perhaps the first step is to imagine it. Individuals are circumventing building codes and creating small houses out of sustainable materials. But healthcare seems trapped within the larger system. If I want less healthcare, or ecologically oriented healthcare, I have to abandon the system for the most part.

What would a healthcare system that really promoted Health Care instead of Sick Cure look like? We have forgotten what those words mean. A Health Care system would have to be divorced from the insurance payment system, and the emphasis would need to be on prevention. A bioethicist and environmental medicine expert would be needed, and there would need to be some way to bypass and make toothless the current emphasis on high-tech cure and end-of-life treatments. Basic preventive care and health promotion could be provided for all at low-cost, with tertiary or extreme cures only available elsewhere through referral, for more cost (if people can pay). Health promotion would need to include assessment of food relocalization, measures of resilience such as community/social supports, general stress levels, transportation, food security, and other basic needs, all weighed against higher order needs. Tools could be devised, people could be counseled, those at the end of life could be encouraged to weigh quality of life against extreme measures, and so on. Geriatric patients could be assessed for polypharmacy, social isolation, and other problems of aging and our high-tech culture. Children could be assessed for nature deficit, computer addiction, over-treatment for medicalized diagnoses such as attention deficit disorder and other disorders of modern life. Home assessments of water and food purity would be available. Families could be examined as systems, and extended families could be encouraged. Classes on financial frugality, growing your own food, eating lower on the food chain, and so on could be a part of the clinic. Some of these ideas are portrayed in the book, God’s Hotel, by Victoria Sweet, if you’re interested in reading more about this.

At the end of empire, the economic system at large has a death grip on profit-making subsystems, preventing the radical change that is needed. How do we begin to imagine what is really needed, rather than proposed incremental changes that only add to complexity and hasten collapse? Any ideas?

Header: In the Talkeetnas, by Toby Schwörer

Starting down: seven deadly sins

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Tiny Energies

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.” ― T.S. Eliot

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”― Mahatma Gandhi

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”― John Locke

“I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.”― George Eliot

By Mary Logan

For those of us who live in countries where we use many fossil fuels, we have been shielded from the consequences of living badly. But that age is ending. Now that the Mayan Baktun 13 calendar has passed, we begin the era of the Gaian calendar. We “will eventually have to reduce either our populations or our living standards (emergy use) by 80 to 90 percent” (Odum & Odum, 2001, p. 170). And as the years go by, adaptation will become harder and harder, as the surplus energy available for the tasks wanes. There are policies for a prosperous way down, but I know that when I mention the word policy to my students, their eyes glaze over. Since we are approaching the new year and a new era, I will approach the idea of personal action by framing actions in the form of Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Sins. Our capitalist culture values growth and wealth above all. It is time to reset our values as we start down in descent. This is a challenge to those of you who are still sitting on your hands when it comes to sustainable, local living. What are you waiting for? Consider Gandhi’s 7 Sins; how many of these are you guilty of, and how can your form personal resolutions that reframe these sins in descent?

Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Science without Humanity
Knowledge without Character
Politics without Principle
Commerce without Morality
Worship without Sacrifice

Take stock of your situation, and try some of these potential New Years resolutions on for size.

Wealth without work

A future with less energy will mean less opulent wealth and waste, and less disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Egregious displays of wealth and income disparity will disappear as more people fall out of the middle class. There will be less support in society for wealth without work that contributes to the community prosperity. Fascination with stock markets, ostentatious houses, cars, and other expensive status symbols will wane. If you now depend on a high income to service extensive debt, you might consider paying off the debt, avoid incurring more debt, and accustoming yourself to a lower level of income. We can assume that taxes will be higher in the future, and the pursuit of wealth may be replaced by societal goals that are more in keeping with a society in descent. If you are working in the financial or insurance industry, consider whether a career change to a local, sustainable business would help you and your community. Is what you do a useful service to the communities of the future?

lotofworkforlunch

Are your expectations based on the idea that business will go ahead as usual? If you are counting on a corporate (or other) pension in the long run, don’t. Don’t count on forms of insurance such as long-term care or life insurance, as most insurance companies assets are heavily invested in derivatives. Start building a buffer of savings so that you could support yourself without working for a while. This is the year to get out of debt, get your financial house in order, and get used to living more frugally on a smaller income.

How we store wealth will need to change in descent. At some point there will probably be a sharp devaluation of our currencies, if history is a guide. What would happen if you woke up one morning and your savings were suddenly worth half of what they were the night before? Consider what is real wealth in a future with less fossil fuels.

Pleasure without Conscience

lifeproudof Sometimes what is easy in the short-term can be bad for us over the longer term. Is your decision-making based on short-term thinking? Just because what you are doing now works does not mean that it will work in the future as descent becomes sharper. There will be less debt-based commerce in the future, as current systems of financing begin to fail. If you are a student incurring large amounts of student loan debt in an expensive university, consider whether the degree that you are getting will prepare you for the jobs of the future. In many cases, the largest, most prestigious universities are being captured by the Corporation. Much of the thinking that is going on in these schools is group-think, oriented towards promoting growth in one form or another. Consider that you may be able to get more unique views and a cheaper education with less debt through smaller, local universities.

Science without Humanity

If you’re a scientist, consider the problems that you are working on. Are you asking the questions that we need to answer to adapt? Or has your focus narrowed to the questions that are suitable to a global economy bent on resource extraction for maximum growth? Examples of scientists caught in the profit machine are nuclear engineers who pitch nuclear power plants as the future. Or nanotechnology. Or GMO foods. If we can make a mlkreasonbutnomorals buck, get a grant, or write a paper out of the advancement of technology, then by golly, we’re going to do it. Are you a cog in the wheel that keeps churning to produce growth? Are scientists allowed to profess (or even have) values? If so, what are yours? What happens when science becomes valueless? Are you a pawn of the corporation?

Knowledge without character

Our future will have less high-tech rescue health care, and health care will be very expensive. Take care of yourself. Begin by getting yourself and your close relationships in shape. If there was an oil shock, could you ride a bike to work and to a market? Would you have enough gear and food/water to camp out in your house if the power went out, shipments stopped, or there was an epidemic, and could you stay warm enough or cool enough?

Pollution from various sources will add to the weakening of both personal and overall population immunity. Personal health may become more tenuous at the same time that the healthcare system begins to fail. In a crisis, our healthcare system would be quickly overwhelmed. Drug shortages are already occurring, and pharmaceutical companies are showing signs of strain. If you are dependent on sleeping pills, pain medications, or other unnecessary medications that create drug tolerance or addiction, wean yourself from them. Don’t count on the healthcare system in a crisis; it would be overwhelmed quickly.

Do you know how to grow some basic vegetables to subsidize your pantry, if imported food becomes untrustworthy or unavailable? Those days are coming, and the plantsIhatethem learning curve on growing food and the process of enriching your soil take time. We have forsaken the natural energies of nature in favor of potatoes made of oil. In a future with less energy, we need to rediscover nature’s renewable energies at a personal level. Begin thinking about the energy that goes into everything we use. Is the emergy basis of your food, or your job, or your doctor’s office based on renewable energies or unsustainable, vulnerable non-renewables? Consider your personal emergy signature, and decide where you can move the bars in the graphs below back towards the left in your community’s processes.

Brown & Ulgiati, 2009 oil-based Corn vs Mangrove Emergy signature

S. Ulgiati, M.T. Brown / Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation 14 (2009) 317. Emergy signatures mangroves vs. corn

pessimistrealist Are your family relationships working? If not, fix them. If you put dysfunctional relationships under more stressors, then the family system begins to rattle apart. Are you relying on future air travel to connect with extended family? Consider that air travel may become more restricted, through cost, contraction of the industry, travel restrictions, and other turmoil. Position yourself so that your extended family is accessible or otherwise provided for. And if you expect your long-term care insurance (or nursing homes, for that matter) to be there as you age, don’t count on that either. Long term care insurance is a waste of money; insurance is an artifact of 20th century growth economies.

Politics without Principle

How about your local relationships? Have you let the mainstream media (MSM) define your sense of community by telling you who to talk to in your community? Or does your community transcend politics, religion, race, and so on? If there is a crisis, your survival may depend on community cohesiveness, and cohesion depends on the ability to transcend ginned up ideological barriers that are whipped up by the MSM. Diversity is useful in community—if all of your friends are TV watching pencil-pushers without useful skills, consider that you might want to diversify a little. Fossil fuels have replaced our cohesive community bonds, since we can buy goods shipped from China instead of depending on others locally. We had a large solstice party this year, and efforts to reach across ideological lines resulted in a warm, friendly gathering, with many thoughts and some poetry shared around the fire pit.

keepcalm Consider how reliant you are on the government. Increasingly, we will be routinely more reliant on government, and the government will have less ability to come to our aid in a crisis. There are just too many people for that. Are you dependent on the television for entertainment and news? Find some community-based forms of entertainment, and consider whether there are other, more active ways to gather information. If there are reference books that you consider essential to a lower-energy lifestyle, buy them in book format. Leave the digital library for literature that you don’t need to keep long-term.

Commerce without Morality

karma Although it seems to be a common mechanism for Americans coping with stress, now is not the time to go out and buy a new car if you can avoid it. Consuming more is not the answer in a contracting economy. If you’re going to buy new transportation that prepares you for a lower-energy world, buy a bike. Having said that, we just did buy a new car. Ironically, our 15-year-old Subaru died this week, and we had to go and get a new one (used Subarus are hard to come by up here). This particular vehicle is made in Oto Gunma, Japan. I checked fallout charts against the map, and then checked the car with a geiger counter. The car is slightly hot–5 to 10 counts per minute over background in our garage. This is our future. Will contamination be one of the factors that pushes people towards relocalization through distrust of products from afar?

What about personal skills? Are you reliant on others for basic needs and repairs? Our complex, advanced society relies on many specialized, paid relationships to provide our basic needs. Consider how dependent you are on others for essential needs, and consider whether you want to add some fix-it skills to your repertoire.

Adaptation at this point becomes a matter of good sense rather than a belief system or world view. It is clear that economic hard times are upon us. Even if we expect that things will get better, doesn’t it make sense to prepare as though things might get worse? Adaptation also becomes the right thing to do, especially since there will be 7 billion of us trying to squeeze through a narrow aperture into descent. As time goes on, making changes will become harder as resources become less available. Get your wood stove now, before you end up in a two-year queue to get one, or you can’t afford it anymore, or there are restrictions, laws, or codes that prevent you from doing what you want to do with it. The future will be more restricted, and less free.

Worship without Sacrifice

takewhatyouneed Our capitalist society no longer values frugality, efficiency, restraint, moderation, respect, or many other traditional values. The first step in retrieving these values essential to a lower-energy society is to begin translating our thoughts into actions. If you’re still here reading, and not doing anything about descent, consider why you cannot translate thoughts into action. Examine your barriers to action and how to overcome them. Using less, living simply and locally–it’s the right thing to do.

Header: Time lapse sun as seen from UAF campus on solstice, photo by Todd Paris, UAF Marketing and Communications.

Make Me!

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Tiny Energies

By Todd Logan

No, that’s not the cry of a spoiled child. It’s food, calling to you!

Anyone can grow, gather, or make a lot of their own food. We do it on four fronts – we garden, we catch a lot of fish, we raise chickens, and we make some of our favorite foods from scratch. What have we learned along the way?

We just wrapped up a very successful second season of our big garden – over 1,200 ft². We also have three raised bed gardens from our early years. Successful vegetable gardening isn’t hard, but you do have to pay attention to your climate. Which vegetables can survive your weather? We need to provide good soil, sunshine, and nutrients. We planted a good diversity of vegetables this year – beans (green), beets, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, collards, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, onions, parsnips, potatoes, radishes, rutabaga, snap peas, spinach, summer squash, Swiss chard, turnips, and zucchini. We feasted from our garden all summer and fall. As the snow is about to fly, we have a 13 cubic foot freezer full of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, snap peas and squash. In our root cellar – our cool damp garage – are burlap bags of potatoes and buckets of carrots, parsnips, and rutabagas packed in damp wood shavings.

http://victorygardenoftom orrow.com/posters.html

Of all our plantings, only green beans were a bust. Germination failure. I don’t know why. I thought the brussels sprouts would be bust #2. We had lots of leaves, but only pea-sized sprouts. But I’ve delayed garden cleanup, and we’ve had a warmer than normal October. Some of the sprouts are now marble sized, so it looks like we are probably going to get a few! I say probably only because I want to let them go a little longer, but that has some risks. Last week a young bull moose apparently learned that he could take out our two strands of electric fence wire with his newly grown antlers and not get shocked. At least he helped a little with the garden cleanup. But he left no fertilizer. We put our young chickens out in the garden after harvest to turn the soil and provide some fertilizer; they’re good soil managers. As Mather’s chickens say, “Sometimes the good stuff is buried where you can’t see it.”

With two growing seasons now under our belts, we also now have some feel for how we should alter quantities to be planted next year. We probably overachieved in the turnip/rutabaga department, and maybe also with 85 pounds of potatoes! We’ll see how we feel about them in the spring after countless meals this winter. We will definitely plant more snap peas, collards, and other greens that freeze well next year. Probably more broccoli, but of all the things we grew, broccoli seems to have the most plant for the least harvest.

Vegetables need the sun. When we decided to greatly expand our garden, we faced a dilemma. Our lot is 90 percent undisturbed forest and we love the trees. The solution: garden the open ten percent, even if that ten percent happens to be the front yard. So much to the dismay of one of our neighbors, our street-side front yard is a vegetable garden. We think it’s quite pretty. Maybe all those folks we see slowly drive by our house all summer think so too.

Our native soil is a challenge. It’s a cold mineral sandy-clay mix. Our goal is to get to no-till gardening, but we’re not there yet. For the past two years we’ve tilled in many cubic yards of local organic compost, composted cow manure, and partly composed leaf mulch just before planting. Each year the soil seems richer and lighter. We plant seeds or starts in hoed up single-row raised beds. It improves soil warming. We leave the soil bare for the first few weeks after planting to maximize solar heat gain. But once the weeds start to appear, we weed well once and then apply a 1” layer of leaf mulch. This mulch is ground up birch leaves that we collect from our neighbors each fall. Some of them think we’re crazy, taking their trash. But this finely ground leaf mulch holds moisture, greatly reduces weeds, and eventually adds both nutrients and organic mater to our mineral soils. Some people swear by plastic for soil warming, moisture retention, and weed control. We can’t do it. We’ll stick with the brown gold.

I know several other successful organic gardeners, and they generally agree that successful vegetable gardening, year after year, requires greater nutrient inputs than that gained by just adding organic materials to your soils. You can find organic fertilizers at both big box and local garden stores. This season we found a great source of local organic fertilizer – fish bone meal made from salmon fish waste. While it can’t be certified as organic (who knows where those salmon have been…), it’s a rich, if fragrant, 5-5-1 fertilizer. To bump up the potassium, we supplement it with ashes from our wood stove. Our plants seemed to thrive this summer despite it being unfairly cloudy, cool, and wet. We just ordered a soil test so we can fine-tune our fertility management next year.

A good gardener blends tried-and-true with things anew. Already the subject of an earlier post, we put up a greenhouse last year to extend our growing season. We had some big successes – like fresh lettuce and other greens in May. However, mid-summer we switched to tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. All produced, but none at the levels we would have hoped or expected. We’ll try doing things differently next year. Two other fun experiments were the potato barrel and growing lettuce and other greens under LED lights. The jury is still somewhat out on both of these experiments.

Feeding oneself isn’t just about growing or catching one’s food. You can also eat better, with few if any pesticides or preservatives, by making some of your basic foods from raw ingredients. During the last year or two, we’ve made some real strides in this area. We make almost all of our own bread. And yes, I often cheat with a bread machine. Mary is more of a purist. Stating the obvious, the other basic food group is beer! It’s a rare day when I don’t have something bubbling in the guest room closet.

Our local grocery stores stock a variety of yogurts produced in the Pacific Northwest. We decided we wanted local. We now make our own yogurt using low-fat milk from the nearby Matanuska Dairy and our slow cooker. And granola? We love what one of our local bread stores makes, but we’ve recently found several make-your-own recipes that we like even more. Last week a local farmer promised Alaska-grown oats on Craigslist. A hand-mill may be in our future!

Producing your own food can be fun, incredibly rewarding, and a great adventure. At times it can be physically demanding and a little tedious. At other times the process is intellectually challenging. It takes time. Make some. Don’t wait for boredom, food lines, or ill-health to get you moving. As Pollan says, “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” Read books. Search the web blogs. Learn from friends. Experiment. Get your hands dirty. These are all good things.

Digital snow days

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Tiny Energies

by Mary Logan

Folks in the Anchorage bowl woke Wednesday morning to widespread power outages, trees down, traffic lights out, and closed schools and businesses. An early September winter storm created hurricane force winds. The power at the house was out for about eight hours, and we have a tree down in the yard. Much of Anchorage is in the same boat. Score one for Mother Nature in man’s apparent battle for control over nature. Fortunately this power outage came in early September and not the dead of winter, serving as a good consciousness-raising event and needs assessment for future power outages. So this post is both pragmatic and fanciful, covering personal, pragmatic issues related to sudden loss of complexity events and some “what if” questions about the future of digitization. I’m typing this during brownouts and occasional triggers of the generator, which got its first real test last night. We are near a trunk line, with underground power, so our power came back quickly. But close neighbors are not so lucky. Today is woodcutting day, for us and our friends, whether we need the wood or not. So this post may ramble a bit, like my thoughts, between the impacts of events at the larger scale like windstorms and regional blackouts, and personal preparation at the local scale.

As we progress further into descent, we will see more electricity brownouts, blackouts, and other events where there is a sudden failure of complexity, resulting in a shutdown of productivity. This failure of complexity has created a new urban word–“digital snow day.” And since our digital snow day in Anchorage coincided this time with termination dust on the mountains, the name is especially fitting. When we lose complexity suddenly, much of modern life stops, as our subsystems are highly connected. When complexity brownouts occur, what systems will be impacted, and what will some of those snow days look like? Does digitization make the failures worse, with a drop to a lower trophic level than would have occurred without digitization?

We used to live in southern Mississippi, in Hurricane Alley. The locals there were resigned to big winds, and were pragmatically proactive about protecting power lines and the house. Many would cut down all the pine trees in the yard, as pine trees were wont to snap off about 20 feet up in a big windstorm. A tree came down in our yard last night next to the house. Trees that stand together are protected from high winds but once you thin or have isolated trees, they are hit with the full impact of a storm and are vulnerable. The Venturi effect also creates vulnerability, as wind is funneled around rigid structures such as buildings that do not sway with the wind. What might have been harmless in a yielding natural system is magnified and made deadly in a man-made system ill adapted to flexibility in the face of the larger scale impacts. Beach groins, dams, and channelization of rivers are similar examples of the dangers of inflexibility. These physical principles have lessons to teach us about the importance of community and flexibility in descent. We recycled the branches into a brush pile at the back of the property. Our command and control neighbors don’t like our brush pile, but it keeps biomass on the property and helps to create a complete ecosystem, with homes for voles, ermine, rabbits, and other small consumers.

Alaskans are able; we loaned out both of our come-alongs before 9 am Wednesday morning. One friend with no backup source of heat was already reevaluating her situation for the winter. Another friend called around to find freezer space for her salmon stock. Much of the communication occurred via cell phone and Facebook–those without either cell phone connectivity or internet access were isolated. One acquaintance admitted to driving around in her car so that she could charge her cell phone. Our social reliance on the digital world may be our worst Achilles heel. A friend complains that if she lost her cell phone, she would be in trouble, since she no longer memorizes or writes down phone numbers. As more and more communication shifts to digital means, we hollow out face to face relationships and old ways of doing, such as analog address books, land lines, and snail mail. We don’t have to talk to neighbors anymore, talking instead to friends around the globe. If digital communication fails, our local support systems lack history and a basis in habit to support trust and resilience during times of stress.

A nursing friend recently had a digital snow day. And when the digital snow day occurs in intensive care, it is a bad day. The computer systems went down together in the hospital early in the day, stopping all work. Pharmacists couldn’t access the drugs, orders couldn’t be placed, lab-work couldn’t be processed, and notes couldn’t be written. Because all the systems were interconnected, they all went down, and the systems couldn’t be easily rebooted. Paper alternatives existed, but did not work as there were too many complexities of returning to the old system. Patients did not get any medications, because nurses are now required to scan all medications using a bar code scanner system, and pharmacists use several computerized dispensing and cross-checking systems. Nurses went home in tears, as most of their responsibilities were thwarted. Chaos ensued, and patient care was inadequate. My friend charted on the electronic medical record the next day, when systems resumed function.

Hospitals are one of the worst places for power outages. Intensive care units have red power receptacles that will supply generator power for essential equipment such as ventilators. But what happens to the many other operations of a hospital in a blackout? What happens when your essential people are trapped on an elevator, and patients cannot be transported downstairs for diagnostic tests? Or employees cannot come and go, or wash their hands adequately, or a myriad of other essential tasks in a hospital? It is hard to put complexity in reverse and back down.

Science fiction? No, this is an event happening all over the US, now that we have digitized many aspects of healthcare. The same sort of paralysis could happen in many other digitized forms of modern life. Consider some of the many existing forms of complexity created by reliable electricity and the added complexity of digitization:

Reliance on electricity for moving resources, people, and wastes in urban settings
Digitization of communication systems through cable, internet and cellphones–landlines and public telephones are increasingly rare
Digitization of books and journals, with storage and retrieval issues
Digitization of photos
Digitization of journalism as the newspapers switch to the internet
Digitized commerce through RFID, cash register systems, payroll systems, time clocks, and inventory systems with just-in-time vulnerabilities
Digitization of money through credit and debit cards, Bitcoin, ATMs
Digitization of stock markets through securitized assets, exchange traded funds, and other complex derivative trading systems that are only achievable through computerization
Digitization of clocks, ignition systems for furnaces, and other appliances
Data storage and retrieval for large internet commerce and financial companies (is the cloud one step too far?)
Distance delivery education and digital libraries–how many of our university libraries have dropped paper journals and books in their transition to electronic media?
Digital security and civil defense systems such as municipal safety 911, and warning systems at the personal, municipal, and national levels (who has a windup radio these days?)
Digital voting systems such as Diebold
Transportation system coordination (traffic lights, trains, buses, airport traffic control, runway lights and beacons, scheduling, coordination, ticket systems, TSA, and electric power for gas stations)
Digitization of records such as mortgage deeds (MERS robosigning scandal)
Digitization of music–in the digital era, you cannot easily share or bequeath your music collection, and if formats change, your collection is subject to instant obsolescence
Digitization of electricity, especially in security and stability of smart grids
Digitization of social relationships through reality games such as Second Life, smart phones, Facebook communications, messaging, and other digital relationships
Global networks (trade, missile defense, satellites)

If there is a human institution in life, we are rapidly creating a simulacrum online. We work, we shop, we love, and we connect online. Digital reality can hollow out our real lives and the real economy, so that digital interruptions create vulnerabilities and gaps. Those connected and vested in a digital second life are part of our information storm, separated from reality and vulnerable to events that decrease complexity.

Vulnerabilities from added levels of complexity

Odum, 1995, p. 24

Trophic levels are descriptions of organisms’ position in the energy hierarchy through their positions in the food chain. But what people do not realize is that trophic levels extend from natural ecosystems on into human economies, as higher and higher amounts of energy and other resources are transformed to build added complexity. If we consider human economies as complex extensions of the food chain, then electricity and transmitted cultural information yield higher trophic levels that have undergone a series of energy-using transformations that exert top-down control in regulating productivity. Information is one of the most highly embodied forms of energy, and high transformity digital information can be shared over a large territory with global impact. Odum was especially concerned about the long-term storage of information in a digital age. How many of these digitized formats have paper backups that are relatively secure for the long-term in an increasingly chaotic world?

Tom Abel – a simple visualisation of a hierarchy of world energy from an anthropological perspective, including human trophic levels. Does this “food chain” look stable?

We think that added complexity improves and makes systems secure. But when the entire system insists on a steady flow of energy, any wobble in energy production, either directly through electricity or indirectly through connected parts of the system such as drought can create instability. When almost all subsystems of our economy rely on electricity and increasingly on computerization, then failures cascade and the system grinds to a halt. Over-reliance on two different levels of complexity, electric power and the more complex, demanding high emergy complexity of the internet creates instability if it fails. Extended internet outages could be a mechanism for one or more lost trophic levels of complexity.

Digitization allows for centralized control and potential manipulation, hacking, and other security issues, as demonstrated in some trading schemes and Diebold voting machines, for example. Information systems that grow and change too fast do not allow the legal system to keep up with inequities and problems. Digitization can be an excuse for planned obsolescence, with the need to buy the same music or book in a different format with little added value. We are sure that more technology and more complexity is always an improvement, but when resource inputs fail, vulnerabilities cascade. Technology requires increasing amounts of energy for every step in added complexity.

Technology is a double-edged sword, with our over-reliance on consistent operation as an Achilles heel. Exploding transformers in a windstorm create fires. Nuclear power plants without power are at risk of meltdown. Online courseware and e-textbooks fail. Infrastructure that expects electric power as a given creates safety hazards when inner rooms of larger buildings become completely dark. Newer university buildings have digital classrooms with lock-down features–what happens to those in an outage? Students said that many doors in their dorms use electronic key readers. They were stuck in their dorms on lock down because they could not come or go easily, with finger foods to eat since the complex electronic ignition gas stoves in the cafeteria did not work either. One wit in my class said that the unintended lockdown was probably a good idea, because, “at least it kept the Zombies out.” Tall buildings that are taller than four stories rely on electric power for elevators and plumbing to move people, resources, and wastes up and down. Fixed windows mandate a controlled climate demanding heating and air conditioning. In a world with variable power, we will need to either abandon or rethink these buildings. Our engineers have a blindspot about the reliability of electric power in the future.

What we need are low-tech or down-sizing specialists, who consider and prepare backup systems for some of our high-tech organizations. In my nursing friend’s case, that hospital needs a resilience committee to begin decomplexifying their systems. At the very point in our complex economy when we should be making choices to simplify overly complex systems, we are going for broke with one last step into digitization of systems that is difficult to step down from, even on a short-term basis.

I started collecting manual appliances about ten years ago. I try to avoid acquiring things that have an electric plug. Students said that they had cans, but no manual can opener. Friends this morning found that they could not grind their morning coffee, use their cell phones, open their small businesses, get gas for their car, or flush their toilets if they were on wells, at least on a local level. My friend without the coffee rescued her habit when she remembered that she had powdered commercial coffee and a camp stove. But that is a

Rombouts et al., 2013: Trophic level connectivity before and after stress with depletion of higher level species

short-term fix, reliant on storages of imported, commercially prepared foods with a long shelf life from big companies. When outages are patchy geographically or temporally, community can accommodate losses, especially when the community has adequate storages. But when outages are uniformly broad over a geographic space or over long periods of time, trouble arises and behaviors rapidly fall back to a lower trophic level. In the example of the hospital network failure, my friend was able to finish her charting the next day. But in a long-term outage, the system would have to adapt to a lower trophic level of complexity in a hurry. Another example of this was one of the many hurricanes that hit south Florida in 2004. Many gas stations were closed, since gas stations cannot pump gas without electricity. Friends spent all day waiting in a line to get gasoline to run their generator. Our friends found that the time spent in long lines was better spent working on other problems like downed trees, while adapting to lower energy for basic activities of daily living by skipping the gas-hungry generator, instead using their camp stove and outdoor grill to cook, which only sipped fuel. Attempts to support the higher trophic levels of complexity fail over time as we try to sustain complexity when the power wanes.

swiped from financialarmageddon.com, Bernanke as a child, click for full effect

Monetary digitization is especially vulnerable. It is much easier to trade globally and control the system when your money is digital. In a crisis, printing digital money is easier and faster than devaluing paper money, and switching to a new currency could be seamless and helpful for those in control, but not for affected people who might lose out in conversion of currencies. If we were forced to rely on paper money alone, could we have built the level of complexity in securitized assets, derivatives, and global financial complexity that we now see?

After a while, failure of the internet becomes unthinkable. But we need to think the unthinkable, as the internet is not a permanent, growing, expanding aspect of a future with fewer resources. Ironically, this week, I updated WordPress and an interaction with a plug-in in the update locked me out of the website. I had to cut the complexity by deleting all fancy bell-and-whistle plug-ins, at least temporarily. While not actually degrading information directly, successive iterations of improvement (tape player, 8 track, personal music player, ipod, iphone, beta/vhs, dvd, blu-ray) destroys information by demanding growth and expansion of the system with each improvement, making old information storage defunct and demanding continued investment while companies have mandates for growth, creating a mandate to always innovate, whether the innovation adds any value or not. Are we at the limits of information, when adding value becomes counter-productive?

At this point, iterations of improvement are derivative. Eventually the derivatives are piled on more derivatives so that profits can continue, becoming so far removed from reality that they become unstable and unsupportable by the resources. Complexity of information creates instability and errors. Complexity collects until it reaches the limits of resource availability. Descent will be complicated by the volume and interconnected nature of complexity that needs to be maintained for a large, concentrated population that is heavily reliant on just-in-time processes. Waste products of our complex civilization such as environmental pollution, swings in weather due to climate change, and accumulation of waste, information errors, and decreasing infrastructure and information maintenance will complicate the problems.

Ever increasing complexity cannot be supported in a lower energy world. Where do we draw the line and begin to make choices for a simpler society? The time is now for people to develop less complex backup systems, in response to a message sent by blackouts and disaster preparedness memes. At some point in the future, those simpler backup systems will evolve into the main system, with higher complexity residing in pockets of higher resource availability. As I edit this post on Saturday morning, some people in Anchorage are still without power after four days. I think we got the message here in Anchorage.

Gender roles and descent

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Tiny Energies

By Mary Logan

This post is about how gender roles might change in descent. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while, but Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article this month in The Atlantic instigated this post. Ms. Slaughter makes the point that women cannot keep up with the demands of work and home in the current American culture, even with the many adjuncts that the hierarchy created by fossil fuels provides, such as day care and fast food. Slaughter states, “Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men.” But Ms. Slaughter fails to recognize an even more pressing issue going forward. All of us will need to work cooperatively to become more self-sufficient as we restructure of our culture post fossil fuels, which requires more time at home, making the juggling all the harder if we refuse to give something up. And women are not good at giving things up, as evidenced by our current quandary of too many roles to play. As Ms. Slaughter found, I have finally found a way to live that is true to myself, rather than the expectations of others, expectations reflecting corporate values. Taking back control by working less was positive in many ways. This is my story, but you can find broader coverage of this topic and the header poster in a Fall 2011 issue of Yes Magazine. And I see that Sharon Astyk is on a similar wavelength about gender roles; maybe it is the dog days of summer that refocuses our thoughts on family. This post is a bit shorter, because I have lots of questions and no answers, and I’m interested in hearing what others think.

I am 56, and I have been happily married for 34 years. I chose the profession of nursing so that I could have an adaptable, flexible, mobile career where I could have it all. I wanted family and a good career doing something that was socially useful, that was also amenable to transition and descent. I wanted a bomb-proof career guaranteed to be an option no matter how descent played out, since caring for others never goes out of style. We had one daughter, and I worked in critical care and then in academia, teaching nursing. At about the age of 50, the hormones wore off or wore out, and healthcare started to seem more and more ridiculous as I started to reconsider my career. I kept removing fun things from my life to cope, until finally there wasn’t much left except work and family, and family was starting to come second. My value system was starting to fray.

And the work wasn’t satisfying. Nursing education was a pink-collar ghetto, with heavy workloads, committees, and the need to also work weekends in a stressful critical care setting, which was my specialty, to stay current. Various certification boards prescribe the curriculum, with a research course that focused on reductionist methods, yielding fragmented pieces of evidence that did not fit into a whole. My pharmacology course focused on treatments developed by for-profit companies using reductionist science. There was no time for holistic systems courses, and no leeway to think outside the restrictive box of western medicine. The overwhelming details and complexity of nursing science expanded rapidly, occupying teachers and students alike with an overload of detail and specialization. I “trained” nursing students to become cogs in the machine of industrial healthcare, which conflicted with my values of holism and descent. Class size, technology, and committee work kept expanding, while pay relative to men’s pay did not.

Crones have a tendency to speak out and act out. And in Alaska, uppity women are part of the culture. A popular bumper sticker up here reads, ” Well behaved women seldom make history.” The attitude is infectious. After jettisoning large chunks of my life and saying no to too many things, I finally scaled way back on work, too. I stopped in time to enjoy the last year of my daughter’s time at home; I just wish that I had stopped sooner. I shifted gears, and I now work as an adjunct, with control over what I will and won’t do. It is much easier to jettison empire without the corporation on your back. In nursing, which is about 95% female in the US, “retention” of nurses in the workplace is largely a function of autonomy and not more common satisfiers such as pay scales (Morgan and Lynn, 2008). Women want control and a say in workplace design, and we’re not getting it, at least in healthcare. In the US, healthcare has adopted the corporate business model, which is the antithesis of care.

The amount of energy available defines how all systems self-organize into designs–that includes family systems. How will gender roles play out in descent? How do men and women respond to transition, and will family roles change (or change back) as well? How do both genders redefine success in a world with a diminishing or absent corporate ladder, and the need to do more manual labor at home?

Gender and the stress response during transition

Gender responses during stressful transitions may lead us to interpret and respond differently based on gender. There is a biological gender difference in how we respond to stress, both hormonally and behaviorally. The classic (Cannon, 1932; Selye, 1926) model of response to stress is fight, flight, (or freeze) involving either aggressive or avoidance behaviors. But early stress researchers used male samples. Taylor et al. (2000) examined women, and proposed that women are perhaps prone to a different model of stress response of tend and befriend, where affiliation behaviors such as maternal tending and contact with peers is predominant in reducing stress of threats. It seems clear that both mechanisms would be adaptive in survival of communities, and the authors suggest that the befriending response could be especially prominent, perhaps for both genders, in situations of resource scarcity. Too much competition in this situation leads to extinction. What this suggests, then, is that we need the women to step up and speak out in the renegotiation of community. Have the male-dominated competitive behaviors become dominant in a century of capitalism, and how do we recollect the cooperative?

As I look out at the blogosphere, the majority of audible voices talking about descent are men. Where are the women? Are they so exhausted and overburdened by multiple roles that they have no time? Did women exchange the values of home and family for corporate values when they left the home for work? Immersion of both parents in increasingly corporate work values probably impacts the values at home. Can women still have it all in a world of descent, where the work at home includes more labor, less hired help and less technology?

In descent, the cultural shift within families will be great, as families and communities reorder themselves. In transition, while we are shuffling infrastructure, roles, and systems of control such as money, how do we straddle the dominant culture and that of descent? Growing your own veggies, keeping animals, and making your own food takes time, yet we still have obligations to the old system–we must have money or savings to pay the utility bills to straddle the dominant system and descent. How much more frugal will we have to become, in both energy efficiency and frugality?

As both men and women return to working at home in sustainable roles, we might revert to functional, specialized roles that were found in pre-industrial societies. Inequities in gender power could re-emerge or expand. Capitalism treats women’s home-based roles almost as poorly as it does Mother Nature by undervaluing or devaluing those contributions. How will that change?

But men aren’t happy either

I watched my husband’s federal career get more and more hectic, as the system compiled more and more bureaucracy and very little was ever subtracted. Computerization added Blackberries. Technology helped to erode boundaries, and the importance of work started to dominate the home life, to the point that workers were expected to be available at home or during other meetings, with instant decisions. Men are just as overwhelmed by the complex bureaucracy that we have woven, where yearly additions pile on, and we subtract very little. After a very long career, he is happily retired, making beer, bread, yogurt, and getting a life. He is much happier being the change he wishes to see in the world, and he looks years younger now.

Trapped elders aren’t happy either

Friends my age who still work full-time seem more and more unhappy, trapped in jobs that they don’t like, with a bewildering amount of responsibility, workload, or lack of control. Wolfers and Stevenson (2009) call it a new gender gap; that women are less happy than women of 40 years ago, and less happy than men in their lives. Secure healthcare insurance or a better retirement income are the carrots that keep some of my friends at their jobs. Some friends’ egos are heavily invested in their work. Many are additionally stuck with mortgages in defunct housing contracts. Our communities will not be free to innovate and redesign until we default these contracts and allow people the mobility and economic freedom to move on with change. We have chained ourselves to old promises of insurance, pensions and loans to the future which are not a sure thing. And are aging workers taking a job in our contracting economy that our unemployed daughters or sons might want to occupy instead? Our failing economy has trapped older workers in jobs, preventing employment for our youth. At the very least, we could job share or work part-time, making everyone happier and freeing up time to allow for creativity in forging new ways of being. The wisdom of our elders could be better employed in helping to create a new culture of relocalization. But that would not maximize profits.

If we’ve got so much surplus energy, how come all of us are working so hard?

What I’d like is to keep the power that we’ve gained as women, and the ability to work as I want. But I don’t think that in descent we can have it all, with many kids, a high voltage career, and be happy too. Our bureaucracy tends to expand over time, as profit-chasing feedback loops accumulate. The amount and technological complexity of work piles up while becoming less meaningful. Having it all requires making a lot of money so that you can live your life without limits. But living without limits means that you cede control to the corporation that controls your life. What a paradox.

As corporate life continues to expand into our personal lives, how much will we endure before both men and women say “Enough?” Women’s voices are especially important, as women seem to be geared physiologically and emotionally towards cooperative behaviors that are critical in relocalization. How much of what you are doing today reflects your values, and how much do we absorb from corporate culture? Do we define success as useful social contribution to the group, or is it making the most money for the company? If you had complete control over your life, what would your own personal values say, and how would you behave? Are you happier living the corporate life or would you be happier walking away from empire? I’m interested in hearing what others think about this?

Adbusters Kickitover.org Are we Happy Yet?

Walking out on empire

Quote

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Tiny Energies

by Mary Logan

Parrot-dime Shift

So what do we do now? At what point does one realize that his or her paradigm isn’t working anymore, and give up and walk out on empire? How do we start walking, and where do we go? Here are some quotes from notable people who are choosing to turn at the crossroads and walk away from empire and then to talk about the transition. These quotes highlight some of their answers to the question of “what now?”

Wendell Berry says, “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope for survival.”
Chris Hedges suggestion to: “. . . nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.”
Tom Englehardt’s advice to the class of 2012 to “make themselves useful . . . and help someone or something on the planet.”
Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist about a pilgrimage to follow the song lines; “You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land.“
Guy McPherson on My Story of Dropping Out and Acting Up, who just let go; “Don’t just join me in walking away. Join me as a witness and a warrior, on behalf of life. Ultimately, in other words, on your own behalf.”

Sometimes the only difference between a budding genius and a blooming idiot is where they choose to take a stand.

Dave Pollard’s solution “All seven of these actions — (1) understanding what is really going on, (2) acquiring essential knowledge and abilities, (3) reconnecting with the Earth, (4) living responsibly, (5) showing and telling others why and how to prepare for collapse, (6) fighting back against the destruction, and (7) living joyfully, are aspects of what I am now calling my liberation from civilization. They are analogous to seven steps one might go through to liberate oneself from an abusive spouse or relative.”
James Gustave Speth on America the Possible “Important here is a “theory of change.” The theory adopts the view that people act out of both fear and love—to avoid disaster and to realize a dream or positive vision. The theory affirms the centrality of hope and hope’s victory over despair. It locates the plausibility of hope in knowledge—knowing that many people will eventually rise up and fight for the things that they love; knowing that history’s constant is change, including deep, systemic change; and knowing that we understand enough to begin the journey, to strike out in the right directions, even if the journey’s end is a place we have never been. The theory embraces the seminal role of crises in waking us from the slumber of routine and in shining the spotlight on the failings of the current order of things. It puts great stock in transformative leadership that can point beyond the crisis to something better. The theory adopts the view that systemic change must be both bottom-up and top-down—driven by communities, businesses, and citizens deciding on their own to build the future locally as well as to develop the political muscle to adopt system-changing policies at the national and international levels. And it sees a powerful citizens’ movement as a necessary spur to action at all levels.”

Cultural collision

American culture may diverge into two camps as fossil fuels wane, resulting in a collision of cultures. Many of us have resided in the dominant culture all of our lives. When faced with the deterioration of that dominant culture, we may become unglued and don’t know how to act. The old culture isn’t working anymore, but the new culture is only partway formed, and difficult to navigate. So we sit, apathetic and rudderless, or fall back on addictions to numb the pain. For those of us actively living in the new minority descent culture, we may experience oppression, shunning, and difficulty in living in either new or old. Even a simple thing like keeping chickens can become a battleground. Laws and mores are geared towards the old, and forging new pathways is a struggle. We have neighbors who view our chickens as a status step in the wrong direction for our neighborhood, and we suffer as a result from periodic bouts of persecution and harassment. Being a minority can be difficult unless one learns to dance between both cultures fluidly.

Adbusters spoof ad kickitover.org

I had a good role model for independent thinking outside the dominant paradigm. HT Odum’s world view was ahead of his time. But understanding that world view placed him at odds with the dominant world view. HT fretted that his students were having trouble getting tenure or getting published, and he struggled for research funding as national societies and funding bodies shunned his unacceptable ideas that opposed growth. Being ahead of the crowd is difficult, and if you get too far outside mainstream thought, the Maximum (em)Power principle suggests that your ideas will not be reinforced. Ironically, suggesting to the empire that it would eventually fail is not a winning strategy. “Because designs with greater performance prevail, self-organization selects network connections that feed back transformed energy to increase inflow of resources or to use them more efficiently” (Odum, 2000). Odum’s ideas were least appreciated in the US, but were better understood in countries that are not so beholden to fossil fuels for their economic function. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

Odum selected for power over efficiency, since during a growth phase in a system, the system selects for power over efficiency. He judged his own actions and their relative value by “the energies spent, the energies stored, and the energy flow which is possible, turning not to the incomplete measure of money” (Odum, 1971, p. 244). Odum calculated his personal energetic budget of his actions. Those actions sometimes appeared contradictory, reflecting his awareness of the impact of scale and Maximum emPower. For example, he would leave the lights blazing around the house, as he considered them an unimportant detail, in preference for the big picture. He circumnavigated the globe at least 7 times in his travels, yet he biked to work. It was much more important to him to focus his energies on the pursuit of high quality information and dissemination at the larger scale. For example, he was a very early adopter of analog and digital computers. He spent extra savings on information development and processing, including books and education. Odum understood that it takes energy to create information, and that his widespread travel was important in the accumulation and dissemination of wisdom. He understood that the information system embodied the highest emergy and thus the most opportunity for transformation. His opinions about the best route in promoting descent was a long-term perspective that emphasized education.

Polarization and hierarchy

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818 Kunsthalle Hamburg

One of the problems with a situation where there is no visible solution is that people tend to feel hopeless and lack direction for what to do. When walking away from something, it is difficult to stride confidently unless we are also walking towards something else. And in a complex world, polarization and black and white thinking lead to action, while shades of gray may lead to inaction. Yet polarization is problematic during times of great change because it encourages us to act without thinking. Thinking for yourself is the opposite. So we need to marry critical thinking with action, and not let the novel choices for the future or fear of stepping away from the herd paralyze us.

At the same time, while we need to keep one eye on the big picture to choose a direction to walk in, we need to also stay open and adaptable to the unforeseen forks, obstacles, and delays in our path. Choosing an inflexible route, traveling partners, or equipment locks us into one path. In contrast, while all who wander are not necessarily lost, it is good to have a general direction in mind. We can discern that general direction by always keeping the larger scale in view.

The trail to hope leads to the winter of our discontent

What does this mean for us as people? I’ve spent decades living with my head in descent and my body in empire. I lived a divided life, an introverted life, and in some ways, a two-faced life. I worked within the dominant culture, in a job that provided a salary and healthcare, doing something socially useful, while passively waiting for the world to change, while withholding much of my mental and emotional self. As we start to descend, my heart and head are now rejoined to the motions I make and the things that I say within the dominant culture and the new. I have increasingly become a multicultural citizen, with one foot in the dominant camp and one foot in descent, mildly oppressed by disapproving neighbors and frightened friends. I have a feeling of wholeness as people begin to join me in small ways in learning how to dance between two cultures to support access to privileges in the old paradigm while preparing for different ways of being in the new.

What is resilience then? It is moving forward with your head and heart aligned, casting off old ways and engaging with the changes to come. Physical resilience involves having enough resources to pay the utilities and move around in the old system while forging more efficient and lower energy features in the new system. One word of caution; jumping with both feet into the new too fast may separate you from the mainstream. Once you are separate you no longer benefit from Maximum Power. Like the hippies who dropped out in the 1960s, going completely off the grid removes you from the advantage of the high emergy basis of society, such as the river of information flowing down the internet. When and where fossil fuels are available, use them. Maximum Power dictates that we need to use the energy or someone else will. But in descent, we need to use resources differently, selecting for greater efficiency and highest best use (information, for example) and not wasteful or luxury uses of power.

Much of our passivity and reliance on the old system may revolve around the issue of money, which is a powerful symbol and information mechanism of exchange in the old system of hyper-consumption. I have boomer friends who feel trapped in a broken bureaucracy, who think that they don’t have enough money-related security to retire, even though they have more wealth than 99% of the rest of the world. I ask them how they would feel if they woke up tomorrow and the currency and all paper securities were worthless. That question universally elicits a long silence. The question resets our value system. Elders could be leaders in relocalization efforts, as they have stored wealth and the motivation to live much more frugally outside the corporate system. Wealth in this country is a relative indicator of status and want–the good news is that we can all get by on much less income if the waste is wrung from the system. But we have to take the very large step from the comfort of the status quo into something uncomfortably different that is not dependent on money. How do we begin to value well-being instead of wealth? In my course on this subject, that is the final exam question. When will people begin to shift their world views towards descent? Perhaps when the current regime becomes futile, useless, or workable economically, politically, and socially, people will start walking out on empire, one by one.

For me, I view walking out on empire as both metaphor and action. Barron and Barron (2012) suggest that walking “bolsters creativity and contentment, and gives rise to an observant, creative, receiving mind. . . . Movement, especially out of doors, can lift your mood, bolster your creativity and even change your path. It might make you think differently. It could motivate you to take small steps to change your habits or big steps to change your life. Walking is good medicine” (Barron, 2012). Paul Kingsnorth alludes to walkabouts when he mentions following the song lines in his quote above. Walkabouts are symbolic rites of passage that enlighten and heal the walker, connecting us spiritually with the land, and representing changes in people and in culture. The song lines are sung as we navigate to “keep the land alive.” Maybe we all need to go walkabout as we move into descent?

Salisbury Creek/Marsh Fork Canning River Arctic Refuge, Gone Walkabout

Doughnuts–alternative fuel for your next vacation?

Quote

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Tiny Energies

By Todd & Mary Logan & Dawn Groth

“Don’t tell me you rode those bicycles all the way out here!” said the folks from Atlanta.

And so began an amusing lunchtime conversation with the vacationing couple from Atlanta. Mary, Dawn, and I were filling our stomachs, resting our legs, and enjoying a spectacular view of the Kuskulana River bridge at milepost 17 on the McCarthy road. We had each pedaled out of our driveways in Anchorage on bikes six days before and had ridden 280 miles since leaving home.

The folks from Atlanta were enjoying their first visit to Alaska. They were at this remote place in their rental car only because they were traveling with friends who had been up to Alaska several times before who were looking for something different – a trip to McCarthy and the Kennicott mines. We each traded a few stories of neat things we had seen or done so far, and we shared some smoked salmon. But the couple kept returning to the idea that what we were doing was super-human and unbelievable. They were younger than us, and lamented that they should be doing more biking themselves and leading a more active lifestyle. They would arrive in McCarthy in a couple of hours, while it would take us another day to arrive. We encountered them two days later in McCarthy at the McCarthy Lodge. We were on the deck eating a celebratory dinner of curried rice with local duck eggs, and up they drove up in a shuttle. We yelled to them, “Don’t tell me you drove all of the way here in your car!” Later they offered us shots; we demurred, as “nothing good ever came from a night of shots!” The theme for our trip reflected the common refrain from Anchoragites regarding the long distance to McCarthy; “McCarthy–too far to drive, but we can bike there!”

Best Transport Alternatives Odum, McGrane, Brown, & Bastianoni 1995 (Florida Policies)

This encounter with driving tourists illustrated a common misconception about bicycle travel – that bike travel is only for super athletes and not for average people. Subscribe to a magazine such as Adventure Cycling or Google your way to any of hundreds of bicycle travel blogs and you will quickly learn that average people do travel by bicycle . . . all the time. And it’s not surprising. Cycling is more efficient than any other method of travel,

Out of gas on an old homestead on the McCarthy road near the Chokosna River

and it is even 5 times more efficient than walking. If we compare the amount of calories burned in bicycling to the number of calories an automobile burns, the difference is astounding. One hundred calories can power a cyclist for three miles, but it would only power a car 280 feet (85 meters)!

In the lower-energy world of the future, cycling will play an ever-increasing role in both transportation and leisure travel. There are already over a billion bicycles on the planet today, and bicycles are currently the major form of transportation in many parts of the world. For leisure travel, Americans could learn much from Europeans. During our 2-week ride we met only two other groups of touring cyclists, and those bikers were all from Germany. And while we considered our ride to be quite ambitious – 550 miles over two weeks – the touring cyclists we met were on rides two or three times the scale of ours.

The idea of getting a group of friends together, hopping on bikes, and pedaling around a place as big and wild as Alaska over a month was not a great stretch of the imagination for the cycling-centric Europeans. It shouldn’t be for Americans either. Americans have been conditioned to think that bikes are toys for children, that bikes are recreation rather than useful tools, or that bikes represent low status unless they are used for competitive racing, using expensive bicycles and special spandex clothes and bike shoes.

Finishing the trip with more socks than you started with–no spandex or bike cleats here!

Not only is bicycle travel efficient, it is inexpensive and fun! And bike touring is an independent way to travel. Alaska suffers from the bane of industrial tourism; tourists are funneled into corporate restaurants, hotels, and venues, making it harder for local tourism businesses to survive and thrive. Touring on bikes supports relocalization.

Three themes emerged as we pondered how our trip was different on a bike than if we’d done it in a car: (1) you see and experience a lot more when you are moving slowly; (2) people really want to talk to you when you are traveling by bicycle; and (3) the challenges you face build a sense of camaraderie and accomplishment.

You see more when you are moving slowly

Big bikes fascinate Todd @ Pinnacle Mtn. Cafe

On our gear-laden bikes, we averaged about 45 miles a day. But we saw – really saw – more dramatic vistas, heard more rushing streams and singing birds, and stopped at more quirky places than most drivers would experience when traveling ten times that far. We also experienced things that drivers almost never notice – the assist of a pleasing tailwind or the energy-burning slow grind up a particularly steep hill. We learned to never ask road condition advice from drivers. For example, we asked a park ranger about taking the gravel “Old Edgerton Highway” as an alternative route one day. We were urged to avoid it because it was winding and rough. We took it anyway, and found it to be the best part of

Hydro-powered low energy fish wheels on the Copper (Ahtna) River at Chitina

the ride thus far. It was a great shortcut, avoided some huge climbs, and we were passed by two cars as we rode its twelve miles. We were also warned about the 60-mile gravel McCarthy road. It was described as rough, washed out, pot-holed, spike-ridden, tedious, boring, and even dangerous. It may be a few of those things in a car, but its 120 round-trip miles were some of the easiest riding of our entire trip.

People really want to talk to you when you travel by bike

http://findsubstance.com/2009/08/07/substance-rolling-coffee-thursday-august-13th/

We both saw and heard the pick-up as it slowly approached us from behind. “You want a doughnut?” a voice called out. Then two hands holding a Hostess donut box sprang from the passenger window as we pedaled along at an easy pace. Of course we stopped and partook. Two young state DOT workers were out doing survey work on road culverts. It was clear that they would rather be doing exactly what we were doing. They got all the details of what we’d already done and what was yet to be done. They carefully inspected our bikes and gear for future reference. This type of interaction, and hospitality, happened again and again over the two-week ride. We think people liked to talk to us for two reasons. First, we looked interesting. Out of the ordinary. Adventurous. Secondly, to some we appeared vulnerable. We were not ensconced in a several ton box of glass, plastic, and steel. We were exposed to the weather, bears, mosquitos, and vehicle traffic.

Dawn and Todd @ Tok Thai at the Hub, best food in Glennallen

We couldn’t just press on a gas pedal to overcome a hill or headwind. And surely we were lacking the type of food and drink often carried in boxes and coolers in motor vehicles. We shared lots of fun stories with these more traditional travelers. We were sought out again and again. And our conversations were not one-sided. Every traveler had an interesting story to tell. We also spent one night indoors after a very rainy day on the McCarthy Road

Little Drifter at Circle F Ranch http://alaskayaks.com/

with a lovely couple at the Alaska Halfway House B&B in their Halfway Done Bunkhouse, and we shared our stories there as well. When we saw a field full of Yaks on the Edgerton Highway, we stopped to investigate, and had a fascinating discussion with the owners of Circle F Ranch, while Little Drifter licked our sweaty thighs with his rough tongue, and we chatted about yak fiber, yak meat, and sustainability policies for Alaska. The most common farewell from folks we talked to was the concerned advice to “Be Safe!”

Bike touring builds a sense of camaraderie and accomplishment

Source unknown?

We started the trip as good friends, and ended as great friends. We got to know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and senses of humor. We shared some glorious times and some real challenges. We traveled and camped in some pretty wild places, and thus were often a community of three; bike touring opens up a lot of novel options for places to camp. We helped each other and looked out for each other. And we had a lot of fun.

Never done a bicycle tour? You should try it! While some people “go big” right off the bat, a saner route is to apply the permaculture principle of starting small and slow. Check out what your local bike clubs are up to. Ask a friend who might have experience or want to go. A super resource for getting started in Adventure Cycling’s “Bike Overnights” website: http://www.bikeovernights.org/. They have hundreds of reader-submitted short trip ideas, gear checklists, and more.

Slow travel is about quality rather than quantity. And rough travel makes you appreciate the comforts of home–commodes, stoves, and hot showers! Welcome to the lower energy world!

Wanderers on the McCarthy Road in Alaska

Slow Travel

Gallery

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Tiny Energies

This gallery contains 8 photos.

by Mary, Todd, and Dawn A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. –Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968 Spring … Continue reading →

Cooperative Living

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Tiny Energies

by Mary Logan and Darcy Dugan

Do you want to live more efficiently and reap the benefits of a closer community? Cooperative living is a great strategy for getting and staying out of debt while building community, resilience and security in a tenuous economy. But it requires a change in attitudes, and a return to more communal ways of living. You don’t necessarily need to relocate into a brand new cohousing situation; there are a range of options. While we live in a close-but-separate multi-family dwelling, by design and by chance, we’ve achieved some important cohousing benefits – shared space and sense of community. So here’s our cooperative living story, as told from the perspective of both top floor and bottom floor residents–I’m going to refer to the people who live with us as our nearest neighbors, as we don’t really think of them as tenants, but as friends. Living together with extended family is nothing new, but here in Anchorage, we are often far from family, and friends are the family we choose for ourselves (Edna Buchanan).

Types of Cohousing

Cohousing options are as varied as one’s imagination. In Anchorage, several cohousing initiatives have begun to infill with planned communities. Cohousing (or pocket neighborhoods) is described as a type of cooperative living in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods. Cohousing residents are consciously committed to living as a community. The physical design encourages both social contact and individual space. Private homes contain all the features of conventional homes, but residents also have access to extensive common facilities such as open space, courtyards, a playground and a common house (www.cohousing.org). Other options include communes, intentional communities, and rental housing cooperatives.

While cohousing communities that are designed from the ground up optimize many benefits of cooperative living, a wide array of simpler approaches can also provide many benefits that don’t exist with isolated single family homes. One of the simplest and most common options is the sharing of a house by unrelated people, usually primarily for the purpose of reducing housing costs. This is particularly common among university students and young people first leaving home. This arrangement has the key cohousing characteristics of common facilities, resident management, and non-hierarchical structure and decision-making. A common but slightly more hierarchical variation of house sharing is when a homeowner rents out a bedroom in their house. With this approach, one gains the cost efficiency of shared living space plus regular community-building interactions with their house mates. In this common scenario, however, cooperative governance of the living situation is usually reduced, as the homeowner is likely to dominate in the decision-making process.

Close-but-separate living arrangements can generate benefits of cooperative living too. There is a growing interest in creating accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single family homes. To the extent that ADUs exist in single family neighborhoods is largely unknown, as many are illegal suites, flying under the zoning radar, against zoning and/or code enforcement that limits the number of unrelated people living together. Vancouver’s experiences with zoning and illegal suites in an expensive rental market are especially interesting (in the Tyee).

Three generations, Gainesville, FL

As usual, my father, HT Odum was my model for how to live in descent in an ecological fashion, and he exposed me to the concept of cohousing as well. While he was focused on modeling and writing rather than home design, he did pay attention to practical matters where he felt that they really counted. HT purchased a house in Gainesville, Florida in 1968 that was close to campus. He was considering peak oil even then. He created an ADU for the random return of children and extended family, with the thought that perhaps caregivers could live in the unit, if need be, as he and his wife Betty aged. North central Florida gets cold fronts in the winter, so HT made sure that the living spaces had several different types of heating sources–gas, oil, and a fireplace as backup. In opposition to the trends, he planted trees all over the property, and let the front yard get overtaken by shade and forest floor. He favored his beloved wetland cypress trees, which he planted down by the sinkhole pond. He piled pine needles on the concrete driveway to allow nature to break it down and send the land back to its original state. Snags were allowed to stand, and deadwood was allowed to lie. Ducks frolicked in the pond, and my augmented feeding with commercial duck food provided a microcosm experiment for me of what happens when surplus energy is supplied to a system–as you can imagine, it’s not all good. HT and his brother Gene taught and role modeled age-old values of frugality, resilience, and ecological living that are finally re-emerging culturally from the jet backwash of fossil fuel living.

In Anchorage, we looked for permanent housing about five years ago with a bit of acreage to build a house where we could have a significant garden, and create resilience in a number of ways. We had been living in traditional suburban housing our entire lives, saving for the day that we could live our lives on our own terms. We found a 1 ¼ acre lot on the hillside where we could have a well and septic, and be within bikeable distance to jobs. Our builder insisted on no less than 2200 square feet, and we were constrained by many building codes, so we opted to design a home where we could live cooperatively. Our house is smaller than most newer houses in Anchorage, and it houses two households. Remodeling an existing home would have been greener, as the emergy basis of new housing is very high in Anchorage, but we couldn’t find any likely candidates at the time in a very expensive, tight Anchorage real estate market. Retrofitting the suburbs will be necessary as we go forward.

“Marrinder Cyclone’s Room, Provence” Martha Odum, 1986, watercolor

Perhaps the most helpful component of remodeling or building anew for cooperative living is the separate entrance that affords privacy and a sense of autonomy for occupants. We designed a home with a bedroom and bath on each floor, including the main floor of the house, an important element for consideration of aging. We finished the walkout basement rental unit ourselves, learning many skills in the process. The main floor bedroom is designed to be flexible, typically used as shared guest space that is accessible to both units. Or the extra bedroom can be closed off and integrated with either living space, depending on our needs. Floors are all tile in order to allow for wood boiler hydronic heat and to avoid carpets, as wall to wall carpeting and its maintenance is not sustainable. Most garages in Anchorage are attached, and benzene and other fumes are a health hazard, so we opted for a detached garage with shared storage space for bikes, skis and gear. Our garage doubles as wood-fired boiler shed, ski waxing bench and chicken coop, and it is really more of a bike barn than a garage. Later on it could be converted to a real barn if need be, as cars fall out of favor. The garage gets minimal heat in the winter from either a garage heater or more commonly from referred heat from the wood-fired boiler. The plumber who did our heating had to order a thermostat for the garage online, as there is no place in Anchorage that sells thermostats that go below 50 degrees!

We used permaculture principles wherever we could, within the restrictions of zoning policies. We let Nature do the work on the property through self-organization. Building from scratch allowed us to leave the trees around the house—we hand cleared the lot and used the wood for our wood-fired boiler during the first years of its operation. Most of the property was left for nature to manage. We repopulated the part of the yard that had been cleared with a compost/soil mix, threw wildflower mixes on it, and then shepherded what came up, guiding the succession by weeding invasives by hand. And we thinned a friend’s spruce forest to replant trees on bare spots. We opted for a permeable gravel driveway, inspired by Eugene Odum’s long gravel driveway. Now, when the tires of our car or bikes leave the pavement to turn onto our gravel drive surrounded by the trees, my blood pressure drops and my heart opens. The sound and the feel of the gravel announce to my body the arrival home to a different way of living, separate in values and form from the empire at large.

Benefits of Cooperative Living

Economic pressures in the future will necessitate more extended family living, smaller housing footprints in square footage per person, and less single-family housing. For young adults who have school debt to overcome, or who are saving for a home, various forms of extended family living are a logical solution. Cooperative living allows for symbiosis, synergy of efforts and diversity of thought. Our neighbors have been multicultural, providing lessons on diverse culture through extended French and German families, languages, and ways of living and being.

Some of the many benefits include:

Retronaut.co WPA posters

Opportunities to share tools, skills, services such as babysitting, cars, snowblowing, convenient exercise partners, laundry, built in ride/car sharing, garden care, pet care (who let the dogs out?)
Better nutrition–treats, meals, and cooking supplies migrate up and down the house
Economies of scale for utilities, Costco runs, DSL (we justify the fast connection and other upgrades with the rent money!)
Better home security with additional residents, and housesitting is unnecessary during vacations
Community gardens and barns are easier when shared
Expanded friendship circles; cheechakos and sourdoughs benefit by sharing their experiences and networks
Added, consistent income streams! Our insurance and taxes for the home are offset (and then some) by our neighbors’ rent payments. That monthly check makes a big difference in our independence and control over our lives!

Problems of Cooperative Living

Rules are one issue in any communal living setting, developing from a natural need for control and resulting in some loss of autonomy for members. Larger or commercial cohousing ventures may have less cohesive community and may need to fall back on legal contracts or formal mediation. These arrangements marry new social arrangements with traditional legal and financial contracts better suited to a growth economy and single family housing. We need to rethink our legal framework for housing.

From an economic perspective, debt-based arrangements work best in situations where there is more growth and more money in the future to pay off the mortgage, since debt requires interest, which requires growth of the economic system and the money system over the long term. Expectations of growth allow us to assume debt casually with the expectation that it will be easy to pay off in the future. Legal contracts that mortgage a large chunk of property over the long term among a group of people during tenuous times may create stress for those holding the contracts. Staying out of debt and living below our means provides a buffer of savings for resilience in a chaotic economy.

Code issues may be difficult to overcome in order to develop a creative sustainable cohousing situation. Current zoning favors monoculture housing of single family dwellings in un-walkable communities with strict separation of commercial and residential zones, so creating ADUs or cohousing may result in battles with your municipality and your neighbors to try to get them to think differently. We have one neighbor who is not fond of either our chickens or our cohousing, perhaps because they represent a diminished status for the neighborhood in her view. Our suite is now a legally permitted ADU, ahem. While the McMansion as a status symbol may be fading, most Americans still ascribe much of their wealth and status to their homes.

Darcy’s smooth disclosures

We’ve been quite delighted with our neighbors, who have become friends as well. Synergies abound. For example, on several workaday mornings, my husband has gone out to the garage at 5:30 in the morning to get on his bike to go to work, only to find that the smoothie sprite has deposited a fresh smoothie in a mason jar tucked in his helmet, with a whimsical poem attached. Or we come home to find a dessert elf has deposited cookies on our counter. What’s not to love about this arrangement? And on the days that we begin to feel old, our nearest neighbors’ youth and energy is contagious. For instance, our smoothie sprite was up at 5 am this morning, before work, in typical all-out summer-in-Alaska fashion, sledding on Flattop Mountain. Life is short, play hard! And our neighbors get to play hard because when they come home, the driveway is plowed and housing chores are taken care of already.

Darcy Weighs In

Cohousing for my husband Toby and me has created a perfect world. When we were first searching for living space and saw the email and photos of the Logan’s unit, we were skeptical due to the distance across town from our jobs. (I wasn’t sure how far I could bike happily and consistently). It was late November and we tramped up to their bright birch-encircled home with our Sorels. I don’t think we could have anticipated the offer that was about to be posed: a tidy, thoughtfully-designed compact space, a parking spot in a garage, a hot tub ten steps away in one direction and a forested back yard fire pit twenty steps in the other, wireless internet, laundry upstairs, an attached guest room . . . and two strangers who immediately offered to open their home to us — sharing all these things like family. I particularly remember that five minutes into our introduction, one of them said “you’re welcome to use the rest of the house when we’re gone . . . it’s a great space – you can throw parties.” (The other quickly following up with “as long as they’re not too wild!”) Welcome to the best cohousing experience ever.

Back in the car leaving their driveway, it was a non-decision. The benefits were clear. Neither of us were new to co-housing (I’d shared a drafty new England dwelling with six other ladies in grad school) but this was a new level. The structural set up had been so well thought out the outset, and offered with such warm hands, that we couldn’t pass it up.

Looking back, however, the best aspects weren’t advertised in that first meeting. It’s the fact we now have mentors upstairs that have ruminated on so many important aspects of life and are willing to share their wisdom. Toby and I are in our 30s with a lot ahead of us to learn, and seeing their lifestyle — from concrete things like devising an innovative heating system and greenhouse, to broader things like their commitment to sustainability, relationships, and community — has been extremely inspiring. Additionally, we have people a few vertical feet away who care. They know when we’re home alone and might appreciate a dinner invite, when we’re late from an outdoor trip, or when something comes up we might be interested in learning about. I think my mother sleeps better at night because of this. I know we do.

I will conclude by saying the bike (or drive) across town couldn’t be more worth it. We feel the benefits of co-housing each day, and are also able to save money to eventually build our own home. With the experience we’ve had with the Logans, I think we’ll work towards replicating the model when the time comes.

Connecting with Community through Storytelling

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Tiny Energies

by Mary Logan

We put away many kinds of violence that we would act out in the natural world beyond the city; in order to inhabit cities we put away actions…Inside these cities we need writers, we need artists, like myself…Nietzsche said, ‘we have art so that we do not die of reality.’–Ray Bradbury

kayak beach campfire in Prince William Sound

Ever since the beginning of man’s oral history, our cultures have taught lessons, stored memories, and guided group values through stories. Stories are a safety valve, and the linchpin of civilization, according to Bradbury. Whether it is transmitting the virtues of hard work through Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, the good fortune tale of Cinderella (as told by Vonnegut) or the Inuit legend about Raven the trickster, allegories, fables, and campfire stories have been passed on from generation to generation, using elements of truth, disbelief, myths, allegories, and wisdom to pass on important cultural knowledge. I’ve recently encountered stories with an Alaskan theme of opposing sides–environmentalist vs. resource extractor–told at three different scales of global, national, and local scales. These stories serve as excellent reflections on how we relate as people within nature and what we need to relocate in terms of connecting with nature and with our community. I will share them below in my own crude attempts at storytelling.

My parents were great storytellers. My mother exposed me to the humanities through literature. My father (HT Odum) told stories describing the current culture and past cultures, relating how civilizations cycle over the larger time scale, and explaining how we would have to go back to earlier culture eventually. He described stories of resilience from his travels in countries where people lived more simply, he taught me ecological principles, and I was reminded often, through natural analogies, that nothing grew forever, everything pulses, and what was, will be again. The stories were invaluable, and they helped to frame my value system, which has been outside the norm and resistant somewhat to the enticements of wealth and keeping up with the Joneses. Although HT occasionally called me a “Yuppie,” perhaps reflecting his general frustration with our consumptive society at large, I have generally lived frugally and simply, within my budget, to the extent that I could. HT was aware that to separate oneself too much from the culture at large was in opposition to Maximum Empower, which suggests that those who do not maximize emergy returns to the system do not prosper. I am very grateful to him that I now think differently about the world than the dominant culture does, and I feel more or less prepared for a future with less.

o/ motivatedphotos.com

The stories that HT told were mostly told at the dinner table and on family trips in the car. I can’t imagine how the interactions would have been changed if our family had been subject to the current digital distractions such as cellphones? While digital forms of storytelling are useful, nothing replaces face to face versions such as the campfire story. In our empire, we still tell stories, but the stories are often much bigger than local campfires, family dinner tables, or community halls. The movie Big Miracle was filmed up here in Alaska, and I saw it recently. The movie can be viewed as a parable about

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1430615/ Big Miracle 2012

the soul of our economy, with environmentalists and resource extractors squaring off regarding resources amidst the lands of mostly neutral, bemused Iñupiaq who have lived sustainably with those resources for thousands of years. Environmentalists and little and big technology save the day in the movie, leaving questions about media, environmentalism, the place of technology, heroic efforts to save symbols of Nature, and our place in Nature.

There are a number of fine local examples of storytelling groups springing up in Alaska, including the Storytellers Guild of Anchorage, Alaska Native Storytellers, Toastmasters, Mudrooms in Juneau, and Arctic Entries. I am most familiar with Arctic Entries, as one of the organizers is our nearest neighbor (we cohouse). Arctic Entries is a grassroots group who describe their mission as the following:

There’s always a place in your home where people gather and stories are born. The east coast has stoops. The south has porches. But Alaska? We’ve got arctic entries. Our Arctic Entries show features true stories born from those moments when we close the door on 8 feet of snow or the midnight sun, pull off our XtraTufs, and say, “You’ll never guess what happened …?

The originators of Arctic Entries in Anchorage came from Baltimore, and they said that they wanted to be able to connect with their community. Since they didn’t immediately connect with all aspects of Anchorage, they brought their favorite piece of Baltimore with

https://www.facebook.com/ArcticEntries Ritzman Greenpeace camp Kaktovik

them to share, which was the storytelling. They said that through storytelling, we often find that we have more in common than we originally thought. Telling our Alaskan stories helps us to develop culture and a sense of place. Here is a sample story audiofile of Dan Ritzman from a recent Arctic Entries event themed Reaping What You Sow, describing more interplay between environmentalists and resource extraction experts in Alaska in “Dan, the oil, and the law.” The audio file is only 9 minutes long. Arctic Entries consists of a format of seven people each telling a seven-minute true story relating to the show’s theme, interspersed with local live music.

We need to recover the art of storytelling, especially in telling ecological stories that explain how people can learn to live again in nature. Here is another example of the interplay between environmentalists and developers here in Anchorage, this time in a letter to the editor regarding zoning issues in Anchorage from Cindee Karns of Transition Anchorage who wrote this wonderful ecological allegory:

I’ve been sorting it out in my head the last couple of days and then it came to me while I was reading Edible Forest Gardens, a book by Dave Jacke.

“To enable one community member to functionally connect to another appropriate community member, we must put each in the right place relative to the other.”

Beachplantman, Northwestern Fjord, by CT

Of course Jacke is talking about companion planting, but I read it as if it were talking about the process of planning a city and where to put things. I re-read your letter with gardening in mind. I know one method of gardening is to simply throw a mixed bunch of seeds out in the dirt. I did that this summer. The borage took over. I liked the borage flowers, so bright blue and tasty, but the plants got so tall and tangled, only a few calendula got to bloom and no poppies at all. Later this summer I read that borage goes well with tomatoes and may even make the tomatoes taste better. Had I known that at the start of the summer, I might have planted the borage with the tomatoes. Well, there’s always next year.

With city planning it’s not like we can tear down buildings when they get too tall and are blocking the sun for the poppies; or move buildings around when the traffic pattern changes. I’m wondering where the balance is between letting the city grow where it wants and planning the city like a garden? Should there be raw survival of the fittest, so that whenever land is for sale, whomever wants to, can plant/build ANYTHING? I don’t think we want that in our city either, do we? There has to be a balance. We need to plan how to use the land, so that there’s a place for the borage to thrive AND the poppies, not to mention the calendula.

So, I believe the city DOES need a landscape design, just like my garden. I do believe that companion planting (multi-use districts) would be beneficial, so that we can stay in Anchorage in our old age and not have to drive all over creation to get our groceries, medicine and gardening supplies. I don’t believe that what you said, ‘adoption of the new code means we lose choice, we lose mobility, (or) we lose privacy.’ It just means we get a nicer looking city.

Stories are the glue that holds communities together, by transmitting wisdom and cultural values. Stories that revive and explore our relationship with nature and pass on ecological principles can help us bridge to a simpler, more connected way of living. Perhaps this summer people can connect around firepits, cabin stoves, coffee tables, and fire-rings, or at the pub or community hall, and start telling their stories?

morning coffee Prince Wiliam Sound

Sub-Arctic Dreams: Fresh Veggies in March

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Tiny Energies

http://pinterest.com/source/good -potato.com/ US WWI Poster

by Todd Logan

Alaska has a long and interesting history of agriculture, including a government-sponsored relocation of 200 Midwest farm families in 1935 to establish the Matanuska Valley Colony near present-day Palmer. Today a modest number of commercial agricultural operations are successfully operating around the state. Nonetheless, commercial agriculture, even when combined with subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering, supplies less than 5 percent of the food consumed by the 720,000 residents of the state.

In recent years home vegetable gardening has seen rapid growth in popularity nationwide. The local foods movement and a growing interest in sustainable and self-sufficient living have at least in part fueled this interest. In the Anchorage area, ornamental and vegetable gardening is popular. Our long summer days are a big plus. Our short growing season and naturally cool air and soil temperatures are our biggest challenges. Anchorage gardeners typically reserve Memorial Day weekend to plant most vegetables outdoors. We enjoy harvests from mid-summer until the hard frosts and first snows of mid-October bring the outdoor gardening season to a close.

At our Anchorage home we have had a successful vegetable garden for several years. Leafy greens such as lettuce, spinach, cabbage, and Swiss chard do well here. Root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, and turnips also thrive in our long days and cool soils at 61°North. However, if you lust for a good tomato, cucumber, or pepper, regardless of season, you must create more conducive growing conditions or accept the imported fare that spends weeks traveling from farm to market.

Harvest from our outdoor garden – September 2011

In 2011 we decided to build a greenhouse. We had two primary goals. First and foremost, we wanted to grow a broader range of vegetables than what outdoor conditions allow, as well as extend the season for the leafy green vegetables we much enjoy. Secondly, we were interested in creating a sunny warm space where we could relax and enjoy a good book now and again. Our mid-winter days are short – 5 ½ hours from sunrise to sunset, and even our July days, on average, only warm up to 65 degrees. We also set some constraints – primarily that the space had to require only modest energy inputs once built, and if possible, capture heat for greenhouse and other domestic uses. We also envisioned significant application of at least 7 of the 12-permaculture design principles:

Observe and interact
Catch and store energy
Obtain a yield
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
Use and value renewable resources and services
Integrate rather than segregate
Use small and slow solutions

We began our research and quickly learned that our goals were somewhat in conflict. A good greenhouse does not make a great sunroom, and a glassed space designed to maximize solar heat gain would not make a comfortable greenhouse or sitting space. We didn’t abandon our goals. We just made some compromises and hoped that we would strike a decent balance.

We chose to create an attached greenhouse – one that shares a wall with our existing home. Benefits of attached greenhouses include reduced construction costs, reduced energy needs for both greenhouse and home, and convenient location. We were fortunate to have a well-situated south wall of our house for this purpose. And the dimensions and configuration of our house prescribed the size of our greenhouse – 9’ x 14’. We selected a local sunroom contractor to design the structure and construct most of it. His knowledge from 3 decades in the sunroom/greenhouse business was most helpful. For example, one’s choice of glazing (the glass) requires a trade-off. Glass that allows undiminished light transmission and optimizes solar heat gain has poor insulation values. Since we planned to heat our greenhouse at least part of the year, the insulation value of the glazing was quite important to us. Contrary to standard sunroom design, we selected glazing that seemed to reasonably balance these three attributes for both the walls and ceiling of our new space (light transmittance = 65%, solar heat-gain coefficient = 0.27, U-Value = 0.25).

Many options exist to warm a greenhouse to extend the growing season and create an environment for growing temperate zone vegetables. One can maximize passive solar heating by adding mass such as dark colored masonry and/or water barrels inside the greenhouse. Potential active solar heating systems include subterranean heat and cooling systems (SHCS) and hydronic heat storage. On the fossil fuel front, we considered simple electric space heaters, a dedicated natural gas heater, and/or expanding our existing home’s natural gas and wood-fired furnace hydronic heating system. We ultimately chose the latter, but incorporated some of the solar heat capture approaches as well. After monitoring a season of greenhouse operation, we will likely incorporate additional solar heat capture.

While deciding how to heat an Alaska greenhouse is of primary concern, we are virtually certain that our greenhouse will actually overheat (exceed 80^oF) on sunny summer days. Greenhouse cooling is typically handled by manually opening windows or automated with exhaust fans that simply blow excess heat outdoors. We are loath to discard heat in Alaska, even mid-summer! Two potential approaches to cool the greenhouse and capture the waste heat are (1) blowing the warm greenhouse air into the rest of the house with a fan, and/or (2) removing heat from the greenhouse with an air-to-water heat exchanger. With respect to the latter, the warm water generated might be stored and used for greenhouse heating, home space heating, and/or domestic water heating. As stated above, we will evaluate the potential for integrated heating/cooling methods during our first season of greenhouse operation.

Foundation footers about to be poured. Footers were topped with 4’ of concrete block to support the floor

Due to all of these heating and cooling options and unknowns, we sought a greenhouse design that maximized future adaptability. We quickly realized that our choice of greenhouse foundation design would affect many options. The simplest greenhouse floor would be dirt, gravel, stone, or a poured concrete slab. While properly insulated dark colored concrete floors are often used in passive solar designs, we felt this approach would be ineffective in a greenhouse filled with shade-creating growing tables and plants. We decided that allowing for active solar heat capture was important and promising, so we went with a joist-supported wood floor over crawl space supported by 6’ deep concrete footers. Water is a superior medium for heat storage, and insulated tanks for hot water storage are an expensive and

Floor framed. Note the access hatch for each compartment.

space-consuming component of solar hot water systems. The two crawl space compartments beneath the greenhouse were designed to allow them to be retrofitted later with insulating foam sheeting and a pond liner to make two 1000-gallon hot water storage tanks (see www.builditsolar.com). We reasoned that one 1000-gallon tank might be used to store warm water in conjunction with a greenhouse air-to-water heat exchanger. A second tank might be

Main structure complete – November 2011

dedicated to store high-temperature hot water from dedicated solar thermal panels at some point in the future.

Greenhouse construction began in early October. Contractors got the foundation in just before the ground freezes in this part of the world. We then built the floor ourselves. In early November, the contractor tented the site and built the pony wall and glass structure over a 3-week period. In January and February we finished the inside of the pony wall, installed electrical outlets, hydronic baseboard heat, two hose bibs, and water and freeze-resistant vinyl flooring. We finally had a greenhouse!

Prototype earth boxes under lights. Good lettuce production. Good tomato plant growth and flowering, but no setting of fruit to date, possibly due to inadequate light and/or low indoor humidity

With respect to growing things, we had yet another goal – low maintenance. We love to garden, but we also love to get into the backcountry regularly to enjoy the amazing wilderness that this part of the world has to offer. With this in mind, we decided to go with “earth box” design growing tables, which will self-water and feed plants for extended periods. We built and tested several mid-sized earth boxes mid-winter, under LED grow lights, and liked our results. Earth boxes (www.seattleoil.com /Flyers/Earthbox.pdf) have a water reservoir in the bottom, then an air layer for healthy roots. Above that the box holds 8” of growing medium, which is topped with fertilizer bands between planting rows and finally a plastic evaporation barrier. Wicking tubes connect the soil layer to the water reservoir. The soil layer stays both moist and aerated from the water and air layers below.

We built two very large earth boxes to be our primary growing tables.

We built our earth boxes out of Douglas fir and cedar 2x4 lumber.

The shell of the first of 2 boxes is done.

Boxes done (upside down) with legs being attached.

The boxes are waterproofed by lining with PVC pond liner.

Boxes in the greenhouse. Tested for leaks.

Float valves will keep 4” of water in the bottom of the box. Soil is supported above with an inch of air between.

The growing medium is supported by fiberglass window screen over expanded metal. Screen is cut away from support tubes so they fill can be filled with soil to make wicking chambers.

We filled the boxes with 25 cubic feet of commercial growing medium to ensure good wicking and aeration.

On March 15 we set the greenhouse thermostat to 50^oF and planted cool season greens -– lettuce, spinach, kale, and Swiss chard. Sprouting began on schedule a week later.

Planting initial cool season greens. Organic fertilizer is laid on the surface in strips between planting rows. The surface is then covered with a 1-mil plastic evaporation barrier (inexpensive painter’s drop cloth).

We are having an unusually cool March. Nighttime temperatures have been dropping into the single digits, with days warming into the 20s. While we are still heating with our wood furnace, keeping the greenhouse near 50^o has not been hard. On several sunny afternoons we’ve seen 70^o inside. These are good temperature ranges for leafy greens. Indoors we have started warmth-seeking tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and celery. In a few weeks these should be of transplanting size. With our warming spring temperatures we can rationalize pushing the greenhouse thermostat to 65^o and see how these do. We’ll share our success, or lack thereof, in a future post. We are quite optimistic that we can make this work, but gardeners know you don’t always get everything right the first time!

Initial planting is done. Space is reserved for tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers after they are started indoors.

While we have attempted to share how permaculture principles shaped some of our thinking on this project, we are in no way claiming that we maximized those principles on this project. With a simple Internet search you can find some great resources on passive solar greenhouse designs, use of recycled/discarded materials in greenhouses, and even how to heat greenhouses with compost and animal manure. We encourage you to take a look at these should you ever decide to build a greenhouse.

We are all anticipating an early harvest!

Finally, the big picture: We must ask, “Should one be trying to grow temperate zone vegetables in Alaska at all? What’s the energy investment in an Alaska greenhouse-grown tomato or cucumber? How does that energy investment compare with one shipped to Alaska from the Central Valley of California, South Florida, or South America? In the energy scarce future, should Alaskans expect to eat tomatoes at all?” Good questions!

The Finished Greenhouse in March

The construction of this greenhouse required large energy inputs, including excavation with a tracked excavator and high tech glass and framing shipped from the East coast. High tech engineering and shipping to high latitudes demands fossil fuels, globalization and a broad base of complexity. Food security can be developed with less technology using hoop houses (here and here) and cold frames. While initial costs of an attached greenhouse are energy intensive, operation and maintenance should be much less demanding. Is a greenhouse an appropriate investment in the face of imminent descent? We think so. Will Alaskans have greenhouses, at least of this design, in the future low-energy world? Maybe, maybe not.

Back to the Future

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Tiny Energies

Ten teams of rather small oxen from 1914 driving timber loaded wagons.

by Bo Falk

Happy he who far from business, like the primitive are of mortals, cultivates with his own oxen the fields of his fathers, free from all anxieties of gain.
–Horace

‪In Sweden, cows and oxen are part of our whole culture’s foundation. The first letter of our alphabet, A, is an upturned symbol of a yoked oxen’s head. In contrast to the limited number of draft horses in Sweden, we have close to 1.6 million cattle. ‪Most are dairy breeds, but we have meat breeds that were once also developed as draft animals. ‪The use of oxen as draft animals was originally necessary when the cows were too small and friskier; only those who could not afford the oxen had to make do with cows or with hand tillage without draft help. ‪With only 300 million draft animals in the world, hand tillage is extensive. ‪Agriculture on several continents is mostly unmechanized.

‪Two recent changes have caused expansion of mechanization to slow, even in our country. ‪Right now, the greatest credit bubble ever is bursting, which affects investments, jobs and paying ability. ‪We and the world should focus our attention on the idea that economic growth is a passing stage.

The author Gunnar Lindstedt has said that we must have a million farmers in Sweden in ten years, which would be a little more than 1 out of 9 of our population. He argues that waning oil extraction necessitates less mechanization and more farmers. ‪In addition, the decline of world exports of fossil fuels is even faster than the decline of extraction. ‪Already now the world exports less than a third of all extracted fossil fuels (Energy Export Databrowser). Also, in this system, our net energy is getting too low so that it becomes difficult to keep our complex society running. ‪In addition, the ability to borrow money for further energy production and the necessary maintenance of necessary infrastructure in the fossil fuel system is largely disappearing. ‪This transition may be almost complete in a few years and make it necessary to mobilize what we can in renewable resources.

Oxen move at about 10 km in two hours during fully occupied driving (time passes fast). These are Jersey oxen; the one on the right side is 170 cm high and weighs about 1100 kg! The young cow attached to the right side of the cart now weighs about 1000 kg!

Over the past century, the cattle and oxen of the western world have become larger. ‪A hundred years ago an ox was considered to be big enough for ploughing if it weighed about 600 kg. ‪Now, the standard weight of an ox is easily double that. ‪My biggest cow, a Hereford, weighs about 1000 kg. ‪I recently heard of a Holstein cow that weighed 1190 kg. before slaughtering. ‪Thus, it is possible to get better efficiency by using our larger cows as draft animals rather than historically-sized oxen, and still get an acceptable tensile strength for ploughing.

Dairy Breeds and Herefords have a quiet temperament. ‪Their large udders, however, can be injured in work. ‪Using the cows during their dry period for ploughing work is advantageous. ‪ It trains the animals, reduces their fat cover and make them easier to breed. ‪Combining dairy breeds with Herefords would yield smaller udders, and the most basic taming and training to drive could be done in one day. The book Oxen: A Teamster’s Guide (Drew Conroy, 1999) is a rather good handbook on the topic of training. But I use the scandinavian traditional way of steering each animal by an ear with the reins attached to the horns.

For me the point in using strong cows instead of oxen is that they can be multipurpose and thus outcompete the oxen in terms of efficiency. They are strong, can provide meat and also provide milk and calves, which oxen cannot do. Therefore they are cheaper to keep. Then we can replace the oxen in Horace’s poem above with cows.

Test of the same oxen in hay raking with Amish equipment.

Bo Falk
‪Agricultural Ecologist & Laboratory
‪Hovmantorp, Sweden

Please join us in discussing the issues by clicking on either “Leave a Reply” below or on the title to this post in order to join the conversation? You’ll need to sign in to WordPress, providing a username and password. First posts for new registrants will be moderated.

Hovmantorp, Sweden @ 56.8 degrees latitude

What exactly is energy descent, or the prosperous way down?

Link

In 2006, Rob Hopkins asked this question, “What exactly is energy descent?” It is time to answer the question. What does the prosperous way down mean to you?

Please join us in discussing the issues by clicking on Replies to join the conversation? You’ll need to sign in to WordPress, providing a username and password.

Arctic Entries

Growing things

Share this:

Green buildings within a growth economy

Healthcare’s death grip on the current system

What might green healthcare look like?

Share this:

Wealth without work

Pleasure without Conscience

Science without Humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without Principle

Commerce without Morality

Worship without Sacrifice

Share this:

Share this:

Vulnerabilities from added levels of complexity

Share this:

Gender and the stress response during transition

But men aren’t happy either

Trapped elders aren’t happy either

Share this:

Cultural collision

Polarization and hierarchy

Share this:

You see more when you are moving slowly

People really want to talk to you when you travel by bike

Bike touring builds a sense of camaraderie and accomplishment

Share this:

Share this:

Types of Cohousing

Benefits of Cooperative Living

Problems of Cooperative Living

Darcy Weighs In

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: