Greenerminds contributor Outback Brad features in this recent local article about urban chickening. I finally got to meet Brad and his family recently at the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. I saw the table for the chicken group and figured he must be nearby. Hat tip to David at Daily Planet.
My most recent trip to the Catskills revealed even more frenetic activity than was evident in June. This includes massive infrastructure, especially in the form of pipelines and right-of-way cuts over forested ridges for feeder branches. The new Millenium pipeline, which will run from Corning east then south and eventually to New Jersey is a mammoth 36″ natural gas replacement for a current 12″ line. That’s a 10-fold increase in capacity. Not one well has been drilled in New York State, yet the writing is on the wall.
© 2008 Russell Honicker
What does this sort of approaching resource extraction orgy have to do with the Third World? After all, as a spokesperson for the NYSDEC said, “this isn’t Wyoming; this is New York!” We are the new Third World. Having raped the rest of the world, time to start in earnest at home. Of course there’s a long history of this here: coal, railroads, oil, highways, farming etc.
The so-called economic growth we’ve been experiencing here in the North-and-West has been subsidized by resource extraction over the last 35 years in places like Ecuador, Zambia, Angola, Sudan, East Timor and the like. Murder, authoritarianism, theft, lies, and squalid urban poverty accompany each new “discovery.” Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls this the “Resource Curse.” John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man calls it unofficial U.S. Policy. There was a recent news story about Indian farmers unceremoniously removed from their lands to make way for a new 900 acre Tata plant. This is our real economic engine.
While op-eds to the NYT place the blame for poverty on proponents of biofuels and opponents to Genetically Modified (GM) foods, and praises the efforts of our good friends at the World Bank, the reality is that our wealth has been, and is being stolen from distant parts of the world. We have been exporting poverty to the Third World for decades. While death squads are palatable or at least ignorable in some of these places, somehow the idea of mercenaries in Delaware and Broome Counties seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, residents report that Haliburton and Blackwater have arrived, along with military helicopters performing alarming seismic testing. Exporting poverty is no longer limited to other countries; we’re bringing it to the Catskills and Southern Tier.
Others have made this point before, but our agriculture is now more of a mining operation than anything else. We frack for natural gas to generate nitrogen fertilizer, applied in massive doses to sterile soil as anhydrous ammonia, most of which washes off into the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico, spawning a “dead zone” (one of 150 worldwide) the size of Massachusetts. Phosphate fertilizer is mined in the Caribbean and in Canada. Diesel and Gasoline comes from Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, by way of Port Arthur and Beaumont. The irrigation water is thousands of years old, mined from the once-huge Ogalalla reservoir, which is being rapidly depleted. All that produces starchy corn and soy beans that then act as inputs to other industrial food production processes like livestock, vegetable oils, soft drinks, and yeah, biofuels. It’s hard to find any actual food in our food systems- that is food that comes from rain, soil and sunshine. Rather, it’s all predominantly the end product of “drill, baby, drill.”
Finally, let’s tie this all back to the current global financial crisis, which is immediately a crisis of real estate and foreclosures, a crisis of land. Naturally, it is a crisis of much more. Ultimately, it’s a crisis of dissociation of money power from reality. All the working business models involve slavery, theft, monopoly or addiction.
Okay, that’s pretty negative. In order to end on a positive, a huge Greenerminds Congratulations and Thank You to Maura Harrington, who stared down Royal Dutch Shell last week.
[UPDATE 15:30 EDT] The Guardian Weekly has another success story- native Peruvians protect the Amazon basin.
I watched Escape from Suburbia the other night. Phil and Tom are featured in the film, and I wanted learn more about what they are doing in NYC. The movie covers a number of efforts across North America to deal with and find solutions to Peak Oil, and secondarily Climate Change and poverty, mainly through local food production. At least local food production was a theme.
What was most moving to me was the segment on LA’s South Central Community farm, a 14 acre community project at ground zero of urban gardening. This farm had private plots for 350 local families who grew food, medicinals and ornamentals. They started a market because people there were growing things not available anywhere else in LA. Horrifyingly, the city took back the land and sold it to a “logistics” company to build a warehouse there, because “people in South Central need jobs.” Despite community action and protest, the site was bulldozed on camera while the urban farmers could only look on in despair.
Carolyn Baker points out in her review what this means. Relocalization is not currently threatening to the powers that be, but will be soon, and we can expect a very nasty backlash. This example is just a taste of that. I’m relating this to the Archdruid’s post a couple of days ago about the misconception that collapse will somehow mystically be okay, and not too violent. I doubt that. The image I have of collapse is not a bunch of spontaneously emerging ecovillages, but something like New Orleans, post-Katrina, times every major metropolitan area in the world. I see pain in our future.
The conclusion I’m coming to, inescapably, is that food, relocalization and gardening are political. The good news is that gardening also seems to be a great way of organizing people in a way that doesn’t overtly seem political. In other words, like me, it’s only after gardening for some years that one comes to understand that gardening is political.
There seem to be two approaches to fighting the Beast. One is to go head to head, like Gandhi, Mandela or MLK. Another is to go underground like the mycelium network and stay off the radar until there is enough strength or pain to stand and fight. The danger is that being underground can become comfortable and the standing up never happens, or it gets co-opted before the groundswell.
This morning I made my first trip to Rochester’s world famous Public Market in over a year. As part of my family’s attempt to get our finances in better shape, we’re looking at our food spending and cutting back wherever possible. I knew the Public Market was open most days during the week and I could stop by before work, but then I’d have veggies baking in the hot car all day. Y. said, “why not just put a cooler with some ice packs in the car and keep them in there?” Within a day I’d found a free cooler sitting by the side of the road and I was set to go.
So here’s what $13.50 got me this morning:
I believe this is about half the price I’d pay at the local supermarket. Plus, these things I bought today usually taste like fruits and vegetables as opposed to tap-water taste and tennis-ball texture of stuff shipped here from Chile or Bakersfield. This gap in cost highlights the huge chunk of food prices being taken by the supply chain, and the quality gap makes another argument for localization. I’d rather be supporting the farmers and getting good food rather than supporting the BigCos and getting garbage.
Even on a Tuesday morning when the place is really quiet, the Public Market offers a lot of variety- tons of peppers, locally grown beans (including favas), potatoes, apples, annuals and perennial plants, not to mention the garage-sale fare. An added benefit is getting to chat with the vendors, or at least say good morning. Usually the most charitable thing I feel like saying at the supermarket is “can you get that f*&#$@ing restocking cart out of my way!” The Public Market and various farmers’ markets are just so much more friendly and pleasant.
The local paper ran a story on all the markets popping up all over town, and some of the more established players were complaining that there wasn’t the demand to support all these, yet I believe the demand will catch up, especially as they start to become more present and convenient.
This weekend was the last installment of the Permaculture Design Course in Hancock. Five of the original ten graduated and I’ve become very fond of these people. We gave presentations of our design projects on Saturday, held the “talent show” after dinner and ended up Sunday talking about invisible structures like legal, money systems, cultural and social processes. Saturday we’d had a visit from a local organic farmer who, after 20 years of struggle, is now facing the Hobson’s choice of selling out to natural gas drilling interests (like Haliburton ferinstance) or continuing to work endlessly treading water in a system where the full weight of the economy falls on the family farmer. This tied in, in a very real, visceral way, with the discussion of these invisible structures.
What I come away with is the concept of Withdrawal. First, I’m feeling the end of this transition, and it was in many ways life-changing for me. After other such initiations there is the need always for an integration period. It leaves me feeling like I’m coming back to a culture that is in no way plugged into the things we were talking about all winter and spring. I feel depressed. Like I’m withdrawing.
There’s the obvious addiction connotation here, as is often tossed about with terms like “addiction to foreign oil.” Like, as if, it’s no big thing to overcome an addiction! Anyway, that’s a little how I feel- on a very small scale- and I anticipate there is more pain ahead as I start to really look at how I’m living. One of my next steps is to “take inventory” but then maybe there’s a real 12-Step progression to this recovery and I should start with powerlessness. The organic farmer is right there: despair.
Looking at the Haliburtons and Blackwaters and World Banks running around screwing everyone, it’s hard not to despair. But there’s another kernel of hope in the word Withdrawal. As in withdrawing from participation in, cooperation with, cooptation by, apologizing for, rationalizing for, and investing in this s***storm we’ve created. Backing away slowly. And with each tiny, seemingly inconsequential action taken (like pulling the paper coffee cup out of the garbage and taking it home to use as a transplant pot for a cauliflower) I will say, “I’m making a withdrawal.” Each withdrawal goes into another account that accumulates over time. One day, one action, one withdrawal at a time. They add up.
Greenerminds is now officially a community project, thanks to Outback Brad who joined and posted for the first time this weekend. I’m looking forward to the details of his project, and what he’s going to share here.
For my part, I promised pictures, so here they are. These are a few weeks old- I dug the swales in mid-April, and did the sheet mulching the next weekend.
Here’s an overview shot of the main garden area, delimited by the swale in the foreground and the straw bales along the back. This area is about 40′ by 60′.
Now here’s a detail of one of the swales. I’ve overlaid a rough section drawing showing the water flow downslope and soaking into the lower side of the swale.
Here’s an overview shot of starting to do the sheet mulching. With the materials all collected this process goes very quickly.
I did an area about 20′ x 30′ (25% of the garden) in an afternoon. For the whole garden area I now figure I’d need 5 cubic yards of manure, 1 cubic yard of compost, and 36 straw bales. The sheet mulch will break down over a winter into excellent garden soil, thanks to worms and microorganisms that do all the hard work. However, you can plant directly into them by creating little pockets of topsoil in the straw. I’ll show this in a later post.
Here’s the detail on how the layers go.
Historically, I haven’t been very good at aesthetic design of gardens, and I have to say that putting in the swales and the pathways really helped to frame the areas. I have a main path running through the middle of the garden that will eventually include a patio area, then smaller paths extending off this along the upper sides of the swales. Keyhole garden paths then extend of these secondary branches.
This design framing was an added benefit I hadn’t anticipated. It also helps with plant placement, especially for larger anchor shrubs and trees by limiting the number of appropriate sites.
We live on a fairly prominent corner in our village, and there’s a lot of foot traffic past, through and around our lot, which is now festooned with curvy swales, sheetmulched areas covered in loose straw, piles of various things, scattered creek stones and a number of straw bales at the back.
What’s taking place in the yard is generating a LOT of questions and commentary. So far, most of comments come with an air of either bemused skepticism or outright ridicule. There are also some notable exceptions.
So as part of the agricultural experiment, I’m also starting to track the social experiment. Will attitudes change once the garden starts to take shape? At what point? What will the comments change to? Will people still be interested? Will their interest increase and turn into action?
Here’s a sampling of some of the commentary so far:
Item 3: What are you building? Leads to the standard response: “It’s a permaculture demonstration garden.” The follow on to this is one of two:
It’s about 4:1 so far for eyes-glazing. Only a couple of people have gone far enough to ask what permaculture is, usually repeat visitors like Mary who walks her dog past the house a half dozen times each day. The question is problematic, since even David Holmgren admits to the difficulty in answering this question with anything other than a 72 hour teach-in on the whole permaculture ouevre. I usually say something like “it’s a sustainable design system based on ecological principles.”
Interestingly, the process is starting to indicate who in the neighborhood is a potential partner, advocate, CSA customer, helper, future permaculture student and so on. In the spirit of having each element serve more than one function, don’t overlook the marketing, educational and promotional value of a site.
I’m killing my lawn and turning it into a food garden.
Let the sheet mulching begin! I went for a walk around town the other day, poking around the old abandoned railway lines (often a good place to find old tree and shrub stock), and walked past a feed and grain store I hadn’t paid much attention to. I called them up and asked if they sold strawbales, and they did. I ordered 20 at $4.50 each.
Unfortunately they don’t deliver and I don’t have a pickup any more. So I decided to rent a U-Haul, and found that the repair shop around the corner from me rents them- I could walk there if necessary. So I lined up a truck for this weekend.
Meanwhile I went on craigslist and discovered all manner of cool free stuff including rotted horse manure and creek rocks (don’t tell these folks, but people pay good money for this stuff). Haven’t heard back from the rock people yet, but I have the manure and straw pickups scheduled for this Saturday. Naturally, the forecast is for rain.
So the way sheet mulching works is this:
The great news about sheet mulch:
Once I get this going, I’ll include some pictures and maybe even a video on the process.
The stuff we are talking about- home, urban and communitiy gardening, food, pattern, integrated landscapes, victory gardens, ecology, edge, small farming, relocalization- is suddenly mainstream. Allison Arieff blogs on these and other topics on the front page of the New York Times website.
Stuart Staniford of the Oil Drum posted yet another rosy scenario about the future of food. What has struck me about this series is the fantastic gaps, assumptions and leaps of faith Staniford takes as givens and most of the commentators go along with. To give just a brief example, he says that there’s no problem with producing nitrogen in the future, despite the fact that natural gas is a critical component in the production of ammonia, which is the critical component of all nitrogen fertilizers. No problem, we’ll just substitute the boundless renewable energy he talked about in a previous post.
David Holmgren points out that if there’s boundless energy, then all of our work in Permaculture and sustainability is probably a waste of time. There’s still that pesky global warming issue, but we can ignore it for a while longer. Nevertheless, Staniford’s posts represent a possible scenario in the future, and we need to consider it, however unlikely it is to come to fruition. Holmgren considers this view as the “green tech” solution- one among a number of possible scenarios, each of which require differing strategies.
My point here is not to take Staniford’s arguments apart. At least not yet. What’s interesting to me today is that the process of uncovering the assumptions leads to more learning. To me this is like digging a trench (to use my friend Bill’s expression). Working at the trench level of detail, close to the ground, gives a strong and coherent foundation to one’s knowledge. So while I intuitively disagree with Staniford’s conclusions, he’s providing tremendous service by defining this swiss-cheese structure, whose negative space is a patch pattern of very fertile intellectual ground.
Permaculture points out that the interesting stuff, the productive areas are at the edges and transitions. This suggests that it is not the anti-assumption that is interesting but the points at which the assumption and anti-assumption approach eachother, where the anti-assumptions spread out to touch eachother, like pioneer patches in a successional field.