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A Chronicle of a summer visit:


We had a wonderfully full house this weekend.  It's not like the house had been lacking in life, with the four of us and Alberto, not to mention two cats, a guinea pig and a cornsnake, but my sister Cathie (8 months pregnant) and Eric and 2-year old Bridget, with their little dachshund, Portia arrived on Thursday.


We gave them cold beer and juice and ice water, but piled them back into their car for an outdoor concert at the Jonathan Edwards winery.  The good-natured crowds with their kids and their picnics were beginning to fill the lawns in front of the players.  We laid our quilts down on the grass, and opened Spanish olives and a cold bottle of Pinot Grigio.  The breeze across the vines was breaking the heat and the music was good and chilled wine even better.  We'd moved on to the winery's chaotic Stone Table Red before Jiri and Sharka showed up with Jacob and Filip.  Now the four boys disappeared and Bridget, drawn by the triple energies of music and air and other children, began to roam and find friends and dance to the music.  There was another bottle of wine.  We stayed into the dark.


On Friday, Monica and Nico headed off to camp early in the morning.  Nico was going to hunt mud puppies at Avery Preserve and Monica was taking her lot to the Beardsley zoo.  I was working at home, doing phone interviews with people around the country on agricultural nitrogen pollution -- trying to get at the conceptual models people are using to understand what the heck I am talking about.  Alberto was looking after the house.  Porter opted to skip camp and play guide for our visitors at the Mystic Seaport.  The snake slept quietly, forgotten behind the Zane Grey novels on the bookshelf.


In the evening, Monica and the boys went off to the movies with Patty and her girls -- to see The Last Airbender.  Cathie, having toured all day with a 2-year old, napped.  And I made margaritas for Eric and myself.  We talked and read and played with Bridget.  Portia and the black cat, Wilbur, negotiated a co-existence.


Cathie, Eric and Bridget are not early risers, but we got them rousted in time to cook up some French toast and still make it to Stonington Borough's Saturday morning farmers' market.  Peaches and raspberries, blueberries and little red plums.  Lemon Italian ice.  And vegetables to last the week.  I tucked it all away into a cooler in the car and we walked the old sea-town out past the stone lighthouse to the jetty.  Bridget was in the backpack and Eric's shirt was soon translucent with sweat.  In the seaweedy water, pebbles clicked as ten thousand little crabs shifted them around in their incessant foraging.  Cormorants flew by and a lone Herring Gull sat watchfully upon a barnacle-encrusted boulder.  Napatree beach was golden in the clear light.  We ate lunch at Milagro - cactus salad, shrimp, carne asada, complex salsas.  I took Bridget on a walk to the green while the others finished up.  She held my hand and took a moment to sit on every bench and ledge.


I had to return the Mystic Seaport pass to the library in Westerly, and Eric, Nico and I took the opportunity to go for a walk around the town.  The library, park, bookstore, merchant strip and so on.  Westerly manages to convey a civic vitality -- staid and traditional maybe, but so unlike most old towns (if they have neither a college nor tourists) who have lost their hearts.  We got home in time to watch the Germany Uruguay consolation match -- possibly the best game of the 2010 World Cup.


At 4:30 Monica, Eric, Cathie, Bridget and I headed down to East Beach, three miles of pines and dunes.  The sun had lost some of its brutality by then, but the ocean was stirred up and the tide coming in.  Bridget didn't like the rough, pounding surf, though Eric and I both braved it.  As I swam, shredded seaweed tickled and clung and I felt like I should look like Swamp Thing when I skipped back up out of the turgid waves onto the beach.


We'd thought of going to Wakefield for Greek food, but instead Monica made us a dish of onions, green beans, tomatoes and finger potatoes for dinner -- from the farmers' market, of course.  And we moved deeper into the fridge's beer supply.


Chloe, the gray cat had greeted Cathie and Eric when they arrived, but after noting the dog and the toddler she then disappeared, not to be seen again.  Porter had followed suit, heading off with Jake off into the woods with hatchets, hammocks, a skillet and a day's supply of hot dogs, bacon and s'mores makings.  He'd return the next morning with tales of angry nocturnal deer and meddlesome raccoons.


Late Sunday morning Alberto went to mass and Cathie and Monica went off to Watch Hill to stroll the town and beach and have lunch at the Olympia Tea Room.  Eric, Nico and I looked after Bridget and fed on fruits and rice and beans.  He did some desultory packing and worked at a book review in opportunistic snatches.  Nico mostly read the book that Eric had bought him at the Other Tiger in Westerly.  In the afternoon, before they left for Pennsylvania, most of us gathered for the World Cup final between Holland and Spain.  We had to watch it on Unavision's slightly jerky webcast, since ABC was broadcasting it on TV and for some reason doesn't want a web audience.  (Why?)  On the bright side, I could more easily tune out the blather of the announcers since it was all in Spanish.  Nico and I were the only ones rooting for the Dutch, (though by the end I was rooting for neither team).


And then it was time for the Pennsylvanians to head off into the setting sun.

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I think I need to take a break from reading the news.
Thank god at least I don't have a TV.


From Mark Twain:

The most interesting information 

comes from children, 

for they tell all they know  

and then stop.

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Guy McPherson writes a thought-provoking doomer blog, whose subheading reads, "Humans have tinkered with the natural world since we appeared on the evolutionary stage.  Our days may be numbered.  As the home team, Nature bats last."


The collapse of the age of oil, and our utter inability to prepare for the approaching calamity sets the stage for a new ascendancy of nature and for the exit of humans from center stage and perhaps an exit from the stage altogether.  In offering an alternative to Guy's baseball metaphors, I wrote in the comments:


"Here’s an alternative metaphor if only loosely sports related: The Donner Party combination pie and hotdog eating contest. Had to be called off with a few contestants still eating because the food was sadly all gone. But no worries, the weather’s changing and it looks like there’ll be plenty of snow to eat."

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Porter's back from a week in Bimini in the Bahamas, where he was there studying marine life with the Dolphin Communications Project.  He came back confident and happy, with a few more freckles and without much in the way of peeling skin.

It was pretty much hands-on marine biology.  His parents shelling out some money to see if Porter's fascination for dolphins and sharks translates to science research.   Says he wants to be an electrical engineer and a marine biologist.  So we'll see.  He's twelve years old.

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The milkweed is taking over the red raspberry patch.  




Red and black milkweed beetles chew the leaves.  






Monica says it's a good year for milkweed everywhere, so maybe it's a temporary ascendancy.  
Honeybees and bumblebees buzz the globish blossoms. 

No signs of monarch or tussock moth caterpillars, yet.  

A cicada-killing wasp weighted down the flowers of one, but flew off angrily when I looked too close.  

Nico and I waded in after red raspberries. 

 


















A pair of housewrens complained from the quince.  The berries weren't very sweet.  Not as sweet as the black raspberries that grow all around the property.  




Maybe they need a few more hot days.  We'll see how many the catbirds leave us.

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Nico
with Chris
and Jaime
at Naragansett Beach.

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The thermometer crested at 87 degrees today -- the hottest day so far here in our woods.  Drawing the blinds wasn't much of a defense.  By 10 am I was driven out of the upstairs office and into the old-fashioned air conditioning of the granite basement.  There I worked on my laptop, clearing up all the tasks I'd neglected in the last two weeks of data gathering and analysis.

The family was scattered into the summer.  Nico was off at Dean's house, catching wood frogs, trampolining, wrestling, and generally rampaging.  Monica was leading her intrepid camp troops to Stepstone Falls in Arcadia.  Alberto, his Colombian blood completely untroubled by the heat, was upstairs vainly trying to rally the Brazilians over the Chileans in their World Cup match.  Porter is furthest off, in the Bahamas searching for dolphins and manta rays.

At 5 o'clock there was thunder and wind and cool air to settle the temperatures back down into the 70's -- and I could come back up from the cave.

Update:  an earlier version mistakenly depicted Alberto rooting for Chile instead of Brazil.  Anubis Bard regrets the error.  :-)

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Chloe, our gray cat, stalks by the flower garden.

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Euan Mearns posting at the Oil Drum put up a couple of sobering graphs showing the scale of the problem we're going to have getting off fossil fuels.

First, the good-looking news:

Then the sobering news:

The thin little line at the top (reddish if you can see it) is our current capacity for renewable energy.

It's possible that if we'd started a generation ago and we'd taken vast amounts of these fossil fuels and used them to build windmills and solar panels and tidal generators and cities that were energy efficient; and if we had created local, less energy intensive foodways and so on; and if we'd kept populations at a level that our ecosystems could support sustainably -- then we would be able to transition to an energy-sustainable system without our civilization collapsing.  But we didn't, and now there are a pair of locomotives coming down the tracks -- the first is the fact that oil production has reached its peak and is about to go into serious decline and the second is that if we don't figure out a way to leave some of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, starting right now, we are almost certainly going to send the planet's climate into a dangerous, and probably fatal, tailspin.

But we are doing nothing at all to the scale we would need to.   Denial, delusion and magical thinking reign.  There is zero political will to even acknowledge the problem, much less do anything about it.  Even leaving the active denialists aside, none of the rosy scenarios seem based in reality at all -- not those rooted in alternative energies, nor conservation, nor technological solutions, nor blind faith that we humans are up to this task and will inevitably figure something out.

Humans have an ability to concoct visionary futures, a profound power that has enabled humans to expand the realm of possibilities beyond what other animals could possibly manage.  Ironically, with that skill of imaginizing running up against the hard physical constraints of an energy economy, it is only enabling us to fantasize our way off a very real cliff.

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An old friend, Marysia, came to visit early this week.  I met her my first day in San Diego 20 years ago.  She overheard me in the off-campus housing office telling a potential landlord that I was a first-year grad student in anthropology.  And we were housemates that year -- five of us in a big old house on Fort Stockton Avenue.  There was good food, and Elise's sunflowers, and every night a funny story of Susan's ESL students.   And Elise and Jordan making art in the garage.  I weathered my studies, Marysia did the same, while also grieving through the death of her brother.  The next year she was off to Poland to start her fieldwork, and we wouldn't live in the same city again until I returned from my own fieldwork in Central Asia at the beginning of 1997.  She was there by Monica at Porter's birth, and I have memories all jumbled up of many dinners and easy friendship with her and Axel.  But it was only a year and a half until she handed off her Chula Vista classes to me and moved to Tuscaloosa to be a potter and professor.


In tallying that up we were a little shocked to realize out that our friendship, which is one we both take for granite,  is based on only 2 and a half years of proximity.  But such is friendship.  Somehow those were times that let us know one another and every visit confirms it.


I was talking with other friends about time and its elasticity (it is midsummer, and the New England days have all been stretching lengthwise).   We think we have time or don't have time for the things we want to do -- and it's true to an extent.  (I still haven't gotten around to re-caulking the shower -- despite visualizing mold and rot inside the wall each time I take a shower -- because I haven't set aside the time.)   But when it comes to the important things -- the experiences and relationships that really enrich a day or week or year -- we have this ability to bring the passage of time to a snail's pace by simply being in the moment.  And in that way, the moment, minute, year, becomes almost infinitely dense.  And so there is time -- if only I am wise enough to occupy it.

The girl was part of the night
 except for eye whites
and smile teeth
and she said to my son softly,
"Porter, for you."


Green glowing on her hand,
a lightning bug, firefly.
He gently touched
his knuckle to hers,
and the bug crossed.
An insect frisson.

Porter was in a thoughtful mood the other  night

 and wrote a poem he called 

yin yang:

A sign of peace?

A sign of love?

The white a fluttering dove?

But what is the black?

The side that attacks?

What about the opposite color in each?

Is it just like the words of the preach

There is good in all evil.

There is evil in all good.

(All of this is under my hood.)

As the cultural anthropologist in a consulting team that works for non-profit clients, I find myself rambling across a mind-boggling array of different issue areas.  It's true that in one sense our work is very consistent:  nearly always looking into the cultural and cognitive models that people use to understand policy issues -- and using those insights to help advocates communicate better with their audiences.


But the particular issue areas that we're working within on any given week can run from racial health disparities in Kentucky, to progressive taxation in Alabama, sustainability of food systems in the US, France and Belgium, climate change, building support for arts programs in Ohio, youth programs in New York City, unionization among retail workers or meat-packers, changing national security discourse in DC, or building momentum for democracy and good governance around the country.


I'm grateful to put food on the table with what amounts to do-goodery.  For most of these projects, it's pretty low stress.  I enjoy solving the puzzles that we design and solve with our research.  I enjoy translating our insights into words that can reach and teach people new and more constructive ways of understanding things.


But when the work deals with the environment -- and particular with sustainability -- I begin to take the topic deadly serious and find the work more stressful and the challenges more distressing.  (I wrote recently about my anxieties about not preparing for what I see as a coming breakdown -- and partly that's a reaction to once again working with the Union of Concerned Scientists to educate policy makers about some of the ways we are destroying those underlying foundations that our survival depends on.)


I know from personal experience how little I like truly acknowledging the repercussions of our current rampage of unsustainable consumption and extraction.  It's hard to imagine how we convince the larger public to wrap their minds around it.  Upton Sinclair observed that:


“If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”


How much more difficult is it to get an entire society to understand something when their entire way of life depends on them not understanding it?

Nico sculpted a wood frog

The living ones,
we hear chuckling in the trees.

A crack-flash of lightning in the woods early this morning made Monica yelp, wrung a curse of out Porter, and brought Nico pattering down the stairs upset by a nightmare.  The strike had punctuated his dream -- there were two bombs in our house, and though no one was hurt in the first explosion,  his classmate's Mom went back for the cupcakes -- and she was blown up.

This man, like all other men, and women too,

(at least the ones not lunatic nor dying)

needed a future to take with him

into his Tuesday morning

(like his grandfather with gray felt fedora,

or grandmother with clayish armor

of red, red lips). 

And this man’s future

was bright and geometric and excellent,

like the images that come

if you press your thumbs long enough

onto clench-closed eyes.

After every Tuesday, a Wednesday and then Thursdays 
all ways

after that. 

“Wednesday,” says the lunatic,

“or more precisely Wotan’s Day –

or if you like, Odin’s Day

is a dead-end day

for the Tree-hugging, one-eye god,

who, you know, gets et finally

by hairy Fenrir pups

or an en’dragon

or some such monsters of the God-Dusk.”

This man laughs, with his

bright and geometric and excellent

future. 

This man in his Tuesday morning.

This man.

This.

Porter says he wants to be an engineer – especially if engineering students don’t have to take as many English classes.  As I was writing yesterday’s blog post about (not) preparing ourselves for this civilization to hit the rocks, I was joking with Monica that we should set Porter up as a blacksmith, too --  (and that Nico’d make the better goatherd.)

Meanwhile, Porter was disassembling the robosapien that his grandmother gave him a couple of Christmases ago.  He seems to be planning a more elaborate and monstrous robot from it.

I set him and Jake loose with a handsaw trimming one of the maples.  It had some large limbs that were shading out the mulberry sapling and causing the cedar, elderberries and dogwoods to strain further and further out into the yard.  (They’ve swallowed up a portion of the clothesline.)  When the limb finally fell without injuring anyone, they were soon at it with hatchets. 

I couldn't find my ax.  I suspect the boys, but they insist that I never owned an ax otherwise they certainly would have remembered that.  Probably, they’re right.  I certainly never used it here.

I was talking with friends about paths not taken.  It’s not really that I think of life in terms of Frost’s roads diverging in a wood.  The paths that take us where we end up seem to be the summary of ten thousand micro-decisions.  Sometimes there’s the clarity and challenge of a fork, but only because of the preceding thousand, barely-noticed choices that put you on that road.  But, nonetheless, I’ve been thinking about my own road-not-taken.  It’s not the obvious ones – like I could have stuck more determinedly in academia or done a different kind of writing or lived in a different part of the country.  As far as all of those alternatives go (to the extent there were forks that might have taken me there) I’m not much tempted to dwell on them.

No, for me the path not taken has to do with actually living up to my convictions when it comes to participating in our fundamentally unsound and unsustainable society.  Whether intellectually or instinctually, I know that our civilization is heading for the rocks – and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the (fading) hope that we are going to do anything about it. 

It is not just about the unsustainability of our civilization.  It is the fact that we have been ruthlessly destroying the generative foundations of everything we depend on.  Not just using up resources, but destroying the very systems that create and renew the resources we depend on.  We are like the heirs to a fortune, that not only ruined and looted the investments, but squandered all of the capital, and took out triple mortgages on every property that he could claim ownership of.  Then we congratulated ourselves on the quality of the champagne we were able to purchase with our wealth.

(Continued below the break)