Gypsy moth infestations

a freshly hatched gypsy moth caterpillar

Growing up in Pennsylvania in the 1980s I saw years when the leaves came out on the trees in May and were gone by middle of June.  From a distance, the rolling, forested hills would look like they had in March – all grays and browns.  Up close, hiking in the woods you would hear a constant hiss of frass falling from the gypsy moth caterpillars above - like a dry rain.  

The first year or two trees would re-leaf by July, but if the moths persisted trees would begin to die.

Here in Rhode Island, flocks of grackles – accompanied by a few cuckoos – spent a couple of weeks last summer in our woods at the height of the caterpillar season.  (The two species have found ways to deal with spiny caterpillars like the gypsy moth.  The yellow-billed cuckoo can discard its stomach lining once it has ruined it with the caterpillar's defensive spines; the grackles seem to take the more direct approach of trying to beat the spines off by smacking them against a tree branch.)  

But there is only so much they can do, and at the end of summer there were hundreds of tawny egg patches - proof that plenty of moths had evaded predation.

Now the trees are coming into leaf, and tiny newly hatched caterpillars are on the move.  That's what has me recalling the deforestation of years past.  Maybe it will turn out to be a localized outbreak and the cuckoos and grackles will come back with friends to share the bounty.  Or maybe it will be like the bad old days, where defoliation stretched mile after mile.

with ballpoint pen, for scale

Enoughness and the Age of Consumer Capitalism, part 2

   This is the continuation of my earlier post on Enoughness . . .

Consumerism lies at the heart of our current civilization.  I don't mean we like shopping.  I mean that buying stuff stands at the very heart of our way of life.

A culture can include for its people a vision of a larger project beyond themselves.  Our own civilization has dabbled in grand projects - from Christian missions to the Space Race - from nation-building and modernization - to Manifest Destiny and America as beacon of democracy.

When you look around today, you'll find little in the way of grand visions.  Progress has been variously imagined, but today it has been pruned down to little more than the incremental tweaks of a smart phone obsolescence cycle - or at best, imaginary self-driving cars.

You might well argue that it's not such a bad thing that we set aside grand visions.  Not only have they proven dangerous, they also have rarely been the concern of the average person, who generally prefers to be left in peace to invest their energies into the mundane concerns of working and wooing and raising their offspring.

But no one really escapes the assumptions and demands of their culture, and here in the mundane is where consumerism truly permeates.  In a thousand subtle ways, our society tells us that the very point of our existence is to consume.  If you are poor you have failed in every important way.  You ought to have the wherewithal to buy those things that demonstrate your ambition and commitment to success.

But of course there is no ultimate success - there is only more striving.  Consumerism is not something that has a conclusion.  On the contrary, there is no level you can reach where you will be safe from an army of marketers that is taking aim squarely at whatever potential inklings of satisfaction or satiety or enoughness you might achieve.  Once the needs of life have been met, then production and advertising becomes all about irritation - trying to create an itch that only this product can scratch and soothe.  To distract you from any budding sense that you might actually already have what you need.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year creating that itch and that lure.  It's commonplace to complain about the oppressive ubiquity of advertising around us - and the way it uglifies and degrades the spaces around us.  But we don't often think about how much of the world we inhabit is designed and built as a stupendous architecture for fueling and enforcing consumerism.   Enoughness must not be allowed to take root.

Human culture is a dynamic inter-reaction between the actual practices of everyday life and a set of guiding ideas, motifs, myths and grand narratives.  What are the implications when our myths are no longer stories that we tell each other, but stories sold to us by vast profit-making corporations?  When we don't sing our own songs to our children and our lovers, but consume them from a music industry?     What does it mean when all of our information about our communities, our political leaders, our collective realities is processed for us by media companies whose sole and overriding goal is to sell our attention to other companies who need us to buy their stuff?

Many of the largest, most familiar, most sophisticated and most profitable corporations in the world don't make their enormous profits from the products they create.  They make their profits by selling us, our attention, our vulnerability and our consumerist potentials to their actual, fee-paying clients.  For Google and Facebook, you are not a customer, but the product they sell to advertisers.  CNN, Fox News, the networks, Clear Channel Radio don't sell their media productions to you.   Those concoctions exist for the sole purpose of luring you away from a life you might be leading in order to keep you in front of that screen absorbing a paid advertisement.  The NBA, NFL, Major League baseball would wither away if they had to rely on ticket sales.  The big money comes from selling all the eyeballs that an entertaining game secures for the sponsors.

I began this essay, by saying that consumerism lies at the heart of the matter.  The powers that be will tell us that this is just our natural, inevitable state, but clearly there is a vast amount of creative and economic energy devoted to molding us into consumers - consumers who just can't get enough.

Next week, I'll continue with some thoughts about the limits and exits from consumerism . . .

Enoughness and the Age of Consumer Capitalism, part 1

trees reflected in a winter pool

There is nothing more destructive to capitalism than the satisfied customer.

Lately, much of my work professionally is focused on reviving American practices of democratic citizenship, as well as reforming our economic culture and our public policies in ways that are less destructive to ourselves and our world.  There are various dynamics at work, but when I look around at all the various problems and potentials of our era, I've long maintained that consumerism is at the heart of the matter.

I thought I'd make use of this blog to try to flesh out my thinking on the topic, so bear with me . . .

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Depending on your priorities, market capitalism can be an efficient way to organize your economic affairs.  Those who possess wealth set up enterprises, and those who don't have wealth must exchange hours of work for a wage.  The desire for a good wage motivates the have-nots to be diligent and ambitious workers and the desire for profits motivates the haves to create goods for their customers in a cost-effective way.  When government is strong enough and democratic enough to set ground rules and make sure the common good is protected to some degree, it's not a terrible system.

For millennia the grunt-work of civilization was done with human and animal bodies, supplemented with the power of falling water and bustling wind, but now coal, oil and gas do the work and ask for no wage other than the effort it takes to get them out of the ground.

It's probably more accurate to call our current system "consumer capitalism," because the energy subsidy from fossil fuels enables a new variant, in which wage earners don't just occupy themselves with subsistence - the reproduction of the workforce - but they secure enough wealth to become key customers in their own right.  And they become a necessary and vital market for the goods being produced.

By the time we got a ways into the 20th century, there was actually enough wealth being produced to ensure material security for everyone, arguably even to a degree of comfort and luxury that would have satisfied an upper middle class burgher from a few generations past.  Leisure and time - freedom from labor and drudgery - had been the privilege of the few, but was now within the grasp of the many.

I ponder what might have happened if we had developed "enoughness" as a core cultural value- if our system had been oriented toward ensuring that people found satisfaction and self-actualization in a materially modest, cozy existence where there was less work and more leisure, more fellowship and edification and less competitive consumption.

But that is clearly not where we've ended up.    Today, instead of free time we have workers putting in 60-hour weeks to pay the rent or rise up the ladder, and mothers dropping their 3-week old babies at daycare.

We have millions of young people medicated and self-medicating to endure a ruthless culture of striving, in which the ability to stay focussed on working and spending are the parameters of life's success.


Our time away from work is no longer "free", but instead an effort of consumerist leisure - whether passively consuming media products or actively - and expensively - constructing our identities as golfers or runners, backpackers or Caribbean vacationers, video gamers or stadium tailgaters.

We work long hours for our wages and forget how to do a thousand things our great grandparents could do for themselves.  We've had our crafts and callings taken from us and replaced with things and services that we can buy from our direct-deposit paychecks.

We bring the global poor into our orbit as factory drones, but with the promise that they can soon join us under the bright lights of our consumerism.

Along a different trajectory, within a culture of enoughness, we might have been the beneficiaries of a golden age of prosperity and civilization - or at least achieved some sort of sustainable global existence. Is it so hard to imagine?

Next week, I'll continue my effort to sketch out this predicament - and the ways that our unhappy system is enforced and evaded . . .

Down to the future

This is an old chart that my father drew up over 30 years ago, around the time I was starting in college, and the global population was 4.7 billion.  The brown line at the top represents available natural resources.  The red line represents population, and the green line, available food.  It makes a simple, straightforward and true point - that natural resources don't increase in the way population and food production have, and at some point in the future declining resources meet ascending demands and so population stops increasing.  Depending on the choices we make it could stabilize or crash catastrophically.


This was true then and true today - as global economic growth starts shuddering to a halt; as soil and water resources degrade; as the anthropocene extinction event continues inexorably; and as climate change inserts itself as a destabilizing wild card.

Nevertheless, after drawing up this chart, my father went on to complete his career and settle into retirement without ever seeing the elbow in this graph.  He didn't join a commune or build a bunker.  He worked and paid his taxes - sent his kids off to colleges and graduate schools, watched them get jobs and found families of their own.  He worked as an educator, activist and community leader to create smarter and more resilient communities around himself, but he didn't or couldn't extricate himself from our doomed and destructive way of living.

I study this yellowed and dog-eared piece of posterboard, as I prepare to usher my own son off to college.  I wonder whether I will retire into a society that continues to tread water despite it's unsustainability - or whether I'll come to regret not joining a commune or building a bunker.  I wonder whether I've given my sons enough resilience to deal with what is coming - the elbow in that chart that we still refuse to prepare for.

In the end, I do much as my father did - work to create more resilient people, environments and communities, keep alive a handful of useful skills including gardening, storytelling, and ecology, and engage with the world we have as best I can.  It's even possible my sons will do the same.  The human ability to muddle along is not to be underestimated . . .

For a complementary rumination upon this dilemma I recommend Brian Kaller's eloquent blog.

Nine predictions for 2016

In the spirit of making this an annual exercise in humility, here are my 9 predictions for 2016:

• 2016 comes in at the second hottest year on record, just behind 2015.
• Clinton / O'Malley handily defeats Trump / Rubio in the presidential election, despite months of breathless concern trolling on the part of the punditocracy. 
• Obama ushers out his presidency with an unprecedented number of blanket pardons for non-violent drug offenders.
• A cultural panic ensues when a US community outlaws the playing of football for youths under the age of 18.  The state legislature quickly repeals the law.
• As Iranian oil comes to market OPEC finally ratchets down production to keep oil in the $30-50 range for most of the year.
• Domestic terrorism - especially against Blacks, Muslims and liberals - will claim more American lives than Daesh, Al-Quaida and their ilk combined.
• Vladimir Putin will survive an assassination attempt.
• Internet advertising will be exposed as utterly ineffective, and the business model for internet content suppliers begins to collapse in earnest.

Then of course, it is easier to predict the many things that could change, but probably won't.  So folded into prediction #9:

• Because representational democracy has gone off the rails at the federal level there are a number of things that won't change:
• Americans won't take back their democracy from the wealthy interests that have hijacked it; and corporations will continue to write regulations to suit themselves.
• Assault weapons will remain legal despite more mass shootings.
• Militarization of police forces, systematic use of homicide and excessive force, as well as officers' de facto immunity from prosecution will continue unabated despite the mounting financial and social costs.
• We will not develop a constructive or effective plan for dealing with Islamic fundamentalism.

And now is when I note that all of my predictions seem awfully gloomy or pessimistic.  When it comes to optimistic predictions that could be concrete enough to be judged right or wrong a year from now, it's hard to see important trends that are looking positive.  

I asked Nico, who just turned 14, what progress he saw being made in 2015.  What were the things that showed us humans moving forward?  For him, the acceptance of gay marriage, improvements in prosthetics and the successes in robotic space exploration (Mars, Pluto, Asteroids) were the main ones that came to mind.  And maybe something would come out of the Paris accords on climate change. Not exactly a landslide of positivity.

For 2016, it seems likely that Black Lives Matter will successfully bend the trend away from ever more lethal policing against minorities.  It's possible that the Republican party's current experiment with extremism, will scare it back toward sanity and toward an engagement in governance once again.   I hold out hope that young people will increasingly seek creative ways out of the consumerist cul de sac they've been led into.

But for the most part, I foresee another year in which we muddle along and fail to solve the problems which are rumbling beneath us like methane bubbles in a melting permafrost. 

Looking back at my predictions for 2015

I'll emerge from my blogging hiatus to revisit last year's predictions to see if I can improve on my 2 out of 9 from last year.  In terms of the big picture, my over-arching prediction from the beginning of 2014 has remained accurate.  We mostly muddled along with the status quo and we neither made progress on solving our problems nor did we bring our civilization finally crashing down upon our collective heads.

But I did go out on a limb with 9 predictions for 2015 - Let's see how I fared.  I predicted that:

• It will be one of the three hottest years ever recorded globally.

1 for 1.  Global temperatures began a leap upwards this year, and 2015 will go down as the hottest on record.

• Obama attempts to put ending mass incarceration onto the public agenda.  In particular, the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders.  The possibility of blanket pardons cause the Republicans to go ballistic and half of the Democratic party runs for cover.

1.5 for 2. Half credit.  Obama actually did make the effort, but a distracted media and a dysfunctional Congress ensured that it never took center stage.  Instead, Black Lives Matter emerged as a powerful civil rights movement protesting the slaughter of African Americans by police.

• Ebola flares up in Asia.  These several thousand deaths rattle the global economy much more than the African outbreak did.

1.5 for 3. No credit.  Ebola slowly burned itself out in West Africa and fortunately gained no foothold elsewhere.

• Americans are shocked when police officers in a major metropolitan area are found to have intentionally singled out and assassinated several critics of police brutality.

1.5 for 4. No credit. The atrocities perpetrated by bad cops continue to mount, but this one doesn't seem to be in the tally.

• Globally, disgust with their political elites continues to bolster support for radical, anti-establishment parties, and in more than one European country they win power, if not for long.

2 for 5. Half credit. Syriza in Greece and the recent up-ending of the status quo by Podemos and Ciudadanos in Spain fall into the spirit of this prediction, but for the most part Europeans didn't rise up to throw the bums out.  

• Occupy re-emerges as a political force among the younger generation - organized around its "debt jubilee" and other efforts to disentangle young people from participation in an economic and political system that is rigged against them.  The Establishment derides them as naive and disengaged.

2 for 6. No credit. The mantle of youthful discontent and economic critique was picked up by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren instead.  

• (Carried over from last year) One of the world's great monoculture crops will mostly fail this year.  Although this will be blamed on a new pest or blight, the failure will actually be due to a combination of narrow genetics, unstable climate and the decline in agricultural research.

2 for 7. No credit. Agriculture plugged along despite its unsustainable and fragile state.

• Kitchen gardens, backyard chickens and other small animal husbandry continue to increase dramatically in popularity and practice in the US.  Grassroots pressure to change zoning and regulatory restrictions continue to find success.

2 for 7. No idea.  I haven't researched it.  Certainly the media isn't talking about it.

• Oil stays below $70 per barrel.  Low gas and oil prices drive several mid-sized energy companies in the US to loan defaults and bankruptcy.  The government organizes a multi-billion dollar bailout of loan guarantees and subsidies to keep drilling operations going, and to keep dreams of Saudi America alive.

2.5 for 8.  Half credit.  Oil did indeed stay below $70 (and is currently under $40 a barrel), and energy companies have been bankrupting themselves, but it hasn't gotten to a crisis stage yet, nor has the government had to intervene.

So, compliments of some slightly generous grading I give myself a 31% accuracy rate, which is a significant improvement over last year's 22%.  We'll see if I can improve on that for 2016.

Feeding birds in the winter's deep.

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I'm inconsistent about feeding the birds - except in these deep winter weeks, when creatures can quickly freeze to death if they fall short of food.  

I had a bucket of black oil sunflower seed left over from last year and put some out a few days ago when temperatures were languishing near zero and the wind chills were well below.  

A couple of hours later the first juncos and white throated sparrows had discovered the seed.  A Carolina wren joined them, followed by the chickadees and titmice.   Soon came downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, blue jays, red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, and song sparrows.  Goldfinches, mourning doves and house finches arrived the next day.  Even a small, un-spotted thrush arrived to see what the fuss was.

Robins and bluebirds, brown creepers and kinglets have been around, but they have no interest in sunflower seeds.

The species have their different dining styles.  Juncos, cardinals and sparrows are scratchers and won't perch on the feeder.  They'll take seed that I've put on top of branches or scattered on the ground.  The doves stroll around on the ground with them.

The chickadees and titmice on the other hand, grab a seed and fly up to a branch, where they hold the seed between their feet to peck open.  

The finches and wrens are happy to perch on the feeder as long as they can get away with it, cracking the seeds in their beaks one after another.  The downy woodpeckers will do the same, but they get restless and go foraging among the lichen.

The red-bellied woodpecker, on the other hand, will snatch a seed, fly to the trunk of a tree, wedge the seed into a crevice where it can be pecked apart.  The nuthatches are also fond of that strategy.

Jays arrive in a  noisy troop - some on the ground, some in the tree, some fluttering clumsily on the feeder.  They make a ruckus and don't stay long.

The air has been thick with the criss-crossing flight paths of scores of birds.

My stash of sunflower seed is gone.  These flocks made short work of it.  Tomorrow I will buy a bag to get through the rest of this cold snap . . .

Nine predictions for the year 2015

Street mural, Denver, Colorado

My over-arching prediction for 2014 turned out to be accurate.  We mostly muddled along with the status quo and we neither made progress on solving our problems nor did we bring our civilization finally crashing down upon our collective heads.

Of the more specific predictions that I made - I could only give myself credit for 2 of 9.  Not a very good showing - except perhaps by the standards of those who predict specifics about the future.

Nonetheless, it is entertaining to make a few more predictions just to see.  In that spirit here are my 9 predictions for 2015:

• It will be one of the three hottest years ever recorded globally.

• Obama attempts to put ending mass incarceration onto the public agenda.  In particular, the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders.  The possibility of blanket pardons cause the Republicans to go ballistic and half of the Democratic party runs for cover.

• Ebola flares up in Asia.  These several thousand deaths rattle the global economy much more than the African outbreak did.

• Americans are shocked when police officers in a major metropolitan area are found to have intentionally singled out and assassinated several critics of police brutality.

• Globally, disgust with their political elites continues to bolster support for radical, anti-establishment parties, and in more than one European country they win power, if not for long.

• Occupy re-emerges as a political force among the younger generation - organized around its "debt jubilee" and other efforts to disentangle young people from participation in an economic and political system that is rigged against them.  The Establishment derides them as naive and disengaged.

• (Carried over from last year) One of the world's great monoculture crops will mostly fail this year.  Although this will be blamed on a new pest or blight, the failure will actually be due to a combination of narrow genetics, unstable climate and the decline in agricultural research.

• Kitchen gardens, backyard chickens and other small animal husbandry continue to increase dramatically in popularity and practice in the US.  Grassroots pressure to change zoning and regulatory restrictions continue to find success.

• Oil stays below $70 per barrel.  Low gas and oil prices drive several mid-sized energy companies in the US to loan defaults and bankruptcy.  The government organizes a multi-billion dollar bailout of loan guarantees and subsidies to keep drilling operations going, and to keep dreams of Saudi America alive.

So, I'll revisit these at the end of the year and see if I can top my 2 for 9 mark!

Streetscape, Denver, Colorado

Looking back at my predictions for 2014.

Driving into Denver

I don't always have my fingers on the pulse of popular culture, but I get the sense that for most people 2014 didn't feel like a rosy year.  In fact, it seems like it was a year that people are anxious to put behind them.

Interestingly, I can't see any particular reason why 2014 was any worse that any of the years preceding it.  The big, dramatic media stories - the Ebola outbreak, Asian plane crashes, civil war in the Levant, police homicides, political gridlock, etc. - were nothing out of the ordinary.

If I were to project my own experience, I would guess that for more and more people it wasn't so much the bad news that was the issue - it was the dearth of good news.  As I framed my predictions from a year ago, we are facing multiple, overlapping, civilization-threatening challenges and it is becoming harder and harder to pretend that we have any kind of feasible plan to meet them.

To the extent that a person looks up from personal efforts to secure a portion of bread and circus and tries to grasp the bigger picture, the credibility of the cheerleaders of progress and happy trends seems to be failing.  Instead we have climate change, fossil fuel dependency, economic stagnation, a malaise in democratic governance, an unraveling of Pax Americana, and the general unsustainability of our way of life.

I short, I think 2014 sucked mostly because the nature of our predicaments became just that much harder to ignore.

From this perspective, my over-arching prediction that we would limp along upon a slowly crumbling status quo seems to have borne out.  But that was hardly an ambitious effort at prescience, and so I also made 9 more specific predictions.  Grading myself on a curve, and giving some partial credit, I'd have to give myself a 2 out of 9.

Here's how I grade myself:

• In US politics, Republicans will spend another couple of months convincing people that their greedy insurance companies are actually Obamacare, before they pivot and take credit for all of the things that are popular about the program.   

0 for 1.  As far as I can tell, the Republicans never did pivot, but continued to demonize their caricature of health insurance reform - with a healthy majority of legislators still paying lip service to repeal.  So, no credit for that one.  I'd drop this one for 2015.

• Democrats will get some credit for successfully pushing for minimum wage increases, and Republicans will mostly get out of the way eventually.  Life will improve slightly for millions of people and small businesses.

1 out of 2. I'll give myself credit for that one.  Every minimum wage referenda on the state ballots passed, even if the Democratic party wasn't as aggressive at leading and claiming credit as it might have been.  Momentum seems to be there for more.

• Having disappeared almost entirely from the political and media discourse, climate change will be back in the news as hot weather, drought, and sea level rise continue to intensify.  Notably, it will be treated not as a problem to be solved, but rather as an inevitability that must be adapted to.  The solution that dare not speak its name (i.e. changing our way of living) will continue to be tabu.

1 for 3. Not strikingly right nor strikingly wrong.  Climate change discourse remains a muddle.  Notably, the idea that fossil fuels will have to remain in the ground has been emerging occasionally into the public discourse.  But no credit for this one.

• Among the Chinese, there will be unrest in 2014 stemming from ecological degradation -- especially pollution in the air, soil and food.  The Chinese government will react by purging some high-profile officials and when that doesn't settle things, it will look for a pretext to stir up the distraction of a nativist backlash against the Japanese, Tibetans or Uighurs. 

1 for 4.  China more or less stays the course.  But this is a prediction I'd renew for 2015.

• Energy production will limp along at a plateau, just enough to keep the global economy sputtering, while food prices will be kept just low enough to avoid riots and revolutions.  Predictors of doom and predictors of a new prosperity will both be disappointed.

1 for 5. Can't really give myself credit here. The US's shale and fracking boomlet continued, despite indications that energy companies have been losing money.  This enabled an increase in energy production, which, in the context of an global economic slowdown, created something like a glut.  Now oil prices have collapsed, which will stimulate many economies, even as it bankrupts energy companies that have been investing in the new frontiers of hard-to-get fossil fuels.

• On the tech front, Google Glass and smart watches will fail to extend their reach beyond the chic geek digerati.  But late in the year there will be the first incarnations of true digital assistants - programs that can adapt to individuals and manage their social networking and digital connectivity.  The nimbler of the telecoms will get on board and start working on these new digital PA's.

1.25 for 6. Well the easy prediction that these iterations of glasses and watches were duds was kind of a no-brainer.  The digital personal assistant, however, didn't materialize.  In fact, there was nothing at all exciting on the tech front - unless you buy into the chimera of driverless cars . . . 

• The Sochi Olympics will be a fiasco impressive even by Russian standards.  The one upside being that few people will go in person so the inadequacies and brutalities of the effort won't become as notorious as they might have.

1.75 for 7. Half credit.  The destructive grandiosity of Sochi looks paltry next to the annexation of Crimea a few months later.

• One of the world's great monoculture crops will mostly fail this year.  Although this will be blamed on a new pest or blight, the failure will actually be due to a combination of narrow genetics, unstable climate and the decline in agricultural research.

1.75 for 8.  Cocoa is faltering under a blight, and candy makers are running out of reserves, but it's not a failure.  No credit, yet.  The prediction is one I'd renew for 2015.

• On the global spiritual front, the push by Pope Francis for a more modest, non-consumerist and even ascetic spirituality will be echoed in popular movements within religions around the world, including evangelicals, muslims and others.  Governments will be unsettled and ambivalent about this development.

He's been busy, but no signs of a Franciscan revitalization movement, yet.

I'll throw in a quarter point for not being embarrassingly wrong on anything - just to round it up to a tidy 2 for 9.   When it comes to the details, my original prediction - that predicting is hard - turns out to be my main point of prescience.

I'll leave this post with a reminder that despite my doomerly tendencies, I remain optimistic.  Here's a picture of the boys climbing the wracked body of a great cedar tree on the Olympic Peninsula.

Porter and Nico

Winter moths

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On my recent hike I'd noticed the yellow-rumped warblers were acting like flycatchers and I wondered what they could be preying on after the recent hard frosts.  Lately the temperatures have been milder and in the past few days I've noticed dozens of small, drab brown moths gathering at the windows and at the porch light.

a male winter moth

It turns out that this is the aptly named "winter moth."  Around Thanksgiving, in mild weather the adults emerge to fly and mate - gathering at trees that the females (who are effectively wingless) clamber up.

Unfortunately, they are an invasive species from Europe that has established itself in New England.  Without the predators that control them in Europe they have become a significant pest - able to defoliate trees - including oaks, maples, apples, crabapples and blueberries.

I was already familiar with gypsy moths and tent caterpillars, both of whom I've seen strip entire hillsides, but the winter moth is a new one for me.

The larvae's most nefarious habit is to creep into buds as they swell in the spring - and if the budding process is delayed by cool or wet weather, the caterpillars can kill off a plant's flowers and leaves before they even have a chance to unfurl.  (For this reason they are especially detested by blueberry cultivators.)

So - something else to pay attention to in the spring.  I wonder what predators I can encourage to come discourage them.  Where are those yellow-rumped warblers when you need them?

winter moths at night

A climate of collective idiocy

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Today the Senate debates the merits of an oil pipeline disastrous to the common good.  The Keystone pipeline and its cousins will enable the development of Canadian tar sands, helping to make catastrophic climate change inevitable and irreversible.  Except for the momentary fever dream of an ephemeral energy boom, it offers Americans nothing but the prospect of oil spills and higher energy prices.  But the fossil fuel companies invested  hundreds of millions of dollars in this legislature, and so we get fossilized fuel public policy.


Last week's hallucinatory agreement between the US and China to start considering getting semi-serious about fossil fuel emissions is already receding into the carbon dioxide haze.  


For those of us who have hoped that humans might act to ensure our grandchildren's well being, it's enervating stuff.  We almost certainly doom our civilization if we don't start moving it away from fossil fuels starting . . .  well, starting years ago, actually.

I am no longer surprised.  We have a bad habit of assuming that since individual humans are capable of intelligence, forethought and planning - that this means we should be equally capable of intentional collective action. Unfortunately, collectively our species demonstrates the cognitive abilities of a toxic lichen. Civilizations, perhaps achieve the blind tropisms of a nematode or a pea plant - sometimes able to evade a fatal obstacle. A nation or a government can often lurch around with the spastic enthusiasms of a poorly coordinated toddler . . . 

I don't place much hope in the plans of our leaders or their critics, but hey, sometimes yelling at toddlers helps - if only as a personal tonic.

_

Eating grasshoppers

I'm making an effort at an autumn garden this year - spinach, chard and greens mostly.  Our only frost so far did no damage, though I have cold frames standing by.

The more immediate problem is that the grasshoppers are relentlessly gnawing on my greens and turning them to lacework.

A few years ago at this time of year a coyote visited the yard - and I wondered what brought him out in broad daylight.  A few days later I found his scat and saw it was composed entirely of grasshopper and cricket exoskeletons.

I'm taking the coyote's cue and experimenting with eating these greedy critters.  The sustainability folks (including those at the UN) insist that humans' living lightly (or living at all) on the earth is going to involve eating more insects.  As an anthropologist I know that our own culture is pretty odd in its aversion to making use of this otherwise ubiquitous food source.

I had a small butterfly net, and I quickly jerry-rigged a foraging container.  I had an old water-cooler jug sitting around, so I cut the top off at the shoulder, inverted it and duct-taped it in place to make a kind of fish-trap style grasshopper container.  A lacrosse ball settles into the opening perfectly as a handy lid.

I gathered a few dozen in and around the garden - hopefully enough to put a dent in their depredations.  I let them sit for a day, so they could pass whatever greens were in their system.  (Real aficionados give them some hominy or some other starchy grain to eat, I think.)  I dumped them into a plastic bag and put them into the freezer to expire.

Our grasshoppers are fairly petite, so pulling off legs and wings was a niggling and tedious process, toward the end of which I had no interest in eating grasshoppers.  (The next time I won't bother with that labor, since wings and legs come off much easier once they've been cooked.)

We rubbed them with olive oil,  sprinkled on some cajun spices and popped them into the oven at 250 degrees until they turned a crispy magenta (the lone katydid turned golden instead).


I won't lie and say that I took to it right away.  They sure look like bugs, and their texture is fairly . . . um . . . complex, especially if the wings and any legs are included.  But the flavor is actually pretty good.  Eventually, I got into a rhythm - like eating pistachios, but instead of shelling each nut, you  pull off the papery wings, roll any remaining legs off with the side of your thumb and pop it into your mouth.  And I have to say - as far a garden pest measures go - it's a pretty good solution.

I may have another go at it this weekend.  There is still no shortage of grasshoppers.

Midwestern Sojourn

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The blog has fallen quiet lately, I know.

For the past week and more I've been traveling on the Great Plains.  I landed in Milwaukee last Friday and circulated down into Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and now back up into Iowa.  Tomorrow is northern Illinois.

Mostly I have been driving the back roads and talking to farmers about sustainability.  The project is for one of the major progressive lobbying groups working to change the food system.  They feel they have pretty good ways of communicating with regular people, but they haven't felt like they communicate as well as they should with farmers and farming communities.

So that's why I'm on the road being an ethnographer of agriculture.

When I manage to track down a farmer - or someone who's mixed up in farming somehow, I tell them the conversation will only take 4 or 5 minutes and occasionally it will, but more often 30 minutes later we are still there, talking about all of the themes that tangle up with agriculture - families, aspirations, compromises, money, the earth, fears, futures and presents and pasts.

Six hours on the roads and I'll have only spoken to eight or ten people, but I've filled many more pages of my notebook.

But back at work, they still need my input on other projects, so in the evenings at whatever hotel I've found - I'm editing video or completing analysis or dealing with logistics for the next research trip or trying to track down my other field workers.

All that's to say, I haven't found time to write in the blog.  I haven't forgotten my Love Note to 2014, and springtime on the plains has certainly inspired me.

But tomorrow night I need to be in Milwaukee again to meet my videographer - because he and I will spend the week talking to Wisconsinites about politics and taxes.  But maybe I'll be able to carve out some blogging time at some point . . . .

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Consuming our Problems

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I've written before that our current civilization has the familiar reek of a speculative bubble whose days are numbered.  Whenever any of our leaders talk about our future, the combination of bad math, delusional happy talk, and faith that this time it's different just confirms the conclusion.

As far as John Michael Greer is concerned, the decline of cheap energy, combined with our unwillingness to change course until it is far too late, have doomed our civilization to join the many, many others that have fallen hard and left their people to find a way through the hard times and dark ages that can follow.  The destruction of a civilization can take centuries, but in fact it is already under way and has been for decades - a lived experience that more people are starting to intuit.

I have tremendous faith in humans' ability to muddle through, (which is why I gravitate toward Greer rather than many other doomsayers who envision a universally sudden, catastrophic and even extinctive collapse).  But there are reasons to think that our current crop of Americans are exquisitely ill-prepared to deal with the twin calamities of an end of the American Empire and the decline of Industrial Civilization.

I think there are numerous reasons for our terrifying inability to grapple with our upcoming problems.  One ingredient of our current recipe for incompetence is what (in our research work) we call the consumer stance.  The consumer stance stands as an antithesis to the engaged citizen or practical problem-solver and shows up regularly as a obstacle for advocates who are engaged with various public issues.  The consumer creates nothing - neither the end product nor the underlying conditions, but instead chooses among options that are presented to them.  However, in an ironic twist, consumer choice is mythologized as the proper expression of power and individuality.  Wherever you may be in the hierarchies of life, when you are the customer you are the one who holds the cards and the one who has to be catered to.  This delusion of power (trumpeted in each of the thousands of advertisements we face every day) can hide people's actual powerlessness.

In fact, most people don't get much practice anymore in creating their own things and social spaces.  Our tastes, our hobbies, our ways of defining ourselves may seem like they come from a kind of infinite buffet, but they are increasingly commodified and pre-packaged for us in ways we don't even perceive.  From the playground, to the workplace, to leisure, to the community organizations that used to be so central to daily life, most people have been maneuvered into being passive recipients rather than active producers and organizers.  

When it comes to politics, we don't get much practice in being producers of power, compromise, and collective problem-solving.  The problem of the consumer stance has been at the forefront of my mind in recent weeks, as I was researching in California, interviewing chance-met people about their thoughts on government.

There are all sorts of themes that come up, which I won't go into here, but one of the most unsurprising findings is that people do not participate in a democracy as creative, constructive citizens.  Instead they are classic consumers, forever electing between Brand X and Brand Y, and if one brand is mostly useless and the other poison, they don't see what they can do about that.  Vote against the poison or protest their lousy options by not voting at all.  Rather than considering their potential to meet challenges collectively through public, collective institutions, the average American is a dissatisfied customer increasingly giving up on democracy and its unreliable barkers.

In another project we research into how to communicate to farmers and their allies about sustainability.  Normally farmers are an unreceptive audience when it comes to progressive policies, since they skew heavily conservative and tend to regard government with scorn.  But interestingly, when it comes to sustainability they are much more "progressive" than regular people.  

Farmers have been producers and they are much more clued into how and whether systems can be sustained over a year, a lifetime, or through the generations.  They have some inkling about what is involved in protecting or maintaining the generative foundations that we all rely on.  Although they are trapped in an increasingly unsustainable food system and being sidelined themselves, unlike regular people they understand enough to be seeking for a way to keep things going over the long haul.

When I look around at the so-called solutions to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, unsustainability, and economic contraction, I see marketers hawking various bottles of snake oil (e.g. fracking our way to energy independence, SUVs driving on windmill electricity, productivity apps for our phones), but only in those cases where someone sees a way to turn a profit on us consumers.  Otherwise there is a deafening silence, and a population that doesn't fully grasp how and why it isn't being served.

A common thread among the problems we aren't solving - is that we need to consume less and do more for ourselves. We need to use less energy, consume fewer goods, participate in democracy and community (rather than delegating it to others).  We need to wind down the consumer-capitalist juggernaut that is quickly destroying its own foundations.  As long as Americans remain habituated to their consumer stance, and fail to become active agents, we're doomed to the sad spectacle of our current lemming-march toward multiple fiascos.

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A Tarot Reading for 2014

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A commenter noted that my predictions from New Year's Eve, were kind of depressing.  Of course, any good pessimist can always simply claim to be a realist.  And I do.

But if I'm being honest, I also admit that I have a superstitious reluctance to make rosy and optimistic predictions, especially about my life or the lives of people I care about.  There's an old and well-established tradition that talking with confidence about future good things will "jinx" them.  It's a tradition that is alive and well in my own upbringing.

If I were just a little more superstitious I could avert the problem by humbly knocking on wood. 

I don't "believe" in such things intellectually.  It seems preposterous to me that the universe at large would care if I get hubristic in my pronouncements about good things coming my way.  On the other hand I do "believe" such things in the sense that the reluctance exists and persists in me.  (Sometimes, in fact, my intellect will relent and allow the superstitious part of me knock on wood for a tiny dose of irrational peace of mind.)

A time tested way to get around this problem is to consult an oracle, so this morning I cast the cards for a New Year's reading.  This is how they fell:

It's my familiar deck, the Mythic Tarot, cast in a traditional Celtic Cross. 

The significator is Strength, with the Three of Pentacles as the crossing card.  This indicates that our strength is being blocked by the things we have created in the material world - our own success and prosperity.  As we try to understand this conflict at the conscious level, the crowning card is the Six of Cups, a card that symbolizes looking back and dwelling upon the past - while in the position of the more unconscious base of the matter is the Four of Pentacles, the miser card.  By focusing on the past rather than the  future, and trying irrationally to hold onto what we have, we thwart our own strength.

The card of where we've been is the Queen of Swords, which is the powerful, but uncomfortable blending of icy intellect, emotion and the grounding of the feminine.  In the position of where we are going is the Two of Pentacles, which is the card of getting down to work and creating something in the world.

The resource card is the Ace of Wands, which is the inexhaustible fire of creativity and passion that gives energy and drive to action.  It is a card without preconceptions, but only the desire to create something.  The next card is how the situation is seen by others.  In this case the Seven of Pentacles represents the challenge of making decisions - of forethought and planning.  So while the common view is that we have choices to make, the reading as a whole puts the emphasis less on planning and selecting options, and more on inventing and doing.  

The hopes and fears card is the Queen of Cups - who symbolizes a more integrated, but also more limited or focused way of being than her counterpart the Queen of Swords.  The Queen of Cups experiences and embodies her emotions and the slippery element of water, where the Queen of Swords manages it all through intellect and control.  In this contrast, there is hope and reluctance to set aside some of the directing force of reason in favor of emotional depth and honesty.

The outcome card is the Nine of Pentacles, which is a card of material prosperity and reward for work and effort.

If I wanted to offer an antidote to the intellectual pessimism of yesterdays predictions, I couldn't have asked for a more straightforward and complementary reading.  As I said yesterday, I don't believe that 2014 is the year that we begin to honestly tackle the problems of our unsustainable ways of living.  But in its inimitable, affirming way, the tarot lays out the case that as we eventually come to extricate ourselves from the material and intellectual pitfalls we have fallen into, we have the resources and the clarity of motivation to invent for ourselves a new, satisfying way of living.

That's why, in spite of my reasoned pessimism about where our civilization is trending - I still raise a family, learn to keep bees, travel, make plans and make friends.

Happy New Year, people!

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The Year to Be - Nine Predictions for 2014

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Medellin, Colombia

As the physicist once said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.  But as the New Year is about to open, I think I'll try my hand at this fools' game.

In general, I think 2014 will continue a time of great caution and lack of vision among those who hold political and social power.

Japan

The status quo has become more brittle due to a bundle of interrelated issues including,

the over-exploitation of the seas, soils and biosphere

the destabilization of the climate

the plateauing of fossil fuel production

the impending cresting of economic growth

the dissatisfaction of global publics who cannot be allowed democracy or democratic discourse

and last but not least, the dishonesty and intellectual bankruptcy of the cult of Progress and infinite growth.

Paradoxically, the very fragility of the status quo, the lack of imaginable alternatives, and the fact that no one wants to overturn the boat, mean that we will muddle along without much in the way of change this year.  Still, things will happen, and here are nine predictions I'm willing to make . . .

Caldas, Colombia

Tokyo, Japan

• In US politics, Republicans will spend another couple of months convincing people that their greedy insurance companies are actually Obamacare, before they pivot and take credit for all of the things that are popular about the program.   

• Democrats will get some credit for successfully pushing for minimum wage increases, and Republicans will mostly get out of the way eventually.  Life will improve slightly for millions of people and small businesses.

• Having disappeared almost entirely from the political and media discourse, climate change will be back in the news as hot weather, drought, and sea level rise continue to intensify.  Notably, it will be treated not as a problem to be solved, but rather as an inevitability that must be adapted to.  The solution that dare not speak its name (i.e. changing our way of living) will continue to be tabu.

Quito, Ecuador

• Among the Chinese, there will be unrest in 2014 stemming from ecological degradation -- especially pollution in the air, soil and food.  The Chinese government will react by purging some high-profile officials and when that doesn't settle things, it will look for a pretext to stir up the distraction of a nativist backlash against the Japanese, Tibetans or Uighurs. 

• Energy production will limp along at a plateau, just enough to keep the global economy sputtering, while food prices will be kept just low enough to avoid riots and revolutions.  Predictors of doom and predictors of a new prosperity will both be disappointed.

• On the tech front, Google Glass and smart watches will fail to extend their reach beyond the chic geek digerati.  But late in the year there will be the first incarnations of true digital assistants - programs that can adapt to individuals and manage their social networking and digital connectivity.  The nimbler of the telecoms will get on board and start working on these new digital PA's.

Quito, Ecuador

• The Sochi Olympics will be a fiasco impressive even by Russian standards.  The one upside being that few people will go in person so the inadequacies and brutalities of the effort won't become as notorious as they might have.

• One of the world's great monoculture crops will mostly fail this year.  Although this will be blamed on a new pest or blight, the failure will actually be due to a combination of narrow genetics, unstable climate and the decline in agricultural research.

• On the global spiritual front, the push by Pope Francis for a more modest, non-consumerist and even ascetic spirituality will be echoed in popular movements within religions around the world, including evangelicals, muslims and others.  Governments will be unsettled and ambivalent about this development.

Rhode Island, US

So, if there is still an internet at the end of 2014, I will revisit these predictions and we can see how prescient I was or wasn't . . .
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