It woulda been nice

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I'm in North Carolina this week, talking with people about the nature of government and what role it can play in causing or solving our nation's problems.

But at the moment I'm procrastinating in the hotel room before going out.  Continuing this week's theme of 21st century capitalism's decline and fall, over at my favorite doomer blog, the Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer is once again exploring the mismatch between material decline and our guiding myth of Progress.  He thinks it is going to be a painful and traumatic wrench - one which people are completely unprepared for.  I think he's probably right, but I'd add a few caveats.

As I've related before, when I went to the former USSR as an eager young anthropologist in 1994, I thought I'd be looking at the excitement of the end of an ideology and the beginning of a new one.  But when I got there, no one wanted to talk about any such thing.  They were much too busy trying to keep a roof overhead, keep the daughter in school, the son out of the army and find a place to store 100 kilo of potatoes for the winter.

There's no doubt that many people did not survive the dry run for collapse that was mid-nineties Kazakhstan.  Male life expectancy was dropping to the mid-fifties and most of that had to do not just with material suffering, but the ripping away of life's sureties - salaries, certificates, positions, status all lost their value and that hit middle aged men the hardest.  Vodka and automobiles culled that herd.

But one advantage the Soviet people had was that they'd almost all given up on the monomyth of Soviet progress.  There was no collapse of an ideology to study, because it had been hollowed out to just another bit of habitual theater.

So the reaction (and the long-established practice) was to hunker down, and do their best to ignore anyone who was rash enough to rave about a new myth - capitalism, Islamism, nationalism, socialism or whatever.  The state was happy to encourage that for the most part.

In the current US, as I ignore the pundits and the boosters and talk to regular people, I find very little faith in the myth of progress.  Yes, Greer's analysis is correct that it's the accepted default mode, and people don't really have cognitive alternatives other than to wish for it to be true.  But they don't seem to believe it.  The faith is broken at least when it comes to their little part of the world - and for many, in the big picture as well.

If and when the failure of Progress becomes too obvious to ignore, there will be those who can't adapt.  But I wonder if the majority of people are being eased into decline at a pace that will eventually result in a "well, it woulda been nice" rather than an abrupt collapse of a world view.

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Inflation, unheralded

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A fascinating little article in the New York Times, called "Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble," makes the observation that with so much money chasing after too few assets, the assets are expensive even though the returns are low.  What's an investor to do?

One obvious explanation for the quandary is that money isn't worth as much as it used to be. There's a huge unheralded process of inflation going on.  Most things are valued less (because of a decline in demand or because an asset that used to be a good investment isn't any more), but since money is also worth less, it looks like nothing is happening. 

On the other hand, the minority of sought-after assets are holding their value but the declining value of money means more is needed to buy it, and so prices rise.

A good way to think about this hidden inflation is to think about something - a thing or a service that you could get at a high quality a couple of decades ago, but today you notice that the quality has declined significantly.  I have some great old kitchen utensils, spoons and a spatula built to last forever, and I salvage old steel screws and bolts because they don't strip and bend like the ones at the hardware store.  But of course the quality hasn't really declined.  I could replace those steel spoons for $100 or so, and I'm sure there are places to get quality hardware rather than the Chinese scrap.  But if you had to spend a buck fifty on a wood screw that you're used to paying 15 cents for, you couldn't help but notice the inflation.

And then you realize that the furniture couldn't hold a screw even if you wanted it to, since the stuff you can afford is mostly particle board held together with staples and glue.

For investors, however, there is a second half to this story: the end of economic growth.  Investment is the practice of taking one's wealth and buying something that will produce more wealth - regardless of whether the currencies are stable or inflating.  The printing presses of the Central Bankers have been running day and night, in the vain hope that the beneficiaries (bankers and financiers mostly) will invest it in wealth-making activities - factories, buildings, new technologies.  But vast trillions of these quick-spun dollars and euros and renminbi sit, flitting from hand to hand in the markets, eroding in value because investors don't see anything that is going to pay off in real wealth.

Now the peak energy people won't have any difficulty diagnosing this.  Our economic growth has been primarily based on access to more and more cheap energy, almost exclusively in the form of fossil fuels - coal, gas and oil.   Now that the cheap fuels have been used up, we have to pursue, dirtier, less concentrated, harder to extract sources - economic growth begins to slow down.  The economy will eventually go into contraction if it hasn't already.

I suspect there's more to it than thermodynamic destinies.  These things are always over-determined.

21st century capitalism is exhausted.  Marx was perfectly aware that capitalism, left to its own devices will tend toward monopolism and eventually stagnation and self-strangulation.  It's taken longer than he thought, but the sclerotic state of our capitalism is probably terminal - as any entrepreneurial upstart is taken up and ingested.

And if the only solutions are to do something different than what we've been doing, who achieves the levers of power these days?  Are the kinds of people who rise to the top of our broken politics and our bureaucratized corporations really the kinds who are likely to solve the problems, which business-as-usual is bringing down on our heads?

So whatever the underlying cause, pity the poor investor who just wants to put those dollars or euros or renminbi "to work", but sees nothing but bad risks and varying degrees of wealth erosion.  Lo and behold, it turns out he's getting poorer.  Just like the rest of us.

UPDATE:

Krugman has a timely rejoinder to my little sally, Addicted to Inflation.  In it he argues that hidden inflation is a phantasm of the political right that proves their inability to see things as they really are.  Krugman is an economist and I'm not, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  But in my opinion the thing that neither he nor the conservatives he lambasts are willing to contemplate or enter into their calculations is the possibility that the party is ending.

The conservatives were wrong about the printing presses causing the currencies to crash, because though vast sums of money were printed, they mostly sit in cyber vaults un-spent by the banks and billionaires.  Krugman is wrong because, like all mainstream economists, he doesn't seriously consider the geologic, thermodynamic and biospheric limits on the economy.  The normal tools of economic craft don't work when we run up against those limits in the way that we are today.

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Pollinators and predators

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fritillary on butterfly weed

The butterflies are out now that the rains have passed.  

on the phlox

The vetch that is swallowing up the back garden is abuzz with bumble bees.  

The boys refuse to pull it.    

A pretty hairstreak suns on a potato leaf

Red-spotted purples and red admirals are fluttering through.  

The brown-eyed susans are full of little bees, flies and wasps.

Is this tiny fly fooling anyone with his hymenopteran disguise?

There are thousands of flies in North America -

hundreds of species of green long-legged flies, little metallic predators.  

A bronze colored long-legged fly

Members of two distinct species are patrolling adjacent milkweed plants.

A long-legged fly munching on a midge

For a hundred million years 

(according to the amber)

they have been plying their hunting grounds.

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Hobby Lobby and the levers of power

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It was probably the wrong day to give up coffee.  

This week, we woke up to another infuriating ruling by our Supreme Court.  

Ostensibly, the "Hobby Lobby decision" was about certain religiously conservative business owners, who felt that the religious beliefs of their corporation (huh?!) should be insulated from the laws crafted by Congress and its voters.

This ruling brought out a rich outpouring of commentary from many directions, lamenting, among other things:

• the assertion that powerful men's religious sensibilities are more important than working women's health and autonomy
• the bizarre notion that corporations can hold religious beliefs, and that those beliefs earn Constitutional protection
• that unlike the rest of us, business-religion gives one the ability to opt out of laws, even if they only indirectly burden a "conscience"
• a culmination of the Catholic Church's long project of placing religious doctrine above secular law
• a table being set for a legal establishment of discrimination rights against gays, Muslims, and others

and so on.

All those things are true, but I think they are also window dressing for the larger project.  The 5 radical members of the Supreme Court are barely bothering to disguise the fact that their overriding goal is to help install oligarchy in the US and to place powerful men and their corporations securely above democratic control.

The courts interpret the Constitution and rightly place limits on the dictatorship of the majority.  Since the document is expressly protective of basic rights, it has often served to protect liberty from momentary, unenlightened swerves of public opinion - and at least it offers a helpful ramp up and away from oppression, whenever such is finally wanted and needed by enough people (see civil rights movement, women's suffrage).

US democracy might still have the potential to unwind the ongoing movement toward a corporate and elite oligarchy.  And for that reason, democracy itself must be neutered, and in an Orwellian twist, the Constitution must be re-interpreted as an instrument to tie the hands of the people.

The Court recently ruled that showering politicians with money is not corruption, but is in fact political "speech," protected by the Constitution and so beyond our right to interfere with.  (There are few in this country, with the exception of would-be oligarchs and the lackeys who work for them, who believe that money has not corrupted the political process.)  Remember, this is not the court just saying such corruption is OK, it is the court saying that we, as a democratic society, have no right to make laws to interfere with this corruption, even if we disagree and believe it is not OK.

The Hobby Lobby is another step forward in this project.  The Court has been laying the groundwork for making each corporation into a kind of "super person" - one whose liberties must be protected by the Constitution - a super person who has free speech to exercise and sincere religious beliefs that must be respected - a super person who must be protected from the general populace's (heretofore widespread) belief that corporations ought to be subject to specific legal controls and even expected to contribute to a common good.

Americans have woken up to the knowledge that our democracy has been hijacked.  The Court is rushing to make sure that if we attempt to reign in these men, their corporations, and the political power they have bought, the legal and political terrain is arrayed against us.  This week's effort, which made a mockery of the Constitution's protection of religious liberty, should be understood in that light.

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Stealing the catbird's mulberries

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Stealing the catbird's mulberries,  

I was well scolded.

Valerian in bloom by the shed.

Bad Beekeeping

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One of the casualties of my busy spring has been any pretense at competent beekeeping.  On May 8th I managed to pick up a couple of packages of bees only a few hours before I was heading off for two and a half weeks.  I hurriedly installed them in the hives I'd prepared and as often happens when you hurry, I made a mistake.

The bees that arrive in a package are not a true colony.  It contains a mated queen and a random collection of workers which are vacuumed out of the air at a breeder complex.  4 or 5 thousand of them are put in a small box with a kind of paint can full of sugar syrup that has a few holes poked in it.  The bees form a swarm around the food source.  Although the bees are from many different colonies they don't molest one another, but if you introduce a strange queen to this motley collection they will attack her and kill her.  The workers need a week or so of exposure to her pheromones before they will accept her as their own queen.

For this reason the queen is put in a queen cage.  Three little conjoined chambers are routed out of a little block of wood and a hole drilled in either end.  One chamber is filled with "candy" a sugar paste.  The queen is placed in the neighboring chambers with a couple of attendants, a scrap of screen covers it and both holes are corked shut.

The idea is that you do a "slow release" of the queen when you get her.  The main box of bees you disassemble and dump into a hive.  You remove the cork from the candy side of the cage and suspend it in the hive.  The bees will stay in a hive with the queen and the candy plug allows the bees to eat their way in to her over several days.  By that time, they will have accepted her and settled into their new home.  As she starts laying eggs the workers will feed and tend her brood until they reach adulthood themselves.

But as I said, I was in a hurry, and I removed the wrong cork, releasing her directly into the hive days earlier than planned.  I couldn't see what happened to her in the confusion of bees, whether they balled around her and killed her, so I closed up the hive and hoped for the best.

It was May 28th, three weeks later, when I next could look in, and there was no sign of a queen, no sign of any brood (that is larva or pupae) that would be in evidence if a queen were present.  I did note that they were constructing "queen cells", which is something a colony will do if the queen is dead or dying.  But if there are no larvae a colony can't make a new queen.  It didn't occur to me to examine the queen cells closely.  I assumed that the remaining colony were simply the package bees, which would continue to work at bringing in nectar until they gradually died off.

Fast forward to June 23nd, nearly 7 weeks after I'd fumbled the hiving.  I saw there was still some traffic in and out of the hive, but assumed it was the successful colony robbing out the honey from the dead one.

Capped brood contain pupae and the open cells white larvae

But it turns out there is a small colony inside with brood and a healthy supply of nurse bees looking after it.  Somehow I must have missed something in that first hive inspection.  Maybe the queen was a slow starter.  Or, given the small size of the colony, maybe the original queen only survived long enough to lay a few eggs, which the workers nurtured into a new queen, who took a mating flight and is now building up her colony.

She's in there somewhere, though I didn't manage to spot her.  I'll look again and see if she has the little spot of paint that the breeders usually put on.  Until then, it's a mystery.

Summer Solstice above Chicago

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At first, when I realized that I would spend the day of the summer solstice working - and end it on an airplane - I was disappointed.  Though the summer solstice has never felt quite as significant as the winter I do always think that I should mark it better than I have.

But this day in Ohio would represent the end of a 10-week gauntlet of research and travel.  I spent a few hours walking with my videographer, Greg, first in the sleepy Saturday suburbs of Columbus and then among the strollers at the Creekside Jazz and Blues Festival in Gahanna.  I was asking people about why we have a government, what its for, what it should do, what it shouldn't do - and from there into a meandering conversation about collective responsibilities, resentments, power, discourse and freedom.

After a week of this, my little brown notebook contained notes on 89 people we'd encountered - Greg's cameras and hard drives contained a couple hundred gigabytes of video and audio recordings to be reviewed and transcribed.

Around 2 pm, I wrapped up a last interview with a trio of pretty and optimistic college girls.  It was time to stop gathering data and turn toward synthesis and analysis.  Besides, Germany was playing Ghana in the World Cup, and we had just enough time to get to the airport, drop off the car, pass through security and find a bar where the match was on.

So we got our beers and watched the Ghanians hold the Germans at bay, while Greg loaded the day's video files onto my laptop.

After the satisfying match, Greg got on a plane bound for California, while I worked on my laptop.  Tornadoes in Illinois delayed my flight for an hour, then another hour.  I was at a gate at the end of the terminal and through the towering wall of windows I could see the solstice sun sloping down onto a plain of hangars and equipment and aircraft.  It was certainly no Chaco Canyon or Stonehenge - just a scene of Late Oil Age Utilitarianism.

Later, after the storms had spent themselves or moved on, I was on the airplane.  It was a couple of hours before midnight and we were approaching Chicago from the south and east.  The aircraft passed out of a layer of clouds into the most spectacular sky I have ever seen.  We were traveling along an enormous, curving wall of billowing thunderheads - like a towering amphitheater of the gods.  The great folds and cleavages and billows were alternately blued by the darkening night and bronzed by the sunset that raged to the west.  Dark blue sky above green and yellow with slashes of translucent cloud - and orange lava flowed upon the horizon.  But as huge and imposing as the thunderheads appeared, they were dwarfed by the cloud-structure that rose up from behind them.  It was a vast mushroom, whose stem rose up from their midst miles to the south, and then spread its umbrella cap above us - painted scarlet and rose by the sun from some even more distant horizon.

. . . and the setting of this sun took my breath away - which is a pretty good solstice gift . . . 

Friends at home, celebrating midsummer night.

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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Hiking Ledyard's Morgan Pond Reservoir

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The Morgan Pond Reservoir in Ledyard, Connecticut is strictly off-limits to hiking.  Yellow signs every few feet proclaim that that force of law will be brought down upon you should you trespass.  The utility takes its responsibility to protect the water supply very seriously - to the point of paranoia.  And they have the rangers to enforce it.

The Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center has permission to lead hikes there, and since it is a rare opportunity for walkers and birders to get back into these pristine woods without risking a $50 fine and a misdemeanor charge - it's a popular outing.

19 people came in total, which could seem like a large herd to move through the woods, but it also means 38 eyes, a few of which are going to spot things that you wouldn't otherwise see.  And Maggie Jones, the director of the DPNC, and the woman leading the hike, is a consummate bird-call identifier.  

And the birds were out.  Yellow throated vireos, scarlet tanagers, orioles.  A yellow-rumped warbler in brilliant breeding plumage, a dapper worm-eating warbler, pine warblers, a common yellow-throat.  

We also saw catbirds and jays and chickadees and titmice, woodpeckers and cardinals - chipping sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, veeries, cowbirds and a great crested flycatcher.

I found a pair of blue-gray gnatcatchers putting the finishing touches on their nest, a little cylinder of moss and lichen that looked exactly like the knot of a tree.  The birds would bring some bit of material - sit and squirm in the nest for a moment as though working it in and testing it out and then flit off again.

On the forest floor the wood anemones were in bloom and wild strawberries.  Marsh marigold amid the skunk cabbage.  Bluets and violets were all upon the path.  The white shad was in blossom and the birches were full of catkins. 

A red-tailed hawk screamed above us and the turkey vultures cruised more quietly.  

The land itself is beautiful - a mixed hardwood forest with granite ledges and fields of glacial erratics - mossy boulders the size of small cottages.  The lake today was dark and windswept and wild looking with stands of drowned snags and its rocky shores overhung with pines and birches.  In the water there were cormorants and painted turtles basking on logs, and an occasional tree swallow above.  An osprey on the move.

The whole troupe of hikers passed within twenty-five feet of a canada goose before the last person noticed "a dead goose".  She had stretched herself flat and inconspicuous upon her little island nest of reeds and sticks and down.

A Swainson's thrush posed long enough for us to identify it.  But the ovenbird and the black and white warblers teased us with calls but never appeared.  Maggie identified at least four different vireos by their calls, but to me it was all just pretty song and flashes of feathers high high up among the catkins.

One woman nearly stepped on a rust-colored snake, which turned out to be a garter snake that must have stained itself in the rust-colored streamlet that emerges from the body of the great dam nearby.  And somehow a gray tree frog, invisible on the stony path was noticed rather than stepped on.

A mourning cloak butterfly circled around us a few times while we passed through his territory.

The vernal pools were filled with the egg masses of frogs and spotted salamanders.  In a couple of larger pools you could see the lily pad leaves a few feet below the surface beginning to unfurl and rise from the mud.

We circumnavigated the entire reservoir and didn't make it back to the cars until well after 1 o'clock, (which put a much bigger hole in my work day than I'd planned, but with no regrets on that score).  When we parted, Maggie gave me her trail map, in case I were going to lead the next one of these hikes for the nature center.  They certainly won't have to twist my arm . . . 

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Early May Garden Blogging

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I'm not a big fan of daffodils, but this time of year I can see why all the old ladies planted them.

Today's lunch was the year's first foraged from the yard -- curly dock, wild scallion, sunchoke, sheep sorrel and asparagus.  Sautéed in a pan it felt infused with health, but I'd resisted harvesting the morels (until Monica gets back tomorrow night) and it sorely lacked for that.  Or  maybe I should have followed my instincts and finished it with a handful of violets.

I only have a week to get most of my May gardening in, since I'll be leaving Friday and traveling for two and a half weeks.  The greens I planted a few weeks ago have sprouted - mustard, mixed greens, spinach, tat soi, and chard.  Maybe Monica will be eating them by the time I return. 

A small toad was patrolling the tat soi.  May it feast well upon the slugs.

I have a fair patch of garden with fine soil, but the best expanse of ground - where the previous owners, Vernon and Edith, had set their garden - was spoiled when we put in the drainage field for the septic system.  Only the asparagus and rhubarb were spared.  I've compensated by creating a couple of mounds on that spot in the hügelkultur model - a traditional German technique adopted by permaculturalists.  You build a heap of rotting wood (of which we have plenty!) and cover it with earth.  As the wood decays it forms a rich sponge of humus to hold water and supply nutrients.

Two hügel

The first, smaller hügel is starting to mature into a useful bed, and I'll be using it for herbs, greens, hot peppers and perhaps try a tomato plant or two on it.  

But the other more ambitious one is still pretty much a brush and log pile covered with last year's weeds.  I put compost and dirt on the very top and planted snow peas, cilantro and some chard on it to get the ball rolling.  I don't have high hopes, but I also don't have time or soil right now to cover it properly.  I planted some climbing peas at the base of it as well, and if all else fails they can clamber upon it.

Last year's soil was as dry as dust, but right now all is nice and damp.  Damp enough that the sump pump in the cellar has been running - so I've hosed it out to the garden to give the soil an extra soaking for good measure.

Tomorrow I'll stop soaking the garden, put in a row or two of yellow carola potatoes (alongside the two rows I've already planted of fingerlings and reds), and get the bed ready for the parsnips and beets.  Maybe plant some more basil somewhere.  The rest will have to wait until I get back.

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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Consuming Essays

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John Michael Greer, who posts a weekly essay on his Archdruid Report announced that he is going on hiatus for a while.  In response, I quipped that I'd come to really rely on his weekly post about the potential winding down of industrial civilization, and now I'd be forced to make the transition from consumer to producer.

I suppose I’ll have to get my weekly dose by writing my own version of the report on my own blog.  After all, one of the more promising avenues of adaptation (in addition to gardening, appropriate tech, etc.) has to be making the mental and material transformations from consumer to producer. And with that I have my first topic to explore . 

But now I have to gather my thoughts and muster my arguments if I'm going to attempt the kind of weekly manifesto that JMG manages to produce.  My recent research travels have given me grist for the mill . . .

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The Love Note to 2014, April 14 - 27

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I love skunk cabbage, a warm-blooded plant,
which unfurls to push away the winter,
and the pollen-dusty pompoms of the maple trees.

Porter as Anselmo the muleteer in The Man from La Mancha

I love a good hike sweat,
and the burn of trembling muscles,
and air drawn to inner-most depth of chest, deafeningly,
for a view of hawks or distant islands.

I love to see my boys becoming men

to hear the teachers say,
so comfortable in his skin,

he stands so confidently to speak,
to say his piece,
and the others - they listen.

I love their unabated curiosity -
and how their strong and agile minds
can prise out more and more
from this world
that so many take for granted.

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Ethnography in California

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I was taking a break from interviewing on the streets, sitting in a tiny Burger King in Central Los Angeles, drinking a soda and dribbling ketchup onto hot french fries.  I wasn’t hungry, only thirsty.  

The mentally ill man who rearranged all the chairs warned me that there was a fry at my feet.  He begged pardon before sweeping something only he could see from the aura above my head. 

I sat beside a red-haired dwarf and her friend, a fat man in cut-off sweatpants with a shaved head.  They were talking together sadly in Spanglish, while little Korean girls in sparkly shoes skipped around a father’s legs.

There was something wrong with the handsome man with the billygoat beard, though he looked perfectly normal.  But some human sense is triggered by invisible aberrations.  His short girlfriend could not help herself, but repeatedly reached up to touch and rearrange the heavily greased curls that that he wore.

I recalled how years and years ago in college Felipe and I used to wander out into the human mazes of Philadelphia and find such scenes and such people.  And how exotic and bizarre those nights were, filled with the colorful and the damaged and the mad.  We laughed and marveled and considered ourselves adventurers into the human panoply.

I had been interviewing people around this barrio – and behind the broken English, and dented lives there were passionate people with intelligent and observant things to say and contribute to the discourse I’m researching – about what the point of government is - and what's gone wrong.  

I didn’t feel ashamed of our old adventures, because it didn’t feel like mockery at the time, but something about the recollection made me feel old.  I can follow enough Spanglish to know that the little woman and her friend were discussing an old high school acquaintance who’d been struggling with illness.  The crazy man held the door politely for me as I left.  He had a dusty roll of paper towels under his arm.

Last I heard Felipe was one of the top neurosurgeons in the Southwest.

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Sans Langue

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[I had a request for a post on language, and since birthdays are involved, I thought I'd better deliver.]

In October of 1986 I'd been living and traveling in Europe for over a year.  I was in the final leg of my journey, having said farewell to Munich and hitchhiked my way along the foot of the German Alps to the Rhein.  I was wandering these last weeks in no great hurry, with no urgency to get home, but also without any burning curiosity about the places I was moving through.  The day before I had fallen in love with a German girl who picked me up in her truck - moving her things to university. I was fairly convinced that I could get her to fall in love with me as well.  But some part of me understood I was just drifting unmoored, and I should go on.  (I was also in love with a girl in Rhode Island, though she was months and many miles distant, and not waiting for me.)

At the Rhein the Frenchmen stamped a new visa into my passport - there'd been bombings in Paris during the summer and these visas were a new thing.  I shouldered my backpack and walked across the bridge, departing a land where people spoke a language that I understood and entering one where I spoke a few dozen words.  But one of those words was the word for train station, so if I could make my way to the city of Nancy, I'd be able to find the gare and get a ticket to Brussels and a flight home.

I had traveled without language before this -- Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, northern Finland -- and some things are easy, like hitchhiking or buying dinner or flirting, and some things are hard, like a doctor visit, or a haircut or flirting.  I had no pressing needs in this hilly farming country and people seemed content to help an amiable, language-less American make his way.  I must have left my map in one of those cars, but it didn't particularly bother me.  I couldn't get any more lost than I was.

Perhaps I had muttered an inquiring "kemping?" to someone, because in the early evening I found myself at a farm with a little campground to the side, standing with the old couple who owned it.  I think they tried to explain to me that it was out of season and the little campground was closed, but my mute, unyielding incomprehension finally won out.  Before long I had my tent set up in their meadow and was making a little pot of potato soup on my cookstove.  The old woman came by and I held up my bowl of potato and carrot peelings toward her inquiringly.  She had seemed a little oppressed by my languagelessness, but she brightened up and with a cheerful merci, took my offering of peelings to the sheds to feed the pigs.  I was secretly glad that I hadn't been able to ask where the garbage cans were.

As I discovered when I went to wash up for the night, the campground's bathroom was filled with a huge pile of ear corn.  It was simple enough to climb over but the sinks were at the far end and the frugal farmers had set the lights on a 3 minute timer - so precisely every 180 seconds I'd have to scramble back over the pile of corn (this time in total darkness), find the light switch, flip it and make my way back across the corn for whatever was left of my 180 seconds.  Questioning the farmers about this set-up is one of those things that would have been hard without language.  They'd apparently already gone to bed, so I left them in peace.

I distinctly recall standing beside the burly old man early the next morning.  He was wearing his Sunday best and was anxious to head out for the day's errands.  I handed him the few francs or deutschmarks we'd agreed upon for the night's stay.  It was here at this moment that the impersonal exchange of cash for hospitality ought to be domesticated by an exchange of pleasantries - a remark about the weather, an inquiry about how I'd slept, a comment about the condition of the roads toward Nancy, or a belated acknowledgement of the pile of corn.  But farmers, even ones with language can be taciturn.  We stood for a long quiet couple of minutes companionably looking off into the cool, foggy morning while he finished his cigarette.  Then he turned, shook my hand and left me alone in the meadow to break camp.
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Midges are the most insubstantial things - just sunlight and dust with wings.  

They have been everywhere lately - swarming in the sun, filling every breeze, congregating on the side of the house.

I remember summers in the Poconos when the midges would come to the windows at night, attracted by the lights.

In the morning their piled bodies would be snowdrifts upon the windowsills.

The Love Note to 2014, March 31 - April 13

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I love the thawed earth - 

to rake the naked garden a darker shade,
and crumble clods between my fingers;
to find the dirt no longer dormant,
full of creatures.

I love to see music being made,
Nico at the keyboard, his fingers certain
with some secret understanding that I don't share,
Porter's baritone that swells the harmonies he builds with his companions,
Monica hums a snatch of song as her coffee cools.

I love the poets whose songs have been such fearsome company:
Uncompromising Dylan,
Pink Floyd along the precipice of sanity,
Johnny Cash enrapturing on redemption,
Joan Armatrading, Tom Waits, Van Morrison,
and all the others who companied my own triumphs and turmoils.

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Rocky Neck State Park

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Bride Brook marsh

We hiked at Rocky Neck State Park on Saturday.  The still ungreen marshes were alive with egrets and herons, green-winged teal and black ducks, and double-crested cormorants.  A pair of ospreys fussed with sticks in their nest upon a platform.  A flock of glossy ibis moved systematically through the reeds, poking their long curved bills into the roots and stems.

We looked for terrapin, but saw only minnows.  The breeze, for the first time since October, had no bite to it, but was soft and warm.

The campground, which is still closed this time of year, is on the east side of the marsh.  On the west side is a rocky spine of land that runs between the brook and Four Mile river. We hiked up along it watching the birds - more egrets, a great blue heron and a pair of hooded mergansers in their spring finery.

Nico and his friend Sam climbed some rocks and trees as we went northward up the spine and then back southward toward the beach.  We had a picnic in the sun on the rocks below the enormous stone pavilion.  As the afternoon came on more people arrived, walking, picnicking, clambering out the long stony jetty, or flirting with the cold ocean on the white sandy beach itself.

Grills Preserves in the wet season

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The Westerly and Hopkinton Land Trusts got together to build a 75-foot steel hikers' bridge across the Pawcatuck river, linking the 500+ acres on the Westerly side with nearly 700 acres on the Hopkinton side.  This winter they added a causeway and bridge across Tomaquag creek to make hiking this thousand acre preserve even more accessible.

And in these days of the spring floods, it is wonderful to be able to walk these woods without hip waders.  The swale of the Tomaquag is drowned entirely, but the bridge and causeway take you across to the granite hills on the northwest side.  Every little spring and brook is burbling and there are frogs eggs in the vernal pools.

The flooded swale of Tomaquag Creek

 We hiked from the Chase Hill road trailhead on the Hopkinton side, crossed the Tomaquag, walked over the Polly Coon bridge, waded through the remaining eight inches or so of the Pawcatuck that had overflowed the banks, and made our way along the river back to the Bowling Lane trailhead on the Westerly side (where we'd left our other car.)  It took about 90 minutes to cross at an easy pace.

Looking back at Polly Coon bridge, spanning (most of) the Pawcatuck river

Though we didn't manage the hike with dry feet, the new construction meant the woods were passable even at this time of year.  So kudos to the people who made all this happen!

Is it a trail or a creek?

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Garden Ho!

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In most of the northeastern US, the earth is finally ready for gardening.  Here in Rhode Island, March is normally an alternation of warm days (that tempt the gardeners) and hard freezes (that remind them it's too soon).  But this year the ground has mostly stayed frozen and dormant, and even on the rare warmish day there has been no deluding oneself that winter had departed.

Lately most of the nights have stayed above freezing.  The robins have left the woods and are to be seen again on the lawns and fields hunting for the rising earthworms.  The phoebe has returned to her perches. A long, steady soaking rain filled the streams and rivers to bursting and now the sun has come out.  Anyone with a drop of gardening blood  was out yesterday, clearing away the winter's detritus.  I raked my little raised beds in preparation for planting spring greens and pulled the weeds from the hugel.

The oregano and sage are putting out a few new leaves, and the first little fists of rhubarb are pushing through.

I dug up a handful of the jerusalem artichokes - each plant seems to have a tuber about the size of a chicken egg.  I ate one that I split with a pitchfork.  It tasted like a carrot, though with neither the sweetness nor the bitterness of a garden carrot.  (And since I gave up trying to coax a carrot from my garden, I'll take that as a win.)

I've been ridiculously late in ordering my seeds, but I took some of last year's leftovers and got them into the ground: mustard greens, mesclun mix, spinach, and chard.  Some I planted on the hugel, and others under cold frames in the raised beds.

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