Among the Trees

Chasing Pat McCormick, and other stuff...

2009-10-18T00:18:00.002-04:00

Only foreigners and half-baked Americans fall for McCormick's tricks...I mean he hires dumb guys like you to work for him, and when it comes time to pay off, he takes a powder.
--Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948

I used to reserve this space for environmental writing and confined purely personal stuff to MySpace. But, MySpace is kind of boring to me, and I write what I can on the environment elsewhere. So, there's both a need and a venue, which means that the rebirth of this place is meant entirely as a personal electronic diary, but one that I don't really care about hiding from anyone.

One of the things I'm currently pursuing is $200. Someone owes me that amount, and like all things $200, it's both a large amount of cash to me yet something also that I'm willing to risk at the expense of a little knowledge broadening. That is to say, I assume there is the very real possibility that the person who owes me this money will never pay, and in fact this has been a running risk. It's not that I consider this person terribly dishonest, only personally incompetent.

We have entered a phase in our relationship where I suspect that this client has pulled a McCormick, which is to have contracted out work that cannot be paid for and from which he/she is dodging responsibility. See above. In the film, the deadbeat was beaten and his money taken from his wallet. In real life, I've noticed from following the online exploits of other freelance writers new and inventive ways of collecting debts. Apparently I'm not the only person who suffers the indignity of a client who pulls a McCormick.

We'll see where this ends.

John Dingell Day

2009-02-11T16:16:00.000-05:00

Here in Michigan, we've been asked to recognize today as John Dingell Day, in honor of John Dingell, who is now the longest-serving representative in the history of Congress. He's also a Democrat and represents a portion of the highly urbanized area near Detroit.

Here is the thing I think is most interesting about John Dingell -- progressives today dislike him intensely over his position on fuel economy standards, while ignoring that basically every progressive advance over the last five decades had John Dingell standing somewhere near its center. It's a fulfillment of a very old criticism of basically any movement that it will eat its own.

I came to politics, and especially progressive politics, in large part because of the work John Dingell has done. That is, I became an environmentalist because I enjoy spending time outside, and much of that is rooted in a trip I took out West while in high school. There, we spent time in national parks and wilderness areas set aside for protection by the federal government so that people would have a place to go find adventure, self-fulfillment, and to a certain extent reconnect with the natural world.

At the time, my interest in environmental issues had less to do with pollutants and chemicals than it did in protecting our dwindling number of natural places left free from development. Some of those places were protected under the Wilderness Act of 1964, which had as one of its chief Congressional architects John Dingell. In fact, Dingell has had his hands on most every major piece of environmental legislation since, including the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Protection Act.

It is true that Dingell has not been particularly aggressive on climate change, and helped to enable uncreative thinking among Detroit's automakers. On the other hand, CAFE standards -- which he's been criticized for holding up increases to -- haven't succeeded in reducing our dependence of foreign oil, evidenced by the fact that 30 years after they were adopted, we're now more dependent on foreign oil than ever. The reason for that isn't the fault of Detroit, but of how the nation as a whole has built its way of life. Criticism for supporting that rests on a great many more shoulders than John Dingell's.

The great irony is that undoubtedly a sizable number of people who have harshly criticized him over the last couple of years came to environmentalism and ultimately progressive politics by the same road that I did -- hiking in American wilderness areas, which inspired a reverence in nature and humility -- and now assail as unproductive and dinosaur-like the legislative legacy of the architect of that road.

Transportation, this summer, and that presidential election

2008-08-09T14:05:00.000-04:00

The Republican plan to address high gas prices can be distilled down into one word -- drill. Oh, there's stuff in there about nuclear power (how this will impact gas prices is anyone's guess), but they're mostly so set on drilling that they've taken to throwing a now-week-long temper tantrum on the floor of the House, hoping to force Congress back into session (or, just generate headlines).

Meanwhile, despite our lack of drilling in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf ... the worldwide price of oil continues to drop. Analysts are starting to suggest that the price might be correcting itself thanks to a strengthening dollar and lower demand.

The connection? There is none, which is the point. For the last three months, Republicans and their mouthpieces in the media have been shrieking at the top of their lungs that we need more supply to bring prices down. It's made no difference whether that new supply would actually bridge the gap between projected increases in demand vs. extra supply (it wouldn't) ... it's been all about drill, drill, drill.

Naturally, they were wrong, and after I read this Bob Novak column mocking the idea that speculation, I began to think that maybe speculation was playing a bigger role than I'd previously thought. Apparently, I can add this to the growing body of evidence supporting my hypothesis that when Bob Novak asserts something as fact that it is not. Nothing today is different than what it was last week -- we still have the same sources of unrest in the Middle East and South America, and although demand is dropping, it's not dropping so significantly that oil would fall that far that fast. From the same article:

Oil's fall is all the more stunning given current affairs. Russia, the world's second-biggest oil producer, invaded its neighbor Georgia on Friday. The United States and Europe are poised to impose more economic sanctions on oil-rich Iran. And a pipeline in volatile Central Asia that carries vital global oil supplies exploded this week.

It's stunning only if you remove as a potential cause the artificial inflating of oil futures by speculators.

Unfortunately, the same problems exposed by the oil spike remain. What it did was expose how flimsy is the foundation of our lifestyle, and how dependent we are on petroleum. You hear the word addiction tossed around a lot to describe this, and it fits.

We've also been presented evidence with how completely shallow and content-free our presidential campaign has become. I allude to the Paris Hilton video, naturally, and her moronic suggestion that we can drill to satisfy demand until alternative energy comes into more widespread use (that this, in turn, is being hailed as intelligent tells you the sorry state of our national awareness).

Since this was apparently a scare rather than the real thing (a drill, if you will), then the question is what we do today to prepare for when oil becomes scare. And, oh yeah, we probably ought to start doing something about global warming while we're at it.

That means something a great deal more adult than what we've gotten. Rather than discussing public transportation and how our communities are organized, and the wisdom of relying entirely on commerce carried by a finite resource, we've gotten temper tantrums in darkened buildings and Paris Hilton back into our national consciousness. I'd say that's just about as definitive proof as anything that when oil really does become scarce enough to permanently push prices up that we're fucked.

Pickling green beans

2008-07-28T11:26:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure how I wound up with so many green beans all at once. Okay, I do know. It was last week, in picking up my share from one of the two community supported agriculture farms I own a summer share in. The woman who I split the share with is currently off on vacation with her husband, so I got the entire thing.

At the bottom was a huge bag of green beans. All mine. Score!

A couple of years ago, I found myself swimming in even more beans, and late-August, early-September was spent furiously blanching and freezing beans and tomatoes. It was actually very fortuitous ... I got laid off about a month later, and the bagged tomatoes got me through the winter (pasta every week!).

The beans were a different story. They tended to develop freezer burn quickly, and got soggy too quickly for my liking.

At the same time, I'd decided that what I really wanted to do was to learn how to can them. Canning, I'm led to believe, opens up a great deal more options, like making your own spaghetti sauce and salsa ahead of time, without the worries of freezer burn. The problem? Alas, no canning supplies.

Last summer, the story was swapped on its head. I got ahold of some canning supplies from a now-ex-stepmother (bye, Bev!), but my garden plot was in a shady area and didn't produce a great deal.

To bring this story quickly to the present, I'm about to launch into my first ever-attempt to can vegetables. Actually, I'm pickling green beans. I don't know if there's a difference, but as far as I can discern, the processes are basically the same.

I'm assuming, based on what I've read and what seems to make sense, sterilizing everything is the most important step. At least, it's that way when you brew your own beer, and I can see why the same principles would apply. Something I read said it wasn't so important to pre-boil things, but the canning supplies I got my hands on (thanks, Bev!) were pretty dirty. In fact, a dead fly was lying in the bottom of a jar.

This is a three-boil process. I'm boiling water right now to sterilize jars and lid ring. Then, there's boiling the actual pickling agent (vinegar, salt, water). Finally, there's the final bath to seal the lids on.

I have eight jars that I can use. More to the point, I have eight lids to screw on, but lots and lots of jar rings and jars. (Updated here) After trimming the beans and washing them off, it looks like I'll only need five.

I've got five heads of garlic set aside, plus the three serrano peppers I've harvested from my garden and a green pepper that's been sitting around asking what it could do to help. Those will go into the jars of beans, along with some dill seed from the head I bought at the farmers market last week.

The water for sterilizing the jars is currently heating to a boil, then I'll move onto throwing the garlic, dill, peppers and beans into the jars while pickling agent heats. Add the pickling agent, screw on the lids, and bathe in boiling water for a few minutes to seal the jar lids. It's time consuming, getting all that water to boil, but we'll find out in a couple of weeks if things are nearly as easy as I thought.

The bass that binds us

2008-07-26T14:48:00.000-04:00

(Quick note: I’ve actually gotten a few e-mails over the last couple of days asking me for more content here … didn’t think anyone was actually paying attention. There is indeed much to write about, from energy to food. Perhaps I can piece off a spare few moments and address some of the growing pile of unfinished business.)

The Two Hearted Ale was kind of warm when I finished it off. The bottle, coming out of the cup holder I’d built into the riverbank was covered with sand and grit. I’d just released a 20-inch smallmouth bass, the largest fish I’d ever caught in the Chippewa River, not so much throwing it back in as letting it slide off the sand. I had no net and the thing was frankly too big, and my head too full of beer, for me to lift it and look at it.

My first instinct was to keep it and filet it. The boy has been bugging me all summer to do precisely that – when we catch something big enough, to eat it. On the other hand, the sign at the entrance to this place had made clear that both beer and bikes were prohibited, even though I had both. I wasn’t sure if it’d mentioned fishing specifically, and violating game management restrictions seemed, to me, more important than prohibitions against bicycles and beer.

I know people who won’t eat the fish out of the river. There’s no good reason why not to. Aside from some agricultural run-off upstream, the river’s water is spring-fed and clean (that’s why trout do well upriver). I wish to eat fish from the river for a very simple reason … because I wish to depend on the river in some small way for my own survival.

My relationship with the Chippewa runs deep. I have canoed its length, and know its physical form. I have slept alongside its banks and drank its waters (after running it through a filter, of course). It provides water for my community, and I have used that water to grow food. I have recreated in it, and I have cooled myself in the summer. I have contemplated while on and alongside it. The only thing that I have yet to do is feed myself from it. The river is familiar to me; the waters are my home waters. I wish to make this relationship complete.

It seems strange that we have a river teeming with fish running through a community of 40,000 people afraid to eat fish from it for no good reason. I tell people that I fish its waters, and their first reaction is to look at me askance. They ask me if I eat the fish as if I am insane. When I tell them that the water is clean and the fish not at all a danger to health, most people look at me with a great deal of dubiousness.

These people have, in fact, given up on the river, if they ever felt connected to it. It is okay to drive past, and to look at, and to rest by, but when it comes to nourishing yourself from, they would prefer to have their fish trucked in from elsewhere. It is a very sad thing to me that this is the case.

I wish that people would not accept that they live near a river for which they have such deep-seated reservations about eating its resident fish. It is perhaps a sign of things that it is automatically assumed that fish from a nearby river are unfit for consumption. One wonders if people assume that pollution does not occur elsewhere, that fish from places you cannot see are somehow cleaner and more fit to eat.

To me, it is vastly superior to insist that the water in which I fish be clean enough that I can eat without worry. In fact, I don’t understand how people are willing to accept less.

Chairman of the Board

2008-06-12T23:55:00.000-04:00

For the last year and a half, or so, I've been serving on the board of directors for our local hippie grocery store -- GreenTree Cooperative Grocery Store. For the last year, I've been the board's vice chairman. Last night (or Wednesday night, since this post will probably be finished after midnight), I became the board's chairman.

This is part announcement, part disclaimer; as was the revelation the other day that I've done some light P.R. work for a local community supported agriculture (CSA) project (I'm a member of another one). It's not a position I necessarily sought out, because the person who was the chair was perhaps one of the most excellent, natural leaders it's been my pleasure to serve with. But, she'd also been doing it for a long time, and it was kind of the natural progression, I suppose, for me to move up the chain when she decided that she wanted to step down. But, let the record show that when I speak here, I speak not for the cooperative but for myself but that the things read here may be indeed influenced by the fact that I'm the chairman of a cooperative grocery board.

Summer of Yum!

2008-06-11T13:38:00.000-04:00

Lunch today (well, part of it):

The contents of the salad are, lumped by source, as follows:

Mixed greens, sliced radish, green onion, carrot, and chopped carrot top from Swier Family Farms, one of the Community Supported Agriculture I'm a member of this year (I'm involved in two, and doing a little light PR work for them). They made their first delivery of the season yesterday, and I got green onion, carrots, mixed greens, and radishes out of it. I hear from the second -- Maggie's Farm (both of them are west of town) -- that they're seeing pea pods ripening, which is good because I didn't grow any this year and the boy is fond of them.

There are also clover sprouts in there, which came from my windowsill. I grew two tablespoons of seeds and the project was so prolific, the finished product is currently basically spread out all over my kitchen. I even topped my lunchtime bratwurst (leftover from grilling last night), and them ... not bad.

There are also some basil leaves in there, which came off my front porch. I was a bit nervous about the basil plant, and then it got warm and muggy and the plant is now both big and deep, lustrous green.

Meanwhile, I staked my tomatoes last week, and have to get back to my garden -- hopefully today -- to get the rest of the plants transferred to the ground.

While I was drilling for oil, I hit the bottom of the barrel

2008-06-05T14:03:00.000-04:00

Skyrocketing gas prices has the usual gang huffing and puffing to cure our addiction by feeding it. Perhaps none sums it up as well as today's column by George Will, in which he suggests that anyone who's ever voted for a Republican has no business complaining about gas prices.

Also disqualified from complaining are all voters who sent to Washington senators and representatives who have voted to keep ANWR's oil in the ground and who voted to put 85 percent of America's offshore territory off-limits to drilling.

This is a sign of the times, I suppose. It's not that you aren't allowed to not complain if you think we should keep our mitts out of ANWR, it's if you voted for someone who thinks this. Talk about comity among Americans.

Will lists facts, like the estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil in ANWR, and suggests that Chuck Shumer, who wants the Saudis to increase production of their own oil (there isn't much room above what they're producing to add more, mind you) in order that the price might drop, and the estimated million barrels of oil that might be flowing out of ANWR today if Bill Clinton hadn't vetoed ANWR exploration legislation back in the 90s.

Clinton can be forgiven this sin, I suppose, since oil was dirt cheap back in the 90s. Unless someone's got a time machine, there's no sense in blaming Bill Clinton for not knowing that today, China and India would be using a lot more oil than they did back in 1995, or that oil fields in the North Sea and Mexico might have been exhausted so quickly.

Here's another interesting tidbit ... 20 million. That was the daily usage of oil for Americans back in 2005. If we got 1 million barrels a day from ANWR, it would reduce our demand from foreign sources by a whopping 4 percent. That's if we get 1 million a day. At peak production, which if we started drilling in 2013 (the earliest we'd be able to reliably access ANWR oil), the EIA estimates we'd get substantially less ... when production peaks in 2025.

This itself raises the question of just how much we could get out of ANWR. While it's true that there might be as much as 16 billion barrels of oil in ANWR, the question is how much of it is recoverable. It's standard to assume that the first half is the easiest half to get at, after which it's a case of diminishing returns. Although technology has permitted us to recover a great deal more oil today than in years past, it's still not 100 percent. So, if there are indeed 10.4 billion barrels in ANWR, as Will estimates (a fair estimation, since it cuts the range in the center), only 5.2 are easily accessible. Beyond that, it's a question of when it stops making economic sense to chase it.

The same basic premises are true of off-shore areas in the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast may indeed have 86 billion barrels of oil, of which 43 billion are easily recoverable. That's about five year's worth of oil usage for the United States, and it would still take 10 years to start exploiting it. Beyond that, it would take several years to get production ramped up to full. Put simply, it is not unreasonable to ask people who have production up and running to produce more; but it is disingenuous for Will to suggest that it's hypocritical for Shumer to call on the Saudis to do that while also opposing opening up ANWR. The reason for that is because while the Saudis could immediately put more oil into the market (assuming that they aren't pumping at full production), it'd still take us almost two decades to get a return on our investment.

But, you almost get the feeling that Will, like so many of the others, think that the current state of oil prices is evidence that they were right all along. Otherwise, how else account for their crowing while being so incredibly wrong?

Local Future

2008-05-30T17:03:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning, like all week, to do a post about this weekend's peak oil and climate change conference in Grand Rapids, hosted by Local Future.

At the center of Local Future is Aaron Wissner, who I got a chance to meet a few weeks back at the Michigan Policy Summit. I went to the presentation listed in the schedule as about global warming, and got there a few minutes late (I'd gotten detained by someone asking me ... something), and heard what I though was a fairly typical presentation on climate change. The language changed, however, and veered right into peak oil and the changes that will mean for the way we live and how peak oil and climate change are essentially hitting us at the same time.

This is Kuntsler territory, and while chatting with Wissner that afternoon, I found that he had read The Long Emergency but not World Made by Hand. I was pleased to learn during our conversation that one of Michigan's Congresscritters has a pretty good grasp on peak oil ... and that he's a Republican (coincidentally, perhaps, that Vern Ehlers is both a scientist by profession and also netted the League of Conservation Voters' endorsement for this year). In fact, Wissner told me that Ehlers pretty regularly attends peak oil discussions in the Capitol.

I can't make the conference myself (I'll be off camping and showing the boy how to cast with the fishing rod I bought him for his birthday), but I understand that there's on-site registration (doors opened 15 minutes ago, and the opening address by the green-friendly mayor of Grand Rapids is in 45). One of the speakers at the conference, Richard Heinberg, just wrote an essay on coal for The Oil Drum.

2008-05-26T23:45:00.000-04:00

The answer to the first paragraph of this…

I admit it: I'm no environmentalist. But I like to think I'm something of a conservationist.

…is, you’re actually neither, Jonah.

Here, we see yet another attempt by people previously hostile to the environment as an issue to attempt to co-opt it. It was a big hit last year, when Newt Gingrich was the first to argue that the problem with environmental issues are environmentalists. The really unreasonable folks, the argument goes, are those who’ve been saying all along that we weren’t do a good enough job to keep clean the environment.

Goldberg, as usual, has no idea what he’s talking about. He certainly doesn’t understand what it means to be a conservationist, hence the ad hominem attacks on Al Gore, who at least as it regards global warming, is more conservationist than hippie. I mean, the man’s solution to global warming is to better husband those resources available today and both upgrade our electrical infrastructure and unleash the imagination of the little guy. Gore, who Goldberg lazily dismisses as the high priest of Gaia worship, sees no reason why we can’t address global warming and make a buck at the same time.

You could forgive Goldberg’s confusion. Knowing all of this would require simple research that is not Goldberg’s forte. This much can be discerned that he goes to a science fiction writer who believes in spoon bending who is hostile to the science of global warming on how to define environmentalism.

This extends to the specific issues Goldberg cites – grocery shopping bags and corn for fuel. While you can debate the thorny paper vs. plastic issue, every real environmentalist answers it by advocating the use of reusable cloth bags that need not be discarded in the first place (and none of them will tell you that corn ethanol is a good idea).

But, again, this isn’t about making a coherent point or even understanding how an issue works. Goldberg, like many conservatives, has been consistently wrong on just about everything for the last decade. Normally, when someone has that shitty a track record, you’d expect them to eventually get tuned out.You can avoid doing that by keeping yourself relevant somehow, which is what Goldberg’s doing – saying that the people who won the debate actually lost it, and that really the only people worth listening to were the ones who were wrong all along.

The cost of getting around

2008-05-24T12:48:00.000-04:00

We haven't seen these stories until much later in the summer in previous years. The headline appears to be a bit overwrought ... the locals interviewed for it don't appear to be near any kind of breaking point, but you can sense frustration.

I can understand it, although it's very difficult to feel much sympathy for anyone near the breaking point over record high gas prices. It's not like a lot of people didn't predict that this was eventually going to happen, and it's our custom to expect people to solve their own problems, especially problems of their own making and that were self-evident truths several years out.

As one of those few lunkheads who suggested that we were setting ourselves up for a hard fall by building a society around the car and cheap gasoline, mostly what was the response to our argument was a lot of head scratching and sometimes -- mostly from the institutional press -- outright mockery.

This has been a constant thread throughout this decade. Warnings that we perhaps think a little harder about the consequences of invading Iraq, and also that our relationship with fossil fuels was releasing carbon to the atmosphere with likely negative consequences for future generations were ignored and mocked. We were on a national spending binge, and no one likes a downer who points out that eventually whoever issued the credit card was going to come around, looking for some dough.

Although the current clown makes us long for the peace and relative prosperity of the Clinton years (now that it looks as if dynastic politics is in trouble), my guess is that history will not judge the Clinton years as well as we maybe suppose. He was probably the best president of the last 30 years, and certainly one of the two least terrible, but looking back from just 10 years later, he appears to have been given a tremendous gift in rock bottom oil prices. This helped stimulate the American economy in terms of both new sales of trucks and SUVs and also suburban development, both of which have since gone into the toilet. My guess is that ultimately, Bill Clinton will be judged for the masterful way that the more his enemies attacked him, the more popular he became, but was something of a wash when it came to crafting wise, far-seeing policy.

Unfortunately, we're left with a world designed and built on cheap oil. If our towns and cities were designed with anything resembling wisdom and foresight, we could more easily absorb the shock of $4 a gallon oil, because it would be easy to let the car sit during the week and use it only when we wanted to get out of town (and out of town to places not connected with a sound public transportation network).

We've also essentially torn down our networks of public transportation. I mean, there's a rail line that runs about 200 yards from my front door, and the old rail station is now a brewpub. Alas, the rails aren't constructed for passenger traffic, and the closest Amtrak station is an hour to the south (luckily, we've got a once-a-day bus heading there). Rather than modernize and update things, instead the notion of public transportation was mocked and we let it all deteriorate. It was generally assumed that gas would forever stay cheap, and the American economy would roar unabated forever, and that the day when gas might become $4 a day was something out of someone's twisted fantasy.

Missing the big picture

2008-03-22T09:56:00.000-04:00

Here is how the presidential campaign has thus far played out to me.

On one hand, you have Republican John McCain, who isn't George Bush, but who wants to continue two of the greatest policy failures from the current administration -- tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq (we'll be there a-hunnerd years if we halfta, he says). He thinks global warming is a problem, but would undoubtedly be required to take with him to Washington many of the same industry people who've helped destroy environmental protections and undermine the role of science in policy for the last eight years. These are Republicans, after all, and doing that kind of thing is pa congenital defect of the breed.

On the Democratic side, I have to admit to a great deal of schadenfreude at watching Empress Hillary I stumble and fall. I am personally turned off by her, and especially by her campaign and many of her supporters, who seem to regard questions of whether she's the right person for the job as deeply stupid. In the camp of Barack Obama, on the other hand, you find people with an earnest desire for change, and I surmise from this that a President Obama would bring many of these people with him to the White House.

Yet, there is something missing from the campaign, which is a vision for what American life will look like at the end of the next presidential term. I find endless debates over individual policy positions not at all useful because a president rarely gets the opportunity to dictate how things will work. Circumstances often drive things more than who is in the White House; and it is my prediction that universal health care will come not because there's a bleedin' socialist in the White House, but because the next 20 years are going to be very challenging ones for health care providers. Naturally, in addition to this, one cannot discern how a president would respond to something like the Sept. 11 attacks based on a policy paper.

I wish to know how the candidates think people will be living in 10 years, and whether they think the American lifestyle -- as constructed right now -- is sustainable. I would like to know what the candidates think about whether the way we live will be affected by the price of gasoline, and how they think ordinary people will respond to that. I would like to know whether they think the way we get our food is sustainable and what we ought to do about it.

World Made by Hand

2008-03-18T09:33:00.000-04:00

If Destiny chose last week for the nation to see a new record high price for gasoline and turmoil in the financial markets, then you have to wonder whether Destiny has a pronounced sense of foreshadowing. This week comes the release of a book that patin.

James Howard Kunstler’s latest book, “World Made by Hand” is the story of the New York town of Union Grove, several years into a period Kunstler calls in another book and on his blog Clusterfuck Nation The Long Emergency.

The reality of The Long Emergency is simple and grim – things fall apart. It comes about because of the end to cheap oil, which stresses an already-fragile economy built around pushing around paper rather than something substantial. The result is collapse.

Starting with peak oil, Kunstler’s prediction is that everything connected with cheap energy for transportation – petroleum – will unravel, taking with it not just global trade but also our ability to feed ourselves through big agriculture networks. Transportation becomes expensive, so too do the tools for growing food. The American economy, today built primarily on the finance sector and driven by debt, just simply fails. Naturally, this means a collapse in health care. And, all of it takes place in a world laboring through global warming.

There are a number of events that are presumed to have taken place between the collapse of the American economy and political system – nuclear attacks on American cities by terrorists, epidemics, civil unrest in urban centers, prolonged war in the Middle East. The president may or may not be circulating somewhere around the Midwest, but no one knows or even cares.

The result of this, for the fictional characters of Union Grove, is a greater reliance on themselves and each other. Things are hard – violence is common, and even basic health care has taken several steps backward. As hard as life is in upstate New York, it’s Eden compared to everywhere else. Glimpses into the world distant from upstate New York reveal a nation that has ripped apart bloodily at the seams. A band of pilgrims that is central to the plot brings stories of race war and chaos around the radioactive ruins of Washington D.C.

By contrast, there is a crude trade network established in Union Grove, and people produce much of their own food. A local plantation has electricity, brews its own beverages, and carries on commerce by boat with the city of Albany.

There is also the return of government, literally, by the people. What infrastructure remains in Union Grove is in a state of collapse during the time frame of “World Made by Hand,” and the software executive-turned-carpenter main character named Robert is made mayor after declaring that it’s time for the townsfolk to get back to work remaking their lives. The wisdom of this is made apparent later in the book during a trip to Albany, when Robert runs across New York’s lieutenant governor, who is very probably the state’s governor and sits – impotent – at his desk. The state would assist, the lieutenant governor tells Union Grove’s mayor, but it has no assets to offer.

There are two competing ideas that run throughout all of Kunstler’s work. The first is a wish that we not go through The Long Emergency (it’s now something of a foregone conclusion to Kunstler). The second is a genuine desire for things to be better. What things? Well, basically everything – better community planning, better building design, and better appreciation for craft. The silver lining of The Long Emergency is that it will provide a great deal of incentive to embrace these things once again. In that world, people make their own music, grow their own food, trade with each other, and take care of each other. It is literally a world made by hand, taking over after the failure of the world made of petroleum.

-----

The book calls to mind another book written about life after the collapse of modern American life. The means of collapse are similar – the predictable results of an overextension of a lifestyle built primarily on consumption. That book was the unironically named “Good News” by Edward Abbey (Abbey famously remarked that the end of civilization would indeed be good news). Both, in fact, even use mysticism as devicest to move the plot.

Wind is to Texas what oil was to Texas

2008-02-24T15:19:00.000-05:00

I missed this article in the New York Times the other day. Luckily, these days we have these-here intertubes to keep stuff around.

“I have the same feelings about wind,” Mr. Pickens said in an interview, “as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” He is planning to build the biggest wind farm in the world, a $10 billion behemoth that could power a small city by itself.

Mr. Pickens is T. Boone Pickens, of Swiftboat Veterans against John Kerry fame.

Here, rather than looking for angels, we follow the money. The money, obviously, says that green energy isn't just doable, but also profitable done properly. It helps that Texas has a long history of being friendly to green energy, and developed one of the first and best renewable standards in the nation. By contrast, what do we have here in Michigan? This:

"The political rhetoric does not match the reality. They (supporters of renewal energy) are trying to jam portfolio standards when they know full well the technology is not there. It's a pipe dream."

That my friends, is your Senate Majority Leader. Anyone still curious why we lag behind other states?

By the way, for the curious, by 2020, Texas is expected to see 39,000 new jobs and $9.4 million in capital investment thanks to renewable energy.

The (perverted) American Dream

2008-02-21T14:13:00.000-05:00

Like I think most people, I have a great deal of sympathy for the poor saps who’ve lost their homes since the collapse of the housing market. All of them share some small bit of the blame, but in the end the lesson they learned – that you can’t get something for nothing – was really less than the price they paid to learn it.

I have less sympathy for the lenders who lost money in this thing, because they lowered their lending standards knowing full well the risk. It’s overlooked that experience is the key to basically everything, and those with experience borrowing and financing are even more guilty of stupidity than those with shaky credit histories who lacked the acumen to know what kind of bad deal they were getting into.

The question, however, is what kind of guilt American society as a whole carries. This is a part of the equation that so far has been relegated to places like this – blogs. Although the American people by and large believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, for some reason you can’t point to specific things as evidence that they are right.

Yet, in this case, that is precisely what happened. A casual review of the thing turns up the usual suspects – artificially monkeying with a market to make it more profitable. In this case, it was playing off the desires of the American people to own their own homes.

It was this sad perversion of the American Dream that really gave us the rotten foundation for the housing market collapse. For basically most of the years I’ve been aware of the world around me, the American Dream has been defined by one thing – ownership of your own house. Your own castle, your own kingdom. A place to hang your hat, put your feet up, and to call your own.

For most of those years, it was believed that home ownership was something you had to build up towards. You left school, took your first couple of shitty jobs and eventually built up the proper credit rating and work history so that a bank would take a chance on you. You paid off your mortgage after 20 or 25 years, burned the paperwork, and kicked back until it was time to shuffle you off to the nursing home.

Somewhere along the way, someone figured out that while that was maybe responsible, it wasn’t exploiting the market nearly as fast as it could be. This is basically how things have gone the last thirty years anyway, stuff that was carefully and properly managed – like privately-owned forests and stuff like that – were suddenly mined and exploited for short-term gain. The long-term impacts – in this case, a collapse of the housing market and mass foreclosures – weren’t something anyone really worried about. Buy low, sell high, and leave some other sucker holding the hot potato.

Everything bloomed – buying, lending, construction. Open spaces disappeared beneath the bulldozer blade, municipal and state governments watched tax coffers fill with taxes from properties with inflated values.

Meanwhile, none of this was made possible without the rapid expansion of credit. Debt used to be something to manage responsibly. No one wanted it, but you had to carry debt to borrow money, because doing so told everyone they could trust you to repay your loans. But, in exploiting a big ticket sector, like sales of homes, responsible management of debt was an impediment because the housing market depended – like everything else – on both margin and volume. It meant pushing people into houses they weren’t ready for, and it meant getting creative with how to do that.

Credit, unfortunately, is not the liberating force it’s touted as. When you borrow, your actual buying power is lower than if you’d paid cash for everything because, as everyone knows, the only way someone lends you money is if they get interest on top of that they gave you. In other words, when it comes to borrowing, the house always wins. It’s become fashionable over the last 20 years to try to get out from under that by, rather than paying off debt and refusing to again borrow, has been to borrow more. It starts a cycle that is every bit as much an oppressive force as black-clad secret police flying silent helicopters though the night sky above the city.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without government, which exists largely to keep protecting everyone, including those poor suckers who take on too much debt because someone told them it was their birthright to own a suburban McMansion, turning a blind eye. Naturally, these last seven years, that hasn’t been a difficult thing to do.

One of these days, someone is going to connect the dots between credit and environmental degradation. Both involve the same basic principle, which is trying to figure out how to live beyond your means. It never works, naturally, because it’s impossible to actually live beyond your means (for reasons that should be, but probably and sadly aren’t), but it’s something that we Americans have turned into something of a religion.

We used to know that as something else – the overemphasis on collecting material goods, which some folks might call greed. Somewhere along the way, it was turned upside down, and it’s now the religion otherwise known as The American Dream.

The silver lining

2008-02-15T14:30:00.000-05:00

Over at Michigan Liberal, I caught this comment.

Maybe corn syrup will cost more than fresh fruit. A can of soda will need terms.

If not fruit, at least cheap, healthy, locally grown food will maybe be cheaper. And, hopefully, people will be forced to take more personal responsibility for what they eat and where it comes from. Hopefully ... but probably not.

It's difficult, with a foot of snow covering the ground right now, to think about the need for us to reconnect ourselves with our physical environment. On the other hand, I don't think it's much of a stretch to think that maybe a lot of our problems could be solved more easily if we didn't tend to think of ourselves as separate and distinct from the environment, rather than wholly dependent on it.

Local food

2008-02-08T10:04:00.000-05:00

It's about the time to start thinking about planning this summer's access to local food. From last summer, I'm down to a spaghetti squash I bought at the farmer's market, a bag of frozen Roma tomatoes, and a bag of jalapeno peppers. Wasn't a very successful year.

This year, right now the plan is to garden, somewhere, and also participate in a local Community Supported Agriculture program. Two of the people who are fellow directors for our local cooperative grocery store have CSAs going this year, and one of them is supposedly a fairly ambitious start-up project. I'm hoping to figure out which one will best suit my needs and then supplement that with what I grow in my own garden. The hope is to have lots and lots of stuff, and to actually have enough to get into canning by the end of summer.

Over the last couple of months, I've also been put onto the trail of someone sells milk from actual, real dairy farm cows instead of from a dairy factory. And, of course, there is the never-ending process of finding local, healthy source of meat. But, those are questions for another day.

Bill McKibben endorses Obama

2008-02-01T10:53:00.000-05:00

A letter was forwarded to me yesterday. It's an endorsement letter by a bunch of prominent names in the environmental movement. One of the undersigned in Dave Dempsey, and one of the other undersigned in Bill McKibben.

Here's the letter.

I'm fairly shocked that McKibben would endorse a particular candidate, because he's a big picture kind of guy. Writes books about the need for substantial change in the way we see things, which are bigger topics than whether Hillary or Obama would be better for the environment. He was also one of the organizers for Step it Up!.

2008-01-10T20:56:00.000-05:00

Tonight, we engage in some rare blog-on-blog action, answering Mark Maynard's question, "How is the Whopper Freakout a dark omen for America?" In particular, a hunch:

I don’t have a lot of time right now, but my sense is that it can tell us quite a bit about the future of our rapidly disolving Republic.

Well, the answer ain't gonna get you elevated from Shithead U. to the ivory towers of academia. The answer is that many Americans have become so hopelessly shallow, self-centered, and concerned with irrelevancy that you would do them a favor by holding a pillow over their faces at night. I mean, I direct you to the hipster doofus with messy hair and a black T-shirt who said he was so livid by the Whopper's disappearance that he gave the manager an earful.

Right, so angry is he at the disappearance of a sandwich from a fast food joint's menu that he had to register anger with the manager. One wonders what would happen if he, and his fellow pro-Whopper partisans put the same kind of energy and effort into protecting the environment that provides them with the air they breath and the water they drink as they do protesting the disappearance from the menu of a local cookie cutter drive-thru joint a processed meat patty sandwich that contains enough calories and fat to sustain them for, if you do moderate exercise, one whole day.

The answer you're looking for, Mark, can be found in this. But, don't dwell on it too long, because it'll just depress you.

An un-useful string of assumptions

2008-01-08T10:59:00.000-05:00

(Part of a longer piece at Michigan Liberal)

It was pretty obvious for most of last evening that we were going to get a storm of some kind. The local schools canceled classes yesterday due to the dense fog created by rapidly melting snow, which was occasionally interrupted by a rainstorm or two. By evening, the temperature was hovering at about 56 degrees and off to the west you could see flashes of lighting in the clouds and hear thunder ... it reminded me of a story I heard in the service about guys watching artillery exchanges outside of Beirut in 1983.

The storm hit right around 8:45. There was a lot of rain, a lot of wind, some hail, and a tornado warning for southern Isabella County and all of Gratiot County. Weather dude came on the screen and showed the passing line of storms and projected a path for what they thought might be its path. Then, at about 9:15, with the storm passed ... kapow! ... lights out. Came back on at 7 a.m. this morning, and I see that most of my cleaning last night was really just reorganizing my piles of stuff (you could make a right proper pyre for the dead with the piles of crap I have in my living room). Plus, now, there are candles all over the place (I found my MagLight right where the boy hid it, about two hours after it would have been useful).

It was a very, very typical late Spring storm ... on Jan. 7. Usually, 'round these parts, when the power goes out in January, the wind and not an inconsequential amount of ice are involved. Last night, it ... was ... a ... tornado, and one 15 miles south of what is generally referred to as the snowbelt.

I know the easy tendency is to blame mean-old global warming for this. After all, it's January and it's very warm (50 degrees again, according to Mr. Weather Ticker on my monitor). There was a tornado in Isabella County, associated with a pretty bad thunderstorm. The problem is that it is impossible to pin the blame for any individual weather event on global warming. The difference between climate and weather is something often overlooked, especially among the skeptics who always seem to marvel at how there can be both winter snowstorms and global warming (as is their fashion, misinterpreting ... well, just about everything).

Unfortunately, I haven't had the time this winter to pay much attention to phenomenon that affects our weather. The last two mild winters, for example, were probably more related to ocean currents (El Nino, I do believe) than global warming, although there is evidence that global warming will have an impact on things like El Nino events. The point is that we just don't know, when something like last night's storm pops up, whether it was global warming or just some radical spike that over the long run will be evened out by a spike in the other direction.

What I can tell you is that global warming is supposed to make this kind of freaky weather less freaky and more typical. Those individual weather spikes are supposed to become more wild, unpredictable, and common. Over time, they'll be evened out into a climate pattern that is supposed to be generally warmer. That means if, next week, a giant snowstorm blows into Michigan and dumps two feet of snow and drops temperatures below zero for three days, that this too could be the results of global warming.

This is why I argue that global warming and the environment should be the biggest issues this, and every other, election day. Why? It's very simple. Because our way of life is built upon a foundation of assumptions of what the weather will be like -- we assume that Iowa will produce so much corn; here in Michigan we assume that you can harvest asparagus and strawberries in late May/early June, grow spinach until the end of June, and start canning tomatoes in mid-August when a hot late-summer sun ripens them on the vine. If a freak weather event comes through, we say, "Well, that August 2 killing frost was a freak event. In Michigan, you can still reliably harvest tomatoes right up to the end of September." What we don't say is, "Michigan is a terrible place to grow tomatoes ... look what happened last year," because you have a bunch of previous years that says otherwise (he says, to the sounds of city workers chipping wood from fallen limbs).

Yeah, yeah, I know what assumptions do to me and you. And, it was bad assumptions about the flow rate of the Colorado River that's led to the impenetrably thick and complex arrangement of how its water is used. However, there is no way you can build a stable society without being able to make certain assumptions about how you grow your food; and there is something to be said for assumptions built on data rather than gut instinct (say, the assumption that the Iraqi people would throw roses and candy at our troops rather than hand grenades).

One of those assumptions for me, who grew up in Michigan and has lived here 26 of his 37 years (the first six in Pennsylvania), has been that snow will cover the ground from mid-December until mid-March. The memory of the first time I heard thunder during the winter has stuck with me since childhood because it was such an odd event. It's gotten frequent enough (though still very uncommon) that the time before last night is no longer in my mind, although I know it was earlier this winter. My memories of Mt. Pleasant back in the early 90s, when I lived here the first time, are of a universally difficult time, weather wise (despite El Nino).

So, while it's incorrect to blame this wierd weather on global warming, it's fair to say that our assumptions about weather are starting to break down because of it. Stories about major weather events these days increasingly include comments from meteorologists or climate scientists on whether that particular event is a sign that global warming is affecting us right now. The fact that you really don't know, and the question itself, is really beside the point. The point is how global warming will affect how we relate to the weather, which plays a critical role in just about everything we do (pollution is really just us, like the world's stupidest bird, shitting in our own nest). While the evidence supporting a link between global warming and individual weather events doesn't really exist, there is considerable evidence for the other ... that it is changing what we can reliably assume the weather to be like from one month to the next.

And, they're off...

2008-01-03T13:41:00.000-05:00

With Iowa again leading the nation in the primary process, I'm shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- to learn that all of the candidates favor subsidies for corn ethanol. I see, however, that not all Iowans are on board.

John Dimsdale: Iowa dairy farmer Francis Thicke has watched the price of his feed skyrocket. He worries government subsidies for ethanol are diverting too much corn to fuel.

Francis Thicke: We're going very fast down this road, and unfortunately we're not going to see presidential candidates bucking that trend in Iowa. Maybe they'll do it in other places in the country, but not in Iowa.

The impact on the prices of food is a longtime criticism of ethanol and ethanol subsidies. So, too, is the reality that corn ethanol can provide only a fraction of our energy needs and is associated with other problems -- namely, transporting the highly corrosive liquid.

What we're not hearing, and what we ought to be hearing, is how our life will necessarily change thanks to the end of cheap oil. The 'burbs, already crumpling under the housing market bubble bursting, will get further strained when it becomes prohibitively expensive to commute. I worked the day after Thanksgiving, and a drive from an hour away ate up everything I earned during the day in gasoline alone. Granted, my wages suck and I was driving a gas guzzler, but I also don't carry any debt.

Where's the talk about this? Will we hear truth this campaign? Well, I've shook my Magic 8-ball and it keeps coming up, "Not bloody likely."

Trash and tides

2007-12-12T09:01:00.000-05:00

There is something alarming about this statement:

Instead of being designated the dumping ground of North America for municipal waste, Michigan could turn that waste into energy, Granholm said. Eventually, families might be able to feed their trash into devices in their homes and out would come something useful at the other end.

The governor has been making a big push for alternative energy, and I’m glad to see it. If she leaves a legacy for rebuilding the state's economy partially on new, cleaner ways of generating energy, it'll be a legacy worth having.

I’m not so comfortable with the notion of turning landfill waste into a positive. I realize it’s a way to put a silver lining on a bad situation, but part of the problem is that people have no connection to garbage once they put it outside and it’s hauled away. They don’t have to figure out where it goes, they don’t need to see it (unless they drive past it, and can see the seagulls circling overhead) … it just kind of leaves their awareness. I’m fairly certain that this is part of the reason why Americans throw so much stuff away. What would be really useful is encouraging people to create less waste, and not look to their energy bills as an incentive to not do so.

It was a point made, oddly enough, by a local development bigwig during a press conference for a local group hoping to create a vision for the community (the group listed, among other things, antigrowth sentiment as a threat to the community’s health…). It’s the big picture people lose sight of, he said.

Meanwhile, this remark from the presidential campaign caught my eye.

We also must increase our use of solar power, wind power and hydro-power. We can reduce energy costs and reduce pollution through conservation. And if we can figure out how to change our electrical grid to a digital grid we'll be able to use our energy on a much more efficient and consistent basis.

We must do everything, is essentially to sum total of Rudy's remarks.

I don’t expect presidential candidates, especially Republicans, to be very well versed in issues like alternative energy or the environment, but I’m not sure Rudy realizes how stupid a statement this really is. Maybe he’s talking about the potential for tidal power, but the potential for traditional hydropower is about nil. Most American rivers that could be reliably dammed to generate electricity have already been so, and the Southwestern drought has reminded us that relying on rivers wasn’t a very good idea in the first place. When water tables fall, water tables fall, and there isn’t much you can do about it.

On top of that, building dams is very expensive. It’s almost as if Rudy is advocating that we return to the days of big public projects from the days of FDR, which I suspect are fightin’ words in some parts.

You can do inobtrusive hydropower, I guess, if you’re willing to invest in new technology, but Rudy also backs things like coal (clean, of course) and nuclear. So, it’s hard to imagine that he wants to turn back the clock 30 years in some cases, and look to tomorrow in others.

Riverwood

2007-11-30T21:25:00.000-05:00

I woke up to about three inches of snow on the ground this morning, and the groaning realization that I had a freelance writing assignment that required that I bicycle to a local golf course/bowling alley called Riverwood Resort.

The ride out, as can be expected during the year's first snow, was atrocious. People don't understand how to drive around bicycles as it is, and when you combine the general lack of long-term memory when it comes to driving on snow (for some folks, the first snow of the year is always the first time they've driven on it, no matter how Michigan winters they've endured).

A couple hundred feet away from the clubhouse, I could see the reason for my trip. Sticking out from above the clubhouse was a windmill, its blades spinning in the wind.

The story was ostensibly about the windmill that the place uses to help generate electricity, but I found that the most interesting elements were actually the way the place is heated, the mechanic who keeps the place up, and the potential for Segway use next summer.

First things first ... the windmill. Three blades, made of wood and coated with copper. I've always heard that one of the knocks on windmills is that they're difficult to maintain, and suffer from equipment failures. Not this one. The reason, I guess, is that back when they decided to build it, they invested in good equipment from the get-go. Every few years, they need to change the six quarts of oil, and the maintenance guy recently stripped down the blades pretty well and recoated them with copper. A few years back, based on the numbers they gave me, and because they got some tax incentives when they installed it, the thing finally paid itself off and now represents a positive investment.

What really caught my attention was how Dick Figg, the business owner, heats his bowling alley.

The entire time we're walking around his place, he's shutting doors that are open. "I try to be green by shutting doors," he kept saying. The obvious first thing on his mind, it was obvious, was efficient use of energy. A good way to go. Once, he pointed to an open door, and said, that's a stick of wood right there.

What's that mean? Very simple. The golf course, like almost every Michigan golf course, has a lot of trees on it. Enough that every year a couple fall over in big storms. Limbs fall down. Trees get old or diseased and die.

So, Riverwood takes its dead trees, cuts them up, and then burns them for heat. Not a wood stove, but to heat water in a boiler -- between 600-800 gallons -- which is circulated through insulated pipes (so as not to lose heat) to big radiators in heat transfer units. A fan blows across the radiators, which disperse heat into the bowling alley concourse. When the place is open and full, body heat from active patrons adds a couple of degrees and the place stays a cozy 70 degrees all winter from burning fallen trees. In fact, scattered around his property, he said he's got about three years worth of wood.

He said this'll pay for itself in less than four years.

The guy who maintains both is an expert on green energy, but because he genuinely appears interested in finding new ways to power things ... not because of political belief. Back in the 70s, he built an electric car and also windmills to provide power for it -- wind-powered transportation, if you will.

Next up? Segways for the golf course, which the literature claims require about a 10th the electricity as a single-rider golf cart (or one-fifth the electricity of a two-rider golf cart).

Human storage units

2007-11-28T16:27:00.000-05:00

Used to be, about a year ago, that I had a conversation with a dude about this place. We thought it would make a much better Waffle House than a party store. I’m sure they move volume in beer through the place, because it’s right down in the middle of the student ghetto, but I can’t imagine how much money the owner of a greasy spoon might make there … he’d probably have to hire dump trucks to haul it out.

I don’t know that selling hard liquor out of the place is such a good idea … because the students who live there are transient residents – most will live there maybe two or three years at the most – they tend to treat the place poorly. A ride through there on most Sundays after a decent evening turns up an incredible amount of garbage and debris littering the yards, the gutters, and the road (broken glass in the road is a fairly common sight, ‘round these parts). This, in turn, encourages future students to assume they’re living in a ghetto, so they treat it accordingly. I don’t know that giving them easier access to liquor is such a hot idea.But, there is a kernel of sense there … like why are we keeping separate the places where we live and where we shop? The party store fulfills a definite purpose there – it provides college students with easy access to cheap beer – but I wonder if the thing could get built today, given how hard nosed we are about keeping things separated.

This is planning, circa 2007, which isn’t really planning but looking at a map and deciding how best to isolate elements of life from each other. This quote in particular stands out:

“The purpose of a residential neighborhood hasn't changed,” he said. “People eat, sleep, study and relax. Extending the hours of operation is in direct conflict with what defines a residential neighborhood.”

Getting away from the fact that this is a party store in a neighborhood populated chiefly by college students, one can see in this statement why neighborhoods in general have declined … we see them as places where people can seek refuge from other people. Livable neighborhoods include places where people can shop, work, and recreate. They aren’t just human storage units.

Water policy

2007-11-19T23:41:00.000-05:00

We, as Americans, have been trained to hate the word socialism. It is, to us, an even more baleful denigration than liberal, which itself is these days practically akin to insulting someone’s mother.

One marvels, naturally, at how quickly some will bend and yield to the ideas of socialism once life gets a little difficult. We hear endless horror tales about distributing wealth when it comes to things like money, health care and food; but for reasons that are probably very obvious, these stories really depend on which side of the redistribution you sit. If you’re sitting in parched New Mexico, and are faced with the intractable problem of a population growing too fast and beyond the local water resources … you naturally go looking for someone else’s water to take.

A national water policy, with associated bureaucracy, was first proposed by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson last month. The solution to the West, where skepticism of big government and intrusive bureaucrats is practically a religion? Create a bureaucracy to go get them water. How did historian Don Worster describe this in “Dustbowl?” I wish I had a copy of it on me.

Only where growth itself is considered an unqualified good does this make any sense whatsoever. In any other endeavor, we’d look at it and cringe at the complexities of a solution to a very simple problem.

A smarter people would go the more efficient, simpler route and encourage people to move out of the desert. Smart, efficient, and wholly unAmerican. We tell ourselves that we’re not a nation of quitters, and that we love a winner. Who do we adore? The guy who stands bloody and triumphant over his crushed and battered opponent, even when that opponent is our own human habitat.