Posts Tagged ‘change’

What the Hemlocks Told Me

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

My favorite tree in all the world died many years ago. She stood in the depths of The Jefferson National Forest. It was an Eastern Hemlock giant, double-trunked and probably 100 feet tall. At her feet a spring bubbled into the world of light and thirst.  I drank the water many times.

The tree seemed female, and she was a comfort on many trips into the woods before and after I made my homecoming to pagan practices and venerating the Good Earth.  Then, from parts unknown, or at least from parts unknown in Asia, a tiny parasite called the Wooly Adelgid began to slay all of Virginia’s hemlocks. A recent estimate I saw notes that 80% of the trees are now gone.

These trees, a lynchpin to the entire forest ecosystem, then began to die in other parts of the eastern mountains.  The hemlock had long been a source of tannin for settlers, and the cool shade they cast in deep coves provides habitat for trout in mountain streams.

When the devastation of these amazing trees began, speculation focused on the role of acid rain in weakening the trees’ resistance, but even with welcome news about reduced Sulphur-Dioxide from Midwestern power plants in recent years, the death of our hemlocks continued.  Some successes have occurred with the introduction of a small beetle that preys on the Wooly Adelgid in its native habitat. This may stem the destruction in the Smokies. In Virginia, simple back-yard solutions I use on my plants, such as spraying horticultural soap, have been applied at a much larger scale to save some specimen trees and thus their DNA for breeding pest-resistant varieties.

May the hemlocks return. In my eight-mile loop I did note survivor trees, none too large. A few showed some infestation, but it was minor.

That’s a think thread to hang a future upon. I know purists who say that 95% native is not native. These same fellow environmentalists dislike the idea of re-introducing the newly developed hybrids of the American Chestnut into nature.

As the reader might guess, I disagree. As a colleague in the sciences put it to me decades ago, by way of his personal friend Bill McKibben, the entire world has felt the hand of man. There is no longer any untouched nature, and thus our natural areas are, in effect, gardens. The wilderness I hiked the other day was once the site of Manganese and Iron mines.  And the Eastern forest has returned, despite batterings by Gypsy Moths coming south, Southern Pine-Bark Borers moving north as climate change works its evil magic. The canopy there looked as healthy, minus the hemlocks of course, as it has since I discovered its wonders nearly 30 years ago.

We gardeners cannot make nature do our bidding. We can, however, help shape what happens in nature. We can seed, prune, treat, and guard our plantings. We can press for good laws or press back against laws that do evil, to undo some of the stupidity of our fellow homo sapiens.

In 1900, the Blue Ridge Mountains were cleared completely. The trees were all gone, replaced by farms. Only a few stands in remote coves remained to reseed the world.  And if our technological society collapses, as I often fear it may when global oil supplies become scarce, some type of forest will outlast us until, in a distant era, the world again cools and the ice comes marching south.

Just a few days ago, in a place of unparalleled beauty, the surviving hemlocks whispered all this to me. Now I share it here.

Incidentally, I saved a piece of bark from my favorite tree, and it’s one of the most sacred things I own. I place it on my Samhain altar each year. I plan to have it go into my grave with my body. Perhaps the remains of my tree and me will nurture the roots of a healthier forest in a saner world.

May it be so.

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Of Oil: Harvest Time

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

We have counted our blessings in our country garden now. Even though animals pretty much cleaned out my cukes and tomatoes (that’s an OLD picture), the jalapeños and sweet Italian peppers came in a bonanza. The pumpkins might make it, but if not, I’ve learned a good amount about how to fence to prevent digging animals.  We’re getting some butter beans and squash, and the rain barrels have been topped off by thunderstorms. Now it’s time to supplement our pantry with locally grown produce while the prices are cheap.  Just ask at any farmer’s market for a box of “canners” and you may get 25 pounds of good tomatoes for less and 50 cents per pound.  Act quickly and try the recipe for sauce I’ll include in this post.

In our city garden, I’ve actually harvested slicing tomatoes for the first time in a few years. It took some ingenuity and expense to surround the containers with hardware cloth and put a little chicken wire on top, but so far the squirrels are not eating the tomatoes: we are.  We’ll repeat that process on a larger scale next year, and although one ground hog died on a fiendishly hot day in one of my live traps, and two raccoons (likely rabid) and one fox (definitely rabid) had to be shot in the country, I’ve let the animals win this year until I put in better fencing.  They need the food, in any case, in the ongoing drought.

Rain barrels have been our garden-savers this year. We have about 170 gallons of capacity in town, so we can be lavish enough to water ornamentals as well as food.  Our basil and parsley have been welcome companions on our table, especially for Lebanese dishes like tabouli and the weekly pesto night.

All of these simply pleasures locally, despite the sickly heat and dry soil, come against the denouement in the Gulf as BP claims to have the situation at the Deep Water Horizon under control.  Let’s hope so, and even more importantly, let’s hope the public has a longer memory for this disaster than it did for Katrina or Prince William Sound.

While we cannot individually stop the flow of oil, we can, as individuals and families, learn from our gardens and lean on them, too. My advice in this post focuses on talking stock of where we live as the time of oil depletion approaches and making stock, in the form of a lowly tomato sauce, to get us through the dark half of the year.

A Vision of Transformation: A trip to the Short Pump area (I get there about once per year) showed me both the foolishness of our past practices and an odd hope. In a time when cars will be nigh impossible to operate, the “Towne Center” of such shopping malls may actually become just that. The sidewalks are already there, and multi-lane roads beg to become bikeways. As a locus for local production, the old commercial buildings will host workshops for making things, stages for cultural events, a farmer’s market, and a range of businesses selling with a post-oil economy will need: crafted metal, simple tools, salvaged electronics, locally crafted furniture. People will walk there or use whatever public transit emerges with the end of cheap oil.  It need not look shabby, like some half-wrecked Roman forum of the 6th Century. The artisans among us will have to bring forth new beauty and the craftsmen will build upon the bones of our 20th Century civilization.

Enough of the land remains unpaved around this particular suburban nexus to revert to farmland and feed a village-in-the-making. Will live theater come to the old cinema complex? Will live music be performed where piped-in music now plays? I think it will in some places, after a terrible time when the American Dream of Hyper-consumption gives way to a local and sustainable reality.

What happens at your suburb, city neighborhood, or small town will be up to you and those you know. Get to know them now.  And give thanks to the Goddess who spun the galaxies and, to me, left the rest in our hands, by using your hands joyfully to put away some of the harvest. Feed some neighbors, and they’ll be more likely to remember your name and be there to help if you ever need it (and we all will).

The recipe that follows uses many ingredients you can grow yourself or find from a local grower without too much difficulty. Making your own sauce and canning it, something our grandparents took for granted, can become a subversive and spiritually rewarding act.

Burdock’s Tomato Sauce

  • 10 pounds tomatoes, cut into eighths
  • 1 large onion, chopped medium to small
  • 10 sweet Italian peppers or 2 bell peppers, chopped small
  • 1 tsp dry hot pepper (optional)
  • 1/2 cup dry basil (whole leaves stripped from stems)
  • 1 tsp oregano (whole leaves stripped from stems)
  • 1/4 cup honey (dark honey like buckwheat or sourwood are superb)
  • 1 tbsp salt
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped (or more, you nuts!)
  • 1 tbsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp allspice

Add tomatoes to heavy saucepan. Press down with potato masher to make juice. Grind basil and oregano in a spice grinder or in batches between your palms and add to tomatoes. Add other ingredients, stir, and bring to boil.  Reduce heat to simmer, stir occasionally, and cook 2-3 hours (or more, depending on your stove) until sauce is thick and not watery.

Serve as-is over pasta or with sauteed okra, sausage, beef (cubed or ground) or cubed lamb, depending on your intentions. This sauce works great with Middle-Eastern dishes (use lamb), over pasta or gnocchi, or over rice.

Add meat (optional), pintos and kidney beans, plus chili powder (1 tbsp per gallon of saurce), plus a square of unsweetened baker’s chocolate,  to make delicious chili.

Canning Advice (and Philosophy):

The sauce can be canned; I put away at least a gallon every summer to get us through the winter. I add more salt to each pint or quart (usually 1 tsp canning or kosher salt per quart).

I use a pressure cooker because of the peppers and onions.  In fact, except for tomatoes and a few high-acid or pickled foods, I use the pressure cooker for everything, though I’m going to dry some figs this year as a first step in learning how to dehydrate fruit.

While a good canning pressure cooker seems expensive, ours has paid for itself after three years. Don’t use your cooking pot; it lacks the crucial pressure gauge.

A warning on canning: it is not an art. It is a science. Bacteria do not care one iota about your sacred or secular intentions.

Check your canner’s instructions or the USDA’s publications found at U Georgia’s site on preserving food . When using books, follow modern recipes online or in excellent books such as Susann Geiskopf-Hadler’s Putting it up with Honey (about all sorts of canning, not just with honey). Do not go by granny’s recipe or a 1950 cookbook. We know more today about the pathogens in fresh food, and the experts have changed processing times for both the boiling-water and pressure-cooker methods.

Canning like an artiste may result in a lingering and painful illness, if not death.

That fear may be why so many folks look at me as if something were growing from my head when I say “I’m doing my canning now.” They wonder why we don’t spend hundreds on a chest freezer or just go to the store.  One power failure ends the bounty of a freezer, and I can only imagine the expense of buying so much sauce, pickles, and veggies in winter. Besides, they’d not bring the pleasure or flavor of what we grew ourselves.

And, damn it, I make a statement, with every pint or quart jar, about my choices in a crazy society based on debt-driven consumption.

My pantry is my hope in a better future, as well as an insurance policy in case the lights flicker and go out for a while.

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Of Oil: Glory Days, Chaos, Community

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

It’s hard to realize that we live in a time of decline. I don’t mean the temporary decline in our employment levels. I mean the decline of a nation that still considers itself the greatest power ever to stride the earth.  I mean the end of American primacy.

We’ll recall the Deepwater Horizon spill as a punctuation mark in an ongoing story that, in my mind, began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy but included events as disparate was the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the 2000 election, the oil embargos of the 1970s, the resignation of Richard Nixon, Woodstock and other monuments to the 60s Counterculture, the backward thinking of a resurgent New Right, the rise of anti-scientific thinking at home and apocalyptic fundamentalism in the Middle East.  Our victories in this era were signal and I hope they will endure: the women’s, civil rights, and environmental movements.

But the punctuation mark that sticks with me most over the years is the Apollo 17 moon landing.

Why that mission? Its commander, Gene Cernan, has said as much on several occasions, but it marked the end of America as explorer.  It saddened me as a kid, and it still does. I was 12 then, but I felt that the glory days were over. We’ve never gone out so far with human beings again, and I doubt we will in the sort of civilization we now have. While the moon landings may have spent too much money on what could have been done cheaply with robots, they provided me and many others with a sense of wonder, a look above events on a very troubled horizon, one that has only become more troubled since 1972.

What we live through now may not be the long-predicted “Decline of the West,” but it may be “the rise of the rest” as America’s and many European economies come to terms with living far beyond our means, at both the governmental and personal levels.  It’s going to be hard to claw our way back to Kennedy-era prosperity without cheap and easily extracted oil, and if you’ve been following my and others’ writing about oil depletion, you know that those days, like tail-fins or moon landings, are relics of our national glory days.

When oil drilling begins in the Gulf again–and it will–the anti-environmental Right will forget the killed animals, lost jobs in fishing, the soiled coasts. It will be “drill here, drill now, pay less” again, even though those who place those stickers on their bumpers take it on faith that enough oil can be gotten if only we forget about Mother Earth. It’s doubly ironic that they won’t make any leap of faith to see the realities of climate change, even though that is backed by good science and the evidence of our senses. Scientists are to be trusted only when they confirm what we already believe.

I predict we’ll see a time of chaos, even worse leadership than we have seen, and shattered hopes until those in denial about the glory days fade from view–the Right is old, after all–or change their hearts.

That time will call upon us to build communities like never before. No one who is unconnected to others will have the spiritual resources, let alone the financial and material ones, to weather the rapid decline of our society into something that looks more like the 1890s, or if we are lucky, 1930s, technologically. I figure we’ll have survivals of high technology such as local electrical grids, locally made fuels, and, I hope, Internet connectivity to remind of that another world exists over the next range of hills.

Now that Deep Water Horizon is capped, one hopes forever, it’s time to take stock of our pantries and our circles of friends.  My spouse has been, in her quiet way, preparing our “hurricane pantry” for a longer time without trips to the grocery store. We work with a few very skilled and talented friends to prepare retirement land in the country, and we hope to find community there, and in our walkable and sensibly designed urban area, when a long motor trip will be a luxury to be done once a month.

Food is all around us now at the time of first harvests, so in my next post I’ll dedicate a more upbeat column to harvesting and storing food without refrigeration. That’s a skill each of us should have.

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Of Oil: What I Learned from a Ginkgo Tree

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

As the disaster drags on in the Gulf, complicated by the start of the hurricane season, it’s easy to grow despondent. Our species can act so stupidly, and on Independence Day I don’t feel independent.  In America we’ve chained ourselves to a way of life utterly dependent upon the passenger car. And while I really enjoy cars and driving, I don’t enjoy the more quotidian uses of the vehicles for most Americans: commuting and running errands.  In fact, those activities, to me, take the fun out of being behind a steering wheel.

The nation won’t give up its motorcars easily or painlessly. Imagine your own life without access to a car; many of us live far enough from shopping, schools, and our places of worship to quickly elevate vague concern to active alarm. Then imagine the US Southeast without readily available air conditioning, from a series of brownouts or an aging electrical grid.

Our entire civilization is one oil crisis away from something I cannot predict, though many writers I admire have given this a try. The best treatment of such a world–and by far not a bleak one–is James Howard Kunstler’s fine novel World Made by Hand. The folks in his fictional Union Grove, NY make do. They get by. They’ve learned something we soft Americans have forgotten.

In my last post, I noted a few simple things we all can do as we prepare for what I believe will be a time of privation and uncertainty. I don’t know that my advice implies a philosophical stance, and while I might turn to Marcus Aurelius or the Taoists for the fine expressions of Stoicism, I need only look out the window. That’s where I see a Ginkgo tree.

In the spring, the city planted a Ginkgo biloba across the street from us. The home owners are new to gardening and lack proper tools for tending their yard in very dry weather. I volunteered to do a deep-watering treatment with a watering probe, something that saved a few saplings of mine over the years.  The neighbors knew they were going to lose their shade tree, so they were happy to have my help. Now the little tree should live–one hopes, in this awful heat–to adulthood in a city with a climate markedly warmer from today’s.

Facing climate change and the looming end of cheap oil, I stare at the little tree. If you don’t know about the Ginkgo, do some research. It’s a living fossil, as shown in the photo a plant common in the Eocene Era, a period of time stretching from 56 to 34 million years ago. That era ended with massive extinctions caused by impacts of meteorites, one of them in the Chesapeake Bay.

And the Ginkgo survived it. In fact, it’s a tree ideal for the disturbed soils, dirty air, and baked conditions of cities. It has no other living relatives on Darwin’s Tree of Life. It comes down the eons to us intact.

Whenever I see the fanlike leaves, identical to those leaves browsed by the first mammals on our planet, I take a very deep breath. I’m in the company of Deep Time, the sort denied by the fearful and overly literal of our time. Yes, the Earth is many many times older than the 6,000 or 10,000 years they claim. And the Earth will be here after 2012 and the Apocalypse of those who misread the meaning of the Mayan calendar.

For these reasons, the Ginkgo gently mocks us. It will be here if we bake the world and our civilization vanishes.  What if we hairless apes could be so persistent? What if we could adapt to changing conditions and live down the eons gracefully?

That’s our challenge as the oil gushes from the ocean floor and the temperatures soar. I don’t know what our specific “Ginkgo Strategy” should be, but in the end, the tree reminds me that survival is not only possible but inevitable for those who can adapt.

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Of Oil, Part 1

Monday, June 21st, 2010

When I set out to write my month’s post, the news from the Gulf of Mexico was bad. Now as I prepare to post this entry, the news has turned catastrophic. None of us can predict, with accuracy, how our hearths will fare as the crude far beneath the surface of the sea continues to gush. All sorts of nightmare scenarios play out, as ridiculous to me at the 2012 “prophecy” of the Maya. I won’t darken your day here with them. But as I look at the Scarab Beetle I keep on my writing desk, I recall the ancient Egyptian idea that the Scarab represents: good coming from evil.

The topic is so huge that I’m going to cover my thoughts on the matter over several posts. This one will focus on oil of all sorts and what it means to us and how we can begin to change our lives to use it wisely.

Oil is precious as fuel, as food, and as lubricant. Oil has always been dear to humans, be it our recently discovered and addictive petroleum, the clean-burning oil of whales that once lit our homes, or, since the dawn of history, oils derived from plants and other animals.  Lard and lye make soap, after all. Though modern soaps are very different, chemically, one irony of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is that Dawn dish detergent is used to clean beaches and oil-coated animals.

To spill oil has long been considered a special form of waste.  While the same could be said for the clumsy villager who spilled water coming from the community’s wells, probably only the loss of seed for next year’s planting could compare to the spilling of oil. Where my ancestors came from, not just anyone could press olives into oil, and thus the loss of this substance was a sacred violation of the hearth. One needed oil to live.

There’s little this writer, or our spiritual community, can do to stop the spill except send our energies and financial support to the humans, animals, and plants whose lives are being ruined by this disaster. If I believed in spellwork, I’d be doing so now.  But even for a Deist like me, who does not believe that any God or Goddess will step in save us, there are things to do to prepare for a time when the oil stops gushing, both from the deep waters of the Gulf and from the global supply of oil.  Permanent depletion of the global supply and untold economic disruption are at hand, at least within the next decade.  How will each of us fare?

In retirement I plan to farm in a sustainable manner, so obviously I’ve made my plans to do what I can to help sustain a future population. Even if that never pans out as I hope it will, I think much of urban Richmond where I live will remain vibrant as it gets harder to use private cars to move about to work and shop. We are blessed with living in a walkable and bike-able community. Yet even those who can or won’t leave currently unsustainable suburban areas can do something positive.

Re-learn old skills: And while we rebuilt community that is not made through the Internet but on the sidewalks and across our fences, this is the time to learn to save seeds and propagate them, to learn “hobbies” appropriate to life after the Age of Oil ends, to study animal husbandry, to figure out who to save and reuse instead of discarding. It’s time to figure out about other oils for cooking, for lighting if the electrical grid begins to fail us as it does in developing nations, to make fuels for the few vehicles we’ll own, tending them as carefully as Cubans do their 1950s Chevrolets.

Simplify: The recent moneyless yard-sale at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church inspired me to think of how we could substitute barter and non-monetary systems of exchange for our debt-based economy.  Can you trade your time cleaning, cooking, gardening, or making things for food or for another skill? Now’s the time to start considering that.

Be Loud: The voices driving the debate today are the paid consultants, the nay-saying radio hosts, the shills for the worst possible corporate citizens. They have the money and power, for now. But the end of cheap oil will hurt them more than it will hurt those who have become the creators of sustainable culture.  I’m a Nietzschean at heart, and my will to power is quite strong. When America’s powerful and greedy slip and fall, we must step forward to press our most able lawmakers for justice, to use whatever media we can muster, to pressure corporate boards with our power as shareholders.

Be Silent: Choose your battles.  The powerful can make changes, so they are the ones to confront and, yes, cajole. We will, however, never win over the most strident and ignorant of those who oppose the transition we are making. I try to remain silent near them.

Often they are victims of economic injustice they champion and have been convinced by demagogues to act against their own interests. Yet circumstances will move some of their hearts to see that problems such as oil depletion and global warming are real, not inventions of some socialist cabal.  Some will never change, but these self-styled “rugged individuals” will not last long into an age when labor in the open air, moving on one’s two feet, and forming communities in the flesh rather than online will be the order of the day.

When all is done, and the changes that are coming have passed, or lives will be richer.  Getting there will be difficult, and oil will be spilled metaphorically and literally, until we once again honor our hearths.

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