Living on the Land

Many people who are concerned with Hubbert's Mesa want to "live off the land".  It is a wonderful dream to find a place that will provide you with all your needs.  By all means, if you have the ability to do so, finding a good place to crash is well worth pursuing.  (If you're looking in western Pennsylvania, I can even help you.)

However, first and foremost, you need to realize that perfection is not possible. REAL real estate will always have something missing.  Some deficiencies can be corrected, which is all the more reason to start sooner rather than later.  Other problems are not feasible to change, you will have to decide whether it is something you can live with.  Consider your needs in their time order both when deciding where is an appropriate place to live and what projects to start with.  Also consider the kind of community you will be living in, including the neighbors' attitude and the local zoning codes.

What if you can't afford to move?  You can still do your best to live off the land you live on, like William Hunter Duncan.  You may have more to be more creative in finding solutions, but the most important advantage is that you can start doing things now, like planting a garden.   Invest in your skills today and "live on the land".  It may even help you save enough pennies that finding the perfect place becomes feasible.

The Long Ascent begins where you are right now.

Human Potential

As I've said before, investing in yourself is one of the ultimate forms of savings.  There is quite a large body of literature about self-improvement, of which I have read quite a bit.  I'm going to share with you some of my favorites.  Before I do that, however, I would like to turn it on its head.  Improving yourself certainly is in your own self-interest.  As we come off Hubbert's Mesa, we will not be able to rely on machines as much as we have.  Necessarily we will have to rely on ourselves more.  Making sure that everyone is living up to their full potential is the best way to resist collapse.

Now for my short list of the books I've found most helpful in improving myself:

• Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

This is the second self-help book I ever read, and the first I ever read deliberately. When my family went on a six-week long car trip the summer after sixth grade, I didn't think to bring anything to read. All I could find in our travel trailer was "Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Energy but Were Too Weak to Ask" by Naura Hayden. This book was at the top of her list.

Back then cybernetics was still a relatively unknown word, and even to this day I'm not sure how many people understand that it is the science of goal-seeking. The basic point of this book is that we all have goal-seeking mechanisms in our psyches, but they are below our conscious awareness and beyond our direct conscious control. This book is about reprogramming ourselves by changing our self-image.


• Getting Things Done / Making It All Work by David Allen

There are a multitude of "time management" books out there. In my opinion these are simply the best. What he describes is not a single system but rather the characteristics of successful systems. Getting Things Done is the simple how-to guide and is more appropriate for people looking for steps to follow. Making It All Work is the follow up that provides a more conceptual framework for people looking to design or tweak their own system.


• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

This is the fundamental guide for creating value. Once you get the central theme, it can get a little repetitive, but that's to make sure that you do get the central theme. One of the important things that distinguishes this book from other books on getting rich is that it is completely independent of monetary and political systems. Even if you are just living with one other person on a deserted island, the concepts in this book will serve you well.


• The NIV Student Bible [Zondervan]

I think this is the latest version of the Bible we used when I took a two-year Bible study through CCO. I've looked at a lot of different editions of the Bible. The NIV translation is the one I've found easiest to read. In addition, I found the commentaries in the Student Bible were the most accessible to me when I was just starting out.

I've found these to be the most useful books on developing human potential, and I hope you find them useful as well on the Long Ascent.

The Tree Speaks

Man is the tool of the Creator and creation.  Man can help nature do what would otherwise take many years.  Man belongs to the earth and the earth belongs to man. -- Coyote Thunder, in Tom Brown's "Grandfather".

Since today is National Arbor Day, I thought we should hear from a tree.  Okay, it's not really a tree speaking, it's a story of a dream and a lesson that Tom Brown's "Grandfather" experienced.  I am, of course, paraphrasing to condense it, but it really is a wonderful read; I hope you take the time to do so.

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Grandfather fell asleep under a very large, old tree.  He had a nightmare that a horde of people came to destroy the tree.  Nothing Grandfather did could stop the onslaught.  Eventually the tree died in agony.

When Grandfather awoke screaming, he was relieved to see the tree still strong and healthy.  He did begin to wonder if he truly was any better than the hordes.  True, he did have reverence for the tree, and all living things, but he still depended on killing things for his survival.

One of his elders, Coyote Thunder, came to Grandfather and knew what was wrong without Grandfather having to explain.  He took Grandfather to a remote mountain gorge.  As they walked silently through it, Grandfather noticed that on one side of the stream, the forest was strong and healthy, but on the other side, the trees were twisted and diseased.  He could see no reason why the two sides could be so different.  Finally, seeing Grandfather's perplexed look, Coyote Thunder explained that he was the difference.  He took care of the strong, healthy forest, even as he fulfilled his needs.  The key was that he always considered what the forest needed first.  Then he only took what was a hindrance to the forest.

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No matter whether we are in a forest, a garden, or anywhere else, learning to give as we take, considering the needs of everything as well as our own, will help us regenerate the world so we can all continue on the Long Ascent.

Packing a Lunch

I packed a lunch today.

I packed a lunch yesterday.

I will very likely pack a lunch tomorrow.

I don't do anything fancy, usually just a sandwich with some kind of lunch meat and cheese -- ham or turkey and Swiss or American, roast beef and cheddar, garlic bologna and American -- usually with a leaf of lettuce, or a piece of fresh fruit on the side.

I pack my drinks, too.  I make a fruit punch with 3 cups each orange and grape juices, 1 cup seltzer water, and 8 cups filtered water.  I also make lemonade with 2/3 cup lemon juice, 2 teaspoons xylitol, 2 packets stevia, 4 tablespoons of organic sugar, and 7 cups water.  I freeze them in plastic drink bottles filled 80% full.  I'll pull one out and put it in my insulated lunch box the night before if I'm working in the morning or in the morning if I work in the evening.  The other I'll put in right before going to work.  That way I have one ready to drink right away, and the other stays cold the entire day.

Why am I telling you this?  In part this is a response to Joel Caris's blog post on irrationality in food choices.  In the office where I work we frequently don't have time to go get lunch.  In previous years I would get so hungry I would just grab something from the vending machine.  Consequently, I would always gain weight during our busy season.  This year, in part by making sure I have something relatively good to eat when I do get hungry, I am actually losing weight (and not spending nearly as much on junk food).

Packing a lunch is a simple act, but it makes us look forward and gets us in the habit of preparing for the future.  We are much better able to resist temptations if we have made allowances for our needs beforehand.

The Ascent will be Long, pack a lunch.

The Garden Path

And Jehovah God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made Jehovah God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil....  And Jehovah God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.  Genesis 2:8-9,15 (ASV)

The vernal equinox last Tuesday marked the official beginning of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere.  For me, this represents the beginning of the gardening season.

I have been an avid gardener for a very long time.  When I was growing up, my father has a very large garden on the east end of our property.  For a couple years the neighbor brought his tractor down and plowed it up in exchange for the use of the field on top of the hill on the south side of the house.  Probably my earliest memory of a garden is hopping from one big clod to another in the freshly plowed garden.

It wasn't too many years later I actively became involved.  Gurney's had a one-cent seed packet for kids.  (Alas, I don't see it in their catalog anymore.)  It was a huge collection of all different kinds of vegetables and flowers.  With that variety, something was guaranteed to grow.  In my case, I had a lot of success with some kind of black bean.  I grew it for several years in a row, until I had a honey jar filled with them.  It would not surprise me if it is still in my parent's house somewhere.  (I wonder if they would still germinate.)

My next foray into gardening came after reading Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholemew.  (If you've never gardened before, I highly recommend it and its successor, All New Square Foot Gardening, which has 10 major improvements.)  Coming home for the summer from college, I thoroughly enjoyed putting together square beds with concrete blocks salvaged from an old basement on the property.  I did enjoy some successes and had a number of learning opportunities.

Shortly afterwards I learned about John Jeavons Ecology Action and his biointensive methods.  I especially like his perspective on grains and compost crops.  I started developing my own variety of rye specifically to use its straw as a mulch.

Around the same time, I entered the Master of Science in Sustainable Systems program at Slippery Rock University.  During my second semester there I took the Permaculture Design Course.  I have been using those principles on my property ever since.

This year I'm coming full circle.  I am taking the correspondence course for teaching Square Foot Gardening, and I've been making boxes and mixing soil accordingly. I wholeheartedly agree with Dorothy Frances Gurney's sentiment:

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,--
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

You don't need to enjoying gardening on the Long Ascent, but you'll be better off if you're close to and with someone who does.

My YouTube

Today I posted my first video to YouTube, on Winter Blackberry Care.  Honestly, the production values are not that great.  If you do have blackberries or other brambles, though, you may find watching it worth your while.

My primary interest in mentioning that here is not self-promotion, however.  (It does come in a respectable second, though).   I more want to comment on an interesting developing phenomemon. While there is a lot of silliness being posted to YouTube, more and more serious offerings are showing up there: how-to's, political commentary, financial advice, to name a few.

What makes this interesting is the ease of putting stuff out there.  I spent $40 for the camera, $9 for the SD card, and a few dollars for the batteries.  After a few minutes of filming and a little over an hour to upload, my video is out there for everyone to see.  That level of access is relatively unprecedented.

There is a dark side to all this, too.  I could have given all the same basic information in under a page of text, which would have only taken up a few kilobytes.  If I wanted to be fancier, adding a few good pictures could have told all the details you can get from watching the video, at a cost of a couple megabytes at most.  As a video, however, I uploaded over 300 megabytes (though I presume YouTube compressed it for download.)

Not only does the video take up more room, it is much harder to store it.  As far as I know, there is no legitimate way to download the video from YouTube.  Printing it out would also prove very difficult.  If the information was presented in a text or PDF file, downloading and printing could both be fairly easy.

Of course this also means if you don't have access to the Internet, you don't have access to this information.  While the Internet itself was supposedly designed to withstand a nuclear war, I'm sure there would be nowhere near the ease of connecting as there is today.  For my little piece of gardening advice, that hardly matters.  But if more and more people start relying on knowledge from the Internet, especially in the form of videos, there is the potential for great loss.

We can use technology on the Long Ascent, but we need to ask ourselves whether it is appropriate and what would happen if it wasn't available.

A Multitude of Rs

Back in a simpler age, education was concerned with the three Rs: reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic.  (Obviously, they weren't so concerned with spelling back then.)  The environmental movement came up with its own version of the 3 Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle.  It is a catchy phrase, but it has become trite.  People rarely think about what it actually means.  We need to carefully reconsider those 3, but in addition, I think several more are worth adding to that list.

• Refuse

If someone tries to give you something you don't want, refuse it. Even something as simple as refusing a glass of water saves the several glasses worth of water and a little soap required to wash it.


• Rethink

Before you consume something new, ask yourself if you really need it or if something else would work as well. A hyper-mileage car may be a good thing, but if you can do without any car, that is far better.


• Reduce

If you do need to use something, see if you can use less of it.


• Rent

If you are only going to use something occasionally, consider renting it. If you only have one week of vacation a year, why own a vacation home or even an RV when you can rent one instead?


• Refill

Not so long ago, when drinks came in glass bottles, it was possible to get them refilled. You still do have the option to fill your own cup with coffee and fountain drinks at many coffee houses and convenience stores.


• Reuse

Refilling bottles is an obvious way to reuse things, but other things can be used over and over even if they are normally thrown away after one use.


• Repair

Usually things don't wear out all at once. As stuff becomes more costly to produce, if something is mostly working, fixing a small broken piece becomes more worthwhile.


• Renew / Restore

Eventually things will wear down or age. When it is something that represents a major investment of materials and energy, like a house, it can be worthwhile to make it like new again.


• Return

One of the problems with being a conservationist in a consumer society is that for many of these options, there are no economies of scale for the end user.  If we were to start returning stuff we have used up to where we bought it, they would have more incentive to deal with it properly.


• Repurpose

This is basically reusing stuff, except it is for a different purpose than the original -- for example, using chopsticks for plant stakes.


• Redesign

Once consumers start returning things they have used, companies will want to rethink how they make things.  Some examples are making things that are easy to disassemble or using standard parts that can be reused if they are still good.


• Recycle

Breaking things down into their constituent materials and reusing them is not a bad option, but it is usually the last that should be considered.  Considerable time and energy has to be expended doing this -- granted, it still usually takes less than starting with virgin materials, but other options are better.


• Regenerate

This is the ultimate goal.  Sustainability sounds like a good idea, but it is not enough.  All the other Rs help minimize the damage we do and keep things going as long as we can, but there is a limit to how much of that we can do.  Focusing on regenerating our resources and world we have degraded is what will propel us upward on the Long Ascent.

The Cheapest Bed Warmer

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow again yesterday, so we are in for six more weeks of winter.  One adjustment people are making on Hubbert's Mesa is turning down the thermostat to save money as energy prices rise. We bundle up as we move around during the day and pile on the blankets at night.  However, the transition as we get into a cold bed can be jarring.

While this is mainly a matter of comfort, this is a practical matter too; you can waste a lot of time trying to fall asleep when you are too cold.  Many solutions have been devised: electric blankets, hot water bottles, metal contraptions to put hot coals in, even putting blankets in a clothes dryer for a few minutes.

My method is one I haven't seen others use.  I like to lie down on top of my blankets (and pajamas) while I'm fully dressed.  For 20 to 30 minutes, I'll read, listen to podcasts, play with my latest iThingy, or type on my laptop.  Then I'll quickly change for bed and get under the covers while they're still warm and cozy.

This is nothing major.  But this solution is almost totally free (since I would spend my time doing those things anyway.)  It is just another example of putting your pants on both legs at the same time.  Small changes in behavior can be simpler and more effective than complicated technical solutions.

The more creatively we can solve our problems, the easier the Long Ascent will be.

Trapping Monkeys, Boiling Frogs, Training Elephants

Despite the title, this post is more about the behavior of humans rather than animals.  If you are familiar with the concepts, feel free to skip it.  The first two concepts are popular with environmentalists, the third is used more by political activists.

In the jungles of Asia, it is reported that the natives have an interesting way of catching monkeys.  They tie down jars with narrow necks and put the monkeys' favorite foods inside.  The size of the neck is large enough that the monkey's open hand will fit through but small enough that once they grab the food, they can't pull their fist out.  All the monkeys have to do is let the food go and they can be free.  The monkeys however are more focused on getting the food they want.  They twist and turn and struggle and try everything they can to get that food out.  They keep doing that until the hunters return and it is too late to escape.

When you put a frog in a pot of scalding hot water, it will immediately jump out.  (Actually, if you put it anyplace unfamiliar, it will still likely not sit still.)  If the frog is in familiar surroundings, and you just raise the temperature a little, the frog will adapt and not try to escape.  If you keep slowly raising the temperature, it will keep adapting as long as it can.  Once it has reached the point where it can no longer adapt, though, it no longer has the energy to escape, and it will be stuck there, even if the temperatures get to boiling.

In India, elephants have traditionally been used as beasts of burden.  They may raise them from babies, but even so, they need to bring in fresh blood every so often so the gene pool doesn't degrade.  Catching a wild elephant is very difficult.  They couldn't possibly expend that effort continuously.  So they train the elephant by tying it by the leg to the largest tree around with the thickest chain or rope they have.  They then stand back and let the elephant struggle all it wants to.  It may take a long time, but eventually the elephant gives up.  They then tie a small rope around the elephant's leg, and even though it could easily break free, it no longer tries to.  It associates having a rope tied to its leg with being trapped and helpless.

People also refuse to give up what they want, even when it hurts them; keep making small changes to adapt rather than trying to escape their bad situation; and let past experiences limit them, even when what held them back before no longer has the same power.  These are all behaviors which we need to change if we want to make any progress on the Long Ascent.

Half Ton People

Today I'd like to engage you in a thought experiment. Imagine you have just accepted a position at a facility for the morbidly obese. But this is no ordinary facility. The people who inhabit it have been here for generations. They have always been allowed to eat as much as they want for as long as anyone can remember. As a result everyone's weight is in the high triple digits. All the problems associated with such extreme weights, such as immobility, are considered a normal part of life.

Your task is to put these people on a diet. The facility can no longer afford to provide them with all they can eat. From now on they will only have a diet of 3000 calories. How will you break it to them?

Now, for most of us, a 3000 calorie diet is still excessive (athletes and Amish farmers being two notable exceptions), but from their perspective of being able to eat as much as they can, it is a terrible restriction.  One objection they are sure to raise is that they can't possibly maintain their current body weight with such little food.  Of course, they would be correct.  You would have to try to convince them that there are considerable advantages to weighing less, like being able to walk.  But they would counter that they get along fine without walking.  You may be able to convince a few of them to see past the experiences of their lifetimes and the lifetime of everyone they've personally known, but most of them would simply not do anything until they are forced to.

So, how do you tell someone who is used to consuming 20 barrels of oil a year that within a few decades they will have learn to get by on 2?

We need to answer that question to get people back on track on the Long Ascent.