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  • A House With A History

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                         Summer Moon

    IMAG0531Why not write a history of this spot, this hectare? An ecological history. It can start with the glaciations, consider the flora and fauna since then, focusing in more tightly once the first nations began to arrive, then even more tightly as Minnesota began to emerge.

    Another starting spot would be today, or from Kate and mine’s presence here. How we decided to be here, why. Go over decisions we made early on like hiring a landscape designer at the beginning. Recount our twenty years, the good decisions and the bad ones, the easy ones and the hard ones. The other historical and geological material could be worked in as backstory.

    It would be good for people to view an average approach to the land, one which changed over time (though its roots were indeed in the back to the land movement) and which took advantage not of a particular approach, but of many. An approach that is dynamic, 06 27 10_beekeeperastronautchanging with new knowledge, the seasons, aging, new plants and new desire.

    The flavor of “Return of the Secaucus 7” with some Scott and Helen Nearing, Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry thrown in, too. Ah, perhaps it could be a sort of third phase update of the movement years, an upper middle class idyll moving against the grain of upper middle class lifestyles.

    Not sure whether to pursue this or not, but it could be interesting. Might even help sell the house. A house with a history.

    A structure based on the Great Wheel might be interesting.


    Anoka County Family Garden Great Work Memories Minnesota Our Land and Home Retirement Sierra Club The Move Third Phase Writing

  • Young

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                               Summer Moon

    How do they get so young? Had my meeting with the organizer for the Franken campaign. She graduated this spring from American University. 20 years old if that. She wanted to know how I got involved in politics. So I told her my story, watching the Stevenson-Eisenhower returns in 1952. She was born in 1994 or 1993. The time difference would be the same for me for an event in 1906/1907. Hmmm.

    We chatted for about 45 minutes. She was energetic, hopeful, trying to be realistic and tough, yet still eager. A hard combination to pull off. She’ll get there though, I imagine.

    The interaction taught me something. Probably something I’ve learned several times, but I’m learning it again. It was fun and revitalizing to meet someone new, to talk about stuff I care about, to get out of the house in the evening.

    One real downside of living up here all these years, with few places where folks just go to hangout (none, really) and with no folks to go hangout with anyhow, is the tendency to get in a rut. Stay home, watch tv in the evening. I love Kate and watching tv, winding down in the evening, is a pleasant and even important part of our time together. Our lives during the day have the garden or sewing or writing or Latin or the dogs, never boring, fulfilling.

    But. What I’m reminded of is the need to engage others, new folks, on a regular basis. When we move to Colorado, I’ll see to it. Politics. Art. Gardening. It does highlight a criteria for our new home (a favorite parlor game for us these days. Oh, and it should have…) I came up with a couple of weeks ago. A community where we want to be.

    Andover’s not bad, it’s just not much at all. And politically it’s very conservative. Political leanings are not everything, of course not, but they do speak to a wider range of compatibility and I’d like to have at least some of that where we live next.


    Aging Colorado Friends Humanities Politics Sierra Club The Move Third Phase

  • An Underlying Question

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                              Summer Moon

    As I saw the video and read the article on fire in Colorado, the underlying question became slowly evident to me. Here it was couched in hotshots, firemen, national forests and parks employees and the complex budgetary manipulations of the Forest Service. Along the ocean coasts of the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific in this country it will involve underwater construction crews, builders of seawalls and levees and drainage systems, the Coast Guard and numerous other federal and state agencies and their employees. And the underlying question is this: how much money, state or federal, and how many lives will we spend in defense of neighborhoods, businesses, cities built in predictably dangerous environments?

    Climate change has begun to push the numbers of such places higher and higher: whole nations like Vanuatu and the Maldives, large portions of heavily populated coastal areas, those spots where humanity, in wealthier and stupider times, has planted itself in defiance of environmental barriers like deserts (the American Southwest and California), wildfire, and many riverine settings.

    (from the Phoenix city guide: Phoenix rises from the floor of the northern tip of the great Sonoran Desert)

    This is the question of adaptation, how much will we modify our current reality as the climate changes, as opposed to the question of mitigation which the EPA has put on the front pages of America’s newspapers. It is not a question of doing one or the other, we will have to do both. But. How much should we do to defend poor decisions on the parts of others?

    (The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs last year.)

    There are, of course, as always, a lot of gray here. It’s one thing to buy a lovely forested home in a Colorado red zone and another to have an apartment built years ago near the Atlantic Ocean. Much of the change will be gradual and the costs to adapt can be made gradually, too. This is true of sea level rise, though the sums of money involved are enormous. But. There are others, like moving into wildfire habitat as its frequency escalates by factors as high as 400%, that are not gray at all.


    Colorado Commentary on the news Great Work Politics Sierra Club Weather +Climate

  • 400%

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                 Summer Moon

    New state, new realities. I’m reading the Denver Post online now and there was a story in today’s edition: THE FIRE LINE: WILDFIRE IN COLORADO. The 27 minute video is worth watching, especially if you contemplate purchasing a home in Colorado. Even if you’re not, you might find its underlying argument, made by fire researchers and fire fighters and natural resource professionals alike, intriguing. The oldest of them, John Maclean, draws an analogy between flood plains and fire habitat. If people move into a flood plain and experience a catastrophe, is it the Federal Governments responsibility to take care of them? Well, he goes on, fire habitat is the same.

    From 2000 to 2010 100,000 people moved into red zone areas. What are they? Areas with a high likelihood of unmanageable fire. Just like a floodplain. Here’s the big question: how much money and how many firefighters should we risk saving structures willingly built within high likelihood fire habitat? Not much, according to the tone of this video. And it makes sense to me.

    It’s an interesting case in the politics of the West where local control and individual choice are part of the political culture. It means state legislatures and even county boards hesitate to control developers and home buyers as they create neighborhoods, beautiful, yes, but also dangerous. Without getting engaged (yet) in these struggles it seems to me that it’s a false libertarianism which champions local control and individual choice on one end of a decision making chain, but then looks for the Federal Government and local firefighters to compensate for the risks on the other end.

    Out of all the climate change material I’ve read and learned over the last year one of the standout predictions is that fire incidence will increase by 400% in the West. That’s 400%. I look forward to working with the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club on issues like this one.

     


    Colorado Great Work Sierra Club The Move Weather +Climate

  • Sustainable, Nutrient Focused Horticulture

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                         Summer Moon

     

     

    The purpose of our company is to
    make soil better as we grow quality crops

    Planted the 3 blueberry plants I abandoned in the orchard. Forgot about them when I planted the egg plant, collard greens and chard in the vegetable garden. Then, I sprayed the orchard for the first time, brixblaster, an international ag labs concoction that feeds plants focused on reproduction: fruits including tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, beans and peas. This feeding program for the orchard goes on twice weekly, ideally before 8 am or after 4 pm. Before is the best for me but I couldn’t make it happen today, so I settled for the good over the best.

    On June 20th the spraying program begins in the vegetable garden. Lest you have an organic twinge here, let me explain the philosophy behind the (International Ag Labs) I.A.L. recommendation. The goal is to produce the highest quality foods (measured by nutrients, not ease of picking and processing) while supporting a soil chemistry that is sustainable over time. This is very different from traditional ags NPK focus which takes out nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from the soil each year, then pumps them back in the following year.

    NPK farming misses the critical elements of soil chemistry that supports microbial plant and animal life, as well as the critical trace minerals that make for healthy plants. Healthy plants = healthy food. There’s a reason for the plough and fertilize model. It produces high quantities of food, but over time the plants become modified not for nutrition but for their capacity to be easily harvested and stored, then optimally usable for food processing. In the past three decades or so the plants have also been modified to contain herbicides and insecticides as part of their genetic material.

    Again, the emphasis is not on the nutrient quality of the food, but on the ease of growing and harvesting. This story is not new to me. Michael Pollan is probably its most gifted narrator right now. I remember a 1974 book, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, that told the story of the unfortunate collaboration between land grant universities (like the Ag campus in St. Paul, Purdue in Indiana) and farmers/food processors. It’s titular story involved the problem of tomatoes. They were thin skinned and had to be harvested by expensive manual labor. The solution? A tomato with a hard skin, pluckable by mechanical arms. That’s the source of the tough hide you get on store bought tomatoes.

    Criticizing the system is easy and the push back predictable. How would you grow sufficient quantities of food for all America and the other peoples of the world to whom we sell produce? It’s a fair question and one that has to be answered.

    There are many competing solutions, often followed with dogmatic zeal, the cults and sects of the horticultural opposition: Permaculture, organic farming, bio-dynamic farming, no till agriculture, the long term project at the Land Institute to develop perennial grains, among others. While of all these organic has created the most scale, it has a huge flaw that should have been obvious from the beginning, but zeal blinded most of us to it.

    Its whole focus is on a negative, the removal of chemicals and their replacement with organic/natural products used to grow food. A good thing, in many ways, but it leaves the more important question unanswered: is organic food better to eat? Well, in that it is grown in a minimalist insecticide/herbicide environment, yes. But. Is organic food more nutritious than NPK farming? Oddly, the answer is not so much.

    That’s where the I.A.L. idea comes in. Improve the soil so that it can sustain its own chemistry and create a healthy environment for microbial life. Recognize that inputs to the food growing process move toward that goal. Make clear that the purpose of this program is not the creation of food for the food industry, but of good food for all. This strikes me as a balanced solution, accessible to individuals and growers for local markets alike.

    I don’t know how the I.A.L. ideas work on the large scale though I know their primary customers are farmers and not gardeners.

    Think about this. The path to a sustainable human future on this planet must start with agriculture that can continue indefinitely. I.A.L. is one approach that focuses on that goal. It’s worth a look.


    Garden Great Work Our Land and Home Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Sierra Club Third Phase

  • The Grandchildren Project

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                       Emergence Moon

    A shift in public opinion concerning climate change seems to be accelerating. We may be near a tipping point where acceptance of climate change science corresponds to acceptance of evolution. Yes, there will always be outliers, just like the Texas and Kansas school boards exhibit every once in a while on evolution, but the mass of us will finally hear the very clear science behind many changes impacting us already.

    Proof? Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and a possible GOP candidate for President in 2016, wrote this remarkable sentence in an op-ed piece for the NYT: “If Republicans can get to a place where science drives our thinking and actions, then we will be able to make progress.”  Paul Douglas, local and national meteorologist and a conservative, too, has long observed the conundrum behind conservatives who refuse to conserve.

    It may be that the long game for climate politics is about to bear fruit. For those patiently (and not so patiently) working on climate change related issues the era of solution based debates rather than denial and obfuscation might be coming near. This will be an exciting but also frustrating time as those only recently convinced try to digest the difficult realities ahead of us.  Those of us who’ve wanted to see forward motion will be in danger of refusing to listen to solutions that don’t fit our already existing paradigms.

    It will be important to recall that our solutions have largely been developed among those of us who already agree with each other. Gaining political consensus for policy will require including those who don’t share many of our assumptions. Here’s a clear one. Nuclear energy may well be an important component of a transition to a non-carbon based energy regime. We need critical mass for the generation of electricity while renewable sources begin to catch up and storage technologies improve. We simply may not have time to ignore capable non-emitting nuclear power plants.

    I’m excited that this push for solutions may happen in my lifetime and that those of us with grandchildren might help create the change. Call it the grandchildren project.


    Aging Commentary on the news Family Great Work Politics Science Sierra Club

  • Not Hope, Grief and Agency

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

    Wanted to say a bit about Paul Kingsnorth, the environmental activist who has given up on activism. If you want to read the NYT article about him, follow the link.

    You might be tempted to dismiss his analysis, or you might not want to hear what he’s saying and deny it. But from what I learned in the climate change course recently completed he’s right in an important sense.

    The goal identified at Copenhagen is to limit warming to 2 degrees centigrade or between 3.6 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit.* This amount of warming is baked in already.  That is, we’ve already loaded enough CO2 into the atmosphere to ensure it. So, the Copenhagen goal will be exceeded.  The question at issue now is by how much.  See below for a definition of RCP.**

    The year to pay attention to is 2050.  That’s the year that the pathways begin to diverge, representing the amount of emissions in that year. RCP2.6 assumes a successful reduction in emissions worldwide of 80% by 2050 and 100% by 2100. This can be done. There are several different pathways that get us there. The problem is the politics of carbon emission control.

    Most of the lecturers in the climate change course thought this was not going to happen. That puts us into the range of RCP4.5 to RCP8.5.  4.5C=8F and 8.5C=15.3F. I don’t agree with Kingsnorth’s word ecocide because the plant and animal world will adjust to all of these temperature ranges.  Yes, many species will not be able to adapt, but many will.

    Still, and I think this is where Kingsnorth is right, the world as we know it is beyond saving. We will have to adapt and adjust to a dramatically changed reality, a new climate reality that may cause the death of billions of people from starvation, dehydration or heat exhaustion.

    I also believe he’s right in saying that we need to accept dramatic change as inevitable and that we need to grieve the loss of our familiar world. Only in grieving will we touch the new reality.

    Here’s where I think he’s wrong. There is still time and there are workable strategies that can limit the magnitude of the changes we face. With no action, the up ramp of CO2 that continues to pump into the atmosphere will ensure the RCP8.5 scenario.  Somehow we must combine working through our grief over a lost world that may seem like paradise in another 100 years with our determination to moderate the degree of change as much as possible.

    If we stick to the 2C goal of Copenhagen, the world will see failure and failure cuts the nerve of political agency. We need to accept that goal as simply wrong and work now to do what’s possible. The future demands that we do everything we can, only much later will we know how well we did.

     

     

     

    *”Fahrenheit (symbol°F) is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736)”… wiki.  Just occurred to me that I didn’t know the origin of the word.

    ** Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) are four greenhouse gasconcentration (not emissions) trajectories adopted by the IPCC for its fifth Assessment Report (AR5).[1]

    The pathways are used for climate modeling and research. They describe four possible climate futures, all of which are considered possible depending on how much greenhouse gases are emitted in the years to come. The four RCPs, RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5, are named after a possible range of radiative forcing values in the year 2100 relative to pre-industrial values (+2.6, +4.5, +6.0, and +8.5 W/m2, respectively).[2]


    Faith and Spirituality Great Work Politics Science Sierra Club

  • The Young Guns

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

    The America Votes meeting was very interesting with lots of good, solid data.  With the exception of two gray-haired guys in their late 50’s/early 60’s, I had a good 30 years + on everyone in the room.  It’s good to see the young guns at the table.  About evenly split between men and women they dressed somewhere between Minnesota casual and hipster. I fit right in.

    It felt good to be there, to hear, consider, analyze, to wonder about the upcoming rounds of primaries and conventions, the long summer of positioning and the hard campaigning to come in the fall.

     


    Politics Sierra Club US History

  • Chum In The Water

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

    Today I return, for a couple of hours, to the world of politics and organizing.  America Votes is a national coalition aimed at electing a progressive majority throughout the country.  This is the Minnesota table, as they call these meetings, and I attend on behalf of the Sierra Club.

    [George Caleb Bingham’s The County Election (1852)]

    Though the specific nature of the meetings are confidential, they involve the usual material for these sort of groups:  polling data, shared strategy, updated relevant news.  This once a month meeting is a vestigial connection with my past, a chance to stay in the fray, at least nominally.

    When I retreat, I advance was something I learned at the Intensive Journal Workshop and its corollary, of course, is when I advance, I retreat.  There is that danger here, I know. The chum in the water draws old sharks just like it does young ones.  Self-awareness and the growing season should moderate the risk.

     


    Politics Sierra Club

  • Kairos

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                      Hare Moon

    A bit more on an old topic, inspired by thinking about Jenkinson’s remarks that appear below.

    The humanities are important as just that, the human forming portion of our educational deposit.  Over the millennia, stretching back to the time of gods emerging from the deserts of the Middle East and continuing right through the poetry and literature and painting and sculpture, the movies and television and games, the sports and horticulture and domestic arts of our day, we have had to grow into our lives, into our identity as human beings. It is not easy, but it is the most important task we have and the one which the family, the schools, our societies and cultures exist to engage.

    This is not an argument for the humanities over science, technology and mathematics.  Far from it.  We have needed and will continue to need the valuable insights that come from deep thinking about the atomic structure of things, the hard rock science of the earth, the softer touches of the biological inquiries and the neuroscientific and all the other forms of scientific endeavor with which we humans engage.  But consider the difference in importance between raising a boy or a girl and lifting a rocket ship to the moon.  Which matters more?

    It is not in the theory of evolution or in the biological sciences or in matters astronomical that we find the answer to such a question.  Even though we often pretend it is in this insecure age the answer is not in the psychological studies.  No, the answer to a question of value, of significance, of which is more than this lies only in the realm of culture.

    The most important task of our time is said simply and defined humanistically, but requires the sciences in all their potency to finish:  create a sustainable human presence on this earth.

    Why is this most important?  Because if it is not accomplished, the earth, no matter our scientific prowess, will scour us from her face.  She will make the thin layer of our habitation, from maybe 6 inches below the surface of the soil, to maybe 12 miles or so above the earth-the troposphere where most weather occurs-outside the parameters necessary for our existence.  That is, as the biologists are found of saying, an extinction level event.

    So we are at a moment of kairos, a greek word meaning the opportune time.  Paul Tillich a theologian of the last century saw kairotic moments as “…crises in history which create an opportunity for, and indeed demand, an existential decision by the human subject.” Wiki His clearest example from the mid-point of that bloody hundred years was World War II, but even WW II and WW I put together do not equal the crisis we face now, a kairotic moment which, as Tillich said, demands an existential decision by us all.

    (damaged relief of the Greek god Kairos of 4 century. BC)

    The will and the skill to make that decision, a decision for or against our children and our grandchildren’s future, lies not in the sciences, but in the humanities.  It is in our sense of who we are as a species, as a being with a history, that we will find what we need to decide.  And, contrary to many, I am now convinced that the biggest barriers confounding our ability to make a non-suicidal decision lie in the realm of governance, a thoroughly humanistic endeavor.

    Strip away those disciplines that force us to consider our humanity and we will be left with the calculus of Malthus.

     

     

     


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