Category Archives: Great Work

Bees, Colorado, Family, Great Work, The Move, Weather +Climate

Toward the New

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Summer                                                                Most Heat Moon

When asked last night if she wanted us to move to Colorado, Ruth nodded her blond head Ruth's 8thand said, “I want you to.” She may go with Grandma to look at property, give the grandchild’s view. We’ll give Ruth and Gabe a chance to have their say since they’ll be very important visitors (V.I.V.s), but Grandpop and Grandma will make the final choice, of course.

The standing in the drive-way, waving as the van pulls away ritual has happened. The three generation of Olson’s Sienna transport to Colorado has left the building.

As Colorado came rushing into the foreground of our lives this week, it’s made me consider what new things I might want to do out there. The first thing that came to mind? Learning to ride a horse. Something I’ve never done and what better place than the west. I don’t want to learn dressage or steeple chasing or barrel racing, but I would like to learn enough to ride on a mountain trail, maybe camp out.

A second thing came while reading an interesting article in this month’s Wired, “How We Can Tame Overlooked Wild Plants to Feed the World.” This article gives a broad brush presentation to how horticulture and agriculture will respond to climate change. It starts by referencing work being done in Ames, Iowa on domesticating new food crops.  The last creative work in domestication of new crop plants ended thousands of years ago.

Here’s the sentence that really jumped out at me: “Today, humans rely on fewer than 150 plants for nourishment, and just three cereal crops—wheat, rice, and corn—make up more than two-thirds of the world’s calories; along with barley, they own three-quarters of the global grain market.” op. cit.

The Land Institute outside Salina, Kansas has had my attention since I read founder Wes Jackson’s book, Becoming Native to This Place. This book along with the Great Work by Thomas Berry, The Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and an excellent climate change conference Kate and I attended in Iowa City changed the direction of my political activism from economic and racial justice issues to environmental policy. They also affected my horticultural practices, turning me from perennial flowers to vegetables and fruit grown in a soil sensitive, heirloom-biased way.

So. When we finally settle down, I want to have a raised bed or two for kitchen vegetables, smaller than what we have here, but I also want to have at least one raised bed or plot devoted to advancing a new food crop. I’m not sure what this would entail, but if something useful can be done on a small plot in the Rocky Mountains, I want to devote the time necessary to it. Given the long time horizons on such projects, I may not hope to get too far; but, any distance toward a broader food palate and one capable of producing in hotter normal temperatures will be useful to my grandchildren and their children.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Right Now

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

My favorite subscription e-mail is brain pickings. The creator and writer, Maria Popova,crane engineering generates it through intense reading and intelligent choice of materials. Last year she wrote an essay outlining 7 things she’s learned in the 7 years of writing brain pickings. You can find the whole essay on her website, but I wanted to focus on one in particular because it reminds me of a lesson I’m learning from my friend, Tom Crane.

Being present, how he shows up in the moment, from moment to moment, is his top priority. I don’t know whether he would counterpoise it to productivity as Popova does here, but his business success in forensic engineering certainly suggests he’s no stranger to productivity. He is clear that he does not want to be measured by his efficiency, earnings or his ability to do this or that. Which is saying something since his company is very well-regarded, growing and prosperous.

Here’s Popova:

  1. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshiping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And a bit more from an interview with a talented writer/observer:

“I think productivity, as we define it, is flawed to begin with, because it equates a process with a product. So, our purpose is to produce — as opposed to, our purpose is to understand and have the byproduct of that understanding be the “product.” For me, I read, and I hunger to know… I record, around that, my experience of understanding the world and understanding what it means to live a good life, to live a full life. Anything that I write is a byproduct of that — but that’s not the objective. So, even if it may have the appearance of “producing” something on a regular basis, it’s really about taking in, and what I put out is just … the byproduct.”

The moment and our questing in that moment for connection, for understanding, for clear seeing is all we have. Ever. Placing the moment and our immersion in it first swings us out of the past or the future, if we’re tempted to sojourn there, and back to the now.

I like Tom’s insistence on showing up and Popova’s emphasis on understanding as our purpose, and productivity as a byproduct of that process. When at a farmer’s market, it would be understandable to see the fruits and vegetables as a product of gardening, but in fact they are the byproduct of a person in love with the soil, with plants, with the changing seasons and the interplay of wind and rain and sun.

The main dilemmas of our current approach to agriculture can be tied to productivity oriented thinking.  This way sees the fruits and the vegetables and the grains and the meats and dairy as the product of farming rather than its byproduct. What I mean is this, when we love the world in which we live, when we treat it with care and thoughtfulness, when we understand our needs and its needs, the world will produce what is necessary for our existence. That’s been the successful ongoing contract between living beings and the natural world of which they are apart since the first one-celled organism began to wiggle and move. It is no different today.

That’s what I understand right now.

Great Work, Politics, Science, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

Changing from Chronos to Kairos

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Summer                                                         Summer Moon

Bill McKibben’s voice has been raised in anger, in intelligent discourse, in pleading before the public and the government and recently in organizing a mass movement 350.org. He has an article in this week’s New York Review of Books elegaic opening paragraph:

“We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural world is daily making it more clear that the clock ticks down faster than we feared. The whole game is very nearly in check.” NY Review of Books, July 10, 2014.

This article reviews a book on changes in Antarctica, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent, and two reports: What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment by the US Global Change Research Program. Both of the reports are available in full at the links.

(Ice cores going back 800,000 years, drilled from Antarctic ice show there has never been a time in earth’s history when the carbon load in the atmosphere was more 290 ppm. The current level, updated monthly from a sensor on Mauna Kea, is above.)

The news is the same as the material I wrote about here while taking the Climate Change MOOC last fall. The Supreme Court today upheld the right of the Federal Government to regulate emissions from stationary sources. In yesterday’s paper Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under George II, and no Earth Firster proclaimed climate change as the problem of our time and proposed a tax on carbon emissions as a solution. All this does indicate climate change may soon become a matter of real, and painful, policy changes. And not just here, but across the globe.

It is the painful part that gives McKibben his dark tone. Changing over from a carbon fuel based economy will not be easy, cheap, or quick. In other words it’s not politically palatable. Just like social security and medicare reform. Policy makers have Pavlovian resistance to votes that may lose them support in their constituency. It will not be a simple matter to overcome that resistance. And yet it must be done. And it must be done now.

A portion of Paulson’s piece I liked a lot was his opening point “...if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.” He echoes Thomas Berry’s much earlier work when he says, “Climate change is the challenge of our time.“

It is our work and one we must do together.

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

A House With A History

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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.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Summer Solstice 2014

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Summer Solstice                                                         Summer Moon

At 5:51 am the sun reached its full height in the sky, full, that is, for the 45th latitude, 69 degrees above the horizon. That means more solar energy per square foot on the ground and rising temperatures to follow in July and August. It also means the rain soaked plants here in Minnesota will finally begin to get the attention they need to grow tall and produce big fruit. Yes, today is the summer solstice.

This day, like the winter solstice, is an ancient holiday, born of fear and hope, awe and wonder, the basic ingredients, according to Rudolf Otto, of the holy. At the summer solstice the hope was for warmth to heal bones chilled by winter’s cold and sunlight to ensure a good harvest, whether food was gathered or grown. The fear, the opposite of that at the winter solstice when many feared the sun might never return, leaving the world to freeze, with food gone, was that the sun would come too close, stay high too long and burn the earth, scorch it with an intensity neither plant nor animal could survive.

In this way these two markers of the solar system’s formative years, when the orbits of the planets stabilized around their mother and father, Sol, could be seen as an early form of output produced by a very basic, but nonetheless real, computer, movement in the heavens. As this difference engine brought new information into the night sky, humans and other animals, too, sighted it and changed their lives according to its data.

If the holidays of Beltane and Samhain mark the human focused seasons, the growing sun calendarseason and the harvest season followed by the long fallow time, then the solstices mark the astronomical seasons, the season of heat and the season of cold. Together these four constitute the liturgical calendar of an earthly religion, one which honors the earth and its treasures, and a solar religion, one which honors the nuclear fusion roaring in the furnace of our star, a basic source of energy which makes the earth’s treasures accessible to our bodies.

The calendar shown here hangs on my wall, the solstices made evident by the yellow yolk displaying the hours of sunlight on a given day. The point where the yolk lies closest to the inner circle is today, the summer solstice, and the one furthest away, its polar opposite, near the top, the winter solstice.

 

This is a day to celebrate the majesty and wonder of photosynthesis, that essential transubstantiation which converts the love of the sun into foods that our bodies can consume. When you look outside today and see green, the color not absorbed by plant leaves and so left over for our eyes as a signal of the miracle, bless them. Bless the leaves and their photosynthetic work, bless the sun which powers it and the plants themselves which mediate between that work and our life. Their work is the sine qua non of our existence. And worthy of our thanks and our praise.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Science

Nothing Alien To This Neighborhood

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

We have had rain. And then some. And will get still more. The Great Anoka Sand Plain soaks it up and funnels it on down to the aquifers below our land, recharging them, then putting more flow into the streams like Rum River and the lakes like Round Lake.

The Summer Moon watches it all, as it has watched all since it split away from its partner the earth. Like the split aparts of Plato’s lovers the earth and the moon have continued together locked in a long term relationship, a dance in the coldness of space. The moon is our seer, an audience for all that we do, we creatures and rocks and clouds and waters of this spinning planet.

The whole solar system is a dynamic ballet. The sun’s selfless and profligate dispersal of energy feeds those of us closest while it’s gravitational pull keeps even those outer planets in our company.

And we humans, we think of ourselves as different from all this, unique, special but look at us from a solar perspective. We’re the deer and the whale, the paramecium and the volcano, the mammoth and the brontosaur. We are nothing more-and nothing less-than parts of this planet we ride. Yes, parts come alive, come animate, even come conscious, but we are creatures of this earth nonetheless and in the most literal sense and we are given energy in the same way all our solar system is given energy. By hydrogen fusion in the nuclear furnaces of the sun.

Terence, Roy Wolf reminded us at sheepshead last Thursday, said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I’ll paraphrase: “Nothing human is alien to our sun’s neighborhood.”

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

An Underlying Question

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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, Great Work, Sierra Club, The Move, Weather +Climate

400%

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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.

 

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

Sustainable, Nutrient Focused Horticulture

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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

And, They’re Off

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Beltane                                                                   New (Summer) Moon

The heat has returned. As has our irrigation. That combination plus the International Ag IMAG0357Labs program seems to have gotten us off to a good start. I was afraid I’d burned the tomatoes and peppers (too much nitrogen), but they seem to be coping.

(2013 garlic)

The tomatoes, with one exception, look strong and so do the peppers. The collard greens, chard and egg plant have put on a growth spurt with that vivid color which signals good health in a plant. The onions, garlic and leeks have made good progress, too, though they’re a bit slower in general than the others. Beans and cucumbers have sprouted, except for one row which has just begin to push up, sugar snaps if I remember correctly.

The tomatillos, planted a week or so ago, have done poorly, and I don’t know why, but we’ll have to replant them. The beets and carrots, planted before we left for Denver, have sprouted, too, the carrots looking as good any I’ve had. The golden beets, beautiful on the plate, just don’t germinate well, at least the variety I’ve planted for three years. Which should be a signal to me. The bull’s blood variety grows with the kind of vigor you might associate with, well, a bull.

Kate went out today and weeded, weeded, weeded. The garden looks neat and organized. Tomorrow afternoon or Saturday morning I have to lay down mulch, seems awful close to planting, but the heat and the cold brushed against each other this year.