tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74747517428427681752024-02-20T22:01:18.133-08:00An Ecology of HomeA Love StoryJim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-73718447900914181292012-03-11T17:39:00.000-07:002012-03-11T17:39:30.237-07:00Milkweed and the Dance of Life<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Just outside our front door is a small patch of <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"><i>Asclepias syriaca</i></span>, common milkweed, that Tanya grew from seed a few years ago. In late spring when the large clusters of pink flowers are in bloom, the air comes alive with their sweet perfume. That scent, or perhaps the flowers’ shapes and color, must serve as a signal to a whole host of insect species, because no other plants on our property rival the milkweeds for the sheer number and variety of insects that buzz, hum, and hover around them when they are in bloom. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7T5HNtA1dbypswza-Vy7GP7ZlDZ2doF9U-34vQ71mhhHLCfTUXqLg0TXrmFuk6xCytvN2TFy3O8itIMT5LOMNri7puSiC82wtV40FLbRFXre1PK6oETNCC7i-kMriNP0pvINnvjFcZXUJ/s1600/DSC_0466.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7T5HNtA1dbypswza-Vy7GP7ZlDZ2doF9U-34vQ71mhhHLCfTUXqLg0TXrmFuk6xCytvN2TFy3O8itIMT5LOMNri7puSiC82wtV40FLbRFXre1PK6oETNCC7i-kMriNP0pvINnvjFcZXUJ/s320/DSC_0466.JPG" width="320" /></a>For several weeks, the flowers are host to an ecstatic dance of insect life. Bumblebees, beetles, moths, spiders, flies, and wasps all make an appearance to suck the flowers’ sweet nectar. The showiest and most easily identified of the insects is the monarch butterfly, with its large orange wings bordered in black. I’m not much of an entomologist, and I don’t know the names of most of the insects that feed on the milkweed flowers, but the monarch is one of those charismatic species that stands out and is instantly recognizable. The milkweeds are the <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"><i>only</i></span> host plant for the larva of the monarch; the continent-wide decline in monarch numbers is due in large measure to a loss of milkweed habitat. The causes are the familiar ones: native ecologies bulldozed and plowed under to make way for agriculture, industry, urbs and suburbs.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Each of the last two years Clementine and Guthrie decided to “raise” a monarch butterfly. They found a couple of caterpillars on the plants and we put them in a small fish tank with some of the stalks and leaves of the milkweed for food. Within days the caterpillars had suspended themselves from the piece of window screen that served as the lid, and wrapped themselves in the chrysalis that would be their home for about ten days until their transformation to butterflies. When that metamorphosis is just about complete, the chrysalis turns clear, and in less than a day a young monarch emerges, its wings tiny and unfurled at first, but growing to full size literally before your eyes. The whole process takes just a couple of hours. The monarchs usually stay in our garden, close to the milkweed, for a day or two before beginning their lifelong journey south, toward the forests of Mexico. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPHI9_cF-4_j_x8VYNtmH7b_WWkTjYe6fwDkt06S2P0p8qSmJYJE94cwvGTuJpobRstIw0OP-cMkmMTFiGNFDLDcBFCPdz91qPnRahiSOvuR_OL0ERVeCfdcBbrrKIWV-tu4xzHSkgWwcF/s1600/DSC_0525.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPHI9_cF-4_j_x8VYNtmH7b_WWkTjYe6fwDkt06S2P0p8qSmJYJE94cwvGTuJpobRstIw0OP-cMkmMTFiGNFDLDcBFCPdz91qPnRahiSOvuR_OL0ERVeCfdcBbrrKIWV-tu4xzHSkgWwcF/s1600/DSC_0525.JPG" /></a>We feel a close kinship to the monarch, and to all the other insects that feed on the milkweed. Not only because they represent the diversity that we are working to restore to our land, but because, like them, we too take our nourishment from the milkweed. Milkweed is delicious, and the shoots, buds, flowers, and immature seed pods are all edible. In spring and summer it has become one of our main vegetables. We like the young shoots as well as any other green vegetable, and the small seed pods are also good, having a taste and texture a little like okra. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But it’s the shoots that we really crave. We prepare them all the different ways that we eat asparagus: grilled, sautéed, chilled as a salad. We eat more than our small patch produces, so we gather them in bunches from a couple of old fields in the neighborhood. We’re happy foraging, but we like to grow as much as we eat, so last year we planted another, larger patch on our own property. This year we’re growing still more from seed. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As their name suggests, milkweeds are easy to grow. In the case of common milkweed, maybe too easy—at least from the perspective of gardeners looking for tight control of their plantings. Two of our favorite native plant authorities, Donald Leopold and William Cullina, both write in their respective native plant guides that the common milkweed is perhaps too invasive for garden settings. Again we’re left with the “problem” of a delicious, native plant that simply wants to take over. That’s OK with us. Our long-term goal for our land here is to restore native seed stock and then let the plants themselves figure out what will grow where. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As for the milkweed, rather than trying to constrain them to formal garden beds, we’re after what Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm described seeing when he traveled through northern New England in the mid-eighteenth century: “The <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"><i>Asclepias syriaca</i></span>…grows abundant in the country, on the sides of hills which lie near rivers, as well as in a dry and open place in the woods and in a rich, loose soil. Its flowers are very fragrant, and when in season, they fill the woods with their sweet exhalations and make it agreeable to travel in them, especially in the evenings.” Kalm also noted that the French in Canada ate the young shoots, “preparing them like asparagus,” which they of course had learned from the Wabanaki or Iroqouis.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We love asparagus, the non-native garden vegetable that everyone is familiar with. We’d been growing it for years in our annual vegetable garden, assiduously weeding around the fussy plants, composting and mulching the beds. But last summer we decided to take them out, in large part because of how they measured up in comparison to milkweed. In taste they are equal, or nearly so. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In summer asparagus was my favorite green vegetable to grill over a fire, but I like the taste of milkweed just as well. Tanya likes it more. Beyond taste, asparagus just doesn’t measure up. The plants take up a lot of space, offering only a handful of stalks each year in return. No other part of the plant is edible or useful. They dislike competition, and so require a lot of work weeding and mulching. As non-natives, they aren’t integrated into our woodland ecology, and so support few insect species. Milkweed plants are the opposite in most regards. The plants produce a lot of food in a small space. In addition to the edible parts, the pods contain a down that was used as bedding and pillow stuffing (French colonists called the plant <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"><i>le cotonnier</i></span>), and the fibrous stalks provided material for a tough cordage. Milkweed is a vigorous perennial that requires no tending. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The semi-rural area where we live has plenty of old fields, where milkweed grows most abundantly, and since few people eat it (or even know it’s edible), for now we can gather as much as we can eat. But more important than any of these other factors is the symphony that milkweed plays to the dance of insect life. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Nothing better distills what we are trying to achieve on our homestead than making milkweed a part of our diet and personal economy. The two pictures capture what I mean by <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"><i>an ecology of home</i></span> probably better than all the words I’ve written in this space. We live off the grid in a small house, heat with wood, compost our own waste, garden organically, et cetera et cetera, but none of these things gives me quite as much satisfaction as the ecological and economic relationships implicit in a plate of milkweed shoots. Dinner may be the most potent force we have available for restoring our ecologies and our place in the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Further Reading:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Regarding the edibility of milkweed all of the wild food guidebooks and cookbooks on my shelf, except for one, tell the same story: milkweed is bitter and should be boiled in several changes of water to remove the bitterness. This has not been our experience, and the one book that tells the story that matches our own experience is Samuel Thayer’s <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"><i>The Forager’s Harvest</i></span>. He also traces the genealogy of the error about milkweed’s supposed bitterness back to a misidentification made by Euell Gibbons. Thayer’s two wild food books are highly recommended. It probably goes without saying, but please don’t use this essay as a field guide.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The quote from Peter Kalm is reproduced in <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";"><i>Medicinal and other Uses of North American Plants</i></span> by Charlotte Erichsen-Brown. <o:p></o:p></div><!--EndFragment-->Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-52877917440099199082012-02-10T17:03:00.000-08:002012-02-10T17:03:56.543-08:00Work and Ecology: Less Is More<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published May 22, 2011</i><br />
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As for the agrarian Romans, the insatiable mouth of empire devoured the land, clearing it for agriculture and leading to irreversible erosion in regions that were once the most fertile in the world. It is hard to imagine that a civilization as brilliant as that of the Greeks, or an empire engineered and administered so efficiently as that of the Romans, could remain so blind in their practices as to bring about the ruin of the ground on which their survivals were based.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>—Robert Pogue Harrison, <i>Forests: the Shadow of Civilization</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Herring, if any desire them, I have taken many out of the bellies of Cods, some in nets; but the savages compare their store in the Sea, to the hairs of their heads: and surely there are an incredible abundance upon this Coast. In the end of August, September, October, and November, you have Cod again, to make Cor fish, or Poor John: and each hundred is as good as two or three hundred in the <i>New-found Land</i>.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>—John Smith, <i>A Description of New England</i> (1616)</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Spring has unfolded haltingly this year, the snow hanging on in the forest almost into May, the skies grey and cool, the normal seasonal warmth slow to return. The robins are back though, and we are awakened at five o’clock by their daily morning song, which lasts for more than an hour. The forest green is interrupted with delicate bursts of white Juneberry flowers, and the aspens, birches, and apples are all unfurling tiny leaves. From our cultivated gardens we’ve already harvested rhubarb, asparagus, violets, sedums, giant Solomon’s seal, cat-tail shoots, ostrich fern fiddleheads and the young leaves of bluebead lilies, which taste like cucumbers. Only two of those plants, asparagus and rhubarb, are from away, as native Mainers say. (They’re native only in the sense that their families have been here for at least several generations, but they’re of European descent like most of us more recent arrivals. We’re all usurpers). The others we’ve bought or transplanted ourselves, and are encouraging their spread in various places in our forest gardens.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">From a gardener’s perspective, the great thing about the natives—the plants, not the non-native native Mainers—is that they require so little work. They’re already adapted to the thin, acidic forest soils and New England’s variable climate, so most of what we have to do is stick them in the ground in the kind of habitat they like—wet, dry, full shade, part shade—and watch them grow. There’s a lesson here, though it’s one we’re slow to learn: Work, for an individual or a society, begins with the effort required to modify or eradicate the ecology that’s there and replace it with something else. For most of history, this is in fact exactly what was meant by the word <i>work</i>. Even more specifically: in most places it meant cutting down forests and then hoeing, plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting fields. In another word, farming. That was the first work and it is still the one that is prior to all others. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Puritans who settled around Massachusetts Bay are well known for their vaunted work ethic, but I suspect that they had no choice in the matter. Their food came from fields planted with crops that weren’t native to anywhere within 3000 miles, which meant making wholesale changes to the ecology. Since economies create cultural values as much as vice versa, it seems reasonable to assume that the Puritan faith in the redemptive powers of hard work was no more than an effort to make a virtue of necessity. If unremitting toil is the price you have to pay to get your daily bread, you may as well tell yourself that Providence is smiling on your efforts. And there’s no doubt about it, waging daily war on a native ecology, trying to make it grow one thing when its collective DNA tells it to grow another, is hard work and risky business. The power of stories to bend a culture’s collective thought should not be underestimated: the Puritans turned their noses up at the mussels and lobsters that were there on the coast for the taking, thinking them fit only as food for their servants. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Meanwhile the lifestyles of the real natives, i.e. the various Algonkian tribes of the northeast, whose claims on the land go back millennia rather than a century or two, offended the Puritan belief in work as virtue. Among the tribes who raised corn, beans, and squash, only the women did the work of planting, weeding, and harvesting. The Puritans applauded their industry, but condemned as wastrels the men who spent their days hunting or fishing or making weapons or playing games. But since they got their food from the ecologies that was already there, i.e. forest, river, and sea, they did little that the Puritans recognized as work. They modified the forest to facilitate their hunting, but that involved no more than burning the understory in Spring or Fall. In the world of English social and economic relations, there was a name for people who spent their days hunting and fishing and sporting rather than in the real work of tending fields and growing food: royalty. And it was only royalty that ate a diet rich in game animals and birds, since only they had access to the royal forests.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Today of course not one person in a hundred takes up the hard work of farming, and most of that work, and the other work of modifying or eradicating native ecologies—mining, drilling, paving, damming, logging—is performed by big machines running on fossil fuels. Today when most of us in the developed world speak of going to work, we mean something else entirely from altering the landscape in one way or another. Mostly what we mean by work is one of the nearly infinite forms of administration and communication that have either come into being or become common endeavors since the advent of fossil fuels. At the end of the day, nothing is created in this work but words, which means the work itself is in essence no more than elaborate, highly ritualized and mostly institutionalized forms of storytelling. Made possible because the essential work, the making of food, clothing, shelter, energy, and other things, is carried out by machines that need only a very small number of people to operate them.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This level of abstraction in most people’s daily experience of work has made it difficult for us as a culture to remember that work, and the wealth it creates, inevitably begins with an assault against native ecologies, an effort to make the land more productive than it is in a wild, or only slightly modified state. From this perspective, work is the necessary agent of the ideology of conquest and control that are at the heart of the agricultural and industrial enterprise. Since the work is unpleasant and antithetical to how most people would choose to spend their days given a choice, for most of history it has been done by forced labor, i.e. slaves, indentured servants, or masses of landless peasants constrained by economic necessity. Only when fossil fuels and industrialization came along was it possible to gradually eliminate the more coercive of those relationships.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Knowing that work is at its most elemental a war against ecology gives us yet another reason to modify our native ecology as little as possible in our efforts to get our food, clothing, energy, and shelter from it. This is a (small p) protestant non-work ethic. It is a protest against engaging in wanton violence against an intact ecology, a protest against unnecessary toil, whether performed by us, other people, or machines, and a recognition that if we want to benefit from all of the embodied energy and intelligence in a native ecology, we have to do less, not more. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Put more specifically: If we want to grow a forest here in eastern North America, we can go on permanent vacation and let the forest take care of the work of growing itself, which it inevitably will. In energy terms, the energy returned over energy invested, or net energy, is just about the maximum possible. (We only have to deduct the energy we use to harvest whatever grows in the forest that we want or need). So is the time we have to do other things we might find more enjoyable than work, such as hunting, fishing, exploring and studying the forest, telling stories, making or listening to music, reading books, visiting friends, or a hundred other things that gather under the general headings of culture and leisure. On the other hand, if we want to grow a field of wheat, say, the odds of its growing itself here are effectively zero. Which means if we want wheat grown locally, some body or machine is going to have to do a lot of work, beginning with removing whatever is now growing on the future field. History shows that when the work is done we can expect an energy returned over energy invested just a little better than parity, at least in the short term. In the long term, the return may be less than zero, depending on local conditions.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Lacking the Puritan’s conviction that the creator of the universe wanted nothing so much as a field of wheat where forest had always grown, or even the conviction that the universe has a creator with an active interest in horticultural practices here on Earth, or that if the universe does in fact have a single creator, that his, her, or its mind is knowable, if we want to kill the native ecology and grow that field of wheat we’re going to have to justify it on some other terms. By our reckoning, the net return of waging war against an ecology in psychological, cultural, ecological, and even economic terms, is less than zero.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">It’s no wonder that the native people here, the Wabanaki, never developed a work ethic, at least not one recognizable to Europeans. Of what use would it have been? They had figured out that by letting the forest and coastal ecologies do most of the work of creating food, and by finding a place for themselves in those ecologies, they could meet all of their needs, enjoy a lifestyle that suited them, and inflict little or no long-term damage on the land or sea. Our own culture, the one that arrived here with the Puritan farmers, took the opposite approach, relying on long days of labor and a conviction that proper food came from a small selection of domestic plants and animals that were superior to any found in a native uncultivated ecology. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">It isn’t surprising then that our own culture’s rediscovery of the benefits of local food has little to do with plants and animals that actually belong to a region’s ecology, but is limited to the practice of both raising and eating food in a single place. Most of the plants and animals—greens, beans, root vegetables, apples, herbs, chickens, cows, sheep—are the same that the Puritans brought here almost four hundred years ago. The local food movement helps solves the problems of reducing transportation miles traveled by the food, increasing the food’s freshness, and supporting local farm economies, but it does nothing to help alter or alleviate our culture’s principal occupation of assaulting every native ecology it encounters. If anything it encourages that work.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Of course many of the practices that the Wabanaki relied on are no longer available to us. The ocean and rivers especially are depleted to a point where they may never recover. The Grand Banks cod fishery alone supplied Europe with 60% of all the fish it ate in the seventeenth century. John Smith, who made himself a small fortune from the cod he caught in the Gulf of Maine, and other English explorers claimed that the fishery here was even better. And that’s just one fish. The inshore waters and rivers here also hosted prodigious runs of herring, salmon, shad, mackerel, eel, and alewives. In our household we all love seafood, and I would be more than happy to be able to catch enough fish to feed us for a week or a month by spending a day fishing from a canoe on the inshore waters of the coast or on the Penobscot River, but the fisheries have all been so abused that those days are long gone. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">On land the forest we have now is radically different from the one hunted by the Wabanaki. The nut-bearing oaks, beech, hickories, and chestnuts that provided nuts (and nut flours and nut oils) for people and fed so many of the game animals that they hunted have mostly been logged and sold off, and the forest is now mostly spruce and red maple, which provide much less food for mammals. Game birds were far more abundant also; some, such as the auk and passenger pigeon are gone forever, having been hunted to extinction. The passenger pigeon was by all accounts delicious, and so numerous that it is estimated that they accounted for more than half the birds in America. Early settlers reported flocks so large that they darkened the skies for hours at a time as they passed overhead.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The important point about these rich ecologies and the food they provided, the salient fact of culture and economy, it that people had been living among this abundance for more than 10,000 years. The stories our culture tells about resource use have a hard time reconciling the twin facts of long human habitation with almost unbelievable abundance. We much prefer to scour the planet for examples of overexploitation and collapse—Easter Island for example, or the Pleistocene Overkill Hypothesis. They comfort us with the notion that what our culture and economy are doing to the planet and our own resource base is inevitable, that other human cultures have done the same, and that the scale of our destruction is only the result of our superior technological prowess and numbers. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">So we ignore the stories that don’t fit that model. You’ve probably come across more magazine articles and book chapters about the people of Easter Island and the ecological collapse of that small Pacific Island than about the Wabanaki, who lived here (and still do) on the coast of Maine and Maritime Canada. The Easter Islanders are practically celebrities among societies covered by ecological historians, but the Wabanaki have far more to teach us. They lived here where we live. Somehow, they found a balance between themselves and the rest of the ecology in their homeland. Their long tenure here puts paid to the fiction that human culture and ecological health are fundamentally at odds. Some cultures make a mess of their homes. Others don’t. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">One of the fundamental differences between the two is in the nature of work. For cultures based on agriculture, work is mainly the hard labor of making fundamental changes to an ecology and ongoing efforts to make the land produce things that won’t grow without significant inputs of energy. For other cultures, work means making slight modifications to an ecology to make it produce more of certain food species, and then harvesting those products. In these cultures, there’s generally less work, the harvests are more reliable, and the quality and variety of the diet is far superior. In designing and implementing a homestead economy, we have tried to follow the model of native cultures that lived within the means of their homeland, and so didn’t rely on frontiers. For us, homesteading is as much a form of restoration ecology as it is a means to provide ourselves with as much food, shelter, and energy from our own land as possible. But it is a long-term project, the work of several or perhaps many generations, and we’ve only just begun…</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-83793183916489688342012-02-10T17:02:00.000-08:002012-02-10T17:02:10.482-08:00The World We Make<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published April 27, 2011</i><br />
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I’ve been fortunate to spend most of the past couple of weeks in two of my favorite places—our forest and our small town’s excellent public library. In the forest I finished hewing the last tie beam for our addition. The tree I was cutting it from was a large spruce—fourteen inches at chest height—that had grown up under a pair of red maples and so was stunted and gnarled at the top with no room to grow upward. The red maples were both healthy and vigorous, though a little spindly from growing so close to the spruce. Felling the spruce was complicated by the location of one of the maples, which limited my backswing with the felling ax. After about twenty minutes I got it down though, and right in the line I had chosen. I set about chopping the limbs off of the trunk for the first fifteen feet from the butt. From that point to the top of the tree I leave the limbs on to hold the tree in place while I hew. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">It was not an easy tree to work with an ax. About ten feet from the bottom a whole tangle of thick limbs began protruding from the trunk. I would need to use about three feet of this section to get the thirteen-foot timber I needed. Spruce knots are hard; so hard that they can chip a chisel or ax striking one. And then the grain at the other end was difficult and prone to tearing out with each slice of the hewing ax. The work was difficult, hard physically, and it took me a full day of work to finish both sides. But this wasn’t like the start of the project when the work was difficult because I was out of practice and couldn’t find a rhythm. It was just the nature of the work—the way the tree grew in the forest gave it certain attributes that made it difficult to convert into a timber. I didn’t care. The section of forest I was working in had been transformed from an overgrown tangle of crowded trees to a place beautiful and magical, with the strong spring sun slanting through the still bare trees and melting the last of the snow on the forest floor. In places like these it’s easy to understand why the ancients worshipped in sacred groves, even as they built temples of stone. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In fact I was enjoying my work in that part of the forest so much that I extended my time there by spending a couple more days cutting firewood and thinning an extensive fir and cedar thicket that had grown up in the last dozen years between our gardens and the forest grove that I had just shaped. Most of those thin saplings I left in the forest to rot. First I cut off the boughs and pile those in low spots to provide protection for various forest critters. The one- to three-inch trunks that remained I scattered in small piles on the forest floor too. Rotting wood is essential to the health of forest soil, feeding all those minute and microscopic organisms that feed on bark, cellulose, and lignin. Among the findings of forest ecologists is that decaying wood actually has more living cells in it than a live tree does—in some cases five times as much. One of my pet hypotheses is that the reason our forest trees today don’t reach the same soaring heights and wide trunk diameter that the early European explorers and settlers encountered is that we’ve starved our forest soils by depriving them of rotting wood. By this logic a forest with a floor cleared of dead and decaying wood is a dying forest.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">While I was aggressively thinning the thicket, Tanya made an unexpected find in the place I was working: a few scattered wild cranberry plants growing in the mosses that carpeted the ground. We’d already planted some cultivated cranberries and lingonberries in our gardens, and had plans to put in more, but this new find created a perfect transition between our cultivated forest garden and the forest that was already here. Our ideal is to blur the lines between our cultivated and wild spaces as much as possible, and the newfound cranberries were a nice affirmation of those efforts.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I should say—even though it doesn’t really need to be said—that the industrial economy has created easier, faster, more efficient ways to convert a knotty spruce log into a tie beam for a house addition than with a couple of axes. With a portable bandsaw mill or even an Alaska chainsaw mill, I could have gone right through the knots and hardly noticed them. My decision to hew the timbers for our addition is an indulgence, and from a certain narrow perspective, a little irresponsible. We could use the addition sooner rather than later, and I can’t really afford to take much more time off from work. From the point of view of our individual desires, that is our desires cut off from any consequences that our actions have on the world around us, my decision to build our addition slowly—using materials and techniques that will take at least twice as long rather than the fastest way I might have built it—is foolish. But from the ecological perspective, from the perspective of the forested land that sustains and supports us, I made the right, responsible decision, even if it means our personal desire for a larger house will be unmet for another half-year or year. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The truth is our desire for a larger house is relatively superficial. We have a house right now that does all the things a house needs to do: provides shelter from the elements, keeps us warm in winter, gives us a place to gather and be together in reliable comfort. By modern American standards it’s tiny for a family of four, only 500 square feet, and as I’ve mentioned it lacks indoor plumbing and has only a very modest amount of electricity. But it sits on eight acres of land and, most importantly, we actually own the house and land. So by the standards of most people in the world, and most people in history (history in the narrow sense where it refers to literate, agriculture-based societies), we are outrageously wealthy. We aren’t landless peasants, we aren’t slaves, we haven’t confused debt and wealth by taking on a huge mortgage. With the notable and important exception of indigenous people, those three categories encompass the large majority of people in the world today and in history. Our lives will be more comfortable with the addition, but the only way I can feel good about using resources to satisfy our wants, as opposed to our needs (which are already satisfied), is to build it with as much respect and care for the native ecology as I possibly can.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">If I went the other way, if I built the addition as quickly as possible with industrial materials—two-by-fours, plywood, sheetrock, asphalt shingles, manufactured windows, etc—my responsibility would end with my family’s personal desires. That limited responsibility is superficial and ultimately not responsible at all because it ignores two important facts: we live in a world that we are connected to at every moment, and that world has a future that I and my family will have to live in. Soon. To ignore those two crucial facts—that we belong to the world and that the world has a future—is a form of irresponsibility so large that it overwhelms my much smaller responsibility to do my best to satisfy my family’s desires. So large that it compromises and threatens the integrity of the world. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">If I choose to build with the industrial, standardized materials available at every building supply store in the United States rather than by hand with local materials, the building would be bland, anonymous, standardized. The materials would all come from places other than here, non-places that exist and have value only as links in a chain of industrial production. I could use stylistic tricks to make our addition look “nice,” even traditional, but those efforts would be nothing but skilled fakery. The nature of the work would be different too, as would the uses of my body and mind that the two ways of building require. Gone would be the very real, sensual connections among my brain, my body, the trees of our forest, and our addition. I <i>know</i> those timbers that I’ve hewn intimately, each one an individual whose grain and knot size and curve resulted in a slightly different experience of work. When I look at the biggest tie beam in the addition, that last log I hewed, I’ll remember it in my arms and shoulders and wrists as much as my mind. I’ll also remember its place in the forest and the combination of hard physical effort and pleasure that filled my days there. As they grow up my children will remember those experiences as well; they’ll become a part of who they are. For each timber I’ve hewn, my daughter has asked me where in the house it will go.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">There’s also the connection forged between the forest and our house. Our house is made of the forest, so our house <i>is</i> the forest. To help preserve the memory of this connection I only hew the timbers on two sides, leaving the logs “in the round” on two sides. The subtle curves that remain visible are another reminder that the timbers are trees, that each one is unique, and that they belong to <i>this</i> place. I suppose you can put a price on that, but I don’t care to. Both of our children were born in our house, and I would like it to belong to them or their children when we’re gone. Our house, our forest gardens, our land are so much a part of our lives and identities that they are as close to sacred space as we can imagine. Finally, I’m building our addition to the highest standard I am able to so that it becomes part of a process and ethic of conservation. My hope is that our house advertises that ethic by telling a story, as all works of culture do. It doesn’t shout, “Look at us, we’re rich.” It asserts simply, “We belong here.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The truth is, even though I make my living as a builder, I think it’s insane that we build as many houses as we do. A sane culture facing serious resource constraints—or a sane culture not facing those constraints—and having the technologies and knowledge to build new houses to last a couple centuries at least would do so as a matter of course. It might cost a little more for the first generation to build those houses—as did more than doubling the average size of an American house over the last 50 years—, but then the next seven generations at least would have quality homes and would only have to bear the cost of upkeep. When I tell this to carpenters they inevitably mention, if only jokingly, that if we build houses to last that long we’ll all be out of work. And if I mention it to most other people, including some prospective clients, as often as not they’ll say, “Oh I don’t care if it lasts that long, I’ll be dead.” </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Our economy encourages this kind of thinking, so only a few idealists really mind if things are built poorly and intended to be thrown away after a short while. In an economic system where the producers have a vested interest in things falling apart and the consumers don’t care if anything lasts longer than their own use of it, a conservation ethic doesn’t have much of a chance. And so we don’t have conservation. But please don’t tell me that the reason we don’t is because we have evil corporations or a corrupt government or criminals running our financial systems. All of these things may be true, but the corporations only exist to sell us what we demand, our government <i>is</i> representative, and only a vanishingly small minority of Americans were concerned about who was running the investment banks or mortgage shops when credit was cheap and all asset classes were going up in price year after year. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">When people with money <i>demand</i> that houses be built to last several centuries, then they will be. When people who buy food <i>demand</i> that it be grown as part of an intact native ecology, then it will be. And when we decide as a people that we satisfied our needs and reached <i>enough</i> many generations ago, then we will have a conservation ethic and a sustainable culture. Not before. In my darker moments I suspect that the nasty truth is that in this movie the good guys all died in the first act and the remaining scenes are just one long, grim denouement. If you’re waiting for a hero to ride in at the last moment and save the day, you’re going to have to put on the white hat yourself.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-84826049381243945652012-02-10T17:00:00.000-08:002012-02-10T17:00:53.980-08:00Working for the Land<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published April 10, 2011</i><br />
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April is the month that our daughter Clementine’s homeschooling group comes to our place, and so this past Thursday there were seven kids aged four to eight here for most of the day. It’s mostly a semi-organized play day, and they did what little kids do when they’re together outside: ran around making up games, explored things in the forest, played on the swing and big Mayan hammock, fussed and complained when they got tired or bored. Tanya was responsible for orchestrating their activities and maintaining relative peace and order. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I was content to be off in the forest for most of the time, hewing the last of the timbers for our addition. Over the course of the day, groups of two or three kids would come to see what I was up to. Almost all the families in our group heat with wood, so seeing one of the father’s swinging an ax was nothing special. Besides, what immediately grabbed their interest was the top of a felled tree that I had left lying on the ground so that it formed a long incline. They all turned it into an instant jungle gym, and I understood where that phrase comes from: like fires, another attraction hardwired into us from our deep past.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">As a culture, we’ve given up so many of the deep pleasures and satisfactions that shaped our lives for almost the entire course of human history: communal fires, climbing in trees, wandering through the forest, making by hand the things we really need to see us through a human life. Like shelter. Hand-hewing timbers for a house addition in the early twenty-first century is unusual, a determined, self-conscious departure from the norm. But as recently as the early nineteenth century hewing timbers and building a house by hand <i>was</i> the norm, at least here where we live.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Our village was chartered in 1762, the charter imposing a number of conditions on the first settlers: that they settle “sixty good Protestant Families, and build sixty Houses, none to be less than Eighteen Feet Square, and Seven Feet Stud; and clear and cultivate five acres of Land on each share fit for Tillage or Mowing; and that they build in each Township a suitable Meeting-house for the public worship of God, and Settle a Learned Protestant Minister...” The learned minister arrived in 1796, recently graduated from Harvard. He carried with him an ax, lime, and carpenter’s tools and promptly set about building his house from plans he had already drawn. The house still stands today, elegantly proportioned with a hipped roof—a little fancier than most of the farmer’s houses from that period when the coast of Maine was still a frontier.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I’ve done restoration work on some of these early houses. The framing and designs I’ve seen are workmanlike, competent, but nothing exceptional. The rafters, purlins, and floor joists were often unpeeled logs hewn flat on the upper side only to save time. These were farmer’s houses on a new frontier. But many of them are still here, more than two hundred years after they were first built. And if rain hasn’t gotten in to the wall or under the roof, the frames have another couple good centuries left. Any house that has a serviceable life that can be measured in centuries is by default an ecological solution to the problem of shelter. To put it in some perspective: today there are just over 10 square miles of forest with trees more than 200 years old in Maine, a state that encompasses 35,000 square miles and is 90% forested.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Despite the durability of their houses, the intent of the emigrants from Massachusetts who settled the coast here was anything but ecological. They considered it part of their divine mission to subdue and improve the land, to finish God’s work by clearing the wilderness (as the charter in fact demanded) and planting fields of grain and grass. These ideas have their roots in the middle ages, particularly in the reign of Charlemagne, but also in the monastic tradition, especially that of the Benedictine monks. Our own culture is more secular than Puritan Massachusetts in the eighteenth century, but we’ve taken up the imperative to subdue the land with a vengeance. We’ve subdued many of the species that inhabit the land right out of existence and we seem determined to finish the grim work of subduing them all until there’s not much left but the species we eat or find valuable for some other reason.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A couple items in the local papers in the past few weeks frame the issue nicely. Some of the state’s sport hunters have been calling for a more aggressive program of trapping and killing coyotes in the state, since they claim that the coyotes are responsible for a reduced deer population. I’ve been reading some of the hunters’ letters and editorials recently, and the kindest thing I can think of to say about them is that their ignorance of biology is no greater than their ignorance of history. Coyotes are predators, like wolves whose ecological niche they occupied after the wolves were exterminated in New England by farmers intent on protecting their livestock. They do eat deer, though studies of wolf predation and hunting success have shown almost no correlation between the presence of wolves and hunters’ success in killing deer. Knowledge of history confirms this. Early English settlers such as William Wood and John Josselyn wrote about the large number of wolves in New England. Yet the natives hunted deer as part of their seasonal subsistence food cycle. In other words they relied on killing deer for survival, not for sport. But there’s no record that they ever attempted to eliminate the wolves, or felt that it would benefit their hunting success. Maybe they were just confident in their abilities as hunters.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The other news item was an article about the most expensive home in Maine, which is being built one peninsula over. The article mentioned that the house would cost 30 million dollars, that it was 9,000 square feet, and that it would be the owner’s fourth house. Those facts offer an interesting glimpse into the ways we’ve chosen to arrange our economy, distribute wealth, and use the finite natural resources that are the only source of that wealth. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The first and most obvious fact about the house is that it is unnecessary. And so all the fossil energy burned, all the trees killed, all the cement poured, all the copper and iron mined, all the carbon released into the atmosphere, every single resource used is wasted. Some of it might be recovered at some future date, but most of it will not be. The house will create jobs, but the work is a waste because the end product has no reasonable value. In fact it has a negative value, since it will require ongoing resources to maintain it. The best it will do is satisfy one man’s, or one family’s, vanity and greed. But it won’t even do that, for it seems clear that by the time anyone gets to building their fourth house that neither their vanity nor greed can be satisfied. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">For the same amount of money, which means for the same amount of labor and resources, 150 modest houses could be built instead. These would employ the same carpenters and craftsmen, but in the useful and necessary work of building houses that are needed to provide shelter, rather than to advertise a multi-millionaire’s affluence, which is the first purpose of any vanity palace.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I don’t envy the owner of the most expensive house in Maine. I wouldn’t know what to do in one 9000-square-foot house, and I certainly wouldn’t want four. In fact I feel a little sorry for him, though my pity is tempered by disgust and anger at his own contempt for the planet and the future. But I feel sorry for him because he lives in at least four places, and so he doesn’t belong anywhere. Maybe he belongs to a computer screen, or a conference room, or a corporate jet. But his experience of the world is necessarily shallow. His experience of the world is of scenery, which is probably why he chose the coast of Maine for his fourth house—a pretty view for a few months of the year. He’s an exile with the means to spend a lot of time and energy shopping, no more, no less. If it weren’t for the damage he and others who share his values were doing to the world and to the things we care about, I wouldn’t bother to write about him at all; he’s null and void.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I don’t believe we’ll be able to change our basic economic relationships until we change the ways we get our food and shelter. And I don’t think we’ll be able to change those until we change the stories we tell about our place in the world. Our start here has been to see how much of our food we can get from the native forest ecology while at the same time working to restore that ecology, and to build and advocate for modest, durable houses designed to minimize demands for future resources. These are expressions of one basic idea: we belong to the land, we are part of a community of life, and our relations with that community are reciprocal. I’m optimistic: I don’t think it will take many people telling this story to change our culture. The roots of the stories we tell now—<i>everything belongs to us, I want more</i>—only grow in impoverished soil. I think they’re dying as I write. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">For thousands of years the native people who called this place home, the Wabanaki, believed that everything in the world—trees, rocks, sun, stars, animals—was imbued with a living spirit. <i>Manitou</i>, they called it. They didn’t believe you could own the land, only that you had a right to use it, and then only if you used it with reverence and respect. The land was sacred. They believed they held it in trust for their children and for their children’s children. How can our culture’s practices of exploitation, extraction and contempt for the people of the future compete with that idea? I don’t believe they can. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Further reading:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The information on deer and wolf predation is from Richard Nelson’s beautiful book <i>Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America</i>.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Michael Williams analyzes medieval European practices and theories of land clearing in <i>Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis</i>.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The essay “Turmoil on the Wabanaki Frontier, 1525-1678” by ethnohistorian Harald E.L. Prins in <i>Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present</i> gives a short description of <i>Manitou</i> and Wabanaki ideas about their relationship to the land.</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-85529601240188590302012-02-10T16:59:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:59:07.406-08:00Gardening on Forest Time<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published March 28, 2011</i><br />
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As suddenly as Spring appeared last week, it retreated this week; six inches of new slushy snow and a cold front that settled back over New England curtailed some of our early garden prep work. I went back into the forest to work under the big trees, hewing more timbers for our addition. Tanya focused on gathering maple sap and boiling it down to syrup over a wood fire outside. One of the fringe benefits of being a house carpenter is that I end up with a lot of wood scraps from each job. If the wood is oak or cherry or birch or some other hardwood I’ll use it to cook over, the hardwood smoke flavor adding depth and subtlety to the taste of the food. The softwoods, however, have resins that make them unsuitable for cooking over an open fire, and we usually burn those scraps as kindling in the woodstove or, this week, under a lidded maple sap pot where the smoke isn’t a concern. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The long stretch of days with temperatures rising a little over freezing during the day and then dropping back down below at night is making this a banner year for maple sap. Very different from last year, when the season ended almost as soon as it began. We’ve got ten taps going, and our preferred beverage for the past week has been sap straight from the tree. Our trees are red maples, which average only half the sugar content of sugar maple; the sap tastes like the purest water ever, with just enough hint of sweetness to make it a perfect spring elixir. It’s better than anything you can buy in a bottle—so good that we temporarily forgot all about the hard cider that we had bottled just two weeks ago.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Mornings this week were cold when I started, about 25 degrees. When I’m swinging an axe I wear only thin gloves so that I have better control, and my fingers were stinging with the cold the first day. The wind whistled through the tops of the trees, but down at ground level the air barely stirred, for which I was thankful. I find it challenging enough to balance on an eight-inch log and swing a heavy felling ax so that it bites into the wood just inches from my foot without 30-mph gusts of wind to contend with. Shelter from winds and storms of driving rain or snow are just one of the many benefits that forests provide.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Most of the logs I was hewing I had felled earlier in the winter, but there are a handful of trees that I still need to cut down, and I cut and hewed the first of those yesterday. This is the last pass thinning an area within sight of our house where we’d thinned once before five years ago. I’d left trees spaced about eight to ten feet after that cut, and in the time since they’ve taken advantage of the added space and available nutrients to put on a lot of new growth and are still crowded at their crowns. So even with cutting out all the timbers I need for our addition—about 30 trees in all—the canopy will still be about 75% closed. I’ve left the oldest trees—white pine, red spruce, northern cedar, and red maple—which I estimate to be from 50 to 75 years old. Forests here take 200 to 300 years to go through the stages of succession to reach old growth, and we’re helping the forest toward that goal by leaving the oldest healthy trees.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">While I worked at felling and hewing a red squirrel busied himself carrying seeds back and forth from an underground hollow at the base of a big red spruce to some other lair that I couldn’t make out. Chickadees were plentiful in the boughs too, flitting here and there, calling to each other across the forest. The sun is up early now, and even though the thermometer never hit 40 on the days I was working, by nine o’clock it was plenty warm enough for someone swinging an ax. The work went quickly and well, and I averaged about an hour and a half to cut each rafter on two faces. It’s days like these when time seems to stand still and I lose myself in the forest, not quite sure where the boundaries between me and the rest of life are, or if I gain anything by trying to make them out.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">When I first started thinning the forest here five years ago it was so choked with spindly balsam fir saplings that it was all but impossible to walk through. There was literally no place for us in the forest, and no place for anything to grow in the understory. Today this patch of forest is open and inviting and one of our favorite places to spend time. Clementine and Guthrie came to watch me work this morning, using the fallen tree as a balance beam before I started hewing, helping me snap chalk lines, replacing a chickenwire cage that had fallen over from the sapling it was protecting, and then going off to repair a fairy house they had made last year.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In these open spaces we’ve already planted new trees over the past several years—two chestnut hybrids, a northern pecan, a sugar maple, and a mulberry. These will become part of the canopy in the second half of this century, but even before then they’ll be providing nuts and berries for us and for the wildlife. In the sunnier openings we’ve filled in the understory too, and with this last pass of thinning, we’ll focus this season’s planting on filling in some of these new gaps. We’ll plant shrubs or small trees that bear fruits and nuts—native plums, serviceberries, hazelnuts and chinquapins. Over the next decade the harvest from this part of the forest will have almost completely changed from wood for heating and building and cooking to nuts and berries and tubers and vegetables for eating. And I expect that beyond that, as the open woodland structure and more abundant food attracts and supports larger populations of deer and turkey and hare that our harvest will expand yet again.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Gardening in the forest requires a much different approach than vegetable or landscape gardening. For one thing, the harvests are much more diverse, and can include wood for shelter, cooking, and heat; plant and animal food; and animal skins for clothing or leather. Unlike a vegetable garden or a flower garden or a field of wheat or corn, a forest garden can provide all the necessities of a human economy, especially at the small scale of a homestead or village. History confirms this. But to reap these harvests requires an economy that is in most of its features the opposite of the economy that we have now and that organizes our world. That is the economy of commodities, where the brute force of fossil-fuel powered machines—or of slaves, servants, and animals in an earlier, and perhaps future, age—is deployed to render the landscape a blank slate that can then be planted with one of a handful of cash crops. This commodity economy is an expression of hubris: in the modern English sense of arrogance, yes, but more definitively in the original Greek, where it means wanton violence. This describes precisely the relationship between an economy and a native ecology when commodities are the repositories of value. Hubris is an effect more than a state of mind, and it can be read in a landscape of overlogged forests, suburban lawns, corn fields, and parking lots.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">An economy of the forest as garden requires intimacy and understanding; hubris and the brute force it implies are useless. The Wabanaki who gardened this land for centuries before European settlement exemplify these levels of intimacy and understanding, and provide rich historical material to draw on in assaying the features of a modern forest garden economy. As I’ve written throughout these essays, the salient features of the forest are complexity and diversity. Gardening in the forest requires methods and actions calibrated to these qualities and to the forest’s own seasons, patterns, and rhythms. We remove wood from the forest, but slowly, incrementally, leaving the stands of trees dense enough to withstand windstorms and prevent soil erosion. We add new species of trees, shrubs, tubers, vines, and herbs, but mostly species already native to the forest, and in patterns already established by the native ecology.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A forest garden economy may ultimately be more productive than commodity economies—I don’t know, and I don’t think that is the criterion by which it should be judged. I’m sure it is more productive when we count the incidental benefits that forests provide, such as climate moderation, topsoil creation, erosion prevention, carbon sequestration, and many others. And the comparison becomes truly absurd when we add the long arc of creation: a movement toward greater degrees of ecological diversity and complexity exhibited over the whole history of life on earth. But some values escape measurement in dollars and cents: the pleasures of intimacy with a living community, the richness of experience that comes from inhabiting a landscape alive with meaning, the value of the diversity of life that is beyond human reckoning. These values can’t be quantified. They are the values central to native economies; monetary values are assigned to the living world by frontier speculators, and their insistence that all values can in fact be monetized demonstrates nothing but the poverty of their own vision. For the fact remains: there was no currency in North America north of Mexico until European settlement. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Scales of time are the other major difference between gardening in the forest and other kinds of gardening. Heraclitus famously wrote that you never step into the same river twice; the same is true of a forest. It changes with the seasons, it changes with the years and decades, and it changes with the centuries, following an arc longer than a single human lifetime. Forest gardening demands patience, but the rewards, slow to arrive though they may at first seem, exceed those of any other kind of gardening. In our first years here our harvests were almost exclusively wood, and that was obviously because our land was already forested. We planted our first fruit trees in the front yard the first spring after we arrived eight years ago. We had to wait four years until we picked the first cherry, five years until we tasted our first homegrown apple. But this year our forest gardens will produce more food than last year, and next year we can count on them producing still more than this. Each year the work we have to do to get that food shrinks, as the main jobs of mulching and composting are taken over by the maturing trees and other plants we grow for those specific purposes. In other words, the energy returned over energy invested increases every year, at least for the next couple of decades.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But this week we’ve been feasting on the last of the bear meat, gathering mussels again from the ocean, and digging the jerusalem artichoke bulbs that are the first garden harvest of the year. We have a big patch of these last at the sunny edge of the forest, and they produce an incredible amount of food with no effort at all at a time of year when the first new growth is still a month away. Their one supposed drawback as a garden plant is that they are so vigorous they are hard to eradicate, though I can’t write from experience since we’ve never tried to get rid of them. We have ours surrounded by a seasonal frog pond, our tool shed, and the forest, but since they’re native to here we wouldn’t worry much about them spreading anyway. In any case, I can’t quite follow the logic that declares a plant that is native, vigorous, pest free, beautiful and produces lots of food a problem.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Note: These blog posts will probably be more sporadic for the next month. I need to spend some time working on the book for which these essays serve as raw material, and with my other commitments I don’t think I’ll be able to post every week. Thanks for reading.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Further Reading:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Two books on the economy and ecology and forests in North America are well worth reading: <i>Americans and Their Forests</i> by Michael Williams is a comprehensive historical treatment and <i>New England Natives</i> by Sheila Connor is a beautifully written and illustrated account of the myriad relationships between people and trees over the centuries here in the northeastern corner of the country.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">One more: I thoroughly enjoyed <i>Notes on a Lost Flute: A Field Guide to the Wabanaki</i> by Kerry Hardy. It is the work of an amateur in the best sense of that word: passionate, personal, and engaging, even when it wanders to dark places on the map a professional historian or ethnographer would avoid.</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-54708453565782929282012-02-10T16:57:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:57:58.173-08:00An Ecology of Building: Making a House in a World without Frontiers<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica;"><i>Originally published March 21, 2011</i></span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica;"><img alt="Pasted Graphic 1.tiff" src="webkit-fake-url://A8E8E75E-751E-43D3-8BD1-14ABBC204BB4/Pasted%20Graphic%201.tiff" /></span>Suddenly, it’s Spring. The temperatures have climbed sharply in the last week, the snowstorms have turned to rainstorms, and the four feet of snow that lay on the ground just a couple of weeks ago is now mostly gone. The maple sap started running only a week ago and then yesterday the temperature almost reached 60. Some of the sap we’re boiling down to syrup, some we drink straight from the tree. Yesterday we made a trip to the ocean to gather a truckload of seaweed and put it around our fruit and nut trees as a compost/mulch. Today we dug jerusalem artichokes, pruned the grapevines, and deer-proofed some of our plantings. Tomorrow we’ll go back to the ocean to gather mussels for the first time since Fall and have a wild foods feast to celebrate the first day of the year that is as long as the night. Our lives here are closely tied to the rhythms of the seasons, and this is the week we left the sung—sometimes too snug—winter harbor of our small house and moved our lives back outside.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Until the twentieth century these seasonal rounds were the norm; it was only with the advent of fossil fuels, the industrial economy, and electricity that we’ve come to spend most or all of our time in artificial, climate-controlled environments unrelated to the world outside. It’s easy to forget, from the insistent perspective of now, for just what a tiny sliver of time those conditions have prevailed. The assumption for most people, I think, is that they are normal, and therefore permanent. Only in the last few years, as oil prices skyrocketed, have even a significant minority of people begun to wonder if perhaps “normal” isn’t resting on a shakier foundation than they had supposed. Here in Maine, where 8 in 10 homes are heated with oil and winters are <i>cold</i>, a rise in the price of oil is doubly painful: at the gas pump and for half the year in the home. And an actual prolonged interruption in the supply of oil—I don’t think anyone at any level of our society is psychologically or politically prepared to come to terms with the implications of that.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The major part of creating an economy based on ecological complexity, and the heart of what I mean by an ecology of home, consists of embracing these seasonal rhythms, and the landscape and native ecology they create, rather than relying on massive inputs of energy and complex technologies to impose an artificial order on the landscape and to wall ourselves off from the wild green world. The differences in the habits of thought and culture that each approach requires are profound. It is the difference between the frontier speculator on the one hand and the native on the other, between an ideology of ownership and one of belonging, between hubris and proportion. In this post I want to sketch the relationship between economy and ecology where they come together to form the walls and roofs that shelter us. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">For most of history in all parts of the world, people built houses with the materials at hand, mostly wood, stone, earth, and fiber. These traditions expressed themselves in Maine in the wigwam, the log cabin, and the timberframed house. The wigwam, built from poles and bark or woven mats, was temporary and portable. The log cabin, usually the first house built by frontier settlers, was temporary and fixed. The framed house, which most often followed the log cabin by about seven years, was permanent, fixed, and a store of value. Each was technologically simple and easy to build, but ingenious in the ways they used the most abundant local resource, wood, to provide snug shelter against the elements and extremes of climate.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I build timberframes, and I’m partial to that tradition. Its advantages are many: it requires only adequate timbers and a small number of forged tools; it allows for the creation of buildings of great strength and durability; it uses a renewable resource and should therefore encourage care for our forests; the body of knowledge that governs its deployment is large and easily accessible; it requires work that is skilled, enjoyable, and permits a sense of accomplishment and aesthetic expression; and as a technology it has already proven itself over a thousand-year history in the West and across a vast range of economic and cultural conditions. For these reasons, I think the “problem” of building a house in a way that doesn’t offend or degrade the local native ecology has already been solved, at least in terms of the technology.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The other obstacles are cultural; they are results of the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, and these shouldn’t be discounted. In fact, I think they are the most pernicious obstacles we face. I can think of plenty of timberframed vanity palaces plunked down in some remote scenic locale to satisfy some billionaire’s notions of rugged individualism for the few weeks of the year when the house is actually used. I even have a book or two on my shelves that celebrate these monstrosities. They embody the frontier mentality that is systematically using up the world’s resources and waging war on the world’s ecologies. As a builder, I’m interested in a very different kind of work. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I call this approach an ecology of building and below is the set of principles that informs our practice of building houses. But it is also an attempt to align that large chunk of our economy and material culture with a story about the world where we are only one part of the ecology and use its other elements with reverence and respect. In this story, making a house is a vital first step and a major part of becoming native to a place.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Build houses to last centuries, not decades.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">All human cultures build one of two kinds of houses—temporary or permanent. Our culture builds permanent ones—sort of. Actually most of what we build isn’t designed to last more than 50 or 75 years. This needs to change. We’ve had the technology to build houses that last 500 years since about the 12<sup>th</sup> century. Building a new house requires very large amounts of energy and material, so we should design them to last as long as possible. The best way to do that is to get them up off the ground on a solid foundation, use wide overhangs to protect the walls, windows, and doors from the elements, and make sure the house is usable regardless of future levels of technological complexity.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Use local, natural materials, mostly wood, stone, earth, and straw.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This is how houses were built for almost all of human history, and it is how they will be built once again after we’ve burned through the allotment of fossil fuels that has allowed us to depart from this norm in the first place. Because we live in a forest ecology, we use mostly wood: timbers for the frame, boards for sheathing, shingles or clapboards for the exterior finish, cellulose for insulation, lath to support the plaster, milled wood for the windows and doors. The foundation is stone, as is the roof and some of the floor if we use slate. Earth and straw we use for the plaster and floor. We’ve eliminated most industrial products from our buildings, including cement, plywood, and sheetrock.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Build for deep beauty in the structure, materials, and craftsmanship.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We think buildings should be enchanting, and although we build with a strong ecological consciousness, our first test for whether a building is successful is that it has to make people smile when they first walk inside. Especially kids. Since the beauty is mostly in the materials, and since the materials are natural, the beauty is subdued and hopefully timeless. And we think that is the key to durability, because if people love the building, they will be more likely to take care of it.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Build small.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Our houses are habitats, they shelter and enclose us like nests. Small houses cost less to build, to heat, and to maintain than large ones do. They’re better suited to people who like one another and who enjoy each other’s company. They help us overcome the toxic notion that everything in the world belongs to us and that <i>more</i> is the only goal worth pursuing.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Rely on local skills and creativity instead of energy-intensive industrial processes. </b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The abilities and knowledge necessary to cut timber frames, to plaster walls, to work with slate or tile, to build windows and doors, are accessible to most people. These are skills, however, and each takes a certain amount of time and commitment and study to acquire. Each requires first an understanding of the raw materials, and then sufficient practice to assimilate those skills in the hands, eyes, and muscles. In this they are very different from the do-it-yourself world of the big-box home improvement centers, which relies on standardized, industrialized components designed to permit assembly without skill or much knowledge. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Make buildings easy to maintain and alter using traditional tools and skills.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Building a house to last centuries means making certain guesses about the future. When I see the technologically complex buildings being sold as solutions to energy efficiency or sustainability, my first thoughts are always: How will the components be repaired or replaced in twenty or thirty or forty years? Who will work on the geothermal ground pump? Who will replace the triple-glazed windows when the seals on the insulated glass fail, as they inevitably do? What will be done with the structural insulated panels when the strand-board sheathing part has rotted due to water damage? Will SIPs or the tools to work with them still be available? </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Except for the mechanical systems, which are separate from the building itself, a 15<sup>th</sup>-century carpenter would have no trouble working on one of our houses. Only the wide wall and roof cavities filled with insulation would be new to him.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Honor the landscape and local ecology.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Our houses are part of a partnership with the land. The materials come from it, the durability and energy efficiency of the houses are meant to minimize future needs for additional resources, the continuum between human habitat and native ecology is meant to be unbroken. In the end, waging war with the landscape is a losing proposition. Like it or not, we are part of an ecology. Cultures that rely on the strength of those connections are strong; cultures that sever them suffer or, in extreme cases, disappear.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Minimize heating and cooling costs with passive solar design, thermal mass, and super-insulated walls and ceilings.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We use a lot of insulation in our buildings, with the result that they require little energy to heat. Our first strategy is passive: orient the building to the south, put most of the glazing there, and then use lots of thermal mass inside to store that heat. Only the extra insulation adds any cost to the building, and that is paid back in the first couple of years that the house is lived in. My goal is that each house should require no more than one to two cords of wood to heat each year. It’s possible to get heating requirements even lower than that, but I think the law of diminishing returns comes into play here, as does the law of unintended consequences. Prophecy is risky business, but my best guess for the future is that we’ll be cooking with wood again before the century is over, and I’d like my buildings to be usable if that comes to pass. If not, a modest change in the windows and doors would cut the heating requirement probably in half, the tradeoff being that a mechanical ventilation system would then be required. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Draw designs from vernacular traditions.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Vernacular designs embody a lot of intelligence about what works in a region, and because they evolved when buildings were made from local materials and assembled with mostly human energy, they are hard to improve upon. Because of that, vernacular traditions change slowly, and over time specific building types have become as much a signature of different landscapes as the native flora and fauna. Think of Swiss chalets, Cotswold cottages, or the low-pitched, clay-tiled farmhouses of Provence and Tuscany. That said, we’ve repaired enough rotten sills, tie beams, and window framing on old farmhouses to know that the New England vernacular would have greatly benefited from the protection afforded by much wider overhangs, and so we like to design with the widest overhangs possible.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Create a healthy, safe, non-toxic living space.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">With today’s tighter houses, it’s more important than ever to eliminate toxic chemicals and VOCs. We use natural materials and finishes, and the only VOC in any of them is a very small amount in the citrus thinner that is used in some of the oils and resins we use to finish wood and our poured adobe floors.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><b>Waste nothing.</b></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Because we use so few industrial products, there’s almost no waste at our job sites. We don’t need a dumpster, and trips to the waste station are rare. Leftover wood goes into the wood stove, stone is saved, metal is recycled, straw is used as mulch, and earth—well, that goes back to the earth. The same will be true at the end of the building’s life: almost everything in our buildings is either biodegradable or recyclable. We’re leaving the people of the future enough toxic waste as it is. I think it would be nice if our houses didn’t unnecessarily add to the waste stream.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The first question most people ask is: So how much does it cost? The answer: No more than a conventional custom house. In fact we’re at the low end of that spectrum, although at the high end there’s so much waste and vanity and ostentatious display that housebuilding is little more than an exercise in burning up resources to satisfy shallow impulses. As I said, the biggest obstacles to integrating an economy with an ecology are cultural; but an economy is no more or less than what we choose to spend our money and labor on, and a culture is no more than the stories we tell about the world and our place in it. The houses we build are the major part of our effort to change both.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">No discussion of building in vernacular traditions is complete without mention of one of the great books of the twentieth century, Christopher Alexander’s <i>A Pattern Language</i>. Some of the patterns I use in every single building project I undertake.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The relatively new, three-volume <i>Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America</i> by James D. Kornwolf is a comprehensive and invaluable resource. It would keep any serious student of early American building traditions busy for years.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Native American Architecture</i> by Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton is an excellent, amply-illustrated, continent-wide study of the many various native building traditions.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-55486381424529514992012-02-10T16:56:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:56:41.037-08:00When Technological Complexity Comes Home<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published March 13, 2011</i><br />
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As I write this the unintended negative consequences of technological complexity are being writ large in headlines from Japan as the world holds its collective breath waiting to see how much radioactive material might be released from several nuclear reactors in the midst of or on the verge of meltdown. There are few technologies more complex than a nuclear reactor; there are also probably not any on the planet with more built-in safeguards and precautionary redundancies, since the consequences of failure are so well known and are horrific on a scale and timeline that no other technology can match.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">As our technologies have gotten more complex and grown in size, the scale of the problems when failures occur have grown in step. Even when technological complexity works according to plan, the scale of ecological and environmental devastation can be unprecedented, as mountain-top removal in southern Appalachia, the tar sands of Alberta, and the vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico remind us daily. It is no coincidence that the destruction of species and ecosystems has reached an epochal level at the same time.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But our culture’s ruling ideology, the story we tell ourselves as we confront each of these problems, is that we’re in control, we need just a little more technical competence, slightly better technologies, a little more time, and we can fix all the problems, and have a bright, clean, green, energy-efficient future of universal affluence. Don’t worry, the engineers and technologists reassure us, we are as gods, we are so close to omniscience that we can reach out and—almost, almost—touch it. We can control nature, orchestrate reality, organize the world.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">No. The story is false. Its basic premises are wrong. No one is in control. Central intelligence, as we’ve known all along, is an oxymoron. The levees fail, reactors melt down, machines wear out, streams and rivers and oceans are poisoned, the climate is altered, a new extinction epoch commences. The unintended consequences gather and lives—human, animal, plant, insect—are shattered. These are today’s failures; tomorrow’s will be different, but equally unanticipated. The technologists and engineers are specialists, educated and paid, often quite well, to innovate discrete solutions to discrete problems. The problem isn’t the inadequacy of their knowledge, the sincerity of their efforts, or the lack of the right technologies. The problem is that there are no discrete problems and no discrete solutions. There’s no discrete anything. There is only a universe of relationships, infinite in number and complex beyond belief or understanding or control. The individual, the species, even the culture or the ecosystem—these are useful fictions that make the world easy to describe and make sense of. But the edges of each are so jagged that none stands up to hard scrutiny. And it is at the edges, where one thing rubs up against another, that definitions are formed and knowledge comes into being.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Failure is the most salient feature of technological complexity. It is as inevitable as the sunset that ends each day. Resilience and stability, on the other hand, are the salient features of ecological complexity. The reason for the difference is that an ecology is organic; it’s alive and therefore adapts. It adapts one plant, one insect, one animal, one fungus at a time, each changing subtly over the generations (and perhaps even within a generation) in response to a dynamic world. The result is an accumulated intelligence that is dispersed throughout the entire ecology. There is no point of control, no central intelligence. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The problems of a homestead economy are relatively simple: food, shelter, energy, clothing. As people always have, we rely on both ecology and technology to solve these problems, but as I wrote last week, we look first to the complexity of the native forest ecology and the lowest level of technological complexity available. In this we are simply following a conservative, commonsense strategy. For this is the combination that has worked in most places and most cultures for most of the human story. I’ve already begun to sketch the implications of this for food, and I want now to shift the focus to shelter, which after food is the largest item in a homestead economy.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Among most of the more progressive members of our culture, a rough consensus has emerged that the most pressing problems we face as a society are peak oil and climate change. The houses we live in, which require a lot of energy to build and then even more to heat and cool, are major contributors to both of these problems. So a lot of the thinking about houses right now is about how to retrofit existing ones or design new ones to make them a part of the solution to these problems. As a builder and a member of that progressive community, I think this is a good thing. But if we approach the problem like a technician, that is if we treat a house as a discrete entity and energy efficiency or conservation as a discrete problem with a discrete solution, we’ll almost certainly be hijacked by unintended consequences. In fact I’m cheating here, because we’ve already been down this path once, during the energy crisis of the late ‘70s, and the unintended consequences that resulted are a matter of record.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Asthma rates in the United States declined steadily from 1960 to 1979 (if you click on the link scroll to charts 9 and 10), due I think to a decrease in smoking rates and the beginning of the exodus of the industrial economy and its polluting factories for other countries. But in the 1970s the downward trend slowed and then reversed, quite sharply in fact, and after a one-year jump of about 40% in 1979 asthma rates began a steady increase that has continued to the present. What happened in the 1970s was the first energy crisis, and one of the solutions to that crisis: the beginnings of the airtight house. Americans were told to seal their houses tight against air infiltration as the best way to keep heat in and so reduce the amount of oil burned. The solution worked, just as any engineer or amateur physicist could have told you it would. But the solution was only designed to solve a single problem and therefore ignored the fact that a house is more than a mechanism for heat conservation. Its primary purpose is to shelter human beings, who have certain needs, among them a regular supply of fresh air. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">There are several ways to get fresh air into a house. One is through open windows and opening doors as people come and go. Another is through leaks in the building envelope. And the last is through mechanical ventilation systems. The problem in the 70s was that since houses had never before been built to be airtight, indoor air quality wasn’t seen as a problem, and builders had no reason to add the extra expense of mechanical ventilation. As airtight houses became more of a standard—a very haphazard standard however, since efforts at energy conservation in the 70s were mostly reversed in the 80s—mechanical ventilation systems became somewhat more common, though by no means ubiquitous (those asthma rates are still rising). The Passive House, a new design standard which has generated a lot of excitement recently among advocates of energy efficiency, carbon neutrality, and zero-net-energy buildings, mandates a very low level of air infiltration, making mechanical ventilation an absolute necessity.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">An airtight house then is a technologically complex solution to building or retrofitting houses in a world of expensive and environmentally destructive fossil fuels. A few of the unintended consequences that such a building might create in the future can be guessed by uncovering the assumptions embedded in the house’s design and components. First, this level of complexity assumes that electricity will always be available, and without prolonged interruption. Without the ventilation system, you would have to open the windows to be able to breathe fresh air no matter what the temperature outside. Second, since the building is designed to be heated passively, it assumes that cooking will never generate a significant amount of heat. This is the norm today, with gas and electric ranges and ovens that don’t produce a lot of ambient heat, but it is a departure from most of history, when cooking was done with wood. Third, replacements and/or maintenance for the technologically complex components, such as the windows and ventilation system, will always be available. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In short, the designers and promoters of the Passive House assume that the future will be more or less like the present, only with cleaner, greener, better technologies. Maybe. But a good case can also be made, based on present evidence and history, that the conditions that came together one time to make our technologically complex, industrial civilization possible are ephemeral, and that the not-so-far-off future will more closely resemble the eighth or eighteenth centuries than the early twenty-first. In that scenario, the Passive House becomes an over-designed solution to a set of circumstances that will exist only as a memory, and its usefulness as shelter will depend on its occupants’ tolerance for stale, unhealthy air or cold drafts from open windows.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Passive House is an engineer’s house, and it didn’t surprise me to learn that it originated with the ideas of Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute. It’s been years since I’ve read his work, but I never found his arguments about technology and the future very compelling. He’s a techno-utopian, convinced that in the future we’ll all drive hyper cars that get 100 miles to the gallon and live and work in buildings that generate more energy than they use. I don’t think that’s the most likely scenario for the future, nor do I think it’s even desirable, for reasons I’ve made clear above and in last week’s post. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We live in uncertain times. The blueprint of the future is blurry at best, illegible at worst, and I prefer to design and build houses that will be useful across the whole range of possible circumstances that might prevail at the end of this century than to pursue a perfect, but fragile standard of zero-energy use. The best way to do this is to build houses as part of an ecology, rather than as a complex technological solution to a set of technical problems. Passive solar and energy conservation are great strategies that should be at the heart of every residential building. They are essentially ecological strategies that can be implemented with a very low level of technology. I stop short of committing to building for a world that must necessarily be all but identical to the one we live in today. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Next week I’ll discuss in detail the ecology of building I rely on for new construction. In the meantime there are all those leaky, inadequately insulated houses burning through our diminishing supplies of fossil fuels. It’s unfortunate that we’ve dotted the landscape with houses designed and built for a make-believe world where energy supplies are infinite and another frontier always awaits just over the next horizon. There are a few things we can do to adapt them to the real world that has rudely arrived on our doorsteps, but I’m afraid there are no simple, cheap and easy solutions to the problems posed by houses designed for a world that no longer exists.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">So: what should you do if you already have a house and want to use less energy to heat it? First, use passive, ecological solutions. Turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater, thermal underwear and/or a hat. The human body has evolved to quickly adapt to a wide range of temperatures, and for the vast majority of history people lived at or close to the outdoor temperature. Put heavy or insulated curtains on the windows. If there are four or more people living in the house, go ahead and seal it up, even if it doesn’t have mechanical ventilation. Studies have shown that with four people coming and going, enough air is exchanged through the doors to supply adequate fresh air. With fewer than four people you want to be careful how tight you make it, unless you’re going to install a mechanical ventilation system. No matter how airtight your house, it’s also a good idea to minimize toxic substances and VOCs, which are common in everything from carpeting to furniture to kitchen cabinets to paints, stains, and oils. Use natural materials and buy no- or low-VOC products whenever possible.</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-43834320485317624092012-02-10T16:52:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:52:49.891-08:00Good Complexity, Bad Complexity<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published March 6, 2011</i><br />
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It’s been a season of mechanical breakdowns here this winter. The batteries for our solar PV system started acting up this past Fall, and the condition has steadily deteriorated so that now they’re only holding a charge for about a day. Off-grid systems like ours are sized to provide five days of charge without sun in winter, so this is a drop in capacity of 80%—pretty dramatic. We’ve lived with solar for eight years; the golf cart batteries we started off with lasted the full five years they were designed for. So I figured for our next set we were ready for the newer, more powerful, and better batteries that are supposed to last twelve years. They’re now three years old. Then a month ago our laptop suddenly stopped working. The computer tech I took it to was able to save our data, but he said the laptop was beyond repair. I bought another used one on e-bay. Two days ago the 4-wheel drive on my truck stopped working while I was driving up the driveway of a client to deliver a door.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A solar PV system, a computer, and a truck are all complex systems. As technological systems grow in complexity, the opportunities for failure of the whole system increase. I don’t know which component of the computer failed, but when it did the computer stopped being a computer and became a waste disposal problem. When the batteries of the solar PV system lost 80% of their effectiveness, the entire system lost its effectiveness by an almost equal amount—it still works at 100% only when the sun is shining. The truck runs, but with ice and snow still on back roads, it is useless going up hills and dangerous going down them or around curves. Both the truck and solar PV system will require an input of additional resources to fix. This is true of technological complexity generally. It solves a problem, but only at the cost of ongoing inputs of resources and energy. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Complex technologies also have the additional problem of unintended consequences. The automobile, one of the most pervasive and probably the most transformative technology of the twentieth century, provides a dramatic example. For while it solved the “problem” of personal transportation over large distances, the additional problems it has left in its wake are legion and in most cases intractable: automobiles have devastated landscapes; resulted in 40,000 American deaths on average every year for the past forty years; require in total more oil than the country has had available domestically since the 1970s; require an infrastructure of roads and highways that costs billions of dollars every year to maintain; have contributed more than any other single factor to global warming; and require an ongoing program of mining and drilling that must continue forever or until we are forced by the inevitable resource depletion to abandon the project altogether.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In the past couple of posts I’ve written about complexity and diversity as positive features of ecologies, pointing to the increase in both over the history of life from its beginnings to the present as evidence of progress and an increase in stability and resilience. This is the complexity that is seen in native ecologies such as forests and grasslands, and in organisms such as dragonflies, whales, porcupines, and us. Life began as very simple ecosystems of single-cell organisms, and over the course of four billion years evolved into the complex, diverse forms and ecologies that make up the living world we have today. This then is good complexity, complexity that works. It is the result of millions of years of adaptation and evolution.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">An example: In the twentieth century a blight killed all the chestnut trees in the eastern forest of North America. This was one of the most common (and most useful to people and animals) trees in the forest, in some places making up 50% of the forest canopy. When the chestnuts died, ripples were felt throughout the forest, but the forest itself was never in danger. Other species moved in to fill the gaps left by the chestnuts, and today a casual observer unaware of the missing chestnuts would have no way of knowing that a key species had vanished from the ecology. Other species eradicated from the eastern forest since European settlement include mountain lions, wolves, caribou, elk, bison (which ranged as far east as Massachusetts in the 17<sup>th</sup> century), passenger pigeons, and Carolina parakeets, to name just some of the larger, more charismatic losses. Yet the forest endures, impoverished, but still with enough resilience to regenerate itself year after year.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The other side of the complexity coin is simplicity, and it works in exactly the way you would think. Simple ecologies are prone to failure and therefore require ongoing external inputs to be maintained. As simple ecologies in nature are rare exceptions to the rule of complex ones, they are most often human creations—fields of wheat, corn, cotton, soy, plantations of pine, spruce, etc. Simple technologies, on the other hand, are less prone to failure than complex ones and require fewer resources to maintain. A knife blade will dull, a ceramic pot may break, but the cost of fixing these problems is small. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">So why don’t societies solve problems using ecological complexity and technological simplicity? They did. Hunter-gatherer societies relied almost entirely on ecological complexity to acquire their food, shelter and energy. It is well known among archaeologists and paleoanthropologists that hunter-gatherers ate a far more varied and nutrient-rich diet than did early agricultural people. The evidence on this is by now unambiguous. The results of this solution to the problem of food are also unambiguous: as an average, hunter-gatherers were taller, lived longer, and were less prone to disease, malnutrition, cavities, and starvation than early farmers. To achieve this they also worked fewer hours per week than farmers. Our own cartoon version of the human story—that life before the comforts and conveniences of civilization was “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Thomas Hobbes pithy formulation—still prevails among those committed to a story of human progress from primitive to advanced regardless of any evidence. In fact the opposite more closely fits the facts. As Jared Diamond put it in his provocatively titled essay, <i>The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race</i>, “Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Why then don’t complex agricultural societies, or the even more complex civilizations that they sometimes evolve into, rely on ecological complexity to solve problems? Because by their very nature they are committed to ecological simplicity. Their size, population density and social complexity are in most places the result of grain monocultures. Over time they evolve stories, myths, rituals, and religions centered on their life-giving grains, whether wheat, corn, or rice. The grains become money and the money supports the elites who tell the stories, organize the rituals, and celebrate the religions. Economics is the story of extremely simplified ecologies. Those fields of grain are so compelling not because they work better than other options, but because they pay better. The shortest economic history of the world can be written in twelve words: wheat, corn, rice, cattle, copper, tin, iron, gold, silver, coal, oil, gas. An unabridged version might include another twenty or so words—barley, millet, potatoes, sheep, horses, etc—but here are the main commodities that the major civilizations of the world have been built on. Our own civilization, global in extent and technologically complex almost beyond belief—depends more or less on all of them. I only intentionally left out wood, probably the most important natural resource of all, because it has been central to virtually all human societies going back well before the evolution of <i>Homo sapiens</i>. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Once a society commits to ecological simplicity, once it sacrifices its native ecology for fields of grain, technological complexity becomes the only available solution to the problems of food, shelter, and energy—problems that are most often exacerbated by the move away from ecological complexity itself. In most places today grain monocultures are kept from failure by the addition of fossil-fuel derived pesticides and fertilizers. (If you wanted to design a food system vulnerable to disruption or collapse, it would be hard to do better than a combination of ecological simplicity and technological complexity). More often than not, the technologies developed, such as military and maritime technologies in ancient societies and mining and drilling technologies in modern ones, have been used to solve the ongoing need for food, shelter, and energy by expanding into, controlling, and exploiting frontiers. Our particular problem at this moment in history is that there are no more frontiers available to exploit.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The different effects of ecological complexity on the one hand and technological complexity on the other can be seen by comparing North America in 1491 and 2011. With over 400 distinct languages and tribal groups with economies organized around very diverse ecologies, the societies of North America in 1491 were ecologically complex but technologically simple. They were resilient and durable as a whole, and a collapse of one, Cahokia say, had no impact at all on most of the others. The societies of North America today, on the other hand, are dazzling in their technological complexity, but very simple ecologically, with only three languages and a single economic system dominating the entire continent. To the extent that the economy has reduced the continent’s native complex ecologies to a very few essential commodities—oil, coal, gas, corn, wheat—it is vulnerable to continent-wide systemic collapse should any of them become unavailable or fail. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In building a homestead economy we’ve put most of our time, energy, and resources into solving our need for food, shelter, and energy by relying on ecological complexity. At the same time we’ve tried to minimize our investment in technological complexity, using it where necessary to function in our society and in the broader economy, but understanding that these systems are resource sinks and are vulnerable to failure. I’ve taken the same approach in my business of designing and building houses: use the complexity inherent in the native forest ecology to solve problems wherever possible, and use technological complexity sparingly and with the understanding that it is prone to ongoing issues of maintenance, repair, and failure.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Peter Matthiessen’s first book <i>Wildlife in America</i> is both an informative work of natural history and a moving elegy to the losses to North America’s native fauna since European settlement. It includes a chapter on the eastern forest.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Diamond’s essay, quoted above and written in 1987, was I think the first popular account to suggest that the lives of hunter-gatherers were superior in most respects to early farmers. He covers similar material in more depth in his best-selling, Pulitzer-prize winning book <i>Guns, Germs and Steel</i>. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature</i> by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is an ambitious, intentionally provocative history that places the large civilizations that grew up around the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze river valleys and occupy center stage in most world histories into a much broader context of people interacting with various environments in various ways in all corners of the world. Like Diamond, he too rejects the progressivist view of history, writing, “history has no course; nothing is inevitable, and progress, in general, is still awaited.”</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-45181727630219705892012-02-10T16:51:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:51:45.392-08:00The Backyard Frontier<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published February 27, 2011</i><br />
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As most people who follow energy issues or peak oil closely are well aware, the International Energy Agency declared that global production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2006 and was unlikely to ever return to those levels. This then represents the end of the historical epoch I have chosen to call the Age of Frontiers, which we can date from 1492 to 2006. Although there are still other, smaller frontiers that will continue to be exploited, none is large enough or expanding quickly enough to offset the effects of the closing of the oil frontier. We are in a new age now, one for which we don’t have a map or blueprint, and for which the assumptions about how the world works that we have taken for granted all our lives will be inadequate. With the end of the Age of Frontiers the changes in the years and decades and centuries ahead will likely be as dramatic and wrenching and unanticipated—although different and more compressed—as the changes of the last 514 years.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">History is written at the level of cultures or states or continents or even sometimes of the entire planet, but it is lived at the level of the individual. Each of us in the Americas lives on land that was once a frontier in the economic juggernaut that formed and then swept around the world over the past 500 years. Our home here on the coast of Maine was a part of that frontier in the 17<sup>th</sup> to 19<sup>th</sup> centuries. The commodities it offered were wood and pasturage and then wood again. In the years since, the land has been used and abused, the native ecology broken and sold off in parts. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The story of your land is different in the details, but similar in overall pattern, no matter where in North America you live. In the cities the finely wrought web of relationships worked out over millions of years of adaptation and selection has been paved over and all but eradicated. In the suburbs the ecology has been simplified to varying degrees, with useless monocultures of non-native grass interrupted by scattered trees, foundation plantings, and flower beds the norm. On the farms the same process of simplification has taken place, with the few commodity food plants and animals that speculators find most easily saleable replacing native prairies or forests.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But I don’t intend to turn this entry into an extended song of loss. I want instead to explore the opportunities offered by these degraded landscapes. For as global frontiers close, three consequences will result—are already underway in fact. First, economies will shrink. Second, necessity will force us all to conserve resources as a matter of habit. Third, many of us will turn to internal frontiers, which offer resources too small and dispersed to be of interest to the global economy and frontier speculators, but which can form the backbone of a resuscitation of homestead economies.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The frontier that occupies most of our own time and attention is the one that begins at our front door. Our mostly forested property was last logged in the mid-70s, and at least several times prior to that. When we bought it, it exhibited all the signs of having been integrated into the cold logic of a commodity economy: a severe reduction of biodiversity, too many diseased and dead trees for its young age, a lack of structural and habitat diversity. No one had loved it or woven their lives into its rich tapestry or enchanted themselves with stories about its magic for several centuries. From the time it entered the frontier economy, it was economically useful, no more, no less. Except for the specific details, the story of your land, the place you call home, is probably not that different.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In last week’s post I established the increase in diversity and complexity over the whole history of life on earth as the first principle that structures our understanding of the world and guides our actions. The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson calls this trend an undeniable form of progress. I have come to think of it as the meaning and purpose of life. I already had this in mind when we moved here eight years ago, but I hadn’t worked out its full ramifications. I still haven’t, and expect that it will be a process that will occupy a part of my thinking for the rest of my life, but I’m further along now than I was then. One conclusion seems obvious: since the record shows beyond any doubt that diversity and complexity are features of resilient, durable ecologies, to the extent that we can integrate our homestead economy (and the broader economy) into that diversity and complexity, it too will be resilient and durable.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">From our first year here we’ve used techniques from permaculture and forest gardening to create diverse guilds of layered plantings, and we also put in a more or less conventional vegetable garden. As I’ve described previously, we created habitats for small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. But our understanding of diversity was limited, and we were thinking only in terms of the diversity of plants and animals. But as I did what research was possible—ecology is still a very young field, and the gaps in knowledge are enormous—I realized that it isn’t possible to create an ecosystem anywhere near as diverse as a native one, even if it mimics it in structure and emphasizes a diversity of plant species and wildlife habitats. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The reason is that native species are already integrated into a network of species, particularly among insects, that are simply not able to make use of alien species in the same way. I owe this insight to the original research of Douglas W. Tallamy and the other primary research he has collected in his outstanding book <i>Bringing Nature Home</i>. He is a pioneer and the work of mapping the relationships that make up biodiversity is still in its infancy. If there’s one tool we desperately need, it’s a map showing the relationships among all the species—which species depends on which other species for survival. We don’t even have a list of all the individual species yet, but what we do know reveals that native plant species support a much higher number of insect species—and therefore a higher number of bird, reptile, amphibian, and mammal species that eat the insects—than nonnative plant species. Diversity is our first principle, and if we’re committed to restoring it to our land, the only way to do it to the fullest extent possible is to add native species back into the forest ecology. Each native plant species we add multiplies the diversity by 10 or 50 or 100, while non-natives might only multiply it by one or two or three.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">So if I plant a native highbush blueberry I am adding much more diversity back into the forest ecology than if I plant an apple. We’ve planted both, but our emphasis has shifted over the past couple of years. Now our first priority is to use natives wherever possible, and then to use non-natives to round out our diet. So as we integrate our homestead economy into the forest ecology, a hierarchy of plants has emerged: 1. Native forest species. 2. Native field species. 3. Non-native forest species. 4. Non-native field species. Here in New England we are blessed with a large selection of delicious native edible forest species, including blueberry, blackberry, grape, huckleberry, raspberry, American plum, beach plum, persimmon, cranberry, serviceberry, currant, elderberry, hazelnut, hickory, walnut, chestnut, at least a dozen mushroom species, and quite a few edible herbaceous and root plants. Planting any or all of these helps rebuild the forest’s plant and wildlife diversity, gives us lots of delicious food, cuts down our food bills, and reduces the need for commercial monocultures and transportation energy. The native plants require much less tending than the non-natives, since the insects that feed on them have predators that are already present in the ecology. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We take the same approach to shelter and energy, asking first, “How can we get a building and energy from the forest while at the same time restoring its diversity and complexity.” Since we know that dead wood on the ground is an essential component of forest health, and that gardening on forest time means cycles measured in decades and centuries, we want to take as little wood out of the forest as possible. So we build our house to last at least as long as a forest takes to mature. We also build to minimize maintenance and external energy requirements. I want to take these issues up in much greater detail in the coming weeks, so I’ll leave it there for now.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The land outside our front door is no longer a frontier. It is once again becoming an intact, vibrant, diverse ecology; it produces no commodities and attracts no speculators, but it is the wild beating heart of our homestead economy. As we restore the forest’s native diversity and eat its abundant fruits, the line between us and our land is blurring. We are becoming one of the strands in the forest’s rich tapestry of life. We are coming home. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources: </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Although we got another fifteen inches of snow this week, it’s the time of year for ordering tree and shrub seedlings. We rely on three nurseries for most of our purchases: Fedco Trees here in Maine, St. Lawrence Nursery in NY state, and Oikos Tree Crops in Michigan. This last is particularly useful for anyone on a budget or planning extensive plantings, as they offer small seedlings and cultivars at a very reasonable price. They’re also now selling some of the herbaceous perennials associated with forest gardening.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">One book I probably won’t get to mention anywhere in the year I have planned for this blog—so I’ll just mention it here because I enjoyed it so much and because it does provide the kind of ecological map I mentioned above—is <i>Mannahatta</i> by Eric W. Sanderson. It’s a recreation of the ecology of Manhattan on the day in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name. This was my home turf for most of my twenties, and I can’t help but note that outside of the parks the ecology today is dominated by humans, rats, pigeons, and cockroaches. Draw your own conclusions.</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-66498957131924241852012-02-10T16:50:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:50:04.338-08:00A Ground to Stand on<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"></span></span></span></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published February 21, 2011</i><br />
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<img alt="Pasted Graphic.tiff" src="webkit-fake-url://689BCBF4-90A3-4B5F-AFBF-198D43FD2160/Pasted%20Graphic.tiff" /> <img alt="Pasted Graphic 1.tiff" src="webkit-fake-url://689BCBF4-90A3-4B5F-AFBF-198D43FD2160/Pasted%20Graphic%201.tiff" /></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A homestead economy needs to be flexible, and a winter of very heavy snow has forced me to adjust my building plans. During my work week the storms and three-plus feet of snow on the ground have chased me inside the shop to make cabinets for one house and doors for another. For our own addition my original plan to drag or carry logs out of the forest and then hire or trade with a farmer/contractor friend who owns a portable sawmill to come over and help saw the logs into timbers isn’t possible. So I decided to cut the trees and hew the logs in place, then carry the lighter timbers out once the snow has melted. Hewing is quite a bit slower than a sawmill, but it was also my first choice, since I particularly like the rippled surface of a hand-hewn timber. The snow gave me the excuse I needed to accept that the project is going to take longer than I first planned.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">It’s been four years since I’ve worked on a project that involved hewing for most or all of a day, and my muscles and technique suffered the first couple of days from the long layoff. The work was much harder than it needed to be, since I was forcing it rather than finding an easy rhythm and letting the axes (felling ax for scoring, hewing ax for finishing the surface) do the work. As a result my muscles tired more quickly, and then the quality of the work suffered since I had less control of the hewing ax as I squared the side of the log down to the line. Since timber framing is my livelihood, I expect the results to be professional, and when they’re not I get frustrated. So for a couple of days I was at war with myself. This week was better. I stopped pushing and settled down into a consistent rhythm, and the pleasure I’d found in the work before returned. I wouldn’t want to do it day after day and year after year, but going into a forest with a couple of axes and turning trees into timbers is one of the things I’ve most enjoyed in the time I’ve been building and renovating timberframes.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I haven’t written very much here about the relationship between building and ecology yet, which probably seems a little odd for a blog published by someone whose livelihood is house-building. I plan to take it up in the weeks ahead, but I want to take this week to ground the various themes I’ve raised over the past couple of months on a solid foundation. When I’m building a house, my first choice of foundation material is stone—slabs of granite or field stone. Maine’s coast is famously rocky, so raw material is abundant, the stones are beautiful and last essentially forever, and even once the house that sits on the stone foundation decays, the foundation or the stones can be reused. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The foundation I have in mind serves two purposes. It provides a ground for our story to stand on, and it guides and informs our actions as we try to build a homestead economy that is not at war with our native ecology. The memoir half of a philosophical memoir should stand on its own; at worst you’ll find our story uninteresting or unrealistic or find us disagreeable or flaky. We can live with that. But the philosophical half, the argument, needs a solid foundation, and I want something as hard and immovable and unassailable as the granite outcrops along the coast here. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I’ve written that we came here to become part of an ecology, that we identify with the native forest, that we’ll work with the land to help it become what it wants to be, that we’ll make a place for ourselves within that context; that we’re seekers of happiness and richer, deeper experiences of being alive. All true. I’ve written that our economy, the economy that consumes frontiers, the economy that is rooted in agriculture and mining and drilling, the economy that too often levels native ecologies to extract the commodities they contain, has run out of new frontiers to exploit and so must inevitably begin to cannibalize itself. It defines the word unsustainable. I think that’s the best interpretation of the evidence. I’ve written that this economy has altered the makeup of the atmosphere, changed the climate, and reduced biodiversity to the point that life on earth is now in its sixth major extinction epoch. As a matter of verified scientific fact, yes. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">These concerns and convictions, our determination to live a certain set of principles, these are the values that animate our story. And there is the story’s weakness, for we’ve learned that values are relative. Yours may be different from ours. Your story may not be our story. Our story is certainly not the story of those who look at a landscape and see only resources to be exploited, or who see economic growth in and of itself as the highest good, or who believe that we stand apart from the wild green world, enabled by our intelligence and technologies, to conquer and subdue. But how will we judge whose story is better? Where is the unmoving ground on which that judgment depends?</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This ground I’m searching for is a first principle, some unifying thing or principle or movement that can be used to explain the world and everything in it. The search for this first principle is as old as our western intellectual tradition; in fact it explicitly defines the very moment of birth of our intellectual tradition. It begins when Thales, the first of the Greek natural philosophers, seeks to discover the one thing that everything in the visible world is made of. Western philosophy begins with this single question. Thales is quickly followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes, who propose different answers to the same question. As Greek philosophical thought progresses through Parmenides and Pythagoras, it becomes increasingly abstract and the search to discover a material first principle is dropped in favor of purely theoretical organizing principles for the visible world. But the emphasis on a single, unchanging, eternal, unifying principle that orders the visible world with all its apparent complexity and change is nearly constant. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">By the time Plato adapts these ideas, another shift in emphasis has taken place as well: to Plato the material world of trees and rocks and rivers and flesh and bone is a deceptive, flawed, unredeemable mess that serves as nothing so much as an obstacle to true knowledge. He invents an invisible world of forms or ideas that are perfect and unchanging and eternal. The world that we see and experience with our senses is merely an imperfect imitation of that divine invisible world. That in a nutshell is Plato’s metaphysics. If you’re unfamiliar with the specifics but it all still sounds familiar, that’s because Plato’s notion of two worlds, one visible and corrupt and deceitful and the other invisible, perfect and pure provided the basic architecture for western ideas about the nature of reality and knowledge until the nineteenth century when the whole edifice came crashing to the ground.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I bring this all up here for two reasons. First it is simply impossible to overstate the importance of the development of Greek thought and culture from 750 BC, when literacy returned to the Mediterranean world following a 400-year dark age, to the death of Aristotle in 322 BC. Our culture, our institutions of learning, and especially our ways of organizing reality owe everything to this period. And second, because the defining feature of our intellectual tradition for the vast majority of its history is a conviction that unity is superior to diversity, simplicity is superior to complexity, that the spiritual is superior to the material, that being is superior to becoming. As I said above, as a metaphysics, the whole edifice came crashing to the ground in the nineteenth century, but the looming shadow and residue of that edifice are with us still. We are still living that legacy. Not at the highest levels of academia perhaps, but as a matter of cultural habit we still believe in unity, and one is still the number of divinity. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A society, an economy, a culture organized around unity implies centralization, control, a diffusion of knowledge and intelligence from a single point. But ecology points to a different model entirely. Where is the center of a forest? It depends on rain and sun and warmth, but those are so elemental to almost all life on land that it makes little sense to talk of them as centers. They are preconditions. Intelligence in an ecosystem is diffuse. So is energy. Diversity and complexity are its most salient features. Try to photograph it and you quickly understand that no single point draws the camera. The forest is everywhere all at once. This is the key to ecological resilience. Try to kill the forest. The obvious way is to cut down or burn all the trees. But the forest’s DNA, its intelligence, is stored in the soil and it quickly regenerates itself. To kill it it must be destroyed again and again until all that stored intelligence has been wiped away. It can be done, but it requires continued, repeated assaults. Try to kill a centralized state, whether it is fed by oil or corn or wheat or coal. You don’t really have to do anything but wait. All its intelligence flows through its single fuel source and the military/administrative/religious establishment that feeds off it. Its resilience is limited by the resilience of that energy flow and that single cultural node. Cut that off, or wait for it to fail or run out, and the entire organization fails. History provides a nearly endless run of examples. As long as the frontiers are large or numerous enough, the centralized state can survive. But frontiers inevitably close. They closed for Athens when access to the timber it needed to rebuild its navy was cut off. They closed for Rome when the Iberian silver mines ran out and it had to debase its currency. They’re closing today in the Middle East as oil production declines and revenue streams dry up.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I’m suggesting that to the extent that our culture and economy are built on the intellectual tradition that began in Ionia in the sixth century BC, developed in Athens in the fourth, and prevailed throughout the Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods in Europe, it is vulnerable to collapse. Centralized systems aren’t resilient. Collapse—or restoration of a more dispersed state depending on your loyalties— is inevitable because it operates in direct opposition to the first principle that organizes the reality of living ecologies. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This is the ground for our story. It expresses itself in a trend that is observable across the whole history of the living world. I think it qualifies as a first principle, and to the extent that it organizes the visible world, I think it is similar to what the early Greek philosophers were after. I think it is sound enough to form the basis for value judgments. For the purposes of building a homestead economy and ecology the forest itself is probably good enough as a starting point. Forests have existed for 350 million years. They’re ubiquitous, persistent, and resilient. They naturally occupy about half the land area of the planet. As I’ve written before, forests work. Other ecologies work too, but forest is what works here where we live, and probably where you live too, since forests and humans have many of the same requirements. The answer to why they work is also the answer to the search for a first principle on which to ground our story and our actions: diversity and complexity. Forests are the planet’s greatest terrestrial storehouses of diversity and complexity. The large majority of the planet’s land species are found in forests. Forests work because diversity and complexity work. As Edward O. Wilson put it in his book <i>The Diversity of Life</i>,</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Biological diversity embraces a vast number of conditions that range from the simple to the complex, with the simple appearing first in evolution and the more complex later. Many reversals have occurred along the way, but <i>the overall average across the history of life has moved from the simple and few to the more complex and numerous</i>…Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard... It makes little sense to judge it irrelevant.” [italics mine]</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">It’s a memorable synopsis from one of the world’s foremost scientists. Life is up to something. It is becoming more diverse and more complex. Not always, and not in every place, but as an average across all of time from the beginning of life. Life may not have a goal, but the trend is unmistakable. The first principle that organizes reality has been with us all along. It’s the opposite of what the Greeks were looking for, the opposite of what the western intellectual tradition accepted as a given, but it’s what the world is made of, and it’s what we’re made of. And for what it’s worth, the same movement is seen in the history of the universe as well, from nothingness to singularity to a few elements to many, from simplicity to complexity. Diversity and complexity work, the evidence suggests that they are woven into the nature of things, and they express themselves most often on land as forests. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">That’s our rock, the granite upon which our story stands. We have a first principle. We can build an economy, make judgments, create new myths, find an intelligible context for history and the world around us. We can work within an ecology and be confident of our actions. Since intelligence is dispersed throughout the ecology, we can do less rather than more. We can watch and learn rather than dictate and control. We can build resilience and retake our place in the majestic pageant of life. We can revalue our commodities, restore our native ecologies and cultivate diversity and complexity. We might find our way back to Eden.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The hewing ax I use is made by Gransfors Bruks. It’s a very nice tool, but the blade lacked the correct curvature when I first got it and I had to spend quite a bit of time modifying it. To hew properly and produce the rippled texture that makes hewn surfaces so appealing, the back of the blade should be slightly convex in both directions. <i>The Ax-Wielder’s Handbook</i> by Mike Beaudry is a good introduction to hewing.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I don’t have a good general-interest book to recommend on the development of Greek thought from the presocratics to Plato. The one I used in graduate school is <i>The Presocratic Philosophers</i> by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield. It’s the standard bilingual academic text, but best suited for someone who really wants to immerse themselves in the topic, as I once did. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>The Diversity of Life</i> by Edward O. Wilson is one of the books that has most informed and influenced my thinking about biological diversity over the past couple of decades. I highly recommend it.</div><div><br />
</div></span></span>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-12775086862123346022012-02-10T16:48:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:48:48.499-08:00The Pursuit of Happiness<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published February 13, 2011</i><br />
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Two stories. One declares emphatically, with no trace of doubt: everything belongs to us. It is a story of conquest and control and ownership. This is our story, what I call the central organizing myth of our culture. All the land on the continent belongs to someone. Our land belongs to us. Not to you, not to the trees, not to the deer, not to the mosses, not to the ferns, not to the ruffed grouse. No one but us has any claim to it. We have the full force of a government and, should push come to shove, unprecedented killing technologies under the rule of law that we can call upon to defend our rights of ownership.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The other story says more humbly, more socially: we belong to the land. We are one part of the community of life. More specifically, we belong to the forest, for on our land forest is the ecology that life organizes itself into. We—Tanya and I and our two children—were born into the first story, so by birth, upbringing, and cultural habit, it is our story. But we prefer the other story, and we are trying to find ways to more fully make it ours.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">On land all over the planet some version of these two stories is being played out. Look and listen to the land anywhere, and it’s usually not difficult to discern which story has the upper hand. On our land, our 8 acres on the coast of Maine, variations on these two stories have defined the landscape and the people on it for the past 12,000 years. Before that the land was under ice up to a mile thick, and before that, if current archaeological evidence holds, the land was truly a wilderness, unpopulated by human beings for all the rest of its history.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">When the explorer Verrazzano landed on the coast of Maine in 1524, he noted that the natives didn’t cultivate the ground. This made them unusual among the tribes the explorers and early settlers encountered, for everywhere south of here on the Atlantic coast the natives grew corn, beans, and squash. But the Wabanaki people who lived here, specifically the Penobscots, got all their food by hunting, gathering, and fishing. It’s no romantic exaggeration to say they lived lightly on the land. They kept their populations quite low, somewhat under one person for every two square miles. The seafood of the coast and summertime foraging would have supported much higher numbers, but in winter they depended on hunting inland game for food, and that set the upper limit to their numbers. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">They modified the forest, but only to the extent of taking what they needed for firewood and to build their wigwams, birchbark canoes, baskets, pots, and other implements. Explorers noted that the forests here were very dense with conifers taller than any trees in Europe. There is no argument that the Penobscot lived within the ecological limits of the land. Or, put another way, they were the last people here who didn’t live on the land as if it were a frontier or depend on other frontiers to survive. When they were finally driven off the land in the 18<sup>th</sup> century, they left little trace of their long history here. The forest was old growth, and the landscape was so close to a “natural” state that if we didn’t know better we would call it a wilderness.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Further back down the coast, in present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island, tribes such as the Wampanoag and Narragansett kept the forest open by burning off the underbrush in spring and fall. Early explorers and settlers frequently commented on the open, park-like character of much of the forest. This modification accomplished two things: it made hunting easier, and it increased the populations of game animals and shrubs with edible fruit, such as blackberries and blueberries. Along with the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, this allowed for population densities five to ten times higher than in downeast Maine. As in Maine, this economy existed within the ecological limits of the land, though the native ecology was modified to such an extent that no one mistook it for a wilderness, though its “natural” abundance was a theme of early colonial writings.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I’ve already described the agricultural practices of the colonial settlers who flooded into Maine in the years following the American Revolution. In brief, they cleared forest for grain crops and pasture, cleared more forest for firewood and building materials, and cleared yet more forest to make money, since wood was their most reliable cash crop. There is a famous painting by Blue Hill’s first minister, Jonathan Fisher, who was something of a Renaissance man. It shows the village and environs in 1824: fields, pastures, fences, an orchard, the nascent village and off in the upper left corner the last remnants of the native forest. This kind of field culture, imported wholesale from Europe, was capable of supporting about forty people per square mile. How long it might have done so is moot. (Thumbing through an early history of Blue Hill, I count the average number of children in a farm family at about ten—they needed a frontier, and a pretty big one at that). The late spring and summer of 1816 was a brutal one for farmers, with killing frosts in every summer month. The year is known in Maine lore as “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” One result was that Maine farmers came down with “Ohio Fever,” a general exodus of farmers from New England to the Midwest that never really ended. Although Maine’s frontier itself was still expanding, Ohio and Indiana were the new new frontiers: Ohio’s population doubled in six years; Indiana’s almost tripled.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Like the English settlers, we own our land. We are the inheritors of those traditions of land use and claims of ownership. To a certain extent, we get to choose the story we live on our land. But only to an extent. If I had to choose one of the three worlds outlined above to inhabit, I would choose the Wabanaki’s without doubt or hesitation. Perhaps on the basis of the food alone, although the personal freedom and relative leisure would count very high too, as would the sense of belonging to an intact ecology and a stable culture not teetering on the brink of collapse. But that is an idle daydream. Our numbers alone have foreclosed the possibility of living as a hunter-gatherer in a near-wilderness. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But what about possibilities of bringing wilderness home, of cultivating it? This immediately will seem a contradiction, I know, but that may say more about our culture and its uneasy relationship with the wild than about any inherent conflict between wilderness and cultivation. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In 1964 Congress passed the Wilderness Act, creating formally designated wilderness areas protected by law. Its definition of wilderness is brief, and worth quoting in full:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I’ve been thinking seriously about those words and the relationship between cultures and the wild green world for a couple decades now. To a large extent it has been the material of my adult life ever since I left graduate school in the mid-90s. There was a time when I believed in the power of those words to protect wild, intact ecologies from the ravages of our economic juggernaut, but somewhere along the way I lost that faith. The act puts up fences and signs that read “keep out,” but fences and signs can come down, and I have little doubt that when we get desperate and really need what’s inside those fences, come down they will. And as Bill McKibben argued so eloquently and persuasively more than twenty years ago in “The End of Nature,” now that we’ve altered the atmosphere and the climate, no place is beyond the effects of our destructive economic arrangements. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But what strikes me most about those words, beyond their ultimate inadequacy to protect, is their deep pessimism about the human place in the world. The Act assumes that any place inhabited by people will be degraded by that fact alone. This is undoubtedly a sound premise in the world dominated by a frontier economy, where every ecology it touches is in fact degraded or destroyed. But as a general principle the Act’s argument is flawed. It has nothing to say about the Wabanaki. Did they trammel the earth and the community of life? There is no evidence to suggest it. What about the Wampanoag and Narragansett? They certainly altered the landscape, in some places considerably, but none of the settlers who saw that landscape described it as degraded or destroyed. In fact it’s generally recognized that they increased the land’s diversity. But where the Act’s definition may fail us most terminally is in its refusal to consider the power of imagination to find another way. Like Genesis, it tells us that we are flawed. The only redemption it offers is the opportunity to visit a magnificent, pristine place, a reminder of the unsullied beauty of a world without us.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We reject that vision. We plant a hazelnut. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the nuts. So do the squirrels. We plant an American plum. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the plums. Some fall to the ground and wild turkey or bear eat them. We plant some cranberries, some blueberries, walnuts, hickories, chestnuts. We eat some. Birds and animals eat others. We plant Jerusalem artichokes, chokeberry, elderberry, grapes, ostrich fern, milkweed, giant solomon’s seal. We eat some. Birds and animals eat others. All are native to the eastern forest. We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness? Maybe it won’t be in the strict, technical sense, but then it never was. People lived for millennia as part of the wildness—so will we. It will be here and it will be alive. With or without us.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">There are good native gardening books and good wild foods foraging books, but I don’t know of any book dedicated to cultivating wild native foods. The few forest gardening books available do include some of these species (not all), but focus much more on mimicking forest structure and ecology. This isn’t a flaw, just a different emphasis.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A few of the books we consult frequently, in addition to the forest gardening books I’ve listed previously:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Native Plants of the Northeast” by Donald J. Leopold</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas W. Tallamy</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Noah’s Garden” by Sara Stein</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Nature’s Harvest” and “The Forager’s Harvest” by Samuel Thayer</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-74887034051470958752012-02-10T16:46:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:46:56.258-08:00Bringing Wilderness Home<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published February 7, 2011</i><br />
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Two stories. One declares emphatically, with no trace of doubt: everything belongs to us. It is a story of conquest and control and ownership. This is our story, what I call the central organizing myth of our culture. All the land on the continent belongs to someone. Our land belongs to us. Not to you, not to the trees, not to the deer, not to the mosses, not to the ferns, not to the ruffed grouse. No one but us has any claim to it. We have the full force of a government and, should push come to shove, unprecedented killing technologies under the rule of law that we can call upon to defend our rights of ownership.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The other story says more humbly, more socially: we belong to the land. We are one part of the community of life. More specifically, we belong to the forest, for on our land forest is the ecology that life organizes itself into. We—Tanya and I and our two children—were born into the first story, so by birth, upbringing, and cultural habit, it is our story. But we prefer the other story, and we are trying to find ways to more fully make it ours.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">On land all over the planet some version of these two stories is being played out. Look and listen to the land anywhere, and it’s usually not difficult to discern which story has the upper hand. On our land, our 8 acres on the coast of Maine, variations on these two stories have defined the landscape and the people on it for the past 12,000 years. Before that the land was under ice up to a mile thick, and before that, if current archaeological evidence holds, the land was truly a wilderness, unpopulated by human beings for all the rest of its history.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">When the explorer Verrazzano landed on the coast of Maine in 1524, he noted that the natives didn’t cultivate the ground. This made them unusual among the tribes the explorers and early settlers encountered, for everywhere south of here on the Atlantic coast the natives grew corn, beans, and squash. But the Wabanaki people who lived here, specifically the Penobscots, got all their food by hunting, gathering, and fishing. It’s no romantic exaggeration to say they lived lightly on the land. They kept their populations quite low, somewhat under one person for every two square miles. The seafood of the coast and summertime foraging would have supported much higher numbers, but in winter they depended on hunting inland game for food, and that set the upper limit to their numbers. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">They modified the forest, but only to the extent of taking what they needed for firewood and to build their wigwams, birchbark canoes, baskets, pots, and other implements. Explorers noted that the forests here were very dense with conifers taller than any trees in Europe. There is no argument that the Penobscot lived within the ecological limits of the land. Or, put another way, they were the last people here who didn’t live on the land as if it were a frontier or depend on other frontiers to survive. When they were finally driven off the land in the 18<sup>th</sup> century, they left little trace of their long history here. The forest was old growth, and the landscape was so close to a “natural” state that if we didn’t know better we would call it a wilderness.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Further back down the coast, in present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island, tribes such as the Wampanoag and Narragansett kept the forest open by burning off the underbrush in spring and fall. Early explorers and settlers frequently commented on the open, park-like character of much of the forest. This modification accomplished two things: it made hunting easier, and it increased the populations of game animals and shrubs with edible fruit, such as blackberries and blueberries. Along with the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, this allowed for population densities five to ten times higher than in downeast Maine. As in Maine, this economy existed within the ecological limits of the land, though the native ecology was modified to such an extent that no one mistook it for a wilderness, though its “natural” abundance was a theme of early colonial writings.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I’ve already described the agricultural practices of the colonial settlers who flooded into Maine in the years following the American Revolution. In brief, they cleared forest for grain crops and pasture, cleared more forest for firewood and building materials, and cleared yet more forest to make money, since wood was their most reliable cash crop. There is a famous painting by Blue Hill’s first minister, Jonathan Fisher, who was something of a Renaissance man. It shows the village and environs in 1824: fields, pastures, fences, an orchard, the nascent village and off in the upper left corner the last remnants of the native forest. This kind of field culture, imported wholesale from Europe, was capable of supporting about forty people per square mile. How long it might have done so is moot. (Thumbing through an early history of Blue Hill, I count the average number of children in a farm family at about ten—they needed a frontier, and a pretty big one at that). The late spring and summer of 1816 was a brutal one for farmers, with killing frosts in every summer month. The year is known in Maine lore as “eighteen hundred and froze to death.” One result was that Maine farmers came down with “Ohio Fever,” a general exodus of farmers from New England to the Midwest that never really ended. Although Maine’s frontier itself was still expanding, Ohio and Indiana were the new new frontiers: Ohio’s population doubled in six years; Indiana’s almost tripled.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Like the English settlers, we own our land. We are the inheritors of those traditions of land use and claims of ownership. To a certain extent, we get to choose the story we live on our land. But only to an extent. If I had to choose one of the three worlds outlined above to inhabit, I would choose the Wabanaki’s without doubt or hesitation. Perhaps on the basis of the food alone, although the personal freedom and relative leisure would count very high too, as would the sense of belonging to an intact ecology and a stable culture not teetering on the brink of collapse. But that is an idle daydream. Our numbers alone have foreclosed the possibility of living as a hunter-gatherer in a near-wilderness. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But what about possibilities of bringing wilderness home, of cultivating it? This immediately will seem a contradiction, I know, but that may say more about our culture and its uneasy relationship with the wild than about any inherent conflict between wilderness and cultivation. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In 1964 Congress passed the Wilderness Act, creating formally designated wilderness areas protected by law. Its definition of wilderness is brief, and worth quoting in full:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I’ve been thinking seriously about those words and the relationship between cultures and the wild green world for a couple decades now. To a large extent it has been the material of my adult life ever since I left graduate school in the mid-90s. There was a time when I believed in the power of those words to protect wild, intact ecologies from the ravages of our economic juggernaut, but somewhere along the way I lost that faith. The act puts up fences and signs that read “keep out,” but fences and signs can come down, and I have little doubt that when we get desperate and really need what’s inside those fences, come down they will. And as Bill McKibben argued so eloquently and persuasively more than twenty years ago in “The End of Nature,” now that we’ve altered the atmosphere and the climate, no place is beyond the effects of our destructive economic arrangements. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But what strikes me most about those words, beyond their ultimate inadequacy to protect, is their deep pessimism about the human place in the world. The Act assumes that any place inhabited by people will be degraded by that fact alone. This is undoubtedly a sound premise in the world dominated by a frontier economy, where every ecology it touches is in fact degraded or destroyed. But as a general principle the Act’s argument is flawed. It has nothing to say about the Wabanaki. Did they trammel the earth and the community of life? There is no evidence to suggest it. What about the Wampanoag and Narragansett? They certainly altered the landscape, in some places considerably, but none of the settlers who saw that landscape described it as degraded or destroyed. In fact it’s generally recognized that they increased the land’s diversity. But where the Act’s definition may fail us most terminally is in its refusal to consider the power of imagination to find another way. Like Genesis, it tells us that we are flawed. The only redemption it offers is the opportunity to visit a magnificent, pristine place, a reminder of the unsullied beauty of a world without us.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We reject that vision. We plant a hazelnut. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the nuts. So do the squirrels. We plant an American plum. It is wild, native to the eastern forest. We eat the plums. Some fall to the ground and wild turkey or bear eat them. We plant some cranberries, some blueberries, walnuts, hickories, chestnuts. We eat some. Birds and animals eat others. We plant Jerusalem artichokes, chokeberry, elderberry, grapes, ostrich fern, milkweed, giant solomon’s seal. We eat some. Birds and animals eat others. All are native to the eastern forest. We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness? Maybe it won’t be in the strict, technical sense, but then it never was. People lived for millennia as part of the wildness—so will we. It will be here and it will be alive. With or without us.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">There are good native gardening books and good wild foods foraging books, but I don’t know of any book dedicated to cultivating wild native foods. The few forest gardening books available do include some of these species (not all), but focus much more on mimicking forest structure and ecology. This isn’t a flaw, just a different emphasis.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A few of the books we consult frequently, in addition to the forest gardening books I’ve listed previously:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Native Plants of the Northeast” by Donald J. Leopold</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas W. Tallamy</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Noah’s Garden” by Sara Stein</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Nature’s Harvest” and “The Forager’s Harvest” by Samuel Thayer</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-51335541638458476082012-02-10T16:45:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:45:47.881-08:00Two Stories: Forests, Fields, Food<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published January 30, 2011</i><br />
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The coastal peninsula where we have our home is largely rural, with plenty of small local farms and a strong culture of organic farming, self-reliance, and back-to-the-land homesteading. Some of this culture is general to Maine, which has the oldest organic farming and gardening organization in the country and an even older tradition of rugged individualism. Some is specific to this peninsula, where Helen and Scott Nearing had their final homestead, and where the generation that followed in their wake is a strong local subculture. As a result there is no shortage of good fresh local food, or of people with lots of specific practical knowledge that a preindustrial farm family or modern homesteaders require. We take advantage of both: buying as much of our food from local farmers as possible and knowing that if we have a specific question about problems with a fruit tree, using seaweed for compost, keeping bees, making hard cider, finding seeds for herbs, or a thousand other things, the answer is only a phone call away. Of the five other families in my daughter’s homeschooling group, one owns a meat and dairy farm; another makes just about everything they use, including house, clothes, furniture and food; another runs a local food nonprofit and was formerly executive director of the Good Life Center, the nonprofit that maintains the Nearings’ last homestead and offers programs that advance their values and writings.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So when I write critiques of farming or agriculture, or of the economies that have evolved around them, it is not without a certain ambivalence. Although I think the critiques are valid and necessary, I run the real risk of offending our friends and neighbors. On the one hand the local farmers and farm activists are among the small minority of Americans who care deeply enough about issues such as food sovereignty, social justice, and the equitable distribution of resources to dedicate their lives to improving them. On the other hand the tradition that we and they are a part of has been responsible for wholesale ecological destruction that really has no precedent in North America. Colonial and early American farmers leveled whole ecosystems, drove species to the brink of extinction or over, eliminated others that interfered with their farm economies, destroyed or displaced native cultures, and in the Southeast created vast agricultural economies based on slave labor. And while I believe that small organic farms are better in every sense of the word by at least an order of magnitude than the horror that is industrial agriculture, I also believe that the uglier side of agriculture and the uglier aspects of its history are too often glossed over. It is always easy to find a villain—some alien other—to blame for the world’s ills. The present favorites are corporations, the financial system, and corrupt governments. It is much more difficult to expose to hard scrutiny our own values, practices, and culture. We run the risk of finding the villain in a mirror.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I want to be clear, however, that the target of my criticisms is a culture, an economy, and the myths and values that support both. Individual family farmers today are more often victims than perpetrators of the vast crimes against the community of life that our culture commits as a matter of course. At worst they can be accused of not having spent the literally thousands of hours in research necessary to tease out the relationships among food, energy, history, ecology, money, profit, and demographics that are all implicit in our agricultural economy. All the family farmers I know lead very busy lives. None of them are getting rich. Most struggle to break even.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This past week we got a flyer from a local farmer we know. He wanted his customers to know that he was now certified organic and that he had just cleared another fifteen acres of forest to create a cow pasture where he would raise grass-fed beef. Everything in our culture right now is telling him that virtue is on his side. Local. Organic. Grass-fed. Traditional, like the colonial and early American farmers who first settled coastal Maine. When the farmer says that he cleared fifteen acres, he means that he removed the forest. Our semi-rural peninsula is today mostly forested, though the original old-growth forest was completely clearcut by the first generations of settlers, mostly between the American Revolution and 1820, when Maine became a state. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In a blog post last week titled “An Affinity for Tree Groves,” Gene Logsdon suggested that after cutting down the “forest primeval”, Americans had a change of heart and decided to reverse the process. It’s a nice sentiment, but it isn’t supported by the facts. First, the idea that the European setters stumbled upon a primeval wilderness is a myth that has persisted despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. When the first European settlers arrived on the Atlantic coast, eastern North America was home to at least one to two million people. Most of the land was indeed covered in old-growth forest, though the natives had been hunting and gathering in it and cultivating and modifying it for millennia. It was more garden than wilderness, and if its abundance awed the early settlers (as their early writings attest), it may just be that the natives who called the forest home were damned fine gardeners. Second, the forests here on the coast of Maine returned after being cleared by the first wave of farmers because the farmers quickly moved to newly opened frontiers in the Midwest and then beyond. And Americans stopped cooking and heating with wood and switched to coal, oil, gas, and electricity. Since Maine farm families typically burned 20 cords of wood per year, that use alone represented an enormous pressure on the forests. Today 80% of people in Maine heat with oil and it is the most forested state in the country. The hard fact is that if modern Americans had an agricultural and energy economy similar to the early farm settlers, we would have no forests, no matter how much we liked trees. In fact, with our current population, such an economy— and the land uses it implies—is not even remotely possible. Our forest and Mr. Logsdon’s—and the very real pleasures we both derive from them—are artifacts of a fossil fuel economy. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">It is natural, or at least customary, to view the farmer’s clearing of his land from the perspective of the farmer, or of the diner who favors gourmet beef, or of the landscape painter or tourist who admires pastoral scenes, or perhaps even of the cows, who will have a happier, healthier life than their grain-fed, confined, industrial counterparts. The perspective that is ignored is the ecological one. The farmer’s ecology, if that term is even apt, is one taken piecemeal from arid grasslands and the floodplains of the vast rivers where grain agriculture began. Since it is alien to a forest ecology, the forest is simply removed. Our local farmer admitted in his flyer that he hated to see the trees go. But a forest isn’t just trees. The trees provide much of the structure, but the forest is habitat to a whole community of life: mosses, lichens, wildflowers, fungi, amphibians, reptiles, small and large mammals, birds, insects—oak trees alone support 534 species of moths and butterflies, which in turn support all the birds that eat them. What is lost is not only biological diversity, but an accumulated intelligence worked out over millions of years. I should say that if it were just a question of dotting the landscape with intermittent pastures, there would be an ecological benefit to the added habitat diversity—similar to that created by tree-toppling storms and fires. But that is not our recent past, and I don’t believe it is our future if we continue on our present path.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">There is a story implicit in the farmer’s relation to the land, and it is our culture’s central organizing myth, the one that informs all the other stories we tell. The story is just a few words long, but its implications are widespread and profound. The story is this: everything belongs to us. It is the story that allows us to remove the mountaintops of West Virginia. It is the story that allows us to level the landscape of Alberta to get at the tar sands underneath. It is the story that gives me a piece of paper that says I own my land and every living thing on it, to do with as I please. The story invests me with enormous powers. But from an ecological perspective, they are powers of destruction. The power to create an ecosystem as complex and diverse as old-growth forest is no more within my grasp than is the power to conjure a solar system into existence. At best I can attempt to preserve it. More likely I’ll degrade it as I integrate it into the economy of money and profit. I might do it slowly, or all at once, but the incentives to do it one way or another are constant and the economy is structured to make them literally irresistible. I could clear our forest, feed our family, and probably make some money on the side—at the cost of removing the community of life that is here now. I won’t do it. I don’t want to be the protagonist of that story. It is the story of an exile, and I don’t want to live the exile’s alienated, lonely life, pursuing fantasies of dominion and control.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The story that whispers everything belongs to us is a very old story, but as I’ve written before, it is a relatively new one to North America. Here, as elsewhere, there is another story, even older. I think if we’re going to stop our culture’s rapidly escalating, terminal crises, more than anything we need to tell ourselves different stories about how the world works. We certainly need different stories if we’re not going to leave as our most enduring legacy a broken, impoverished world. There is little I can do to stop the holocaust that our economy is visiting on the planet’s ecologies. I can control how I make my living, where we get our food, which economies I support, but only to a certain extent. The one thing I can most easily change is the story I tell about the world and my place in it. If I can get the story right, the other necessary changes might more easily fall into place.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We eat meat. This year we shot a bear. We didn’t actually set out to kill a bear, but a bear in the neighborhood had become particularly aggressive. It broke into our car and then into a shed where we keep an ice box. Our two dogs would chase it at dusk every evening but it wouldn’t leave. We talked with the game wardens, who said that they just didn’t hear about this kind of behavior. They suggested shooting the bear. When we told them we had two young children who spent a lot of time outside, they said they would have shot it a week ago. I got out one of our wildlife books and looked up bear biology. Sows give birth to two cubs every other year. A black bear lives for about ten years. That means ten cubs in the life of a sow, eight more than the carrying capacity of the land can support. We knew from sightings and tracks that there was a female with a new cub in the neighborhood. A picture of what was happening formed. One of the bears from the previous litter was being pushed out of its mother’s territory, but had no territory of its own to move into. We shot the bear. It was a 2-year-old male. When we skinned it we found two teeth punctures in its shoulder. This winter we ate bear meat. The bear lived on its own terms until the last day of its life. Its habitat, the forest, is intact. I can’t imagine a way to build a money economy on those relationships and values, and as long as our culture values money and profit above intact ecologies, the community of life will pay the price. But at the level of a homestead economy, a winter of bear meat works just fine. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Here’s our story: we are the bear and the deer and the blueberry and the ostrich fern and the grape and the wild strawberry and the milkweed and the pine and the spruce and the oak. Here’s our commitment: to the extent possible, we will get our food and our shelter and our energy from the forest. We will add diversity back to the forest, starting with the numerous understory plants and tree species that were stripped out over the years. We will add other plants native to the eastern forest, but not to here. We will modify the forest where we need to, but only as little as possible, and always respecting its rhythms and patterns. We will take the knowledge we need wherever we can find it, from any tradition that has something to teach. We will only get our food from local artificial field cultures as a last resort and as part of a transition while we learn how to get our living from the forest ecology. Grasslands belong to other places with their own ecological intelligence. The forest is the ecology we have, the home we belong to. Here’s our story: we are the forest.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Helen and Scott Nearing wrote many books about their experiences as homesteaders. The most popular is “Living the Good Life.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I took the estimate of the native population in eastern North America at the time of European settlement from “Facing East from Indian Country” by Daniel Richter. The literature on interactions between Native Americans and the environment during the historic period and just before has grown considerably in the last quarter century.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Two good books cover the complex, often troubled relationship between forests and agricultural civilizations. “A Forest Journey” by John Perlin is particularly good on wood shortages, which were the chronic energy crises that seem to have afflicted all preindustrial civilizations.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">“Forests: The Shadow of Civilization” by Robert Pogue Harrision is a study of the way forests have been portrayed in the literature of the West.</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-58151003831178832102012-02-10T16:41:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:41:39.111-08:00E Pluribus Unum: The Frontier Economy at Work<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published January 23, 2011</i><br />
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For a variety of reasons I’ve structured this blog as a chronicle that follows the course of a year on our semi-rural, 8-acre homestead. The seasons here in Maine are distinct, each with its own rhythms, particularly for a household that relies on the sun for its energy, heats with wood, and where employment involves a lot of outside work, as mine does. Winter days are short, and when night temperatures drop to zero or below and the weak sun is slow to warm the morning, time spent indoors is much longer than in any of the other seasons. I like the cold, but if I have a choice I’d just as soon wait until it’s at least 15 before getting going outside. This week two winter storms passed through, one at the beginning of the week and another at the end; snow falls outside as I write this. So it’s a good season for sitting by the wood stove during the long dark hours after an early dinner and trying to weave together the various strands of history, culture, ecology and economy that intersect at our forested homestead.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Between the storms I was back in our forest swinging an ax, cutting out trees: red maples for next year’s firewood, spruce for rafters for the addition we’re putting on our house. I’m still cutting out the smaller trees that will never break through the canopy of trees passed over when our property was last logged 30-some years ago. We’ve loosely adopted a plan from permaculture for our property, dividing it into four zones: Zone one includes our buildings and intensive edible forest gardens. Zone two is the next ring out and this is where I was logging. When we moved in eight years ago the forest was overgrown, with young, stunted spruce and fir trees growing as close as six inches together. Some of these were dead, others were dying. In most places there was no understory, and nothing growing at ground level. We’ve thinned repeatedly over the years, and now the smaller trees that remain are perhaps thirty feet tall, though the canopy is still overcrowded and the forest will benefit from this final round of thinning. In the meantime the increased sunlight reaching the forest floor and the release of nutrients has allowed life to begin reclaiming that space: mosses, bunchberry, and starflower; small wild raisin, highbush blueberry and winter holly shrubs, seedlings of oak and beech; and fungus that includes chanterelles, honey mushrooms, and various boletes. We happily gather and eat the blueberries and mushrooms. We’re also planting in this zone, and the long-term transition we have in mind is to a woodland with a canopy of nut and tall fruit trees (in addition to the mature pines, spruces, and maples already present), with a rich understory of mostly native smaller trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, and groundcovers. This is the most experimental part of our project, one that draws on several different traditions, and I’ll discuss the particulars in much greater detail come spring and summer, but for now I want to focus on the forest we have, its past and present place in the frontier economy, and the effects of that economy on the various ecologies it confronts and colonizes.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I call it the “frontier economy” because it is an economy that has only existed—until now—in the context of ever-expanding frontiers, that cannot actually function without frontiers, and that has created an academic discipline (economics) that takes it as a matter of faith that frontiers are permanent. Like all faiths, this one is at odds with reality in some of the details, which explains the odd disconnect between official pronouncements about future prospects for the economy and reality as it is experienced by most people. The two main frontiers that have defined economic activity and opportunities in the West for the past five hundred years (and now also the East) are the western hemisphere and its huge stores of wealth in the form of previously mined gold and silver, fisheries, forests, grasslands, and arable land; and the discovery of a planet’s worth of fossil fuels and the minerals those fuels allowed to be mined. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">In last week’s post I wrote that an economy produces the people it needs. Different economies need different kinds of people, but every economy needs elders or priests or bards to store the culture’s wisdom and to tell the stories that keep the culture organized. The stories mostly contain the message that if people do the right things then the gods or elites will favor them. Our own class of such priests is enormous, given that a fossil-fuel based economy requires so few people to do the actual work of farming, drilling, mining and making things and therefore has the energy and resources to support thousands of less essential occupations. The sheer volume of the songs of praise they sing to the frontier economy and consumer lifestyle can be maddening. (Besides, the lyrics are so damned insipid). The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, all of the major media belong to this priest class, as do our economists and politicians. All are creations of the frontier economy. When a culture is stable, and the economy is not exceeding its resource base, the priests’ odes of praise for the status quo are taken at face value and the priests are esteemed. Dissenters are relatively few, and are quickly dispatched or ignored. But when the economy wobbles or falters badly enough, and the culture begins to lose its bearings, the apostates grow in number and their claims that the priests may be liars or fools grow bolder. More people are willing to listen and consensus begins to disintegrate. For the past five hundred years anyone betting against future growth and prosperity (at least in the terms understood by the frontier economy), even in the depths of the worst depressions, was making a fool’s bet. The frontiers were all but limitless. Many minor frontiers have closed over the years, barely making a difference to the broader economy, which always had newer, bigger frontiers to exploit. But the peak in conventional crude oil represents the first closing of a major frontier, and it’s no accident that parts of the economy wobbled at just the moment when the price of oil made the effects of that closing frontier obvious. At this point the question to ask the priests is this: Where is the next frontier? (Answers involving some mystical frontier of the mind deserve no response other than rude laughter).</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Today’s frontiers are well known: the tar sands of Alberta, the oil fields of Iraq, the mountaintops of West Virginia, the deepwater oil fields, and other remote locales that are too often now where the remaining fossil fuels and minerals are to be found. These are difficult frontiers, requiring extreme technological sophistication, huge investments of capital and energy, and risking significant ecological damage or accepting such damage as a given cost of doing business. Frontiers always involve high risks and therefore high costs, and the frontier economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, centered on the East Coast of North America was no different. The risks and costs of that time involved military competition among the nations vying for control of the frontier and dispossession of the natives by main force who called the frontier home. It’s worth following several stages of the frontier as it moves up the Maine Coast on foot, rides down the Penobscot River on a logging drive, and then travels down the Atlantic Coast for trade with Barbados, the British empire’s wealthiest colony in the 17<sup>th</sup> century and one of the purest incarnations of incipient capitalism.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The frontier economy arrived in Maine at the beginning of the seventeenth century, same as Massachusetts (of which it was a part until 1820), but unlike that colony, which grew rapidly after 1630, it was settled sparsely and hesitantly until the eighteenth century. (Just offshore was a different story, where the cod fishery was already a valuable component of Europe’s frontier economy in the century before New England was settled). Maine, like the rest of New England, was fully inhabited at the time of European settlement, as it had been for more than ten millennia—in this instance by the various tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The economy of these tribes was different from those of southern New England, the crucial difference being that corn cultivation, if present at all, was of limited importance. The Wabanaki made their living hunting, fishing, and gathering mollusks, fruits and vegetables. They also created one of history’s great transportation technologies: the birchbark canoe.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Wabanaki economy was entirely dependent on the native ecology of woodland and coast. The English settlers, on the other hand, brought with them the economy of fields and pastures that formed the lifeblood of their culture. The economic distinction then is only superficially between Native American and European; the essential one is between field culture (agri- in agriculture is from the Latin for field) and forest culture. The same distinction can be found in Europe, though it is buried more deeply in the past. The family farmers who settled the coastal regions of Maine were small players in the frontier economy. Maine absorbed the excess people from the rapidly growing colonies to the west, an excess that in Europe would have been absorbed by famine, disease, or war. But their impact on the ecology of the forest was extreme, and from our vantage at the beginning of the twenty-first century, permanent. The typical farmer migrated northeast from Massachusetts alone or with his young family, cleared five or six acres of forest, burned the land and planted corn, wheat, English hay, and rye, and pastured cows, sheep, pigs, oxen, and perhaps a horse. The forest they cut was old growth, the immense size of the trees a matter of historical record. One farmer boasted of standing his team of oxen on the stump of a spruce he had just cut. Some of the trees were used to build houses, first a log cabin, and then later a framed house if the farmer could afford it. The farmer continued cutting trees, many for firewood, since a typical farm household burned 15 to 20 cords each year. Other trees were sold, often as clapboards or timbers to the West Indies, which was an important trading partner to New England.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The reconciliation of a mixed farm economy of grain crops and pasturage for grazing animals and a forest ecology is not an easy one. Grasses are annual plants that grow on disturbed ground; forests are perennial polycultures that can persist for centuries without significant disturbance, particularly in the moist coastal climate of New England. The farmer’s solution then, as now, was to simply remove the forest and all of the life it supported, using or selling off those parts that had some economic value. And the forest fell quickly. With the threat from natives and the French removed by the 1760s, Maine’s population exploded, from less than 30,000 in 1770 to just over 151,000 in 1800, a fivefold increase in less than 30 years—a rate of growth only possible in a frontier economy. There are 19<sup>th</sup>-century paintings of the Blue Hill Peninsula, from where I write, that show a landscape almost entirely devoid of trees. It looks more like a pastoral scene from the English countryside than a landscape that had until recently been forested for 10,000 years. The effect of the early frontier economy along the coast was to level the forest and replace it with the field culture of small farms imported wholesale from England. Our own forested property, four miles outside the village of Blue Hill that was established during the population boom, was probably first cleared in the middle of the 19th century, when the farmhouse up the road was built. The barbed wire I found embedded in an old cedar stump suggests that it was used for pasture. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">By that time Maine was a state and its economic frontier had moved north, up the Penobscot River to the small city of Bangor, gateway to the state’s vast forested interior, the justly famed Maine Woods. Here the frontier economy accelerated from the subsistence and modest income of small family farms along the coast and rivers to the pure commodity economy of timber. By 1830 Bangor was known as the “Lumber Capital of the World,” with the speculative frenzy that all frontier boomtowns seem to attract. One participant noted: “Broker’s offices…were crowded from morning until night and frequently far into the night by buyers and sellers. All were jubilant, because all, whether buyers or sellers, were getting rich. Not one in 50 knew anything about the lands he was buying, nor did he care to know as long as he could sell at a profit. Lands bought one day were sold the next day at a large advance. Buyers in the morning were sellers at night. The lands were bought and sold over and over again, until lands which had been bought for a few cents an acre were sold for half as many dollars. As is always the case when speculation is rampant and inexperienced men become speculators, dishonesty was in the ascendant.” If that sounds like the most recent real estate craze and mortgage fiasco, it’s no coincidence. All frontiers close, and all booms go bust. Today Bangor, which once spoke of “Boston and New York as sisters,” is a small unassuming city renowned for nothing so much as being home to the popular writer Stephen King. 1872 was the year of “peak wood” in the city, when 246 million board feet worth $4 million were carried down the river. Maine still produces a lot of timber each year, but the frontier moved on and timber harvests are stable or declining. As a matter of ecology, only 6,000 acres of old growth remain in the state—everything else was clearcut at least once. Maine’s giant trees are gone (though the forests in the parks and preserves are slowly recovering), and the industrial “forests” are now often planted in single-species stands sprayed with herbicides and cut on 30-year rotations. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Most Americans seem to know at least the official histories of colonial New England and Virginia, but few seem to know much at all about Barbados, England’s third Atlantic frontier. It’s unfortunate, since Barbados’ sugar plantations of the 17<sup>th</sup> century reveal the workings of the frontier economy in its purest, most unrestrained, venal, and pathological form, the one that helped to usher in modern capitalism. Sugar cultivation, harvesting, and processing required more capital and labor than any other colonial crop. It was a rich man’s game, but the profits were so great that virtually every living thing and every human life on the small island of Barbados became subservient to sugar. First, the native forest was cleared, taking most of the wildlife with it. The whole island was planted in cane, a vast monoculture where no room was spared even for subsistence crops. Food and wood were both shipped in from New England, even at high prices. Labor initially was English indentured servants, then criminals and political prisoners, finally African slaves. The brutal working conditions, tropical diseases, overcrowding, and poor diet killed them all by the thousands. Average life expectancy for newcomers to the island was about seven years. Even the plantation owners died, but the promise of quick riches kept them coming. In 1700 Barbados had a population density four times higher than England’s. The majority were slaves. Threats of rebellion were constant, and the planters lived with a siege mentality, relying on torture, castration, and execution to maintain order. Sugar was an insatiable maw that consumed almost every living thing and spit out money. A new kind of ecology was created, unusual in its purity: sugar was a super-predator, enslaving and consuming all other life-forms. It was the frontier economy in its purest form, for sugar represented nothing but profit, the opportunity to increase capital year after year.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">On the face of every American coin is the Latin phrase <i>e pluribus unum</i>. It means “from many, one” and refers to the United States. But it is also a concise description of how the frontier economy works in the world. It could easily serve as the frontier economy’s motto and rallying cry, and it should come as no surprise that it is printed on our money. The frontier economy is above all a great leveler and a great simplifier of both cultures and ecologies. Confronted with any undisturbed ecology, the frontier economy selects the element or elements that can be sold at a profit, and discards the rest. If the element is profitable, trees say in Maine, it will cultivate them. If a valuable commodity is hidden beneath the ground, copper or coal perhaps, it will simply expunge the aboveground ecology wholesale. While this is not something entirely new in the world—all expanding economies require frontiers—the scope of the process is. For it now encompasses the entire planet and impacts all ecologies. The line on the graph has gone vertical. The frontier economy has altered the atmosphere and changed the climate. It is eliminating human cultures and languages at a rate never seen. When it appeared in North America there were more than 400 distinct languages and native cultures. Individual ecologies are no longer being pushed aside or plowed under, now the entire diversity of life is being set back, and we have a species extinction rate last seen 65 million years ago, when a meteor smashed into the side of the planet and brought the Age of Dinosaurs to a close. This is not just another historical cycle that will soon revert back to a trend line. This is irreversible, epochal change on a geological timescale.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This is the most salient feature of the frontier economy: it is opposed to the most basic processes of life. For if we wanted to sum up the whole 4-billion-year history of life in a phrase, it would go something like this: <i>from one, many; from many, more</i>. (The same phrase might serve as well for the history of the entire universe). A movement toward diversity seems woven into the fabric of life. This is how ecologies work. This is how life works. It may be the closest we ever get to the elusive concept known as progress. It is the process that produced the millions of species that science still doesn’t have a number for. It is the process that produced forests and grasslands and estuaries and oceans of indescribable diversity and complexity. And it is the process that produced us. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We don’t just need to adjust to an economy no longer able to grow. We don’t need new “green” technologies that will allow the growth to continue. We need to develop habits of thought and stories and cultures and economies that are not inimical to the basic processes of life. And sooner or later, I think we need to sharpen the long knives and kill the super-predator in our midst. If it were anything but our own economic system, we would have done it long ago.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>A History of Maine Agriculture:1604-1860</i> by Clarence Albert Day and <i>A Long Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England</i> by Howard S. Russell were my sources for colonial farming in Maine. The quote and statistics about lumbering in Maine come from <i>The Interrupted Forest</i> by Neil Rolde. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The sugar economy of the Caribbean in the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries was so important to the early development of capitalism and provides so many useful insights into the present-day economy of oil that study of it is amply rewarded. Two books I recommend are <i>Sugar and Slaves</i> by Richard S. Dunn and <i>From Columbus to Castro</i> by Eric Williams. <i>American Colonies: The Settling of North America</i> by Alan Taylor is an outstanding general history of the Atlantic colonies that includes the Caribbean. </div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-4357181868897393502012-02-10T16:39:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:43:07.666-08:00The Frontier Economy and the Culture of Monotony<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"></span></span></span></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published January 16, 2011</i><br />
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The winter storm that slammed into the East Coast this week came through our parts Wednesday, leaving a foot of snow and bringing just about everything, my work included, to a standstill. As it happens, Wednesday was also my son’s fourth birthday; he says winter is his favorite season and he loves the snow, so the weather seemed like a perfect gift from nature. The whole family ventured out into the blustery snowstorm and we built a 7-foot snowman in the middle of one of our food forest guilds, right between a honeycrisp apple tree and a nanking cherry. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">On either side of the storm I worked on each of the two projects that currently occupy most of my working hours: the farmhouse kitchen and bedroom I’m adding to our house, and the French-style farmhouse I designed and have been building for the past year for clients. For our addition, I was working with conventional materials and methods, framing the window and door openings and building the lightweight trusses I use to create thick wall cavities for insulation that’s about double a standard stick-built (i.e. framed from 2x6 “sticks”) house. Winters here are cold, and I want to minimize the amount of wood we need to heat our house for the long winter. At my paying job, on the other hand, I was applying a lime/clay plaster to the interior walls. My clients have done most of the plastering themselves; I’ve served mostly as teacher, consultant, and coordinator, but I’m also doing some of the plastering on the largest walls so we can get them done in a single day. These two projects offer useful insights into the nature of various economies and the uses they make of workers, resources, and ecologies.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The addition I’m putting on our house is one of many compromises that defines our semi-rural, part-time homestead. I say part-time because although we grow and forage some of our food, cut the firewood that supplies all of our heat, and this year are cutting the timbers that will form most of the structure of our addition, the large majority of our needs and wants are purchased in the broader economy. Although my work is necessary as our only source of income, since Tanya has been a full-time parent for six years, I’m fortunate to do work I enjoy, creating houses that I believe have long-term value. I had plans to build the kind of small timberframed house I build for clients, but we decided with our kids now four and six we needed the extra space sooner rather than later, so I went ahead and designed an addition that has features of my timberframes, but also accommodates the existing structure. It will be much faster and cheaper than building a new house, use fewer materials, and involve no additional disturbance to our forested property. I didn’t design or build our house, a small stick-built cabin that was only half finished when we bought it. It’s basically two rooms: a 20 x 20 living/kitchen area downstairs and a 10 x 10 loft bedroom upstairs. Electricity comes from a 4-panel solar system, and there’s no plumbing or running water. We use a composting toilet. There was a small hand pump on the kitchen counter when we moved in, but the pipe froze solid each of the first two winters (we hauled water) and we decided we would rather have our water source in the middle of the edible forest garden (described briefly in the previous post) just outside our front door. Our third year here we installed a stainless steel Bison pump, made here in Maine, which we’ve been very happy with.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">After I framed the floor and stood up the timber posts, I was ready to build out the walls. In the buildings I’ve designed, this is the part of the process that is closest to conventional stick (2x4, 2x6, etc) framing, and it is the work that I least enjoy. The process is repetitious, more or less automatic, and boring. My mind tends to wander when I’m doing it, especially if I’m working alone, and I find myself making careless mistakes, or standing around trying to remember what it is I was about to do. It’s no coincidence that there is often loud music blasting on job sites, the work of conventional building is so unengaging. There is no real connection to the materials either. The wood is of the lowest quality, cut from young trees grown in plantations or from young forests managed for rapid production of the spruce or fir trees that get milled into framing lumber. When I go to the building supply store to buy the sticks I have to pick through the pile to find some that are even usable. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">On ecological and economic grounds, my first choice would be to cut the wood from our property, but it was cut aggressively in the late ‘70s, and it hasn’t recovered enough to have that many trees taken out of it again. My second choice would be to buy the better quality wood that I used to be able to get from the small, family-owned sawmill here in town, but the sawyer disliked the work and took up carpentry instead. I miss the business, but I can’t blame him; running trees through an electric sawmill five days a week year after year seems to me—and to the former sawyer—like tedious, soul-crushing work. So I settle for the least good option. At each step down the ladder of options—from homestead, to the local mill owned by a local family, to the large business—the role played by care and affection for the forest and the work are likely to diminish. I love our forest and want to see it restored to some semblance of the health that is its natural birthright. I enjoy spending time in it, so cutting out trees for a week or two is more pleasure than work. The local sawyer lives amidst his work, in the same community as us. His family may have been here for generations, and he likely has no plans to leave. His commitment to the land is perhaps not unlike mine, since his livelihood depends on it. On the other hand, it is possible that he values the trees he buys only as commodities, and not as the key species in a delicate ecology, but it is also possible that he values my business or my good opinion of him enough to be sensitive to my values. The concerns of the large business, on the other hand, are likely to be purely mercenary. They operate at a large scale, and the wood they sell comes not from here, but from somewhere else, cut and milled no doubt by another similarly large operation. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The hard fact is that at the largest scale, each step of the process, from management of the “forest” to cutting and milling the trees, to assembling them into a conventional wall system, is fully embedded in the industrial economy and a culture of monotony that values efficiency of production above all else. The system’s center of gravity is in maximizing opportunities for profit at each step in the process, not in the quality of its products. In the bloodless idiom of the economics text: the system maximizes production of a resource and products. In plain English: it converts trees to lumber to houses to money as quickly and profitably as possible. In ecological terms: it sacrifices the complex, diverse genius of the forest for a commodity monoculture. Since an economy of monotony, such as the one of trees to lumber to houses I just described, is fundamentally at odds with the functioning of ecologies, it operates most effectively on frontiers, where it can exploit fresh resources that its own operation hasn’t yet degraded.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This is not a process that is new in the world, but it came relatively late to the forests of New England, arriving with the first settlers from England and France. Those first explorers and colonists were driven by a whole complex of motives, purposes, and desires, but at the top of the list of priorities was to seek out trading opportunities and commodities that could be sold at a profit. The pilgrims who founded Plymouth in 1620 may have been exiles from England’s political and religious divides, they may have been utopian seekers looking to do God’s work in a new world, but they were also frontier speculators sensitive to the presence of forest products that could be sold back in England. The ship that returned to England just one year after their arrival was “laden with good clapboard, as full as she could stow, and two hogsheads of beaver and otter skins, which they had traded in exchange for a few trifling commodities,” in the words of their governor, William Bradford. With most of its land cleared for agriculture, England had been chronically short of wood for at least two centuries. So when English settlers looked at the forests of New England, they didn’t see the diverse ecology that was the essential heart of equally diverse native economies. They belonged to the field culture of crops and pastured animals. Forests didn’t even count as property, since they were uncultivated, and therefore unimproved. But they were rich with a valuable commodity, wood, available for easy trade or the taking. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This is the essence of the frontier economy and the culture of monotony. It exists wherever a landscape is reduced from native ecological complexity to the artificial simplicity of commodity monoculture. So old-growth forest is cut down, sold off and replaced with single-species tree plantations or young forests managed for fast cutting cycles and stripped of a diversity that may have been thousands of years in the making. Or native prairie is plowed under and replaced by fields of wheat or corn. Or a mountaintop is removed to get at the coal inside. In short, the frontier economy and the culture of monotony replace the native intelligence embodied in these intact ecologies with the ignorance of the idiot. I use idiot here in its original Greek meaning: a man who did not take part in civic life, an individual separate from the community. The idiot does not inhabit an ecology, and he is ignorant of its workings, dumb to its accumulated intelligence. Remember that no scientist anywhere in the world understands completely the ecology of a forest. Knowledge of the thousands of species and the nearly infinite number of ways in which they interact, particularly in the forest soil, is simply not a part of the body of knowledge of our culture. We are the descendants of the farmers and speculators who cut down and sold off the forests of New England. We know enough to manage them for profit, at least in the short term. Their culture, the culture of fields and commodities, is ours. They didn’t live in the forest and neither do we. Though of course we do, since forest is the native ecology of New England, England, and about half the land area of the planet. Most of us are exiles in our own homes, idiots. I don’t like living as an exile, and neither does Tanya, and when we moved to our forest homestead, a major motivation was to find out what it might mean to become native to this place, and what kind of economy it would permit.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But standing with my circular saw cutting the knotty, twisted 2x4s at the far end of that economy, encompassed in the frontier speculator’s vision of the world refined in the centuries since, I participate in the culture of monotony. I help feed it. (As I said above, I would prefer to get my wood from our property or a local mill, but the frontier economy excels at foreclosing options). But I have ulterior motives. The wide walls are for extra insulation, which will save a cord or two of wood every year for the life of the house. It seems a winning trade, since that’s a lot of trees not cut over the next century. And as more people switch their heating from oil to wood, the pressure on our forests will grow. While the implications of peak oil, peak natural gas, and peak coal are all alarming, if you really want to scare yourself late at night, lie awake trying to imagine a world later this century where everyone is trying to heat and cook with wood. The sixteenth-century Native Americans of southern New England who cleared land to cultivate corn suffered local shortages of wood for heating and cooking; their population density, where Boston stands today, was about 3 per square mile. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Economies produce the resources they require, and they produce the people too. Before industrialization, the economy required skilled joiners schooled in the long tradition of timber framing, which was the standard building technique in North America, Europe, and indeed in most parts of the world where there was forest and iron-making technology. In Europe, timber framing developed through a guild system of master, apprentice, and intermediate stages such as journeyman, It was a craft with a body of knowledge and a set of skills that had developed and been refined over centuries. The chief benefit of the elaborate system of joinery that evolved was that it allowed the conversion of trees to buildings constructed with large timbers with a minimum amount of processing and without the use of nails or other metal fasteners. It is one of the great technological triumphs of history, made possible by the forests that girdle the planet. At its highest expression, it allowed for the creation of buildings of refinement and beauty that could last for half a millennium or more. The timberframing revival of the last forty years has been called the most successful revival ever of a traditional craft.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Most often the original timberframed buildings were finished with clay or lime plasters, and later in the week I was helping my clients plaster one of the walls in their new house. Instead of the traditional three-coat system, I like to use a single coat that is a mixture of clay, lime, sand and straw. We use lots of chopped straw to eliminate cracking as the plaster dries, and doing one coat instead of three saves time and money, but still produces a beautiful finish that far surpasses sheetrock and paint for warmth and depth. I’ve worked with sheetrock crews in the past, and even done a little of it myself when I had no choice. The work is monotonous and tedious, the materials standardized and insipid. Paint is what makes sheetrock tolerable as an interior surface, but even so, to my eyes it is flat and lifeless. Plaster, on the other hand, is luminous, with each subtle variation in the surface and texture catching the light in different ways, giving a plastered wall richness and depth. I like plastering, and tend to lose myself in the work. A rhythm of moving the plaster up the wall, smoothing it, adding more, smoothing that into the previous section, is quickly established. For me at least, the work becomes a kind of meditation, and time passes quickly. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Like timberframing, plastering is a traditional craft that long predates industrial economies and modern building technologies; plaster finishes of clay or lime have been used for millennia on all types of handmade buildings all over the world. Plasters have also been central to the growth in popularity of traditional and natural buildings over the last couple decades. Plaster is commonly used on strawbale, cob, and adobe buildings; it can even be used as a finish over sheetrock. The skills needed to begin plastering are easily acquired, as are the materials, so plastering is popular with owner/builders. But like most traditional crafts, plastering encompasses a large body of knowledge, and the master plasterer has an intuitive feel for the material and techniques that takes years of experience, dedication, and study to acquire.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We could use more jobs like that now, and we’ll need more in the future. As the frontier economy falters, crashes, and then disappears—as it must without ever expanding frontiers to exploit—we’ll need to return to the practice of building things of quality and long-term value that rely more on traditional skills and local materials than on mass-produced components manufactured from commodities. Those will be in short supply. We might find the rewards of making things well from the materials at hand more deeply satisfying than the promise of quick profit from speculation. We need to create an economy that doesn’t rely on a frontier. Right now, yesterday in fact. I need to work in an economy that isn’t the work of idiots destroying ecologies they don’t understand and sacrificing diversity and complexity for the quick profits but long-term instability of monotony. Diversity created us; monotony will be our ruin. The forest is more than the sum of its trees, the mountain is worth more than the coal it holds, the prairie is more supple and resilient than the field of corn. I can imagine an economy deeply rooted in local ecologies rather than the unsustainable extraction of particular commodities. Such economies have existed before; they exist now, in the marginal lands out past the frontiers. An economy is nothing more than how we choose to get our food, clothing, shelter and energy. Our home, our ecology, is the forest; we can nurture it or cut it down to make a buck.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Of Plymouth Plantation</i> by William Bradford is the source of his quote.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>The Humanure Handbook</i> by Joseph Jenkins is the book to buy if you’re interested in composting your own waste.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Of the many timberframing books, the ones I find most useful are <i>Build a Classic Timberframe House</i> by Jack Sobon, <i>Timber Building in Britain</i> by R.W. Brunskill, and the classic <i>English Historic Carpentry</i> by Cecil Hewitt.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>The Hand-Sculpted House</i> by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley, and Michael Smith is the natural building book that I have returned to repeatedly for sound advice, an ecological approach to building, and inspiring writing. Even though cob isn’t really suitable to New England’s climate and weather, it’s worth having for valuable information on subjects such as design, site work, natural plasters, and earthen floors. <i>Building Green</i> by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan offers sensible advice on various natural building techniques from a more mainstream perspective.</div><div><br />
</div></span></span>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-24184935122545558192012-02-10T16:38:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:38:02.731-08:00The Forest As Garden: Visions of Plenty<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally Published January 9, 2011</i><br />
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The weather warmed up here this past week to an unseasonable fifty degrees. I took advantage of the warmth to open up the walls of our house where the addition will join it, put in the new structural members, and closed it back up again just in time for the cold to return. Now I’m back to cutting firewood and waiting for the forest ground to freeze solid so I can drag out the pine and spruce logs that will become rafters, purlins, and tie beams. The timbers are being logged from an area of about two acres inside an imaginary oval with our house in the middle. The portion of the oval just south and southeast of our house was cleared by the original owner eighteen years ago. Since then a scattering of paper and gray birches and quaking aspens have grown up. We’ve left most of these since we’ve been here for the pleasures and benefits they provide: shade, beauty, soft shaking music of wind-blown leaves, cover for birds and squirrels visiting the feeders we put out, and protection for the tree seedlings and saplings that will eventually take their place. We see our entire eight acres of forest as a garden; this part, just beyond our front door, is the most intensively cultivated. It is our version of a front yard. The canopy trees are mostly ones of our choosing, and with a couple exceptions are not native to our eastern forest: apples, pears, persimmons, medlars, plums, and a peach. We’ve left a couple red oak seedlings that some blue jay or squirrel buried and then forgot. Some time next decade they’ll begin providing mast for the wild turkey and deer that visit.This year I’m cutting out the small handful of aspens though. They’ve done their work as pioneer trees, helping prepare the ground for species that follow in succession, though in this case it is cultivated fruit trees rather than climax forest species that are taking their place. Next winter they’ll do their final work, providing the fuel to cook our meals and heat our house for a few weeks. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The agricultural tradition has left our culture with a strong preference for highly simplified landscapes. So the conventional arrangement for a collection of fruit trees is an orchard with grass and maybe some clover and wildflowers carpeting the ground. But our model is an ecological one, where some species or other exploits every available niche. So under and around the canopy of fruit trees, we have a layer of shrubs. Here almost all the selections are native to the eastern forest; most have delicious fruit too. Planted in clumps are highbush blueberries and elderberries and gooseberries and currants and serviceberries and hazelnuts and chokeberries and raspberries and beach plums and a highbush cranberry. A few of the blueberries were already present, as were the chokeberries and a scattering of wild raisins. We’ve left these last for the birds—we like the fruits too, but the birds clean them out before we get any. In the sunny patches and dappled shade among the trees and shrubs we’ve planted a varied layer of herbaceous perennials—some for food, others for adding nutrients to the soil and making compost, still others to attract insects and hummingbirds. Among these plants are borage and lovage, anise hyssop and lemon balm, catnip and comfrey, Jerusalem artichoke and yarrow, rhubarb and asparagus. Blank spots are filling in with ground covers of cranberry and lingonberry and alpine strawberry and clover and sorrel. Logs inoculated with mushroom spawn lie in shady spots beneath the fruit trees. Grape vines climb a long arbor. At one edge of the garden is a large fire ring I built for outdoor cooking. Friends join us there for dinners on summer weekends. Finally are the rock piles and logs scattered in strategic locations for snakes, salamanders, frogs, and other small critters. They belong in the garden too, and feed on slugs and other insects.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">There are various prototypes for this type of forest garden, many in tropical climates, a few pioneering efforts in temperate zones, but I like the oldest one best: the Garden of Eden. Every culture has its own creation myth, and the one that served western culture for the roughly fifteen hundred years up to the middle of the nineteenth century, is found in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In chapter two Eden is described as a place of effortless abundance, where every want is satisfied. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.” The original garden was a garden of trees, a forest garden. Although the Old Testament was written down some time in the first millennium BC, some of its stories seem rooted in oral tradition that reach far into the past. So the story of Noah and the flood finds echoes in flood stories from cultures all over the world that most likely describe the truly epochal flooding that would have accompanied the end of the last ice age as sea levels surged. In similar fashion the story of Eden seems to preserve a very old folk memory of the world inhabited by hunter-gatherers, living off the natural abundance of the land. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We know from modern hunter-gatherers that their knowledge of the local ecologies on which they depend is virtually total. We know too from the work of anthropologists that on average they work far fewer hours to secure their food than do farming people and that their diet is more varied and more nutritious. And we know that the text of Genesis presents a bleak picture of the farming life. When Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden for usurping God’s knowledge of good and evil, God’s punishment is severe: “cursed is the ground for they sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” From forest garden to weedy field of grain, their fall is complete. The message seems clear enough: so long as man is one member of the community of life, all his wants will be satisfied by the natural abundance of that community. Aspire to the knowledge reserved for God, and the curse will be exile and the unremitting toil of the farming life. A few chapters later the message is reinforced in the story of Cain and Abel: the farmer’s offering is rejected by God, while the shepherd’s is gratefully accepted. Cain too is cursed with barren land and exile. But it is his lineage that survives, just as it was agriculture that survived and spread, eliminating hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in the process.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A modern, historical example of the clash between the lifestyles, economies and ecologies of hunter-gatherers and farmers—and one that is central to our own work—occurred here in New England at the start of the seventeenth century. Eastern North America was settled by the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English; the English of course ultimately prevailed in the contest of European nations for ownership of the continent. England’s native ecology is not unlike parts of eastern North America; with abundant rainfall and a climate milder than New England, it is naturally forested. But England has been farmed for thousands of years, and by the seventeenth century, the native ecology had been dramatically altered. As British science writer Colin Tudge puts it, writing about the pastoral landscape of his homeland: </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“I chauvinistically suggest that there is none more beautiful in the <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>world.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yet this is the glory of devastation. Britain is the northern temperate equivalent of denuded Crete, whose beautiful pastel rocks shine in the sun, but which, just a few thousand years ago, was covered in forest that might have harbored dwarf elephants and hippos. The soft purple hills of Scotland, with their melancholic accompaniment of pipes, were formerly smothered in ash, pine, and birch in the warm, damp west, and oak, pine, birch, and rowan in the Grampian Hills. The lush green fields of England were once covered by open oak forest—the temperate equivalent of australopithecine country—practically from border to border. In fact, Britain retains less of its pristine forest than any other country in Europe.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">As go the forests, so go the animal and bird species that depend on them for habitat, and Britain is today impoverished in both. Impoverished too—or cursed as Genesis has it—were the peasant farmers who were yoked to an agricultural economy that wrought this destruction. Disease and famine were constant features of all the countries of Europe in the centuries before and just after the colonial enterprise began. The eminent French historian Fernand Braudel records no fewer than forty general famines (not counting the “hundreds and hundreds” of local famines) in France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. And France serves as a stand-in for the continent: “The same could be said of any country in Europe,” he writes. (Under the heading <i>Be Careful What You Wish For</i>, it should be pointed out that the sickness, the starvation, the malnourishment, and the wholesale destruction of native flora and fauna—in short the impoverishment of a wide swath of the biota of England to the benefit of a handful of domesticated crops and animals—was the work of a culture of organic farming powered by energy from the wind, sun, water, and animals).</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Farming came late to New England before European settlement, if it can truly be said to have arrived at all. A date of around 900 AD is generally accepted for corn cultivation in eastern North America, but in most places it formed only a part of a diverse diet of wild game, fish, fruit, herbs, and tubers. The small civilization centered at Cahokia was already in the past, and whatever urban culture de Soto encountered in the Southeast in the sixteenth century was gone by the seventeenth. In most of Maine corn cultivation never arrived at all until initiated by the English and French. The people of eastern North America had a woodland economy, as they had for about 10,000 years. That the various native tribes modified the forests to serve their own purposes there is no doubt. The forest was no pristine unpeopled wilderness, it was home to dozens of diverse but related tribal groups, the basis of an economy that provided wood for shelter, heat, cooking fuel and transportation; game, fruit, and vegetables for food; and shelter for defense and attack. That the early explorers and settlers were in awe of the abundance they encountered—fish, fowl, wood, and game all far exceeded what was commonly available in England, as the letters home from early settlers attest—points to the very different relationships between people and their native land in Europe and America. Speaking in broad terms, European farmers tended to obliterate their native landscapes, replacing species wholesale with domesticated, imported varieties of grains and animals that they attempted to isolate from the ecosystem as much as possible. The Native Americans of New England—hunters, gatherers, part-time gardeners—on the other hand, fully integrated their own lives with the local ecologies, modifying them to suit their own wants and needs, but avoiding wholesale destruction. The two modes of living, the two economies, are as distinct as the lives of Adam in Eden and after the fall. And if the interpretation of Genesis as a folk memory depicting the displacement of hunter/gatherers by full-time grain farmers is accurate, then that same displacement occurred in New England in the seventeenth century—as it must have all over the world at various times whenever farming spread into intact ecologies and the human economies they sustained. That the farmers ultimately won—the beneficiaries of disease and superior technologies for killing—is a matter of historical record. But which mode of life is actually preferable, or more tenable in the long run, is a matter of perspective and the assumptions from which conclusions are drawn. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The story that tells of farming as the first major step forward leading humanity out of the darkness and into the light of urban civilization, the refinements of high culture, democracy, industrialization, material comfort, and finally technological prowess, is well known. It’s our story, or at least the official one we most often tell ourselves about ourselves. But other stories fit the facts too: of a fall from grace perhaps. Or of a loss of connection with the rest of life; and of a loss of freedom, security, and equality that are among the features that many people find admirable in indigenous societies. Or of a long dark age of slavery, poverty, starvation, and warfare on a scale previously unimagined. Or perhaps the most depressing possibility of all: the story of a species that proves once and for all that an organism with a large brain and a capacity for tool use is an evolutionary dead end, the biological equivalent of a super virus or of a meteor crashing into the side of a planet. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;">But then again a dark age can only be seen clearly once the light has dawned. And the proper perspective for the history of modern humans is 50,000 years, not 3,000, and it encompasses the entire planet, not just the regions that produced literate civilizations and self-aggrandizing cultural elites. I can imagine the outlines of a story told a century or two from now where a millennia-long dark age that encompasses all written history to date ends with the closing of the final frontiers and the end of the social experiment that began with the rise of farming. For expansive, acquisitive societies need a frontier, to absorb excess population and to accrue new resources. In the last 500 years a global economic system rooted in agriculture and centered in Europe discovered and colonized half the planet (which had been inhabited under very different economic circumstances) and then discovered and colonized an entire planet’s worth of fossil fuels and minerals. These frontiers are now closed or closing. There are no more continents to be settled and exploited, no untapped sources of virgin resources to be mined or drilled. Those who argue that the current status quo can continue indefinitely are obliged to point out where the next frontier is to be found, or how the circumstances of the past 500 years are not entirely exceptional. For our particular economic and social arrangements—capitalism and constitutional democracy especially—have only existed in a world with an ever-expanding frontier. In 1500, the world’s population was perhaps 500 million; in 1800 it was about 1 billion; later this year it will reach 7 billion. The next frontier had better be a big one. That is the story of our culture, even though it is too rarely told in those terms. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;">The most likely story of our immediate future is one where the harsh trajectory that began with the rise of grain agriculture and the foolish, profane notion that the world belongs to us ends in a cultural implosion that is inevitable and necessary before we consume all life on the planet. I imagine that the dominant global culture of industrial capitalism, having finally reached the limits of growth, will begin to viciously cannibalize itself. I imagine a minority choosing to simply walk away from the long history of control and domination and the destruction and suffering and impoverishment they bring about. In this story Genesis is one creation myth of many, rooted in the history of loss and epochal change, the story of hubris and despair that are the dark heart of the agricultural enterprise and the empires it feeds. I dream of forest gardens and the restoration of Eden.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;">Resources</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;">The contemporary version of forest gardening in temperate climates dates only to the 1980s. The best books for North America are <i>Gaia’s Garden</i> by Toby Hemenway, which is particularly well suited to suburban-scale plantings, and the two volume <i>Edible Forest Gardens</i> by Dave Jacke, a comprehensive resource that is particularly good for the northeast.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;">The quote from Colin Tudge is from his book <i>The Time Before History</i>. <i>The Structures of Everday Life</i> by Fernand Braudel is volume one of the three-volume<i> Civilization & Capitalism: 15<sup>th</sup>-18<sup>th</sup> Century</i>. It provides a fascinating portrait of the material life of people throughout the world during those centuries as well as a wealth of data. <i>Stone-Age Economics</i> by Marshall Sahlins is the seminal study of the economies of hunter-gatherers. The best place to begin a study of the relationship between the ecology and economy of New England during the colonial period is William Cronon’s landmark <i>Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England</i>. The bibliographical essay, though somewhat dated now, is alone worth the price of the book. A good overview of the history of agriculture is <i>Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization</i> by Richard Manning. And finally, an extended discussion of Genesis along lines somewhat similar to my own brief comments, though with a different emphasis, can be found in <i>The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World</i> by Hugh Brody.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><br />
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</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-88804021469861362672012-02-10T16:36:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:36:00.319-08:00Gardening in the Forest: Winter's Harvest<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published January 2, 2011</i><br />
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Late Fall and Winter are among my favorite times to be in the forest. After the bold, eye-catching colors of early Autumn fade and drop away, the woods take on the bare, austere cast that they’ll hold until May when the new growth of another year returns. As the days shorten, the air turns sharp and cold. With fresh snow on the ground and the light of the low sun slanting through the barren branches and glinting off the snow-heavy boughs of conifers, the forest is as magical and invigorating as at any time of year. I guard these days jealously, especially the shortest ones in the weeks just before and after the solstice, and try to arrange my schedule so that I can spend them at home, cutting next year’s firewood. It doesn’t always work out that way, but this year it did. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">When we moved from Asheville to Maine, one of the many changes we made, in addition to moving to a much colder climate, was switching from oil heat to wood. When we arrived at our new home on the last day of 2002, the 530-square-foot, half-finished house had a leaky wood stove and a propane wall unit heater. It was cold outside and cold inside. Our first priority was to get warm. The previous owner had left some firewood stacked near the house. We burned that up, found some more buried under the snow, burned that, then resorted to cutting dead, fallen trees and burned them. After two weeks the propane tank was empty. We removed the heater. It was a frigid winter. Some nights when the temperatures dipped into the negative numbers we slept right next to the stove with our two dogs and lots of blankets. In the morning, the dogs’ water bowl was frozen.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Our approach to cutting wood the first couple of years was uncertain and timid. We had a vision, but not much of a plan, and even less of a method. The forest was unhealthy, that was obvious enough from the overcrowded conditions and the many dead and dying balsam firs. I knew forests pretty well, mostly from the time I had spent in the protected forests of the southern Appalachians, particularly Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the wilderness areas of the national forests. But those were southern forests. And much later in succession than our new home forest, which had been cut pretty aggressively in the 1970s. I’d cut some smaller hardwoods—red maple mostly that was regrowing in clusters from older stumps—then get distracted thinning out all the spindly balsam firs, trying to create space for the healthier spruces, pines, and cedars. My time was limited, and I was focused more on learning the intricacies of timberframing and house building. Most of those early years I didn’t get enough wood cut to get us even half way through a winter, and we ended up buying firewood.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But I spent a lot of time in the forest, listening, trying to understand what it was trying to become. A big obstacle was my not wanting to waste anything. The forest was horribly overgrown, but if I cut out all the small softwood saplings, what would I do with them? I had spent a lot of time in forests, but only as a visitor, a hiker or backpacker or fly-fisher. I had looked at forests, admired and appreciated them, often been awed by them, but I had never lived in one, and certainly had never needed one to help keep me alive. At that level, I had to admit, I didn’t really understand forests at all. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I took it as small consolation that I wasn’t alone. Common practice among the locals seemed to be to gather the thinnings and brush and burn it. That struck me intuitively as wrong. Then researching natural building, I came across a technique known as cordwood building, which used short lengths of wood mortared together with cob or cement. I designed a greenhouse/bathhouse (the house itself had no plumbing) that used this technique and created a use for all the softwood thinnings that needed to come out. A local foundation that supported natural building gave us a grant to get the project underway. A friend and I spent a couple months cutting small diameter (3-8”) softwoods from about 2 acres starting at our house and working our way out. We cut the unhealthiest trees first, then the ones that were already dying, then the ones that were healthy but growing in the shadow of older or taller trees. Always we left the best trees, giving the forest the best chance of creating a mature canopy in the shortest time. When we were done we had enough wood for the cordwood part of the building and the forest was transformed. It was open enough so that you could walk through it, and with all the sick trees gone, it seemed far more robust and healthy. (We left most of the standing dead trees for the woodpeckers, chickadees, and other forest denizens who use them for food or shelter). As for the smallest cuttings, the saplings too small to build with and the branches of all the larger trees, I arranged those in scattered piles on the forest floor, figuring that the smaller mammals would use them for habitat and they would eventually rot and help build the forest soil. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A year or two later I came across a book called <i>The Hidden Forest</i> about the Andrews Experiment Forest in the Pacific northwest. I discovered that biologists and ecologists were using the forest as the site of a multi-decade study of how a forest functions as an ecosystem, to understand how its seemingly infinite disparate parts relate to one another. This was exactly what I had been looking for. The scientists admitted that even after three decades they were still just scratching the surface of the forest’s diversity and complexity. Thousands of the arthropod species that live in the soil, for instance, hadn’t even been named yet. But one discovery they made was that the most important contribution to long-term forest health is dead wood on the ground. Clear the deadwood away and you starve the soil. Like cuttings and a garden. Forests waste nothing. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Now, four years later, when I go into the forest to cut wood, I feel more confident. I’m less ignorant than I was eight years ago. I’ll never fully understand the forest—its complexity overwhelms my limited human capacity to comprehend relationships— but I’ve worked out the broad outlines of a vision, a plan, and a method. The vision is to take what the forest offers on its own terms and to work to restore as much of the diversity and resilience that have been taken from it in the past 400 years. The plan is to go slowly, to treat the forest as a garden, but to garden on forest time, which means a plan that unfolds over years and decades and even centuries. Central to the plan is to minimize how much we need to harvest from the forest each year. Our house is fully insulated now; we heat it with two cords of wood per year. This year we’re adding a farmhouse kitchen and a bedroom, another 400 square feet, which will bring the total to just under 1000. When the addition is done, we’ll switch to a wood cookstove. Since the addition will be superinsulated, the heat from cooking should heat the whole house. That follows the permaculture idea of stacking functions: when we cook, the heat is a byproduct. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">As for method, that starts with respect too. To cut trees I use two axes—one for felling, the other for limbing—and a bow saw. I sometimes use an electric chainsaw for cutting logs to stovewood length once I’ve carried them out of the forest but never in the forest. It seems disrespectful to the trees. But it’s more than that too: like lawnmowers, chainsaws represent everything that’s wrong with the way we relate to the land. A forest is full of sound and nuance. Squirrels chatter at each other or at intruders, chickadees flit through the spruce and pine boughs singing their repetitive songs, woodpeckers pound at trunks, ermines appear out of brush piles, wind whispers in the treetops, branches crackle under the weight of snow. Some of my happiest days have been spent working in the forest during the crisp days of winter. My kids come to watch me and play while I’m limbing the tree I’ve just felled. They help me plan which way the next tree is going to fall, ask me questions and give me advice. Swinging the axe keeps me warm, and in practiced hands an axe is plenty fast enough. In the silences between its rhythmic <i>thwack thwack thwack</i> against the flesh of a tree, you can hear the rest of life carrying on. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But turn on a chainsaw and this world is silenced. The deafening whine and violence of the machine overwhelms the senses and deadens its user to the life around him, slave to another machine and the unending quest for efficiency and maximum productivity. It’s a dead end. Life isn’t amenable to efficiency; you’re alive or not. Accomplishing a task faster doesn’t make you more alive, it just means you’re done sooner. It also changes the task from one that might enter the realm of craft to one that exists exclusively in the world of production and accounting. How much? How long? How many units per hour? If you don’t enjoy the task, why do it in the first place? Some tasks are necessary chores, they have to be done, and the sooner the better. Cutting wood to stove length is a lot like that. I’ve done it with a bow saw in the past, but this year I’m using the chainsaw. It’s less enjoyable that way, dead time more or less, but the time I save I’ll get to spend cutting the joinery for the new addition, and that’s the form of woodworking I enjoy more than any other.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>The Hidden Forest</i> by Jon R. Luoma is a fascinating account of the efforts of scientists to understand a forest as a complete ecosystem. Although the research forest it features is in the Pacific northwest, it is essential reading for anyone interested in how forests work.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">My felling and limbing axes are made by Snow & Neally, an old company based in Bangor. I use a Bahco buck saw. I had to order it over the internet, but it’s better than the cheap ones available in the local stores.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474751742842768175.post-24472106180001859602012-02-10T16:31:00.000-08:002012-02-10T16:34:37.154-08:00Site Work<div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Originally published December 24, 2010</i><br />
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This is a blog about ecology and economy; about food, shelter, energy, and forests; about relationships, family, and love; about limits and possibilities; about a fracturing world on the cusp of epochal change. My aim in writing it, and the book for which these entries will serve as a rough draft, is to explore in real time one family’s efforts to integrate the basic essentials of its livelihood with a local native ecology in a way that not only diminishes the deleterious impacts on that ecology, but that actively works to restore the health and diversity that have been stripped from it over the past 400 years. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We established the rough contours of this work eight years ago this week, my wife Tanya and I, when we moved to our property, eight forested acres four miles outside the village of Blue Hill on the coast of Maine. We met in Asheville, North Carolina ten years ago. Tanya had just finished law school with a degree in environmental and Native American law and had moved back east to be closer to her family. I was writing and publishing backcountry guidebooks. In my spare time I was renovating a bungalow I lived in and writing editorials for the local papers about local land use issues. My writing attracted some favorable attention, and I ended up sitting on the city’s 2020 visioning committee, speaking frequently before city council and civic groups, and serving as president of a “smart growth” non-profit. I met Tanya when we hired her as executive director. We became best friends, then lovers, finally partners. We used to go for long walks along the winding mountain road that rose up behind my house. She had the unsettling habit of interrupting long silences by saying exactly what I was thinking, even when it was unrelated to any previous discussion. I think it was on those walks that I decided we’d better get married, since in some deeper sense it seemed like we already were. Our shared interests then, as now, were sustainable local economies, permaculture and forest gardening, natural building and historic preservation. We have two children, Clementine (age six) and Guthrie (almost four).</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">A few words about ecology and economy before we get started. Both words are rooted in the Greek word for household, <i>oikos</i>. The phrases ecology of home and home economics therefore both contain a certain cross-lingual repetitiveness. I like both and find the echoes pleasing. Both are central to these writings; I chose <i>ecology of home</i> as the title since it’s closer to the heart of what we’re doing and I couldn’t think of an elegant way to incorporate both. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">All durable, successful economies--whether at household, village, or national level--are rooted in a respect for the local ecology,. Nevertheless, it is a matter of historical fact that most economies at the largest scale have not been rooted in a respect for the local ecology or the limits it imposes. To my mind among the most interesting aspects of such economies are the details of their eventual disintegration. It is fashionable at present to talk of such disintegration as collapse, and while the term is apt (particularly as it applies to our own national and/or global economy), I think it also reveals the unspoken bias that large, extensive economies are the norm, the inevitable end result of a natural progression, and that the smaller scales are earlier stages in an upward evolutionary trajectory. It is common to hear these largest economies referred to as complex, with the complexity itself being unsustainable and in part responsible for their ultimate collapse. I think it’s more accurate and profitable to speak of the largest economies as the most highly centralized in their organization, with a fundamental simplicity behind the apparent complexity. For a given geographic area, North America say, a large diversity of small economies offers more complexity than does a single centralized economy. This perspective eliminates the awkward attempts to reconcile the fact that while diversity and complexity are central to resilient, durable ecosystems, they are somehow fatal flaws when it comes to economies. But that’s a topic for a later post and I’m getting ahead of myself here…</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The starting point for our project is also the most obvious feature of the landscape: here on the coast of Maine, as across the rest of North America east of the Mississippi River, our home, our <i>oikos</i>, our ecology, is forest. Since we humans use stories to narrate our worlds, I'll suggest several narrative threads to set the stage for the story of our forest home. First, if we listen to the land, it speaks quite clearly and insistently: “I want to be forest,” it says. Leave it alone, and forest it will become. If that strikes a reader as sentimental, anthropomorphic nonsense, it can be put another way: life organizes itself into forest communities. If still a reader objects to the implication that the disparate lives that make up a forest are up to anything more organized or far-sighted than their own survival, the fact can put more simply still: Forests happen. Repeatedly, persistently, almost without exception, and perhaps most importantly for our current predicament, without any external energy input. Unlike suburban lawns, vegetable gardens, cow pastures, or fields of wheat or corn. Each of these requires initial and ongoing energy inputs–human, animal, or fossil fuel. To create a lawn, vegetable garden, pasture, or field, also requires an ideology of ownership and total control, since the forest and all the life it encompasses must be removed. We might suppose that such control is both necessary and inevitable if human economies are to be sustained. History suggests otherwise. Archaeologists say that Maine has been inhabited by human beings for roughly 12,000 years. After the last ice age, the forests recolonized the land within 1,000 years. For the next 10,600 years the human economy was based on the forest ecology. Only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with European settlement, did field culture become the basis of the human economy in Maine. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Forests work. They are stable, resilient, and have been a pervasive ecological form for about 300 million years. They occur everywhere on earth where there is adequate rainfall and warmth. It is quite possible that in their structural and biological complexity and diversity forests embody an intelligence, worked out by natural selection over millennia, about what works and what doesn’t that dwarfs any of our own ideas about sustainability or ecological resilience. We would do well to listen. And to remember that among the many creatures that have evolved from the diversity of forests is a funny looking naked ape with an unusually large brain and a propensity for tool use and a gift for language.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">My plan for the blog is to post once a week (Sunday nights) for the next year. These posts will chronicle a story, our story, as it unfolds over the course of that year and varies with the changing of the seasons. But it will also be a meditation on a particular place at a particular historical moment: I hope to use the mundane details of a household’s daily functioning to address larger issues of economy, ecology, family, community, and happiness.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I have a couple other hopes for the blog. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We live in precipitous times. As more people learn about peak oil and other hard ecological limits, or about the very shaky foundation of our economic system, many are coming to the realization that some fundamental, perhaps epochal shift is under way, even while political leaders and the mainstream media whistle happy tunes about recovery, growth and signs of renewed vigor in the consumer economy. For anyone who doubts the sincerity of those singers, or detects a disingenuousness in the tune, these notes might offer not only an alternate interpretation of present circumstances and future prospects, but also an alternate set of values that may prove more durable and honest than those shaped by an economic system based on extraction and exploitation, and more amenable to a life fully lived.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Second, I make my living building and restoring timber frames. I would like to have the time and space to make the case for my approach to this work as completely as possible. I would like to help move our culture away from assessing houses – and just about everything else for that matter, people included – as commodities that have a value of so many dollars. Houses and other buildings are works of imagination that become persistent features of the landscape. To build a house is to remake a small part of the world. Like any other craft, it can be done well or poorly, with care for the work and respect for the world or without. Too often in our bottom-line culture the world suffers from the undertaking; too often each new building leaves the world a little poorer for beauty and ecological health. Winston Churchill once (twice actually) famously observed, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” That’s true I think, and I can’t help wondering why, when as a culture we’ve put such enormous time, energy and money into cultivating an organic food movement that supports artisan food producers and emphasizes quality, freshness, and sustainability above cost, we’re so willing to settle for the fast food or big box retail mentality of fast and cheap when it comes to our buildings. In what strange, unwanted ways are we letting this bottom line accounting of our houses shape us, our culture, and our landscape?</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">We are still a wealthy country. In fact, with oil production at its all-time peak and coal and natural gas not quite at peak yet, we have as much real energy and wealth at our disposal as any people are likely to ever have again. I believe that the best current use for that energy and wealth is to build an economy of food, shelter, energy, and transportation that allows us to flourish while at the same time restoring the ecological health and diversity that the land naturally cultivates and that the rest of the community of life depends on. Whatever out intent, we are on a path to leave future generations much that they will not want: crushing debt or the ruins of a failed economic system, an unstable climate and atmosphere, a biologically impoverished world, depleted mineral and energy reserves. Perhaps we might start thinking about a few things we could leave behind that they might actually find of value, particularly since “they” are our children and grandchildren. It seems like the decent thing to do.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Resources:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i>Eastern Forests</i> by John Kricher is an excellent introduction to the ecology of eastern North America. <i>Twelve Thousand Years</i> by Bruce L. Bourque covers the archaeology and history of Native Americans in Maine.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This is not a peak oil blog, but the reality of peak oil structures much of the discussion, as it will structure so much of our future. Attempts to plan for the future without taking into account the consequences of peak oil are like trying to build an airplane without accounting for gravity: the results are bound to be disappointing. theoildrum.com offers the best ongoing discussion of the technical issues surrounding peak oil and energy. energybulletin.net is also good and covers a wide range of related topics.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times New Roman; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Of my writings from a decade ago, the only one I’m aware of that is available online is an interview I did in 1999 with the writer James Howard Kunstler, that was published in Asheville’s arts and entertainment weekly. I link to it here because I think he has been one of our more prescient, intelligent writers. He writes a funny weekly blog at kunstler.com</div><div><br />
</div>Jim Bannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173657555693588120noreply@blogger.com0