Thursday, December 31, 2009

Well, it’s New Year’s Eve—and not only that, but it’s also a blue moon. I guess it’s time for me to reflect back on the year (and the decade, if I get around to it) and plan for next year (and maybe the next decade)[and maybe even the next half of my life].

I feel like we’re on the brink of societal collapse. It seems important to focus on the positive things we can be doing so that the transformation will be less chaotic. That’s what I’m going to be working on.

This past year I began to feel a much more urgent need to learn skills that could help me become more self-sufficient. These are skills I’ve always wanted to learn, but it’s all begun to fell urgent nowadays. I expanded the garden and was able to can and store a lot more food this year for the winter. Not nearly enough, but at least it’s made a noticeable dent. Next year one of my goals is to start a serious food storage effort. I want to have at least a year’s worth of food always in reserve and more than that if I’m able. For the coming year I’d like to buy a good supply of beans and grains and other staples (salt, sugar, vinegar,…) and then can and dry and store as much garden produce as possible.

My burning need is to disengage from the system. The system is making life on earth unsustainable and as long as I continue to participate in the system I’m a guilty party.

How do I more fully disengage? By taking back a lot of the responsibilities I’ve delegated to others, particularly nameless, faceless corporations. I certainly can’t do it all in the coming year, but I feel confident I can in the next ten years.

I really like all of the new initiatives that have been springing up in the past few years. There is an increasing group of people awakening to the true reality of our time.

The Transition Town initiative is an interesting movement. It was started to help prepare towns for peak oil, but I think it’s much more broadly applicable to all of the crises we’re facing. I think the financial crisis is a much more ominous worry—like possibly in the next few months. We really need more time to re-build resilient communities.

I’ve been giving considerable thought to my town of Snyder. I actually think it has a lot going for it and if society collapsed we may actually be a very cohesive community. We’re small enough, old-fashioned enough, and skilled enough to potentially pull together quite well. Most people already garden and many have backyard livestock of some sort. We could grow most of our produce, plus eggs and small-scale livestock, and the surrounding farms can produce grains. I think we could all look out for each other quite well, and do alright.

In the next year I’d like to get hens and meat rabbits, and all of the accoutrements I’d need. I’m planning to expand the garden to 800 square feet at least and get the soil tested and amended. I’m planning to grow oats and get a grain roller, start nixtamalizing my own corn to make homemade masa, hopefully finally get a pressure canner AND finally clean out the storm cellar. I hope to order some bulk grains and beans in February through a Denver-based bulk grain sale and buy a bunch of buckets for food storage. I plan to get suitable crocks for making sauerkraut. Ideally I’d like to get a high quality grain mill, but I’m not sure that’ll happen this year. And I’d like to finally put up a clothesline.

I’m no longer buying any disposable products except toilet paper, and any clothes I buy (besides underwear) are secondhand. I’d like to learn how to knit socks so I can make several pairs of durable and warm wool socks for Collin and me. Store-bought socks nowadays are so cheap they’re almost worthless. I think manufacturers purposely design them to wear out as fast as possible.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Khatru died yesterday, aged 17 years, 4 months, and 12 days. It was a rather beautiful death. I got to wake up with her beside me (she’s been sleeping with me, snuggled against my chest, for about the past month because her body could no longer keep her warm). She was still alive but her body seemed to be completely paralyzed. Even so, her eyes through very subtle shifts of focus were responding to everything I said. I talked to her and stroked and kissed her for about half an hour, then told her I was getting up to fill her hot water bottle. When I got back a minute or so later her head was torqued back and she wasn’t breathing. She spasmed a few times and her heart stopped beating a few minutes later. It almost seems like she waited for me to wake up so I could say good-bye to her.

We had to borrow John’s mattock so we could dig a hole in the frozen ground. It wasn’t easy. Collin and I tag-teamed to get it done.

It seems very strange without her here. I spent more years with her than anyone else in my life except Mom and Dad—and with them it was only a few months longer. So the energy shifts yet again in the house.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I woke up exceedingly groggy this morning and my morning coffee hasn’t helped me feel any less dazed (yet). It’s been bitterly cold, but at least this morning the sun is shining and the weather system that brought snow the past few days has cleared out. It was supposed to get down to -9 last night, but when I woke up this morning (although not until 7:30) it was 10 above, so I don’t think it got quite that cold last night. Yesterday it didn’t get above 10 all day.

I’d like to write about Albrecht’s book but my thoughts are so cloudy this morning—we’ll see how it goes. I haven’t read all of his book, but what I’ve read has been almost earth-shattering for me.

Forgive me if I get some facts wrong here—I haven’t internalized the information yet so I could easily garble it.

He explained of course how mineralized soils led to plants with high mineral and protein content and likewise how low-mineral soils led to plants high in starches and sugars. He also explained how soils age and that when temperature and humidity increase, aging happens much faster. In areas with high rainfall, such as the northeast US, soils age rapidly.

In his first few chapters he included these really fascinating maps of the US. Obviously the most fertile (and mineralized) part of the country is what we call the nation’s breadbasket. The most infertile section is the humid southeast. One thing I had never realized is that forests spring up on old, depleted soils. That should have been obvious—trees are all cellulose. And the lushness of Pennsylvania is really all about plants being all about carbohydrates rather than proteins and minerals.

The subdued nature of life here on the plains is actually healthier. Mineralized plants grow much smaller, but concentrate much greater nutrition. The conservative way life expresses itself here is a sign of health.

Fodders grown in the east are only good at fattening cattle—not for raising healthy cattle.

On a hunch I looked online to see if I could find a map which shows the distribution of diabetes in the US.  I was shocked when I found one—it totally matches Albrecht’s maps! I wasn’t sure I would find such a close correspondence, since our diets aren’t very local anymore. Maybe it’s a total coincidence, but I don’t think so. Maybe it’s what’s in the water (or not I the water) rather than the food that makes a difference. Most water is local—even soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi are bottled regionally. Maybe there are enough regional foods—dairy and produce perhaps—to allow the soils to express themselves through the people. It’s shocking and fascinating and brings me right back to—what else—environmental determinism!

We are expressions of the land—and only as healthy as the land itself. That Hamaker fellow I quoted the other day believed that the glaciers were responsible for mineralizing much of the land (by crushing and distributing rocks over vast distances) and that because we are so far into an interglacial period we’ve largely depleted our supply of minerals.

There would then be a cycle of health and disease on earth, it would seem, that would correspond with glacial advances and retreats. We are currently in a dying or disease part of the cycle.

The implications of everything Albrecht wrote seem enormous. It will take me awhile to trace the paths of all of them.

One thing I’m wondering about is the Fertile Crescent and the advent of agriculture. When those first grains were cultivated, the land there must have been highly mineralized. Those would have been very high protein, mineral-rich crops. Healthy humans grew out of that soil and civilization grew from it too. But eventually the land was depleted (actually salinized is what I’ve heard). Then what happened—marauding, pillaging, conquering. Everyone fighting for resources. Haven’t we simply been fighting for protein and minerals? And haven’t people with the most protein and minerals been the most dominant cultures? It’s Jared Diamond all over again. The tropics are all carbonaceous—cellulose and starches. They have starchy root crops, woody nut crops, no grass crops (except sugar cane?).

For cultures to be strong enough to maraud and conquer they needed protein-rich food. Is this true? Or were they marauding and conquering because their own supply of protein was dwindling and they were trying to find more?

It’s clear to me that in order to have healthy humans we need to have healthy soils. If we all were eating healthy, mineralized foods I’m convinced the true potential of our species could unfold.

More and more I’ve been thinking lately that I might not want to move back to Pennsylvania after all. This new part of the equation—the health of the soil—adds another factor to my considerations.

Appalachia is artsy and creative—very expressive in other words—like the rampant growth of foliage there. All sky energy.

Colorado is understated in its expression. It’s aging very slowly because it’s so arid, so there’s not as much going on here. The soils are more mineralized—there’s more earth energy here.

Where would the ideal blending of earth and sky be found? It seems it might be somewhere a little wetter than here—where soils age faster and there’s more going on—but somewhere drier than Pennsylvania.  Probably it would be smack dab in the middle of one of Albrecht’s maps.

Of course if I’m growing all of my food and doing so in re-mineralized soils, I could do that anywhere. But simply because I would be getting a healthy balance of earth and sky isn’t enough. The whole culture surrounding me matters, so I would want that to be healthy too.

And I wonder, if I found a place that perfectly balanced earth and sky energy, would that also be a place where new paradigms wanted to be birthed?

(Ooh—the outside temperature right now is -3.3. When I though it said 10 above earlier, it must have actually said -10.)

Sunday, December 6, 2009

In William Albrecht’s book, Soil Fertility and Animal Health, (which I was able to download for free) he says this about corn:”Corn, another of the grasses, can have considerable concentration of nitrogen. However, the introduction of its hybrids has reduced that while the starch and fodder yields have gone up. Hybridization has been the equivalent of pushing the physiological performance by the corn plant down to make it duplicate more nearly those of sugar cane. By this manipulation we have pushed the crop’s production of protein nearly down and out for growing young animals.”

But I found a quote in John Hamaker’s book the Survival of Civilization (also a free download) that seems to contradict what the woman said Charles Walters said in Eco-Farm regarding hybrid corn being unable to take up trace minerals. Hamaker said:

“In the summer of 1977 a corn crop was grown on soil which was mineralized with glacial gravel crusher screenings. The corn was tested along with corn from the same seed grown with conventional chemical fertilizers. The mineralized corn had 57 percent more phosphorus, 90 percent more potassium, 47 percent more calcium, and 60 percent more magnesium than the chemical-grown corn. The mineral-grown corn had close to 9 percent protein, which is very good for a hybrid corn.”

Hamaker also said:

“Virtually all of the subsoil and most of the topsoil of the world have been stripped of all but a small quantity of elements. So it is not surprising that the chemical-grown corn had substantially less mineral content than the 1963 corn described in the USDA Handbook of the Nutritional Contents of Food. The mineralized corn was substantially higher in mineral content than the 1963 corn. Hence, as the elements have been used up in the soil, a poor food supply in 1963 has turned into a 100 percent junk food supply in 1978. There has been a corresponding increase in disease and medical costs. Essentially, disease means that enzyme systems are malfunctioning for lack of the elements required to make the enzymes.”