“Everything worthy is under fire.” Wendell Berry
Like many people these days, I watch the world with some puzzlement and dismay. This is not the world my generation thought we were making. When we were marching against the Vietnam war, or fighting against nuclear war, or marching for women’s rights, we thought we were working for, and we talked about its coming into being, a bright peaceful future where everyone would be fed, housed, cared for, fulfilled.
And the odd thing is, we won most of these battles – sort of—(and they were battles, however peaceful they looked.) The Vietnam war finally ceased; women moved out of their kitchens and into work and jobs; the environmental movement was created; all kinds of social services were also created; nuclear weapons stopped being tested in the South Pacific and in the American desert; the Berlin Wall was torn down; the Soviet Union disintegrated and the Cold War was over. We thought.
But that peaceful global future we envisioned has yet to appear.
I get up every morning and while I am drinking my coffee, I cruise through various websites; what is the price of oil doing, what are people saying about global warming, what is up with those one hundred dolphins being held for slaughter in Taiji, Japan? And so on. Clicking through. Good news and bad. Facebook, where more and more people seem to have taken to putting up links to news stories they deem important. Click. Click.
And then I get on with my day. I’m not marching anymore. But worrying, oh yes, indeedy.
But what is there to march against? And with whom? The problems coming down the pike in some unknowable and largely unvisionable future are so big, so vague that most people don’t talk about them, and don’t even seem able to talk about them. Global warming – what will that do? When will it happen? Is it happening now? Well, sure the Arctic ice is melting, but hey, last winter was really cold. Wasn’t it? Things seem normal? Don’t they?
Peak oil? The oil industry says one thing, the peak oil doomers another. Everyone agrees that oil will get much more expensive in the future but how much, and when? And everyone agrees that the higher price of oil will have a drastic effect on our economy and the North American suburban-drive-everywhere-all-the-time way-of-life, but when and how much and what to do about it is never discussed in the political arena. The only people I really talk to about all this are a few women my own age, in our sixties now, and watching the future for our grandchildren grow darker.
Our children are busy with careers, jobs, bank accounts, school, raising their children, buying houses, mortgages. Busy doesn’t even begin to describe it. They worry sometimes when they have a moment and then they rush off to the next appointment.
And me? I stay put. I grow food. It’s not much and it has no impact on anyone but myself, and the friends and family members I can supply with food. If there were more to do that I thought would be effective, I would do it. If there was a march I thought was heading in the right direction, I might join it. Or not. Maybe I’ve been on too many marches and spent too many hours in meetings to really believe there is a right direction anymore.
I grow food, I read, I write and I worry.
Click…click…click.
Showing posts with label peak oil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peak oil. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Belonging by Luanne Armstrong
Belonging:
by Luanne Armstrong
I got a chance to read my great-aunt, Catherine Armstrong’s diaries the other day. She and her three brothers came west in 1907 to take up land grants in southern Alberta, near the Cypress Hills, and to build lives centred around ranching, cattle, hay, seeding in the spring and harvest in the fall. Her journals, while not detailed by any means, are full of references to visits by friends and relatives, riding to the neighbours, or going to dances. And also references to work; she counted the number of pieces whenever she did a laundry, I presume by hand. One hundred and fifty-one pieces of laundry, she writes one day, or one hundred and thirty, always hundreds of pieces of laundry.
And then there was all the other work, one day, ten loaves of bread, the next day, seven pounds of butter churned, plus whitewashing walls, cleaning the kitchen, riding out to look for stock and all the meals for visitors and her brothers.
And also, occasionally, references to depression, to weeping, to homesickness, or to a day spent reading. And as well, a wonderful romance, buried in this pages; casual reference to “Fred” showing up, to walks and talks and finally, she says, “Well, I guess we will get married.” And so they do and become one of the founding families of an Alberta town called Irvine.
She and her brothers worked the ranch but eventually, one brother bought out the others. After that, my grandfather moved to Saskatchewan, and after his wife died and the drought in the thirties made grain farming impossible, hecame west to BC, and bought the farm where I still live. So that is why I am not an Alberta girl, or a rancher, though when I was a girl, I dreamed of it, wanted to be a cowgirl, and dreamed of the romance of the West.
I read these diaries in the interesting context of staying in a writer’s house, the Wallace Stegner House in a small town in Eastend, Saskatchewan. It’s October, and farmers are still harvesting grain, racing against time to get in a big crop. Too much rain, for a change, instead of too little.
Interesting to be here and reading Wallace Stegner and his take on the romanticism of the American west and how distorted and historically inaccurate it is. Now the west is the land of big trucks, big machines, big harvests, big farms and big skies. It’s very hard not to wonder how will this land, and these people, function in the future? How will global warming, the price of oil, the future of food, the price of land, affect them? Most of them have only been here for three or four generations. This new generation, the children of my cousins out here, are in university or working. Very few of them want to be or are farmers.
This land, this economy, these big ranches and fields and grain farms, are all adaptations to the exploitation of gas and oil. None of this will last forever. As Josh Farley, an ecological economist says:
"Before fossil fuels, when humans lived almost exclusively on the energy of contemporary sunlight, one calorie burned by a worker could create 10 calories of food, but now we use 10 calories from oil to create one calorie of food. And remember that the market has no way to account for the disastrous consequences of burning all those fossil fuels. And we’re increasingly dependent on non-renewable resources for the food we need to live.””
The land here is beautiful and productive but it has also changed before and will change again.
Near Stegner House is a museum containing dinosaur bones that were found near here, laid down 65 million years ago when big parts of North American were under water and the rest was a lush jungle.
And yet people are smart, and adaptable, and the land has always called people to be farmers. People who feel they belong to this place will adapt, I hope. It was wonderful to spend time with my family here; they know this land in a way I never could and they showed me their parts of it and their understanding of it. If they ever come to my part of the world, could I show them how I now belong there? And what would they then see and understand about me?
by Luanne Armstrong
I got a chance to read my great-aunt, Catherine Armstrong’s diaries the other day. She and her three brothers came west in 1907 to take up land grants in southern Alberta, near the Cypress Hills, and to build lives centred around ranching, cattle, hay, seeding in the spring and harvest in the fall. Her journals, while not detailed by any means, are full of references to visits by friends and relatives, riding to the neighbours, or going to dances. And also references to work; she counted the number of pieces whenever she did a laundry, I presume by hand. One hundred and fifty-one pieces of laundry, she writes one day, or one hundred and thirty, always hundreds of pieces of laundry.
And then there was all the other work, one day, ten loaves of bread, the next day, seven pounds of butter churned, plus whitewashing walls, cleaning the kitchen, riding out to look for stock and all the meals for visitors and her brothers.
And also, occasionally, references to depression, to weeping, to homesickness, or to a day spent reading. And as well, a wonderful romance, buried in this pages; casual reference to “Fred” showing up, to walks and talks and finally, she says, “Well, I guess we will get married.” And so they do and become one of the founding families of an Alberta town called Irvine.
She and her brothers worked the ranch but eventually, one brother bought out the others. After that, my grandfather moved to Saskatchewan, and after his wife died and the drought in the thirties made grain farming impossible, hecame west to BC, and bought the farm where I still live. So that is why I am not an Alberta girl, or a rancher, though when I was a girl, I dreamed of it, wanted to be a cowgirl, and dreamed of the romance of the West.
I read these diaries in the interesting context of staying in a writer’s house, the Wallace Stegner House in a small town in Eastend, Saskatchewan. It’s October, and farmers are still harvesting grain, racing against time to get in a big crop. Too much rain, for a change, instead of too little.
Interesting to be here and reading Wallace Stegner and his take on the romanticism of the American west and how distorted and historically inaccurate it is. Now the west is the land of big trucks, big machines, big harvests, big farms and big skies. It’s very hard not to wonder how will this land, and these people, function in the future? How will global warming, the price of oil, the future of food, the price of land, affect them? Most of them have only been here for three or four generations. This new generation, the children of my cousins out here, are in university or working. Very few of them want to be or are farmers.
This land, this economy, these big ranches and fields and grain farms, are all adaptations to the exploitation of gas and oil. None of this will last forever. As Josh Farley, an ecological economist says:
"Before fossil fuels, when humans lived almost exclusively on the energy of contemporary sunlight, one calorie burned by a worker could create 10 calories of food, but now we use 10 calories from oil to create one calorie of food. And remember that the market has no way to account for the disastrous consequences of burning all those fossil fuels. And we’re increasingly dependent on non-renewable resources for the food we need to live.””
The land here is beautiful and productive but it has also changed before and will change again.
Near Stegner House is a museum containing dinosaur bones that were found near here, laid down 65 million years ago when big parts of North American were under water and the rest was a lush jungle.
And yet people are smart, and adaptable, and the land has always called people to be farmers. People who feel they belong to this place will adapt, I hope. It was wonderful to spend time with my family here; they know this land in a way I never could and they showed me their parts of it and their understanding of it. If they ever come to my part of the world, could I show them how I now belong there? And what would they then see and understand about me?
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