Describing Climate Doom

 

Mark and I were talking about Climate Change this morning. It’s not an unusual topic of conversation around here. I am always wondering what I need to say or do to have people take the issue seriously and make profound changes.

                “I don’t think we are doomed,” Mark said.  “Human being are not going to be totally wiped off the face of the planet.  That’s just not possible.”

                “ I don’t think so either,” I agreed. “I just think we are going to go back to the Dark Ages. No energy, very little food, no medical care…”  It was kind of a revelation; we had never really tried to quantify or describe what Doom looks like. The Dark Ages—we could both agree on that.  But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that, in Europe and The United States, it might look more like Ukraine, right now, going into the second winter of the war. Or Maybe France during World War II. Or any other war torn country. Very limited fuel. Bombed out buildings. Restricted  food, mostly locally produced. Poor health care. Tainted soil and air.  Add in drug resistant viruses so basic infections are no longer curable and nowhere to go that is not in the same situation. There will be no escape. James Kunstler called it the Long Emergency.   That sounds like Doom to me.

                Then I continued with the thought experiment. What if we all lived with the same consumption patterns as people in the early 1950s, but with the newer, more efficient technology?   Average house size was about 1400 square feet, rather than 2200. That’s half the space to heat, cool, maintain, and fill with stuff. There were 380 cars per thousand people in the U.S. in 1955; 808 per 1000 in 2012, when the chart ends.  Regular people did not fly for vacations. If my Betty Crocker cookbook—and my mother’s cooking—are any indication, people ate meat, potatoes, and a veg for dinner almost every night. Mostly fresh, some frozen. But portion size was much less. Gong out for a meal was a special occasion. People had fewer clothes, coats, pairs of shoes, toys and bikes. But this was not a time of deprivation; consumerism was just ramping up after the war.   But the life style, just by scale of home and not flying, is less than half of a carbon footprint today.

 We can do this. We just have to want to.  

               

 

Winter Veg

 

Last weekend, we walked up to the Fill Your Pantry event at the Benton County fairgrounds. The place was buzzing with people picking up preorders of beans, grains, and veggies, as well as adding to their pile while eating samples of winter foods.  We dodged a downpour and came home with about 30 pounds of dried beans (our winter stores) and a poster that tells us to Eat Our Winter Veggies! For the fridge.

We don’t really need to be exhorted to eat winter veggies, especially local ones…we have potatoes stored under the basement steps, squashes and onions in the larder, canned tomatoes and salsas on the shelf, and dried fruit in jars. I made a batch of sauerkraut from a huge head of cabbage last Tuesday evening; it is fermenting on the top of the refrigerator.  There are still leeks and parsnips in the garden, as well as some volunteer mustards.  We buy our greens and other veg from Sunbow every week.  We are ready.

 We eat our local winter veg  first because it tastes better than summer food driven  in from the other side of the world. A fresh head of kales and mustard is alive in a way that a pale winter tomato will never be. It is also better for our planet; we are not shipping what is essentially water  thousands of miles. And it supports the local economy. We know the people who have grown our food and we know where they are spending their money close to home.  There is also the challenge to menu planning from what is at hand and how that ties us to the seasons. We eat asparagus until it is done then wait for next year.  Broccoli and cauliflower come and go several  in the course of the year.  We eat zucchini until we are bored but embrace it very early summer when it comes around again.

So it is time to shift, again, to winter foods. There are beans  for soup in the crockpot.  New bread. Cauliflower waiting to be chopped and roasted for dinner this evening.  Winter veg.

November Begins

         

On Halloween night, Mark and I opened the doors to the dark time of the year, but we placed our guardians around the place for protection. We started with serious local food for dinner: a quiche with leeks and apples from our yard, salad from Sunbow, and a peach pie to finish up the peaches Mac delivered to our doorstep back in August. While everything baked, we carved our pumpkins—elaborate faces for the door guardians and flowers and swirls for the garden spirits. I lit a fire using the branches of a tree we had taken down in September; it was the first fire on the hearth for this winter. After dinner, I shuffled the tarot deck to pull, yet again, the Five of Wands, which encourages me to focus my energies.

Since then, we have been bringing in food for the winter—dried beans, onions, wheat and flour—to add to the stock already in the basement. I grew enough squash to carry us through the winter; there are canned tomatoes, jams, and cider on our basement shelves and potatoes under the stairs. Today, we put the woodpiles into order, finally sorting the wood into fireplace and stove, small, medium and large pieces with the oldest, driest wood on top. Slowly, we are settling in for the winter, bringing our basement life, at least, into order.