You Must Be Mad!

Oh, how I could go on that times, they are a-changing. It is my deeply held suspicion that at the present people are coping with the sharp rise in fuel and food prices by means of credit more than by means of cutting back. This household doesn't do credit, so any constraints that rising prices put on us are dealt with entirely by cutting back. Not that we're doing much of that either. The underlying theme of our economy is direct use, but viewing the same thing another way, it is not relying on Babylon for anything but what we must.

So as prices have risen, we have ever the more made it a game to test our cleverness at consolidating trips to town, making use of foods on hand (in fact making feasts of foods on hand), making repairs and capital improvements with natural materials, and amusing and entertaining ourselves without reference to Babylon.

Yesterday was town day and our first stop was to look at a vehicle for sale by owner half way into town. It's a bigger vehicle than the one we use now but its extra capacity would allow us to get everything done in two trips to town a month rather than the present three and so even though the gas mileage on this land yacht would be a quarter less than we are now getting, our use of the vehicle would be a third less. And there would be that other day a month we aren't off the farm. To be sure, 'off the farm' is not where we want to be.

But there is the phenomenon, as they say, of catching a falling knife. The price of big vehicles is falling rapidly in cadence with rising fuel prices. How cheap will these discarded behemoths become? When I discussed this frankly with the seller, he displayed an admirable understanding of the status of things and in doing so a shadow crossed his face, a shadow of apprehension. He admitted to being genuinely scared at the way things were headed.

We continued on our round, to the library, bank, feed store, even indulging in what might be the last $1 hamburgers in history for lunch, and then on to the Mart for the few things left on our list that are more expedient to buy than to make or grow. While sharing the pessimistic view of the fellow at our first stop, we found ourselves sharing none of his foreboding.

At a few places in the Mart, we'd come upon some item or commodity that we used to buy, but now that the price is going up so sharply, we have decided to grow it, make it, or do without it.

"Do we want to consider buying any of this?"
"Let's see the price."

I am surprised we didn't get thrown out. Do you recall, those Monty Python fans among you, Harry the Haggler in The Life of Brian? Brian is trying to elude the Romans when he finds himself in Harry's booth and so he picks up a gourd and asks "Quick, how much?" In typical Monty Python style, Harry won't sell him the gourd until he haggles over the price. At the end of the skit, demonstrating how Brian should be haggling, Harry says "Ten for this? You must be mad!"

As we went from aisle to aisle and bin to bin in the Mart, one of us would come across some item we had purchased in the past but whose price had risen a third in the last couple of months, hold it up and say, "$1.59 for this!? (and then in unison) You must be mad!"

By the time we left with our scant purchases, we were in a fine mood.

Babylon is forever offering to buy your life from you and it is sad to see so few people enjoying haggling over it. For us, at each offer, we have looked at what Babylon is offering and said ".... for this?! You must be mad!"

Right Livelihood

This blogger has often been asked to define right livelihood. Most of the time the querrent wants a definitive list of occupations, that is, a butcher earns a right livelihood but a stock broker doesn't. I've never risen to that bait and I am not doing that now.

Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism, visited a village where the richest man in town was holding a feast for all the holy men. Guru Nanak instead went to dine at the house of a common laborer. When the rich man discovered this, he was furious and had Guru Nanak brought before him demanding why the guru preferred the laborer's food over his own. Guru Nanak held up a piece of bread from the laboring man's table in one hand and picked up a piece of bread from the rich man's table in the other. He squeezed them Both. Drops of milk fell from the laborer's bread. Drops of blood came out the rich man's bread.

So my definition of a right livelihood does not necessarily deal with a particular occupation or type of work, but rather whether milk or blood comes from your bread.

Do you earn your livelihood on the labor and life of others? And especially is that labor and life's effort obtained from them by means of force or fraud?

To obtain a right livelihood the people with whom you are trafficking must do so entirely of their own volition, it must be openly and honestly a voluntary transaction. If it is not, you are obtaining goods from them by force or fraud.

I wouldn't think of it!, says you. Oh, yes you would. Let me use myself as an example.

I once earned my living as a government school teacher. Of course at the same time I was also gardening and pursuing other legitimate occupations as well. The teaching was done under the guise that is was helping and enriching the lives of children. After all, if someone didn't teach them to read, what would the world come to? I was as resistive as any other "professional" teacher to the notion that if we just stopped mucking with children's lives, they would learn to read and write quite well on their own just from exposure to the world at large. In fact they'd learn it much more quickly and efficiently if we just stopped indoctrinating them that unless we did some magic on them at the government school, they would be hopeless ignoramuses the rest of their lives.

Here I was earning my living by applying one of the most heinous frauds possible on the population.

But it didn't stop there. In order to have my salary, it was necessary for the local and state governments to take up money forcibly from the people. If they did not comply willingly, their homes could be seized and sold to pay my salary.

I was earning my living by force and fraud. My bread oozed blood.

In taking up or pursuing some line of work, first ask, is there any force or fraud being used to earn my income. Do you tell the congregation that God Himself wants them to give the money to pay your salary? Do you work under the protection of a guild law which uses the threat of jail if someone competes with you? Are you paid money that is forcibly removed from unwilling people? Then your bread oozes blood as well.

Guru Nanak was a farmer. It is told that his habit was to rise before dawn for his meditations and then hold audience at dawn for his followers. He then went into the fields, even when he as elderly, and worked to earn his own bread. An element of right livelihood is to do everything for yourself that you possibly can rather than expect someone else to do it. After all, we do not expect someone else to wipe our ..... noses .... for us, do we? Like that it is not moral for us to expect someone else to provide us with anything we are capable of doing for ourselves. This principle for me has found expression in a direct use economy.

The things I cannot produce for myself, and the things that must be rendered unto Caesar, and things for which I cannot barter, must be paid for with currency. It is a tricky thing in Babylon's world make a fair exchange and not use force or fraud. I think I've done well enough in that.

However, I am now eternally vigilant to examine every morsel of bread for telltale signs of milk ... or blood.

Money on the Table

This morning while going about the usual homestead tasks the radio was carrying Bush's address concerning the economy where he opined that he saw no reason to think we were headed for recession. What caught my ear, though, was that during the usually catalog of political clichés numerating what the people want, he said people wanted to be able to put money on the table.

Of course true disciples of Eleuthronomics will instantly recognize here the fallacy of viewing money as if it were something real.

I know, it's just another of those colorful Bushisms. But it reflects an underlying way of thinking that Bush does not hold alone.

If the love of money is the root of all evil, then thinking that money is real, that it is something that one 'puts on the table', is the root of foolishness.

The Wealth of Nations

Near the Southwest Virginia town of Castlewood is what is arguably the most beautiful cemetery in the country. It sits high up on top of a mountain where the wind shakes the trees and grass continually and commands a view of the countryside all around. The stock SW Virginia names on the headstones are sill reflected in the farms and dwellings in the valleys below. Most of my ancestors of living memory are buried there as are those of Et Ux. Not too many days ago we made the pilgrimage there to the funeral of a relative, an octogenarian with a long and eventful life behind her.

On the way there with subtle thoughts of ‘my people who have gone on’ finding their way through my mind, I regarded the countryside. The geography is that of a mountain range with very steep knobs that in the youth of my relative were clear pasture land. One mightn’t think it, the hillsides are so steep that (and I am not exaggerating) if you stepped five feet forward from the hillside, you would fall thirty feet. There is a house on the way there, a small house, whose front door is level with the paved road and the back porch is on 25’ tall piles.

There’s an old saw told about such country. It seems a motorist there about stopped abruptly when a great cloud of dust tumbled from the mountainside and into the road. When the dust settled, he spied a mule in full tack, a plow, and a old farmer lying in the road. The farmer stirred himself, got up, dusted himself off, while the motorist ran to his aid and asked what he could do. To which the farmer replied, “Aw, nothing, really. That’s the third time this morning we’ve fallen out of that field.”

You’d think such a place would be unsuited for farming. And yet, as long as 200 years ago those nosebleed steep hills were cleared and grew up with tough grasses. There’s little sign of erosion after more than a century of use.

Of course over the years first this then that pasturage has been abandoned and began to grow back in blackberry vines, then scrub, the forest. Winding through those hills on the way to Temple Hill Cemetery that day I was aware that there was a change. For miles there were patches where the tress and scrub claiming the ancient pastureland had been cleared. Cows and goats were more abundant. Fences had been repaired.

I found small cause to wonder. A few days before I had been by he produce stand for something and noticing the 50 lb sacks of seed potatoes I inquired their price. Mercifully the same as last year. BUT, the proprietor added, the fertilizer had more than doubled since last year, from $3.25 a fifty weight to $7.75. Chemical nitrogen fertilizer is made using natural gas or petroleum and when fossil fuels go up in price, so does fertilizer. Not only that, world demand for chemical fertilizers is sharply on the rise. I reminded him that we used compost and manure and so the price of the artificial fertilizers didn’t affect us.

They don’t affect us in the potato patch at any rate. But all of us will find the high price of petroleum products, especially fertilizers, affects us in many ways. Around here hay has been scarce and expensive this winter due last season’s severe drought. The owner of a riding stable opined that hay would be scarce and expensive again this year no matter what the weather. Why? Because in order to get hayfields to yield the abundance farmers are used to, they must be plied with tons of chemical nitrogen fertilizer. With the price of fertilizer more than doubling in one year, most hay farmers will apply less and their fields will yield less. Or they’ll just not bother with hay at all.

Peakists and anti-consumerists and frugalitarians have warned for years that there would come a time when the draw on the world’s supply of fossil fuels would strain to the limit the rate at which they could be extracted. When this happens, the price of the fuel will go up and so will everything that uses that fuel. Fertilizer going up in price that much that fast is ominous. In all likelihood we have now set the first foot into the post oil age.

So wending our way to the memorial service at the cemetery, passing through the hilly marginal farm land, I could not help but reflect that during the generation of this relative, which includes my parents who are still with us, there was no chemical fertilizer. Grass and cows and goats and corn all grew at Nature’s pace. They were not urged into a superfluity of activity by chemicals and machines. It is only during my lifetime of little more than half a century that the agricultural revolution has come and I am likely to live to see the end of it. At least the preview impressed me. With the prospects of a hay scarcity and higher prices for what little could be had, the farmers had once again revived the ancient hillside pastures where even at Nature’s unhurried pace some sustenance was to be had for cattle and goats.

With the whole world now scurrying to put dibs on the available fossil fuels and the artificially created fertilizers made from them, we are beginning to see the ragged edges of the world being squeezed. Because of a scarcity of fuel, the food supply is in jeopardy in Nepal. Wheat is so expensive and scarce in Pakistan that bread is being subsidized and rationed. There are food crises in Mexico, Zimbabwe, and many other spots around the world. Here food and feed prices are steadily climbing. Fifty pounds of whole shelled corn was $3.15 two years ago, it’s well over $6 now. Fifty pounds of commercial rabbit feed was $6.95 last year, it’s just a bit under $12 this year. Prices of food in the marts and even at the produce stands are increasing apace. The age of oil is passing away in front of our very eyes,

So what next? For many centuries the wealth of a people depended on the wealth of their land, how many crops, pasturage, fiber, and fuel it produced without the input of artificially contrived fertilizers. The last century’s oil consumption has given us a blurry and distorted view of what wealth is because we could bypass Nature. Soon we will not be able to bypass Nature and we must once again learn to live at Her pace.

The above picture is from the oldest part of my vegetable garden. It was claimed from an old hay field some 18 years ago. A time lapse photo of that spot would show a steady parade of things having been put on it during those years: leaves, sawdust, manure, muck from the bog, forest mold, compost, wood ashes, weeds, grass clippings, and from time to time it was fallow and host to a compost heap. The amount of food it has produced taxes the imagination and yet with each succeeding year it is more and more fertile. It has gone from inhospitable yellow and blue clay to being as black as coffee grounds and as soft as sugar nearly 30 inches deep and easily worked with only the tools you see there.

Babylon is just now gearing up for war. Oil and gasoline prices will be hitting new highs, banking and finance will be in turmoil from the housing debacle, pensions and entitlements will dry up, food will be short in many places around the world and fuel even shorter, investments that people have set their hearts upon will evaporate.

This has been my investment. This plot will still grow our greens and onions this season with no inputs from Babylon. The death throws of the Age of Oil will not be heard here. That’s because this is the real wealth, all the real wealth there ever was.

I'm Gonna Love It

The internet and media are all aflutter with Obamamania. In a way it is a relief in that with each passing day Clinton fades from the picture more and more. It is not my intention to wax political, Babylon can please itself about that. But when I examine the reasons, sparse and scant enough they seem to me, as to why Obama would be such a change, it still looks like little odds to me.

Seven years ago bloggers on the internet began warning of an impending housing bubble and crash. When, right on schedule, it is upon us, the governing structure and powers that be slap their foreheads and ask, “Who could have seen this coming?” Oil Peak-ists said ten years ago that somewhere along now oil would rise to $100 a barrel and this would cause world-wide shortages of food. Only now do we hear from those we have put in charge of our affairs that, geeze, guys, I don’t think we can produce oil as fast as people are using it.

Like that, the Obamistas point to his record opposing the war and opposing torture, both of which will soon become mere footnotes in history. The same doomsayers who accurately predicted the housing and credit bubble and the fact that world oil production would plateau about now (which it has) are pointing to a deep world wide depression in our immediate future. If they are right, it behooves us to ask just how things will be any different with Obama as president rather than anyone else.

None of the major candidates (at this writing, that would be McCain, Clinton, and Obama) have in any way addressed the real problems their administration would face. If the face of oil depletion we hear the same old discredited mumblings about ethanol and hybrid cars. In the face of a currency crisis brought on by the unimaginable debt and the default of it, we hear about 30 day delays in foreclosure on houses.

There is a great economic tidal wave heading our way and all the major candidates, especially the esteemed Mr. Obama, are touting their way of putting a patch on the inner tube as being better than that of the other candidates.

Things are afoot that the government, and certainly not the president, cannot hope to affect. But if this unfolds as it now seems to be, the party, political philosophy, and candidate on whose watch it happens will be discredited beyond resurgence for out lifetimes.

It’s going to be amusing watching this over the next few years. Those standing with their toes in the surf of “We need change, if fact we need to change the way we change..” are about to be hit with a seawall beyond their imagination.

Yes, I’m gonna love it. By the bye, Obama spelled backwards is amabo, which in Latin means roughly, “I’m gonna love it!”

Faustian Bargain

It was some time back at the local building supply store that I changed my mind about cell phones. I’d always said I wanted nothing to do with them and had I had a glimpse into the future where people walk about in a trance with the cursed things clipped to their earlobes, unaware that the world is happening around them, I would have been even less enthused about them. If I ever wanted to contact home, I reasoned, I could always find a pay phone and an occasional quarter would be cheaper than the cheapest cell phone and without all its attending annoyances.

What I was buying that day, I don’t recall. But I needed something back home measured to make sure it fit so I went to the vestibule of the store to the pay phones and dialed home. The recorded message came back “Please deposit $3 for the first minute.” What??? To call 20 miles away in the same local dialing area? I found the number for assistance and dialed it.

“The phone is asking for more money and I just dialed a local number.”
“Sir, the phone you are using is in Virginia and I show you have dialed a number in Tennessee and that’s why it’s long distance.”
“But it isn’t! It’s a local call from here.”
“It’s in a different state.”
“Yes, ma’am, but that state is about 50 feet away from where I’m standing. I could easily throw this telephone into that state. It’s not long distance.”
“Our records show that is a long distance …”
“But I’m telling you that it isn’t.”
“I can send you a refund. Please write down the serial number of the phone and mail that with the number ….”
“Ma’am, I put a quarter in the phone, it costs more than that to mail anything to you. I don’t want a refund. I want you to connect my call.”
“Very well, sir, if you will deposit $3 ….”

OK. That was it. The local phone company used to take pride in maintaining a usable system of payphones but since that time some smarmy outfit had filled in the gap the phone company no longer wanted and the service was unusable. I immediately went next door to the Mart to see what sort of deal could be had for a cell phone.

There I found a Y in the road. There are two distinct types of cell phone service. One where you sign an agreement with a provider, usually for some extended period of time but rarely less than a year and a half, and you get a certain number of minutes air time each month. The other is where you pre-purchase air time, as little or as much as you anticipate you will need, and the arrangement is from month to month with no long term contract involved. Of course, I chose the latter. The price of an individual minute on the phone is more expensive but I buy only the minutes I think I will need and any unused minutes roll over to the next period. If I need more, I can always purchase more. With the first type of arrangement, most often the unused minutes from one month don’t roll over into the next month, or don’t indefinitely. And at any rate, you cannot pay for fewer minutes for a lower cost during a month when you have little occasion to use the phone.

It is the psychology of the two different systems I want to explore here. Under the prepaid arrangement we tend to use the phone only when we really have a need to use it. Using the phone in excess means that we must dip into the purse and pay for more minutes later on. In very real terms this means we will be using money with which we could have rented a movie, bought some chocolate, or had some other treat. At the very least it means that we must earn the money to pay for the idle chat, and when we are engaged in earning that money, it is time we can’t spend picking berries, going fishing, or just taking a walk in the woods. Weighed against any of those things, idle gabbing on the phone falls short.

But under the usual type of cell phone contract where the end of contract period approaches and there are unused minutes left which will be lost if not used, the motivation is just the opposite. Why not call someone at random and talk about nothing in particular?

Imagine, if you will, that you wake up one morning and there has been a change in the way the world operates and you find that everything now is under the same sort of Faustian bargain as cell phone contracts! You pay $300 a month for 100 gallons of gasoline. You pay that amount whether you use the gasoline or not but it is the only way gasoline can be had now. Likewise you pay $200 a week to the grocery store and in order to get food from that store at all, you have to sign a contract to pay that amount every week for two years. Every time you stop by to get things for supper, the price is deducted from that $200. But if you don’t use the whole $200 for that week, it doesn’t carry over into the next week. You pay $350 to the shoe store for up to five pairs of shoes for the year. The only way to get shoes is to sign a contract for the same sort of arrangement for five years.

Imagine that you can’t just spontaneously decide that you want to go out for a pizza and then to the movies some night. You have to have signed a six year contract to pay the theater $100 a month for three nights at the movies for your family (whether you are in the mood for movies or not) and a twelve month contract with the pizzeria for $75 a month for a certain number of pizzas.

How would such arrangements change your behavior? Just like the predisposition to gab away the unused cell phone minutes or lose them, if the end of the month approached and you still had credit for 30 gallons of gas, what would you do? Go somewhere! Doesn’t matter where, and it doesn’t matter that much whether you really want to or not. What if you had only spent $75 at the grocery by the end of the week and had another $125 credit you hadn’t used? Steak and a bottle of wine for dinner Saturday!

While such contracts for gasoline, food, movies, and pizza seem like a bad idea, I’m going to suggest that most people sign such a Faustian bargain to lock in most of their waking time for most of their lives. They have a cell-phone like agreement in their jobs. They have made the sanguine signature on the infernal dotted line to agree to trade 40 hours (or more, or a lot more) of their time and effort each week for a certain amount of money whether or not they need or want that money any particular week.

In the comments on the previous post, Laura asks how is it that one can be poised and set to live the minimalists life and yet hang onto the Babylonian way of things? How can one, for example, raise and preserve a good deal of one’s own food and then walk by it grab the convenience food instead? One possible answer is the Faustian Cell Phone effect. Many years ago I was enamored by the notion of raising all (or almost) all of my own food on the 150 x 50 suburban lot most of which space was taken up by the house. Early one summer I found myself walking through the garden beds of the back yard, past the tendrils of peas, stalks of corn, salad beds, etc. and picking up a burger on the way to the second job. It bothered me. After much reflection I found that I was in the mindset of acknowledging that the jobs I was working, jobs under contract for at least a year at a time, were taking up by far the bulk of my time and energy. So much so that I really had nothing much to do with the money compared with the little time I had at my discretion. An overall plan of suburban self-sufficiency was an interesting project, but in the real world of that very day, I was all too happy to have someone cook for me. If I didn’t, it was just an opportunity that would evaporate.

Now I and my family are very conditioned to our locally produced and bulk food for breakfast. We never have packaged cereal, never, for breakfast that is. The children will get a box of the stuff as a treat to have while watching movies (two or three times a year) instead of the usual popcorn. But we don’t buy it on a regular basis. You see, we only work at cash jobs just enough to get the cash we need and want, and then no more. Sometimes that’s a little and sometimes it’s a lot, and sometimes it’s none at all. When we have the modest bills paid, some bulk items bought, major projects funded (by putting money in the mason jar for that project), some strategic savings, and then some with which to have fun, we stop grubbing after money. It’s much like the prepaid cell phone deal. If I want more money, I will make more items and/or hang out my shingle more prominently and get the money. If I don’t want so much, I will do other things. So for this economy that box of overpriced breakfast cereal (“Part of the complete dessert!”) represents giving up a trip down to the pond to go fishing, sawing that extra log for a really cozy fire that evening, or writing on this blog. It isn’t worth it and so we have no temptation to buy it.

But if we were under the diabolical contract to bargain away our lives as if we were the object of a cell phone agreement, why not pass by the steel cut oats and grab the box of cereal. In real terms we are going to pay for it whether we use it or not.

This above all else should illustrate how different life within Babylon is than without. We are conditioned to accept as normal that we will trade a fixed block of our lives, years on end, for a fixed amount of money and then try to figure out what sort of life that money will buy us. Outside Babylon we lose that conditioning and instead live our lives, calculating how much money we will need or want and coming up with a plan for obtaining it. When we’ve earned enough for that week, or month, or even year, we quit. Anything more to be bought is weighed carefully against what it really costs in terms of the other things we will give up to have it.

Be aware, though, that this Babylonian conditioning runs deep. Do you recall having been taken out of school for a dentist appointment or some such and how it seemed that everyone’s eyes were on you all the time of your truancy? Why’s that child out of school? I have been amused at the extent to which this carries over into the lives of adults. All the time I have people shuffle their feet and glance about guiltily and explain completely unsolicited and out of the blue that it’s their day off, that’s why they are lounging about during the work week. We have signed away that part of our lives and we no longer have any claim to it.

And yet the reversal of that one paradigm makes all the difference. We were once trying to live under that Faustian bargain and simplify out lives and cut back some, but now that we have torn up that contract and only participate in Babylon’s economy a la carte, we are spending on one hundredth of what it took formerly (actual figures, not an estimation).

So to Laura I would suggest, look at it this way, when you reach for the commercial breakfast cereal instead of the bulk steel cut oats, what are you giving up to do that? If the answer does not readily come to mind, maybe it’s because of the wrong sort of cosmic cell phone plan.

Every little bit helps, right?

If we did a digital recording (and I almost typed "tape recording") of a conversation now of days and sent it back in time to ourselves, we would surely understand almost nothing that was being said. I can only imagine the bewilderment 30 years ago that would have greeted any snatch of current conversation: "I was on the cell telling my FIL that he should Google the hybrids on his WiFi before thinking about paying for carbon offsets..." All gibberish until just a few years ago.

It's not just in the technical areas that the language is again on the move. Recently I ran across the term lamer which is perhaps only of interest to anti-consumerists and minimalists. It refers to someone who disparages small token efforts at conservation as being meaningless, "lame" efforts, if you will.

Perhaps we need to coin a word for the opposite of a lamer. Tokener perhaps. That's too long, three syllables to the lamer's two. Maybe we should shorten it to toker. At any rate their hue and cry is any effort toward the goal does some good, after all, every little bit helps, right?

No. As much as intuitive logic might demand that conclusion, even a tiny bit of energy saved is that much energy saved, there's another side to the question.

Everyone knows that if you put a compact florescent bulb in the socket beside the basement door, that's not going to make much of a change in the world. So the game is played that if everyone replaced one bulb in their house, calculating from the average use of all light bulbs and not some seldom used out of the way bulb, we would save some very impressive amount of electricity in a year, enough to supply all the electricity needs of some impressive number of homes.

Does that not remind you a bit of all the curious facts such as if you put all the disposable soda bottles used in one year in the US end to end, they would reach around the world three and a half times. That would be something to see, would it not? I always wondered how they would get those soda bottles to stay in line as they crossed the oceans? Wait, you say, that's just a statistic, no one is actually going to put all the bottles end to end around the world!

Right. And no one is going make sure that everyone is replacing one bulb and then divert all that energy to particular houses. Those are just numbers and not anything that is really happening or is likely to happen. Since replacing one bulb produces an imaginary effect on the world's energy use, we might as well say that we agree that we positively will not buy a new Hummer. That will save enough gasoline to provide millions of people with motor fuel. It's really the same thing.

But beyond the imaginary nature of such propositions, what if they were really affected? Let me take an example I lifted from another blogger: If everyone (and I mean everyone!) bought their next package of 20 tall kitchen bags as 65% recycled plastic bags rather than those made of virgin plastic, it would save 45,000 barrels of oil in a year, enough to heat and cool 2,500 homes!! In the scheme of things, how much oil is that? The US uses for all purposes about ten billion barrels of oil a year. That (imaginary) 45,000 barrels of oil we'd save is less than on half of one thousandth of one percent of the oil we use. It would be like making an effort to save 1/16 teaspoon of flour when you bake a loaf of bread. That is, it wouldn't make any difference at all. More flour than that is lost sifting it or dusting the pans or cleaning the spoon. A scheme to save 1/16th teaspoon of flour out of six cups in a batch of bread is meaningless.

But here's the real rub. Go to the mart and try to find any plastic trash bags that aren't already made out of recycled material. There aren't any. So the proposition becomes more imaginary all along.

A good measure as to whether a resource saving or energy saving idea would have a significant or measurable effect on the overall economy if everyone did it is to see whether it has such an effect on your own economy. Does buying one box of a different type of trash bag make a difference to your very household? Does putting one compact florescent bulb in the attic make a measurable or significant difference in your electrical consumption? No? Then it wouldn't if everyone did it either. It is relatively meaningless.

The danger, of course, in token efforts is that they lull the toker into a false sense of having done something and removes the urgency to actually do anything of substance. The moniker is fitting better all the time.

Along these same lines, some of the token conservationist ideas can have just the opposite effect. The photo at the beginning of this post was made over the 3 gallon stock pot that is kept full of water on the cookstove during the winter so nearly boiling water is available for various kitchen tasks. The three drops of water you see going into the pot, that's helping to fill the pot, right? Sure, it's a tiny amount of water, but every little bit helps, right? No. More water is lost as steam when the lid is lifted than is added by the three drops. The best example of this is the 'eat local' fad. The idea is that food is hauled, using fossil fuels, far too great distances. To conserve fuel people are encouraged to eat locally. On the surface it sounds good. But having read many blogs describing the attempt at local meals, it is apparent to me that more fuel is being consumed by the locavores than Mart shoppers. The reason is that the criteria are all wrong. Most of the parameters proffered stipulate that the food must be from within a certain distance of the eater, say 100 miles. And so when the locavore travels 20 miles for some local organic potatoes and another 15 miles for some local parsley with which to garnish it, the meal is considered to be local and the toker can then say, "But I'm at least doing something, aren't I?"

That would be a 'no'. Food obtained within a certain radius is meaningless in terms of fuel used to get it to the table unless the formula includes how much food was transported per mile. For example, all our wheat on this farmstead comes from Montana, over 2000 miles away. Several local co-ops and health food stores place an order and a truck brings more than ten tons of wheat at a time. We buy anywhere up to quarter ton of it (10 50# sacks) once every year or so. So 20,000 lbs of wheat travels 2000 miles to reach the bulk food store. That's one tenth a mile per pound. We then bring 500 lbs of wheat 20 more miles to the farmstead adding another four hundredths of a mile/pound. So each pound of wheat has traveled .14 mile/pounds. If the locavore drives ten miles to get a 5 lb sack of local wheat or flour, the wheat will have traveled 2 mile/pounds, almost fifteen times the impact of my wheat from Montana.

It isn't that 'eat local' isn't a good idea, it is. But with the single criterion that it be with a certain distance of the eater leads to more overall fuel use than buying the food all at once at the Mart.

The world is facing some really interesting times due to Peak Oil, financial crisis, and a number of other things with which the readers are likely familiar. If the face of these, does every little bit help? Imagine you are on a boat that is sinking, taking on water at the rate of five gallons a minute. If you placidly bail out the boat with a soup spoon, will every little bit help? No, the boat will sink anyway. If the ticket costs $7 and you want to go to the movies and you have $3.41, does finding that nickel and three pennies in your other pocket mean that every little bit helps? No, you still don't get in to the movies. There is also another phenomenon at play that has to do with human nature. We would think that if we find a cheaper and more efficient way of doing something it would lead us to consume less, but history tells us just the opposite. Every innovation that has made our use of some resource more efficient has resulted in more consumption, not less. To illustrate, take the following quiz:

1. The gas mileage of cars has more than doubled since the early 70's. This has meant:
a) People have driven the same amount and used a lot less gas
b) People drive a lot more and use even more gas than before

2. Televisions were once hand wired from discrete parts but now are mechanically assembled from large-scale-integration parts making the production of TV's cheaper and more efficient. This has resulted in:
a) People save a lot of money by having just the one TV in their homes as in the past
b) People now have six TV's in their house.

3. When meat came from small farms, meat consumption was modest because it was costly. Now that meat comes from agribusiness factory farms:
a) People save a lot of money and resources on their meat
b) People eat so much meat they spend even more and deplete resources even faster

4. When houses were hand made from basic materials, houses were small. With the advent of plywood, particle board, vinyl siding, drywall, etc. building houses became cheaper. As a result:
a) People spent less on housing costs
b) People built much larger houses

The correct answer in every case is 'b'. And, of course, I didn't come up with this myself. It is the well known Jeavons Paradox which shows that conservation of a resource through technology and more efficient use results in more consumption of that resource and faster depletion. So the small token bits of conservation of this and that, even if the plan were successful, historically leads to more consumption, not less. Sort of like this: if everyone used one box of recycled trash bags, it would save enough energy to heat 2,500 homes, which, now that energy is that much more available, we will build 30% larger and use even more energy than before.

The reason so many of the cute ideas offered by the tokers lead nowhere is that they do not involve a shift in the paradigm or mindset. It reminds me of the marketing efforts of the tobacco companies in the 60's and 70's. Back then the incidence of adult smoking was well over 90%, non-smokers were in the definite minority. As smoking came to be accepted for the health risk that it is, the companies began marketing cigarettes that were low tar and low nicotine. The methods of quantifying "low" were dubious at best and the actual reduction of substances in the smoke was token. The result? People smoked all the more. After all, it was a reduced and safer cigarette so why not have a few more? As to one type of cigarette having a few micrograms of tar or nicotine less than another, hey, every little bit helps, right?

Some time after this smoking itself fell out of fashion. The question of whether it was better to smoke this or that brand became moot. Smoking itself was bad and foolish. Now of days by some estimates the incidence of smoking among US adults is as little as 15%. The paradigm has shifted.

Facing the realities of our immediate future calls for a shift in the paradigm, a shift in thinking, a shift in the mindset. On one of the blogs where lamers were being upbraided, the blogger described putting up a clothesline in the basement and foregoing the use of the clothes dryer. It was greeted with the usual kudos of how much energy was being saved and if everyone did the same so many barrels of oil would be conserved. I fear the blogger missed the point. The clothesline was a marvelous step in the right direction, not because of the energy it saved which is negligible in the scheme of things if not outright delusional, but rather because it represents a shift in the paradigm. Hanging clothes on a line to dry has seeped into our minds as drudgery, a throw back, admission of failure that we would be reduced to it. But shutting off the clothes dryer and hanging the clothes in on the line quickly dispels that unsubstantiated mental conditioning. It's quite easy, pleasant even, and the results are as good if not superior to the energy intense way.

We are mentally conditioned to think that we would be happier, more comfortable, in a larger over heated and over cooled house. We think prepackaged food is vastly easier to prepare. We think a food processor is a hundred times easier than a knife. Of course this farmstead is on the lunatic fringe. We have experimented with cutting all the firewood we need for heating and cooling with hand tools. It's some more work, to be sure, but not much. Yet in the imagination of the uninitiated, a chainsaw is many hundreds of times less work.

On this farmstead 85% of our food involves zero food-miles and almost all the rest is bought bulk, we use very little electricity and no commercial gas or other fuels. We wear used clothing. We drive bottom feeder vehicles and those only very rarely. Yet how much do we impact global energy and resource use? None, negligible at any rate. The random motion of molecules accounts for more fuel savings that we do in the scheme of things. What we represent is not some quantified amount of energy and resources saved, but rather a complete paradigm shift from the consumerist world.

When we can affect a shift in paradigm, we will generate so much less trash that which type of trash bags we choose is moot. We will reduce the number of rooms and therefore the number of light bulbs to the extent that switching to LED's or florescent is only a small difference. We will choose a place to live and design our living away from personal automobiles to the extent that saving 20% more on transportation fuel is moot.

What the toker often confuses as disparaging remarks from the lamers in reality is a call for a shift in the paradigm rather than just some token and meaningless reduction. The lamer is urging the toker to quit smoking, while the toker is taking out yet another slightly lower tar and nicotine cigarette and protesting, "But every little bit helps, right??"