Debt Rattle April 20 2016
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[See the full post at: Debt Rattle April 20 2016]“Imagine a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth…turns increasingly obsolete.”
This is written by someone who’s never grown things but wants to sound smart by sitting in a climate-controlled chair, tapping on little buttons. The climate is always changing — no, hear me out. It was so cold for Jacques Cartier that the St Lawrence froze solid at Quebec in 1535. This was coming out of the Little Ice Age that had crushed Europe in the Middle Ages. It gradually warmed for centuries with remarkable volatility: in the 1930’s we had the hottest weather ever, and in the 1940’s we had some of the coldest winters in 60 years, back-to-back. And all that time we grew crops. Crops that drifted north, crops that worked, then failed, then worked again. New varieties were created, whole new species (as it were) recruited like peanuts and canola and agave. All that time we adjusted. Because it’s what men who grow things and are not sitting around in armchairs complaining, do.
Let me illustrate if I can: in medieval cookbooks you will find an incredible paucity of ingredients, no potatoes, no tomatoes, lacking spices, corn, even rutabagas. We’re talking Mediterranean fare of olives, flatbread, barley, and fish, or rye bread and Grune (green herb) sauce. Chickens? Barely. Citrus? How about pamplemousse and hard citron? Carrots were black. Even apples were primitive, once bred from quince. We bred those into today’s vegetables. Fast forward to Jane Austen. Recipes call to boil asparagus or green beans FOR AN HOUR. We think, gosh, I guess they liked really brown, soggy vegetables! But no. The varieties themselves were so coarse, so woody, so unproductive, even in 1820, that they would be considered “wild” varieties today, inedible. Boiling an hour was required. We didn’t get what we call modern varieties until the Victorian breeding frenzy—in cattle, sheep, and dogs as well as veg.
Fast forward to the 1920’s, with the need to grow something shipped on train cars from the western desert. Something like broccoli, so alien, bitter, cabbagey, that children despised it for 50 more years, but so cheap and available, they bought it anyway. Those are not the sweet light broccolis of today—you probably never had one, couldn’t find one if you tried. How about Cavendish bananas? Found, and lost, and found, and perhaps this decade to be lost again.
The Native Americans here–and for that matter, the early farmers–knew and used an infrastructure founded on wild, unpredictable weather. They planted a wide variety of crops on each farm, backed with the pasture-rotation and the necessary fertilizer-generating efficiency of animals. It used nuts in the woods, maple sugars, hedgerow apples and berries, potherbs, pond fish, and wild game. We would call it a form of permaculture. Why? Because the weather in the U.S. is highly volatile and wildly unpredictable and always has been. This was true until family farms were driven out by force in the 60’s and 70’s.
So will we have to not be complete blithering, book-worshiping, corporate-following idiots and stop growing a single genotype of terminator seed over a 10,000-acre area without variation? Harvested by oil-machines with parts made 11,000 miles away? Founded on oil-based irrigation instead of dry tolerant varieties? Um, yes, but that was incredibly, unprecedentedly, suicidally dumb anyway. Will we have to vary our seeds, our crops, grow and rotate 5, 12, 15 things in the hopes that 3 will prosper? Undoubtedly. Because except the period since 1975, we always, always have.
Yes, we can call a crisis when it rains if we’ve never looked into how to build a roof. We can say we’ll die in the snow if you never bothered to ask how to build a fire. But that’s a choice we’re making, NOT a physical or economic reality. Food production on earth isn’t even being tapped right now–they’re not even trying. And they’re talking mass-murder and dieoff. Before you volunteer, get a book and two seeds and try something. You may be amazed at what you learn.
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