Wildflower Stew

By Bill Vitek

Prairie Writers Circle

I am not prone to tirades or radical behavior. I have never participated in a public protest and refuse to sign most petitions. In the classroom I offer both sides of an issue. I have a stable job and hope to someday spend the money collecting in my retirement account. In British America in 1775 I would have been a loyalist.

But as an applied philosopher — I know that sounds like an oxymoron — poking around modern civilization’s foundation and plumbing for two decades, I see cracks and leaks growing, and ever faster. I see that the past half-century’s wonderful ride, an amazing and blazing run on the carbon bank of coal, oil and natural gas, is sputtering out. But not before we clog our carbon sinks, particularly the atmosphere, triggering global climatic disruption that is already under way.

We want to see our current problems as part of the usual ups and downs of the business and climate cycles. But in the past three years oil production has remained steady while the price has doubled. Oil supplies will soon fail to keep up with ballooning world demand. Then the other fossil fuels will flare out too. But not before adding to atmospheric carbon dioxide already a third higher than pre-industrial levels and strongly tied to a long, abnormal rise in global temperatures.

I have come to this perspective reluctantly, but am now convinced: We are living in revolutionary times! We must change to a way of life as inconceivable to us as the invention of the modern factory or heart transplant would have seemed to a peasant or professor in medieval Europe .

The good news, if I can call it that, is that only by accepting this challenge in revolutionary terms will our odds of succeeding in this change go from “fuggedaboutit!” to “long shot.”

“Well, change, yes,” you might say, “but revolution? What about technological progress and efficiency? The environmental and sustainability movements? Isn’t all that enough?”

In “Common Sense” Thomas Paine recognized this reluctance: “Until independence is declared, the continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done … and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity.”

Efficiency tweaks won’t save us. Ever since England in the 1800s grew efficient with coal, only to use ever more of it, efficiency has led to higher consumption and more atmospheric carbon. Even if every car in the world were a hybrid, and every light bulb a compact fluorescent, growing demand would dwarf savings.

And though Toyota , General Electric and Wal-Mart tout their green efforts, their need to profit by increased consumption of their products is not questioned. This system can’t fix the problems it has created or fit our emerging realization that Earth has limits, any more than King George could have encouraged independence-minded Colonials, or medieval scriptural authority could have embraced 17th century scientific discoveries.

Our challenge is to make a new Enlightenment, rejecting belief that we can master Earth and treat it as our unlimited supermarket, playground, laboratory and dumpster. Every human enterprise and standard needs reorientation to recognize the boundaries of our sun-powered planet.

We don’t have to be violent about it. But we must be as single-minded and insistent as someone yelling “Fire!” when there is, in fact, a fire. That’s not radical, that’s prudent and morally required.

It’s so much easier to hope for a miracle. But our best hope lies in embracing revolution — to, in John Adams’ words, “start some new thinking that will surprise the world.”

Here’s a short “to-do” list:

— Reduce the industrialized world’s carbon footprint 80 percent by 2050.

— Prevent the projected 3 billion increase in human population over the next 30 years and actually reduce population by 2110 without famine, disease or war while preserving human dignity.

— Revise the scientific method so that it better balances the goal of discovery with moral considerations and precaution.

— Switch our economy to sustainable energy: solar, wind, hydro.

— Make that economy one in which happiness and success do not require increased consumption.

It’s time to accept the creative limits and boundaries that gave us sun-powered Earth in the first place. It’s time to change our minds and our lives.

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Bill Vitek teaches philosophy at Clarkson University in Potsdam , N.Y. , and edited “The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability and the Limits of Knowledge.” He wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina , Kan. His address is vitek@clarkson.edu. Reprinted with permission from Land Institute Prairie Writers Circle.

Let’s handcuff the property cops
By Stan Cox
Prairie Writers Circle

Susana Tregobov dries clothes on a line behind her Maryland townhouse, saving energy and money. But now her homeowners association has ordered her to bring in the laundry. The crackdown came after a neighbor complained that the clothesline “makes our community look like Dundalk,” a low-income part of Baltimore .

Tregobov and her husband plan to fight for their right to a clothesline, but the odds are against them. Although their state recently passed a law protecting homeowners’ rights to erect solar panels for generating electricity, it is still legal in Maryland for communities to ban solar clothes-drying.

Twenty percent of Americans now live in homes subject to rules set by homeowner associations, or HOAs. These private imitation governments have sweeping powers to dictate almost any aspect of a member’s property, from the size of the residence down to changes in trim color and the placement of a basketball hoop.

In the view of HOAs, people hand over control of such things when they buy their home, so they have no legitimate gripe. But a growing number of state and local governments are deciding that when HOAs ban eco-friendly practices, they violate the property rights of their members and damage everyone’s right to a habitable planet.

In recent years, a dozen state legislatures have passed laws that restrict the ability of HOAs to ban solar panels and solar water heaters. Florida and Colorado now protect the rights of homeowners to replace irrigated, chemically dependent lawns with more natural landscaping that requires little or no extra water or other artificial life support. And Colorado has become the third state to give legal protection to people who dare to defy their HOAs by putting up that most economical of all energy-saving devices, the clothesline.

The more restrictive HOAs cling to outdated standards that treat necessary features of an ecologically resilient future — renewable energy devices, clotheslines, fans in windows, awnings, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, compost bins, natural landscaping — as eyesores to be buried under restrictions or banned outright.

Meanwhile, HOAs commonly mandate large, centrally air-conditioned square footages, two-car garages, lawn sprinkler systems or synthetic lawn fertilizers and weed-killers. You’d think that in 2008, community leaders would be embarrassed to enforce overconsumption and pollution, but these property cops seem determined to impose their narrow aesthetic preferences on everyone else.

Critics say that only a strong federal law can effectively protect America ’s 60 million HOA residents from antigreen rules. One bill, the Solar Opportunity and Local Access Rights (SOLAR) Act, is designed to do just that, but it languishes in Congress with only one co-sponsor.

The energy to restrain overbearing HOAs may have to come from the grassroots. As families struggle in coming years to keep up with rising grocery and utility bills, on top of their mortgage payments and HOA dues, they may well put the heat on lawmakers to protect their right to money-saving conservation, renewable energy and edible landscaping.

A small but growing number of HOAs are actually encouraging green practices. But let’s see them push harder: Set strict limits on house size, ban pesticides and leaf blowers, maybe even discount association dues for energy conservers. These are rules we all can live with.

They also raise a dilemma. Rousing appeals to individual freedom and property rights can be effective in, say, winning Susana Tregobov her right to dry in Maryland . But as a vehicle for environmental causes, the property-rights argument can backfire. In its more fatuous forms, it can be a favorite weapon of anti-environmentalists, who would doubtless use it to obstruct green HOA rules.

We can debate the details of the rules, but we have to keep our eye on the ball — that blue-green ball we all live on. We must enforce universal rights, not just individual rights. With human-made climatic catastrophe looming, neighborhood groups have an ethical responsibility not only to protect their own turf but also to lighten the burden we all put on an ecosphere that belongs to everyone and to no one.

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Stan Cox is lead scientist for the Land Institute in Salina , Kan. , where his front yard is a vegetable and herb garden. Author of “Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine,” he wrote this comment for the institute’s Prairie Writers Circle. His address is t.stan@cox.net.

By Wylie Harris

Prairie Writers Circle

I look at the empty countryside around our farm and can’t help but wish it were as thick with people as when my grandparents made a living here. Until recently, though, the kindest name the rest of the world had for this wish was “nostalgia.”

Back then, leaving the farm made sense. The economy was growing on an energy-dense broth of cheap fossil fuels. The energy in those fuels replaced that from the muscles of farm people and their animals. Today one person can grow food for more than a hundred.

A century ago, almost 40 percent of the United States population worked on farms. But with industrialization, millions of farm folk, their labor cheapened, headed to the city for better wages. That tide continued until fewer than 2 million farmers — less than 1 percent of the country’s population — remain today.

Now, though, the seemingly limitless reserves of petroleum that fueled the past century’s exodus from the farm are about half gone. From here on, fossil fuels — and all the everyday essentials that depend on them, like transportation and food — will grow increasingly costly.

Without some miraculous new energy source, muscle power could soon again be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels for growing food. Blunt economic pragmatism seems set to out-shout nostalgia in the call to put more farmers on the land.

Just how many more farmers would it take to cure farming’s fossil fuel habit? Lots, according to farmer and writer Sharon Astyk and “Oil Depletion Protocol” author Richard Heinberg, both leading activists for facing up to life after world oil production peaks. They estimate that without cheap fossil fuels, we would need 50 million new farmers. That’s one farmer for every two households in the United States , 25 times more than there are now.

This isn’t a move-to-the-boonies-or-starve ultimatum. In fact, many people are ideally positioned to become farmers right where they are — it’s the silver lining to suburban sprawl.

Suburbia occupies vast swaths of former prime U.S. farmland. NASA’s ecological forecasting research group reports that the people living there already water about 30 million acres of lawn, three times the land planted in irrigated corn.

Those lawns average somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of an acre. Authorities like gardening guru John Jeavons and “The Contrary Farmer” author Gene Logsdon say that’s ample land for growing a substantial portion of a family’s food.

This isn’t to say that the 50 million farmers-to-be should grow all their own food, nor that the entire country’s food supply can come from former lawns, parks and golf courses.

Rather, it’s to point out that growing as much of one’s own food as possible can be a cornerstone of sound household finance, and that the necessary land and water are already in the same places as many of the people who now participate only in the demand side of agriculture.

The most effective tactics for making farmers out of more of us are local: convincing homeowner associations that vegetable gardens look as nice as lawns, zoning boards that chickens belong in back yards, and state health agencies that bread baked in home kitchens for sale to neighbors isn’t any likelier to hurt anybody than Wonder Bread.

Rethinking what we mean by “farmer” is also important. The necessary transition is as much mental as political. “Farmers” who plow thousands of acres with gigantic diesel-guzzling tractors and sell corn by the bushel for their entire income aren’t much use in an age of expensive energy.

On the other hand, “farmers” who grow substantial amounts of food for their families and perhaps also for sale to neighbors, as primary income or not, are far better equipped to weather a forced fossil-fuel fast. This is the kind of farmer many of us are already within a hoe handle’s reach of becoming, and perhaps with less effort than we realize.

An agrarian nation isn’t just a nostalgic wish after all. It’s insurance we can’t afford to live without.

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Wylie Harris ranches with his family in Cooke County , Texas , north of Fort Worth . A former W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy fellow, he wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina , Kan. http://landinstitute.org

A big factor in the immigration dispute is the food we put on our tables. I grew up in South Texas where seasonal migrant workers were part of everyone’s life. I also grew up close to the earth and I knew where my food came from.

Every year my grandfather would plow up a few rows for each one of us kids and we could grow whatever we wanted. We were on our own.

I would put my hands in the dirt and run it through my fingers. I knew how deep to plant the seeds and how much to water, how to thin out the weaker plants and leave the strong ones and when to pull the weeds.

I loved to grow squash. I loved the sensuous vines, the big bright yellow blossoms, the little squashes growing almost hidden under the large shading leaves, nestled on the soft earth until the umbilical cord connecting them with the mother plant dried out and I knew it was time to harvest.

David Mas Masumoto grows organic heirloom peaches and raisins. In “The Day Without Farmworkers” he tells what immigrant farmworkers mean to the future of small farmers and the quality of the food we eat.