Giving care

For someone in her mid-30s, I have a fairly large experience of being someone's caregiver. In high school, 'I began working in a nearby nursing home. I can't remember quite what drove me to seek that work out - it was not the kind of work that most teenagers I knew did. I think what intrigued me about it was its importance - as a teenager seeking meaning, caring for people at the end of their lives seemed urgent. It was only later that I came to realize that taking care of the elderly and disabled was, in our society, viewed as not onlyl not urgent, but not integral or important. Even as a teenager I couldn't understand why it was treated as unskilled labor, when it seemed to require such a complex measure of compassion, kindness, physical strength and humor. Why weren't my fellow caregivers, most of whom were supporting families, better paid? I never did come to fully understand it, in years I spent working in nursing homes and hospices.

Later, as an adult, my husband and I chose to care for his grandparents in their last years. This was by no means easy, and devoured a large portion of our existence, at a time when we also had very small children and infants. It was exhausting, stressful and sometimes very sad. It was also wonderful in many ways - a gift to my children to know their great-grandparents intimately, a gift to us to know them so well, a gift to us to understand that what we were doing is part of a cycle that they had done for their parents. Acknowledging that something can be a gift does not mean it is always easy or pleasant or joyous, but i have no regrets and would do the same again in a heartbeat, because it needed to be done.

Parenting is not caregiving - one gives care to one's children, but within expected parameters as they grow and increase in strength and ability. But my oldest son's increases do not work the way most children's do, and one of the measures of his development is how we gently approach the day in which I will shift from the ordinary work of parenting to the less typical (but still very common) work of caregiving to my adult child, who will probably never live fully independently. This comes with some sorrows and ambivalences, of course - and of course comes with the recognition that someday, this responsibility will have to pass to someone else, when Eric and I can no longer care for Eli. This is a scary thing. But on the whole, caring for Eli too is a gift and a delight - even when it is messy, tiring and stressful job. I know it will be my work for the whole of my life in one way or another, and that does not frighten or horrify me - although it occasionally seems exhausting since my son is rather like a two year old - but with the physical abilities of a very large 10 year old, and will only get bigger. Still, the rewards and return of loving Eli is enough and we try to frame our future as the project of making a life that includes our child and meets our needs as well. It is an art project, this life we make.

There may be more caregiving roles in our future. My husband is an only child - and it is he who will face the responsibility of any care his parents need (G-d willing little and long from now, for their sakes). Eric and I have agreed to act as guardians for a child in our extended family - this little girl has serious disabilities, like Eli, and a mother who is a full generation older than we are. Again, hopefully long from now, but someday we will be responsible for her care and helping her navigate her life. I cannot say we look at each of these future obligations with delight, but we wish to live in the kind of family, the kind of world where families make a place for people who are not able bodied, who are not fully able to reciprocate, and in order to live in that world someday when I need care, I must begin to make it with my own hands.

One of the questions that comes up more than any other in our adapting-in-place class is what to do about aging and retirement, how to avoid being a burden on another person, particularly if they cannot count on their retirement savings cushioning their esxperience. And I don't have good answers to this question. But the ones I can come up with are these. First, it is not necessarily inherently burdensome to need help - that is merely a responsibility, and if it can be lived gracefully and handled gracefully, responsibilities are not crushing.

Moreover, in the course of our lives, every one of us will be dependent upon someone else - perhaps for only a few moments, perhaps for many years. Many of us will be disabled, elderly, ill, fragile, injured. It is an illusion to think that by saving money and hiring people, we can avoid "being a burden" - instead, what we can do is shift our dependencies onto professionals. If those professionals are fairly paid and enjoy their work, they may not find you to be a burden. I can say, however, that sometimes they do. Money doesn't make you less burdensome, in merely makes people less free to tell you that they find you burdensome.

I point this out because I think we misframe the relationship when we speak of this as a choice between "money to pay for assistance, no money to pay for assistance and thus a burden." I think that's the wrong way to frame this. Instead, I think it is important to remember that dependencies are mutual - and that the relationships on which are burdensome or not based on reciprocities and acknowledgements. That is, it was not a burden to care for Eric's grandparents because even though I had not the experience of being raised and cared for by them, my husband had that experience, and I had the experience of being welcomed, included and loved by them. It was also less of a weight because I knew they understood what the experience was like - they had done the same for Inge's parents, and they could see this from my perspective. And in talking to them, and listening to them, I could see a small view of my future, and how I would want to be treated and cared for myself. Doing this for them was a way of doing it for myself, in anticipation.

I was thinking of this when I read Arthur Kleinman's moving and fine article on giving care - on the medical interpretations of this act, and the way that our medical system doesn't really have a language for the ordinary acts of giving care to one another, and the hard realities of caring for his wife with Alzheimers. He writes:

Joan can't, on her own, find her way out of the bedroom. Yet, once safely in my hands or those of our trusted home health aide, she can walk effectively. A China scholar who translated and interpreted ancient texts, she can no longer read. A wife and mother whose fierce commitment to the family was its moral backbone, she now struggles to be part of family functions and can sometimes seem impassive and cut off from us. Formerly the primary caregiver for her husband and children, she is now the care-receiver. She may no longer be who she was even seven years ago, but her subjectivity has not so much disappeared--there is much of her personality that is still present--as altered. And that alteration has affected what had been for four decades an all-consuming relationship--our identity and orientation. I still cannot accept to treat her as if she can no longer share the sensibility and narrative we have created, and yet, more and more frequently, she can't. She is happy much of the time. It is I, the caregiver, who, more often, am sad and despairing.

She is a source of great concern to each of us, her family members, about how to best manage her condition. We grieve what we have lost and fear what we know lies ahead. We have each of us gone through feelings of loss, anger, and frustration. We have been marked by a special kind of pain. But we have also experienced a deepening sense of responsibility, gratitude for all that we had lived through together, love, solidarity, and a shared sensibility that we have resisted what is beyond our control and are, individually and collectively, more for it. This is not meant as a self-satisfying summing up--there is no final summary yet and the proper genre is tragedy, as millions who are engaged in these everyday practices know.

Economists configure caregiving as "burden." Psychologists talk about "coping," health-services researchers describe social resources and healthcare costs, and physicians conceive it as a clinical skill. Each of these perspectives represents part of the picture. For the medical humanities and interpretive social sciences, caregiving is a foundational component of moral experience. By this I mean that we envision caregiving as an existential quality of what it is to be a human being. We give care as part of the flow of everyday lived values and emotions that make up moral experience. Here collective values and social emotions are as influential as individual ones. Within these local moral worlds--family, network, institution, community--caregiving is one of those things that really matters, but usually not the only thing.

As a scholar, I engage with other medical humanists to understand the dimensions of this moral activity--how it is experienced and organized. In part, I hope it can be better taught. I believe that what doctors need to be helped to master is the art of acknowledging and affirming the patient as a suffering human being; imagining alternative contexts and practices for responding to calamity; and conversing with and supporting patients in desperate situations where the emphasis is on what really matters to the patient and his or her intimates. A program of medical training that makes this happen, however it is innovated, should combine practical experience of caregiving for health catastrophes in homes and institutions, where students actually do those things that families do, with the knowledge that stands behind the art of medicine.

For a whole host of reasons - demographic, economic, energy-linked and environmental, giving care is going to be a more important job in the future. More of us will have to care for one another, where institutions could once do so. More of us will have to rely on people we know, rather than our savings. More of us face the terrible fragility of those questions - who will care for me, how will I manage to care for them?

And for all that I do not find my own work as a caregiver to be unpleasant, I know that it can be hard. I've been fortunate - we were able to integrate Eric's grandparents into our lives, and our son, as autistic children go, is easy. I tell everyone that Eric and I won the lottery. I know people who deal with complex medical situations, with recalcitrant and angry Alzheimers patients, with mental illnesses that simply are unmanageable. And I wish I had a good and magic answer for how we're going to do this. I don't. All I can say is that many more of us will be struggling with this project, to do the very best we can. More of us will have to begin earlier - having conversations and speaking to one another, and more importantly, creating the kind of deep relationships of biology or choice that make it possible to take without reciprocating based on a long and deep history of generosity, a well of shared experience and love that make it possible to draw deep when there's nothing left.

Ultimately, I think Kleinman gets this right - giving care is part of what makes us human, of what makes us moral. I hope that institutional responses to our coming collective crisis will be sufficient to help those who need it the most, although I am not wholly optimistic. But for those looking down the reality that all of us age, all of us suffer illness, all of us face times of needing care, the only real answer I can give - and it is no solution, just a part of the answer, is that we must begin to conceive the act of giving care correctly, as part of our lives, begin to speak of it and make space for it, and most of all, find our way to navigate this essential and yet not fully visible path in our lives.

None of us, if we think of it, want to live in the kind of world where there is no place for those who cannot participate fully. And that means that each of us has an obligation to do the work of making this harsher, warmer, poorer world still a place with space for those who are old, who are weak, who are ill, who are disabled. We need to make sure that they are fully integrated into our lives, because they deserve it, because we know that someday we will be them too, and our only hope is living in a world that gives care.

How green are the ‘childless by choice’?Bell construction widens its scope

Could a new “Manhattan Project” produce radically new energy sources?

Summary: Can a new Manhattan Project produce a breakthrough in energy technology?

A November 2007 post discussed the last and perhaps foundational source of American’s confidence that peak oil will prove manageable despite our feckless lack of preparedness: An urban legend to comfort America: crash programs will solve Peak Oil.

This does not mean that we have adequately funded energy research. For example, the Navy (not DOE) funds development of the Polywell at only a few million dollars per year (see here; for more about the Polywell see here and here).

But there are dozens of potential new energy sources, from algae-fuel to satellite-based solar power generators (see here for research about some of these). If we throw vast sums at every likely candidate, what breakthroughs might result? If we start soon, perhaps a substitute for oil can be developed and implemented in time.

Perhaps, but probably not. The Manhattan and Apollo projects were narrowly focused engineering projects, for which the underlying science was already well-developed — and the potential well-understood. With the possible exception of the Polywell, nothing else fits that description at this time.

As usual, research by the Congressional Research Service provides an invaluable starting place: “The Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, and Federal Energy Technology R&D Programs: A Comparative Analysis“, Deborah D. Stine, 30 June 2009. She compares the Manhattan and Apollo projects in both absolute terms (constant dollars) and relative to the US economy at that time, and compares those to our energy research since 1975.

The Manhattan Project was intense (in terms of GDP), small in dollars, and brief. It was an unqualifed successThe Apollo Program was intense, large in dollars, and long. Apollo met its narrow goal, but was a near-total failure in larger terms (producing no space infrastructure or long-term national benefits). Energy research has been a low fraction of GDP, but massive in dollars and sustained for almost 2 generations. With few useful results.

We’re one for three. Not a happy record. We’ll have to do better in the future if we’re to prosper — or even survive.

Here’s the data.

Excerpt from the Report Summary

Some policymakers have concluded that the energy challenges facing the United States are so critical that a concentrated investment in energy research and development (R&D) should be undertaken. The Manhattan project, which produced the atomic bomb, and the Apollo program, which landed American men on the moon, have been cited as examples of the success such R&D investments can yield. Investment in federal energy technology R&D programs of the 1970s, in response to two energy crises, have generally been viewed as less successful than the earlier two efforts. This report compares and contrasts the three initiatives.

… Besides funding, several criteria might be used to compare these three initiatives including perception of the program or threat, goal clarity, and the customer of the technology being developed. By these criteria, while the Manhattan project and the Apollo program may provide some useful analogies for thinking about an energy technology R&D initiative, there are fundamental differences between the forces that drove these historical R&D success stories and the forces driving energy technology R&D today. Critical differences include

the ability to transform the program or threat into a concrete goal, andthe use to which the technology would be put.

Although the Manhattan project and the Apollo program may provide some useful analogies for funding, these differences may limit their utility regarding energy policy. Rather, energy technology R&D has been driven by at least three not always commensurate goals — resource and technological diversity, commercial viability, and environmental protection — which were not goals of the historical programs.

Other posts about energy projects

Fusion energy, too risky a bet for America (we prefer to rely on war), 4 May 2008An urban legend to comfort America: crash programs will solve Peak Oil, 16 September 2008A long-shot project for fusion power: the Polywell, 30 September 2008

The true value of energy is the net energyGulf spill won’t dampen U.S. appetite for oil

Merlin's time

Perhaps the most interesting responses to the discussion of mass movements here on The Archdruid Report have been those that insisted that the only alternative, either to a mass movement in the abstract or to some specific movement, was defeat and despair. That’s an odd sort of logic, since mass movements are hardly the only tool in the drawer; I suspect that part of what drives the insistence is the herd-mindedness of our species – we are, after all, social mammals with most of the same inborn habits of collective behavior you’ll find in any of the less solitary vertebrates.

Still, the pressure toward some such movement has another potent force driving it: the awkward fact that the vast majority of people today simply do not want to hear how difficult their future is going to be. It doesn’t matter how good your evidence is or how well you make your case, most of your listeners will simply look uncomfortable and change the subject. Why this should be the case is an interesting question; I suspect that much of the blame lies with the cult of positive thinking Barbara Ehrenreich anatomized in a recent book, though I’m quite willing to hear alternative explanations.

Still, for whatever reason, an extraordinary blindness to the downside has become crazy-glued in place straight across contemporary culture. From economists who insist that the bubble du jour (right now, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s government debt) can keep on inflating forever, through technology fans who believe devoutly that their favorite piece of drawing-board vaporware will necessarily solve the world’s problems without side effects and with spare change left over, to millions of ordinary people who can’t or won’t imagine a future without the material abundance of recent decades, we seem to have lost the collective capacity to recognize that things can and do go very, very wrong. It’s not merely a matter of blindness to the “black swan” events Nassim Nicholas Taleb made famous, either; we’re just as bad at seeing white swans coming, even when they’ve been predicted for decades and the sky is so thick with them that it’s hard to see anything else.

It’s an appalling predicament: how can a community prepare for a troubled future if most people tune out even the slightest suggestion that it might be troubled? It’s for this reason, seemingly, that many people in the peak oil scene have chosen to downplay the difficulties and insist that we can have a bright, happy, abundant future if we just pursue whatever baby steps toward sustainability we all find congenial. I’ve been assured by some of the people making such claims that they’re perfectly aware that the situation is far more difficult and dangerous than that, but that the need to get as people involved in some kind of movement toward sustainability is so great, they say, that waffling on that point is as justified as it is necessary.

As it happens, I think they’re making a hideous mistake. I’ve discussed the reasons for that perception at length in several recent posts, and won’t rehash them here. The question that remains is whether there are any viable alternatives, and that’s the question I want to address in today’s post. To explain the option I have in mind, though, it may be useful to borrow a metaphor from history.

I don’t know how many of my readers know this, but my most recent publication is a translation of a very strange book from the Middle Ages. Its title is Picatrix , and it is one of the sole surviving examples of that absolute rarity of medieval literature, a textbook for apprentice wizards. Those of my readers who grew up on stories about Merlin, Gandalf et al. take note: those characters, legendary or fictional as they are, were modeled on an actual profession that flourished in the early Middle Ages, and remained relatively active until the bottom fell out of the market at the end of the Renaissance.

By "wizard" here I don’t mean your common or garden variety fortune teller or ritual practitioner; we have those in abundance today. The wizard of the early Middle Ages in Europe and the Muslim world, rather, was a freelance intellectual whose main stock in trade was good advice, though admittedly that came well frosted with incantation and prophecy as needed. He had a good working knowledge of astrology, which filled roughly the same role in medieval thought that theoretical physics does today, and an equally solid knowledge of ritual magic, but his training did not begin or end there. According to Picatrix , the compleat wizard in training needed to get a thorough education in agriculture; navigation; political science; military science; grammar, languages, and rhetoric; commerce, all the mathematics known at the time, including arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy; logic; medicine, including a good knowledge of herbal pharmaceuticals; the natural sciences, including meteorology, mineralogy, botany, and zoology; and Aristotle’s metaphysics: in effect, the sum total of the scientific learning that had survived from the classical world.

Now it may have occurred to my readers that this doesn’t sound like the sort of education you’d get at Hogwarts, and that’s exactly the point. Whether you believe that the movements of the planets foretell events on Earth, as almost everyone did in the Middle Ages, or whether you think astrology is simply a clever anticipation of game theory that gets its results by inserting random factors into strategic decisions to make them unpredictable, you’ll likely recognize that a soothsayer with the sort of background I’ve just sketched out would be well prepared to offer sound advice on most of the questions that might perplex a medieval peasant, merchant, baron or king. Nor, of course, would someone so trained be restricted in his choice of active measures to incantations alone. This is arguably why so many medieval kings and barons had professional sorcerers and soothsayers on staff, despite the fulminations of all the dominant religions of the age, and why wizards less adept at social climbing found a bumper crop of customers lower down the social ladder.

The origins of this profession are, if anything, even more interesting. Pierre Riché’s useful study Education and Culture in the Barbarian West showed in detail how the educational institutions of the late Roman world imploded as their economic and social support systems crumpled beneath them. In Europe – matters were a little more complex in the Muslim world – they were replaced by a monastic system of education that, in its early days, fixated almost entirely on scriptural and theological studies, and by methods of training young aristocrats that fixated even more tightly on the skills of warfare and government. Only among families with a tradition of classical letters did some semblance of the old curriculum stay in use, and Riché notes that while that custom continued, those who learned philosophy, one of the core studies in that curriculum, were widely suspected of dabbling in magic. It’s not too hard to connect the dots and see how a subculture of freelance intellectuals, equipped with unusual knowledge and a willingness to stray well outside the boundaries set by the culture of their time, would have emerged from that context.

All this may seem worlds away from the issues raised earlier in this essay, but there’s a direct connection. The wizards of the early Middle Ages were individuals who recognized the value of certain branches of knowledge and certain attitudes toward the world that were profoundly unpopular in their time, and took it on themselves to preserve the knowledge, cultivate the attitudes, and make connections with those who shared the same sense of values,or at least were interested in making practical use of the skills that the knowledge and attitides made possible. There was no mass movement to support the survival of classical science in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, and no hope of starting one; the mass movements of the time – when they weren’t simply stampeding mobs trying to get out of the way of the latest round of barbarian invasions – embraced the opposite opinion. How much of a role wizards might have played in the transmission of classical learning to the future is anyone’s guess, since records of their activities are very sparse, but it’s clear that they were an intellectual resource much used during an age when few other resources of the kind were available.

I’ve come to think that a strategy of the same kind, if a bit more tightly focused, might well be one of the best options just now for an age when very few people are willing to make meaningful preparations for a difficult future. Certain branches of practical knowledge, thoroughly learned and just as thoroughly practiced by a relatively modest number of people, could be deployed in a hurry to help mitigate the impact of the energy shortages, economic dislocations, and systems breakdowns that are tolerably certain to punctuate the years ahead of us. I’m sure my readers have their own ideas about the kind of knowledge that might be best suited to that context, but I have a particular suggestion to offer: the legacy of the apppropriate technology movement of the 1970s.

This was not simply a precursor of today’s sustainability projects, and the differences are important. The appropriate tech movement, with some exceptions, tended to avoid the kind of high-cost, high-profile eco-chic projects so common today. Much of it focused instead on simple technologies that could be put to work by ordinary people without six-figure incomes, doing the work themselves, using ordinary tools and readily available resources. Most of these technologies were evolved by basement-shop craftspeople and small nonprofits working on shoestring budgets, and ruthlessly field-tested by thousands of people who built their own versions in their backyards and wrote about the results in the letters column of Mother Earth News .

The resulting toolkit was a remarkably well integrated, effective, and cost-effective set of approaches that individuals, families, and communities could use to sharply reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and the industrial system in general. It was not, I should probably point out, particularly esthetic, unless you happen to like a lively fusion of down home funk, late twentieth century garage-workshop, and hand-dyed back-to-the-land hippie paisley; those of my readers who own houses and are still fretting about their resale value (and haven’t yet figured out that this figure will be denominated in imaginary numbers for the next several decades at least) will likely run screaming from it; those who were incautious enough to buy homes in suburban developments with restrictive covenants will have to step carefully, at least until their neighbors panic. Apartment dwellers will have to pick and choose a bit; on the other hand, those of my readers who will spend time living in tarpaper shacks before the Great Recession ends – and I suspect a fair number of people will have that experience, as a fair number of people did the last time the economy lost touch with reality and imploded the way it’s currently doing – will find that very nearly everything the appropriate tech people did will be well within their reach.

What’s included in the package I’m discussing? Intensive organic gardening, for starters, with its support technologies of composting, green manure, season extenders, and low-tech food preservation and storage methods; small-scale chicken and rabbit raising, and home aquaculture of fish; simple attached solar greenhouses, which make the transition from food to energy by providing heat for homes as well as food for the table; other retrofitted passive solar heating technologies; solar water heating; a baker’s dozen or more methods for conserving hot or cool air with little or no energy input; and a good deal more. None of it will save the world, if that hackneyed phrase means maintaining business as usual on some supposedly sustainable basis; what it can do is make human life in a world suffering from serious energy shortages and economic troubles a good deal less traumatic and more livable.

This is the suite of technologies I studied as a budding appropriate-tech geek during the late 1970s and 1980s, and it was central to the training program that earned me my Master Conserver certificate in 1985. One teaches what one knows, and I’m going to take the gamble of devoting much of the next year or so of Archdruid Report posts to the details. My hope is that I can encourage at least a few of my readers to follow the very old example mentioned earlier, and become the green wizards of the decades ahead of us.

For that, I have come to think, is one of the things the soon-to-be-deindustrializing world most needs just now: green wizards. By this I mean individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility to learn, practice, and thoroughly master a set of unpopular but valuable skills – the skills of the old appropriate tech movement – and share them with their neighbors when the day comes that their neighbors are willing to learn. This is not a subject where armchair theorizing counts for much – as every wizard’s apprentice learns sooner rather than later, what you really know is measured by what you’ve actually done – and it’s probably not going to earn anyone a living any time soon, either, though it can help almost anyone make whatever living they earn go a great deal further than it might otherwise go. Nor, again, will it prevent the unraveling of the industrial age and the coming of a harsh new world; what it can do, if enough people seize the opportunity, is make the rough road to that new world more bearable than it will otherwise be.

I also propose to have a certain amount of fun with the wizard archetype in the posts to come. Still, that’s an example of what the Renaissance alchemist Michael Maier called a lusus serius , a game played in earnest, a dead serious joke. The present time, as I’ve suggested here more than once, has plenty of features in common with the twilight years of classical civilization, the age that gave rise to the legends of Merlin and Arthur, and made it in retrospect a poetic necessity for the greatest of all legendary kings to be advised by the greatest of all legendary wizards.

Thus there’s a certain lively irony in the fact that, back in the days when I was sanding blades for a homebuilt wind turbine and studying the laws of thermodynamics in Master Conserver classes in the meeting room of the old Seattle Public library, one of my favorite bits of music was Al Stewart’s Merlin’s Time :

Who would walk the stony roads of Merlin’s time,
And keep the watch along the borderline?
And who would hear the legends passed in song and rhyme
Upon the shepherd pipes of Merlin’s time?

In its own way, that’s the question that upcoming posts will pose to my readers; we’ll see what the answer turns out to be.

4G networks could be revolutionaryA pathless land

Crisis of democracy

From the Enron debacle to the BP catastrophe, the principal architects of our society have abused the trust they enjoy because of their specialized knowledge. It’s time, on the world stage, for the emergence of вЂomni-competent citizens’

In her article, Toward a new Alexandria, Lisbet Rausing has criticised the academic community for failing to share what they know with the public. In an age of disaggregating and democratising rupture of time and space, as she argues, this has profound consequences on the democratic vision of universal learning and education. This is true not only for academics, but also the ruling elites of our economy - both classes being guardians of specialised knowledge. The difference is that the public can forcibly feel the impact created by the latter. If we are to truly live up to democratic ideals, we, the public, need a greater sense of urgency to ensure that we are empowered with knowledge.

The principal architects

Walter Lippmann, one of America’s most influential journalists in the twentieth century, presented a penetrating analysis of democracy, popular participation and media in his classic work Public Opinion (1922). He saw the difficulty facing the governing class as вЂa chaos of local opinions’ in which any decentralized decisions would soon flounder. So the general population must be governed by вЂa specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.’ This elite class is to master information and knowledge that is not вЂcommon property, in situations that the public at large does not conceive.’ In other words, only the select few would be the вЂomni-competent citizens’.

This specialized class contained the вЂprincipal architects’ of national policies, a term coined by Adam Smith to describe the вЂmerchants and manufacturers’ of his time, and reiterated by Noam Chomsky to describe contemporary multinational corporations. These principal architects have designed a system to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the very few. They have ensured that their interests are attended to, whatever the grievous expense this has cost others.

Because this class act upon privileged information is not accessible to the public, Lippmann wrote that, вЂit is irresponsible […] and it can be held to account only on the accomplished fact.’ On this, Enron former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, speaking from prison, made a very relevant point in his interview with Fortune this month. Reflecting on lessons for business executives facing allegations of white-collar crime, he said he вЂtalked too much and educated the prosecution on issues that they would otherwise have had to figure out on their own.’ He should have exercised his Fifth Amendment rights following his attorney’s advice.

However, honesty and trust are essential for the market economy to function. If the elite class is irresponsible, how can we place our trust in them?  In Lippmann’s words, they can only be held accountable based on вЂaccomplished facts’. But Franco Moretti, writing in the New Left Review (Jan-Feb 2010), has suggested that honesty is retrospective, in the sense that вЂyou can’t be honest in the future tense – which is the tense of the entrepreneur […] Even if you want to be honest, you can’t, because honesty needs firm facts.’

The specialization discourse

A fundamental paradox emerges: on the one hand, increasingly specialized knowledge and information have removed public understanding of common interests further away from the realities of public life. On the other hand, unfamiliarity with these languages of specialization and abstraction prompts us to impart legitimization and authority to multinational corporations and principal architects who have major influences on public policies. But whether they will behave honestly is an entirely different matter.

It was only weeks after US President Obama announced an ambitious plan to open up more US offshore waters to oil drilling that the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill, the worst man-made environmental disaster in the US, occurred. It was only last autumn that David Rainey, BP’s vice president for the Gulf of Mexico exploration, told the US Congress that the US Interior Department’s proposal to tighten federal regulation of oil companies’ environmental programmes was unnecessary: “I think we need to remember that offshore drilling has been going on for the last fifty years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment,” he said.

Moretti also reminds us of the Enron story, in which the mark-to-market accounting, entering as actually existing earnings those that are still years in the future, was invented. The day this accounting on asset values was approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jeffrey Skilling brought champagne to the office: вЂIt wasn’t a job – it was a mission… We were doing God’s work,’ Skilling said after his indictment.

In the decade following Enron’s debacle, the world would see how global financial institutions made record profits by selling complex financial instruments and mortgage-backed securities, only to end in a dramatic meltdown of the global economy at the cost of the general public. Naturally, the principal architects of a handful of these financial institutions, notably Goldman Sachs, avoided collapse by arranging for the taxpayers to pay for bailouts. вЂI’m doing God’s Work,’ said Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Private emails by Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman trader at the centre of SEC’s fraud investigation into the bank, illustrated vividly the abuse of trust: вЂMore and more leverage in the system, the entire system is about to crumble any moment...the only potential survivor the fabulous Fab standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities !!!’, вЂI've managed to sell a few abacus bonds to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport...’

Specialized discourse, which presents matters in a highly technical manner inaccessible to all but a few experts, has effects as far as the North Korean nuclear crisis. There is no doubt that North Korea plays a large part in the crisis with its nuclear brinkmanship. But Roland Bleiker, international relations scholar and former Swiss diplomat, has suggested that Pyongyang’s action has not taken place in a vacuum. It has been subject to clear and repeated American nuclear threats for over fifty years. The image of North Korea as an evil and rogue state is so deeply entrenched, that any crisis can be easily attributed to Pyongyang’s problematic behaviour, even in the face of contradicting evidence. Behind this threat projection is the specialized discourse on security and national defence. The public has become used to the techno-strategic language of abstraction used by  defence analysts to the point that these experts are politically legitimized to comment on these issues with moral authority.

With this insight, we can understand how it is possible that President Obama can ask Congress to approve a record US$708 billion in defense spending for 2011, at a time when US military power goes virtually unchallenged. Defense Secretary Robert Gates only has to point to sophisticated new technologies being developed by enemies overseas, threats posed by militant groups, and other unexpected scenarios. Of course, the public has no way to access these claims.

Omni-competent citizens

From what we have seen above, the principal architects, or what Pierre Bourdieu, one of the twentieth century’s most influential social scientists, called the вЂinvisible hand of the powerful’, are creating a complex and refined mode of domination in virtually every area of life, ranging from finance and defence to the environment. The behaviours of the elite class, however, hardly instil any confidence in the public, as judged by the repeated occurrences of one catastrophe after another. But surely what we call the вЂcrisis of democracy’ occurs not when we stop trusting the elites, but when we find ourselves not able to participate in an intelligent discussion in public matters. The Climate Gate Scandal, for example, raised a whole lot of questions about the accuracy of the prediction of global warming and public education.

Pierre Bourdieu therefore advocated new forms of struggle, in which researchers have a key part to play. He envisages вЂa political action with new ends – the demolition of dominant beliefs – and new means – technical weapons – based on research and a command of scientific knowledge, and symbolic weapons, capable of undermining common beliefs by putting research findings into an accessible form.’ In other words, only a programme aimed at the mass cultivation of Lippmann’s вЂomni-competent citizens’ could counter the abuse of trust by the principal architects of our societies. At a time when corporate power remains unchallenged as the financial crisis fades away, and our principal architects are once again bending their attention to global issues like climate change, food shortage and nuclear weapons, the stakes could not be higher.

About the author
Andy Yee is a writer, blogger and translator based in Hong Kong. Educated at SOAS and Cambridge University, he has worked at the EU Delegation to China in Beijing

Peak oil — a crisis postponedGovernment shuts down 4 failing banks

Why sociopaths win & why, no, you don’t want to be one of them

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied

Everybody got this broken feeling

Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets

Everybody wants a box of chocolates

And a long stem rose

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby

Everybody knows that you really do

Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful

Ah give or take a night or two

Everybody knows you’ve been discreet

But there were so many people you just had to meet

Without your clothes

And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

And everybody knows that it’s now or never

Everybody knows that it’s me or you

And everybody knows that you live forever

Ah when you’ve done a line or two

Everybody knows the deal is rotten

Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton

For your ribbons and bows

And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming

Everybody knows that it’s moving fast

Everybody knows that the naked man and woman

Are just a shining artifact of the past

Everybody knows the scene is dead

But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed

That will disclose

What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you’re in trouble

Everybody knows what you’ve been through

From the bloody cross on top of Calvary

To the beach of Malibu

Everybody knows it’s coming apart

Take one last look at this Sacred Heart

Before it blows

And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

Oh everybody knows, everybody knows

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

Everybody knows

Leonard Cohen

“I’m sure you have the answer, you and Ron Paul and all the other pot-smoking libertarian do-gooders have it all figured out. But what I’m saying is, no confidence means end of the confidence game. That’s what Lehman showed. Every single player in finance suddenly had to face the fundamental problem—this whole fucking economy is built on fraud and lies and garbage. So when Lehman collapsed, every single player panicked, going, вЂIf Lehman was nothing but a Ponzi scheme—and I know what I’m running is a Ponzi scheme—holy shit, that means everyone else is running a Ponzi scheme too! Run for the exits!’ No one trusted anyone else, everyone pulled out, and the entire global economy collapsed just like that. And that meant your parents, my parents, every teacher, every fireman, every person in the country going into retirement, every price on every asset—wiped out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sociopathy lately, after reading the article I quoted above. Here’s more:

…let’s throw the book at every firm and every executive that our people can make a case against. Because you know, gosh, it’s all about rule of law and blind justice, just like Che says.’ OK, so now this means indicting just about every serious player in finance, so they take down Goldman Sachs, they take down Citigroup, JP Morgan, BofA… and they also serve all the big funds who are at least as guilty, if not more. So they shut down Pimco, Blackrock, Citadel… maybe they indict Geithner and Summers, haul in some of Bush’s crooks… right? …OK, now guess what you’ve just done? You’ve just caused the markets to completely tank. Remember what happened after the Lehman collapse? Remember how popular that made every politician in Washington? Still wondering why they coughed up a trillion bucks? They were scared for their lives; that’s why they voted for that bailout. You’d have done the same goddamn thing. But if we go after everyone guilty of fraud and theft, the market crash this country would see would make 2008 look like Sesame Street. Open that can of worms labeled вЂFraud’ and the whole fucking economy collapses. You may as well prosecute people for masturbating. No one will know where the fraud investigation stops and who will be charged next—everyone will try to cash out, and the markets will tank to zero. And guess what happens when the markets tank to zero? Every fucking American with a retirement plan, or an investment portfolio, or a 401k—every state pension plan in the country, every teacher’s pension fund, every fireman’s pension—every last one of them will be wiped out. That’s what the Lehman collapse taught us.”

I thought back to the question Catherine Austin Fitts asked:

In the summer of 2000, I asked a group of 100 people at a conference of spiritually committed people who would push a red button if it would immediately stop all narcotics trafficking in their neighborhood, city, state and country. Out of 100 people, 99 said they would not push such red button. When surveyed, they said they did not want their mutual funds to go down if the U.S. financial system suddenly stopped attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion a year in global money laundering. They did not want their government checks jeopardized or their taxes raised because of resulting problems financing the federal government deficit.

We haven’t built a big enough prison system to handle it all. Unless you’re causing trouble, and even if you are, you are contributing to it. And if you are contributing to it, you are just as guilty as they are. That’s the story. And even if you don’t want it to all fall down, even if you love capitalism and wave your countries’ flag proudly, even if you are willing to bail out the banks by increasing your tax dollars, and handing over your kid’s inheritance and are willing to trade their capacity to live on this planet for another gallon of gas, it’s too late. Too late for a shiny new President to walk in and make it all better. Too late to punish the “rich bad men” who stole our wealth and polluted our planet.

And it’s your fault for letting it happen. And you’re naive if you think you can fix it.

But here’s what I really want to say, as a psychologist, to all of you: Sociopaths lack something 95% of us have: They lack a conscience. They lack the capacity to feel empathy, to feel guilt, to feel bad about doing bad. When you lack Vitamin E(mpathy), you hate people who have it. You walk around with an expensive suit and you have a black card to pay for an expensive dinner, and you buy and sell people and marry the hottest mates around, but it’s all for nothing. You can’t attach to other people, even though you know it is something you should want to do. You can only treat people as pawns in a chess game, because you can’t relate to people as anything other than suckers or fools to manipulate. You “fuck” your husband or wife, because you have no clue what “making love” would feel like. You cheat and lie because it helps you to get what you want. Money and material wealth, along with a sense of increased power, are your only true motivators.

But getting “powerful” is just too easy, you see? “Suckers” let you take it, and they seem happy to give it to you, get it? They’re such “idiots.” The “suckers” will sacrifice anything for what they love and value–things like their families and principles and their religion and their environment. They take out money from a weekly check to put toward retirement or toward a college education for their kids. To a sociopath, these things are truly alien. They couldn’t believe how easy it was to stop paying for the retirements of their workers, and make the workers pay for it, instead. It was unbelievably easy to convince the workers that they needed to lived on less, and put the money into the stock market for their retirement, for their kids’ college education. The corporations had to pinch themselves! The money they pay workers went right back into the hands of these very same corporations, as stocks. It was too good to be true! Now they could leverage even greater wealth with these same dollars! Like taking candy from a baby.

There is no point pitying the “suckers.” They hate the “suckers” for loving and valuing these things, for wanting to take care of themselves and their futures. For believing that if you worked hard, you could be rich or grow up to be president one day. They didn’t realize that the tough part is that first million. The next ten million are much easier to make. The suckers don’t “get it.” They still believe in the great and powerful Oz. But just along side the theft and rip-off is the disdain. They want to prove that nobody feels true compassion and caring. No one actually wants to be responsible, when they can make someone else do it. A sense of principles are for hypocrites and fools, and if you try to push some of them on the sociopath, they are taking everyone down with them–your parents, your teacher, the firefighters, all of it. Without Vitamin E, life is one big fraud, and the emptiness inside rings as clear as a bell when someone shakes it:

вЂHey, assholes, you’re supposed to be hypocrites, OK? You’re supposed to be two-faced free-market liars, not libertarian Quakers! You’re not supposed to believe in anything—your job is to get up in front of the public and lie about free markets and the rest. Period.’

That’s it, how fucking hard is it? Look, watch my face: Say one thing out of one side… and do the other out of the other side. Got that? Let everyone else whine and cry about, вЂOoh, that’s not fair, ooh, that’s a bailout, that’s socialism, that’s corruption.’ That’s what losers do—they whine. …you whine all the time…

Yes, they say, “You aren’t adults. You aren’t mature enough to get it. There IS nothing to believe in. Principles and integrity are for babies or fools. The politicians are doing their job by lying and that’s how it is suppose to be. Corporations are there to rob you and your role is to shut up and take it. Even when you have to bail them out. Shut up and get out of our face. Let the scam continue, and stop whining about what’s fair, because nothing is.

…look at you… Can you pay the bill for this meal? Is there a libertarian on earth who can afford to buy a decent meal in Manhattan? And now, look at me: I’m a hypocrite. Hell yes I am! I lie every day of my life, I lie to myself in my sleep. Hell, I’m lying to you right now, in fact I don’t even know what the fuck I’m saying anymore because I’m so used to lying. And yet—who’s the guy with the black card? Who’s the one who’s going to pick up the check tonight? Guys with power, guys like me, we lie. You got that? вЂLie’ as in вЂMy Lai’ the massacre—as in, вЂMy Lai you long time, me so free-markety.’ You distract the dumbshits with free-market B.S. because hey, for whatever reason, that’s what the public likes to hear, it doesn’t really matter what lie you feed them so long as it’s the lie that puts them in a trance. And then behind the scenes, you do the very opposite: You fix the game, you cover up this problem here with those funds there, you move shit around, you skim budgets and you subsidize the system, you cover up the bad shit and once in a while throw a has-been to the wolves to keep the public entertained—that’s the way the system works, and anyone who’s an adult understands that.

Like in a war, you shoot someone in the head in cold blood and you say “That’s war.” Nothing personal, dude. When you shoot the economy in the head, when you destroy every element of an economy, entire countries, and you take the entire world down with you, you show contempt for those who have the nerve to suggest that there is anything wrong with it.

It’s what adults do.

And the whining “babies,” the ones who’s parents and grandparents haven’t committed some “big crime” to allow them to enjoy the mega-wealth of status and privilege, the “suckers” who haven’t figured out how to make their first million yet, these are the ones you put into a trance, that you feed the ‘bread and circuses’ to. Only the grown-ups know this. The wise-guys. The insiders. Only the whiny babies cry when they put a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger. To be a real adult is to be heartless, and to lie. Only a fool believes that there should be any honesty or devotion or empathy in the world. All others believe in cash.

Here’s my advice: Back away slowly when you hear this.

You can tell the sociopaths because they are so charming and convincing until they bare their teeth. Then they are terrifying and crushing to our spirits. They lull us into believing that we’re either going to be a part of the “action,” a real “grown up” or we’re setting ourselves up to be objects of ridicule. And they are great at ridicule in the form of “friendly advice:”

“Here’s the thing: I think it’s great that you and your friends memorized Road to Serfdom in between Star Trek episodes—no really, I’m happy for you. Yeah, we’re all so proud. But here’s the thing: We grown-ups are really, really busy now trying to sort out the free-market mess you made with that Lehman move of yours. Yeah, so why don’t you run along to your libertarian chat rooms and have your little debates about Jekyll Island and the gold standard, because it really means a lot to us. And report back to me as soon as you have it all figured out, m’kay? Just get the fuck out of my face and leave the adults alone.”

If you don’t get out of the face of a sociopath, they will try to remove you. They’ll buy you or kill you or cripple you, but deep down, they know that they are a small minority, and maybe they’ve got a bunch of “friends” all “acting” like them, but without the real stomachs for it. These “friends” have a big enough dose of Vitamin E, that it is wrecking their marriages, causing them ulcers, impacting their self-respect. And things turn quickly when they turn. When those “suckers” come out of the trance, you better have the “cover story” all set up, and the jet planes ready to evacuate because things can get ugly very quickly. And even in the chaos, you’ll have that 5% directing you, pointing out the way to salvation. And you can tell who they are, when they aren’t baring their teeth, because they seem like the most trustworthy folks in the world. They have a bright smile and a warm handshake. And when they say “Trust me” they sound so confident and certain that you do.

Psychologist can’t really treat sociopaths, because we’ve not figured out how to provide Vitamin E to those who lack it. Sometimes aging makes them less dangerous, but they are never truly like the rest of us. There is a steel gaze in their eyes, when you block them. When you see it shining back at you, you can never feel completely comfortable with them again, despite the charm and the wealth that successful sociopaths can offer. And if you marry one, you stop feeling human after a while. You can’t appeal to their humanity, because they have none.

And when sociopaths rule every aspect of our lives, when the largest organizations are modeled after sociopathic humans, it takes the rest of us a long time to figure out that we’ve been suckered in. We’ve been tarnished and harmed by it. The reason is that, having empathy, we bend over backward trying to believe there has to be some logic to completely merciless, cut-throat destructive action. Having empathy, we can’t believe anyone would do that “for no reason” or only “to make a buck.” We keep thinking that anyone who has gotten to that level of power and authority has to know better than we do, what they are doing. And when we finally get it, when we finally realize that, no, there is no “deeper purpose” other than profit, there is no “master plan” other than getting richer at any cost, most of us feel deeply, deeply impacted. Depressed, or angry, or speechless, or outraged.

When this happens, we stop shouting at them “Don’t you CARE!” because we understand that they don’t. They can’t. As long as we are shouting “Don’t you care!” the sociopaths secretly laugh at us. When we finally “get it,” realize just how disordered it all is, and stop putting ourselves in the same pool of “humans” as those with sociopathy, our actions can be much more effective.

Before we understand the sociopathy of the system, we keep believing that if we protest, and shout loud enough, the system will respond. But once we understand that this is a sociopathic system, devoid of Vitamin E, we have to start looking at how we, ourselves, have been suckered into acting like sociopaths too. We’ve been seduced into believing that our own internal greed, our own desire for “something for nothing” is the best part of us, the normal, adult part.

When we really get it, deep down, the vast majority of us are going to do some soul-searching, because we have a soul to search. And we’ll be tempted to believe that the “anxious” or “depressed” part, the part were we’ve “got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died,” is the part we have to kill off with drugs manufactured just for this purpose by the sociopathic Big Pharm. And the sociopaths score again. Those pills that are supposed to make you “larger” and feel “less,” are worse than the “ones that mother gives you that don’t do anything at all”: they might make things worse. If they kill you or cripple you, the sociopaths pay the lawsuits. No big woop. But they make a lot of cash in the meanwhile.

When you’ve, been well lubricated by this system but still have a healthy dose of Vitamin E, you start having problems if you don’t start causing trouble or withdrawing your participation. In fact, when we start to believe that only the “babies” and the “suckers” are the ones who don’t lie constantly (even in their sleep), when only fools “don’t ‘sell their own grandmothers for a buck,” and we start trying to join them instead of beat them or withdraw from them, that’s when we become mentally ill. And our mental illness might be the first clue to those of us who have bought in, that something, something deep down has got to change fundamentally about how we relate to other people, to ourselves, and to the planet.

Gross National HappinessNashville People in Business

The peak oil crisis: the real gulf crisis

At last report BP was making progress on the relief wells that are being drilled to plug the runaway well in the Gulf. The London Times reports that BP hopes to penetrate the casing of the leaking well and start pumping in well-sealing mud in about two weeks. Let's hope something works.

In the next few weeks, or if things do not go well, perhaps months, the leaking well will be plugged, fishing hopefully will resume, the tourists will return, and the whole matter will be left to lawyers who will spend decades arguing how much New Orleans strip clubs that lost business during the oil spill should be remunerated by BP.

Someday, however, it will become apparent that the real disaster is taking place 150 miles to the south at BP's multi-billion dollar Thunder Horse oil platform that was supposed to extract a billion barrels of oil at a rate of 250,000 barrels a day (b/d). Production at Thunder Horse began in May of 2008 and by the end of the year had reached 170,000 b/d. Then something unexpected happened; instead of production increasing to the rated 250,000 b/d, production began to drop at 2-3 percent each month so by the end of 2009 production was down to 60 or 70,000 b/d. As BP is under no obligation to tell us what is going on, little news other than mandatory federal production reports have been released.

While new oil discoveries are trumpeted widely, failing projects, especially multi-billion dollar ones, just seem to fade away. Another Gulf project know as Neptune is not doing too well either. Neptune was expected to produce 50,000 b/d. The platform peaked at 40,000 b/d in August 2008. Sixteen months later production was down to 16,000 b/d. It now looks as if the platform that was supposed to produce 150 million barrels of crude will produce on the order of 33 million. The pattern emerging here is that deepwater oil production is not only dangerous, it may not be all it is cracked up to be.

The international oil companies that are drilling in deep water certainly are not about to connect the dots for us, but independent observers say it is looking like our new deepwater oil wells are only going to be producing some 10 or 20 percent of initial estimates. Deep water oil is a whole different game with which no one has much experience. None of the deepwater fields have been producing long enough to have established any track record as to just how much oil can ultimately be recovered from deep beneath the sea where temperatures and pressures are extreme.

Now all this might be of academic interest until we recall that, outside of Iraq, there are few places left to drill on dry land with much potential. The few good dry land and shallow water sites left are firmly in the hands of national oil companies, whose first job is to ensure that their domestic oil market is fully supplied with cheap oil for their citizens. If there is any left over, they will be happy to sell it to foreigners.

The next question is what the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon disaster will be for deepwater oil.

A recently released BP document shows that before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the company was basing its whole future on production from deepwater wells. There is little doubt that there is a whole lot of oil deep below the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Brazil and the east coast of Africa. The industry hype says there is at least 100 billion barrels or even more. Keep in mind that this is only three years of global oil consumption and even in the best of circumstances; it would take decades to extract.

Right now there are two issues regarding deepwater oil.

First is how much can be extracted. If it turns out that 10 or 20 percent of initial estimates is all that can really be recovered, then the cost of this oil will be prohibitive. Deepwater wells were running $100 to in some cases $200 million per well drilled. Platforms that drill and support multiple wells can easily get into the billions of dollars before they are producing. If these wells unlimitedly yield only a fraction of what their planners were hoping for, there are going to be some very broke oil companies, or some very expensive gasoline in our future.

The next question is what the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon disaster will be for deepwater oil. The U.S. has already imposed a moratorium on further drilling until the causes of the blowout are fully understood. This moratorium alone is almost certain to add substantially to the costs of drilling in deepwater. Add to this the new and most likely tougher drilling regulations and the development and deployment of a new generation of blowout preventers that work reliably and we are going to see some very high cost oil coming from offshore wells.

All this says that we may not be getting half of our oil from deepwater wells 10 or 15 years from now. Unless there are some major advances in vehicle mileage, the oil that we get from offshore just may be too expensive to put in our gas tanks.

Nashville families’ beach plans marred by Gulf oil spillThe Peak Oil Crisis: After the spill

Wine, local food, and local resilience, Part 4

In this series’ previous post, we discussed making wine at home as a possible solution to wine availability in an age of declining cheap energy. In this the final post of this series, we will discuss in some detail the advantages of home grape growing and wine making. Along the way, we’ll mention organic viticulture methods and briefly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of specific grape varieties that might be considered for a home vineyard.

Advantages I see for home wine production include the following. First, we’re by no means limited to Concord and Delaware; we have many, many more choices than Gene Logsdon’s immigrants did (Logsdon 78). Many of these newer choices have a fair degree of disease resistance, and they include a much wider variety of wine types and flavor characteristics. Second, the home winemaker can rely on his/her own wine tastes in choosing vines to cultivate; he/she is not restricted to what will sell commercially. Third, it’s easier to practice organic soil maintenance on a small scale, and this could prove very important in maintaining vine health in an era when fungicide sprays may be difficult to obtain. Fourth, growing one’s own wine as part of a household economy means minimal carbon footprint and possible long-term sustainability. Finally, for those who have the attention to detail, the interest, the patience, and the space to raise and test hundreds of grape seedlings, breeding one’s own grapes for wine quality, better disease resistance, and suitability for one’s local conditions remains a possibility.

Choices, Choices

We have many more possible grape variety choices in the east and Midwest than just about anywhere else on earth. I have listed a mere few of them at the end of this post. There are so many others that one could try, with new varieties being released every few years or so, that it can be almost overwhelming. The key is to pick vines that ripen well in one’s climate, that have at least some disease resistance, and that can produce the kind of wine that one’s household enjoys. And another key is not to pay attention to what the wine snobs say.

Antidote to Wine Snobbery

Leon Adams defined wine snobbery as “drinking the label, not the wine” (13). Snobbery occurs when people turn up their noses at a wine someone else enjoys just because they don’t like it (or think they don’t like it). Wine, for some strange reason, seems to encourage this boorish attitude. Here in the eastern US, a kind of wine snobbery has arisen against the French hybrids—especially the red ones—among those who enjoy the vinifera wines grown and produced here and elsewhere. Growing the kinds of grapes that make the kinds of wine one likes, and then making the wine oneself, is perhaps the best preventive to snobbery, since the wines can be enjoyed at home without disparaging comments from others.

Furthermore, grapes that aren’t widely grown by commercial operations can often be good choices for home winemakers. I’ll talk about a few of these in my comments on specific grape varieties. The home winemaker is free to experiment with unusual varieties since there’s no bottom line to keep in mind.

Organic Grape Growing

Organic agriculture has made significant strides in recent decades. The key to organic growing is building, maintaining, and protecting the soil structure, including the complex soil ecosystems of microorganisms and other soil dwellers. We are learning more and more every year about the vital importance of maintaining and encouraging good soil ecology, as it provides direct benefits to the plants we are trying to grow, including increased disease resistance. Lon Rombough, in his excellent book on organic grape growing (see the Works Cited list at the end of this post) gives a detailed discussion of the benefits of organic soil maintenance. I highly recommend Rombough’s book, not only for the organic techniques themselves but also because it provides all the basic information one needs for successful grape growing—not just the basics of organic soil maintenance, but also the fundamentals of grape growing such as training and pruning.

One of the most interesting and helpful discoveries about soil maintenance is the importance of micorrhizal fungi. These fungi live in the soil and develop symbiotic relationships with the roots of many plants, including grapevines. The fungi provide soil nutrients to the plants, and the plants in turn provide sugars to the fungi through photosynthesis. This symbiotic relationship can help keep vines from becoming stressed, making them more resistant to disease and insect damage. Lon Rombough provides detailed information about micorrhizae in his book; he also posted this article online. Micorrhizae inoculant is available online and is easy to use.

Many techniques for organic soil maintenance exist; one of the best known is the French bio-dynamic system. Lon Rombough recommends that anyone interested in growing grapes look into this system (Rombough 72). I don’t know much about bio-dynamics specifically, but it and similar organic techniques (I think of John Jeavons’ and Toby Hemenway’s books) seem to be ideal for home and small producers. They will likely become vital in an age when fossil fuel inputs are not available or are extremely expensive.

Home Economics

Growing one’s own grapes and making one’s own wines with them, just like growing and canning one’s own tomatoes, can be a valuable support to a household economy. And it can eliminate most of the carbon emissions caused by industrial-scale wine production, distribution, and retailing. Here’s a simple example: a home winemaker can clean and re-use empty wine bottles much easier than a commercial operation could. One can even learn how to culture wine yeast strains and keep them viable from year to year.

Creating New Grape Varieties

I won’t go into detail about this because Rombough devotes an entire chapter to the topic. Anyone interested in the topic should consult Chapter 13 of his book. All who are interested in maintaining the cultivation of good wine grapes in the eastern third of North America into the future will be interested in breeding efforts, whether they actually want to participate in it or not. The goal for breeders would be a vine that reliably produces grapes capable of making high-quality wine, is well-adapted to one’s locality, and that is so highly resistant to the indigenous diseases and insect pests that it can be grown successfully in a given location without chemical spray. Those who have the inclination, the patience, and the space to engage in breeding grapevines will help carry the tradition of quality wine into the future.

Musings about Specific Grape Varieties

I don’t know this, of course, but my guess is that the immigrants Gene Logsdon mentions did not spray fungicide on their Concord or Delaware grapes. Neither of these varieties is immune to fungus attack, but if the vines were planted in a favorable location with good air circulation and trained to take best advantage of that circulation, they would have been less likely to contract disease. If they did, the grower might have picked off diseased leaves, shoots, and/or clusters and burned them. Active and meticulous grower attention to how the vines are doing, along with removing and disposing of any infected plant material, can go a long way toward maintaining vine health. Add to that solid, organic soil building and soil ecosystem maintenance techniques, including the cultivation of micorrhizal fungi, and the grower can increase odds that the vines will stay healthy most of the time.

But the vines themselves come first. Choosing vines that have natural resistance to infection is the first line of defense. It isn’t infallible, but it’s the best place to start here in the humid east and Midwest. I’m going to end this discussion with some thoughts about specific wine-grape varieties, including a few that are not commonly seen in commercial vineyards, if they are grown there at all. I’m basing these choices primarily on disease resistance and wine quality.

These are NOT recommendations, however. These are mostly observations. The varieties one should try depend on one’s local conditions (including such factors as disease pressure, winter cold, length of growing season, air circulation, and soil type and drainage) and one’s personal tastes in wine. One may or may not wish or be able to consider any of the varieties mentioned here. Nevertheless, readers might use my descriptions as a guide to the things to look for when choosing grape varieties to grow.

I did not include any vinifera varieties here, since they are all well known—if you live in a favorable location (such near the shore of one of the Great Lakes) and want to try Riesling or Cabernet Franc, by all means go for it. Just keep in mind that you likely will be committing yourself to rigorous and systematic spraying against disease. Also, I didn’t discuss most of the standard labrusca varieties—Concord, Catawba, and Niagara, not because of snobbery (if you enjoy wine from these grapes, by all means grow them!) but because they usually need sugar amelioration. I’m assuming that refined sugar, just like fungicide chemicals, may be in short supply in a future without cheap energy, so I think it’s best to include only grapes that are capable of obtaining adequate sugar levels on their own.

For Red Wine

Baco Noir —this French hybrid is a good choice for beginners. The vines are easy to grow and it’s easy to handle in the wine cellar. It can make a good red wine. Vines are quite vigorous—secondary shoots with secondary clusters need to be pinched off. Grapes ripen quite early and must be protected from birds. A friend in southeast Ohio told me it is susceptible to black rot there, but the vines were always healthy for me in Bowling Green. Baco tolerates heavy soils.

Chambourcin —Considered one of the best red French hybrids. Productive, moderately disease resistant, Chambourcin produces a balanced dry red wine that is often highly rated. But it needs a long growing season to ripen fully. The other common French hybrid reds—Chancellor, Chelois, and De Chaunac—ripen earlier than Chambourcin and have similar wine qualities. Of the three, Chelois, perhaps, is the most disease resistant. Some commercial operations blend two or more of these four varieties for a proprietary red.

Corot Noir —A new variety from the Cornell breeding station in Geneva, New York. The release notes claim that Corot makes a vinifera -like red wine with lots of tannins and none of the grassy, herbaceous character that some dislike in the red French hybrids. They also claim good disease resistance.

Frontenac —Developed at the University of Minnesota breeding program for cold resistance, Frontenac produces a uniquely flavored, more vinifera - than hybrid-charactered red wine. I’ve tasted wine from Frontenac and it had a luscious, cherry-like aroma and flavor. It lacks the typical red hybrid herbaceousness. Frontenac vines should be highly disease resistant.

Marechal Foch —A very early ripening French hybrid, originally from Alsace and named for Marshall Ferdinand Foch, the French World War I hero. It’s highly resistant to cold and disease. It ripens well in cool growing seasons. Ron Lombough indicates that in the cool coastal Oregon climate it can be grown without spray and the cool nights help it develop a deeply-colored, complexly flavored wine (188). It’s grown successfully here in Ohio, too, though it usually ripens with perhaps less complexity. A sister variety, Leon Millot (from the same cross as Foch), ripens a week earlier and produces a very similar wine. Millot was disease free in Bowling Green, but I had to protect the ripening clusters from the birds. Foch and Millot might be good choices for home growers the northern Great Lakes regions.

Marquette —A new variety from the University of Minnesota breeding program, Marquette is supposed to be capable of producing a vinifera -like red wine with lots of tannins and without red hybrid herbaceousness. Marquette should be quite disease resistant and very cold-hardy.

Noiret —From the Cornell breeding program, Noiret is a newer variety that, like sister release Corot Noir and Minnesota’s Marquette, promises to produce a high quality, vinifera -like red wine with none of the red hybrid herbaceousness. One commercial winemaker recently told me he’s very excited about offering it when his first crop is ready for release in a couple of years. Noiret may be a bit less resistant to disease than Corot.

Norton —An old American variety, also called Norton’s Virginia and Virginia Seedling in the east and Cynthiana in Missouri and Arkansas. Thought to be pure or mostly Vitis aestivalis , Norton can produce a high-quality red wine with no off-aromas or flavors. It needs a very long growing season to ripen properly. It may not be a good choice for beginning winemakers, as it requires expert handling to make good wine. Norton vines are said to be virtually immune to fungus disease.

For White Wine

Beaumont —The late Byron T. Johnson of Cincinnati bred grapes for both disease resistance and wine/juice quality and released several named varieties. Lon Rombough claims that Johnson’s varieties can be grown “in much of the central Midwest” without fungicide spray (242). Unfortunately, of the varieties Johnson released, only Beaumont and Kee-Wah-Din (a Baco Noir cross) are available commercially, so far as I know. (Someone who is interested in starting a grapevine nursery and who likes to do detective work might want to track down and obtain cuttings of other Johnson releases like Scioto, Beaufort, Joyous, and Chief Wauwautan [Rombough 242], propagate them, and begin offering them to the public.) Beaumont is descended from Delaware; the clusters are similar to Delaware in appearance, but the vine is more disease resistant than Delaware. Johnson thought that it made an excellent white wine with a slightly musky or spicy character, similar to Delaware. Beaumont certainly is worth experimenting with at home.

Cayuga —From the Cornell breeding program, Cayuga (often labeled Cayuga White) was their very first wine grape release, and it immediately became popular among growers and winemakers in upstate New York and beyond. Cayuga makes an excellent, fruity white wine that some have compared to Riesling. The vine is vigorous, easy to grow, and quite resistant to disease. Cayuga has Zinfandel and Seyval in its ancestry.

Chardonel —From the Cornell breeding program, Chardonel is a cross between Seyval and Chardonnay and is supposed to have wine qualities similar to its more famous parent. It isn’t widely grown in Ohio, however, possibly because Chardonnay itself grows well along the Lake Erie shore, but it’s popular in places like Missouri where summer heat and humidity are simply too much for Chardonnay. Moderately disease resistant.

Delaware —Among the old labrusca varieties, winemakers considered Delaware the best for wine quality. And it’s still worth growing, in my opinion. My favorite wine from the old Steuk winery in Sandusky, Ohio, was a dry Delaware. Unfortunately, Steuk went out of business about fifteen years ago and I haven’t found another source for dry Delaware. Unless grown in deep, fertile soil, Delaware vines should be grafted to increase their vigor. It’s not a heavy producer, but in most years, Delaware develops enough sugar not to require amelioration. The vine is not as disease resistant as Concord.

Horizon —Cornell’s second wine grape release (Cayuga was first), Horizon has not become commercially popular. Horizon comes from the same cross as Cayuga. Lon Rombough says the fresh juice has a strong apple aroma and flavor. He also says the clusters are prone to botrytis bunch rot, like Seyval, one of its parents, if wet weather coincides with ripening (Rombough 187). The vine is vigorous and productive. Experimental home growers might wish to try it out.

Melody —Another release from Cornell’s breeding program, Melody has also not caught on among commercial winemakers (maybe it was the name). But it’s a heavy producer and might be ideal for a home wine making operation. Melody has Pinot Blanc and Seyval in its ancestry and is said to produce a wine with Pinot Blanc character. Disease resistance is supposed to be moderate.

Seyval —Considered the best of the French hybrids for wine quality. Well made Seyval, or Seyval Blanc, compares favorably to Sauvignon Blanc. Not highly disease resistant, Seyval is also susceptible to bunch rot (botrytis) if cool, wet weather coincides with ripening. Cayuga might be a better choice for a home vineyard, unless local growing conditions are favorable for Seyval.

Steuben —From the Cornell breeding program, Steuben was bred as a table grape, not a wine grape. The grapes are quite tasty: very sweet and juicy, with a unique spicy tang (though they are not seedless). Steuben also makes great unfermented grape juice. However, if the juice is pressed out and fermented at low temperatures, without contacting the dark blue skins (the way “white Zinfandel” is made), and a small percentage of residual sugar is retained, German style, Steuben creates a unique, spicy, slightly pink wine that is the only wine I know of that really can complement the sweetish-smoky taste of ham. I don’t know whether any commercial winery makes wine from Steuben grapes today; Dr. Tom Wykoff’s Cedar Hill Wine Company in Cleveland Heights made it and sold it in his Au Provence restaurant back in the 1970s and ‘80s. Unfortunately they’re out of business. His Steuben wine was very tasty. Making Steuben wine might be the perfect project for a home winemaker who wants to do something unusual. It also helps that Steuben is a very healthy and vigorous vine. It’s also one of the relatively few vines that develop attractive autumnal colors. Ron Lombough says Steuben would probably do very well trained on an arbor (191).

Traminette —A Cornell cross between GewГјrztraminer and a French hybrid, Traminette is the latest big hit among growers and wineries. It’s much easier to grow than its vinifera parent, and it can produce a spicy, aromatic wine very similar in character to GewГјrztraminer. Doing well with it, though, probably requires some winemaking expertise. I’ve tasted Traminette wines that ranged from very excellent (try the 2008 Traminette from the Meranda-Nixon winery in Ripley, Ohio!) to good to so-so, and one example tasted downright medicinal. The vine is moderately disease resistant.

Vidal —Vidal, also labeled Vidal Blanc, is probably the most popular and widely grown French hybrid, at least here in North America. One of its parents is one of the most widely grown grape varieties in Europe, known as Trebbiano in Italy and St. Emilion or Ugni Blanc in France. Vidal is easy to grow, very productive, and versatile, so it’s a good choice for beginning grape growers and winemakers. I grew Vidal in Bowling Green and could regularly count on a yearly harvest of at least five gallons of juice from four vines. The wine is pleasing to excellent, with a slight herbaceous aftertaste if finished dry. The best wine I ever made came from Vidal juice fermented in a cool place with Epernay yeast. Wineries make a wide variety of wine styles with Vidal, including an unusual sweet wine called ice wine (the sweet juice is pressed from frozen grapes that are left to hang on the vines until a deep freeze). Aside from that, wineries typically make Vidal into an off-dry, aromatic, German style wine (try Farmers White from Troutman Vineyards in Wooster, Ohio; it was so aromatic I even asked them if there wasn’t a bit of Traminette blended in. They assured me it was 100% Vidal). However, I once tried a dry, barrel-fermented, malolactic, sur lie Vidal labeled St. Mary’s Blanc from Rockbridge Vineyard in Virginia that was also quite excellent. My Vidal vines in Bowling Green were somewhat susceptible to powdery mildew but otherwise healthy. Vidal needs a fairly long growing season to ripen properly.

Vignoles —A French hybrid, Vignoles has gained some popularity, mostly for sweet dessert wines, though a few make a dry table wine from it. I have never tried wine from this grape. Moderate disease resistance.

Conclusion

Much more could be said. I hope that these musings spark further discussion among those concerned about coping with the end of cheap energy. I believe that wine will become an important part of the future home and local economy as we begin doing more and more things for ourselves.

Cheers!

Works Cited

Adams, Leon. The Wines of America . 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.

Logsdon, Gene. Good Spirits: A New Look at Ol’ Demon Alcohol . White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1999.

Rombough, Lon. The Grape Grower: A Guide to Organic Viticulture . White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2002.

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