Unschooling & unworking: Confessions of a stay-at-home family, Part 3

Frogfish puzzled by tennis ball. Learning.

What is unschooling? What do we do on a daily basis? How does my daughter learn if she isn’t taught or isn’t forced to do homework? Is it legal? These are only a few of the questions we get about unschooling.

There are many different kinds of unschooling, as each family adapts the general method to their specific family culture and comfort levels. Overall, unschooling means using everyday life as one’s curriculum, one’s basis for learning. We don’t spend time on homework (although on occasion, we do “play” school, and believe me, it’s odd to hear a child beg for math problems or a spelling test), and I don’t teach in any traditional sense, as in a hierarchical “I am the teacher you must obey!” manner. When learning opportunities come up, and they do quite frequently, we learn. Every interaction in life can be approached as a learning opportunity.

I enjoy learning quite a bit myself, and as an adult, when I get interested in something, I learn all I can about it, from books, people, practical experience, and any other resources I can find. This is unschooling. Just because I am out of school doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy learning! It’s the same kind of process my daughter uses in educating herself, with my help, of course.

But what do we do on a daily basis? We live life! As a dedicated unjobber, I work sporadically, making just enough money to support my daughter and myself, and we spend the rest of our time as members of our community. In nice weather, we spend a lot of time in our garden and outside. We hang out with friends, help on each others’ projects, do house repairs, go to the park, read books, play games—anything and everything we want to do—because we are blessed to have the time and motivation to do it.

Now with all that goofing off, you might think that learning doesn’t happen. Actually, the best kind of learning happens, because it’s natural, and it totally relates to matters at hand. To give you an idea of how unschooling works, I’ll fill you in on what my daughter did just this week.

On Sunday, our traditional potluck day, Kid Khalila is at her dad’s house. This week, we and our local friends all hung out with some out of town friends who were stopping through on a spring break trek out west. They came in a veggie oil car, so KK learned how to cook up veggie oil and filter it. She learned all about how the car works with veggie oil vs. gasoline. Later, we tramped around in the woods and walked around in our neighborhood, practicing backyard tourism at its finest. When we got back to my house, KK saw the altar I had set up for our spring equinox celebration, and we talked about why and how that is important, plus what the symbols used mean (such as pomegranate seeds).

On Monday, Kid Khalila goes to the local YMCA for homeschool classes. These are mostly, for her, fun classes that provide social time with a variety of age groups of other homeschooled kids. She goes to an art class, followed by swimming class. After swimming class is free time in the pool, and we generally stick around and eat lunch with a pile of kids. For some reason, my daughter is one of the popular kids, and other kids argue over getting to sit by her. She does not know how to handle this, and my shy unfriended kid self has not much advice for her there! I was never popular! By Monday evening, KK had read two two-hundred-page novels.

On Tuesday, a gorgeous weather kind of day, KK played outside for quite a while. She collected bugs and worms, played in the mud (oh, glorious mud!) and water, and did tricks on her rope swing for hours. We were sitting on the porch, chilling and talking about the meanings of words. I told her I just learned that the word “man” originally meant “woman” in Sanskrit, while the word “wer” meant man. A werewolf, then, is a manwolf, but a manwolf is a womanwolf! We agreed it was weird that a word like man could come to mean its opposite. I started talking about the words apocalypse and revelation, and how those words used to scare the bejeezus out of me when I was a kid, but now they make me feel free. Why? I grew up with my grandparents, who were fundamentalists, and we used to have bible study and prayer each evening before bed. Occasionally, we would read from the book of Revelations, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would scare me, but not as much as hearing about the world being consumed by fire.

After an odd look from my daughter, like who would really take something like that seriously, I told her about the Cold War. I’m not sure she had ever heard the words capitalism and communism. I explained that capitalism is the economic system of the United States, where everyone must work and exchange the money they receive to pay for food and shelter. Communism was the economic system of the Soviet Union (wow, that’s an antique place name!), where the government held all the land and money and everyone shared. She thought that sounded good! Well, sure, except that governments tend to collect power and become filled with corruption. “What’s cor-rup-tion, Mama?” Corruption, dear Kid Khalila, is where people at the top take the power and the money and do anything and everything they can to keep themselves in that place. It doesn’t matter what kind of government or economic system you live under; it’s corrupt. That’s just the nature of power. That’s just how it works.

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Why are we propping up corn production, again?

News flash: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a lousy product.

As Tom Laskawy reported here Tuesday, a recent study by Princeton researchers found that rats fed chow laced with HFCS gained more weight than rats fed equal calories of table sugar. All processed sweeteners add empty calories to food; but calorie for calorie, HFCS appears to be even worse than white sugar. Although the two sweeteners have roughly the same fructose/glucose ratio, we mammals seem to metabolize the HFCS differently than we do cane sugar.

That's grim news. On average, Americans get 10 percent of their total calories from HFCS--and kids, who rank among its heaviest users, get an even higher percentage of calories from it.

And even if HFCS isn't metabolized differently than table sugar--and some non-industry-related observers remain doubtful about the Princeton study--the ubiquitous sweetener would still be a lousy product. As I and others have argued before, rise of HFCS as a cheap sweetener (see chart, above) has helped push up overall sweetener consumption to unseen levels. In short, a gusher of sweetener from cornfields to food factories has resulted in billions of additional, and nutritionally void, calories in the American diet.

All of which got me thinking about the enormous U.S. corn crop. If HFCS is a product of dubious social utility, what about the other uses of corn? Are they any better? The question has serious public-interest implications, because the federal government is a major underwriter of corn production. Between 1995 and 2006, the government paid out $56 billion in corn subsidies, the Environmental Working Group reports. Corn is our most lavishly subsidized food crop, by a wide margin; it drew more in subsidies over that period than wheat ($22 billion), soybeans ($14 billion), and rice ($11 billion)--combined.

Now, whenever one discusses subsidies, it's important to note that the real beneficiaries aren't farmers, most of whom scrape by, but rather the companies they sell their corn to: from grain trader/sweetener makers like Archer Daniels Midland to meat producers like Tyson (or mega-firms that perform both roles, like Cargill). A recent study by Tufts researchers Tim Wise and Alicia Harvie reckons that by putting downward pressure on corn and soy prices, federal subsidies saved chicken producers $11.3 billion, pork processors $8.5 billion, and beef packers $4.5 billion in the 1997-2005 time frame. Producers of HFCS benefitted, too, to the tune of $2.2 billion, the researchers estimate.

The U.S. corn juggernaut. Source: National Corn Growers Association, World of Corn 2010

OK, subsidy disclaimer to the side, let's talk for a second about just how massive our corn crop is. According to this extraordinarily informative document from the National Corn Growers Association called the "2010 World of Corn,"  our corn crop is by far the world's largest. We produce 42 percent of the globe's corn--more than the next most prodigious corn-producing countries, China and Brazil, combined. (See chart, right.) We churn out six times as much corn as the entire European Union.

In acreage terms, fully a quarter of U.S. farmland is typically planted in corn (see chart, below left). Corn is typically grown in rotation with soybeans, which commands another quarter of our farmland. Thus together, these two industrial crops--neither of which can be consumed by people without heavy processing--occupy fully half of our farmland, a total area roughly equal in size to the state of Texas. And not just any farmland. The great bulk of corn and soy production takes place on what was once prime prairie terrain in the Midwest--one of the greatest stores of soil tilth and fertility on the globe.

As far as the eye can see: corn and its companion crop, soy, blanket half of U.S. farmland. Source: National Corn Growers Association, World of Corn 2010

And to grow all that corn on that gorgeous land, farmers douse the soil annually with massive amounts of agrichemicals. In terms of synthetic and mined fertilizers, the corn crop sucks in nearly 40 percent of all nitrogen fertilizer applied in the United States, and upwards of 30 percent of phosphorous and potash. (Numbers crunched from USDA data, see table 2). Such voracious use of fertilizers causes all manner of ecological trouble (see our recent series on nitrogen fertilizer, as well as this discussion of the ravages of phosphorous mining).

This annual cascade of industrial fertilizers, along with other agrichemical inputs, advances in diesel-guzzling farm machines, and new seed-breeding techniques, has given rise to an extraordinary surge in corn yields. At the end of the '60s, U.S. farmers were producing around 119 million metric tons of corn using 26 million hectares. Last year, they cranked out 334 million metric tons using 35 million hectares--a 180 percent increase, using only 34 percent more land. (Figures from above-linked World of Corn document.)

So where is all that corn going? Surely a crop that takes up a quarter of our land and burns through nearly 40 percent of our annual nitrogen use, and draws billions in annual subsidies, must deliver something amazing to make it worth all the trouble.

But the chart to the right offers other lessons. True, high-fructose corn syrup takes up just 3.5 percent of the corn crop. But what are the other uses?

We're all ears: Where did all that corn go? Source: National Corn Growers Association, World of Corn 2010• Feed and residual, 42.5 percent. So, upwards of 40 percent of the corn crop goes into feedlots to fatten livestock for meat, milk, and eggs. The post-war explosion of cheap corn gave rise to an explosion of cheap meat. In 1950, Americans ate 144 pounds of meat per capita annually. In the 60 years since, corn prices fell steadily as output rose, and meat production shifted from diversified, pastured-based systems almost exclusively to corn-intensive, factory-style confinement systems. As a result, per-capita meat production has reached 222 pounds--a startling 54 percent increase since 1950.

The ill health effects of overconsumption of meat are well-established--they include "increased risk of heart disease and cancer, particularly colorectal cancer," as well as a heightened risk of dying early, as the Washington Post reported last year.

Moreover, industrial livestock production is surely one of our filthiest industries--it tends to produce far more manure than can be absorbed into nearby fields as fertilizer, causing all manner of trouble downstream. And the confinement style of production given rise to by cheap corn has generated public-health threats ranging from MRSA to swine flu toantibiotic-resistant salmonella. Feedlot meat also has a tremendous greenhouse-gas footprint, despite industry tripe to the contrary.

In short, like HFCS, feedlot meat is a highly dubious product made possible by the explosion of cheap corn.

• Fuel ethanol, 32 percent. Groan. Do I really have to go through this argument again? To see why corn-based ethanol is a suspect product, please see here, here, here, and here.  Or read through Grist's 2006 special series on biofuel, which remains largely relevant. Bonus: for an unholy intersection between ethanol and feedlot meat, go here.

• Exports, 15.7 percent. Ah, this is the bit that makes U.S. ag officials and agribiz chiefs crow about "feeding the world." But dumping cheap, subsidized U.S. corn on foreign markets only leads to the global spread of questionable practices like turning corn into sweetener and meat. In the global south, the annual gusher of cheap U.S. corn undercuts domestic farms, eroding food security and prompting a flight from rural areas to cities. Mexico makes for an appalling case study. According to Tufts researcher Tim Wise: /AgNAFTA.html

Corn showed the highest losses [among subsidized U.S. crops entering the Mexican market]. Average dumping margins of 19% contributed to a 413% increase in U.S. exports and a 66% decline in real producer prices in Mexico from the early 1990s to 2005. The estimated cost to Mexican producers of dumping-level corn prices was $6.6 billion over the nine-year period, an average of $99 per hectare per year, or $38 per ton.

For a small-scale Mexican farmer, that's enough to make the difference between earning a living off the land and having to go try to scratch out an existence in a Mexico City shantytown--or sneaking across the northern border for gainful employment.

So low-quality meat and sweetener, a shoddy alternative car fuel, an agrarian crisis visited upon our neighbor to the south ... that's more or less the corn crop. The 6 percent going to "other" use reflects mainly industrial-food ingredients: stuff like starches that end up in everything from ketchup to mac 'n cheese. Another small fraction goes to extremely low-quality liquor.

This is what we're getting out of 32 million hectares of mostly prime farmland and billions of dollars in annual subsidies? It's time to start thinking about how to encourage more diversified, lower-input forms of agriculture. It's not that we need to grow no corn; it's just that we can't afford to keep growing so damned much of it.

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Fear and loathing in Ohio

The passage of health care reform legislation in the House of Representatives last weekend was met with such a crescendo of hyperbole and vitriol on both sides of the political aisle that even William Shatner thought, "Jeez, tone down the theatrics.”

The passion is understandable but in some cases has crossed the bounds of political rhetoric and into strange and dangerous territory. In the last week, there have been multiple reports of death threats made against elected officials who voted for the bill’s passage.

Slaughter, a Democrat who chairs the House Rules Committee, said a caller to her office last week vowed to send snipers to “kill the children of the members who voted yes.” ...

Mike Troxel, an organizer for the Lynchburg Tea Party, posted what he believed to be Perriello’s home address on his blog this week, sarcastically urging other tea partiers to stop by and “say hi and express their thanks regarding his vote for health care.”

The address turned out to be the home of Perriello’s brother — who has four children — but Troxel told POLITICO he didn’t intend to remove it from his blog. “If they would like to provide me with the address of Tom, then I’d be more than happy to take it down,” he said. “I have no reason to believe it’s not his house.”

It’s tempting to dismiss these as isolated incidents and those who perpetrate them as fringe crackpots. I’m sure some of them are. But their anger and fear are far from isolated. I’ve often wished that carbon dioxide were visible, so we could actually see how much of the stuff we emit. I now wish the same for the flow of powerful emotions (and don’t talk to me about mood rings, okay?)—that we could somehow see when and how love and fear were passed from person to person. In these days of economic, environmental, and social uncertainty I bet fear would hang over many of our houses, neighborhoods, cities in varying layers of darkness.

The contagion of fear and anger can infect those you might least expect. Take the case of Chris Reichert who became an Internet sensation when he threw dollar bills hostilely at a man suffering from Parkinson’s Disease (video here: 1:15 mark). In the days following the incident, Reichert struggled to make sense of what he had done. He finally came forward to issue an apology.

"I snapped. I absolutely snapped and I can't explain it any other way… He's got every right to do what he did and some may say I did too, but what I did was shameful," Reichert said. "I haven't slept since that day... I made a donation (to a local Parkinson's disease group) and that starts the healing process."

Reichert said he is not politically active. He said he heard about the rally on the radio and a neighbor invited him to attend. "That was my first time at any political rally and I'm never going to another one," Reichert said. "I will never ever, ever go to another one."

Thanks to the massive reach of television and radio talk show hate-mongers, and the untold number of websites calling for violence and sedition, these days you don't even have to leave your house to join a mob. The mob will come to you.

And don't fool yourself in thinking that this is all just uncontrolled, and unorganized, populist rage. When nested fears meet vested interests, a cloud of discontent can turn into a raging storm. It's instructive to look at the role that corporate-minded special interest groups like Americans for Prosperity have played in the healthcare debate. 

In early November, thousands of protesters descended on Capitol Hill to hear Representative Michele Bachmann decry House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “takeover’’ of health care. As they disembarked from their buses, they were greeted with doughnuts and coffee, and handed protest signs and talking points about socialized medicine. Few of the protesters were aware that a right-wing billionaire had paid for the meals, buses, or salaries of the helpful guides...

Across the New York social circuit, Koch is hailed for his donations to reputable causes, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But for years, Koch has also been funneling tens of millions of dollars to more subterranean efforts that reflect his conservative politics. His flagship group, Americans for Prosperity, sponsored Bachmann’s rally against health care reform.

David Koch is the ninth wealthiest person in the United States, worth an estimated $14 billion. How did his family make all that money? Oil and gas, of course.

If Koch and others are feeding fear to protect the profits of health insurers, just imagine the kind of fomenting we'll see when the stakes are even higher—when the energy and climate crises come front and center in the national debate. For a glimpse of what we could be dealing with, consider this: in 2008, just ten percent of the profits of ExxonMobil, the world's largest energy company, could have funded the campaigns of every single Congressional, Senate, and Presidential candidate. By that I mean every candidate.

Forget coffee and doughnuts for rent-a-crowds. Forget the signs littering the Capitol Mall and the halls of Congress comparing healthcare reform to laws in Nazi Germany. The battle over our energy future could make all this furor look like a real tea party.

If this reads like fear-mongering, it's not. All hope is not lost, but let's not fool ourselves in thinking that this will be an easy fight. Thanks to the recent, lamentable Citizens United v. FEC decision by the Supreme Court ("a ruling that may make the hundreds of millions spent in past presidential and congressional elections look like a pittance"), it's now abundantly clear who is David and who is Goliath. 

And our stone? Direct action. We don't need buses to deliver us at the doorsteps of Congress and the White House. Or not only. What if we respond to fear and anger with a shrug and a trowel? As Rob Hopkins wrote in this brilliant post during the Copenhagen Climate Conference last December:

How would it be if we all took a very different tack, if the approach of activists was one of ‘practically modeling the world we want to see’? ...We stay home and insulate whole streets, create community gardens, work meaningfully with our local authorities to do projects with them, eat local food diets for the duration of the conference, live without cars, insulate our schools, set up an area of the settlement in question as a model for what it would look like transitioned. We start bringing the future that we can imagine but which is still beyond the comprehension of so many, into focus.

The good news is that there are lots of ways to plug in to just such efforts. Our friends at 350.org are organizing work parties on 10.10.10 to make this very statement and, of course, Transition Initiatives are popping up left and right. It's not enough, but it's a start.

 

image source: Huffington Post

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What works: food

As I described in my prior post, water is a big deal for humans, as it is for all life on Earth. But food is pretty important, too. Currently, most Americans store large quantities of food in the form of body fat. The primary storage facility for unconsumed food is right down the street, in the nearest grocery store.

I think we're nearing the end of the line for both classically American storage facilities, and that it's time to start making the recently proverbial other arrangements. Even business leaders recognize the irrationality of not preparing for peak oil and its economic implications, but there are many other reasons for growing your own, including purging the high-fructose corn syrup and other industrial toxins from your grocery list. This post describes our systems for producing and processing food at the mud hut.

Production

Perennial plants are much easier to work with than their annual cousins. After the perennials are established, there is no need to weed, and watering is a breeze. Fertilizer is still necessary, and woody plants need the occasional pruning. But in general, I prefer the lazy nature of perennial plants over the back-straining events of tending a garden.

The mud hut has gardens, not farms. After all, Eden was a garden, not a farm. The difference is primarily one of scale. We have no interest in developing an empire, although we'll barter with neighbors.

Our perennial plants include about three dozen fruit and nut trees, including cherries, apples, pears, peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, pluots, pecans, and Asian pears (i.e., Asian apples). We have a fig, a pomegranate, and several citrus trees.

Unprotected citrus will not survive the cold winters here, so we have four dwarf varieties growing in a greenhouse (lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit). The greenhouse is filled with 55-gallon drums brimming with water, which keeps nighttime temperatures about 25 F warmer inside than out.

At two years of age, the citrus are already bursting out the greenhouse, so I am building a partially subterranean straw-bale greenhouse to ameliorate temperatures and give the citrus trees room to grow. It should also allow production of tomatoes year around. When the new greenhouse is finished, we will use the existing greenhouse to grow greens in the winter, start peppers and tomatoes in early spring, and dry various fruits and vegetables during the summer.

In addition to the trees, we have several varieties of fruiting shrubbery: raspberries, blackberries, table grapes, kiwis, blueberries, and native rose (for tea). Blueberries thrive in acidic soils, so we amended their beds heavily with compost made from pine trees. Non-shrubby perennials include asparagus, horseradish, artichokes, and rhubarb. All plants are protected from pocket gophers with hardware cloth. Roots of woody plants are protected by the three-foot cone of hardware cloth around the roots, and herbaceous perennials and all annual plants are planted into beds surrounded by a "basket" of hardware cloth, as I described early last year.

Because the honeybees of the world, and especially those in North America, are suffering from colony collapse disorder, we have our own bee box. We aren't not particularly interested in their honey. We just want reliable pollinators.

We have two cold frames (also known as hot boxes). They produce abundant greens during the winter, and we will use them for summer vegetables, too. I didn't slant the roof enough to allow sufficient light, so I cut gaps in the front of the cold frames, covered the gaps with plexiglass, and added shiny insulation on the inside walls of the cold frames. And I was wise enough to leave a few bags of concrete mix outside during a rainstorm; these serve as counter-weights for the extremely heavy windows comprising the roofs of the cold frames (shown below without the new gaps in front or the insulation).

In addition to the gopher-proof beds, we have two large areas protected only from large animals such as javelina. We grow large quantities of potatoes in these areas and, starting this year, Valencia peanuts. We simply give up some of the plants to the greedy mouths of the omnipresent pocket gophers (last year we lost 3% of the potato plants). We will eat the goobers and feed the aboveground portion of the plants to the goats.

We have two adult females and a kid housed in a fully insulated shed. They spend their days lounging in a nice paddock, and they provide about a gallon of milk each day in addition to considerable entertainment. We drink the extremely high-fat milk, make yogurt, and we've been trying our hand at a few different kinds of cheese, so far including soft chevre, Colby, cheddar, Monterey Jack, and Parmesan. The aging process precludes grand proclamations of success, so far.

Fowl include eight Khaki Campbell ducks and ten chickens. The six duck hens produce, on average, five eggs each day. They require no special accommodations besides a poultry-netting subfloor beneath their house to keep the skunks from digging for supper. The ducks spend most of their time in the nearby irrigation ditch, so they are easy to keep and inexpensive to feed. We're transitioning to Red Star chickens, which are weather-hardy and reliable layers. We have successfully incubated eggs and kept birds alive through the adult stage. We installed into the chicken coop a corrugated roofing tin subfloor that slopes away from the entry door, into a gutter, and then into a drain pipe that empties into a shallow basin the chicken excrement (i.e., fertilizer). So far, this arrangement has been more trouble than it's worth. In total, we produce a dozen eggs each day, which gives us plenty of barter material for our neighbors who prefer humanely treated, free-range, healthy fowl.

Storage

A deep-chest freezer holds a wide variety of foods with considerable convenience. We can a lot of the harvest and stack the jars in the pantry. Finally, we store much of the bounty in three root cellars, one dry and two humid (because no combination of apples, onions, and potatoes should be stored together, according to the books and articles we've read). The dry cellar is a cargo container surrounded by cinder-block walls and buried beneath a couple feet of soil. The humid cellars are relatively simple holes in the ground, marginally protected from critters with hardware cloth, pressure-treated lumber, and snap traps.

When I write "simple," I mean conceptually. Digging the holes and constructing the cellars has been anything but simple for my old, worn-out bones.

Processing

We have an outdoor kitchen complete with dining area, wood-fired cook stove, two double sinks, plenty of scavenged counter tops, orno (Earth oven), and a hand-cranked mill. General sloth forced me to add a motor from an evaporative-cooling fan to power the mill.

While we have grid-tied electricity, we continue to use the electric oven in the mobile home, particularly during the winter months. We have a microwave oven in the off-grid, straw-bale house, too. We often ignore these newfangled electric-powered ovens and the two ovens in the outdoor kitchen, opting instead for cooking with the power of direct sunlight.

When we started this endeavor, about two years ago, I could barely distinguish between a hammer and a zucchini. And that tells you all you need to know about my construction skills as well as my gardening skills. As I've pointed out many times before, if I can do this, I can hardly imagine somebody who can't. But you'd better get cracking. The time to plant a garden is not when you're hungry.

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Honeybees are still dying

Three years ago, honeybees started disappearing in the United States and other countries. Hives that had been thriving were suddenly found to be devoid of bees. The epidemic of catastrophic bee losses is called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). This last winter was the worst yet for beekeepers. From the San Francisco Chronicle—

In normal times, David Hackenberg would begin trucking his 20 million honeybees from the almond orchards of California to the orange groves of Florida this week.

Instead, after a month working the almond blossoms on the West Coast, his exhausted pollinators will get some rest and relaxation in the Georgia woods before the East Coast apple blossoms summon them to work once more next month.

These are not normal times for bees, or for commercial beekeepers, so Hackenberg's pollinators will skip the citrus gig to reduce their exposure to pesticides and get some rest. "Everybody is seeing (bee) losses this winter," said Hackenberg, of Lewisburg, Pa. "This was probably the worst year ever."

More than three years after beekeepers starting seeing the sudden disappearance of hive populations, scientists have yet to find the cause — let alone the fix — for a condition called colony collapse disorder (CCD). Meanwhile, the commercial beekeeping industry is struggling to provide pollination services to the nations' farmers. One-third of food crops rely on insect pollination.

I first wrote about this alarming situation in The Sixth Extinction.

Probably A. mellifera [the common honeybee] will not become extinct, at least in the foreseeable future, but that’s actually begging the question, isn’t it? If there were a single, remediable cause of the honeybee die-off, the question of possible extinction would lose much of its force. We need to know why honeybees are dying.

[We] ruled out many potential causes for CCD and found many possible contributing factors. But no single culprit has been identified.Bees suffering from CCD tend to be infested with multiple pathogens, including a newly discovered virus, but these infections seem secondary or opportunistic much the way pneumonia kills a patient with AIDS. The picture now emerging is of a complex condition that can be triggered by different combinations of causes. There may be no easy remedy to CCD. It may require taking better care of the environment and making long-term changes to our beekeeping and agricultural practices.

Honeybees are dying of everything, just like AIDS sufferers with weakened immune systems. This points to environmental stress as the primary cause of the ongoing demise of A. mellifera. If we continue to degrade the environment, the stresses on bees will increase. This will further weaken the bees, which will result in more die-offs, which will increase the probability of extinction over time.

Barring extinction, honeybee population declines could easily be severe enough to preclude industrial scale pollination for the various fruits and nuts we eat.

So far it has been impossible to pinpoint a single cause for CCD, which strengthens the hypothesis that general environmental stress has weakened the immune system of A. mellifera. An estimated one-third of American agricultural products depend on honeybee pollination. We are getting closer to the point where the number of bees left is inadequate to service this huge industry. We are now importing bees from Australia to make up the shortfall (see the video below).

After three years of research, scientists think the cause is not a single factor but a cocktail of maladies that together weaken and sicken the bees. "We know CCD bees get all the pathogens causing the symptoms; it doesn't leave answered what's the underlying cause," said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, Pennsylvania's acting state apiarist.

Environmental stress, including pesticides and the strain of being trucked across time zones and climates, may also be a factor. Poor nutrition may also contribute, a diet of corn syrup or the nutritionally inferior nectar or pollen of crops such as cranberry, cucumbers or melons.

"We have been losing bees and beekeepers in this country for 60 years, and now we are at the point where almost half the colonies in the country are needed to pollinate almonds in California," van Engelsdorp said. "We are close to the margin" of a viable ratio of pollinators to crops, he said. "It's amazing to me how close we are to that line."

"Something is going wrong here," Hackenberg said.

Something is going wrong here. No kidding. Not all of our problems are financial or political, though you wouldn't know that from listening to the media. This video from Silence of the Bees (Nature, PBS) explains the potentially catastrophic problems we face as pollinators die off.

Since this 2007 report, things have only gotten worse for the bees. Now that our self-congratulatory Congressmen are full of themselves—at least the Democrats are—because they actually managed to do something, let's see them "fix" this problem.

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Blood in the boots

What does a post-industrial relationship with the land look like? There are emerging clues

Walking recently to the top of Sugar Loaf, the hill that overlooks Abergavenny, brought my grandfather to mind. He died about 20 years ago, and had a lifetime’s love of walking, though living in Co. Durham he was more a creature of the the Lakes and (especially) the Dales. He wouldn’t have thought much of the walk (barely an hour from car to trig point) or that we drove to the car park, about half of the distance from the A40 to the top, or even of our comfortable modern walking boots: he once told a cousin of my mother’s, after a day hiking together, that it wasn’t a real walk unless you had blood in your boots. So far, this perhaps sounds like a set of nostalgic North(East)ern cliches, but wrapped inside it is a set of questions about the land and our relation to it which are coming back into our minds at the end of the long ascendancy of industrialism.

My grandfather would have taken the bus to the junction from the A40 because he never owned a car. He was past 50 by the time the car became a mass consumer item, during the 1950s, and at that stage in his life was not well-off. But the journey was part of the distance between town and country, just as the effort of leaving the city was a demarcation for the ‘chain-gangs’ of the cycling clubs in the 1920s, ’30s, and later. The nature writer Jim Perrin has described that experience like this:

just take ourselves off, sleep rough at weekends and holidays among moors and hills that were a very cheap bus-ride away from the inner city where we lived. What we saw there was what we did not have in the close streets of the slums: trees, skies, clear rivers, space, unthreatened journeyings, a sense of an older landscape that had always been, from which we ourselves had come and to which we were now finding our ways back.

My grandfather’s attitude to the land, and his access to it, would have been different too, if only because the law on both land and access changed so much during his lifetime. He described himself as a ‘Christian socialist’, without ever defining either term too exactly, but would not have thought it right that God’s land was closed off by landowners. Interestingly, this argument surfaced quite strongly a decade ago in the debate in Scotland which paved the way for its Land Reform Act in 2003.

Alastair McIntosh has documented this well, in his fine Schumacher Briefing Rekindling Community, and elsewhere (opens pdf). This quote, from Dr. Alison Elliot of the Church of Scotland, from Rekindling Community, can stand here for the whole:

The Earth belongs to the Lord. The land itself is a gift from God. We are stewards of it, and the idea of somebody ‘owning’ it in the same way you own a bicycle is something that is deeply offensive to people who have that perspective on life and creation.

My grandfather would have cheered the ‘mass trespass‘ in 1932 at Kinder Scout in the Peak District by ‘the ramblers from Manchester way‘. And he would have felt vindicated by the post-war Act which created the National Parks, in 1949, which have proved to be one of the lasting institutions of that post-war settlement. Indeed, it is striking how resistant the idea of the National Parks have been to the last quarter-century of globalisation and pro-market politics; it happens that the last of the National Parks proposed in 1949, the South Downs, will finally be opened in March of this year. The coalition of conservators and radicals which promoted them has proved to be effective and enduring.

In some ways, this history is a partial answer to a question posed by Jim Perrin in a recent issue of new welsh review (the article itself is not online):

“What measure of compensation can be found in contemporary life for the loss of connection with the natural cycle which was woven through the whole fabric of natural life in the pre-industrial world”?

But it is only a partial answer. In other ways, for all of their virtues, the notion of the ‘national park’ represents the industrialisation of open space, the creation of an opposite of the city, a separate domain with its own boundaries and its own rules. It is a space in which the land is used to ‘produce’ leisure, just as the relationship to the land of the new urban food movements (for all of their virtues) is also a relationship of production. Putting a ‘value’ on naturemay reduce depredation (but may also just give permission to depredators, who may think they’ve paid for the right to do it). Either way, it is essentially an industrial model in which land which can be demonstrated to produce value in terms of ‘eco-systems services’ has a higher price when it goes into a cost-benefit equation.

Perrin’s answer to his own question instead looks at our experience of nature.

The key vocabulary here is: contact, connection, relationship … there is rigour, rurality, discomfort, patience, application necessary to be on close terms with nature. Dipping in and out of scenery or tarns, imposing patterns of attention deficit culture … these are not enough.

For McIntosh, answering the question goes back to how reintegrate the land into community, which he sees as being rooted equally in ’soil, soul and society’. This ‘triune’ basis of community – the three elements are intertwined – are ‘community with nature; community with the divine; and community with one another”. My grandfather, who lived in a village and was also an active volunteer throughout his life, would have understood this formulation intuitively, in a heartbeat. I understand it too, of course, but only rationally, and that’s what we’ve lost in the half a century between him and me. If our species has a long-term future, I suspect that recovering that lost visceral sense of the worth of the land and the soil is a critical task for the next half a century. My grandchildren will need their boots.

The picture of Sugar Loaf is from the photostream of Helen James, and is used here with thanks.

What is Community Wind?Nashville State Community College considers more sites

An Interview with Neil Adger: resilience, adaptability, localisation and Transition

Professor Neil Adger is a lecturer and researcher at University of East Anglia. He is a researcher and teacher who specialises in social vulnerability, resilience and adaptation to environmental change; on justice and equity in decision-making; and the application of economics to global environmental change. He is a member of the Resilience Alliance, and is involved in a range of climate change research projects, including the IPCC and work for the Tyndall Centre. He has written many papers on the subject of resilience, and so, for the research I am doing, I was thrilled to be able to interview Neil about resilience, Transition, peak oil, and localisation.

How do you define resilience?

Intuitively resilience is about being able to be flexible and also about the ability to be able to adapt. So the working definition within the Resilience Alliance that we’ve been working towards, which has three elements, is quite succinct. It’s about the ability to absorb perturbations and still retain a similar function; about the ability of self-organisation; and also the capacity to learn, to change and to adapt.

Although that sounds quite generic because it comes from a systems perspective I think that captures most of what we’re trying to articulate in terms of resilience. I should say that I think the key element is about the ability to change rather than the ability to continue doing the same thing.

What for you is the overlap between resilience and sustainability – is one part of the other? What’s their relationship?

That’s a very good question. Let me try and break this down in two ways. Sustainability, and sustainable development, in particular, are normative concepts: they are goals, something we would strive towards, and that’s the usual sense. It’s contested what the exact elements of that might be, but there’s general agreement that we want our developments, societies and environments to be sustained.

Resilience is used in two ways, one of which is very similar to what we would call sustainable development, i.e. resilience as a normative goal. Clearly resilience in that sense would be part of sustainability. So part of sustainability would be the ability to change, the ability to deal flexibly with the future, and in the context of changing social values, a changing demographic and other types of social, environmental and political change.

Whereas, I think resilience in a positivistic sense is actually just a characteristic of a system – a system can be resilient or not resilient. And that positivistic scientific view doesn’t necessarily speak to sustainability as a societal or normative goal. You can have systems, and even ecosystems that are quite persistent and resilient, but they don’t necessarily produce l lots of ecosystem services which societies demand. So I think there’s a distinction here between resilience as a system property, and resilience as a goal for society.

I was reading a piece of yours yesterday where you wrote “some elements of society are inherently vulnerable, and others are inherently resilient.” What is it that determines the degree to which things are vulnerable or resilient?

First of all both vulnerability and resilience need a referent, so we need to be vulnerable to something, or resilient to something. I think the things that parts of society are vulnerable to are environmental change at the large scale, and the changes in the way the world and society works, which you can capture in the idea of globalisation. Some parts of society are, in effect, vulnerable to the large scale structural changes that are happening around the world – the changes in the flows of capital and labour and the restrictions on those, and the impact that that has on their life and livelihoods.

So if you think about the farming sector, it’s vulnerable to large scale price shocks, and we as consumers are vulnerable to large scale price shocks around the world. Some parts of society are vulnerable to environmental change and in combination are vulnerable to the sorts of things that are going on in terms of economic globalisation around the world. Others are more resilient. But being resilient to the forces of globalisation doesn’t necessarily mean that those parts of society are immune to them or even aren’t integrated into them.

I don’t think you can simply isolate yourself from the globalised world and say, “well, that’ll make us more resilient”. It’ll make us more resilient in some senses, but the world is as it is and I think we just need to deal with the fact that it’s more globally integrated and look on the positive side of that and reap the benefits of it.

Would you not have any truck with the idea that a resilient society is one where local economies are stronger?

I don’t disagree with that. What I’m saying is that local economies, for all sorts of reasons, are actually stronger and likely to be more resilient, because if we go back to the definition, they have more autonomy and room for self organisation and adaptability and change. Hence, I think it’s impossible to isolate a community or society from a globalised world.

Simply looking to give more autonomy to a community is a positive thing, but trying to isolate it from the rest of the world and not realise that we’re globalised and all the rest of it isn’t a sensible thing to do. As I say, there are a lot of benefits to globalisation (not necessarily economic globalisation) such as the flow of information around the world, global solidarity with places in other parts of the world. There are all sorts of up sides to globalisation. I’m sure you’re familiar with all those arguments and you know this on the ground.

Indeed. I’m just reading the Adapting to Climate Change book that you published recently. How much does your take on resilience differ if peak oil and economic contraction are added in as things that we need to build resilience to? How does that differ in how we understand what resilience is or does it not make much difference? Most of the stuff I’ve read about resilience, particularly with your work, tends to be built around responding to climate change….

Yes, the work I have been involved in primarily deals with responding to the impacts of climate change now and in the future.

So does what resilience look like in practice change if actually we add peak oil and economic contraction in as the things that we’re building resilience to? And do you know of anyone who’s doing any work on that?

It’s a disciplinary perspective, and something that I’ve been interested in: how do people and systems (i.e. interacting human and environmental systems) respond to environmental change. I’ve been particularly interested in how people cope with a change in climate and what that does to their resources, but also what it does to their sense of identity, place, things that people care about.

So there’s a huge amount of traction that ideas of resilience can give to how we’re going to cope with change in the long run and how people cope with change in the contemporary and historic sense. That’s why resilience ideas are so popular in those areas. But I think that if resilience has some purpose and traction and explanatory powers of theory, then it needs to be able to explain and also give normative goals for all areas, including how we deal with what others call socio-technical transitions and change in the way that we actually use resources.

Although I haven’t worked directly with this myself, basically I would suggest that if a community or a place or a sector of the economy has the capacity to respond to a changing climate, then it should also have common assets and common sets of resources that will allow it to adapt to, or even implement, the transition towards a reduction of dependency on fossil fuels. Although the ideas of resilience have been applied to the areas I’m familiar with, to responding to environmental changes and exogenous shock, it clearly needs to be able to explain those phenomena. I think this is an exciting area, to work on deliberate transitions away from a dependence on fossil fuels towards a more sustainable economy.

Some of Gill Seyfang’s work touches on some of those things as well.

Yes, you’re obviously going to talk to Gill and many colleagues – Adrian Smith at Sussex – and others working on these ideas of what characteristics within a technical system that allows change and facilitates change. It’s the key idea of resilience, just in terms of the diffusion of technologies or the uptake of them and that sort of thing. I think those are all really, really important.

What does local government, if it’s optimally designed to facilitate resilience, look like? Part of the stuff I’m doing is looking at Totnes as a case study and at the moment we have this three tiers – town council, county council, district council – and trying to get a sense of what a shift in local government would look like if it actually were designed to really support transition and resilience? I suppose, from the resilience perspective, there’s the short term, emergency planning type stuff, and then there’s the longer term resilience building. But I wonder what your thoughts are on the qualities local government would have or how it would operate if that was its intention?

It’s interesting that resilience is part of the remit of local government, at least in the UK. But a lot of that comes from the Civil Contingencies Act and there are regional Resilience Forums and the like. There is also Scottish Resilience, part of the Scottish Executive, which on the face of it sound absolutely fantastic, but actually they have a very specific and rather narrow remit to deal with emergency management and emergency planning.

Perhaps resilience is a more publicly acceptable word that assumes proactive government and is slightly less scary than вЂemergency management’ or вЂdealing with crisis’. But that’s a start. It’s good that there’s a lexicon and ideas of resilience are within local government, even if they’re narrowly defined at the minute. In terms of overall principles in how local government can facilitate resilience, I don’t have anything very specific, but a couple of things I would say: I think local government needs to be able to identify, in terms of responsibility, who, where and what the vulnerabilities are in the system because that’s what collective action and what governments are for. One of their primary roles of government is to protect its vulnerable citizens. And so, to make sure that processes don’t leave parts of communities or places behind, and actually make them more vulnerable to change I think is a first step.

The second thing is that I don’t there’s any such thing as an optimal government to promote resilience, but clearly they need to be able to promote flexibility. Of the key parameters of that are two things: one is to let civil society flourish and to provide the resources that allow civil society groups to flourish within a local region. A second principle is to have the democratic accountability and open forums and new ways of gathering information that allows government itself to take on board new ideas.

It seems that there’s never any shortage of ideas of what can promote resilience but, without sounding too vague about this, it’s actually about democratic structures but also the synergistic relationship between civil society and government at all levels but local government level as well. Governments need to promote social capital and promotes social learning between civil society and government. That all sounds very at the principle level but I don’t think I’ll go beyond that at this point.

Well it certainly goes beyond the Civil Contingencies Act which actually is about suspending the rule of law – it’s quite a scary piece of legislation when you read it.

Yes. But nevertheless I do see a glimmer there – the idea of flexibility and resilience are at least within the remit of what the responsibility of governments and even local governments might be. There may be ways for those ideas around short term emergencies to say actually, вЂwe need to address some longer more structural crises’. In those circumstances the language and the ideas of resilience are actually something that could be taken forward.

Is there not a danger with resilience that it could actually, in the wrong hands, be used as a concept for unpleasant things that fly in the opposite direction of a social justice agenda? Could one also distinguish a healthy resilience or an unhealthy take on resilience? I’m thinking of the DEMOS report, Resilient Nation, which actually….if we say it’s about being resilient to terrorism and pandemics then the approaches that we put in place are very different from when we’re talking about resilience to climate change and peak oil.

Yes. Now clearly, all these terms, even sustainability can be used in broad senses for example, to sustain your transnational corporation is a sustainability goal for those organisations. I don’t think any intellectual community can define resilience and capture it and say, “this is what resilience is”. I’m a little bit more sanguine about this. I think even the national security strategy from the Cabinet Office and other documents – the IPPR’s National Security in the Twenty First Century adopts a lot of the language of resilience and this is a positive development.

But I think that’s actually a platform for debate of what resilience actually means. In a lot of that language and in a lot of those debates and the issues that are being applied to, is an engineering view of resilience. It’s more actually about robustness – let’s make critical national infrastructure like our power stations be able to stay the same. But I don’t think that takes on board the work over the last twenty years that refines resilience, and looks at the distinction between resilience and robustness, i.e. the ability to (change vs. the ability to stay the same). I think that actually opens up space for direct intellectual debate about

a) what we mean by resilience and

b) what it is that we have at the minute that we want to stay the same and what it is that we have at the minute that we want to change.

I wouldn’t agree with you Rob about healthy and unhealthy resilience. I think having resilience in the public domain in terms of the goals of public policy is just a good thing in general, even if much of the community doesn’t agree with the terminology being used.

How might we measure resilience at a community level?

Resilience – it’s difficult to measure directly because it is an emergent property of a system, if we’re into the positivist view of what resilience is. We know from the ecological literature that there are various determinants that make an eco system resilient in terms of its abilities to retain its stability domain and either its singular or multiple equilibrium state, and you can measure that by looking at the populations and the interactions between the interactions within an ecological system and characteristics that tend to make ecological systems include things like diversity – diversity of species, diversity or eco system function within an eco system and that sort of thing.

So it’s a challenge then to say, “do those same characteristics that you can measure in an ecological system translate into a social system?” I would say you could take those analogies so far because societies tend to have other characteristics than eco systems, and clearly for communities I think some of those things still hold. The structural equivalent of eco system function are things like diversity of skills, diversity of values within communities and those sort of things and those can be measured. You can see parallels between eco system resilience and social system resilience.

I think it also measures the autonomy of an economy or a community, in other words its ability to have some say or have some voice over it – all those things are parallel to how we’d measure eco system resilience as well as social resilience. Let me say two things: first of all you need to be able to look at both together. Clearly we’re all dependant on the ecosystems in which we sit and our global interdependencies with those, so the key research challenge for which I don’t think we’ve got an answer at the moment is how do you measure the resilience of a socio-ecological system, the combination of the two. Secondly of course is that resilience is a relative concept. It’s not something you can observe directly but you can show that something can become more resilient over time or more or less resilient compared to other referent cases. So it’s a complex area: it isn’t something that there’ll be a set of Newtonian laws for.

One of the things in the paper I was reading was when you said, “social psychologists have long made a link between perceived vulnerability and marginalization and that actual ability to take positive adaptive action”. What do you see as being the link between well being, happiness and resilience? Can we argue that people who are more resilient are inherently happier?

Let me start with the first bit and the quote. The reason why social psychology is of interest to our research group is because we have been directly interested in perceptions of vulnerability and perceptions of marginalization. There has been some very good work in social psychology by Terre Satterfield at University of British Columbia with Paul Slovic and others (and also by Tony Patt at IIASA in Austria). Their work basically showed that if people perceive themselves not to have the capacity to adapt, then that perception actually acts a barrier to their action.

So perceptions of low marginalization and self-efficacy as it’s known, actually in itself becomes a symptom of vulnerability and means that people perceive themselves as unable to act. We’ve been testing this through looking at populations vulnerable to heat waves in the UK and the direct impact on extremes in the population, primarily the elderly, and we were able to document such effects. Perceptions of low self efficacy are a barrier to actions in itself, even if these actions to make people less vulnerable are relatively straight forward and not costly.

Interestingly, we also found that issues of identity are incredibly important within those apparently vulnerable populations (i.e. people with poor health status and therefore likely to suffer impacts in the context of heat waves or have increased levels of particular types of illness or even mortality). For those populations we also found a small sub group whose identity was all about their independence. These were elderly people who basically told us, “I’m not vulnerable to the impacts of heat waves because I’m not elderly!” They have very high self-efficacy and actually their whole identity was about being independent and therefore denying the risk of, “Oh, this doesn’t relate to me, because this is actually about my independence”. So the lessons from that research do speak across to those ideas of well-being and resilience because resilience is clearly something that a community has, and a resilient community is likely to have high levels of social capital, high levels of interaction and collective action and community and people looking out for each other.

Therefore in those circumstances, vulnerable populations are less likely to feel marginalized, or they’re going to have more social interaction and actually more of a sense of community and therefore going to be able to cope better with shocks that come along. Clearly I’ve talked about extreme weather and those sorts of short term things, but I think you can see from the sociology and social psychology experience and findings that a resilient community is actually likely to have higher levels of self-efficacy and lower levels of people who feel excluded and marginalized. I think that’s good in a collective sense. So I can see how evidence about personal well-being can be translated into high community resilience.

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Here is an interview with him done by someone else too!

Tim Kasser on Consumerism, Psychology, Transition and Resilience. Part TwoNashville State Community College considers more sites