[ This is a guest post by Wendy. She wrote it last spring, and the book's been out for several years now, but Wendy's thoughts on it seem more timely than ever. ]

Children know things.

They listen and they see – things we, adults, miss, they don’t. They may not have any idea of what they are seeing and probably lack the capacity to logically analyze what it is they’ve seen, but they know.

When I was a child in the 1970’s, I knew that a thing could only get so big and then it couldn’t get any bigger. I had observed the phenomenon in practice with balloons. You could only put so much water or air in a balloon before it would burst.

As a child, I applied that practical experience to real-life situations. I knew that the supply of oil was finite, because as we learned in school, it was made from dinosaurs, and so, logically, there was only so much of it.

I knew this.

And, since I was a child in the 70’s, I knew that oil was running out for us. I could see. I could hear. I may not have been fully aware (and I’m still not sure about what is actual “memory” versus information I have gleaned since that I might be attributing to memory) of what was happening around me or what the implications of those events to my future were, but I knew that something was happening.

When I reached adulthood in the 80’s, I, like most of America, forgot, and I jumped right on that consumer wagon. I went to college and graduated and entered the workforce (which during the mini-recession of the early 1990’s wasn’t as wide-open as I’d thought it would be for a recent college graduate) … and started buying my happiness and that of my children.

Deus Ex Machina and I bought our house in 1997, and we were thrilled to discover a few short years later that the value had almost doubled (and we refinanced, cashed out the equity and paid off our out-of-control credit card balance).

A couple of years later, we discovered, again, that the value of our house had increased, and we opened a 2nd Mortgage, Home Equity Line of Credit, Adjustable Rate Mortgage with a really good interest rate. It was about this time that I started remembering what I had learned as a child during the tumultuous 1970’s – the party always ends – sometimes badly, and a thing can only get so big before it explodes.

And I started getting really nervous. Two mortgages are bad. One mortgage that’s an ARM – bad.

About a year after we opened the HELoC, we refinanced, again, rolling both mortgages into one 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. So, in essence, the house we’d purchased in 1997 on a 30-year mortgage, we now owed three times what we’d paid back then, AND we were still obligated for thirty years. Talk about lack of progress.

But then it happened. The balloon burst … or as they’re calling it the “Housing Bubble.” The housing market bubble burst, and a lot of people have lost their homes. I always felt that it could only get so big. I always knew that the value of our house couldn’t and wouldn’t continue to increase indefinitely. I was pretty sure that our 1500 sq ft cottage-style ranch on a quarter acre would never be worth a million dollars.

According to Kunstler, it’s just the beginning of what is going to be a very long process with a lot of weird fluctuations, of prices going up and down, but in a three steps up, one step back kind of way that will keep us believing, for a while, that things aren’t as bad as they are.

In 1998, the price per gallon for heating oil was $0.899. Last time we had our tank filled, the cost per gallon was $3.629.But the price didn’t rise steadily from under a dollar to almost four. It went up a lot, and fell a little, and went up a lot, and then fell a little, and then shot up, but dropped back down.

It’s like with gasoline for our cars – the price goes up, and we all hold our breath, and then just when we start to resolve ourselves that the higher price is here to stay, the price drops down … just a little … but just enough to lull us into the belief that things are getting better.

I heard remarked today the belief that the price of heating oil would decrease next winter, because more people were transitioning away from oil to natural gas, electricity or wood, and as such, there would be a glut of oil.

And, maybe. Maybe the price of heating oil will drop a little – down to, say, $3 per gallon* from close to $4 today. That’s a savings of a dollar per gallon, which compared to today, will look like a bargain.

But consider …Maine has seen a 6% decrease in the consumption of gasoline over the last couple of months, but our prices haven’t dropped – at all, and in fact, have steadily increased.

The fact is that as a world, we are using 85.6 MILLION barrels of oil per DAY. In short, the world is currently using as much oil as is produced each day. We’ve already tapped into Europe’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves, and the US Congress recently voted to stop stockpiling oil so that more was available to the American public. Even if everyone in the northeast switched to burning wood for heat (and please don’t, because our forests couldn’t handle that), the demand for oil would still outpace the current and near future production capabilities.

Because it’s not just gasoline for our cars or heating oil for our houses where we have a demand for the stuff. Look around you. Everything you see has been touched by oil.

Everything.

From the food you put into your body to make you not feel hungry (and I won’t use the word “nourish”, because the nutritional value of said “food” is questionable), to the plastic bottle you drink your Poland Spring water out of, to the computer screen you’re looking at as you read my words. Food packaging, deodorant bottles, toothbrush handles, fleece material, fertilizers, pesticides, all non-electric motors, lawn mowers, the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, the bottles that hold the Tylenol capsules, indeed the little dissolving capsules that hold the medicine … all of it – oil.

Every industry in the United States is DEPENDENT on cheap oil to operate.

Every.single.one.

This is the information I took away from reading The Long Emergency. I had a lot of sleepless nights, and many nights of fitful, restless sleep this month. I had quite a few nightmares, too.

The implications of the book are terrifying. The world as my parents and my peers (and me) knew it HAS come to an end. It’s not “coming” to an end. The end is already here.

Kunstler provides a great deal of historical background and research – things I knew, but only in a child’s way of knowing. And it angered me. It angered me, because we could have been a nation of people who were not dependent on oil for our very lives. We could have been developing the infrastructure to move us away from being an oil dependent nation. While we, literally, had oil to burn, we could have been developing new technologies to take the place of cheap oil. Now, it’s too late. We no longer have excess oil to burn.

Our leaders have known for a very long time what was happening. Back in 1956, M. King Hubbert a geophysicist, employed by Shell, warned that at some point, the oil would run out. Even before I was born, someone knew that the oil would run out. That the great “party” would be over.

I was very skeptical when I first started reading Kunstler’s book. I wasn’t impressed with him after watching The End of Suburbia, but having read his tome, I am no longer able to simply discount his assertions, and I can no longer deny that building a national infrastructure around dependency on oil, especially when our political leaders KNEW, and have known for YEARS that oil supplies are not dependable, was a pretty short-sighted, and, yes, stupid thing to do.

The first few chapters of the book left me pretty terrified. I’m still a little worried, but that’s because that’s what I do. I worry. It’s part of what Deus Ex Machina loves about me, and after thirteen years of him loving me for who I am, I’m not about to change .

I know, though, that there is very little I can do. I can try to stockpile resources and be comfortable for a little while longer, but at some point, those things will run out, too.

The thing I can do is to learn. I can learn to grow food. I can learn to save seeds. I can learn to mend my clothes. I can learn a new skill that could possibly provide some income for me.

Thing is, while I know that I will see things get bad, I suspect the worst of the transition will happen when I’m too old or just gone. I suspect that those people who will see the worst of “the end of oil” have yet to be born.

But that’s where I have hope. Because those people will not have grown up on a diet of MTV, Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies and Mountain Dew, SUVs and CAFO meat. Those people will have been raised by people like my daughters, who are learning to grow their own food, and save seeds, and mend clothing, and knit, and conserve, and do without.

So, where do we go from here?

I can’t answer that for anyone else, but as for me …I’ll be staying in my suburban home – two miles from the town center, five miles from Deus Ex Machina’s job, six and a half miles from the grocery store, seven miles from my best paying client and twelve miles from my daughters’ dance school – and homesteading my quarter acre.

We’ll learn to be more self-sufficient and less dependent on oil for heat and transportation.

We’ll not only enjoy an increasingly more local diet, but we’ll also be patronizing more local, smaller, independent shops, where we’ll pay higher prices, but the flip-side will be that we’ll learn to live with less – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In short, we’ll keep doing what was set in motion two years ago when I saw The Good Life for the first time, and that is moving toward a less “cluttered” life.

I do recommend this book. It didn’t change my life, but it did convince me that my current path is the one best traveled … for me.

[The following is a guest post by Pat Meadows. Yes, we just ran another review of this one, but Pat's extensive knowledge of container gardening and related topics warrants revisiting this book...]

‘Fresh Food from Small Spaces‘ is an exciting book, an inspirational and
informative book. Ruppenthal’s main topics are container gardening,
sprouting, fermenting, growing mushrooms, and small livestock (chickens and
bees only), making compost and worm boxes. He lists and describes steps
that anyone can take towards helping to build a more sustainable planet and
living more lightly on the earth, as well as being more self-reliant.

I was very glad to see a short chapter on ‘Survival During Resource
Shortages’ and one on ‘Helping to Build a Sustainable Future’. The
‘Introduction’ also touches on these topics.

I was also glad to see that Ruppenthal recommends the use of Self-Watering
Containers. I know from personal experience (and from being the listowner
for a list devoted to Edible Container Gardening) that this is a very, very
superior way to grow vegetables in containers.

What the book is *not*: it is definitely not a how-to book. It is *not* the
only book you’ll ever need about *any* of the topics that it covers. If you
buy the book thinking that it is, you’ll probably be disappointed.

Instead, it gives an excellent general overview and introduction to some
very disparate topics. It gives you ideas for things *you can actually do*.
The author also points you towards more detailed sources of information on
each topic. I doubt if *anyone* could have written a detailed instructional
guide on all of these very different topics.

Major disappointment: the only illustrations are black-and-white stock
photos. Some color photos – and more personal photos – would have been a
great addition. This is really a very glaring lack. (Shame on you, Chelsea
Green Publishers!)

Second major disappointment: no index. I would have expected an index in
anything published by Chelsea Green, a quality publisher.

Major plus: The book is referenced, with endnotes. There is a list of
resources as well.

Ruppenthal writes well, and I would definitely have given this book my unalloyed
praise if it only had better photos and an index. I have no other criticisms.

I was at the library the other day looking through the new releases and I stumbled upon this book.  I knew that Jamie Oliver was a proponent of getting away from the factory farm system, but until I read this book I wasn’t aware that he was such a proponent of growing as much of your own food as possible and using it in your kitchen right after you pick it.  Sounds like a winner to me!

This cookbook is organized around the four seasons and when items in the garden are ready, and he shows you plenty of different ways to prepare them.  He even talks a fair amount about hunting and foraging.  To top it all off, this author isn’t someone who buys their food from a local farmer, he grows it.  So he even has tips and info about growing the items, or in the case of animals, raising them.

It’s an interesting book and I liked it.  I’m not sure I could recommend it as it costs $40, and most of the dishes are more fancy than the fare I serve at my house, but if you would like a cookbook based around the seasons that will give you some fancy dishes to entertain with on occasion this might be the answer.  Apparantly he has a television series on the Food Network with this same idea so perhaps you could check that out as well.  (There is info on the Food Network site but I won’t send you there because their site is awful and never come up quickly, and they have auto start videos.)

This book is great.  There, I said it.  There is really no reason to go further about it.  No matter how much space you have you would benefit from this book.  There is information about using containers, using reflected light, transplanting and fitting berries and fruit into small spaces.  Information about cultivating mushrooms and sprouting beans and grains.  Information about making yogurt, kefir and other fermented foods.  This book is a one stop shop.  If you are working on being self sufficient in a small space you need to get this book and keep it as a reference manual.

I have however found another book as well that I think should be in the reference library of any urban homesteader.  If you are urban homesteading you should have both of these books for your reference library.

Ethicurean reviewed this book as well.

I think most people who are environmentally conscious, peak oil aware, or otherwise green-leaning (or should I say “brown-leaning“?) will agree than monoculture is bad. Growing a hundred (or even a thousand) contiguous acres of a single crop is asking for trouble. Doubly so if that crop is vegetatively propagated, since the individual plants are genetically identical, and so, identically susceptible to any pest or disease that happens to infiltrate the defenses. (See: Irish Potato Famine.)

To get around such susceptibility, many have taken up the flag of permaculture. Others follow in the footsteps of Joel Salatin, or Gene Logsdon, or Elliot Coleman, or Scott and Helen Nearing. If you read these authors, they aren’t always in agreement, and you may start to wonder who to listen to. Which method is best? Which author is right? What is the answer to the ultimate question of sustainable food production?

After reading Return to Resistance by Raoul A. Robinson (available for download here), I think I’ve discovered the answer.

It’s not that this book contains the answer, though maybe there’s a case for that. The conclusion I came to is that the monoculture problem applies to how we grow things as much as what we grow. We must have diverse approaches to sustainability. A single solution, whether it’s the Nearing’s low-on-the-food-chain vegetarianism or Salatin’s plant and animal symbioses; whether it’s permaculture’s emphasis on trees and perennials or Elliot Coleman’s emphasis on annual vegetables; perhaps even whether it’s organic vs. chemical farming — a single universal approach is inherently vulnerable.

The vulnerabilities Robinson brings to mind are pests and diseases. Modern large scale farming, to use an extreme example, essentially has to use tons of chemical fungicides and pesticides and antibiotics, because the plants and animals have lost all of their natural resistances. The more they are protected by chemical and pharmaceutical defenses, the more their natural defenses fade away.

Breeders can sometimes manage to arrange for a short-term biological resistance to pathogens through something Robinson refers to as vertical resistance. In essence, they find a particular genetic lock that bars entry to a particular pest completely. It’s invariably hailed as a breakthrough, a triumph of science, the beginning of the end of disease and pestilence. It also tends to be both expensive and short-lived.

In essence, the monoculture of a modern farm has put the same lock on every door. Once the lock is picked — and history tells us that it will be picked  — the pathogen has free access to every single specimen. Hence, the chemical arms race on the food supply front lines.

The problem is not confined to large scale commercial farming though. Even open-pollinated vegetables can have some vulnerabilities, if the genetic base is too narrow, if it has lost some ancestral resistances, or if it is offered too much external protection from pathogens. Unfortunately, if natural resistance is not tested, it is essentially bred out of the line.

In a natural system, it’s not in the parasite’s best interest to devastate its host, since that would threaten its own survival. As a result, a natural system might have ten different locks, or a hundred, so that although the pest may pick a lock and damage or destroy a tenth or a hundredth of the hosts, it won’t do widespread damage to the population as a whole.

Natural systems rely on horizontal resistance. Once an infection or infestation has begun, the target organism can use a variety of means to minimize the damage. The genetic diversity of a population ensures that there is always a spectrum of susceptibility, with some specimens struggling or succumbing, while others thrive in the resulting void.

According to Robinson, the most effective way to take advantage of these natural defenses is to allow and encourage this horizontal resistance instead of vertical resistance. The latter can be painstaking to achieve, and results are often quite temporary. And vertical resistance is nearly impossible in perennial plants, since a perennial need only be infected by a disease once, after which the specimen may have to live with the disease indefinitely.

In contrast to vertical resistance, horizontal resistance can be achieved by the following low-cost, low-tech means:

• Growing a large, diverse, non-hybrid population
• Encouraging cross-pollination
• Not particularly discouraging pests or diseases
• Saving seed from the best performers, even if (especially if) conditions are stressful

(Robinson’s book focuses on plants, but it seems to me that the same logic would apply to animal breeding as well.)

The beauty of the process is that you don’t need to know how the horizontal resistance is achieved for it to work. You only have to see which specimens are the most successful and let them reproduce. Results may be terrible at times, but depending on how diligent and thorough you want to be, remarkable results can be achieved in as little as five generations. To really push the envelope, you can actually inoculate all individuals with a particular disease, to accelerate the process, as Robinson has done in his work with potatoes and other staple crops.

I’ve read quite a few books from various authors on gardening, farming, and sustainability. I’ve learned a great deal, and I have great respect for all those mentioned above. But if I overlay Robinson’s clearly explained concepts onto any one of these techniques, I can suddenly spot certain vulnerabilities in each. Elaborating on them would risk turning this article into a novel, so for now I’ll leave it as a thought exercise for the reader. I could speculate as to which approaches seem least susceptible, but the devil is in the details. Just as stock brokers are fond of telling clients, I think diversification is the best course.

So if you are keen to grow your own food, don’t worry about finding the One True Path to sustainability. Don’t fret over which advice to follow or how to do it perfectly. Just find something that works for you, start saving seeds and letting Nature do her best (and her worst). And if you want some clear and fascinating insights into how resistance works, I absolutely recommend you read Return to Resistance.

–

After reading the Humanure Handbook (which you can download for free here) I have to say, I have an all new appreciation for the subject of composting. Not just composting normal yard waste and kitchen scraps for my garden. But also thoughts on how to compost better, and more efficiently. How to compost better my own waste, if I chose to, as well as waste from other animals.

The Humanure Handbook, in case you have been living under a rock, is a short book put together to introduce people to the idea of composting their own human waste and recycling it onto their gardens. There is compelling information here as to why it should be done. As we all know when you remove a crop from the ground you take some of the nutrients with you. Adding them back through compost and green manures are important. But one missing link in the current chain is that a lot of people flush their waste down a drain, thus polluting clean water that they spent oodles purifying. When they do this they also take precious nutrients and toss them down the drain. Nutrients that should be recycled back into the soil.

Now, before you get up in arms about pathogens and diseases and other nasties you need to read the book. This information is all detailed in the book, very frankly, and the system sounds like it works very well. There is no smell, when you do things right, and there aren’t any problems, when you follow the precautions. Most places in America aren’t ready to accept composting toilets just yet, but the knowledge from this book did come in handy recently when my city was flooded and we were told not to flush the toilets or use water for fear of compromising the water system. We still flushed the toilet in certain instances, but we were able to dump liquids onto our compost pile and follow the directions in this book with no problems. Now, no emergency problem at my house.

If you get a chance, check out the Humanure Handbook, if for no other reason than to learn even more about how to compost, a very valuable skill when gardening.

Images courtesy for the author’s website.

Christmas presented an opportune time for me as I was able to acquire a very good book about root cellaring food to get through a winter with fresh, local produce. The book is called Root Cellaring-Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables. I started to read it shortly after I got it, and it made profound changes to the way I was planning to store some of our root crop items over the winter. I had planned to store them in our garage, but come to find out that squash and sweet potatoes need one temperature, while potatoes, onions and apples need another temperature, and garlic has a different set of requirements. So, I had to readjust my plans. We’ve moved our crops around to different areas of the house, taking advantage of natural differences in temperatures in different places.

One thing that is great about this book is that they show you how to use a root cellar if you have one. If you don’t they will show you a million different ways to build one. But, they will also discuss how you can use other areas of your house as a root cellar if you are willing to monitor the items and use a thermometer to keep watch on them. That’s what I did. By moving a portable thermometer around the house I was able to locate different areas of the house that will work for our different items. Our squash and sweet potatoes are hanging out in our basement, while the potatoes and onions are in an attic crawlspace. The apples are still in the garage, but in a cooler.

This is really a great book and I consider it a must have for people trying to eat completely local. A root cellar is a great way to preserve food stuffs through the winter, and a root cellar doesn’t use any energy to preserve your food. Canning and drying foods are great, but they are fairly energy intensive (unless you dry your stuff in the desert), but a root cellar naturally keeps items fresh for you to use. If you want to know more about storing food through the winter this book is a must have. Besides, imagine less canning in the summer because you were going to depend on a root cellar? Sounds like a winner to me!

I finished the book This Organic Life-Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader recently and I thought I would mention it here as a worthwhile book to read. It’s not one of those books that’s a step by step DIY guide, it was a fun read. I enjoyed reading her stories about all the trials and tribulations she had during her life gardening. Especially once she moved to a property on the bank of the Hudson River.

There are numerous places throughout the book where she makes a point or mentions a statistic or piece of information and I would just stop reading and think about what she just wrote. I consider that a mark of a good book. Not that I studied it afterwards, but that the information forced me to study and think about it while I was reading the book. Plus I had a hard time putting the book down. Another good sign.I think Barbara Kingsolver summed it up best with this quote:

For many years, as I’ve worked hard to raise some of my family’s food and attend closely to the sources of the rest of it, doubtful observers have asked me why I bother when stores nearby sell anything in any season, cheaply. I’ve struggled to explain that this effort is for me a matter of moral responsibility. From now on I’ll simply hand them a copy of This Organic Life.

If you get a chance check it out sometime.

After I finished reading this book I wasn’t sure what to think about this book. I had heard so many good things about this book that I think my expectations were high, but after I finished the book I was kind of disappointed. Not disappointed in the book’s material, but perhaps more disappointed that it didn’t live up to the hype that I had built up in my head. There is a ton of useful information in this book, but it wasn’t all applicable to me. The author spends a lot of time talking about fermenting vegetables, which I don’t care for that much.

He does talk for a fleeting moment about making cheese and other dairy products, while also touching on beer and wines. (Good for an old fraternity boy) With his information I was able to figure out why my apple cider turned out so badly (I let it ferment too long), but I’m not sure if his information is quite enough to allow me really get into the fermented foods in the directions I would like.

For the information I was looking for Nourishing Traditions had a lot more relevant information on fermented dairy products. As well as fermenting quick beers and such. To further develop my wine and beer objectives I think I’ll need to find another book as my resource. The end result? I do think that this book offers some good starting points, which will allow me to try some of the more simple items while I build up a nice base of skills for the harder items. If you are looking to get started in fermenting food products I would suggest trying either this book or the Nourishing Traditions book from the Weston Price Foundation.