mandarine

Have you ever noticed how we laugh at other people’s supestitions, while we think we are not superstitious ourselves? Some of us find Feng Shue a stupid hassle that comes in the way of home and garden design; some of us eat pork with delight (sometimes with our left hand); most of us skip mass; we can say ‘rabbit’ onboard a boat. And we dismiss any claims that this will bring bad luck, bad spirits, or even hell our way.

And yet we rich westerners fall victim to a very dangerous superstition. A supestition which is destroying the planet, destroying other people’s livelihoods, destroying the livelihood of future generations. We believe that we cannot be happy with less stuff, less comfort, less energy. We sure believe we cannot be happy without a well-paying full-time job, however morally or environmentally or economically questionable said job might be.

All those who have stopped shopping, who have downshifted to a smaller house, who have sold their car will tell you readily: happiness and affluence are totally unrelated. And yet we cling to our stuff and our comfort like barnacles and limpets, and we feel helpless when we find out that our planet is dying, because there’s really nothing we can do about it.

Changing all the lightbulbs or buying a Prius or setting up photovoltaic arrays is OK, because it is about buying new stuff -this fits with our mental frame. But letting go of stuff and habits altogether is something we absolutely dread, unconsciously.

Emily’s challenge is about learning to let go, one finger at a time, so that we can discover not only that it does not cause misery, but it can even bring some feeling of pride (I am prone to this kind of feeling) and achievement. And in any case, it brings exactly the same kind of relief as when one unpacks after a long flight and finds out one had forgotten the anti-crash amulet home: we are still alive and well, regardless of what TV commercials want us to believe.

Emily’s ecojustice challenge is good for you. Everybody else does it. You’ll feel bad if you don’t. Do it now.

Warning: I could not resist a little doom and gloom.

When we are burning fossil fuels, we only see the environmental impact. There is supposed to be a Kyoto quota, and when we consume more, we feel some sort of hypothetical environmental guilt regarding global warming. The concept of future generations is very abstract, and very uncertain, and it does not make for easy arbitrations in everyday’s life.

Digression on market, non-renewables and future generations

As a side-note, just note that market price is fixed just with today’s supply-demand balance. Future generations cannot stake claims on today’s market, while today’s sales will deprive them of their share. Imagine a group of ten friends camping together in the wilderness, with so much tea for breakfast. Four early-risers sit down for breakfast at sunrise, and drink as much tea as they wish. Four others wake up later, find that there is only tea left for three. Two of them agree to drink just half a mug each in exchange of cookies from the other two. The two late-risers get nothing. Had we placed all ten together with the global tea and cookie problem, the share would have been quite different.

For non-renewables, day-to-day supply-demand market rules are a total nonsense.

An unfair negotiation

But let’s not consider future generations. Let’s just focus on today’s market. What does the price of fuel reflect? It reflects the market and the law of supply and demand of today. The more people want fuel now, the higher the price will get.

I want fuel. Fuel price rises. I can afford it. I pay my fuel. Why should I feel guilty of burning it? Because a sky-high price is just a way of saying that somebody else forsook their expected share of today’s fuel supply. It would be OK if it were my retired neighbor in the same affluent neighborhood who said: “OK, you need to drive to work, I will stay at home instead of going fishing, so you can have my share of today’s gas”. But it is not like this. The negotiation power on a market is money, not importance. Therefore, the final share will not reflect an arbitration in terms of what’s more important to humans considered equals (e.g. trading comfort uses for vital ones), and the rich will always get more of the share, however futile their intentions.

Economic theory says that the rich will pay more, therefore get poorer, while the poor save money by not buying the stuff, therefore things even-out in the end. This is only true if the rich do not get richer with what they get to do with the stuff. And if the poor do not starve before that. Because in the meantime, rising gas prices are also pushing food prices upwards.

In a world of scarce resources in which the power scales are already all the way to our side, something has to break somewhere if we want more for us. Whenever I drive my car for a week-end excursion, whenever I turn heating on, whenever I eat a juicy steak, I can only do this because someone else forsook their share of today’s driving to work, their share of today’s stove, their share of today’s food.

My macabre illustration

Imagine yourself and a small child fighting over a blanket while camping out in a blizzard. The colder it gets, the harder you have to pull to keep warm and cosy. You have more strength, therefore you get more of the blanket, although you do not need it as much as the kid does. At some point, the child is too weak and lets go of the blanket altogether. This is called price elasticity in an unfair market.

Two weeks after moving in, our hens (at least one of them) have started laying. So far, we’ve had six eggs in one week. It would be enough if the eggs were standard calibre. But it takes two of our bantam eggs to make one ‘normal’ egg.

In any case, they tasted delicious.

The context

I have been doing a lot of slate-sorting in preparation of roof works on my third roof. Traditional slates around here are fish-scale-shaped shale (schist?) slabs one inch thick and eight inches to three feet long. The long ones are used near the gutter, and the size decreases as we get nearer the top. This means they have to be sorted according to size.

I have a three planks with small cells of gradual sizes, which I use as a riddle. And one by one, I pick slates from the heap, find the smallest cell in which it fits, and make tidy stacks of matching sizes. This is extremely tedious. The ideal job for listening to audiobooks.

The first audiobook I had been listening to when I started the sorting in January was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The second book was Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, again a solo work from LibriVox.

The audiobook

The recording was quite unusual, as the voice was particularly monotone and slow, as close to machine-read as a human can imitate. The tone was gramatically perfect, but there was hardly any warmth and emotion anywhere. This was disturbing at first, but then I discovered that I got used to it very easily.

In fact, I found out that this kind of neutral, unobtrusive tone was what came nearest to actually reading the book with my own eyes: what I was hearing was the equivalent of printed text, and I got to put the warmth and the emotion in there myself. This confirmed what I had suspected: for all I know, an audiobook could be read by a machine (if the tone is gramatically correct) or chanted like monks used to read from the Bible, and I would not be put off. This kind of neutral reading is not ‘being read to’: it is reading with one’s ears. The closest image of this process is me reading a book with my ear to the pages.

However, whenever there was dialogue, then the narrator turned from a machine to an actor. The voices, the southern accent, the inimitable negro expressions were so vivid that it proved without a doubt that the narrator’s dull tone for the rest of the text was absolutely intentional.

The story

The story is built around a ‘Prince and Pauper’ frame, with the son of rich Missouri townspeople being switched in his infancy with the snow-white slave son of their snow-white negro servant Roxy. To save her kid from the doom of ‘being sold down the river’, Roxy switches the clothes, and nobody notices the switch. Valet de Chambers (the name of the slave son) becomes Thomas Driscoll and vice-versa. The problem is that the newly promoted Thomas grows to be a complete brat.

The story has many other characters, among which is “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, a passionate collector of fingerprints (guess who’s going to find out about the switched boys?), with a law career completely thwarted by an unfortunate joke he made on the day he arrived in town. Apparently, XIXth-century Missouri townspeople have this sort of zeroth-degree humour that we French and British credit all Americans with (no offense meant). The funny thing about Wilson is that his actual part in the story is almost completely accessory, but Twain managed to make his presence ubiquitous by starting all chapters with a quote from Wilson’s ‘calendar’, a collection of witty aphorisms and such like:

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries,
king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a
Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

The story also has a pair of enigmatic Italian twins, which I could not quite ‘locate’. In fact, I understood in Twain’s afterword that they formed part of an initial plot, and were later refactored into secondary characters when the author understood there was not room enough for two stories. This afterword is very interesting: it feels just like a DVD’s ‘deleted scenes’ bonus section. Mark Twain explains his struggles with the manuscript, the story, the characters, and how he untangled the mess by severing the story of the twins off the main story. A great lesson for aspiring writers, I guess.

The author

After Huck Finn, this was my second encounter with Mark Twain, and I must admit I am in total awe. The story is good enough, but the language and the witty criticism of society is so sharp that I cannot help comparing him with Voltaire (and acknowledging Twain’s superiority in the comparison).

I’ll go download some more from LibriVox, to keep me company for the rest of the sorting.

Now is the time for my farmer self to say good-bye and move to roomier premises. The Mandarine half here will presently revert to literary mutterings, amateur photography, dilettante philosophy and leftist social criticism.

For those interested in my experience (and my errors) as a gardener, you can visit my new website, l’arpent nourricier, which I declare open as of now. If you read French, good for you. If not, you can still look at the pictures

My primary objective is to write about this wager of mine that I’ll be able to farm a garden big enough to feed a family while still working full-time (80% full-time) as an engineer. My secondary objective is much more pretentious: I want to transfer to the French-speaking internet all the experience and resources I can from the very vast corpus of resources and techniques for new, small-scale, organic farming from the English-speaking internet. My ultimate goal (apart from the obvious selfless contribution to the good of that part of humanity which happens to read French and among whom I happen to live) is that there is a chance that like-minded people might get to know me, and offer me to participate in projects involving local, small-scale, organic farming.

The name “l’arpent nourricier” translates to “the nurturing acre”. It is too bad that the term “nourricier” in French only conveys the “food” idea, and not the “care” idea that “nurturing” implies. It would have been an even better name.

PS: do not worry about the theme, I will be changing it as soon as I can.

Let me introduce you to our new tenants in the garden: Mr Orpington, Mrs Orpington, Mrs Orpington and Mrs Orpington, a family of bantams proudly acquired this morning from an almost-neighbour (20 km drive, with the poor things in cardboard boxes).

I had been considering the possibility of having hens in the garden for a long time, and now is the great leap forward for me and them. I count on them for many things:

• eat, peck, scratch, so that after a month, the patch of prairie under their chicken tractor is devoid of any weeds and pests, and I only have to fluff the soil up a little with a broad fork and then plant my seedlings.
• dispose of kitchen scraps, saving me 90% of the work with composting
• lay eggs
• brood some of the eggs and raise the chicks so that we can eat one of our tenants now and then
• entertain us and the kids with their chickenness

In return, they count on me for:

• moving the pen now and then
• replenishing the water bowl and grain plate
• leaving them alone when I can help it

Let us hope this very unequal partnership will give us full satisfaction. After all, they can’t complain. Industrial layers generally have to live on 2/3 of an A4 sheet of paper of real estate. My hens have twenty times that.

I feel as generous as a western executive building a brand-new factory in a Kuala-Lumpur suburb.

I have good friends who are miles away from understanding that our way of life is unsustainable. The minute they learnt they would have a second child, they changed their brand-new car for the same model in station-wagon format. Now they have three kids and will have a fourth one soon, and they have upgraded their car to a mini-van to accommodate the newcomer (in addition to buying a second car for the missus).

When I try to suggest that they should try to invent other ways, all they can say is that they could not manage otherwise. Could not go to work on their bicycles; could not go on holidays by train; could not rent the big car on week-ends; could not take kids somewhere without a full army campsite in the trunk of the car.

Each time someone says (including me) that something pertaining to energy expenses, transportation, or comfort can’t be done otherwise, I feel sad for the next generation, who will have to do otherwise in any case. And if those who have four kids can’t think for the next generation, I don’t know who will.

Energy savings.

A lot of governments worldwide are promoting a gradual switch to renewables. It has long been lip service, but now it will have to be a reality, as even the big petroleum companies are revising their peak-oil estimates - latest is Shell, with 2015. In fact, some are even claiming that we have been on an oil plateau since 2006.

After a peak comes a downhill. After a plateau comes a cliff. Whatever way, the changes that we will have to make to adapt to scarcer oil will be enormous. Even with a 20% yearly growth, renewables will not be able to make a real dent in the total until it is much too late. Even nuclear energy is very very far from allowing such fast ramp-ups.

Let us just take the catastrophic example of bioethanol. Just to reach the 10% bioethanol ratio in US gas tanks, an enormous proportion of corn production has been diverted to be burnt instead of eaten. By an interesting cascade effect, this has sent the price of food skyrocketing worldwide.

A 10% saving in fuel burn can be achieved by simply driving 120 kph instead of 130 kph, therefore losing five minutes for every hour of the trip. Have you never started your trip five minutes late or lingered five minutes along the way sipping a coffee? Why are you in such a hurry anyway? I’d rather take five more minutes for every trip I make than see famin riots all around the world because my pathetic 10% bioethanol has tripled the price of wheat…

Agrofuels are not the way. Nuclear power is not the way. Coal-to-liquids is not the way. Even wind power is not the way.

What then?

As I have said: power savings. Like it is much easier to save a dollar than ask it from one’s boss, likewise is it much much simpler to save energy than to make more. Even a 10% reduction can have great relieving consequences (see above). But I prefer the big cuts. The ones that save 50% or 75%. Let us list some of the things people can do:

• quit flying. One round-trip across the Atlantic costs you your yearly Kyoto quota. Unless you are prepared to quit driving or live in an unheated house to compensate for the trip, you’d better find nice places and people to visit nearer to you (I am sure they exist — keep looking).
• quit driving. As I have written before, driving is not faster than riding anyway. At least, carpool. Drive shorter trips. The longest trip I now drive is the one to the train station (10 km). And most times, I ride there anyway.
• drastically cut on home heating. Stack up your warm quilts and allow the temperature to drop to 15°C/59F in your bedroom. Reef you heated real estate in winter: have the kids sleep in the same bedroom, work in the living room, and stop heating two or three rooms. Consider setting aside one dollar for insulation improvements for every five dollars spent on the heating bill.
• telecommute. Office buildings and factories are very bad in terms of energy efficiency. And you’ll be able to sell your car.
• eat better, eat local, eat less meat, eat less. The ‘less meat’ factor along with the ‘eat local’ factor allow to considerably reduce the energy bill and the environmental footprint in general. Better food may mean ‘more expensive’ (although that is not always the case when you can eat local if you can avoid the distribution network), but because you will eat less meat and less food in general, the overall budget will be reduced.

Look at the list above: none of the items require any money. Power savings are the cheapest renewable energy source. And believe me, the psychological comfort cost is much lower than people anticipate. At least if you can do these things for moral reasons before being forced into doing them by financial reasons. And if anyone tells you that these things can’t be done, just know that they will be done in the near future, that much is absolutely certain.

Now I must go to my boss with these arguments and ask him when on earth he intends to arrange things for me to telecommute.

Day after day, I am more deeply disturbed by the contradictions between our speech and our actions on the environment front. Every time I hear or see someone complaining about the state of the environment, it seems there is always a third-party that can conveniently be blamed for the situation. Let us pick a few examples:

• the price of gasoline: Chinese growth.
• deforestation: Brazilian peasants.
• water pollution: farmers and agribusiness.
• nuclear plants: the nuclear lobby.
• overfishing: those stupid fishermen.
• biodiversity: sprawling third-world mega-cities
• lack of investment in renewables: the government
• financial insanity: those greedy stock-exchange traders
• ad lib.

No need to use a microscope to see that in each instance, we are a link in the chain that leads to the disorder decried. We drive cars, we eat beef or fish, we prefer to buy the cheaper good, we use electricity and we would not want its price doubled overnight, we want our savings to generate an income, etc.

Just like a throng pushing towards the exit can trample or suffocate dozens of people without anyone actually pushing that hard, each time we are a part of one of these chains, our weight adds up to the weight of all the other actors, putting an enormous stress on the end-links until the Earth gives in. The Brazilian lumberjack felling a 200-ft tall tree is no more guilty than his boss, his boss’s stakeholder, or me.

This is not about buying hybrid cars or compact fluorescent light bulbs. It is not about buying organic or fair trade once in a while. ‘Buying’ is the problem; not the solution.

Climatologists, energy experts, agronomists, social workers: they are not talking about a 20% change in fifty years, but about an 80% change in five years. It is about stopping before doing anything and ask myself: if seven billion people behaved like I am about to do, how would the world end up?

Somehow, it is a moral obligation to change radically right now, so that whatever catastrophes happen, I will have tried my best. And if catastrophes don’t happen, then I will jokingly congratulate myself on saving the world. But there is no carrying on pretending. Fortunately, there are tons of things I can do.

Self-catering is the cultural norm

You have a kitchen. You buy your food, but you cook your meals. And you know you would not relinquish your kitchen and always eat out or call a caterer or buy instant food because:

• you could not afford it (*)
• you’d lose the pleasure of cooking
• you’d lose on quality
• you would not really know what went in the meals you eat

Why cook and not grow?

Maybe agricultural practices of olden times were inefficient enough that any job at the factory paid more food that one could grow otherwise. I doubt that. I would rather say that the social conditions drove people out of the land and into factories regardless of the economic interest for them. In any case, new techniques and practices (mulching, crop rotations, polyculture, cover crops) have considerably reduced the labour needed to grow food on the garden scale since the time when our society bifurcated from distributed micro-agriculture to the ugly industrial model which is currently ruining our lives, the planet, and our kids’ future.

I say that, just like we can show that the average speed of a car is not much higher than that of a bicycle if we count the time one works to pay for the car, we can show that the time one works to pay for food is not much shorter than the time it would take to grow said food (**).

Obviously, I have taken the real-estate factor out of the computation. Not everybody can afford 300 square meters of vegetable garden + 500 square meters of cereals and another acre of grassland for one ewe. This is another matter and relates to a future post on why we pack people into cities in the era of the internet.

My project for 2008

I wager that personal agriculture can make a new dent in the over-centralized, over-specialized, industrial model, just like personal computers wiped out mainframe systems when nobody expected them. In 2008, I will try to prove something: I will spend one hour per day in my garden (maybe two because I am a beginner; maybe three because one must not forget the pleasure factor) and I will try to feed my family.

I will blog about my endeavour. In French. Soon.

Meanwhile, enjoy this song (by French artist Ridan) which expresses my current state of mind better than I could.

Je préfère être pauvre avec mon âme que vivre riche avec la leur ; si le blé me file du bonheur, je me ferai peut-être agriculteur

I had rather be poor with my own soul than be wealthy with theirs; if [growing] wheat makes me happy, maybe I’ll turn farmer

Footnotes

(*)