If you are not sure you are ready to come into my world with the podcast below, click this link for a really good starting point in the shape of a cartoon (thanks to Charlotte). It’s funny, it’s extremely eloquent, and it is so true before christmas.
In case you can spare one hour of wasted time (commuting, washing up, walking the dog, working out), I invite you into my world:
‘What will we eat when the oil runs out?’. Lecture by Richard Heinberg. (From The Soil Association)
You may have seen it coming; I think I have reached a tipping point in my life. I want out of the treadmill of (debt- and) wage-slavery. My career as a classical engineer for the aerospace industry will have to gradually give way to a new life as a farmer. Not the intensive-type farmer. Just the type of farming that can feed family and some neighbours and leave time for whatever things I feel must be done (like continuing with the well-paying engineering work while it remains so interesting, working for LibriVox, developing websites for community initiatives, blogging, reading, raising kids, cooking meals for guests, whatever makes life the best experience possible).
Additionally, the new way of life will probably be more robust in case when we get hit by one of the looming crises (oil, finance, climate). Funny that the lifestyle I want should also probably be the life I would have to adopt sooner or later anyway, like all those who fled cities and returned to homesteads during the great depression or WWII. If no crisis comes, so much the better.
I do not think the tone of the blog will change much, but I will sure write more about my farming endeavour and try to share some of my enthusiasm.
I was trying to prepare a short post on what I thought was a clue to the ‘natural’ diet of humans. But before I started writing, I had to find documentation to back up my claims. As often, I started out with a small idea which I believed was original, and the internet opened up monumental double-doors to a gigantic library where thousands of people were discussing the very same idea and scores of other similar ideas, and had been doing so for a very long time, so that all I could do was listen (read) before talking (writing my post).
If I was left without fire nor kitchen appliances and I had to choose between:
I would probably turn a vegetarian on the spot. There is no way you can make me kill a duck with my bare hands and then tear bits of raw flesh apart with my teeth. The best I could do would probably be the egg, the worms and the crickets.
From there, I decided that without fire, humans are psychologically vegetarians. A hot steak straight from the barbecue is yummy, but a warm steak straight from the antelope is yucky.
But I am supposed to have a scientific mind, therefore I must doubt everything — starting with everything I say, because there is a very strong subjective bias.
I cannot remember when it started. Maybe the turning point was shortly after I started on my first job eleven years ago, when I explicitly told my wife that although I had one of the most prestigious degrees in France, I would not go for the associated prestigious careers. Instead of using my position to get the highest paychecks, I’d be using it to get the best quality of life possible.
Four meters. This is how long the surprise cucurbitacea near my potato patch has grown now. It must have sprouted some time in June, but I only started noticing it around the end of August when it started blooming and I could not mistake it for any old weed.
Let me take you on a detour through aerospace systems design: when we have to engineer spacecraft that will operate for twenty years in geostationary orbit without any maintenance (imagine your washing machine running 24/7 for 20 years without interruption), or when we have to design aircraft that will fly a billion flight hours without an accident (imagine your computer running for 117,000 years without hanging), we need fault-tolerance and robustness. The way we achieve this robustness is through redundancy and diversity. Whenever a system fails, there is a similar backup system that can take over (redundancy). Sometimes, even the redundant system fails eventually. The most frequent case is because there was a common design flaw in both the nominal and redundant systems. When we want to ensure robustness even against such unforeseeable events (we never know where our design will be flawed, but we always know it can be), we design another backup system that is completely dissimilar from the nominal system (diversity). Generally the backup system design is much less efficient, but much more rugged, therefore it has a lot more tolerance to off-nominal situations. This will allow the pilot to land the aircraft or give ground operators time to reconfigure the spacecraft. The more diversity we build into the system, the more robust the design will be.
I recently read an interesting analysis in a gardening book: the author was showing that there were always ‘magic’ weeds which showed up after an ecosystem had been upset, so that it always seems to be just the right weeds to improve the soil and make it ever more fertile. [more]
People living in Tokyo, San Francisco, Naples, know that maybe their house will be destroyed tomorrow and half their family will be dead. Yet they carry on with their lives. Many of them even manage to live happy lives, while they never forget altogether what might happen.
How about the rest of us? [more]
I took this picture ten years ago in Dinan (Britanny). I bet the house is still standing.
I am in awe of really old houses, and this one beats them all. My own house (at least the center part) is probably as old as this one, but nowhere as good-looking. Apart from the occasional ghost, living in an old house is a truly wonderful experience. The old stones exsude serenity and timelessness. When I know my house has been standing for close to four centuries, I can really quit worrying that I may be late in my restoration project.
