Waiting for a Chicken Tenders Platter at Applebee's...

One night last week, I had a work-related evening appointment which lasted until nearly 9 PM. I wasn't thrilled about having to fix myself dinner at that hour, so I went to an Applebee's near my house. Lately the Applebee's chain has been hosting live music at some of its locations (along with other odd variations on the “family restaurant” theme, such as face painting.) I ordered my usual and waited.

As I waited I heard a young woman, a solo acoustic singer-songwriter type who was strumming away on her guitar and singing lyrics of the “confessional” sort. Most people were oblivious to her, but because she was situated next to the bar, some of the patrons there applauded her at the end of each song she sang. One middle-aged man was paying particular attention to her, repeatedly asking her if she would come away to Australia with him. Later on he began to harmonize with her, contributing “oohs” and “ahhs” that were actually in key, surprisingly enough. Still, his “contributions” got on my nerves, and I was glad that I was sitting several tables away. At one point, the man asked her, “Can you rock out?!” “Yeah, when I have my band!” was her answer.

I found myself asking myself why this woman was singing at an Applebee's on a week night. This led to the larger question of why there were so many people like her, both male and female, whose chosen ambition was to make it big as rock or pop stars or singer-songwriters. After all, the field is very crowded and after a while, everyone starts to sound the same. “Making it” in the business has come to mean being signed by some major record label, and becoming rich and famous shortly thereafter. But the music “industry” has many gatekeepers who have turned music into a standardized, commoditized package consisting of a limited selection of musical “flavors.” I am sure that it's very hard for an artist to be widely heard outside the dominant system.

What of those who are outside the dominant system? It seems to me that one key to their continued existence (and happiness) is that they've lowered or altered their expectations of what they want to get out of their music. They have turned their backs on trying to be famous. If they are trying to make a living, it's via teaching (or busking) or performing at weddings and other functions – and they have a backup “day job.” Otherwise, they play just for the fun of it. (Maybe that's what that woman at Applebee's was doing.)

This got me thinking about blogging. The same sorts of questions could be asked of many bloggers, especially the left-leaning, anti-materialist sort who write politically-tinged blogs. “Why do you do it?” And, “Don't you know that you all are a dime a dozen by now? Who pays attention to you, anyway?” “You think you're gonna change the world just because you went to Guitar Center and bought a guitar and an amp?” “You think you're gonna change the world just because you started a blog?”

There's an uncomfortable reality behind these questions. One blogger said recently that in the United States, we have the illusion of freedom of speech. This is because while anyone can say almost anything they want, the chances of any ordinary person being heard by a large audience are very small. The balance of media power is still skewed very much in favor of a small number of very wealthy people who have inordinate media access, and who use that access to unrelentingly hammer home their message, their worldview, and an agenda that is harmful to many.

But there is a further problem, namely, that most of America has been advertised to death by now. As a result, most of us are jaded. In the minds of many of us, anyone who has a message must have some ulterior motive which will cost us dearly if we allow ourselves to be persuaded by the message being offered. “Besides, we've heard it all before,” many of us say. “Why should I trust you?”

I don't have easy answers to any of these questions. I have to admit that when I first started blogging, I guess I had some half-conscious idea that “I could change the world” – maybe just a little. Now I'm much less optimistic. At this time in our national and societal history, when we are facing a comprehensive predicament that will require intelligence, maturity and the starting of adult conversations that most people would rather not have, the best I can hope for is that I can engage a handful of others in an adult conversation. And I appreciate the conversations of some of my fellow bloggers, conversations which I have been privileged to join. We can think of ourselves as participants in a “house concert.”

Deepwater Event Horizon

I was sitting in a job safety training meeting this morning. The trainers challenged us all to examine our attitudes toward jobsite safety, especially attacking the assumption which they believe to be prevalent among many employees that “what really matters to our company is the bottom line. If safety interferes with the bottom line, then safety has to take a back seat.” The trainers emphatically stated that at their jobsite, safety is always first.

This got me thinking about the recent deepwater oil well blowout and sinking of the British Petroleum mobile rig Deepwater Horizon. I haven't been able to follow the story as closely as I should, but I do know a few things, namely, that the sinking of the rig killed eleven people onboard; that according to reliable sources, the rig was the deepest in the world; and that for years its owner, BP, had fought the sort of safety regulations that would have prevented a disaster of the magnitude we now see. The ruptured well is leaking between 5000 and 25,000 barrels of oil per day at present (depending on whose estimate you believe), and has leaked enough oil to form a slick bigger than Rhode Island. BP's present efforts at inserting a concrete cap on the sea floor will only deal with one source of leakage; by now there are several. And there is a chance that the cap will not work as intended. Moreover, it may be months before BP can stop the leak fully. Lastly, this massive oil leak comes during both the spawning season for a lot of sea wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico, and the beginning of the tropical storm season in the Atlantic.

Although I am an engineer, I am by no means an expert on the oil industry. But I am a student of human nature. I remember the strategy of the McCain-Palin campaign in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and how the Republicans and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News blamed high energy prices on “excessive” Democratic/leftist concerns over the environment. The Republican message was simple: “Drill here, drill now, pay less,” and they wanted to open up all of the most environmentally sensitive areas in the United States and its coastal waters to oil drilling. The Gulf Coast states were all Republican-leaning “red states” in the 2008 election, with the exception of Florida.

Now they are about to be baptized in oil.

I wonder how many Republican-leaning good-ole-boy commercial fishermen will have their businesses wiped out this year by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I wonder how many coastal residents will be sickened by toxic chemicals washing up onto their beaches. I wonder how much of an economic disaster the Gulf Coast will have to face from the spill. More importantly, I wonder how many of these people will be both able and willing to connect the dots between their lifestyles and electoral choices and the oil now killing their ocean. “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” Or as J.R.R. Tolkein once wrote, “The burned hand teaches best. After that, advice about fire goes to the heart.”

That is generally true, I suppose – unless someone interferes with the lesson of the burned hand by drugging the burn sufferer. And Fox News is a willing pusher of drugs these days. Their coverage of the disaster has painted BP in a very positive, almost heroic light, while greatly exaggerating the effectiveness of the work done by BP to date to stop the oil leaks. They have also tried blame shifting, questioning whether the Obama administration's response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster was effective enough. They have downplayed reports of dead animals washing up on Gulf Coast shores, saying, “...even though the dead turtles and jellyfish washing ashore along the Gulf of Mexico are clean, and scientists have yet to determine what killed them, many are just sure the flow of crude unleashed by the explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon is the culprit.” And in an unbelievable display of bad timing, they have even revived the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” mantra, as stated in an opinion piece written by Newt Gingrich yesterday. I have compared Fox to a collection of drug pushers, but to publish the kind of distortions they do they must all be taking mind-altering drugs. Then again, money is a drug, and some people will do anything to get some of it.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is an example of the risks that come with trying to exploit ultra-deepwater oil reserves. Many respectable analysts do not believe that deepwater oil will save the world from a post-Peak state of affairs. But deepwater oil can make one really huge mess. How much more can the earth's oceans take before all the life in them collapses?

Sources:

• The Oil Drum | The Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

• FOXNews.com - British Petroleum Caps One of Three Gulf Oil Leaks

• Power Line - Was the Federal Response to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster Adequate?

• BP Fought Safety Measures at Deepwater Oil Rigs - ABC News

• Big Oil Fought Off New Safety Rules Before Rig Explosion

• NEWT GINGRICH: We Can't Let Gulf Spill Put An End to American Offshore Drilling

• Gulf Oil Spill a Slow-Motion Hurricane‎

• How Much Oil Has Leaked Out of Deepwater Horizon? : TreeHugger

Post-Peak Health Care - The Revival of Midwives

The global industrial economy is contracting because its resource base is contracting. This contraction is occurring throughout the First World, including the United States of America. For ordinary people experiencing everyday life in the U.S., this means that the large, complex, centralized systems for meeting our needs are becoming increasingly unaffordable. This unaffordability is an early sign that these systems are breaking down.

Mainstream health care in the U.S. is one such breaking system. Health care spending is higher in the United States than in any other industrialized nation, yet health care outcomes in the U.S. are quickly becoming the worst of any industrialized nation. In a recent study published in the medical journal Lancet, the United States placed 49^th in longevity for adult women and 45^th in longevity for adult men. This is worse than all of Western Europe, as well as countries like Peru, Chile, Libya, Costa Rica, Canada and Cuba. (Sources: “Adult mortality rate figures put Canada ahead of US‎” and “Adult mortality trends reveal massive global inequalities rise”.)

The Federal government and the media recently declared American health care to be a “crisis” needing a “solution,” but that solution turned into a mere discussion of “health insurance reform.” Out of this discussion came a law designed to force most Americans to buy health insurance. The law does not prevent insurance companies from continuing to raise their premiums to unaffordable levels, nor does it address the real problems of American health care. Health care has not been fixed in the U.S., and our system is still on its way to a massive breakdown.

Yet there are emerging, local, decentralized systems for care. These systems and approaches depend primarily on the skill of their practitioners, and do not lean heavily on expensive, technology-driven complexity of our mainstream model of medical care. Midwifery is one such system and approach. Midwifery is an ancient skill which has enjoyed thousands of years of peaceful practice, as well as periods of persecution and suppression during periods when doctor-based care was gaining ascendancy. In the U.S., the most recent period of suppression was during the early part of the 20^th century, when the American Medical Association worked to marginalize and criminalize midwifery as “the practice of medicine without a license or proper training.”

But in recent decades midwifery has experienced a resurgence, as more women have become dissatisfied with the standard doctor/hospital approach to childbearing. In our present time of economic contraction midwifery has become even more relevant, as standard health care becomes ever more expensive and ever more people lose access to this care because of loss of income.

Thus I found myself recently checking out the Birthingway College of Midwifery in Portland Oregon, as part of my ongoing coverage of post-Peak health care. I had the opportunity to meet with Holly Scholles, founder and head of the College, and she graciously agreed to be interviewed by me. We had a long and interesting discussion about the history of Birthingway, the history of midwifery in the United States, the 20^th century attacks on midwifery by the American Medical Association (as documented in the book Midwifery and Childbirth in America by Judith Rooks), and the present state of the practice of midwifery. Some interesting facts came out, such as the fact that outcomes with midwives practicing according to modern techniques are better than outcomes for doctor/hospital-based births; the fact that births by caesarian section have risen drastically over the last two decades, even though historically they were necessary on only five to fifteen percent of cases, and the fact that the introduction of expensive medical technologies has not necessarily improved birth outcomes overall.

Holly took me on a tour of the College, where I saw a community lactation coaching center, available free of charge to residents from low-income neighborhoods; an impressively well-stocked library full of medical journals, training media and books, and computers with access to online resources; a mock “birth center” complete with beds; and an herb garden for the growing of medicinal plants used in childbirth. The herb garden is interesting, because this interest in herbs is also shared by health care practitioners who are part of the Cuban health-care system. Forward-thinking groups such as these are actively building their knowledge of medicinal herbs, a useful thing in times in which many standard Western pharmaceuticals may no longer be available.

Birthingway is a good example of many useful elements of post-Peak adaptation, and not just in relation to health care. First, they are an example of people who know a vital, necessary skill, and who know how to apply it in an increasingly low-tech world. Secondly, they are part of the continuation and preservation of a useful body of knowledge. Third, they are an example of an emergent, grass-roots, bottom-up response to needs in both health care and education. Holly and I discussed all of these elements in our interview, and I hope to touch on these in more depth in a future post.

For further reading, feel free to check these links:

• Harvard Public Health Review/Summer 2002

• At Least U.S. Health Care Works For Somebody - Health Insurance Profits Soar in Q1 2010

• Alternative Health Care Flourishes in the Caribbean

As to the interview, a podcast of it can be found at the Internet Archive, at “Post-Peak Healthcare - The Revival of Midwives.” (I have one confession: being a newbie podcaster, I failed to make sure my recorder's batteries were fully charged before the interview. So you'll only hear a part of it. Still, there's over 45 minutes of audio there. And I am planning to conduct a follow-up interview to cover things that were missed. There will also soon be a transcript of this week's interview.)

There's also a short video clip of my visit on Vimeo, or you can watch it below:

Post-Peak Health Care - The Revival of Midwives from TH in SoC on Vimeo.

Hallucinating Riots

On Ran Prieur's website, there is a link to an online article from the May 2010 issue of Reason Magazine, titled, “Disaster Utopianism.” It is, among other things, a critique of CNN's coverage of the aftermath of the January earthquake in Haiti, where “news” correspondents talked of “chaotic crowds,” “chaotic scrambles,” and the need for “crowd control of...thousands of desperate people.” But the images of calm, orderly people recorded by the CNN cameras contradicted the attempts by CNN correspondents to portray Haiti as out of control.

This contradiction was noticed by a number of people, and not just those employed by Reason Magazine. Sasha Kramer, director of the Haitian nonprofit SOIL, described the calm, orderly solidarity of ordinary black Haitians after the quake. And in her post titled, “"The Quake"– Haiti Through The Distorted Lenses of PBS' Frontline,” blogger Chantal Laurent also noted that there are many discrepancies between the official American version of the story of Haiti and the reality on the ground – discrepancies whose effect is to present a magnified portrait of the United States as some kind of savior to a poor, backward, unstable nation. The American mainstream media portrayal of Haiti can best be summed up in this sarcastic statement from Reason Magazine: “Send cops to contain this peaceful crowd!”

So far that portrayal has worked – not many people have questioned the reasons for sending over 10,000 armed U.S. troops to Haiti to “restore order.” This is unlike Iraq, which the U.S. invaded because the Iraqi government “had ties to Al-Qaeda,” and “was building weapons of mass destruction.” When those statements were proven false, there was a brief period of much “hand-wringing” on the part of everyone in power, both in the mainstream media (except for Rupert Murdoch and Fox “News”) and in the Federal Government as they “wondered” how they could have made such a huge “mistake.” In the case of Haiti, where a major magazine has questioned how coverage of the situation could have been so inaccurate, the reasons cited have been rather vague. Reason Magazine blames the error on “cultural truisms” and ingrained prejudices that prevent affluent Anglo news reporters from seeing the reality right in front of their eyes.

Those reasons are certainly valid and operative in mainstream American media, where blond, blue-eyed survivors of disasters are described as “foraging for supplies” and “digging out from under the rubble,” but dark-skinned survivors performing the same actions are described as “looting” and “breaking and entering.” But I want to suggest another reason for this breakdown in perception, a reason which has been explored only by a handful of analysts.

Upton Sinclair once said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” A corollary statement could go like this: “It is easy to get a man to see the world a certain way if his salary depends on it.” It is instructive to ask why the American mainstream media see Haiti the way they do, and why the American media are working to make the rest of us see Haiti the way they do. My short answer is this: “Follow the money.” To those who want a more accurate understanding of the world, I'd like to suggest that it is time for us to make a natural resource map of Haiti, along with a map or database of foreign companies operating there – especially companies involved in mining and other resource extraction, or in industrial factory farming for export. It is time for us to study the conditions under which these companies operate, as well as the flows of money and capital from company to company and between the companies and outside governments such as the United States and the other member nations of the U.N Security Council.

As we try to construct such a database, we notice certain companies right off the bat, companies such as Eurasian Minerals, which has had a strong interest in Haiti for over three years (and possibly much longer), as noted in an article originally published in the South China Morning Post and republished on the HaitiAnalysis.com and “Preval Haiti” websites. That article featured an interview with a Mr. Keith Laskowski, a geologist for Eurasian, who was beside himself with excitement at the possibilities of exploiting Haiti's potential for gold mining. Eurasian Minerals' interest in Haitian gold is also described in articles published in 2009, such as “Eurasian Minerals: The Early Bird Once Again Gets the Worm” and “Eurasian Minerals Discovers Two New High-Grade Copper-Silver-Gold Prospects at Treuil Property, Haiti.” Eurasian Minerals is by no means the only company interested in Haiti's mineral wealth; there are also several Canadian mining firms operating in that country.

Now that the earthquake has occurred, Eurasian Minerals and investors such as IFC and the World Bank have cast their gold-lust in a softer, more humanitarian light, as noted in articles like this: “IFC invests in Eurasian Minerals to support Haiti recovery.” This article states that “...this investment reaffirms IFC's commitment to social and economic growth in Haiti. It also comes at a critical time for supporting the country's recovery through private sector participation.”

The earthquake seems to have benefited others interested in extracting Haiti's natural resources, people such as oil prospectors, as revealed in these articles: “Haiti quake may have revealed oil reserves,” and “Haiti: Bonanza for Foreign Mining Companies.” Indeed, the earthquake and subsequent American occupation seem to have benefited everyone except the ordinary resident Haitians, and the promises of foreign companies and governments to use Haiti's resources to rebuild Haiti sound as hollow as American promises to use Iraqi oil to rebuild Iraq after the American invasion.

Eurasian Minerals, gold and oil are three dots that can be connected to form an accurate picture of the real reasons for American (and First World) interest and involvement in Haiti. There are other “dots” to connect, for those who have the time. Many of those “dots” can be found on the blog The Haitian Blogger, and in the Black Agenda Report. But even if you only do your own digging, I suspect that you'll find lots of verifiable, multiply-corroborated “dots” to connect, and that the resource “dots” can be connected with geopolitical and governmental “dots” to form some eye-catching combinations. How about it? Anyone over at Energy Bulletin or The Oil Drum interested in playing a game of connect-the-dots?

So what does this have to do with American neighborhoods? Well, if you live in a poor or working-class or minority neighborhood, everything. Beware of the media. Especially in the aftermath of a disaster. Especially if you have things that rich outsiders might want.

Threatened Honeybees and Urban Sanctuaries

On the 20^th of March, I attended a beekeeping workshop at Zenger Farm in Southeast Portland. The class was taught by Tom Lea, one of the founders of Zenger Farm's Community Bee Group.

The workshop was a good introduction to the practice of urban beekeeping as an element of “home economics,” or the set of skills by which households can meet their own needs. There were also a couple of facts mentioned that have a huge bearing on agriculture in general and the relationship of Americans to the food they eat. First, it was said that a majority of Americans kept bees from the time of the Revolution until just after World War Two. Beekeeping was an art handed down through the oral transmission of “bee lore” and through apprenticeship. Then modern industrial factory farming arose and wiped out the large-scale practice of keeping bees, as people traded their skills for the convenience of the supermarket. Only in recent years, as the weaknesses of the industrial food system have become widely reported, have people begun to revive their interest in things like beekeeping.

And that brings up the second point. Mr. Lea mentioned the threat of colony collapse syndrome, and placed the blame for this syndrome squarely on the large-scale agribusiness practice of shipping bees hundreds to thousands of miles each year to pollinate crops at various farms. (This is also mentioned in a Wikipedia article that describes the practice of “migratory beekeeping” and the fact that it artificially boosts crop production on farms.) In his words,

When you're dealing with smaller scale agriculture, you don't have the pests that you have with agribusiness, because you don't travel as much. With beekeeping, the bees are being transferred down to, for instance, orchards in California for almond pollination, and all the diseases are transferred from one hive to another, and then they're taken back to their homes. So diseases are spread around like nobody's business...But this [colony collapse] is just the canary in the coal mine. All agribusiness is like this; everything is moved around much more, and on such a large scale that the pests, viruses, diseases and stress that we see in honeybees are now being experienced in every area of agriculture.

It's not something that can go on forever. At some point, different areas of agriculture will collapse as we are seeing with honeybees. It's a perfect storm... [Emphasis added]

In other words, the very practices of industrial agribusiness generate consequences that threaten the very existence of industrial agribusiness. And colony collapse, along with the rapid spread of plant and animal disease, are consequences of large-scale, fossil fuel-driven industrial agriculture and the transport of plants, animals and insects over thousands of miles.

Mr. Lea held out hope that small-scale agricultural practitioners can provide a defense and remedy for the dangers posed by industrial agribusiness. Toward that end, his workshop offered a number of resources for people who want to get into urban beekeeping. Some of these are:

• www.orsba.org, the Oregon State Beekeepers' Association

• www.biobees.com, a website by Phil Chandler in the United Kingdom

• www.beesource.com, the primary U.S. based beekeeping website and forum

• www.Anarchyapiaries.com, by Sam Comfort of upstate New York

• www.bushbees.com, by Michael Bush of Nebraska,

• and www.beethinking.com, by Matt Reed from Portland, Oregon.

I also made a video of excerpts from the workshop. You can watch it on YouTube at this address.

Video Troubles and Citizen Journalists

This weekend I created another video for your enjoyment. Once again, however, the process of uploading that video is anything but enjoyable. Here's the deal:

I made the video from clips I shot three weeks ago. The problem is, I wanted to add a little music to my work. I knew that the only way I could add music without paying huge royalties was to use music that was published under some form of Creative Commons license. So I logged on to Magnatune, because I knew that all the music published through Magnatune is released under Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses to people who want to use the music for non-commercial applications. (That certainly applies to me. I haven't made a dime from this blog. Then again, I haven't charged a dime either.)

I have a couple of CD's of a vocal group that I heard about via Magnatune. Two of their songs seemed to fit my video quite well, so I looked up Magnatune's policy on using their music in noncommercial videos posted online. I was surprised to learn that there are restrictions on the use of Magnatune music in videos hosted on commercial, for-profit sites like YouTube and Vimeo. I think this is because of the “rights” such sites assert and claim on material hosted by them. (I suppose I shouldn't have been so naïve, but then again in many things I'm still a newbie.)

As I read the Magnatune policy, it dawned on me that these restrictions don't apply to videos hosted on non-for-profit sites like the Internet Archive. (At least, I think they don't.) But one problem with the Internet Archive is that it doesn't seem to like Linux users. My computer runs on Linux most of the time. My machine is five years old, and although it came with Microsoft Windows XP when I bought it, I've been trying to move away from expensive dependency on Microsoft. Much of the trouble I've had with trying to upload video to the Internet Archive has had to do with the fact that their site is not friendly to computers that run on Linux or UNIX. They are not the only such site. My troubles uploading to Vimeo were for this very cause; the only reason I was able to upload my “Managing Trees, Stormwater and Hunger” video was that I finally gave up and ran my computer on Windows XP.

All of this had me thinking as I tore myself away from the computer screen and headed for my bedroom in the wee hours of this morning. First, about the Internet Archive itself. After all, the Archive is a product of the protest against the excesses of “digital rights management,” the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the attempt to destroy the public domain in order to create a culture in which everyone must pay rent in order to participate. The Internet Archive is a big promoter of open-source file formats and the Creative Commons licensing model. So why does their site require the use of proprietary software for optimum success in uploading video files? I mean, one can use a computer running Linux, but what happens if after waiting all night for your files to upload, you fail because you weren't using Windows? Believe me, I speak from experience!

But the Internet Archive is but a subset of a larger problem. Linux has proven itself as a stable, capable operating system for computers both large and small. Linux is even being offered pre-loaded on new laptops and notebooks sold in the U.S. nowadays. (By the way, a computer pre-loaded with Linux can be quite a bit cheaper than a computer pre-loaded with the latest version of Microsoft Windows.) And there are entire suites of free, open-source software (such as OpenOffice) available for users worldwide.

All of these things mean that access to computers and to the digital world is within the reach of an ever-larger population – including ever-more people of very limited means otherwise. This includes people in poor countries and poor communities in the U.S. who could become potential citizen journalists, telling their stories accurately and authentically, and making a valuable contribution in forming an accurate picture of our world.

But this access and the democratization of digital media is hindered even today by the existence of proprietary digital systems that restrict access so that their creators can collect rents. This is why you can't buy a DVD from a store in the U.S. and play it in the video player that comes standard with Ubuntu Linux. This is why you can't upload a video to Vimeo from a machine that has only Linux installed. This is why until recently you couldn't even view some sites from a computer that was running on Linux. It's not that Linux is bad. It's just that it's free – and allowing people to meet their needs via a thing that's free is bad for the profit margins of the rentier class. This is the reason for the existence of obstacles to the use of free things. So rising citizen journalists in poor communities and poor countries are nipped in the bud – because they can't afford to pay rent to Microsoft.

The rentier mentality pervades almost all other areas of life in America these days. Take driving, for instance. In most states, if you want to get around, you must buy a car. If you do buy a car, not only are you charged registration, but in some states you are also charged a vehicle excise tax on top of registration fees. The excise tax must be paid even if you never drive the car. If you actually drive anywhere, you must carry insurance. Cars nowadays depreciate in value fairly rapidly, so eventually you will wind up needing a new car. In other words, there are fairly substantial “rents” paid to various persons for the privilege of driving a car. Yet if you can't afford these rents, there are almost no other options than driving. Many places still aren't bike-friendly.

Or take health care. People in this country are dying from lack of affordable access to medical care. This is largely due to the rent-seeking of various bodies – the pharmaceutical companies who squeeze the last bit of profit from their patented medicines, the medical technology companies who push their latest and greatest machines, and the health insurance “industry” which does next to nothing, yet has now been gifted with a national law that requires most of us to buy health insurance. On a similar line, there are the efforts by industrial agribusiness to push everyone into reliance on GMO crops, in order to extract rent from us all for the “privilege” of eating the food made from these crops.

The rentier class is the ultimate example of a something-for-nothing way of life, in which people who do absolutely nothing useful are supported by the enforced contributions of millions of others who are under some sort of specious legal obligation to pay their livelihoods to the rentiers. As their appetite grows, so do the obligations they place on the rest of us. Are you in rags? Sleeping under a bridge? Do your children have skinny arms and distended bellies, like pictures of malnourished people in some Third World country? It matters not at all to the rentiers, as long as you keep paying up.

Leaving the Cubicle for the Farm (In The City), Part 2

This post is part 2 of a transcript of an interview I did three weeks ago with Josh Volk, urban farming consultant and proprietor of Slow Hand Farm. Part 1 can be found here. For the sake of continuity, I have included all of Part 1 as part of today's post.

Speaking of Part 1, I noticed that after I published that post, the Energy Bulletin website started churning out articles covering many of the same things discussed in my post, including the idea of cities putting together “diggable databases” of urban plots available for cultivation as the city of Portland has done. I'm glad I could be something of a ghostwriting inspiration to the folks at Energy Bulletin. (Then again, thievery is a form of flattery, isn't it?)

And now for Part 2. As usual, my questions and comments are in bold type.

What are the first steps for someone who wants to transition into urban farming as a career?

The first thing is to ask what your goals are. In other words, why are you doing this? What do you want to be doing day by day? Second, ask yourself what you need to get out of it, both financially and otherwise. Lastly, there is learning the skills. This depends heavily on how much money and space you have to play with.

When I first started, I met with this guy named Jac Smit, and he had an organization called the Urban Agriculture Network, which I think is still going – he died last year – but he had been working on urban agriculture projects. It turned out that he was not working on things in the United States – there really wasn't much going on in the United States at the time, but in a lot of other countries, they were fairly far along, particularly in a lot of developing countries, partly out of necessity.

He said one of the problems he saw in the United States was that most of the people that were interested in urban agriculture came from an urban background and probably came from a gardening background. They didn't know a whole lot about production, and didn't have the same mindset or skill set as a farmer who is producing goods. They were just growing things for their own consumption. So he said, “If you're really interested in urban agriculture, you should go and you should learn farming – and then bring that back into the urban setting,” because it's an appropriate thing, and that was one of the things that he saw that was working in developing countries – a lot of the people coming into cities were very recent migrants and had an agricultural background already.

So I took that advice and I went and apprenticed on a farm. And I've kind of been stuck in that farming thing for more than ten years now, learning the production end, and I feel like I'm just starting to get back to it [urban farming]. In some ways I'm actually a little less excited about it now, because I know some more of the realities and some of the reasons why it doesn't work as well. But I haven't given up on it, so I'm still looking at it and trying to figure out how I think it fits in best.

It's been about fifteen years since I talked to Jac Smit, and I think in that time period, the landscape has changed a lot, and there are a lot more people who are looking at urban farming, and there are more people coming in and doing urban agriculture projects with a production background, but there are still a lot of people doing it without that background. So that's one place where you could start – go to some production farms, whether in the city or outside the city, and just learn the techniques they're using and try to apply that to a smaller scale.

What were some of the difficulties you encountered that made you less enthusiastic as time passed?

One thing is that I'm excited about growing a lot of different things. If you are trying to do production in an urban environment, land is very expensive – space is very expensive – and water is expensive. There's a very limited subset of crops, I think, that make sense for a limited space. There's a lot of crops that take up a lot of space, so there are some things where I'm not sure how they fit into the urban setting, and I wasn't aware before that there were those differences, or maybe how big those differences were.

For example, the urban agriculture projects that I've seen that have been the most successful generally concentrate on something like salad greens, because you can grow a lot of salad greens in a very small space. And people don't eat as much by pound of salad greens as they eat of something like wheat. In 100 square feet you might be able to get a couple hundred servings of salad greens, whereas with wheat you could get something on the order of ten servings. That's a big difference, and the price of salad greens is probably at least five if not ten or twenty times as high as the price of wheat. So when you think about what you're going to do with an expensive, limited amount of space, there are some limitations there.

What does it take to get access to land in the city? Say Portland, for example?

There's a bunch of different models I see. Some people just outright buy a spot and own it. I have friends who just bought a house that sits on six tenths of an acre. I don't think there's a lot of places like that left in Portland, but there are still places like that. If they really wanted to push it, as a couple, they could certainly make a living off that amount of space. Other people might have a small yard of their own or they might have multiple small yards, and they're bartering that space, either because the people want to see things grown on it, or they want a share of the produce coming from it. And that's questionably legal right now, although the zoning will probably change in the near future to make it legal.

Why is it not quite legal right now?

It's questionable whether the zoning allows you to grow something and sell it on your property. You can probably argue that you can grow it and sell it, but the way that you sell it would have to be off the property. So if you were trying to distribute it directly on the property, that would probably make it illegal. It could probably be argued – although I'm not sure anyone would do this – that it's not even really legal to grow it on your property. Certainly if your neighbors were complaining, they would have a case, although they would probably not win, advocating that you shouldn't be doing what you're doing.

That you shouldn't be growing things on your property?

Not that you shouldn't be growing things, but that you shouldn't be growing them commercially. It's the commercial designation that makes it legal or not legal, because the space is zoned residential; it's not zoned commercial or agricultural. The same thing goes for commercial spaces, because they're zoned for a particular type of commercial use and they're not zoned for agriculture. Contamination is another issue you have to look at, because there are a lot of contaminated soils in urban areas and concentrations of different kinds of chemicals, particularly lead paint.

So another way people get land is more temporary – but land owned by a developer or even publicly owned land has a designated use, yet isn't going to be put to that use for a few years. So the owners may allow that land to be used for a period of time to grow things until they're ready to build their project on the land. I know a few people who are farming on such land; one group in North Portland is doing that with a church property where the church is going to expand, but they're probably not going to do it for another four or five years, so in the interim they're letting folks grow crops on the land.

And the County has a certain amount of tax-foreclosed land, and they make some of that available to organizations that want to do urban agriculture projects. Typically, these are non-profit – but a food production “business” (for lack of a better word) wouldn't necessarily have to be for profit; you could run it in some sense as a non-profit, and in an urban setting, that might actually make more sense, especially as you're not likely to make much of a profit anyway.

How do you find this land? Do you go on real estate websites to find properties like this that people aren't intending to use for a while?

I think one of the things that's an important distinction between urban agriculture and other types of agriculture is that there's a community aspect to it, and I think networking is important. Networking is how those lands and spaces get identified. It's probably more word-of-mouth than anything else. Once you get connected into a community of people that are talking about that and you start putting it out there that you're looking for space or that you have a project you want to do, you start running into people that say, “Oh, I know a spot. You can check with this person,...” or, “I have a spot. How could we work something out?” That's what makes urban agriculture work in a way that rural agriculture isn't working right now.

I think there probably are efforts – I can't recall any off the top of my head – but I think there are people who want to make clearing houses and create lists of available land. There was an effort through the City – I'm forgetting the name – I think it was the “Diggable City” project that tried to identify land a few years ago. But as far as the people I know who are actually doing urban agriculture projects, it's been more word-of-mouth, or people finding each other through existing networks.

You say that rural agriculture is not working that way – is rural agriculture failing in the United States?

In general, I think that it is, because I think what's happened is that the consolidation that's happened in terms of family-scale farms being consolidated into larger and larger industrial corporate factory farms has torn apart the rural community. So there's not a whole lot of “community” in rural communities anymore. That's a big issue, because it has switched the population base in the U.S. from a rural one to an urban population. This has gutted rural communities. It has also disconnected rural communities from urban markets – it has put a couple more layers of distribution systems between the two, because consolidation makes those operations so large that they have to distribute over a wider area in order to make their business work. That has lengthened ties and broken ties in a lot of communities.

If I were to look at the whole picture, I would say that strengthening the rural communities and going back to a rural agriculture that makes more sense is in most ways more important than thinking about how to do urban agriculture appropriately – because there is land there, and it's inexpensive land. If instead of trying to concentrate everybody into a few large urban centers, and figuring out how to make that urban land produce intensively for those people, we could spread those people out more so that the resulting population centers had more of a land base and didn't have to work so intensively, I think that would be ecologically a better model.

Let's say someone decides they want to move out to a rural area. They look on “Oregon Lands for Sale” and see a nice property, and they say, “Let's go for it, babe,” and they move out there. What are the financial barriers and pitfalls that might drive them back into the city? I know that you're not going to get rich from farming...

I don't think it's impossible to get rich, but I think you have to be more of a businessperson than just an idealist. You'd really have to concentrate on what it is that you're growing and how you're doing it, and take advantage of the things that a lot of other kinds of businesses take advantage of in order to make the people who own the business wealthy.

To get back to the pitfalls of moving out to a rural place, one is that there is still a general movement – although it's slowing down – toward consolidation in agriculture, and a movement from rural areas to the cities. So finding rural areas where that's not the case so much and trying to start a reversal – that's one challenge, or trying to become part of a movement that is reversing that trend in the particular area that you're moving to. To me that's a really difficult thing to predict – you can try to move to a place and become part of the community there, but it's a bit of a gamble.

I know farming folks, for example, who live on the south coast of Oregon, and they've lived there for their entire lives, and just now those communities are starting to grow again. They've been on a large downward slide for a long time, and now it's starting to come around again to where they have markets that they didn't have before for their produce. Before, they were more focused on exporting stuff and figuring out how to get it to the urban centers, and now they can actually market their goods within the area because of the change in the community.

How does someone secure land without going into debt, or without going deeply into debt? Or is that impossible right now?

I don't know if it's impossible right now – there's actually a blog by a guy named Andy Griffin, and he writes this blog called The Ladybug Letter. The writing is excellent; he doesn't post very often, but when he posts essays, they're really good. One of the last posts that he made was about that question. He's been farming in the Salinas area of California, which is some of the most expensive agricultural land in the country. He doesn't own any of his land.

He frames his essay in the form of a letter to these folks he heard on the radio. So he hears a young business student interviewed on the radio, and this business student is coming out college at a time when the economy is as bad as it's ever been in this person's lifetime. And the interviewer is asking this person how this is going to affect what the person will do once he gets out of business school, and he answers that he has a backup plan – “find some land with a bunch of friends and start a farm.”

So Andy's essay is his advice to this person, and the advice is, “Don't buy land.” There are enough people out there who own land and want something grown on it and are willing to lease it. From a business point of view, it's better to have the flexibility to leave the land if it's not productive in the way that you want it to be productive, and it's less expensive to lease the land than to buy it, and to get all your capital tied up in the land. You need your capital to be available for the operation of your business. His advice – and I think that in a lot of situations, it's very good advice – is to look for other options besides buying.

Try to find good long-term lease situations on good land, but leave things flexible, particularly if you're growing annual crops. It's more difficult to be flexible when you're growing perennials and tree crops. But with annuals, although this is not ideal, you can spend a year or two getting the land into good enough shape to produce profitably, and then pay off your lease in two or three years of crop production. And if the lease terms go longer than that, you're basically just making money. If the terms don't go longer, you haven't lost any money. But if you buy the land, you could get two or three years into working it and realize that the land doesn't produce what you want it to produce, and you'd be stuck with this piece that you have to keep putting excess money into.

Both from a rural and an urban standpoint, is it possible for a person without debts to pay the yearly expenses of life in the United States by farming?

Oh, sure, yeah! But part of it also goes back to that question of “What do you want to be doing from day to day?”, and “What do you want to be growing?” Is it possible in every situation everywhere? No, but farming isn't inherently not profitable. But there are certain segments of farming and ways of farming which are not profitable, yet common.

Ways of farming that are both common and unprofitable...how do they survive?

Well, most of them survive through subsidies. And there are all kinds of subsidies – some people subsidize themselves through holding other jobs, and some people are subsidized through the government.

But they're basically doing something that's unsustainable in the long run?

Economically, yeah, unless the subsidies stay there.

That brings up this question: a lot of Western farming is basically mining the soil. How do we “close the loop”? I read The Humanure Handbook and other literature along that line, and it seems like that's what we'll have to go back to if this is going to be viable. And there are podcasts on Deconstructing Dinner where they talk about decreasing concentrations of certain minerals in crops. So how do we close the loop? Is anyone working on that?

I think lots of people are working on it. It's a difficult question – are you familiar with biodynamic farming? Do you know who Rudolf Steiner is?

No...

Rudolf Steiner was a guy who worked on a lot of different things. He was able to understand the complete picture regarding many things. He worked on biodynamic agriculture. One of its primary tenets is that you create the farm as a closed system. He says something important when he says that this is the goal; it's not necessarily something that's going to happen. But if your goal is to always try to work toward the farm as a closed system in itself, so that nutrients aren't leaving the system and you're not having to import nutrients, you'll be creating a better form of agriculture.

So the whole biodynamic community is working on that. There are also a lot of people outside the biodynamic community – in organic agriculture, in particular – that have that same thought process. The people who are trying to do this properly who are at the same time trying to sustain themselves economically are always balancing those two things, because our present economic system basically doesn't reward that in any way. Instead, it rewards the “mining” system.

That's maybe one of the drawbacks of leasing as opposed to owning land, although it's not an intrinsic drawback. But the tendency with leased land would be to take that mining approach, because you won't necessarily see any kind of payback [from restoring the soil] as opposed to working the land for a longer period of time.

The humanure concept is an important one – to understand that anything people eat that's going off the farm – if you're not capturing that waste and putting it back into the system, then it's a loss, basically. You can try to limit the losses in every other area, but if you don't address this loss, you can't recapture it without mining somewhere else to bring nutrients in.

Are there experiments in urban areas in the United States to try humanure composting for urban agriculture?

It's very controversial in organic systems, because, for example, in the Midwest – I can't remember whether it's Wisconsin or Minnesota – they've been pushing sewage sludge as a soil amendment in fields, because it's high in nutrients. But the problem with the municipal waste system – and I think there's some question of the amount of heavy metals in people's diets also – is that you're concentrating heavy metals and other contaminants into that waste. So not only are you getting nutrients onto the fields, but you're also contaminating the fields by using sludge. For those reasons, the organic community has decided that they will not allow any kind of sewage sludge in organic fields. Cleaning up the waste stream has to happen before this waste can be used on a large scale.

On a small scale, the fellow that wrote the Humanure Handbook has a good argument for it and I'm sure there are other people doing humanure composting, but because of all the points he makes in his book, I don't think very many people are willing to talk about it openly. I've met a couple of people who have admitted to trying that system, and I haven't heard of any downsides, but I haven't met a lot of people who admit to it.

* * *

That concludes the main part of my interview with Josh Volk. We talked a bit more afterward about how people can learn farming by visiting urban farms and volunteering to help (along with volunteer etiquette). We also talked about a typical day for an urban farmer (contrary to stereotype, not all farmers work from sunup to sundown, seven days a week), and discussed a few urban farmers in the Portland metro area who transport themselves and their cargo entirely by bicycle. (Obviously, this doesn't work for everyone in every situation.)

One last note: for several months now, urban agriculture has been very much on the radar screen of the mainstream media. Many news articles have focused on key individuals – “movers and shakers”, if you will – with lots of money and influence who are announcing plans to “save” dying cities in the U.S. through the promotion of urban agriculture. The interest, energy and vision of these people is often praised by the media (and by undiscerning members of the blogosphere) as a good thing, a key component of a national return to a more sustainable lifestyle.

I think such a view is totally mistaken. The beauty of urban agriculture and of other strategies of resilience now being adopted by ordinary people is that these offered a way for ordinary people to decouple from a predatory economic system so that these people wouldn't keep getting bled dry by that system. When the “big people” – the rich and influential – also “discovered” these opportunities, they saw them not as a way to live more sustainably, but as an opportunity to cash in by turning a public trend into a growth industry. Therefore, where cities like Detroit were places where people who wanted to decouple from the money economy could go to live simply, cheaply and debt free, Detroit has now been “discovered” by speculators with big plans to “do something good for the city” while making tons of money. Thus one avenue of escape from our predatory money economy has been destroyed. Ordinary people in Detroit are once again in danger of being sucked up into a system whose masters maximize profits by squeezing people to death.

What good is urban agriculture to ordinary people if it takes on all the characteristics of every other form of industrial, consolidated modern agribusiness? What good is it to be an urban farmer in Detroit or Cleveland if urban agriculture there is controlled and run by a handful of rich speculators who have swooped in and bought up all the land and you're just minimum-wage "hired help"? I commented somewhat on the disturbing activities of speculators in depressed areas of our country in two 2009 posts titled, “Is Community Resilience Possible At This Time?” and “Report From The Front Lines - 3-20-09.” More recently, a blogger named Ran Prieur also made the same observations on his blog.