Depletion & Abundance discussion post - Part Four

Hey, we're halfway there! This section only has two chapters, so today's discussion post will be a little shorter than the last one.

So, here's the fourth discussion post for the Depletion and Abundance book club.

Chapter 9: Little House in the Suburbs. Sharon argues in this chapter that not everyone can move out to a rural area to be completely self-sufficient, it just isn't a feasible option. She also doesn't have the same sort of vitriol that Kunstler has for suburbia, but takes the more realistic stance that many people will have to make do with where they are. And for a lot of the population, that's going to be in the suburbs.

Basically, the suburbs cannot be abandoned if we still want to feed people. Since we turned all that arable farmland into tract homes, what better place to dig in and grow food than in the dirt right beneath our feet? This idea of "Little House in the Suburbs" takes the rural lifestyle, but applies it to the burbs: low-energy and sustainable.

A big issue with living in the burbs is the high cost of transportation, but if you can adapt how you get to work and limit your shopping trips (by growing much of your own food), staying put may just very well be the best option. A bigger issue is one of just being able to keep our homes. And here we need to be creative and adaptive in how we not only use our space at home, but how we share it with others, if necessary.

Essentially, your little house in the suburbs would include vegetable and herb gardens, fruit trees, and animals for meat and milk (chickens, goats, rabbits and the like). You would also want to secure a source of water, a supplemental source of heat, food storage, library (for educational materials) and perhaps a dog for protection. Make sure you have or learn additional skills that can be used for your own benefit or others in the informal economy.

How does your little house in the suburbs compare to her recommendations? If you live in a more urban area or an apartment, what are you doing to prepare yourself for being more self-sufficient?

Chapter 10: The Beauty and Necessity of the Low-Energy Home. This chapter addresses how to manage living in a world where an inconsistent energy supply is the norm. Brownouts and rolling blackouts are already common in some areas of the country, so how should you prepare yourself to adapt to this?

For many of us, plunking down $20,000 on a solar panel system isn't a likely option. Nor is setting up your own rooftop wind farm. So, instead, Sharon suggests a $2,000 budget to help you along on being more resilient to energy disruptions. Purchasing items such as insulation, insulating curtains, solar lanterns, a solar battery charger, battery powered lanterns and rechargeable batteries will help keep you comfortable and provide some lighting.

Figuring out your water cachement or how to pump your well water is wise as is alternative energy sources for cooking and heating. Having other options for transportation, such as bikes or even a fancy Extracycle will allow you to still be mobile. Additionally, it would be smart to opt for more human powered means of doing tasks like knowing how to wash your clothes in the tub and line dry.

In other words, think through all that you use that requires some form of energy and figure out how you would adapt to not having that electricity, propane, gas or oil. If you can do without or do it manually, that's great. Now you can focus your attention on the things you rely on so that you are prepared for not having them.

How prepared are you for living a low-energy lifestyle? Do you have alternative ways of heating and cooking in your home (wood, solar)? What about lighting and transportation?

Depletion & Abundance discussion post - Part Three

Man, at this rate, Sharon's next book will be published and on the shelves before I finish the book club posts. But, I'm determined to speed things up since I know a lot of you have finished reading it a long time ago.

So, here's the third discussion post for the Depletion and Abundance book club. Now, be forewarned, I'm a little critical of these chapters, but I am really enjoying the rest of the book.

Chapter 6: Talking Population with Old Men. You'll have to forgive me on this one, but I had a real hard time getting through this chapter. Every time I tried to pick it up, things just grinded to a halt. I know Sharon has a background in demographics, but this chapter just didn't engage me as well as the others. I didn't want this to keep holding me up so I just sorta breezed through it.

So, here's my short synopsis of this chapter (and mind that I really didn't read the whole thing closely - I just skimmed through it, so it's possible I missed something): overpopulation is bad for everyone and the environment. If you have a lot of kids, try to live with a low-carbon impact and you'll end up actually using less resources than the average American family with no kids.

Chapter 7: The Permaculture of Family. The gist of the early part of this chapter is that, throughout human history, children have spent the majority of their lives with both parents every single day. This continued up through the transition to agriculture and really ended only in the modern era. Sharon states that this lifestyle is a more ecologically and environmentally sound form of family life and that it, ultimately, leads to greater psychological happiness.

This is where I differ with her a bit. I'm sure the children enjoyed being around their parents more often, but that time was spent working. Now, I'm not saying that a bit of work isn't good for children, but up to and during the industrial revolution we really saw the end of childhood as we know it today. In other words, children were considered to be just as useful and responsible for earning their keep as an adolescent or adult. This certainly doesn't necessarily preclude happiness, but it by no means suggests to me that these children were psychologically happier than children who spent their childhoods playing, albeit not at their parent's side while doing so.

Sharon also contends that, after decades spent living apart, we have created a society that "valorizes apartness and fears closeness". I would argue that people have chosen to live apart because they prefer it and, for the first time in history, a large group of the population could actually afford to do so. Given the choice of living under the thumb (or roof) of one's parents, in-laws, neighbors, relatives, what-have-you, most people prefer to live on their own.

I don't think it's because people fear closeness, it's because it's difficult for people to get along. Without some extenuating circumstance forcing them into living together (financial reasons, etc.), I believe that most people would choose to live in smaller family units away from the prying eyes of others.

Another point that Sharon makes is in discussing how "labor saving devices" (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc.) have stripped much of what was valuable and interesting in domestic work, rendering home labor boring. I'd have to contend that most domestic work is boring, particularly if you don't have a choice about the matter.

Doing domestic work as a hobby (like line drying clothes, washing dishes by hand, etc.), can be enjoyable and quite satisfying. But, if you have a huge list of manual labor tasks to get through and no quick alternatives to employ, scrubbing the clothes in the tub and wrestling with the dirt on the floors with a dustpan loses its luster real quick. She claims that "what the reduction of domestic work to cleaning did was take away the fun and excitement..." I don't think there's a whole lot of excitement in scrubbing toilets, but then again, maybe I'm in the minority here.

The last bit of the chapter deals with relying on family to help with housing and elder care. The argument that it's stupid for adult children to work a ton of hours in order to pay the costs to support their parents or grandparents in a nursing home assumes that those children wouldn't mind taking on this task themselves. For the most part, many of these adult children don't have the skills to take on an elder (and with people living longer, these elders have increasingly more physical and mental disease).

I think the underlying issue with this scenario and the idea that people would be much happier also assumes that you actually like your parents/grandparents and this wouldn't be a tremendous burden to either party. It's also possible that the parents/grandparents wouldn't like this situation either. If it works out for all parties involved in that everyone agrees that this is a doable arrangement and the older generation doesn't have significant health problems, then this certainly would be ideal, but I reckon that those families are in the minority. It isn't just social pressures that stop people from doing this, it's because, again, they don't want to. Of course, if economic pressures force one into that situation, it's a valuable arrangement, but I wouldn't argue that the people are happier for it.

Chapter 8: Raising Kids in a New World: Family Life and Education. In the first section of the chapter, Sharon discusses what I like to call "the toy situation". That is, Americans buy their kids too many toys and too many toys made out of crap. She urges us to buy non-toxic, more sustainable toys and in lesser quantities.

Now, while I agree with her, sometimes it's difficult to entice children with the hand-hewn wooden toys when brightly colored and molded Legos are calling. Now, I'm not talking about the cheap crap, just the environmentally unfriendly toys. So, in order to keep some semblance of family peace, I'm all for buying the coveted goods, just in small quantities.

Let me also state that, starting in this chapter, things really started taking off for me with her book and I was really excited with what she had to say. Now, Sharon and I may not agree on a lot of things, but it seems like we both end up at the same result regardless of our motivations.

In the next section, Sharon starts talking about something near and dear to my heart - adding ecological and agricultural education to our children's lives. As she mentions, expecting public/private education to provide this is not exactly realistic and it's something that, most likely, parents will have to do themselves. So, teaching your child about the native flora and fauna and learning where your water and electricity come from is a great start to an education that most adults don't even have. Throw in growing food and they are well on their way to self-sufficiency.

Sharon also discusses alternative or mixed forms of formal education for our children. I believe the solution is really dependent on a number of factors, specifically the availability of parents, proximity to schools, children's temperament and/or learning ability and strength of school districts, that I think it's difficult to extrapolate out a suggestion. What works for one family doesn't work for another. While I still disagree with her that the school systems will collapse in the coming years, it certainly doesn't hurt to have educational materials on hand just for your own edification.

Related posts:
Depletion & Abundance discussion post - Part One
Depletion & Abundance discussion post - Part Two
Depletion & Abundance - the book club

Related books:
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience
Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change

Depletion & Abundance discussion post - Part Two

Sorry for the delay, but here's the second discussion post for the Depletion and Abundance book club.

Chapter 4: Meet the Real Economy. Sharon argues in this chapter that the real economy is not the one that we are used to hearing and reading about. The idea is that the "real", or informal, economy is the one that is uncounted for. Some examples of this includes all the work that is done at home by stay-at-home moms, wealth that is created through bartering, even under-the-table transactions (babysitting) and criminal activity. These are all part of the informal economy.

The wealth generated by some of these activities are easier to calculate (illicit drug sales, housecleaning) than others (tending to a sick elder). But all of this input is not represented in what is considered the formal "economy". Her argument is that this unrepresented labor, this informal economy, is what really runs things.

Furthermore, she points out that the idea that this informal, or subsistence, economy is subsidizing the formal economy is inaccurate. In fact, it is often the other way around. Her examples of this are generally related to third world countries and those in economic turmoil and this makes sense.

[The rest of these chapter comments are my own, just to be clear...]

I do take issue with the concept of Peasant Economics in that all one needs to do (and I'm assuming that the majority of the readers of this book are middle class Americans and not sub-Saharan Africans) is to slowly slide outside of the formal economy. The benefits of this I'm still somewhat unclear or dubious about, although she states at the end of the chapter that "we should reduce our participation in the formal economy because it is the right thing to do".

I know very few, in fact, pretty much nobody that participates in the informal economy. We all work for the "man", hire legitimate child care, educate our children through public schools, pay our taxes and buy most of our food from someone else. So, aside from cooking at home and the occasional toilet cleaning, there is little in the way of supporting the informal economy.

So, if we decide to take a few steps toward self-sufficiency, what exactly is that gaining us? Maybe I can trade a few pumpkins with a neighbor for apples or sell some rosemary to the guy down the street, but it's really not going to keep me from relying completely on the formal economy. For very few of us will the formal economy be a supplement to a subsistence economy, even if we find the time or interest to spend on making that transition.

The problem with this has to do more with the assumption that people actually want to do these things that lead us to be more self-sufficient (growing their own food, making things by hand, repairing items). The idea that families will gather around to pitch in and do these tasks with relish and wonder what they've been missing all this time is misconstrued.

The reason why people stopped doing all these things and why convenience appliances and services are the norm is because most of these tasks, for many people, are a huge pain in the ass and they don't like doing them. Some people prefer to work at their career than struggle with teaching their children at home. There's a reason why there's specialization - it's because it's not only more effective (higher productivity), it's also because some people just don't have the interest to learn how to do everything and do it well. Bartering for services just isn't a reasonable way to obtain them in modern society where goods and services are based on a monetary value.

She makes a huge value judgement in that staying home to work on the "home economy" has way more value to society. This "good and honorable work" for one person is drudgery in chains to another. The woman's movement into the workforce speaks a great deal to this and it's not all because of finances - it's a way to escape. Would I rather employ my time doing something challenging, using my intellect and doing work that I know serves a great deal of people in a positive way or stay home chained to household chores with its never ending litany of laundry, dishes, ironing and cooking?

Being a part of the formal economy affords me the time to do many of these self-sufficient things with pleasure only because I know that I have conveniences available to me if I don't have the time or energy to do them. In other words, these tasks have become pleasant hobbies, but if they were all I did all day long, they wouldn't give me the same sort of satisfaction.

[One other thing I wanted to point out in this chapter is that I believe Sharon's analysis of 11th century serfs is inaccurate in the amount of time they spent working. The estimate of labor is under-represented and her calculation on the number of days put in during harvest time is wrong. Unless harvest time lasted only one week.]

Chapter 5: Making Ends Meet. Rather than buying our way out of our problems (either though retail therapy or the misconception that buying things will make you a better, happier, sexier person), "the goal is to reduce our costs by extreme frugality." Additionally, all that purchasing produces climate changing and oil-depleting gasses, so we are better off limiting consumption.

Purchasing goods is the root problem, even if you are buying greener products. So, the end result is that we need to be buying a lot less items. Sharon advises using what you have rather than buying more of things you don't need.

The next item towards gaining self-sufficiency after reducing spending is to reduce your debt. Because of interest, debt makes you poorer so focus on reducing your spending and putting that saved money towards paying off your debt. The other adage is to use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.

Finally, do what you can to stay in your home. If that is not feasible then cut your losses and move on before investing a ton more in paying down a mortgage you will end up forfeiting anyway. This makes the assumption that the housing market will never recover or, at the very least, it will take a longer time to recover than you have or can afford to wait. So, before taking this advice you should really weigh that one - I'd hate to see people sell their "underwater" homes at a huge loss when, if they had hung onto it for 5 or 10 years, they would have regained that loss.

In any case, paying down your mortgage is a good way to reduce your financial exposure. Sharon advocates doing whatever you can to reduce your other debt even if that means cancelling all your other services (like cable) and selling the financed car or items that you are no longer using or need. Basically, reduce your costs and consumption in other areas.

If you are truly cash strapped you may not have the funds to spend building the garden that Sharon recommends, but you'll have to do your own cost-benefit analysis on whether or not the monetary input is affordable enough to try growing your own food. I know from personal experience that just because you plant a fruit tree doesn't mean that you'll actually get anything edible off of that fruit tree and maybe that $35 would have been better spent on beans and rice this year.

Related posts:
Depletion & Abundance discussion post - Part One
Depletion & Abundance - the book club

Related books:
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience
Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change