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The Daily: 8 February 2023

February 11, 2023

The Daily: 8 February 2023

You have your way.
I have my way.
As for the right way,
the correct way,
and the only way,
it does not exist.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
(in the Old Farmer's Almanac 2023 Planner)

I do not agree with Nietzsche on many things. Big surprise there, I’m sure. So when I saw this alongside the entry for 8 February in my daily writing planner, I felt it was a sign. Or at least a minor portent.

Recently, in the conversations I have been having here and there with many people, there has been a running theme — what we (universal) need to do (also universal). One of the professors who comes into our store each day held forth on this subject for so long that there was audible eye-rolling from the kids. This is also a trope on many of the blog sites and podcasts I favor, even those that ought to know better. Ought to have read Nietzsche anyway.

I am going to trot out another quote, often ascribed to Einstein (someone I do agree with regularly). “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Or there is this impression of the same sentiment from Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

And I will add this of my own making: our future isn’t a problem to be solved.

We do not face one broken thing that we can put back together. We face many things that are working more or less properly — though many aspects of that proper functioning are not going our way — and we can’t solve any of it. But even if there were problems to solve, there would never be one solution. One solution thinking is the tool of the global elite, those who want to retain control through top-down fixes…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Home Soil

May 26, 2022

Home Soil

We need more geology in school. Or perhaps ecology. Probably both. If we are to survive, we need to understand who and what we are, and for that we need to understand this world that made us. We are earthly beings. We are small parts of a small planet on an average star in the outer reaches of a galactic backwater somewhere in the vastness of the universe. We are small parts that have not been around for long, nor is there any reason to expect that we will continue for more than a few million years — most of our close cousin species are already extinct, after all. We are small parts that do not live long enough to have much impact. Yes, even all this mess we’ve made of our planet — while naming ourselves “the intelligent species” — will not last long. If there are geologists in the future capable of reading the rocks, they will be hard-pressed to even find the layers that contained humans.

A centimeter layer of rock most often represents thousands of years of deposition, perhaps millions of years when deposited in regions of high topography. (Some thick layers can be laid down in hours though these are more often igneous than sedimentary.) All that we’ve done, from our birth in Africa to our global ending, will likely comprise a layer of stratigraphy that is thinner than your smallest toe. To be sure, that layer will have ludicrously irrational geochemistry, laced as it will be with plastics and concentrated poisons. If there are mass spectrometers in the future (not likely, but humor me), geologists will spend careers trying to understand how this particularly toxic time period came about. They may invoke extraterrestrial impacts — because any thinking being will find the true story of our abiotic idiocy hard to accept.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Waste

December 12, 2021

The Waste

I make some broad statements about work. These are my opinions generally, but most of my opinions are based in recorded — and therefore verifiable — fact and direct experience. To say how I arrived at these statements would take up a library of books and perhaps a good deal of “walking in my shoes”. But there are some generalities that I can address in an essay. I have not because I think most of my readers thus far have reached similar conclusions in their experienced lives, so I feel like we’re all on the same page. But now it may be that I am beginning to reach a larger swath of people, many of whom have not shared in these experiences, most of whom have not even had the time to do so in their young lives. I suspect some have formed the opinion that I’m just a crazy old bat with yet another blog of dubious advice. So I’d like to address that. I’d like to talk about the waste of work today. Today seems a good time to do so, given the enormous waste work is unleashing on the world in the form of holiday shopping.

I’m going to start with that. I used to own a kids’ bookstore. Like most small retail business owners, I did an outsized part of my sales in the last weeks of the year. I did little to accommodate or encourage that. It was just how the industry works. There are more books released in the autumn than at any other time of the year, and this is especially true for the children’s and young adult markets. I never counted, but catalog listings for books released in the fourth quarter were easily as numerous as all the rest of the year combined…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gatherers

October 13, 2021

Gatherers

I’ve been an armchair archeologist/anthropologist for most of my life. I’ve always had a fascination with deep history. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to tease out the Story of Us not mediated through the words of the privileged few; and deep history, pre-history, is where you find the story before it was broken. Further, when you live in the desert, reading the petroglyphs in the morning walk and treading on potsherds from a thousand years ago, of course you are going to develop an interest in the people who left behind all this wonder and beauty. Then as a geologist, I did quite a bit of data gathering for actual archeologists and anthropologists in the radiogenic isotopes lab which introduced me to current ideas. So I suppose I know as much as any armchair enthusiast and maybe as much as many professionals.

I’ve talked about my irritation with Man the Hunter, but I haven’t much discussed the other quasi-mythical being from the nearly two hundred thousand years of human existence before the narrative was hijacked by those with an agenda. I haven’t talked about this person directly, that is. I’ve written around her. She is central to my thinking. I believe in her story — her-story, not his- — largely because she makes sense; she fits within stories that don’t have that privileged agenda. She is Woman the Seeker, Woman the Gatherer. She is the half of the hunter-gatherer society that might truly have fed humanity — because she still does so today all over the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Educating for the Prime Directive

August 30, 2021

Educating for the Prime Directive

Recently, I was involved in a discussion about the things we do and do not teach our children. I’ve already said quite a bit on this subject. But after talking with a few other people about education, and especially secondary education, I realized I approached the subject from the assumption that the purpose of school is to train the mind in skills like reading and manipulating numbers. Which is not at all what I believe. I don’t think head skills should take precedence over hand skills even in this world where head skills are critical to wage-earning. Every child today needs to be learning how to do, how to make, how to take care of themselves and others. In a world that is falling apart, hand skills are essential.

Still, being a writer and a bookseller and a scientist I have many reasons to want to see head skills perpetuated. And even if I did not have these particular values, I would advocate for book learning and mind training. Most head skills are, in essence, how we communicate, how we remember, and how we make judgements. We teach our children to read so that they can take in more information than they can gather from direct experience. We teach them to read so they can know what came before and what they might expect to come in the future. We teach them to read so that the past can talk to them and they can talk to their own descendants. We should also be teaching them to evaluate all this information critically and draw conclusions from it, but that has fallen victim to teaching to The Test. We don’t teach thought; we teach head skills.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New England Ecology

March 29, 2021

New England Ecology

(Or Eat the Damn Deer)

Deer droppings

This week the garden finally thawed out. I can see the grass and soil and the lower trunks of trees again for the first time in months. And right along with that, I see enough deer droppings to cover an acre in an inch-thick layer. I know this because the cleared portion of my three and a half acres is just over one acre… and that’s about covered in deer poo. (OK, yes, I’m exaggerating. A little.)

So it is time to have the deer discussion again. This has been a recurring theme in my world ever since we moved to New England and I planted apple saplings as deer food. Or that’s their version of the story. Other unwitting deer buffets include six cherry trees, three walnuts, twelve each of the blueberry and hazelnut saplings that I intended as an edible hedge on the veg patch, several hundred-foot rows of corn, all the peas I ever planted, same for all the sunflowers, two really expensive apothecary roses (though never the rugosas), a whole slew of willow and viburnum, every strawberry that dared show its rosy cheeks to the sun, and possibly several hundred dollars worth of tulip bulbs.

Meanwhile, the deer diners have left tips in the form of small, blood-sucking parasites that gave my aging dog Lyme disease and hastened her demise. They also latched on to my body frequently enough to merit several trips to the doctor to be tested. (Four negative, one “probably but can’t confirm” because the little buggers go dormant. They may still be in there, causing periodic mayhem.)…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eliza Daley,  my solitary hearth, deer, food production, pests, 

Is Farming the Problem?

March 15, 2021

Is Farming the Problem?

Here is a story that we tell ourselves. From The Good Ancestor: “Consider the immense legacy left by our ancestors: those who sowed the first seeds in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago, who cleared the land, built the waterways and founded the cities where we now live, who made the scientific discoveries, won the political struggles and created the great works of art that have been passed down to us.”

We don’t question this narrative. We simply accept it as “the way things happened”. But read it again with your critical brain engaged. To begin with, this ancestral narrative begins in Mesopotamia. This is not accurate. A few people in the Mesopotamian river basins started writing down what they were doing (mostly with regard to how much grain and gold were passing through their hands), but our cultural story begins long before Mesopotamia and in many different parts of the world, and ultimately, the human story begins in Africa, not the Middle East.

Farming did not begin with sowing seeds. This is a classic chicken egg of an assertion. What seeds? Where did they come from? How did humans even know to put them in the ground and expect to harvest something humans could eat? We’ll come back to this because this is the focus of this essay.

Let’s consider the assertion that humans built waterways. Yes, there are some canals, some irrigation projects, a few long-distance pipes and aqueducts. These are not generally waterways in terms of transport, which is I believe what is being referenced. Humans have not, in any case, built most of the bodies of water we use. Waterways are part of this planet, a priori; humans have done more to break rivers, lakes and oceans than to build them…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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