Beekeeping

Emily's new obsession, which I think will be awesome to implement (eventually), is backyard beekeeping. Not as hard as you might think, it does take some specialized equipment, but you can get something like 60 pounds of honey in a year from a single hive! And in an urban homestead, sugar and beeswax can be extremely useful commodities. Not only can you take honey and use it anywhere sugar is called for, but you can ferment the honey to make alcohol, and furthermore, although I haven't heard of anyone doing it, I imagine could make vinegar from the alcohol (as is the case with most any alcoholic beverage). Furthermore, you can use the beeswax for candles, furniture polish, and probably a number of other things, too. I haven't yet gotten hip to the many uses of beeswax, but having lots of it around could be useful, if for no other reason than you can sell it...

Personal Food Security

There was an article recently in the New York Times that points out what's been happening as a result of the rising price of oil - the price of food has been rising, all over the world. As more and more food crops have been devoted to biofuel production (stimulated by high oil prices), less and less have been going to food, for people and for livestock. In addition, higher fuel prices mean higher cost for producing the food due to our reliance on fuel for cultivation, fertilization, and delivery of the food. Thirdly, the rapidly growing economies of the two most populous countries on earth - India and China - has put increased demand on the production of meat, since people moving into the middle class tend to increase their consumption of it. Of course, the production of meat uses far more food, water, and fuel than the production of the same amount of plant-based foods. So, compound the problems of lower supply, increased demand, and increased cost of delivery for basic foodstuffs like corn, soybeans, and grain, and you have the makings of serious price pressure. And that's not to even mention the probable effects of global warming on agriculture. As the New York Times article puts it:

A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food.

A growing middle class in the developing world is demanding more protein, from pork and hamburgers to chicken and ice cream. And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some of the places best equipped to do so, like Australia.

All this means it's a better time than ever to resurrect old ways of creating food close to home, preserving it, and valuing the food that we buy.

Part of our solution has been to begin increasing the amount of food we produce at our house in the city, and learning ways to make good use of it. We just planted four fruit trees - semi dwarf cherry and apple (both grafted with multiple varieties on the same root stock!), and two different types of plum. We're also planning on transforming most of the backyard into raised vegetable beds instead of grass. Already, we save quite a bit of money by keeping chickens; over the past three weeks, we've started getting four or five eggs per day from our seven chickens, which keeps us in high-quality protein. The excess we'll have by the time spring production rolls around will go up for sale or trade with our neighbors. Now that's food security...

Irrigation in California

I recently returned from a road trip through California to visit all of my daughter's grandparents over the holidays, and drove through most of California's Central Valley, all the way from Redding down to Porterville. Man, does that place have a lot of agriculture, and all of it is dependent on irrigation. It's a pretty arid valley, I'd say a lot of it bordering on desert, and if the water were ever to dry up, the whole country would feel it. California's Central Valley is the main reason we have tomatoes in the winter, and all the other "luxury" fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be out of season throughout the colder parts of the country in the winter. With the combination of the climate heating up, and the price of oil rising (it just hit $100 a barrel today for the first time ever), it could be a one-two punch that would dry up a huge amount of the agricultural output from California, whether because of the lack of water, or because of the expense of transporting it. I'm really glad that Portland has had an urban growth boundary in place since the early 70's. It means that there are farms not 15 minutes drive from the center of town, and in hard times, you'll definitely want your food close by.

The Story of Stuff

This is so great - The Story of Stuff

Annie Leonard presents a cool little cartoon about, well, stuff; where it comes from, how it gets to us, how we use it, and what happens to it when we're done with it. It's really thought-provoking, and she describes it in such a sensible, straightforward, and entertaining way.

Really, check it out.

Learning Electricity

I'm currently learning about electricity, as I realize that the ability to build, customize, or repair electrical or electronic systems would be a very handy skill to have in an energy-depleted, economically-depressed world. What I want to be able to do is install and repair a solar system for our house, but I've also started becoming interested in pedal-powered generators and battery storage systems. Knowing more about the efficiency of anything that uses electricity would be very helpful as well in being able to identify the areas that energy is wasted. I'd also love to be able to repair electronic things that don't work anymore, instead of junking them. That would certainly require more than just the basics, but you gotta start somewhere...

LETS get trading!

My newest interest gets me very excited. It's a system whereby a community of people trade goods and services without using any cash, called a Local Exchange Trading System, or LETS. There are some great links and a decent description of a LETS at the WIKIPEDIA article. This would be a perfect system for protecting one's ability to get necessities in an economic crisis, not to mention it can save a lot of money in the short term. Imagine you could provide services, or home made goods, or whatever, to people in your community, for an agreed upon number of credits. You could then use those credits to acquire goods or services you need. It keeps "value" in the community, and it means that you can directly benefit from your talents. I like the idea a lot, but I have to find a way to easily implement it in my area. There are some cool open-source software or web-based Exchange Systems I've found (my favorite one at the moment is here), but I have to do some more research.

To wrap up, here's a great little story I found on a community exchange site based in Bellingham, Washington, that kind of gets at the crux of the matter:


An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna.

The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, "only a little while." The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?" The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this all take?"

To which the American replied, "15 or 20 years."

"But what then, senor?"

The American laughed and said, "that’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions, senor? Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

New Topic for the Blog

So, I started this blog with the idea that I would just have a place to write whatever was on my mind, but I've now decided that it's going to have a real purpose. I'm going to start covering topics that relate to what I see as the (almost) inevitable hard times ahead. With an obvious convergence of factors staring the world in the face (oil prices rising, war in the middle east, dollar value falling, and global warming) , it's been on my mind a lot lately, so I'm going to put my thoughts about it out here in the blogosphere, and talk about what my family and I are doing to prepare for it. I just read another article on wired news that talks about a different facet of the peak oil theory, essentially stating that even if we have enough oil to feed the world's demands in the coming decades, we don't have the production capacity the GET it:

"At the rate oil fields are being depleted, simply maintaining our current production of 85 million barrels a day will require producing at least another 4 million daily barrels every year. That, according to the Journal, is roughly five times the daily production in all of Alaska, and doesn't account for any increase in demand at all."

Yikes!