Last Tuesday was the final week of our fall/winter CSA share and in his newsletter our farmer, Eduardo, said that there were some big changes ahead for his family and this may have been his last season farming. Sure, there are plenty of other CSAs we could buy a share from, but Eduardo has been our organic farmer for 5+ years. He grows vegetables that aren’t the typical CSA selection—no bok choy or kohlrabi for instance. He is big on peppers and Latin flavors. He has also offered an add-on share of homemade traditional corn tortillas that are the best tortillas I’ve had in my life. So we are very sad.
James surprised me, however, by asking how much of what Eduardo grows could we grow? And if we could grow it, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to scramble from week to week to use up or preserve all the produce in the box that is really just a little too big for two people?
So this puts a whole new spin on selecting seeds to grow in the garden next year. We can’t do corn and sweet peppers because squirrels. But we can do hot peppers, tomatoes, kale, and all the annual herbs. Lettuce has never done well in my garden so we’ll need to visit the farmer’s market for that. And we won’t worry about tomatillos. They are good, but we prefer tomato salsa. I’ll need to give growing butternut squash a try. But I will not miss being overwhelmed with delicata squash. It’s good, but it doesn’t store well, and one can only take so much at a time. We already grow potatoes and garlic. I need to figure out onions. And more varieties of carrots.
Replacing Eduardo was not originally in my garden dreams for next year, but since nothing is bought or planted yet, it is easy enough to pivot. Growing all this extra is going to be more work, there will be no allowing the arugula to go feral and I will absolutely need to stay on top of weeding and watering. We’ll see how it goes!
November ended as one more consecutive hottest month on record in the Twin Cities. Still, my local lakes are managing to ice over, even if the ice is thin, and the top layer of the garden soil is frozen. We have no snow and I continue to ride my Brompton on my bike commute. I don’t think I have ever made it into December without having to switch to my winter bike, at least not in the last five or six years.
I’ve not been listening closely to the news from COP28 because I believe the COPs to be an utter failure of promises made and promises broken. If any of the petro-states attending, if the United States, China, and Europe really cared, they would have done what needed to be done long ago, like 28 or more years ago. Plus, I am tired of yelling at the journalists and their bad reporting.
I am tired of talking about climate change.
Coincidentally, this last week I read Dougald Hine’s newish book, At Work in the Ruins. He is tired of talking about climate change too and is not going to talk about it anymore. Let me explain.
The thing about climate change, Hine noticed, is that we talk about it through a scientific lens, one that quantifies, one that suggests to everyone that if only we can figure out how to balance/reduce/capture our carbon emissions, everything will be just fine. Hine uses the metaphor of a fish tank. If you’ve ever kept fish, you know it’s a delicate chemical balance within a closed system. A scientific approach to climate change, Hine argues, treats the world as though it is a fish tank, as if we know and can somehow balance all the entire system. As if we can balance the greenhouse gases and continue on our merry neoliberal capitalist extractivist way by a simple change of energy source.
Science will save us! Technology will save us! The billionaires and politicians will save us! These are all lies. All of these things have gotten us to where we are and will not save us. Sure, science can help and so can some kinds of technology—a hoe is technology after all. But, Hine says, we are asking too much of science. Science lacks the ability to make judgments. Science is not the only way to know the world. Science is not the only reality.
He makes some very goos arguments, and I highly recommend the book.
I think I’m going to stop talking about climate change too. Climate change, as I have mentioned before, is a symptom of a bigger problem. To focus only on carbon emissions as the solution is like taking a medication for the common cold. The medication will help with the symptoms, but it won’t cure the cold. To talk only of climate change is to ignore the bigger problem.
Some people call that problem civilization collapse. Others call it the Great Simplification, the Great Humbling, the Great Unraveling—so many greats! All of them are true in one aspect or another, but none of them really work for me. They all lock what is happening into a particular framework or point of view. They all, in some respect, make is sound like we are being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, as though the whole world has been living in paradise. When in reality it is only one way of looking at the world and the dominate systems that are coming to an end. There are quite a lot of people, especially in the global south, who have not benefited from any of this, but have suffered greatly because of it.
The way I see it, we have reached an inflection point. A particular worldview has run its course and what happens next is anyone’s guess. The inflection point means we are suddenly open to all kinds of possibilities. Many of the possibilities are very bad—more of the same, authoritarianism, fascism. Many are very good like Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, or the resurgence in Indigenous ways of seeing and being.
My—not problem more like irritation—with all those Great whatevers, is that they are making judgments about what is happening, what the outcome will be, and only doing it through a particular global north, industrial west frame. Worried about renewable energy? There are people in this world who don’t even have electricity or running water. The world is not unraveling or simplifying for them. It might actually get better when corporations stop polluting their land and water or burning down their forests to plant commodity crops.
I would really like to name what is happening too; it puts a boundary around it, corrals everything into something one can see and poke at. It makes it feel knowable, controllable, so much less terrifying. But when everything is interconnected, there is no boundary. Everything is coming into play, anything is possible and to start naming things shuts down possibilities, some of which might be really good.
So if I am going to name anything right now, I’m going to name it Possibility. I am going to name it plain old change. I think Octavia Butler in her book Parable of the Sower knew all of this when she wrote:
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
The Buddhists and Taoists know this too.
The question is not what do we call this global inflection point we are in, but what possibilities do we—do you—want to see made reality? Now that we have an opportunity to truly change things, what do you want that change to look like? And since even those changes will change, what do you want the changes we make now to evolve into? How do we leave the possibility door open rather than creating a new system that slams it (temporarily) shut like the one that is ending now? We need to let our imaginations run wild, and then get to work.
Reading
- Article: “Finding Other Ways to Flow”: The Once and Future Le Guin. This is a roundtable discussion about the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, another woman, like Octavia Butler, who saw much. I took a break from my read ALL of Le Guin project for the summer, but once I wrap up a couple novels I’m currently in the midst of I will be getting back to it.
Listening
- Book: Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. From the read aloud stylings of James. It’s super entertaining listening to James trying to read the dialogue of the Nac Mac Feegle, which is a combination, according to Pratchett, of Gaelic, Old Scots, Glaswegian, and gibberish.
- Meditation app: Healthy Minds. This mindful meditation app is free. James and I have been using it for the last couple weeks and we both really like it. You can choose active or sitting meditation, select how long you want to meditate, and choose the person you want to guide you through the meditation. There are also podcast-like short lessons, but we’ve just been doing the mediations with Daniela as our guiding voice.
Watching
- Series: Doctor Who. Saw the first of the new Doctor-Donna episode. It was rather madcap, and I can’t say some of it made much sense, but I thought it was really cool Donna’s daughter is trans. We’ve also been watching the first ever season of Doctor Who in black and white from 1963, and I have no idea how the show made it past its first season because it is dreadful. The acting is terrible, the characterization is inconsistent, it drops you right into a story with no explanation about the Doctor or the TARDIS, or anything. James thinks it’s because it was so different from anything else on TV back then. Maybe? If that’s the case, TV in 1963 was really bad.
Quote
Squirrels are, namely, tree squirrels. They also come to the ground, but for the most part they traipse among the treetops, damaging the vegetation. There are few nuts that squirrels do not eat. In particular, beechnuts, acorns, and walnuts are some of my very favorites.
Takashi Hiraide, poem 78 from For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut. Translated by Sawako Nakayasu
James’s Kitchen Wizardry
James continues healing from his hernia surgery and is starting to get his energy back. This week he made some fabulous quesadillas:
And spaghetti squash chow mein with a few ingredient changes based on what we had on hand:
I totally agree about the COPs, their carbon footprint alone has me raging every year. I like your idea of Possibility, we need a new paradigm (or several) and it’s not as though humans are short of imagination. I just wish we could get on with it quickly. I think it’s very easy to wear yourself down with worry and frustration so I tend to focus on what I can do now at a personal level and hopefully reach out to others in a gentle way, too. The ideas for your garden sound great, it’s a shame about Eduardo but it sounds like an opportunity for exploring new food-growing options. Are you in a hot zone, is that why lettuce don’t thrive? Good luck with it all!
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I’m with you on focusing on what I can do on a personal level even though I know it won’t move the needle on the larger systemic one. I hope one day there will be an up swelling from below, but if there isn’t then I’m hoping to be able to share skills and resources with my neighbors. 🙂
As for lettuce, I have in the past grown some just fine, but in recent years spring weather has become so unreliable with late April blizzards (I’m in Minnesota), torrential rainfalls, and blasts of summer heat in April and May, that if seeds manage to germinate the plants end up stunted or bolt before I can pick more than a tiny leaf or two. So I gave up trying. We had windows on our house replaced last summer and saved the old ones and have plans this coming year to use them to build a small greenhouse and perhaps a cold frame or two. So I might eventually attempt lettuce again 🙂
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Can’t agree more about Octavia Butler. She saw where we were headed. I just read Cory Doctorow’s Lost Cause and am not sure I want to review it because I feel like the main character–a young adult–is all heart and very little head. It does have a CA-centric view of where we’re headed, though, which reminds me a little of Butler.
I know I’m far from alone in thinking that holding COP28 in Dubai kind of defeats the point.
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Interesting about Doctorow’s book. I haven’t read him but keep meaning to and have a couple of his books on my shelf. I’ve heard and read many interviews with him and he seems like such an interesting person.
Next year’s COP will be in Kazakhstan, another big oil producing country. I don’t even know why these things continue, they are so useless to their purpose.
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I haven’t read anything by Pratchett, but that very English man wouldn’t even have been able to understand anyone speaking Glaswegian, never mind Gaelic or Scots so I suspect it is mainly gibberish! Our garden has been festooned in snow for the last few days and prior to that we had very hard frost, just as well I got my bulbs planted. I have no confidence in any of these COP things, they just cause yet more pollution.
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LOL Katrina! There is definitely plenty of gibberish, but since we also have to understand what they are saying, there are plenty of, to my American ears, Scottish words that are mostly familiar, or at least can be figured out from the context. You are right about the COPs causing more pollution, what with the 80,000+ attendees, just getting there is a carbon nightmare.
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Agree about COPs too. And, I like this point, “The thing about climate change, Hine noticed, is that we talk about it through a scientific lens, one that quantifies”.
I like your point about Change, but you know how it is. People, overall, hate change. They don’t think they do, but see the reaction whenever any change is suggested. It’s rarely accepted, even though, quite often, all the terrible things that the naysayers say will happen don’t happen. But, next change idea put forward, and it happens again. And of course, some change is bad. I guess the question – I’m doing stream of consciousness here because I’m in a rush to go to yoga – how do you define Change.
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Hine made an interesting point about quantification. He said we used to want to save the whales because they are beautiful, intelligent beings. Now we talk about saving them because they sequester so many tons of carbon every year.
Yeah, people hate change WG. I don’t like change just for the sake of change, but change for good reasons? Let’s do it! But really, change is a constant and we are different every day, we just don’t think of things in that way. Change makes us feel like we aren’t in control, which we aren’t even if we think we are. Change has risk, especially big and sudden changes. But change of all kinds happens to us all the time and I think that’s something we should begin recognizing and getting used to and more comfortable with.
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Planning your garden with a different goal in mind will be an interesting winter project to work on. The weaving and garden-planning just might be inspirational for both!
I think people know in their gut that the coming changes are going to be massive on so many levels and are desperately clinging to the old ways of thinking. Perhaps the best we can do is keep our minds open to other ways of looking at the world and living, reject capitalism as much as possible in our own lives, never forget how much power grass-roots initiatives have and join in those that speak to us, and reach out to other such initiatives in other places.
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The garden planning is definitely kicked up a notch Julé, including me reminding myself that even with James helping, we can’t do it all all at once.
Yes, I think a good many people know something is happening and are clinging onto the status quo for as long as they possibly can because all they can imagine is a terrifying dystopian world. It breaks my heart because things could be so much better for everyone.
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I don’t name climate change… or any of the other aspects of these “crises” either. While there is, no doubt, a lot of mess to tend to — much more so than in the human-scaled past — it’s not a crisis for most of the world. Only a very small, over-privileged subset. Most of the world would be very happy to let modernism (or… capitalism, human exceptionalism, hierarchy… whatever you want to call it) die because they’ve taken very little but harm from it.
As to change specifically, all this is still just life. It changes. Always. Though we should endeavor to not make messes and cause harm — just for our own sake! — there will be change. We might ascribe value to the change, good, bad or indifferent, but those are our labels, not real things. And really, this is nothing the world hasn’t seen before. Well, plastic is… but blue-green algae caused enormous changes, not for the betterment of the world from many of the perspectives of that time. We aren’t the first beings to do things for ourselves and destroy the world as we knew it.
The thing that all these greats miss is that life continues. Even the archaea that can’t tolerate an oxygenated atmosphere are still around. All the main forms of life will persist until the planet itself goes on to the next thing. Even most of the human world will be just fine. Probably better, if the fall of the past empires are anything to judge by.
What will not persist is greatness… human exceptionalism, capitalism, hierarchy, modernism, etc. Because that is a self-defeating mode of organizing life. Like a creature that somehow evolved to feed on its own tail. Exactly like…
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You’re right Elizabeth, the crisis is very one-sided in many ways. And I’m sure those who are being exploited for the privilege of the few, will be more than happy to see the house of cards fall.
Well said regarding change! And also, while humans might go extinct along with many others in the beautiful world as we know it, I’m pretty confident in the Earth’s regenerative capacity, life will go on, it will just look a lot different than it does now. And if humans do survive, or if another animal evolves with human-like abilities, I just hope they get things right next time. Part of me wishes I could be around to see it 🙂
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For myself, I spend a lot of time thinking about the kinds of questions and concerns you’re grappling with here and I particularly circle around definitions and terminology because, as you’ve said, it reveals so much more about perspective.
For conversations, however, I would rather have conversations, even with terms or definitions that don’t necessarily resonate for me in the same way they once did, than not have conversations.
Aww, I’ve been in that position, having to find new CSAs after a beloved farming family has ceased to grow for others. I hope Eduardo’s family is electing to step back from farming and wasn’t forced to.
I hope you’ll be able to find another CSA to support, too, in addition to whatever additional growing plans you have, so that these local food systems are nourished and nurtured. We have two CSAs here which, together, keep us fed, and are regularly hearing about just how hard it is and even more so with increased costs of food. #niceproblemtohave
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Oh for sure regarding conversations Marcie! But I think instead of talking about the problem being CO2, it’s very easy to nudge the conversation beyond that I think, we just need to be brave enough to do it 🙂
I think Eduardo’s family is choosing to step back from farming, but he hasn’t sent any additional information. I think we are going to see what we can grow this next year and hold off on finding a CSA and instead get what we can’t grow from the farmers market. Then re-evaluate and go from there. We are lucky to have many local growers. It is definitely a nice problem to have!
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