Walking in old graveyards is also always a reminder of how fortunate I am. Most graveyards have a "children's" section, or family stones record the brief and incredibly short lives of children - and a world where losing at least one child was a norm. Add in the high risks of childbirth and a walk through a cemetary can be a laudable reminder of things one doesn't want to lose in a lower energy society - childhood vaccination, clean water supplies and good reproductive medicine - low technology whenever possible, but high when truly needed.

Moreover, for those concerned about population, counter-intuitively, demographers generally find that the conditions necessary for people to choose fewer children include radically lower child, infant and maternal mortality. Because childbearing decisions are often built on economic necessities, the less certain you are your children will live to adulthood, the more likely you are to have more of them. A longer term stability depends on keeping child, infant and maternal mortality low, even as we struggle with health care costs and the creation of a lower-energy infrastructure.

Over the last thirty years, infant and maternal death rates in childbirth in the US have crept up - in 1987 the death rate in childbirth was 6.6 deaths per 100,000 live births while by 2006 it was 13.3 - it had doubled. Some of this was probably attributable to better record keeping and reportage, but there's no question that the infant and maternal death rate in the US has climbed quite dramatically - even though it remains low compared to the Global South. In the same approximate period, however, enormous gains were made (although there is still much more to be done) in reducing child and infant mortality in the Global South - only in the US were we headed backwards.

For women of color, the rates of maternal and infant death, or serious and long-term health care consequences from childbirth are four times what they are for white women in the US. Two African-American women die in childbirth every day in the US - a rate that is truly scandalous. And compared to most of the rest of the Global North, the rates are extraordinarily high.

It would be easy to say that by necessity a lower energy and poorer world must result in worse outcomes for women and children - but there's some real reasons to question this. One way to look at this (and I do this in much more detail in my book _Depletion and Abundance_) is to ask whether it is possible to keep maternal and infant mortality rates low while using low-cost, lower energy interventions much of the time. We already know that many nations that have higher rates of home and midwife attended births have as good and better outcomes than the US. We also know that the Old Order Amish, who have what most of us would describe as high risk factors for perinatal death and injury - most women have many children, often continuing to have babies into their mid-forties or later, physician medical care is usually involved only if an emergency occurs, while most prenatal care is provided by Amish lay midwives at home in houses without electricity or often, running water, and most households do not have easy car access to transport women to the hospital. Despite this, studies suggest that rates of infant and mother mortality for Amish women are similar to white rural women in more modern settings.

This, and the experience of less wealthy nations with low infant mortality like Cuba might be used as a model to create a low-energy infrastructure that could further reduce infant and child mortality, a functional "shadow" health care system that could both reduce loss of life now, and also serve families in a world that may struggle even further to provide adequate health care access.

Amnesty International points out rightly that maternal and infant health care are a human rights issue - none of us want to live in the bad old days, when women made their wills before childbirth and cemeteries were filled with the memories of babies and children and women's lives cut short. None of us want to live in a world where preventable consequences of childbirth disable women and children and make it impossible for them to live a functional life. What's most disturbing about the growing rate of women struggling with health care issues is that it is so obviously possible to prevent most of those problem, most of them at low cost and with comparatively simple interventions.

Sharon

Now that's hot, baby! Happy Valentine's Day!

The weather of our discontent continues - weirdly warm for upstate NY in winter, plants and animals blooming or returning too early. The pussywillows have catkins, my elderberries have green buds, the daffodils are up and we saw a red-winged blackbird yesterday - all of which are signs of late-Marchness in upstate NY, here at the beginning of February. Mud season, usually a month from March to April, has been going on steadily since the hurricanes back in August.

That said, even when you know it is a sign of wrongness, it is hard not to appreciate less wood burned, easier barn access and more days outside for the critters. The goats, unconcerned about climate change, do appreciate all the opportunities to follow me around and get in my way - everyone needs a dozen does to help them carry firewood (help here is defined as "stand in front of me and refuse to move, stick your face in the wood bin to check for any snacks left lying around, untie my shoelaces and then nibble my coat buttons), hay or water (tripping me while I'm doing the water is the little one's favorite game).

The calves and our buck goat who gave us four cryptorchid babies this year went to the butcher on Tuesday, so we were able to open up the fence and move the remaining couple of bucks down the hill with the does. The poultry (ducks and chickens) will move up to the barn that held the calves and bucks, for several reasons - first to get them further away from the house where they have been flying over the fence and trashing my perennials, and also because that gives us more space down the hill for goats. Moving everything around is a bit of pain, but well worth it. So was the baby beef operation we did this year - we are hoping to do more next year, since this was so successful. We are also debating buying a heifer calf to be raised up as a milker as well.

Real seed starting (rather than the little bit of desultory stuff) commenced this week - early tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, flower and herbs that need a long season got started this week, along with some more things that require stratification. I also took geranium cuttings for spring as well - both brightly colored red, white and pink, and lemon and rose scented.

I'm still pruning fruit trees, which I should have done earlier in the winter - normally early February isn't too late, but this isn't a normal winter. The goats and the rabbits have eagerly devoured our offerings.

We had the first winter litter of rabbits when Marigold, one of our does kindled with 9 beautiful babies - this is the first time we've crossed our American Blues with the Cinnamons, and I'm anxious to see what color combinations we get, and also whether the Blue's faster rate of growth gets transmitted.

A kind reader sent me a box of cloth diapers from her children (THANK YOU) and I'm expecting a few more, so I took the time to sort out what I'd saved from my own kids - it turns out that there was more than I thought that survived my children (and a lot of it had come from a friend of my mother's with twins, so more than my four) including some wool diaper soakers and a few precious wool covers - my favorites. I may knit a few other covers as well - but I'm glad to be able to cloth diaper again.

The foster stash is in increasingly good shape - which is a huge relief. The main issue for me, given where we live, our one-vehicle situation, our ongoing schedules and Eric's work schedule is that I may have to go four or five days before I can go shopping for children's clothing, and yet the kids have to be dressed - and for visits or trips to synagogue, dressed fairly nicely. I think I can now do that for just about all sizes, which is a huge relief - after all, no one either wants, in a house full of 7-10 overstimulated kids to either take all the children to a store or worse, be the one stays home with them alone while the other goes shopping - this gives me the time and space to get everyone settled without dragging kids out all the time.

We've managed to do almost all the major reorganization of the house, except for the garage (which will by necessity be done next week since we have to clean out the freezer in said garage to put the beef from butchering in). We've now got the door between the kitchen and dining room gated, so that we can use the wood cookstove while foster kids are at our place (previously we tried to gate around it, but really can't cook on it that way, so had just been only using the other stove). There is still cleaning, sorting and organizing in small places yet, but we're WAY ahead of what we've been. I suspect it will all go to pot when we finally get a large sibling group placement that stays, but at least we start ahead.

I haven't done much on building up my pantry - actually, sort of the opposite, as we've been rearranging it, I've been working on us eating down some things. Still, the time to build on this will come.

Skill-wise, the main thing I've been working on is figuring out whether couponing is worthwhile for us. I've never bothered much since we purchase so few things at the supermarket. Foster care, however, has changed some of that - besides the desire to sometimes offer familiar foods and snacks as kids transition to our home (we can work on food issues gradually, but comfort is the most important thing initially), we also now need more things like toothbrushes and toilet paper - and need toiletries that can go home or on to other placements with kids. I'm still not totally clear on whether this is worth doing for us generally - while using the occasional good coupon is always nice, serious couponing and sale shopping requires a. more driving (in some cases, Eric goes past some of the stores coming from work some days) and often the best savings are found in buying the smallest sizes, which increases net packaging. Still, I'm playing with running the numbers and seeing what we can make work for us within the bounds of our general environmental priorities.

Best of all, we began the week with a lovely celebration of Tu'Bshevat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees. We ate fabulous things - including Key Lime pie (with limes brought back by a friend from a FL trip), Black Forest Cake (from cherries frozen over the summer by another friend), Banana Cream pie (from totally non-local bananas) and apricot-applesauce. It was wretched and delicious excess, and a lovely time was had by all. I celebrated the actual day by planting the seeds of some quinces and apples gone mushy to stratify. It may be too late (I planted others in the fall) but hope springs eternal, which is kind of the point.

Ok, official results:

Plant something - Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplant, Hawthorn, Quince and Witch Hazel, Coneflowers, Galliarda, Geraniums, Eryngium, Echinops, Basil, Dianthus, Alyssum, Parsley.

Harvest something: Eggs, Milk, Beef and Chevon. Also fruit tree prunings for bunnies and goaties.

Preserve something: Nope. Should can some applesauce from the soft apples, though.

Waste Not: All the sorting out and organizing have been great - the kids are thrilled with the exciting "new" things we find in the back of the attic or in boxes, and we've managed to give away a lot of good stuff. Otherwise the usual composting and feeding wastes to various critters.

Want Not: I can't take credit for the cloth diapers, but they were awesome! I am totally out of peanut butter (our dumpster diving friend and our foster son's WIC had us stocked for what seemed like eternity), so I need to add that. I also will need to buy apples pretty soon - my kids eat 5 - 7 apples a day, and we use them in cooking, but this year's supply didn't keep as well as usual due to the warm temperatures. We will buy a few bushels from the local coop.

Eat the food - Nothing really new. We are eating the small hen turkeys we bought from a friend (we didn't do turkeys this past year for reasons that were really stupid ;-)) - at 13-14 lbs, they make two meals for a family of six straight and the one large pot of laotian chicken soup (basically chicken soup seasoned with lots of citrus juice and soy sauce and a bit of brown sugar, ginger, garlic and ciles until it is salty, hot, sweet and sour, and then with added onions, canned pineapple (if we have it), and I usually stir brown rice in. With a few extra ingredients, one chicken is 4-6 meals, depending on size and how many people are home. The apple-apricot sauce was also really fabulous - a bunch of apples, some dried apricots (about 5-1 proportions), a little apple cider and a splash of vanilla. You can add sugar if you want, but it doesn't need it. A hand blender, food mill or food processer all work equally well at smoothing it out if you want. Just cook until the apricots are very soft and the apples are applesaucy.

Build community food systems: Not a thing

Skill up: Aforementioned coupon research. That's about it.

How about you? You can report here or just stick in a link to your blog!

Sharon

But, in its early release of the Annual Energy Outlook for 2012, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) cut its estimate of technically recoverable resources of U.S. shale gas from 827 tcf to 482 tcf. (That says little about whether all those resources will be economically recoverable.) Much of the decline in the EIA estimate comes from a downgrading of the Marcellus Shale, by far the largest of the U.S. shale gas deposits spanning vast areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia as well as sections of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. The downgrade resulted from extensive drilling results now available as the rush to extract gas from the Marcellus Shale accelerates. The EIA cut its estimated technically recoverable resources from 410 tcf to 141 tcf. This estimate remains well in excess of last year's estimate from the U.S. Geological Survey which put those resources at 84 tcf.

What ought to be acutely troubling is that the history of revisions to oil and gas resources has heretofore been one of increases. For the first time, we are now seeing not just downward revisions in estimated natural gas resources, but drastic downward revisions. That should tell us that the era of unlimited horizons for fossil fuels has come to a close. All the advanced technology that was supposed to bring unending plenty in the form of fossil fuels is now giving us better estimates of what will be available, namely, not nearly so much as we thought.

Cobb goes on to mention the recent failed attempts at finding profitable shale gas in Poland and Hungary. Just as we wildly overstate the potential of most oil fields at discovery, we do the same with natural gas, and that leaves us in a precarious place. As we've seen recently our public officials read the same news stories the rest of us do - and no one ever publishes the headline - "Radical downgrade in extractable resources anticipated" - even when it is entirely true.

We have systematically misled just about everyone who doesn't read the raw data carefully to expect a future of abundant fossil fuels. The mismatch of expectation and reality, however, is likely to be enormously painful.

Sharon

Email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com for details or to enroll.

Sharon

Now on virtually all farms I have ever visited, everyone who lives there farms. The children help in the barns, the spouses share the duties - even if there is a gendered division of labor much of the time, as on Amish farms, the harvest or peak canning season overwhelm this and everyone who is present pitches in. It should go without saying that no farm can have anyone who isn't competent to recapture lost livestock, fix a fence, handle an emergency birth or a medical crisis - because some days one person isn't there. Nor can all knowledge rest in one person - because who milks or picks the beans when someone is ill, giving birth, caring for a family member or making the money that most farms don't provide to pay taxes and bills?

Yet we cling stubbornly to the idea that instead of a family of farmers, all equally engaged with the land, if sometimes in largely different ways, that a farm family consists of a "farmer" and a "farmer's wife" - and that the female partner is necessarily secondary. Gene Logsdon has a great essay about both why this is, and how that presumption is being disrupted by the growing number of independent women farmers:

Women rarely did the plowing however, and that seems to be the key difference. Lots of plowboys, nary a plowgirl. In other field work, women did more than their share. (I have theories but will leave it to someone smarter to explain why women didn't plow.) The notion that males were the real farmers probably was rooted in the hunting and gathering stage of civilization where men brought home the game from afar (adventure time) and the women did the rest of the work at home (boring).

This prejudice was astonishingly apparent even at farm magazines. As a journalist working for Farm Journal magazine, I often sat in farm kitchens interviewing farmers and their wives about their business. It was amazing how often the wives answered my questions much better than their husbands and how they so often did this by diplomatically and cleverly putting words in their husbands' mouths. It was obvious that most successful farms got that way because the wives were smarter and more articulate than the husbands. But the wives knew how to keep the male crest from falling by seeming to defer to their husbands on every occasion. The wives knew they had to make their mates look like top operators so that they could borrow the money they needed to keep on going. Bankers were no different from farm editors. They wanted to deal with men: women weren't smart enough to run a business like farming.

The answer to the question about why women didn't do the plowing is anthropological - when tillage was done with digging sticks and handtools, in many societies women were the primary tillers of soil. But as anthropologist Judith Brown long ago observed, there is virtually no society in human history where women's primary work is incompatible with the care of young children - and plowing behind draft animals is tough to do with a babe in a sling, and hard to do when you may have to stop and nurse, or chase a toddler away from the horse's feet. Tractors are not good places to haul babies and young kids for long stretches either, and I know from experience you don't fit well behind the wheel in late pregnancy. Moreover, in the era of chemical agriculture any number of things that are part of the farm experience are best not touched by women who may be pregnant or nursing. For most of women's history, being pregnant or nursing was a normative experience for many years.

Most of us don't have a baby every three years anymore, so there isn't any reason why tillage or organic no-till agriculture can't be done by women (chemical agriculture is still tougher for women of childbearing age, since so many things accumulate in body fat and breast milk). So is small-scale farming without large equipment - with the modern digging sticks. In the meantime, independent women small farmers are the only fast-growing segment of American agriculture - an entity that we all know is going to have to grow fast just to keep up with the aging population of farmers, and all the more if we are to remove the fossil fuel inputs from our agriculture and untie food and oil.

We have used language to write women out of agriculture - out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the "housewifization" of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer's wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

I look around me at the farm families I know and see women and men with a host of skills that step outside of gender. Sherri, who lives with her aging mother cuts hay for a living. Alice handles the thousand pound draft horses on their farm with skill and grace. The sheep are Rosa's, not her boyfriend's, as is the market garden. Louise milked fifty cows a day to her husband's fifty and drove the tractor while he tossed the hay bales for forty years.

This started out as my farm, with my husband who was happy to give me credit, happy to do the heavy lifting, but not so interested in plants. It has become a project of two overlapping people with related interests and the ability to do one another's work. The bees are his. The native plants and herbs are mine, the livestock are both of ours, the work is shared inside and outside as preference, pleasure and ability define. The daily applied science of agriculture is worked out between us. The pride in it is shared, and neither of us would demean our contribution by suggesting it comes primarily through the other, as "farmer's wife" does.

The question of where the next generation of farmers is going to come from is an important one, because we're engaged in an experiment with no historical precedent - for the first time in history, the majority of new farmers will have to come from off the farm - for decades we have been able to reduce the number of farmers by drawing off many and destroying farm cultures and communities, while still having enough to meet our needs, but the farm population is rapidly aging, the next generation of farmer's children have already left the farm, and now we must ask who will replace them?

The answer so far is that women are a part of the answer, and I hope this will be the end of farmer's wife syndrome and the emergent recognition of the fact that farmers come in many packages, and that a way of life is something that circles round and encompasses everyone who lives it.

Sharon

My general take on that the rigid lines drawn between home and school are somewhat artificial - that homeschool and public school are actually part of a larger continuum that anyone with children to educate in their lives needs to participate in. Moreover, even if we are committed to one option or a particular educational philosophy, we never know when our ground could shift. Some of the most ardent anti-homeschoolers I know have found themselves home educating when a local public school couldn't meet a child's needs, or when a child was victimized by bullying or laid low by a major health crisis. Many a dedicated homeschool parent has found themselves unable to continue due to a health crisis in a parent, a need to take on new work for economic reasons, a kid who didn't respond well to the dual role of parent/teacher, a disability they were not prepared to respond to at home.

Moreover, in more difficult situations, any of us may HAVE to become homeschoolers or public schoolers - consider a major natural disaster like Katrina in New Orleans which closed many schools for an extended period. Some kids can be out of school for a bit and no harm done - others can't. in a longer term crisis, the community will need to respond to the need for education for kids.

All of which is just a long way of saying that I don't think of myself as an ideological homeschooler. I could probably become one, however, if I lived in Texas. Check this out:

The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

One of the things that has fascinated me as a foster parent is the realization of how afraid many people are of children. Whether this stems back to Coumbine or other issues, a few rare cases of violent children seem to have reshaped our national culture in a way that makes us genuinely afraid of kids. I've had people outright ask whether I worry foster children will kill me in my bed - even though the kids are far more vulnerable than they are dangerous.

Add into this the fact that non-white children, especially boys, are much more likely to be disciplined more strongly for the same things - expulsion rather than detention, and to be judged as violent and extreme for things that would be considered minor in a white or female child, and I admit, I'm pretty strongly suspicious of the impulse to police childhood. That doesn't mean no children are hard to handle or that classrooms aren't hard to manage, but to me this is just one more sign of something deeply wrong in our culture generally.

I was a disruptive teen in high school myself - I was politically aware and active and a bit of an agitator. I had smart mouth, and my dream as a 16 year old pain in the rear was to be a test case for the ACLU ;-) in a high school that I saw as repressive and intellectually deadening. I was fortunate in that my teachers and the school administration were, for the most part, smarter than I gave them credit for, and kinder - they didn't want to ruin the records of young people, and handled my actions appropriately. I can only imagine what would have changed in my life when childhood earns you no grace, only harder and harder crack-downs. The track to prison already begins in school for many kids - do we really need to make the track run faster?

Sharon

GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very poor because there are social safety nets that take care of them.

"I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I'll continue to take that message across the nation."

Ultimately, Mitt is pretty safe in saying this, because he's playing on a whole host of American presumptions about poor people that are generally shared - even by many poor people. First of all, that the poor constitute only a tiny percentage of people, while 95% of us are "middle class." In America, everyone is middle class - it is one of our cultural precepts. There is lower middle class, which for the most part could be more accurately described as "poor' or "poorish" and upper middle class (better known as "richish" or actually rich), but very few people who will willingly call themselves rich or poor. This is, of course, factually ridiculous, but it is part of our national mythos.

The second assumption is that the very poor people are doing pretty well. You can see this on evidence any time any news story about social welfare appears, whereupon one is deluged with commenters about people on food stamps driving Jaguars and how unfair it is that some people get to live with these awesome safety nets while others have to work for a living. This is because one of America's best tricks is setting the poorish against the poor, and setting up the very poor as the enemy. What we like to believe is that poor people are those whose moral failings are the primary reason for their being in poverty. In fact, their moral failings (which exist) tend to be mostly the same moral failings of ordinary Americans, only exacerbated by a lack of support and many things that other people take for granted.

Mitt seems to believe what most Americans believe, which is that those on social welfare programs are doing just awesome, while the real victims are middle class Americans. This is a pretty funny idea, but it isn't just Mitt's. The notion that lower and middle class Americans are struggling more than the truly poor is not an uncommon one by people who look on social welfare programs with hostility. If there's anything really different about his assumptions it is the very funny classing of the desperately poor with the extremely rich as having a lot in common.

Let's take a look at some of Mitt'e assumption, though. First, how many people are actually poor in the US? The number is just around 40 millon at this point, not the 2-5 percent at the top and bottom that Mitt seems to think, but around 15% of the US population (relative poverty is greater, but I'm using the US census figures).

More than half of all Americans will spend at least a year in poverty during their adult life times. Almost a quarter of those people that Mitt just said he didn't give a crap about are children. Another ten percent are senior citizens. Let us note for the record that Mitt just disavowed interest in just under 10 million children and four million elders. Just mentioning it, since kids and senior citizens get a lot of attention during an election year. But they aren't the right kind of kids or seniors.

How well are safety nets doing for these folks? Well, we know that despite those safety nets, the ones that the Republicans do their best to hammer Barack Obama with (despite the fact that the dramatic rise in food stamp usage began under George W. Bush), 11 percent of American households were food insecure in the course of a year. This means that even though the largest percentage of people in history are on food support programs, we still have a significant number of people who don't know where their next meal is coming from a lot of the time. Again, it would be worth noting that a lot of those people are kids.

What about other measures? Well, we know that infant mortality rates in poor areas are a scandal. We know that in a number of poor counties around the America lifespans are actually declining, and that the poor endure more stress, having higher rates of suicide, depression, homicide and disability due to untreated medical conditions - yup. those poor people are doin' just awesome - practically as good as their counterparts like Mitt, the incredibly rich.

What's disturbing about this is that it reinforces an absolutely insane set of beliefs that people really do hold - that an upper-middle class person struggling to manage private school tuition is actually really hurting, while the desperately poor are protected by social welfare programs. Unfortunately, this belief isn't limited to the American right - it is reinforced by the language of the Occupy movement, which speaks of the "99%" as though they are uniformly oppressed by the ultra-rich 1%. This isn't the intent of Occupy, of course, which is vastly more concerned about poverty than Mitt is, but the rhetoric being used builds on the assumption that we're all basically part of one group, the (vast) middle class except for a few people, and that there is a great deal of commonality between the moderately rich and the very poor.

That simply isn't the case. While the 1% have more money than the 2 and 3%, all of them are doing just fine - what the rhetoric does is make sure that the people you are opposing are never you, always someone else. By building on language of classlessness that America loves so much, we elide differences just as much on the left as the right. That's not to say that under the sound bites the Occupy Movement hasn't a had a lot of good things to say about class and poverty - but that the sound bites are the things that other people hear best and remember longest.

Income disparity and poverty have become part of the national discourse in a way that owes enormously to both the Occupy Movement and the traditional poor-bashing that goes with an election year. That's a positive thing - but the language that we use to talk about poverty, class and equity falls short of what is needed and that's a problem on all sides.

It is easy to pillory sleazy, ignorant Mitt Romney for his inaccuracy and inequity - actually what really should be news about this is the unpublicized part of this. What's actually shocking is Mitt's statement that if safety nets are inadequate he'll fix them, a statement almost unheard of by a Republican. What he doesn't know about poverty and class aren't really news, unfortunately, because they represent what America doesn't know and doesn't want to talk about.

In a society where energy and resource decline has clear economic results - more poverty, more volatilty, more uncertainty and a winding down of the growth economy, those people that Mitt doesn't care about will get greater in number - indeed, have been growing greater in number. As long as we use language and misconception to conceal them, however, they can grow and grow and still be marginalized until the day that they decline to be marginalized any more, and everyone looks up, startled, that the very poor are so many and so angry and so familiar to us.

Sharon

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

I should be in the woods at this time of year. Instead, because of the unusually warm winter and heavy rains that have left the ground saturated and soggy, rather than frozen and covered with snow, and because I managed to do something to my shoulder chopping wood. (I turn forty this summer, and my assumption is that the two different minor injuries I sustained in about two weeks were the official "the warranty on your body has expired and it will all go to hell now" notice.) I mostly haven't been, but they call me. This is the season of trees on a farm.

In the dark of January and February, when the ground is hard as stone (normally) and the weather is cold, cutting wood, hauling downed braches by sled, harvesting bark for baskets and medicinal use and pruning trees are the natural works of the season, and I really enjoy them. We don't cut most of our own wood - when we first moved here we assumed we would take all our own wood from the property, but what we found was that firewood and hay are the two most common ways for our rural neighbors to make a living, and in the end, we'd rather have the time for other things and enrich our neighbors, so those are two jobs we don't do a lot of. Still, we put up some hay by hand every year, and we cut some of our own wood. The depredations of the hurricanes this fall mean that we've got a large supply of fallen wood - plenty for many years to come, so I expect I'll do more soon.

One cuts wood for the following winter - 9 months or a year to season is a minimum, and a bit longer is better. I don't use a chainsaw, because, frankly, I'm afraid of them - I have always been more than a little clumsy, and I like my limbs attached. The Bucksaw and the Crosscut saw are slower, but also quieter and much less likely to keep going without me if I make a mistake.

In a good year Eric and I find time to go out in the woods together - the two person cross-cut saw is an art and a pleasure to use, and it is good for a marriage. Until you master it, it can be bad for marriage too, but once you learn one another's motions it can be deeply satisfying. Most of the time, though, it is just one of us that go into the woods to make piles of firewood that will then be sledded out.

There has been no sledding this year - in fact the pussy willows have catkins and today is supposed to hit sixty degrees. My daffodils are up and the world is convinced that spring is nigh - whether it is or it isn't, it makes the woods harder.

Harvesting small wood for bentwood (one of Eric's hobbies), hurdle making, basket making (which I do incredibly badly, but I try) and pruning the fruit trees are less tough on my shoulder, so most of the time I spend with wood of late is around the house. The goats and the rabbits are delighted when I bring them the trimmings from the peach and apple trees, and I the quince prunings I set in glasses of water to force into bloom.

I found pruning intimidating at first, not really grasping what it was that I was trying to do. A friend who is an old orchardman simplified it for me - he taught me to imagine what the tiny growth of this year will look like in ten, drew me pictures, and then showed me what it would look like if I made different choices - all of a sudden the idea penetrated and I was able to look and see what I wanted my trees to look like - more or less. I still pay some price for my years of not fully grasping things, but it gets better all the time.

Our property has more willow than anyone would want to shake a stick at - it is a wet piece of land, and willow grows abundantly here. We have encouraged the goats to cut back on the sumac and willow in certain areas, and we coppice the willows behind the barn - in fact, this year I'll take our second harvest after the cutting we did 7 years ago. We have only just finished burning the willow - not great firewood, but old dry willow make a good starter - that we took off the trees the first time.

Thorny locusts are wonderful fence posts and great firewood if you can cut it - we lost two big locust trees to the hurricanes, one right by the barn, the other behind the house, and the goats and calves quickly denuded them, eating their high protein leaves. In a few weeks, after the calves are gone to the butcher, I'll need to cut up the locusts, but it must wait until I take the fence that encloses it down.

We're out of "tree hay" at this point - mostly locust and willow that I put up and dry on old shipping pallets for winter. The rabbits, goats and calves love it, and it is an infinitely renewable resource for us. Over time, I hope to cut more each summer to feed our herd. To do so, I also have to keep planting trees - I want plenty, and of course, we also sell some trees in the nursery business, so I check on the little dormant nursery, and then harvest willow to make willow water for rooting cuttings in late winter.

The sap is already starting to rise in the trees because of the unseasonable warmth - soon enough we'll put up our little mite of syrup - our sugar bush is tiny, and we do it in the simplest possible way, with buckets and homemade taps, but it is a sign that winter is winding down. Ordinarily the beginning of February doesn't mark spring at all, but simply the time when northern people and critters start to dream of spring, but this year all is early, and everything feels ready.

I still hope for some snow and ice yet - it is too early for things to move forward, and while it saves on heating fuel, it isn't good for birds and plants to be so out of synch. Moreover, I still hope for some time in the woods yet when my shoulder mends and the sound of chickadees and the crosscut saw are the only songs in a wintry silence. If I don't get it, though, the trees and I still have plenty to do.

This coming week is Tu B'shevat, the Jewish holiday that marks the "new year" of the trees - the date that one counts tree birthdays from. It is traditional to celebrate with the fruits of trees, mostly out of season here, but a pleasurable luxury that reminds us of days to come when we will devour piles of peaches and apricots, process baskets of apples and quinces into jars, when the fruit of trees will pour upon us in abundance, asking little, giving much. Now, in the quiet season of winter in the north, it seems that trees give little - unless of course, you go into the woods and see what there is to receive.

Sharon

The accusation that local food is elitist is actually a product of the industrial food infrastructure - that is, the requirements of an industrial food system, the presumption that the basic structure of food production should be industrialized is what makes the price of good food higher. The accusation that local food isn't "serious" because it costs more is an accusation in bad faith - the reason it costs more is because the same system makes it cost more.

Now I can hear the protests - after all, all this stuff exists in the name of progress and food safety, right? Well, the problem with that is that if you need all this stuff for milk to be produced safely, you have to first explain away the fact that the French are all still alive ;-). Because it is perfectly evident that it is possible for someone to hand milk six cows in a milking parlor without electricity or running water, in a building built 400 years ago and to the standards of that day, to take it from the cow and cool it in a bucket of water from a spring, and sell some of it directly to consumers who do not die, and indeed, go on to have lifespans longer than our own and who spend less per year on illness and health costs

So the idea of some of the many billions that the USDA throws around going to local producers as Hamerschlag suggests is pretty cool in some respects. That said, however, among the actual farmers I know, there's a lot of ambivalence about subsidies and programs that actually work to our benefit - a lot of times the seeming generosity comes with some downsides like new levels of scrutiny and regulation that make it harder, not easier in the net. In many cases policies that seem to favor the small and local are actually more easily taken advantage of by the large and industrial.

That's not an argument wholly against Hamerschlag, but it is a cautionary note - most small farmers I know would love to see the barriers and benefits shifted off an un-level playing field. They are less sure that they want to engaged the USDA's full attention ;-).

Hamerschlag proposes the following:

Increasing support for local aggregation, processing and distribution so that farmers can more easily sell healthy food, including locally raised and processed meat, directly to schools, hospitals, stores and restaurants.

Diversifying and increasing the production of healthy and sustainable food by increasing funding for the Specialty Crop Block Grant program and increasing access to credit, crop insurance, and other support for organic producers, diversified operations, smaller-scale and beginning farmers.

All of these things could be good - particularly a program that upped the percentage of SNAP and WIC foods that could come from local resources (I've always thought that the elegant simplicity of Michael Pollan's proposal that WIC and SNAP dollars should pay double at farmer's markets worked to everyone's advantage). Beginning farmer programs also are good. But I wonder if we're coming at this from the correct end - what the Farm Bill and the USDA as a whole have done over the years is radiically re-shape the way Americans eat - ostensibly, of course, it was about agriculture, but really it has been at least as much about changing how we consume. Perhaps that's the end of this we need to focus on.

As much as I'm in favor of working with schools to bring in local produce, what most farmers I know that have done so have found is that because schools are not set up to process produce themselves, what ends up happening is that our "local" food gets transported to a distant processing plant and then back to the school - establishing both the infrastructure to deal with crops closer to home and also giving schools the capacity to use foods in states nearer to their actual origin (you would not believe what a carrot has to go through to show up on a school system plate). One wonders if perhaps what's needed most is to shift the expectations of school systems and school children so that they recognize the value of a carrot piece that isn't encased in plastic, waffle shaped and three days old.

Supporting an increase in processing facilities that support small scale producers of all kinds could be of huge benefit - community kitchens that support small-scale producers, local slaughter infrastructure and when possible, local processing infrastructure for institutions like schools and hospitals - but the question becomes, if we smaller local producers have to specialize and narrow our focus in order to grow precisely the kinds of vegetables that run best through processing equipment so they can be bagged and shipped to school children, are we still doing what really matters - producing the diverse crops that grow best and meet our community needs?

I'm not opposed to any of these programs, and generally, I think anything that keeps small farmers in business or helps create new ones is good - but if the larger goal is for small farmers to be producing a larger chunk of our food, which I think it is, we have to look down the road towards that larger goal. It may be that what we need most are resources devoted to shifting the American diet to the kinds of foods that grow best around them. If there's a place for the USDA, which after all, has helped shape America's diet into one that is demonstrably bad for us, it might be there - in putting resources away from big ag, and towards eaters, as much as farmers, and towards helping people change their expectations about food. So much of what we do is focused on what farmers grow - but farmers respond to what eaters eat, and as I've argued before, farmers alone cannot transform their agriculture - it starts at the table.

Sharon

Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won't help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity groups -- each may prove helpful in limited ways, but for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change.

Or consider sweltering Texas. In 2011, firefighters responded to 23,519 fires. In all, 2,742 homes were destroyed by out-of-control wildfires. But government action saved 34,756 other homes. So you decide: Was this another case of wasteful government intervention in the marketplace, or an extremely efficient use of resources?

The increasing number of natural disasters attributable to climate change will make us more dependent on institutional response structures, and we are likely to have no choice but to prioritize those. At the same time, I'm less optimistic than Parenti that this will change rhetoric - after all, disaster recovery is big government, but so is the world's largest military force, and many of those who oppose big government favor highly interventionist militarism. Imagining a sudden outbreak of consistency seems optimistic to me.

One point not mentioned is the biggest impact of climate change is most likely to be one that is hard to respond to with emergency inputs - drought. A reader who like me has been following Stuart Staniford's reading of the climate model papers on drought mentioned it, and I thought the rest of you, if you haven't been reading, should also follow along. There are more here and here, just in case your morning isn't cheery enough.

Needless to say the conclusions here are terrible - if there is that much drought on a regular basis, lots of US forests will be turning into savannah (and savannahs into grasslands or deserts) and there will be huge releases of carbon dioxide from the biosphere - really nasty positive feedbacks that the climate models I'm quite sure are not capturing properly - and we are really going to turn our beautiful planet into a hell fit only for robots to live on.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the robots won't like the grit in their gears from the massive dust storms either. Unfortunately, if you've been tracking this data, it isn't really new, either. The data has suggested for years that the biggest impacts of climate change will be the drying of presently fertile lands. For example of the 17% of global grainlands that are presently irrigated, more than half are likely to lose their water supplies (that 17% of irrigated grainland produces almost a third of the world's grains).

Drought is ongoing and chronic - governments can set up refugee camps, bring in emergency food supplies and help with resettlement, but they can't make it rain, restore glacial melt or refill depleted aquifers. And in a world that is going to have to produce more food than ever before, that's bad news indeed - I suspect that Parenti is right that many of us will cease to object to these government services as they become more necessary - the only question being whether anyone will fully grasp the underlying philosophical issues that lead some to undermine the infrastructure that would enable a humane and just response.

The authors, James Murray and David King, confirm what geologists involved with peak oil have known for a long time - that reserve estimates are unreliable at best, and that the science behind oil peaks is both clear and established - we know that the rate of consumption has long exceeded the rate of new discovery, we know that a majority of oil producing nations have already had peaks, and that the world itself must inevitably peak - the only question is when - and the material evidence increasingly suggests that we are already on a bumpy plateau:

The typical industry response is to point to increasing assessments of global reserves -- the amount known to be in the ground that can be produced commercially. But this is misleading. The true volume of proven global reserves is clouded by secrecy; forecasts by state oil companies are not audited and seem to be
exaggerated.

Production at existing oil fields around the world is declining at rates of about 4.5% (ref. 4) to 6.7% per year. Only by adding in production from new wells is
overall global production holding steady. In 2005, global production of regular
crude oil reached about 72 million barrels per day. From then on, production capacity
seems to have hit a ceiling at 75 million barrels per day. A plot of prices against production from 1998 to today shows this dramatic transition, from a time when supply could respond elastically to rising prices caused by increased demand, to when it could not (see 'Phase shift'). As a result, prices swing wildly in response to small changes in demand. Other people have remarked on this step change in the economics of oil around the year 2005, but the point needs to be lodged
more firmly in the minds of policy-makers

This is an important article, not because the data is new, but because it clarifies the need for immediate response and also points out that while much progress on climate change is stalled out, a response to our oil situation can move us in several right directsions at once - if we have the common sense to respond appropriately.

Sharon

I try really hard to ignore the presidential election, I do, but this was too funny not to post! Yes, a hoax, but hey, shoulda been.

Sharon