Ecofeminism, Subsistence Living & Nature Awareness

April 30, 2012

Garden Connections

Filed under: Ecofeminism,Homestead garden,Paula Mariedaughter — Paula Mariedaughter @ 10:29 am

hawthorne flowers

Hawthorn trees are thick with thorns year round and lush with flowers in spring.


hawthorne flowers

Hawthorn trees are thick with thorns year round and lush with flowers in spring.

A garden is a web of life: mineral, animal and plant life.

We gardeners orchestrate much of what appears in the garden. But Mother Nature is the true spinner of the web of life in our gardens. I am drawn to a garden with personality and unexpected quirks. I am drawn to gardens emphasizing the collaboration with Nature. Our gardens have appeared slowly over the last twenty-five years. Nature has presented unexpected treasures like the tree along our front entrance with the large thorns marching up its trunk and spaced down the limbs. The deer would not dare browse this formidable forest citizen. But, a wild grape vine with a five-inch trunk had engulfed the canopy of this unidentified variety of hawthorn almost killing it. Once we cut back the grape and removed some large sweet gum trees that kept the hawthorn in shade, we discovered this lovely spring bloomer. Four years later our sturdy hawthorn has grown taller and greets the sunny days of spring covered in delicate white blossoms as it arches over the walkway. In fall the red/orange berries provide food for the birds preparing for winter. In this case, all we did was remove the other plants stealing the sunshine on the hawthorn–we just got out of the way!

ladyslipper flower

In the orchid family, but Yellow Ladyslipper flowers bloom in our Ozark hardwood forest.

Providing a shady spot for the native yellow ladyslipper orchid was a different challenge. Over a decade ago we discovered a small colony of these showy yellow wildflowers
in the moist woods beyond our house. Each spring we looked forward to viewing their spectacular curved blooms. Then came the spring where the deer mowed the entire colony to the ground causing us to fence that three foot area and hope the plant would recover. It was several years before the ladyslippers recovered and bloomed in their protected enclosure. Five years ago I noticed that a single stem of new growth had grown beyond the fence. I carefully transplanted that shoot because I knew how fragile was the existence of the colony given the deer population. By that time, I knew I could provide a spot for it in my Rusty, Rustic shade garden. You can see the picture of this plant thriving next to a lush maidenhair fern. Ladyslippers are in the orchid family—our Orchid Creek was named by our neighbor Sharman Sturchio in honor of these lovely native orchids. In this case we actively assisted nature by providing a protective enclosure for the ladyslippers.

lady slipper flower

Here the Ladyslipper is thriving next to a lush maidenhair fern.

Years ago I heard an interview with southern writer and avid gardener Bailey White on NPR as she recounted how gardens had been an important asset in binding a community together. In the South, in the days before big box garden centers, gardeners swapped plants and gave starts to each other of plants that thrived in the locale. “Pass-alongs” were a tradition connecting gardeners with a passion for growing as many plants as possible. She explained that if you wanted a start of a particular rose or a lush hydrangea in south Georgia in those days, you made sure you were in good standing with the gardener who grew those plants. Gardens were nurtured by gardeners who shared extra plants. Seeds, seedlings, slips and starts, cuttings and divisions from one gardener enriched the life of anyone receiving these pass-alongs. Often the shared plants came with stories of their origins. Always the plants came with accurate information about preferred growing conditions. And you knew the plant was well adapted to your area!

Seven hundred hostas later I can speak of the value to my garden of a dark green hosta given to me by my long time friend, Martha Payne. Eighteen years ago Martha gave me three hostas belonging to her mother after her mother’s death. Once the lovely white flower stalks mature they drop hundreds of seeds teaching me the meaning of the phrase “prolific self seeder”. Often times that phrase is issued as a warning when one receives a pass-along plant to warn you of the possibilities of many more seedlings. In this case Martha’s hostas from Kansas City, KS have thrived here and given a lush richness to my shade garden and to the shady sections of our back yard. I pot up hundreds of seedlings and pass them to neighbors and friends. If you want some of these hosta seeds, send me a self-addresses, stamped envelope and I will pass hosta seeds along to you.

red gazing ball

Fran's red gazing ball reminds us both of Jeanne's mom.

Our red gazing ball is a new addition to our garden. Jeanne gave it as a gift to her mother a number of years ago. Fran enjoyed seeing it in her yard for many years before her death at 94 last July. Her gazing ball compliments our blooming peonies. We want to update you on our ceiling project–we’re two-thirds finished.It has been slow-going due to Kas’ schedule and our own schedules. It looks good and we look forward to removing the scaffolding from our living space.

The other news is that our kitten, Catfish, and Scout have bonded! Catfish is full of energy and enjoys following Scout to pounce on him whenever possible. They often sleep together like good buddies. Catfish is now eight weeks old. We feel we have been successful in providing a new feline companion for Scout after loosing both Summer and Striper. All four dogs have accepted him and Zora enjoys playing with him at times she chooses.

Catfish and Scout--feline companions

Catfish and Scout--feline companions.

December 14, 2010

Brain Health or Talkathon

Filed under: Ecofeminism,Health& Safety,Paula Mariedaughter — Paula Mariedaughter @ 7:38 am

WARNING, DO NOT HOLD THE PHONE ON THE BODY reads the tiny type on your cell phone. But, you are probably ignoring this suggestion like millions of other people. In fact, you are engaging in “risky behavior” that may cost you your life! Every cell phone releases radio frequency radiation. Use of mobile phones by children should be limited to essential calls, yet many children have their own cell phones. Use a speakerphone or earpiece to keep the cell phone radiation away from your head or other parts of your body! Do not carry it on your body.

Author Devra Davis, scientist and professor at Harvard, has described the evidence of cell phones and the increase in brain cancer she believes is linked. My information here comes form her book Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation. What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family, available at the Fayetteville Public Library.

Devra Davis declares, “No matter how hard I look at various ways researchers have tried to measure the incidence of brain cancer and its rate of change, I remain convinced we should not wait for proof that population-wide shifts have occurred before taking simple precautions to reduce direct exposure of our brains and bodies to cell phone radiation. Science on this complicated topic remains uncertain for two reasons. First of all, science truly is complex and not easily understood by most of us. But a very large part of that uncertainty on this issue has been manufactured by those with deep pockets whose bottom line remains their primary focus. (emphasis mine) Many of those engaged in efforts to study cell phone radiation have made up their minds in advance [having been hired by the industry to perform the study]. The fact that ready money has been there to support those who would cast doubt on the dangers of radio frequency radiation certainly plays some role in the perpetuation of their views, as it did with tobacco, asbestos, benzene, and hormone replacement therapy.” p. 202

Do you realize that cell phones operate with the same wavelength used to heat and cook food in a microwave oven? Yes, the power in the cell phone is reduced, but we are probably cooking our brains when using a cell phone for any length of time! p. 210

Please understand that your smart phone or any cell phone radiates radiation! Author Davis recommends using a landline at home, not a cordless phone. When using a cell phone keep it away from your body. Do not carry it on your body exposing your internal organs to an onslaught of continual radiation. Don’t sleep with your phone turned on while it is near you. Texting uses less radiation, and it keeps the radiating phone away from your head.

Stop pretending that your cell phone is a harmless toy. Recognize your cell phone as a tool with potential to harm you and your loved ones—rather like a power saw. Read this book by Devra Davis and you may disconnect your phone and reach for the clunky landline like ours. You will probably save money too!

phone

Our cats won't knock this clunky phone of the hook, we will not misplace it, and we will receive no cell phone radiation while using it.

August 24, 2010

Fracking Brings a Living Hell to Earth!

Filed under: Ecofeminism,Economics,Patriarchy,Paula Mariedaughter — Paula Mariedaughter @ 6:59 am
bale1

Gasland is a documentary movie by Josh Fox who was approached about leasing land near his forest home for gas drilling.

The documentary film Gasland (www.gaslandthemovie.com) introduced me to the people who are living in the earthly hell created by the extreme drilling technique, called fracking, currently favored by the major gas companies who dig 8,000 feet, inject water laced with 596 chemicals (many are very toxic) to pump up natural gas mixed with the water and chemicals. Once the gas is separated, the 7 million gallons of chemicalized water from that one well is a hazard we all have to live with. The closest neighbors to the well—more often multiple wells—will breath the toxic chemical fumes, drink those chemicals in their water. We met those people and heard them describe the severe health effects for themselves, their children, pets and all of nature unfortunate enough to live near polluting gas wells. Endocrine disruption, cancer, asthma and severe headaches are just a few of the results of exposure to the contamination of the air, soil and water caused by the gas drilling industry. Dr. Theo Colborn, a leading expert on this subject has more information available here: http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/chemicals.video.php

My opinion is that this deep drilling technique is fundamentally unsafe because of the chemicals used, the multiple deep underground blasting and the impossibility of obtaining enough water for the process and finally because the trillions of gallons of used water cannot be safely stored or restored as safe water.

No Regulations from Government!George W Bush and Dick Cheney (both oil men) and earlier Richard Nixon convinced congress to exempt the natural gas industry from meaningful regulation. The industry is not covered by:
the 1972 Clean Air Act
1972 Clean Water Act
exempt from Superfund Cleanup
exempt form Safe Drinking Water Act
needs to provide minimal environmental impact statements

The industry is dominated by several big companies (including Halibuton) who have no oversight—the EPA has no authority to regulate drilling. You may not be aware of the scale of the environmental destruction, even if you are aware of some of these problems with gas drilling. Thursday afternoon I was aware of the problem, but unaware of the scale of the problem. By Thursday evening I had seen images of hundreds of square miles stripped of life and dedicated to pulling gas from deep within the earth and destroying peaceful life in the process!!

After viewing the reality, I could not sleep—haunted by those images. And I was haunted by the faces of the people trapped by circumstances! They had been lied to and treated without regard for their health and safety. It could have been any of us. This was not a natural disaster, but an un-natural disaster, a man made disaster. No one protected them. Some were told to hire an attorney and sue if they felt wronged.

In fracking, the blasting creates mini-earthquakes that blast open underground cracks to release the gas. We are told these blasts are harmless, but do we know that? No, this extreme drilling process has only been in wide use for ten years. Can the earth sustain this assault? Will the earth sustain this assault? Our clean water comes from underground aquifers of ancient water, how will these nonrenewable resources be protected?

And where will the water to perform the drilling come from? How will the toxic water be stored safely forever? Each well drilling requires from 1-7 million gallons of water. The same well can be tapped up to eighteen times and will use that much water each time. Using the low estimate of 1 million gallons per drilling, that would be 18 million gallons of water per well. In the Dallas/Ft. Worth area there are 10,000 gas wells. Again, using the low estimate, 18 million gallons of water multiplied by 10,000 wells equals 180,000 million gallons of poisoned water to store and protect. This is only for the wells in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area!

Water shortages are already predicted to be a major concern worldwide. Safe drinking water will be the luxury of the future, if we do not make major changes now!

Your well and my well, could they be next?
My concern is not merely an intellectual concern. Last year the national forest service leased forest land 30 miles or so south of here to a company determined to use fracking to drill for gas in the national forest. The owners of the nearby resort, Mulberry Mountain, called our attention to the situation and arranged for a public meeting with local officials. The process was described and the concerns and protests we offered were ignored. My understanding is that the drilling has begun and soon there will be 1-7 million gallons of toxic water used in the drilling waiting to be disposed of somewhere. Where and how?

water-tank

We collect water from our roof for our garden and store it in these open stock tanks. Even this water can be polluted by the chemicals in the holding ponds of polluted water vaporizing into airborn chemicals and released as acid rain.

The gas companies have a legal strategy called “forced pool” that can deny people to decline drilling on their land! Many of us do not own the mineral rights to our land, or own only a percentage of the mineral rights. Imagine the complications this could bring to a landowner not wanting to lease to gas drilling companies.

We could be next! Several years ago, Jeanne and I were contacted by a gas company representative who told us they wanted to drill on our land. Neither we, nor our neighbors were interested. Fortunately, we have not heard from them in years. We have 40 acres of oak/hickory forest where we built our solar powered house and began our organic gardens twenty-one years ago. We love where we live and have invested heart, mind and soul here. Josh Fox, who created Gasland, began his search to learn more about gas drilling because he lived in a similar rural area in Pennsylvania, where his parents had settled in the 1970s. He grew up in the woods and especially loved the stream that meandered through his homestead. The gas company offered him $100,000 for drilling rights. He wanted to learn more. He sought out landowners who had agreed to lease to the gas companies. Gasland showed us streams near drilling sites that are polluted with gasses from the drilling and have pockets of gas in the stream that can be lighted on fire. Often the deep underground blasts force new seams to appear in the underground rocks sending gas and methane formerly trapped underground into pristine wells, springs and streams. We heard people describe all this in Colorado, Pennsylvania and many other places! His worst fear and our worst fear! These were real people stuck in a living hell.

Foolishness
Don’t be fooled by the PR campaign financed by the natural gas corporations that declare gas to be a “clean” energy source. The 10,00 wells around and in Dallas/Ft. Worth emit 200 tons of toxic emissions per day—more than the automobiles in that metropolitan area emit each day. And, the natural gas pipelines have built-in release valves that we are told are not toxic, but it is gas released into the atmosphere on a regular basis, yes?

We need to educate ourselves, our neighbors and our political representatives about all the consequences of fracking. However, the gas companies are big campaign contributors, so we may have to become more creative in letting the politicians know of our outrage that the gas companies call all the shots and we, the people, are left to fend for ourselves.

Stop using natural gas is another radical possibility! Radical means going to the root of the problem. If there is no market for natural gas, the gas companies have no incentive to drill. Build a clothesline! Gas clothes dryers were not common place in Miami Springs where I grew up in the 1950s. We were a family of six with lots of wet clothes and they were all hung out to dry. Put up a clothesline and hang your wash. Change those ridiculous city regulations that forbid clotheslines if you have such restrictions.

I am not a politician, so I can and will express my unpopular opinion: reduce, reduce, reduce. Conservation of all our natural resource use is the central component in saving our planet from the extreme climate changes we are heading for today. Reduce your consumption of all energy sources: batteries, electricity, oil, gasoline, propane, as well as plastic and water and food. Perhaps we can reverse the consequences of our dependence on unlimited access to energy sources. Walk in the woods. Ride a bike. Grow a garden. As my mama used to say, “Actions speak louder than words”!

fern913

Destroying habitat of millions of plants and animals from Texas to Ohio and from Pennsylvania to Colorado to extract gas to fuel consumer lust for luxury must stop. Our garden reminds me of how plants and people have coexisted for thousands of years, until now.

For more information about the drilling practices of the natural gas industry proceed to these resources provided by Joyce Hale, president of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. The screening of Gasland in Fayetteville was sponsored by the League of Women Voters, Omni Peace and Justice Center and the local chapter of the Sierra Club.

Learn More about Natural Gas Development and Take ACTION!
SIGN UP FOR FUTURE EMAIL ACTION ALERTS

1. ProPublica online articles
http://www.propublica.org/search/search.php?q=natural+gas&x=10&y=13.
They have intensively developed the topic over the last couple of years. Their investigative reporting is some of the best out there.

2. Become acquainted with everything on the subject at endocrinedisruption.com/. Dr. Theo Colborn is the go-to person for information about the impact of chemicals, particularly on children and the unborn. http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/chemicals.video.php

3. Make sure that any landowner facing the decision to lease is familiar with OGAP (Oil & Gas Accountability Project). Their free manual, Oil and Gas at Your Door, http://www.earthworksaction.org/LOguidechapters.cfm should be the bible of everyone interested in this topic.

4. Blogs will give you local insight and help you connect with where the action is having negative impacts. Check out:
http://www.a4gda.blogspot.com/ (Arkansas)
http://txsharon.blogspot.com/ (Texas)
fwcando.org/ (Texas)

5. Videos are a wonderful way to learn:
a. Split Estate – This documentary about Colorado and New Mexico features the conflict between surface ownership and mineral rights. Health problems are a key part. If you get this video www.splitestate.com, be sure you watch the “extras” in addition to the main feature
b. Gasland – Film maker, Josh Fox, gained a high profile after winning at Sundance Film Festival and became popular guest with national television interviews. There are HBO showings still being scheduled so check the HBO Documentary section for listings. Copies should be available to buy in December. Go to www.gaslandthemovie.com for information.
c. What You Need to Know About Natural Gas Production – An excellent description of the process and chemicals by Dr. Theo Colborn. It is available at her website or they will send you a DVD. http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/chemicals.video.php
d. But MOST IMPORTANT is a MUST WATCH 3-part video by the Cornell Professor Anthony Ingraffea, revealing the true economics and scale of this problem. http://nyrad.org/videos.html This is possibly the most critical thing to be understood, since it is the only argument that will resonate with the political leadership. They must be shown that they have been listening to one side of the economic equation.

TO REQUEST A PROGRAM ON NATURAL GAS DEVELOPMENT IN ARKANSAS FOR YOUR GROUP OR ORGANIZATION:
Contact JOYCE HALE 479-527-2777 or joycehale43@gmail.com

striper878

Gasland documents severe health problems for people, domesticated animals, and wild animals when exposed to toxic water, fumes and noise related to gas drilling. Children developed asthma, others experienced severe headaches. Endocrine problems were common complaints of those living near drilling sites. Some of the animals lost much of their fur. Striper is one of our seven household animals we are concerned about.

Postscript from Paula: Here at Cedar Hill we heat our 800 square foot house with locally purchased seasoned firewood, and do not use air conditioning. Solar energy collected from eight vintage solar panels located on our roof provides our electricity including the biggest energy hog: refrigeration. (We do use a Sunfrost refrigerator which operates off a 12 volt system like ours and is built to be super energy efficient. We do not have enough solar electricity to operate the freezer unit.) Propane is the energy source we use to cook and bake, although in winter when we have our wood stove burning we heat water and cook some food on the woodstove. We consider this bonus energy! Our 100 gallon propane tank lasts us about nine months. We have had to do some research to find out where and what propane is. Do you know?

Propane is a gas often found with natural gas and even with petroleum deep within the earth. Some sources name it as a by product of processing natural gas and of petroleum refining. The processing of natural gas involves removal of propane and butane from the natural gas, to prevent condensation of these liquids in natural gas pipelines. Additionally, oil refineries produce some propane as a by-product of production of gasoline or heating oil.

Because we want to reduce our use of natural gas to a minimum, this means that one of our goals is to reduce use of propane in every way possible. Instead of heating water on the stove for our showers, we are now depending more on using the sun to heat the water in our solar shower bag for a refreshing hot shower. We will wash our laundry in Fayetteville tomorrow because we are going there to do our grocery shopping at Ozark Natural Foods Coop. To avoid burning all the natural gas it would take to dry our clothes (and the electricity used to turn those large tumblers) in the gas dryers, we will hang everything here in the hot August sun to dry. Actions speak louder than words….

August 2, 2010

Are We Trapped in Recreational Shopping?

Filed under: Ecofeminism,Economics,Subsistence Living — Paula Mariedaughter @ 6:43 am
bale1

This huge bale, or mitumba, of fabric heading out of sight

I shop for treasures in unlikely spots. I enjoy my time browsing through thrift shops and flea markets. As a lifelong admirer of quality fabric, textiles are a weakness for me. I can almost always think of a possible use for an attractive piece of cotton or silk. As a quilter, the range of possible uses for a particular pleasing textile is unlimited. I love fabric—whether it is a richly colored teeshirt, a vibrant plaid, a large scale floral or a swirling batik, I want it in my life! Imagine my shock when I arrived at the parking lot of the local salvation army and saw tons of fabric compressed like junk into two huge bales. Each bale was as large as a railroad car! At first I did not know what I was looking at: it seemed to be new wall beyond the building. I looked closer and grabbed my camera because it was an unbelievable sight. When you look at the pictures I took that day, you will see the fluttering corners of hundreds of white plastic bags among the flattened clothes. I experienced it as a chilling, unworldly sight.

As a regular shopper here, I had never seen such a sight. When I inquired inside, I was told that they ship several bales this size every week. They send it “overseas”. The worker explained that most of the clothes they receive as donations will not be purchased, so they move it on as quickly as possible. In a recent book, Fred Pearce wrote, “On average, each of us buys around 75 pounds of textiles a year. We eventually throw about 65 pounds of that into the landfills and hand over about 10 pounds to charities….” It seems that most of those charities bale up most of their donations and many sell the bales to raise money for their other projects. Often the bales are sold to importers in African nations who then sell the individual items to poor people for a profit (emphasis mine). “In Tanzania, they call old shorts and shirts and skirts and socks mitumba, meaning a bale. That’s how the clothes come, in bales unloaded from shipping containers at the Dar es Salaam dock.” Mitumba is big business in Tanzania where most of the ordinary people wear the Western world’s cast-off clothes. This invisible connection to the consuming lifestyle of most Americans has been traced by Fred Pearce in Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff. The author offers you an extensive research on the life of stuff once it leaves your hands.

bale2

Closeup of the bale with all the flapping plastic bags

Compulsive consuming often involves “recreational shopping”. Recreational shopping was a central part of my girlhood and family life in the 1950s and 1960s. What is recreational shopping? The easy definition I use describes recreational shopping as something to do when you are feeling down, something to do to celebrate an occasion, and something to do if you are just bored and want to get out of the house. Shopping becomes central to existence.

I noticed this recreational shopping phenomenon in my own life only after I became actively involved with the Women’s Liberation Union in Kansas City, MO in the early 1970s. There I learned about the power of capitalism to dominate the lives of us ordinary people. At the same time my mother had been divorced by my father and was struggling financially. She observed, “You can’t go out of the house without spending money!” She was experiencing the limitations of her reduced income, and noticing a phenomenon she had not seen before in her own life. These were the early days of consumerism—credit card use was not yet wide spread. Today we are now consumers rather than citizens or neighbors. We live in markets, not cities or towns. Have you even noticed this change in terminology in the media?

My values and consciousness were changing as I examined many parts of my life. My good friend Kate Kasten wrote a guide to the thrift shops in the Kansas City area in the mid-1970s. We enjoyed searching for “finds” and “necessities” along Main Street’s bargain spots. When each of us purchased vintage houses in downtown KC we shopped for furniture and appliances with a past life. It was great fun for me to search for items that caught my eye and pleased my sensibilities. I was not buying what was being promoted at the furniture and department stores. Often I bought better quality than was available new! I furnished my 1888 Queen Anne Victorian house with style!

Thirty-five years later I still get a thrill looking for unique items at thrift stores and flea markets. Fashion is irrelevant to my life. Quality fabrics and well made furniture and tools draw my attention. I do enjoy shopping, but I avoid any, and every big-box store. The majority of my clothes are treasures I’ve found at thrift shops. One of the advantages of shopping where clothes cost five dollars or less is the freedom to not wear something uncomfortable. One cannot always tell how comfortable a particular item will be until worn in real life. If it doesn’t work out, I can wash it and redonate it to the thrift shop. Many of us have a few things in our closet that have become our favored outfits because we feel good when we are wearing them.

jacket

Paula is outfitted in her second-hand clothes and feeling good.

Here is my favorite outfit. The picture was taken as I stood by the special exhibit I pulled together for our quilt guild’s 2009 quilt show. The blue knit shirt, the cotton slacks and the black and white ikat unlined jacket all came from thrift shops. I have worn the slacks, shirt and the jacket regularly for at least the last eight years. They will not be donated to a thrift shop any time soon. Shoes, underclothes and well-fitting pants are items I generally purchase new. I choose carefully and expect each to last a long time. I stopped wearing fashionable women’s shoes in the 1970s because of the long-term damage such footwear does to women’s feet. At the time I worked as a flight attendant for TWA. The airline required me to carry the doctor’s letter declaring I needed to wear the low heeled, lace-up leather shoes for health reasons. My flying partners sometimes couldn’t resist making comments like, “Those shoes look (long pause) comfortable.” We worked long hours and walked many miles, but fashion trapped many of my women coworkers in uncomfortable shoes.

How did I make drastic changes in my life? Radical means “finding the root” and I was part of a movement of women who looked for the roots of sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism, colonialism and capitalism. We read, talked, argued, laughed and grew together. I consciously chose to limit my exposure to advertising and to the content of television after reading Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, I gave away my second hand tv in 1974 and I’ve never missed it. Fads, fashion, celebrity gossip, and catchy commercials are not part of my life. However, I still am a consumer on many levels: driving a car, using a telephone, buying food at the farmer’s market or at our local food coop. All these require my participation in the capitalist economy.

Yet, I have successfully limited my participation emotionally and financially in our consumer society. Adrienne Rich clarified my efforts when she wrote, “The most valuable educational experience a woman can have is one which teaches her to identify and analyze—and resist—the conditions in which she lives, the morality she has been taught, the false images of herself received from high art as well as cheap pornography, classic poetry as well as TV commercials.” This is my ongoing effort: to identify and analyze oppression and injustice and to resist. Often I turn to the garden for renewal.

January 24, 2010

My Fair Share

With “developing” and wealthy nations now battling over obtaining their fair share of global carbon emissions, the belief that all people will someday enjoy the standard of living of the wealthy nations has become an unmistakable fantasy. Human societies are already in overshoot, consuming the resources of one and a third earths every year. If everyone on earth were to consume as much as people in the United States, humanity would be consuming the resources of five planet earths and there would soon be little of nature – or us – left. Yet the rising and very numerous middle classes in rapidly industrializing nations such as Brazil, India, and China are joining the shopping spree. Meanwhile one fourth of humanity, 1.4 billion, live on $1.25 or less per day and are unable to meet their basic needs.

The belief that the poor nations and poor people of the earth would eventually catch up and enjoy an abundant standard of living has allowed well-meaning people in the wealthy nations to act as if their own high incomes and consumption were unrelated to the poverty of others. Now that the limits of the earth are at hand the question “What is my fair share?” is getting tough to avoid. I want an answer to this question. I don’t want to participate in destroying nature and I don’t want to be responsible for other people living with hunger. But, I do want to live. How much can I have?

heirloom corn

Stowell's Heirloom Corn from Seed Savers growing behind comfrey, astragulus, and sage plants.

To discover my fair share I started with statistics from the World Bank (World Development Indicators: 2008). The average per capita gross national income for the world in 2008, equalized by “purchasing power parity”, was $10,357. The purchasing power parity correction makes it easy to compare income in different countries, despite the fact that the same amount of money can buy much more in some countries than others. For example, you could buy half a dozen bananas in India for the same amount of money that would get you one banana in New York City (example from Norm Myers and Jennifer Kent in their book The New Consumers). The purchasing power parity correction rate for India is 5.35 (as of 2002). The international standard is the U.S. dollar so the same amount of money goes 5.35 times further in India than in the U.S. In other words if you are in the U.S. you can think of the $10,357 average world income as actual U.S. dollars. If you are in any other country, then you must use the purchasing power parity correction for your country.

But, the figure of $10,357 is the average gross national income, which is not the same as personal income because it includes things like the average amount of money your government spends on infrastructure. In 2008 gross national income in the U.S. was $46,970, but U.S. personal income before taxes was $40,189 and spendable income was $35,486 (Bureau of Economic Analysis, bea.gov). According to Myers and Kent, actual purchasing power for the world in 2002 was 60% of gross national income, corrected for purchasing power parity (and 70% for the U.S.). Let’s say then that my actual purchasing power would be roughly $6500 (somewhere between 60% and 70% of $10,357).

Whoops! What about Carbon?
But, wait! There’s a problem. At current levels of world income humanity is producing such a large quantity of greenhouse gases that we are threatening the continuation of human civilization and much of life on earth. The Global Humanitarian Forum, a think tank directed by former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, estimates that global warming is already causing 300,000 human deaths per year. To reduce greenhouse gases either income and related production must be reduced from the current world average (meaning I’d get less than $6500), world population must drop significantly, or every dollar spent must result in much less carbon entering the stratosphere. Damage to the environment is commonly calculated by multiplying these three factors (i.e. Impact=Population x Affluence x Technology). Both population (.7% per year) and income (1.4% per year) are growing. The most palatable option for the world’s rich is the third option, commonly known as reducing carbon intensity.

Carbon intensity can be decreased by increasing efficiency (producing goods and services with less energy) and by using non-carbon energy sources like solar power. Over the past 25 years carbon intensity has improved by almost 23% worldwide. But, this downward trend has not been consistent over the years. Since the year 2000 carbon intensity has worsened worldwide. With worsening carbon intensity, increasing income, and increasing population the total amount of carbon going into the atmosphere has increased by 3.5% per year since 2000 (up from under 1% in the 1990s). This rate of increase is far higher than the rates assumed in any of the models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in making its predictions of future global warming. Even with the Kyoto Protocol, no part of the world has succeeded in diminishing its carbon emissions.

Prosperity Without Growth, a recent report from the United Kingdom’s Sustainable Development Commission, has calculated the improvements in carbon intensity that would be necessary to offset projected growth in population and income between now and 2050 and still reduce carbon in the atmosphere down to 450 ppm. While in 2007 carbon intensity was at 768 grams of carbon dioxide per dollar we would need to get down to 36 grams per dollar by 2050. In other words carbon intensity would need to improve by 21 times! Remember that 25 years of technological improvements between 1980 and 2005 were only able to improve emissions 1.3 times (from 1000 to 768 grams carbon dioxide per dollar). This projection allows for slow income growth, but no equalization of income between rich and poor countries. If world income were to equalize at current European Union levels by 2050, allowing no income increases in the developed world, carbon intensity would need to diminish to 14 grams carbon dioxide per dollar, 55 times better than today. This last scenario presumes no income growth in the European Union, a loss in income for the U.S., and large gains in income throughout the developing world.

Prosperity Without Growth concludes that these levels of improvement in carbon intensity are not feasible and that economic growth cannot safely continue. Worldwatch attempted to put similar figures into perspective by pointing out that for everyone on the Earth to live at the EU levels expected in 2050 if “normal” growth continues we would need cars capable of getting 700 or 800 miles per gallon! It looks like even my fair share of $6500 is too much unless a revolution in technology dropped carbon intensity down to nearly nothing. Since new technologies take decades to come into common usage, the hope for such a revolution is just a fantasy, albeit a popular and dangerous one. The only other alternative – and this is just a personal solution – would be for me to find a way to spend my dollars on products and services that emit almost no carbon.

Shrinking Ecological Footprints
Carbon emissions are not the only constraint on growth. Globalized industrial patriarchy has been stripping the earth of every “resource” and is already butting up against other shortages such as water. The resource thieves in the “developed” world, myself included, must cut back their lifestyles. The world average gross income of $10,357 gives us a rough and too high upper limit and a clear message that drastic lifestyle cuts are called for since most people in the developed world have far higher incomes than this. Ideally, entire nations will take up the challenge to quickly dismantle their polluting systems and adopt new ways of life that involve far less consumption. While we as individuals are pressing for the massive social change needed, we can begin the process by changing own way of life and setting an example for others.

But, where to start? Whether setting about change at a national level or an individual level, a measure that quantifies how much different activities take from the earth is necessary. Here’s where calculating national or individual ecological footprints can help. With an ecological footprint analysis, the resources required to produce the specific products and services consumed can be estimated and translated into a land equivalent, measured in square yards, square meters, acres or hectares. For example, a pound of potatoes requires about 33 square yards of land if grown using industrial farming methods. The potato plants themselves use a small growing space, but the chemical input, farm machinery, and transportation to market all contribute to the footprint or land area required to produce the potatoes. Similarly, a kilowatt hour of electricity from the grid uses 31 square yards of land, while the solar equivalent takes under a third of a yard. A full ecological footprint for a nation or an individual is the land equivalent for everything consumed in a year.

In the United States the average ecological footprint for each person is 23 acres. But, if you divide the amount of productive land on the earth (2.8 billion acres excluding polar regions, deserts and deep sea) by the earth’s population of over 6 billion, the bioproductive land available to each person to produce everything consumed would be 5 acres. Therefore, in the U.S. we are each using 18 acres of land more than the earth can spare for us. These figures do not provide land for all the other species on the planet, so each person’s 5 acre allotment must be cut back further.

Jim Merkel’s excellent book, Radical Simplicity, provides detailed instructions for calculating your own ecological footprint, along with tables that show the land equivalent required for a wide range of products and services. As a longtime practitioner of radical simplicity Merkel has lived on $5000 and an ecological footprint of 3 acres of land for many years. His book describes scenarios for a life lived with a 1 acre, 3 acre, or 6 acre ecological footprint.

On 3 acres, an amount that is enough less than the world personal allotment of 5 acres to allow at least some room for wildlife, the sample lifestyle is far removed from that of the typical American. While plenty of veggies, fruit, beans and grains could be eaten, meat, dairy products, juice, and alcohol would be excluded from the diet because they require too many resources. The living space would be quite small (150 square feet or so) in a very energy efficient building such as a straw bale house. A very small allotment of fuel oil or firewood for heating would be possible. Transportation would be largely by bicycle or on foot with 50 miles of bus travel and a couple of gallons of gasoline allotted per month. Air travel would be impossible.

Returning to Traditional Lifeways: The Real Sustainability Revolution
If all of this sounds like returning to a third world way of life, then you are correct. The average ecological footprint of the low income nations is under 2.5 acres. The peoples of both Africa (3.4 acres) and Asia/Pacific (4 acres) consume less than their share of the Earth’s biocapacity while those in Latin America (6 acres) and the Middle East/Central Asia (5.7 acres) slightly exceed their share. People are obviously capable of living on less than a 5 acre footprint. Although some people in the global South have far too few resources, this does not mean that one cannot live well without overdrawing the Earth’s biocapacity. Deprivation results when traditional peoples have their ways of life disrupted by thefts of land, water, or other resources, as has happened to many, thanks to the powerful forces of first colonization and now globalization. Where necessary resources are still available and communities are left intact, traditional and truly sustainable ways of life continue (See Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, 1993). The peasants and indigenous peoples still living largely traditional lives in direct interaction with the Earth and each other are the models that those of us living in the heart of globalized industrial patriarchy need. Although small scale, traditional cultures may (or may not) have problematic patriarchal social structures, these cultures are able to maintain the Earth’s fertility and health and do not require huge amounts of energy from dangerous energy sources.

People immersed in globalized industrial patriarchy view traditional ways of life as inferior because these lifeways have been the target of an enormous smear campaign since the era of European colonization and then the inception of industry. Traditional people (and this includes all our ancestors) leave the land and their traditions when the powerful forces of industrializing, colonizing or globalizing patriarchy take the land and destroy their communities. Forced into cities or other participation in the globalized patriarchy, the propaganda of the dominating culture eventually persuades most displaced people that the old ways of life are inferior or too hard. But, now it is time to reverse this process! We can recognize the value of traditional ways of life linked directly to nature and local communities, dismantle globalized industrial patriarchy, and build new subsistence cultures. The traditional lifeways of indigenous peoples, peasants of the global South, and our own ancestors are our models for sustainability. Many of these small-scale, traditional cultures are also models for equalizing distribution of resources and more equitable social relationships. Some have matriarchal social structures (matrilineal, matrilocal) and these cultures deserve the closest study. Low-tech, modern inventions like bio-intensive gardening and perhaps bicycling can also help us to build subsistence cultures, as can social practices like consensus decision-making and consciousness raising.

In contrast, the vision of “sustainability” put forward by most of the political and educated classes of the industrialized world leaves many of the deadly bases of the dominant society untouched: industrialization, consumerism, capitalism, inequity, domination, patriarchy. Almost all the books, government reports, and even non-governmental organizations proposing solutions to climate change assume that industrialized society must continue. They call for major changes in practice – energy efficiency, recycling, de-carbonizing energy sources, even sometimes for an end to inequity – but do not address the roots of the problem. How can a system based in domination (patriarchy) and greed (capitalism) and therefore dedicated to giving more power and more goodies to some people create equity among people and live in balance with the Earth? Why would a sane people who care for the earth want to gamble that an aberrant way of life can be reined in enough to preserve the climate when there are existing ways of life that have worked for our species for thousands of years? Perhaps there may (or may not) be ways to live with the earth that could include some benefits from modern technology, but revolutionary changes are needed, not a new consumerism and more of the same old patriarchy. Only by getting rid of the social elements that have created the climate crisis, poverty, and ecological overshoot – patriarchy, capitalism, domination, consumerism – will we save the Earth and save our Selves.

Writing about my fair share has not been easy, but the writing is the easy part. How will I ever get my income and ecological footprint down to a level that does not hurt the Earth and steal from much of humanity? One step at a time is my only answer. The largest part of our ecological footprint here at Cedar Hill comes from the miles driven in two four wheel drive vehicles, the firewood burnt for heating the house, and, to a lesser extent, the food we eat. Our automobile usage seems hard to modify at the present moment due to our remote location, rough roads, lack of public transportation and a commitment to eldercare for my mother. We are currently creating window quilts and sealing up the house more effectively to reduce firewood use. We’re also growing more of our food on site and moving away from trucking in garden inputs. Fortunately, reducing income does have a clear upside: less time spent working for money and more time available for fighting patriarchy, spending time in nature, and working and playing on the homestead!

January 22, 2010

Trust Women, Every Day, Everywhere!

Filed under: Ecofeminism,Patriarchy,Paula Mariedaughter — Paula Mariedaughter @ 4:10 am

Fall, 1950
Marie said to her long-time doctor, “As you know I have had four pregnancies in six years. I have three healthy children, and I have my hands full! I’d like a tubal ligation to insure that I don’t get pregnant again. I do not want any more children.”

Dr. Boughton replied, “Now Marie, you’re young. (She was thirty.) You’ll change your mind—I can’t do that.”

This is a reconstructed conversation relayed to me by my youngest sister Lea who heard the secret from our father long after Mother’s death in 1979. According to our father, Mother had some kind of “breakdown” after this third child’s birth. She went away for a week or so, leaving him with the children. Marie stayed with women friends and (he says) played bridge with them for that week. We don’t know if her request for a tubal ligation happened before or after this “breakdown”. In telling Lea about this episode in Marie’s life, our father was not sympathetic.

My mother, Marie Virginia Donovan Neilson, was a strong woman who had overcome a number of obstacles in her life. But seeking control of her fertility was out of her reach in 1950. The shame of this situation is not my mother’s shame! She was a victim of the shameful attitudes of the patriarchal medical institutions we live with. Today, 60 years later, we are in mortal danger of returning to the days of enforced motherhood and unsafe, illegal abortions! I am writing about family planning today because 37 years ago on this date the US Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to choose a safe legal abortion within the first months of her pregnancy in the case Roe vs. Wade. The assault on this decision has been ongoing and quite successful!

family

A favorite family photo of Mother, Paula (far left) and my sisters relaxing in our camper and photographed by Dad about 1959. Our brother Karl is not pictured here.

Women and girls live in intensely woman-hating societies in most parts of our planet! Facing this fact is not easy for any of us.

Our strengths are called weaknesses. Our unique ability to nurture new life within our own bodies has long been treated as a shameful condition by patriarchal societies. Pregnant women are at higher risk of physical abuse from their male partners who often beat and kick them in their growing bellies. Choosing when and how to bring forth new life is the most personal decision anyone can make. The decision to have a baby is different for a woman than it is for a man. The frank reality that motherhood and fatherhood are not equal decisions is obvious and usually ignored! Women risk their lives to bring forth new life, men do not. Men cannot give birth. Men do not risk their lives to bring a child into their lives. Nor do they bond with the unborn baby in the same manner that a woman who carries the growing child within her own skin can do.

Pregnancy is a potentially dangerous undertaking. In fact, an abortion in the first three months of the pregnancy is much less dangerous to a woman’s health than a full-term pregnancy. Every woman makes a series of choices in her life that may or may not lead to her becoming pregnant. Many times she is forced to have sex against her will. Once pregnant, we must decide what is right for us, and for the fetus beginning to grow inside of us.

In the fall of 1973, I believed I might be pregnant. I remember walking home from the doctor’s appointment, kicking leaves as I walked, and not knowing the answer to that question. For days I considered my options. I thought about the possibilities of raising a child at that point in my life. I decided I was not ready to risk my life, or to bring another child into the world–I would have an abortion. Then I discovered I was not pregnant.

Trusting women to do the right thing is not a principal of patriarchy! Patriarchy is about domination of mind, body and spirit. Dr. George Tiller was an abortion provider. When Dr. Tiller wore the words “Trust Women” on his chest, he became a traitor to the idea of male domination of women. George Tiller’s actions to allow women to choose when, and if, they wanted to become mothers, put him at grave risk. He knew the risks to himself and his family. His commitment to women who had few choices to legally terminate their pregnancies grew from all he heard from women and girls. Dr. Tiller was murdered on a Sunday, while serving in his church in May, 2009 because of his commitment to women!

Assassinations such as Dr Tiller’s accomplish multiple purposes including eliminating an individual, as well as intimidating the rest of us. Assassinations also make clear the political agenda hiding behind the slogans of the love for the unborn. Abortion is a legal right in most western countries, but the assault on reproductive rights here in the US has been effective:
Conservatives, energized by the success of their antiabortion drive, are ratching up their offensive [against birth control]. They’re doing it in their churches and in their faith-based organizations and with the help of numerous point people in Congress. Those on the right claim they’re honoring women by preserving the sanctity of motherhood, but their real beef is the freedom birth control affords women to enjoy a healthy, safe, sex life while avoiding unwanted pregnancies. That speaks for the forty-two million–or seven out of ten–American women in their childbearing years who are sexually active (and heterosexual, I add) and don’t want to get pregnant.

This warning is from Barbara J. Berg’s new book, Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining our Future. Many women depend on effective birth control and assume that will protect them from considering an abortion. (It can’t happen to me, thinking.) However, many birth control methods are being redefined as abortions! Berg informs us that so-called Right of Conscience Regulation created by the recent Bush administratination broadens “the definiton of abortion to include many kinds of birth control, especially oral and emergency contraception, and allows health care providers to withhold available medical information if it conflicts with their moral or religious beliefs.”(p. 154)

What does “sanctity of motherhood” mean? Mary Daly, one of the most influential thinkers in the women’s liberation movement, warned us to be aware of patriarchy’s reversals of reality. For me, “sacred motherhood” or “the sanctity of motherhood” begins with respect for a woman’s capability to make informed choices about her life and to make the right choice about bringing new life to our crowded planet. Every child born into a wealthy nation consumes eleven times the resources of a child born in a developing country. All our personal choices affect the planet. We have come to understand the resources of our bountiful planet are not infinite. We are embarking on a new world where we must trust women–every day and in every way!

January 5, 2010

Insanely Dedicated?

Filed under: Ecofeminism,Global Warming,Jeanne Neath,Patriarchy — Jeanne Neath @ 11:36 am

The lesbian feminist movement was sizzling, with formerly heterosexual women racing out of stagnant relationships with men and into the beds of their best women friends. This was the mid 1970s and I was going to graduate school in social psychology at the University of Kansas and undergoing huge life changes including a divorce, coming out as a lesbian, and then adopting radical lesbian feminist and lesbian separatist politics. No one suggested to me or to the thousands upon thousands of formerly heterosexual women that lesbian genes were required to be a lesbian. I stayed in graduate school for a little longer than an eternity because I was so involved in doing lesbian and feminist political and cultural work that I had little time and interest in my graduate studies.

Jeanne

Jeanne, age 32, in front of Spinsters Books, 1983

On graduation, with my PhD in hand, I continued working in a low wage horse tour job and devoted my best energy to Spinsters Books and Webbery, the lesbian feminist bookstore and women’s center in Lawrence, Kansas. My work at Spinsters was mostly unpaid and I lived with my Dalmatian and cat on about $500 a month in a small semi-finished garage. By 1984 I became somewhat dissatisfied with my life situation, not so much because of my low income, but because the feminist movement was cooling down and some of my friends had moved away. I continued on with the bookstore for several more years, but eventually I began to feel resentful and not properly appreciated for the work I was doing there. While I was living on a small income and devoting my best energies to Spinsters, other lesbians and feminists I knew were moving upward in their careers. My separatist and radical feminist political views elicited mostly defensiveness from much of the larger feminist community in Lawrence, though our collective at Spinsters held similar views. Eventually I had had enough of giving so much of myself to a fading feminist community. I no longer was receiving an adequate return for my work and I moved on to a new adventure, homesteading on lesbian land in the Ozarks.

Several years ago a young female student at Smith College interviewed a number of the lesbians involved with Spinsters and a local lesbian journal called Monthly Cycle for a class project in her “Queer Publics” course. This student had grown up in Lawrence and became interested in its lesbian herstory. Not surprisingly, from her postmodern, queer perspective she was unable to fully understand the motivation of the lesbians creating Spinsters in that very different era. Although she valued the contribution the lesbians of Spinsters and Monthly Cycle had made, the conclusion of the paper she wrote for her class implied that we were not quite sane. She seemed to agree with one of Spinsters’ collective members she had interviewed: the lesbians of Spinsters and Monthly Cycle were “insanely dedicated”.

As I look back now to my years at Spinsters I see quite the opposite. I admire the dedication that my younger self and her sister revolutionaries had. The problem, then and now, is with all of the women (and men) who aren’t dedicated to creating an ecofeminist revolution, who instead find their niche in patriarchal society, enjoy the rewards of overconsumption, and make their own contribution to destroying life on this planet. We did not give too much to Spinsters or to feminism. Others gave too little. If everyone, then and now, tried their hardest to challenge the patriarchal social system that is killing the planet and took only enough to live a quality life, then we could all be supporting each other with the gifts of our consciousness, our revolutionary fervor, and our lives of voluntary simplicity. We would create the life-loving and ecofeminist society we need.

In the 1970s it took a strong vision, like that provided by radical feminist or lesbian separatist theory, to be able to see how deadly patriarchal society was. We knew that the patriarchal society we lived in could not be reformed and we were committed to building an alternative ecofeminist society. At Spinsters we attempted, not always successfully, to manifest lesbian feminist revolution in our day to day work in the bookstore. We did not care about getting ahead in the larger patriarchal society because we wanted to radically change that society, not participate in it. To someone immersed in patriarchal society we may have looked crazy in our dedication. But, we already knew at that early date that patriarchy was destroying women’s lives and life on earth.

Global warming is now demonstrating to everyone who isn’t actively denying reality what we already knew back then. This society is deadly and has to be stopped. The kind of vision and dedication possessed by the radical lesbian feminists and lesbian separatists of the 1970s is what is needed now in order to stop globalized industrial patriarchy before it is too late. The results of this patriarchy’s practices are now clear for everyone to see. Thousands of the world’s top scientists are telling us that business as usual will have devastating consequences for humankind, plant and animal life, and the Earth’s ecosystems.

Unfortunately, much of the response to the problem of global warming is guided by the same patriarchal mindset that has created global warming. We desperately need to use the insights of radical feminist and ecofeminist theories and dismantle globalized industrial patriarchy. These radical ecofeminist insights can be used in conjunction with those of the world’s indigenous peoples, matriarchal peoples, and others still living close to the earth on the margins of patriarchal civilization. Those of us in the wealthy nations that have created global warming need to transform our own lives and our society, leaving behind our large incomes, our ridiculous overconsumption, our dependence on industry, and our domination of nature and other humans. We need to face up to the entirety of our problems. We need to insanely dedicate ourselves to creating an ecofeminist future, a future that ends domination, restores women to a central place in society, and returns the earth to the way she was before patriarchal civilization:

“From the air we breathe to the water we drink to the food we eat, every one of these has been altered from the way our ancestors experienced those things. The earth itself, when you pick it up and analyze it, is not the same. Everything has been changed. Yet if nature is sacred, it would be our mind to change it back to make it the way it was when it was supportive of life on the earth. This would mean to make the food the way it was, to make the water the way it was, to make the air the way it was, to make our bodies and everything on the planet the way they were, the way nature made them to be.” (from John Mohawk’s essay “Clear Thinking: A Positive Solitary View of Nature” published in Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future)

July 14, 2009

Subsistence and Resistance

In a recent column in Orion (May-June 2009) Derrick Jensen criticized the “simplicity” movement and what he says is one of its core questions, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?” Jensen’s criticisms of simplicity living are multi-faceted, but the heart of his argument, as I understand it, is that this culture is “killing the planet” and must be stopped, just as a psychopath rampaging through your house and killing your family members would need to be stopped. In light of the severity of the problem (a culture that is killing the planet), lifestyle choices are insignificant and resistance is imperative.

Reform or Revolution?

Yellow squash plant

Lush yellow squash plant

While I agree wholeheartedly that we need to resist and stop the globalized industrial capitalist patriarchy that is killing the planet, those of us living in the “developed” world desperately need to create vastly changed human cultures that live in a way that benefits nature and benefits humans. In many “developing” countries ancient and sustainable subsistence cultures still remain more or less intact outside the cities and land areas taken over by development. But in the developed world the takeover by globalized patriarchy is so complete that almost everyone is dependent on the captor (globalized patriarchy) for their basic means of living – food, shelter, water, clothing, fuel. In subsistence societies where the earth is healthy (as it was prior to patriarchal civilization), basic needs of life can be met by every person either in direct interaction with the earth or with members of their own local community.

The value of individual lifestyle changes depends largely on whether the purpose and effect of the changes are reform or revolutionary change. For example, buying efficient, “green” consumer goods is an act aimed at reform. While the “green” products may be an improvement over older, “legacy” goods in terms of environmental impact, consuming the goods supports continued large scale industry and business almost as usual. Production of the products is far more likely to harm the earth than help her. In contrast, the development of subsistence cultures that benefit the earth and replace globalized patriarchy is revolutionary change. People living in lands now dominated by “developed” nations can take steps toward developing matriarchal, subsistence cultures. When they do, their individual lifestyle changes contribute to revolution. Just as acts of resistance to globalized patriarchy can attempt to reform society (leaving massive industrialization and male dominance in place) or effect radical change, daily living practices can intend and produce reform or revolution (or perpetuate the status quo).

Post-Patriarchal Living

I don’t think that we can “stop this culture from killing the planet” without both resistance and creation of new/old subsistence cultures. We need to both stop the patriarchal earth-destroying culture and create new earth-loving cultures. The devastated earth needs the restoration and caretaking that humans in matriarchal, subsistence societies can provide her. Freeing the earth of possession by patriarchy and seeing nature begin to recover is a big motivation, but people also need to be able to envision and experience post-industrial, post-capitalist, and post-patriarchal ways of living. For most people in “developed” nations an end to globalized industrial capitalist partriarchy would seem like suicide – an end to the basic necessities of life (as well as the treasured frills). By starting to create subsistence cultures now, more people in the developed world can believe that there is a path to take out of globalized patriarchy and industrialization that allows life, including their own, to continue.

We also need to influence the form of the subsistence societies that will follow globalized patriarchy. Globalized patriarchy is heading toward collapse because it is taking from nature at a rate that exceeds nature’s ability to replenish herself. Subsistence living will follow collapse, but past and present subsistence societies have frequently been patriarchal and harmful to women. As a woman I greatly fear male violence and other attempts to control women during and following societal collapse. Beginning to consciously transition to subsistence now can help create cultures that are matriarchal – egalitarian, based in strong bonds between women and respect for all of life. The end of globalized patriarchy can be a door opening into a far better world, but not if any form of patriarchy continues.

Building Subsistence Cultures

At the heart of any human culture are the ways people relate to the earth to provide for basic needs – shelter, water, food, heating. As members of the “developed” nations turn to subsistence living, new subsistence cultures will develop from humans meeting their basic needs through direct relationship with local nature and local human community. These are “lifestyle changes” that create new subsistence cultures. Subsistence gardening is one activity that begins to build subsistence cultures. As Richard Heinberg has pointed out, without fossil fuels and machinery many more people will need to become involved in growing food. Using techniques such as Ecology Action’s Grow Biointensive (Jeavons, 2002, How To Grow More Vegetables, 7th Edition) people can work with nature to grow more food and more nutritious food on less land. (One person can be fed with the crops grown on as little as 4000 square feet using Grow Biointensive methods while “modern” agriculture requires 15,000-30,000 square feet for the average U.S. diet and much more for heavy meat eaters.) This method of horticulture grows topsoil as well as crops, benefiting nature. With large numbers of people gardening small areas of land, the land can be well cared for and areas of former farmland can be returned to nature. People able to grow their own food (including staples such as grain and potatoes) lose a big chunk of their dependence on globalized patriarchy and become freer to resist.

Sweet corn, oats, comfrey, astragalus

Sweet corn, our first attempt at oats, comfrey, astragalus, sage

Gardening can be more or less an act of building subsistence culture. At Cedar Hill our goal is to help build a subsistence, matriarchal culture, not just to grow a few tomatoes. We are a long way from an ideal of growing most of our diet and using no outside inputs, but we are moving in that direction. We’re growing at least some dietary staples like dried beans, potatoes and, this year, a few oats. We use mostly heirloom and other open pollinated seeds and are saving the seeds. We use hand tools exclusively so the energy used to grow and maintain the garden comes from the sun and human power (though the hand tools are well crafted 20 year old industrial-made tools). We’ve never used chemical fertilizers or pesticides, but we have brought in alfalfa meal, greensand, manure, worm castings and compost produced off site over the years. Now we are getting very serious about the compost pile(s) and planning what crops to grow so we’ll have enough carbon and nitrogen in the residues to create enough compost to fertilize the entire garden. We collect water off our roof into big stock tanks (again industrial-made) and water by hand, so we are trying out plantings that can get by without much irrigation in our very hot summers. We are still trucking in mulch, wonderful ash shavings from a local handle factory, but we did use oak leaves for one potato bed this year with successful results.

Lina Sisco Bird Egg heirloom beans, Tomatoes

Lina Sisco Bird Egg heirloom beans, Tomatoes

The men who sold us industrial society were first rate snake oil salesmen. Regaining our lost connection to nature (and to human community) should make up for many supposed “losses” that come to people in the “developed” world with an end to massive modern industry. Subsistence gardeners begin developing a real relationship with the earth – the smell of her soil, the wildly colorful food crops, the native plants returning to the lands freed from agriculture, the insects chomping their way around the garden, the precious predator insects, bug-snarfing toads, the feel of the rains and winds on their own skin. With connection to nature can also come the directly experienced spirituality that so many people in globalized patriarchy have been futilely searching for. Replace patriarchy with matriarchy and “heaven” comes down to earth!

Stop Globalized Patriarchy Now!

Subsistence and resistance. Resistance and subsistence. We need both. But, practitioners of each need to keep their eye on the ball. Globalized patriarchy is destroying the earth. We don’t need minor adjustments and reformist change. The small cuts in fossil fuel emissions by 2020 promised by the current version of the ACES bill in the U.S. Congress does next to nothing to reverse global warming, a frightening example of the failure of the reformist approach. We likewise can’t afford to get so busy out in the garden that we forget to resist. Subsistence is in some ways easier than resistance as one could co-exist without active opposition to globalized patriarchy (at least until the waters rise, the bug-eating toads go extinct, or cancer strikes home).

On the other hand, a singleminded focus on resistance prioritizes the public (traditionally male) sphere over the “private” (traditionally female) sphere, as Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (The Subsistence Perspective, 1999) and Sharon Astyk (Depletion and Abundance, 2008) have pointed out. Politics with a capital “P” and economics with a capital “E” characterize male-dominated, large-scale societies, while daily living and the women who typically provide are more important in small-scale subsistence societies. Revolutions in industrial societies have consistently produced only male-controlled, domination-based societies.

We have to live during and after the revolution and the living could even be the revolution if only everyone, including the power holders, walked out on patriarchy. There isn’t much sign that most people in the developed nations are leaving their modern gadgets (and the rest of globalized industrial patriarchy) behind, so we need resistance and subsistence. As Jensen argues, we need to stop this culture from killing the planet.

May 25, 2009

Sustainable or Business Almost As Usual? (III)

My mother and father moved into a suburban house with a large yard in the late 1960s, after living many years in more constricted living arrangements. The yard seemed to call for a dog and for my father’s 54th birthday I bought him a six week old Dalmatian puppy. My father went with me to pick out the puppy, but we did not consult with my mother ahead of time. When we arrived home, puppy in arms, my mother opened the garage door, screamed “Oh no” at the sight of the puppy, and slammed the door in our faces. Within a day or so mother was completely enchanted with the puppy and she dearly loved him until his death at age 17.

I eventually found out that part of her reaction to seeing the new puppy came from the loss of her family’s dog when she was in high school. Her family had recently moved to Kansas City due to the failure of my grandfather’s trucking company in the Great Depression. Their dog was out in the residential street in front of the house when a group of young males gunned their car right at the dog and purposefully ran him over. They had attempted to run the dog over before and were jubilant that this time they succeeded in killing him, loudly exclaiming “Got it”. Over thirty years later my mother did not want to risk loving another dog.

This story of male cruelty and violence is one among millions that women have told during the centuries of worldwide feminist resistance to patriarchy. Feminists have called western patriarchy a death-loving culture in part because of its long history of violence and bloodshed including, but not limited to, rape, war, cruelty to animals, sexual degradation, lynching, racism, incest, slavery, and environmental destruction. Feminists have already had plenty of evidence of the death orientation of western patriarchy, but by now everyone else should be wondering too.

A consensus has emerged among the scientific elite that industrialized society is creating dangerous climate change that, unless stopped soon, will put as many as 30% or more of the world’s species at risk of extinction. What does it mean that this society has acted in a way that endangers a third or more of earth’s life forms? What does it mean that most of the concern about global warming focuses on its effects on human societies, not other forms of life? Global warming provides indisputable evidence that globalized, capitalist patriarchy is a powerful life-destroying force. The fact that many feminists, indigenous peoples, and other resistors have known for a long time is now the province of everyone in the developed world: something is terribly, terribly wrong here!

Efforts at abating global warming focus on lower carbon use, more renewable energy, and reduced waste and pollution. But there has been so much delay and resistance by the developed countries in initiating these changes on a large scale that even a lower carbon “developed” lifestyle cannot extend to 7 or 9 billion people. Extreme and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are now needed. A “developed” lifestyle cannot safely be extended to developing countries, nor can the U.S. continue with anything remotely resembling “the American way of life.” We must face up to this reality honestly and scale back our society in a purposeful way, eliminating much while reconstructing institutions that can be of real value such as education, health care, or disability supports (see http://sharonastyk.com/). The other options, denial or Business Almost As Usual (BAAU – see Part I and Part II of this blog) are a catastrophe for humans and for huge number of species likely to become extinct if temperatures rise much further.

Global warming has reached an emergency level with temperatures rising and ice sheets melting at far faster rates than projected by the most recent IPCC reports issued in 2007 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, 2007). The IPCC operates using a form of consensus that results in assessments that are overly influenced by conservative forces such as the OPEC nations and the former Bush administration. Most of the research (118 scenarios) included in the latest IPCC report focused on what will happen if CO2 levels reach 485-570 parts per million (ppm – 560 ppm is double preindustrial levels). The IPCC barely studied scenarios of a world that put more serious limits on greenhouse gases: just six scenarios studied projected CO2 levels of 350-400 ppm. Even these lowest studied CO2 levels are predicted to increase global temperature 2.0-2.4°C over pre-industrial times.

Many nations, including the European Union, view a 2°C change in temperature over pre-industrial times as a maximum for preventing “dangerous climate change.” Increasing numbers of scientists and non-governmental organizations now call for limiting temperature even further, with some suggesting 1°C over pre-industrial as the long term goal (see Worldwatch’s 2009 State of the World for a summary). However, we are already at .7°C (387 ppm) and there is a time lag, which means that even if no more fossil fuels were burned, temperatures will continue to rise to well above 1°C over preindustrial.

The earth requires an immediate lowering of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet emissions have continued to rise despite the Kyoto treaty and escalating worldwide concern. Although there are some hopeful signs from the Obama administration such as the decision that the EPA will regulate CO2 as a pollutant, both the Obama administration and the proposed American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) legislation propose much smaller cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than the European Union advocates. [The EU calls for emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The Obama administration wants to skip the 25-40% cut and return to 1990 levels by 2020. (Kansas City Star March 29, 2009 and New York Times March 31, 2009.) ACES confuses the issue by calling for 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Of course, 2005 levels were much higher than 1990.] If there is any hope of reaching any of the lower goals for greenhouse gas concentrations, emissions must peak by 2015 and begin a rapid decline.

The BAAU plans are running out of time, have probably already run out of time. Ross Gelbspan, the Pulitzer prize winning author who has written two books on global warming, says that we have waited too long to make the necessary changes and there is no hope now of stopping the rising temperatures at a safe level (http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=7203&method=full). The Worldwatch 2009 State of the World report recognized the need to limit temperature rise to 1°C, but could not project a way to reach this goal without relying on carbon capture and storage, a technology that has been used only on a small scale trial basis. The safety of carbon capture and storage, which buries CO2 captured from power plants (or even from the atmosphere) underground, is highly questionable. Imagine an earthquake and the earth burping out massive quantities of carbon unsafely stored underground. This is not a comic book fantasy. A similar event happened 55 million years ago when a natural methane “burp” released over a trillion tons of methane from the ocean floor and sent temperatures soaring by 18°F causing mass extinctions. (See Fred Pearce’s book, With Speed and Violence:Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change.) Technological solutions, like carbon capture and storage or far more science fiction type possibilities, are the wave of the future if BAAU plans are followed and are likely to cause far more problems than they solve.

We must instead begin to realize that BAAU plans won’t limit climate change adequately or create equity among the peoples of the world. But, there is still a way to turn climate change around and end world poverty and inequity by making radical, not BAAU, changes. Radical change is change that goes to the root of the problem.

First, we must recognize that industrialization on the enormous scale it is currently practiced must be severely curtailed. I don’t know if there is a safe way to use limited industrial production or not, but at the very least we need to reduce industry to producing essential and very efficient, durable goods that help take care of the basic needs of all the billions of people on earth. Perhaps any industry is so destructive of nature and of our human nature that it will best be eliminated altogether.

Second, we must address the root of our problems by bringing an end to the social system of globalized, capitalist patriarchy (and other forms of patriarchy as well). Economically, as Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (see their book The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy) have explained “Subsistence is the Alternative”. Politically, Matriarchy is the Alternative. By matriarchy I mean an egalitarian society that is strongly based in bonds between women, similar to many of the matrilineal, matrifocal societies that exist now or that have been described by anthropologists in the past. By turning to subsistence and matriarchy, societies can develop that are able to meet the needs and hopes of people in a way that globalized capitalist patriarchy never even attempted. The time for change is right now, before each of us in developed countries becomes responsible for the extinction of many of the earth’s species and the creation of a world that will give all of the earth’s children and grandchildren a life no one wants for them.

Nikki, Jeanne and Chase, Zora, Shyla

Nikki, Jeanne and Chase, Zora, Shyla

Tonight (9 PM) there is a low fire in the woodstove. Paula’s antique irons are heating on top of the stove. We have one 15 watt light on in the center of the house. Women, dogs, and one cat are drawn together to the heat and light. Two flats of tiny seedlings – tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil – are stashed behind the stove keeping warm overnight. I am not at all certain what the future will bring, but tonight I am warm and content, happy to be sharing this 40 year old couch with dreaming dogs. Tomorrow the dogs will go on the run they are dreaming of now (their legs are twitching) and I will take another step toward subsistence.

April 19, 2009

Sustainable or Business Almost As Usual? (II)

Filed under: Ecofeminism,Jeanne Neath,Patriarchy,Subsistence Living — Jeanne Neath @ 12:11 pm

Part 2 of 3

Temporary clothes dryer

Temporary clothes dryer

Today I’m still worried, yet hopeful enough to stick with my subsistence activities and keep writing about my concerns. We don’t have running water on our homestead and do our laundry at a laundromat. This week I skipped using the gas drier and brought my wet clothes home to hang outside, even though it was raining. The weather radio had promised a dry, warmish day for Friday, the next day. My first activity Friday was to get the clothes hanging, but the weather turned out to be quite cold and very damp and felt like it could easily rain. I hung the small stuff inside near the woodstove and put my shirts and pants outside where it turned out they would not dry. Mid-afternoon I brought everything in the house where it did eventually dry, though things were congested around the stove. I’d probably have been better off with a more radical change – washing and drying a smaller amount of clothes entirely at home instead of washing a large amount all at once at the laundromat and assuming the weather was going to cooperate. Apparently Business Almost As Usual (BAAU) does not work so well even on a small scale.

BAAU (Business Almost As Usual) sustainability plans focus on changes in technology and efficiency without changing the root cause of environmental destruction and social inequity: globalized capitalist patriarchy. The BAAU approach to sustainability is so beneficial to powerful people in politics and business that no other possibilities for change are seriously discussed by government, the political class, or mainstream media. Decades of indoctrination against subsistence and rural living have made most of the populace in the developed world both completely dependent on society (e.g. food comes from grocery stores, not the earth) and scornful of rural life. Even environmental organizations like Worldwatch or Earth Policy Institute that are concerned with both environmental damage and social inequity propose BAAU plans to address poverty, global warming, habitat loss, and resource depletion, while failing to realize that their carefully crafted plans cannot and will not be carried out by a globalized, capitalist, patriarchal society whose very basis is oppression and theft from nature, women, and “developing” countries.

The leaders of the western world have been promising for decades that the “developing” world can “catch up” to the western “developed” world and many people in the West believe this promise. (See the book Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva.) This “catch up” view ignores the fact that “advancement” in the developed countries is made possible by taking the natural resources, lands, and work of the people in the “developing” world. Who will provide the unpaid for and unaccounted for resources to extend western style abundance to the developing countries?

We are now seeing the answer to this question as several of the large “developing” countries, including China, India, and Brazil, have begun to catch up. Elites and middle classes in developing countries like these are moving to a western lifestyle while people formerly living sustainable subsistence lifestyles are forced off the land and into expanding urban slums. At the same time the inability of our living planet to support the level of pollution (e.g. global warming) and resource depletion (e.g. food and water shortages, diminishing oil supplies) for billions more people living a “developed” lifestyle has become apparent. The earth cannot support a new coal-fired power plant coming on line every week in China on top of all the carbon burning already taking place in the “developed” world. Likewise the earth cannot support a meat-heavy diet expanded to billions more people since livestock produce massive quantities of greenhouse gases as they eat and digest the grain needed to feel billions of people.

The idea that billions of people can catch up and live a western “developed” lifestyle is clearly incorrect. But now that the ecological truths have been revealed, the BAAU plans for sustainability still pretend that with greater efficiency, use of renewable energy, and new technologies billions more people could live a modified, “developed”, yet sustainable, lifestyle, all without changing the social underpinnings of patriarchy, class, racism, and capitalism.

Most people living a “developed” lifestyle have (so far) little interest in returning to a subsistence way of life. On the other hand, people living a subsistence way of life do not voluntarily choose development, but are forced out of subsistence when their land and ability to live are taken by the powers of globalized, capitalist patriarchy (See Ecofeminism by Mies and Shiva). These are not parallel situations. Development is not the all desirable good that people in the developed world have been indoctrinated into believing. People living in developed countries are so dependent on society, that the idea of living through direct exchange with the earth is frightening. We lack the knowledge and skills of our ancestors. Our dependence on globalized capitalist patriarchy is no accident. Most of us have ancestors who were once the peoples forced off our lands for the benefit of patriarchal powers. Think of the enclosure movement in England, the Appalachian farmers forced off the land by the coal companies, the genocide of Native Americans by Europeans taking over the U.S. Dependence on globalized capitalist patriarchy keeps us participating and supporting this undesirable social structure.

There must be a way to wash my clothes without a washing machine!

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