Dry Creek Chronicles

Last spring we began our first experience with pigs, when a neighbor stopped by in April and asked if we were interested in some piglets. We took two, and kept them in the pasture with the cows. Our field dog Samson took to them right away, and for months they were constant companions. We fed them, hog feed and table scraps and extra milk, but otherwise didn’t pay much attention to them.

We had vaguely expected them to go to the slaughterhouse sometime in the fall, but about a month ago we noticed that they were big—really big, bigger than Samson the Great Pyrenees. Then a couple of weeks they got out of the pasture, through a cattle panel that had come loose. Then they got out again. When they got out the third time, it occurred to us that they may have gotten a taste for getting out, and so the kids went around the pasture perimeter reinforcing the fence panels. Sad to say, not only had the pigs gotten a taste for getting out, they had gotten a sense of their own strength and were now testing the fence regularly. Worse, they were clearly strong enough to push and bend their way through a cattle panel, no matter how well attached.

The good news was that the pigs weren’t interested in roaming far, and always made their way back for evening feeding. But we were worried about them doing damage to someone else’s garden or property on one of their jaunts, so when they got out last night we decided it was time for them to meet their final reward.

This morning Debbie called the slaughterhouse and found out that they could take the pigs right away, so we scrambled to borrow a trailer for transporting them. Loading them ended up being fairly easy; they hadn’t been fed that morning, and were eager to get at the feed Chris used to lure them up the ramp into the trailer. And the ten-mile ride was uneventful; the trailer floor was covered with sweet feed from when it had been last used to haul cows, so they contentedly munched on that all the while. Unloading into the chute at the slaughterhouse was just about as easy.

The pigs were six months old and weighed in at 230 and 232 pounds. This was good news to me, not only because it was a respectable weight, but it is the weight at which Europeans usually slaughter “entire” (i.e. uncastrated) boars so as to avoid the risk of boar taint, an unpleasant flavor that can permeate the meat of a sexually mature hog (the American average slaughter weight is 260-270 pounds, i.e. the pigs tend to be older). I decided after some research not to castrate our own pigs, and I’m still a bit anxious about possibly having doomed a couple of hundred pounds of pork to inedibility. You can be sure that when I pick up the meat on Monday, the first thing I will do is thaw a pack of pork chops and anxiously throw them on the grill.

We expect to end up with meat weighing half the live weight, 230 pounds of it. We asked for the bacon and hams to be kept whole so that we can take it elsewhere to be smoked and cured. And we’re looking around to see if anyone in the neighborhood might be interested in buying a portion of the harvest, since 230 pounds would probably feed us (and take up valuable freezer space) for a couple of years.

We will almost certainly raise one or two pigs again next year. The taste of these will decide whether we castrate them or not. And we will probably try to figure out how to keep them in the woods rather than on pasture.

If you are concerned about the rapidly growing national debt and its likely effects on life down the road, you may want to check out the new documentary I.O.U.S.A., which is being given a one-night showing in theaters nationwide on August 21, in hopes of generating enough interest to merit theatrical distribution. Here’s their blurb:

Wake up, America! We’re on the brink of a financial meltdown.

I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. As the Baby Boomer generation prepares to retire, will there even be any Social Security benefits left to collect? Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions.

Throughout history, the American government has found it nearly impossible to spend only what has been raised through taxes. Wielding candid interviews with both average American taxpayers and government officials, Sundance veteran Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) helps demystify the nation’s financial practices and policies. The film follows U.S. Comptroller General David Walker as he crisscrosses the country explaining America’s unsustainable fiscal policies to its citizens.

With surgical precision, Creadon interweaves archival footage and economic data to paint a vivid and alarming profile of America’s current economic situation. The ultimate power of I.O.U.S.A. is that the film moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer potential financial scenarios and propose solutions about how we can recreate a fiscally sound nation for future generations.

Pointedly topical and consummately nonpartisan, I.O.U.S.A. drives home the message that the only time for America’s financial future is now!

The critically-acclaimed documentary film I.O.U.S.A. was concieved of, co-written and executive produced by Agora Financial’s Addison Wiggin. In July 2008, the film was acquired by The Peter G. Peterson Foundation. It will be featured in a Live Premier with Warren Buffet, Pete Peterson and David Walker in 400 theatres around the nation on August 21st, 2008. To find out more visit the film’s official site or click here to locate a theater near you.

And, if you’re interested, here is the trailer:

Here’s a series about how the Green Revolution may have led to overshoot in India. First the Green Revolution turned a country that was on the edge of starvation trying to feed 350 million people into one that was feeding three times as many and even exporting food:

When the Green Revolution arrived in Punjab, the “land of five rivers,” India faced chronic food shortages. A combination of massive irrigation infrastructure mandated by the Indian state, new hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides boosted yields to record levels over the following decades, saving India from the specter of mass famine. With just 1.5 percent of India’s land area, Punjab produces 20 percent of the country’s wheat and 12 percent of its rice. It provides 60 percent of the government’s reserve stocks of wheat and 40 percent of its reserves of rice, the country’s buffer against starvation.

Punjab’s amazing productivity made it possible for India to feed most of a growing population that tripled from 350 million when the country became independent in 1947 to more than 1.2 billion people today. In 2001, India even began to export grain, though critics claim this impressive achievement was gained at the expense of India’s poor.

But then things reversed course:

Only two years later, in 2003, India had to reverse the funnel and import grain, something it had not done in decades. Every year since then, India has imported more and more of its food. Panic-buying by India is credited with helping to raise the price of wheat on global markets by more than 100 percent last year, causing prices to spike around the world, from pasta in Italy to bread in Russia. […]

The nasty side effects of the Green Revolution have gotten only worse in the years since. The irrigation canals are drying up. Water tables are sinking. According to a new report from Punjabi University in Patiala, pesticide levels, among the most elevated in the world, are being blamed for actually altering the DNA of Punjabis exposed to them.

What exactly happened to make the Green Revolution thrive and then go sour? Well, it depended on lots of water:

The hybrid seeds introduced during the Green Revolution flourished when a grand scheme of irrigation canals brought plenty of water to the fields. Where the canals didn’t reach, farmers sank tube wells and pumped water out of the ground. A naturally dry area, Punjab became one of India’s top producers of water-loving rice.

For decades, the water flowed through the new canals and out of the wells as if it would last forever. Then the flow began to ebb. Wells had to be dug deeper to reach water tables that now sink as much as 100 feet a year. Those who couldn’t afford to dig deeper placed their faith in seasonal rains, a faith that was all too often dashed. The canals, their symmetrical culverts lined with imported eucalyptus, carried less and less water. Where water was applied with too much abandon, naturally occurring soil salts rose to the surface, making the topsoil too saline for plants to grow properly.

And it depended on the monocropping approach of modern industrial agriculture:

The Green Revolution’s miraculous yields depended on boosting efficiencies through mono-cropping. Family farms that placed small plots of vegetables next to fields of wheat or other traditional grains, such as local varieties of sorghum and millet, disappeared in favor of an American agribusiness vision of the farm as a vast outdoor factory. Today, Punjab is practically one continuous lawn of wheat and rice.

And it depended on cheap oil, to run the machines and produce the fertilizer:

Tractors allowed farmers to plow larger fields faster. Everyone wanted one. Very poor farmers with only an acre or two borrowed money to park one of these shining symbols of modernity on their land. Brides brought them to their in-laws’ farms as dowry gifts. Double-cropping and even triple-cropping were introduced, one harvest succeeding the last during the same calendar year, like shifts on an assembly line. The amount of food produced soared. India’s grain stocks groaned under the sheer weight of Punjab’s incredible productivity.

And it depended on liberal applications of costly insecticides:

Insect pests also thrived under this new regime. An infestation in one field quickly spread to a whole region across an uninterrupted ocean of grain. At first, chemical pesticides were effective, but the pests became resistant. More pesticides were applied. Farmers, unaware of any danger, sprayed their crops without donning protective clothing. Pesticide and chemical fertilizer runoff permeated the state’s soil and water, and Punjab became one of the most poisoned regions of India, a country where pesticide use has generally been heavy. Cancer rates rose so alarmingly that the government of Punjab began a cancer-registry program this year to understand how bad the epidemic has become.

But now this approach is failing. The price of fertilizers, insecticides, oil, and even seeds is spiraliing upwards while yields are flat or declining. Water supplies are tapped out. This path has proved to be a dead end.

Fortunately, there is some awareness among Indian farmers that the Green Revolution sold them a bill of goods, and that there may be hope in returning to traditional farming techniques:

The farmers who’d come to Umendra’s workshop realized they were caught in a vicious cycle requiring them to buy more fertilizer and more pesticides, to invest more money in getting water while they watched pests become even more voracious and their soil fertility decline. Seeds were also becoming more expensive. The farmers paid dearly for new hybrids that promised ever-greater yields. They paid even more for the new genetically engineered seeds whose very DNA was copyrighted, making it illegal for farmers to do what farmers have done since the dawn of agriculture: save seeds from one year to plant the next.

These farmers were practical men, not eco-warrior ideologues. What they wanted from the workshop was a way out. They shouted out the names of their various insect enemies. With Ramuji’s coaxing, they came up with a few traditional means of control. When Ramuji played a video showing low-cost, effective, nonchemical techniques for pest control, such as digging trenches into which hairy caterpillars fell and were trapped or using neem-based and cow-urine-based sprays, the farmers watched with rapt concentration, scribbling notes in their datebooks.

And when Umendra told them that they were learning how to take back their land, their lives, and their freedom from the agribusiness giants who profited by keeping them hooked on toxic pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and genetically modified seeds, and that they were revolutionaries in the mold of Bhagat Singh, the farmers roared their approval.

Unfortunately, the population of India is now three times the size of a population which was straining against the limits imposed by traditional farming techniques. The addition of that extra 850 million people was critically dependent on the assumption that the extra food being supplied by the Green Revolution was permanent supply, but it turned out to be phantom supply. In other words, based on the false promise of the Green Revolution, India has overshot its permanent carrying capacity by 850 million people.

Recently I was talking with a friend about another fellow with whom he had business dealings; the other fellow was acting in a way my friend thought was unscrupulous, and it was causing him headaches (and costing him money). My friend called this fellow a poor businessman.

I asked him what he thought made a good businessman, and he listed a number of traits: honesty, fair dealing, concern for a quality product, willingness to bend over backward to make things right. I told my friend that I thought he was confusing business with neighborliness, and that the two realms were unrelated; the fellow who was causing him trouble was clearly being a bad neighbor, but he may very well be doing exactly what a good businessman should do in his situation.

I think we can easily confuse the two realms because we often conduct business in our neighborhood, and in fact most of what the average person understands about business comes from their business dealings with neighbors. And neighborliness can definitely have an effect on how we conduct business.

One great example is recounted in The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The winter has been hard, no supplies are coming in to DeSmet, and the townspeople are on the edge of starvation. Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland hear that somewhere south of town there is a man with a supply of wheat, and they decide to make a dangerous journey in search of it. Mr. Loftus, a town storekeeper, agrees to put up the money to buy whatever wheat they find. Almanzo and Cap return with the wheat and turn it over to Mr. Loftus. Then Almanzo gives Mr. Loftus his change:

“You gave me eighty dollars to buy wheat with, and here’s what’s left, just five dollars even.”

“A dollar and twenty-five cents a bushel. That’s the best you could do?” Mr Loftus said, looking at the receipt.

“Any time you say, I’ll take it off your hands at that price,” Almanzo retorted.

“I don’t go back on a bargain,” the storekeeper hastily replied. “How much do I owe you for hauling?”

“Not a red cent,” Almanzo told him, leaving.

“Hey, aren’t you going to stay and thaw out?” Mr Loftus called after him.

“And let my horse stand in this storm?” Almanzo slammed the door.

Here we see Almanzo playing the neighbor and Mr. Loftus the businessman. Almanzo has rescued the town from starvation; Mr. Loftus intimates that he hasn’t gotten the best possible bargain for his money. Almanzo offers to make it right by paying for the wheat himself; Mr. Loftus, knowing that even if the bargain isn’t the best it is plenty good, demurs by insisting on his own honorableness. Almanzo refuses to put a price on his valiant effort, and Mr. Loftus doesn’t argue, happy to keep the hauling fee for himself. Almanzo is certainly an exemplary neighbor here, but I would also say that even though Mr. Loftus is being a rotten neighbor, he is concerned with exactly the thing a businessman should be concerned with: the bottom line.

When Mr. Loftus puts the wheat on sale, he decides to charge three dollars per bushel for it. The townspeople are not happy—in fact, many are determined to just go and take the wheat from him—but Pa Ingalls persuades them to go with him and talk to Mr. Loftus.

They all tramped along after him single file over the snowdrifts. They crowded into the store where Loftus, when they began coming in, went behind his counter. There was no wheat in sight. Loftus had moved the sacks into his back room.

Mr. Ingalls told him that they thought he was charging too much for the wheat.

“That’s my business,” said Loftus. “It’s my wheat, isn’t it? I paid good hard money for it.”

“A dollar and a quarter a bushel, we understand,” Mr. Ingalls said.

“That’s my business,” Mr. Loftus repeated.

“We’ll show you whose business it is!” the angry man shouted.

“You fellows so much as touch my property and I’ll have the law on you!” Mr. Loftus answered. Some of them laughed snarlingly. But Loftus was not going to back down. He banged his fist on the counter and told them, “That wheat’s mine and I’ve got a right to charge any price I want to for it.”

“That’s so, Loftus, you have,” Mr. Ingalls agreed with him. “This is a free country and every man’s got a right to do as he pleases with his own property.” He said to the crowd, “You know that’s a fact, boys,” and he went on, “Don’t forget every one of us is free and independent, Loftus. This winter won’t last forever and maybe you’ll want to go on doing business after it’s over.”

“Threatening me, are you?” Mr. Loftus demanded.

“We don’t need to,” Mr. Ingalls replied. “It’s a plain fact. If you’ve got a right to do as you please, we’ve got a right to do as we please. It works both ways. You’ve got us down now. That’s your business, as you say. But your business depends on our good will. You maybe don’t notice that now, but along next summer you’ll likely notice it.”

“That’s so, Loftus,” Gerald Fuller said. “You got to treat folks right or you don’t last long in business, not in this country.”

The angry man said, “We’re not here to palaver. Where’s the wheat?”

“Don’t be a fool, Loftus,” Mr. Harthorn said.

“The money wasn’t out of your till more than a day,” Mr. Ingalls said. “And the boys didn’t charge you a cent for hauling it. Charge a fair profit and you’ll have the cash back inside of an hour.”

“What do you call a fair profit?” Mr. Lofton asked. “I buy as low as I can and sell as high as I can; that is good business.”

“That’s not good business,” said Gerald Fuller. “I say it’s good business to treat people right.”

“We wouldn’t object to your price, if Wilder and Garland here had charged you what it was worth to go after that wheat,” Mr. Ingalls told Lofton.

“Well, why didn’t you?” Mr. Lofton asked them. “I stood ready to pay any reasonable charge for hauling.”

Cap Garland spoke up. He was not grinning. He had the look that made the railroader back down. “Don’t offer us any of your filthy cash. Wilder and I didn’t make that trip to skin a profit off folks that are hungry.”

Almanzo was angry, too. “Get it through your head if you can, there’s not money enough in the mint to pay for that trip. We didn’t make it for you and you can’t pay us for it.”

Mr. Loftus looked from Cap to Almanzo and then around at the other faces. They all despised him. He opened his mouth and shut it. He looked beaten. Then he said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, boys. You can buy the wheat for just what it cost me, a dollar twenty-five cents a bushel.”

“We don’t object to your making a fair profit, Loftus,” Mr. Ingalls said, but Loftus shook his head.

“No, I’ll let it go for what it cost me.”

This was so unexpected that for a moment no one knew exactly how to take it. Then Mr. Ingalls suggested, “What do you say we all get together and kind of ration it out, on a basis of how much our families need to last through the winter?”

They did this. It seemed that there was wheat enough to keep every family going for eight to ten weeks.

I quote this passage at length because I don’t know of a more beautiful picture of the uneasy relationship between business and neighborliness. Here are some of the things that occur to me as I read it:

• Throughout the episode Mr. Loftus follows good business principles. His only mistake is to forget that he is also a neighbor of the folks he is selling to, and as such he is subject to the sorts of pressures that neighbors can apply.

• As Mr. Loftus points out, the law is on his side. He is free to charge what he likes for the wheat, and the townspeople are free to buy or not buy it from him. The townspeople are free to be angry about the price he charges, but they are not free to express that anger by appropriating the wheat or otherwise doing injury to Mr. Loftus.

• Pa Ingalls and Gerald Fuller rightly point out that the good will of one’s customers is an important factor in doing business. But Gerald Fuller goes too far in claiming that it is necessary to treat people right, i.e. be a good neighbor, in order to do business. Provided that Mr. Loftus is willing to put up with being despised (as many businessmen are), there are plenty of other tools at his disposal to keep ill-treated customers: low prices, better selection, advertising, convenience, deception, collusion, and so on.

• Pa Ingalls is mistaken to bring up the idea of a “fair” profit, at least as he means it. It is possible to have a system where such an idea operates, but modern business defines a fair profit exactly the same way as Mr. Loftus does: buy as low as possible, sell as high as possible. Pa is trying to temper the ill effects of good business with neighborliness.

• The most striking example of how average people have confused good business with neighborliness (willfully, I think, so as to leave open the possibility that they themselves might sometimes benefit from a “fair profit”) is when Pa Ingalls tells Mr. Loftus that they wouldn’t object to his price if Almanzo and Cap had charged what their trip had actually been worth. Mr. Loftus was quick to point out that he was willing to pay any reasonable charge for hauling, since that would have put the entire transaction in the realm of business. Pa may have been implying that Almanzo and Cap’s trip was in fact priceless, but he seems to be reluctant to say so, instead implying that the price was very high—but there was a price, nonetheless.

• Cap and Almanzo are clear, though—the value of what they had done was entirely out of the realm of supply and demand. Their community was in need, and they met that need valiantly. To even suggest that they had compensation in mind was a gross insult.

• When Mr. Lofton capitulates and decides to sell the wheat with no markup, it may or may not have been a business decision. Pa Ingalls had left open the possibility of a smaller, “fair” profit. But either Mr. Lofton decided that the cost in ill will wouldn’t be worth the money, or he decided to simply back off completely from a bad situation. He may actually have decided to do what would have been the neighborly thing in the beginning, but also realized that it wouldn’t be perceived as such. At that moment, not much short of giving away the wheat would have changed folks’ minds about him.

• The final situation is about as un-free-market as you can get. Everyone pays for the wheat they buy, but it is allocated strictly by need; no doubt there were folks who could have afforded to buy more (and eat better), but their buying power was not allowed to trump the need of those with less.

The final irony is that in this case the merchant was totally irrelevant to solving the problem. It would have been just as easy for Almanzo and Cap to gather up what money there was in town (there was obviously enough, since everyone ended up paying) and use it to buy the wheat, then settle up accounts once they were back in town. But somehow these folks have been so deeply propagandized by business proponents that they think it is natural, even required, to give Mr. Loftus a profit for simply opening his till and lending out some money that he knows he will get back. Their only objection is that it be a “fair” profit, namely one that doesn’t cause them too much pain. Unfortunately for them, their situation is so dire that any reasonable calculation would peg the demand as being nearly infinite, meriting a very painful price for the buyer and a handsome profit for the seller.

What the people of DeSmet have forgotten, along with the rest of us, is that business practices were explicitly developed as an alternative to neighborliness, not an elaboration or enhancement of it. Karl Polanyi points out in his book The Great Transformation that until recently business trade was a relatively limited endeavor, taking place between towns and cities, leaving the countryside (and most of the population) largely unaffected. The reason was that there was no reliable means of enforcing business arrangements with villagers; until recently, a business dispute with a customer in a village had to be settled in that hard-to-get-to village, before a council of elders that might very well decide in favor of the villager if it was determined that the deal was somehow unfair to him. Business practices, especially enforcable legal contractual obligations, were developed specifically so people could conduct transactions with people who weren’t their neighbors.

My point here is not to rail against modern business practice, but only to urge readers not to romanticize business relationships by infusing them with the traits we expect to find in human relationships. There is nothing wrong with engaging in commerce, except to the extent that you give in to the temptation to treat your neighbor badly; those temptations are legion, and not only the world but much of the church is devoted to soothing our consciences about succumbing to them. But if you do choose to enter into a business relationship with a stranger, whether it be the box store whose headquarters is a thousand miles away, or the Chinese laborer who assembled your iPod, or the produce packer in south Texas who negligently contaminates your hot pepper, the contractor who gouges you for labor and materials in the aftermath of a hurricane, or the hometown bank that is shamelessly willing to say, “Well, this is business, after all” when you trigger some conjunction of events that violate the small print of your account agreement and incur some huge fee that compensates them for a trifling inconvenience—well, you shouldn’t be outraged or even surprised if you are being treated badly as a person. After all, the whole point of modern practice is to make it possible to deal with distant people at all, dealings that until recently couldn’t be conducted at all except between neighbors.

This past weekend Chris and I had a couple of performances that needed some preparation—and we like that, it gives us an excuse to spend some evenings learning new songs and sharpening up some of the old ones. Back when we started playing together we practiced fairly steadily, whether or not  a performance was looming. That helped us build up our repertoire and get our playing skills to a respectable level, but it also ate mightily into our free time and risked burnout.

These days there is more ebb and flow. Sometimes we’ll go for a month or more without practicing, just showing up for the easier performances like our weekly date at the Bread of Life Cafe or a set at a local church or lodge. (And there’s some deliberateness to that as well, since it’s good to be able to play at a moment’s notice with no special preparation.) And sometimes, like in July, we’ll spend about half our evenings for two or three weeks to get ready for a particular show.

Friday we drove to Abingdon, Virginia to play at the Virginia Highlands Festival, a two-week arts/crafts/music fair that is pretty popular. The festival didn’t officially open until Saturday, but the Crooked Road organization arranged for a show in the event tent that featured the Dixie Bee-Liners, a local group that is just experiencing some much-deserved recognition on the charts and on XM Radio. They were polished and very much in the contemporary bluegrass pocket, great stage presence, very personable; we liked them a lot, and hope they hold it together long enough to enjoy some success.

Chris and I were there to back up Ron Short for his program of coal mining songs, which opened the show. It’s the twelfth time in the past twelve months, and things really do improve with practice. Ron was telling us about a band that deliberately played a long stretch of time at Silver Dollar City, multiple sets per day for a couple of weeks, and came back home tight and polished. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to devote ourselves to something so concentrated, but it would be fun to try.

Sunday we were back at the Pickin in the Park program at Natural Tunnel State Park in Duffield, Virginia. Five years ago Chris and I made our first public appearance at this open mic, and for three years we were regulars until our move to Kentucky put an end to that. But we did manage to get back last year, and this year they asked us to be featured performers, which meant we played a thirty-minute set rather than the usual three songs. It was a real treat for us. There were lots of familiar faces in the audience, and it really is a pleasant venue, a nice amphitheater with a good sound system.

After the program I dropped Chris off at Ron Short’s house, where he will be staying for the week while he is teaching fiddle class at Ron’s mountain music school. I’ll pick him up Friday afternoon in time to be back at the Bread of Life Cafe for Friday evening’s performance.

Chris and I have been learning some new songs, so we spent some time this afternoon making some reference recordings. We were only good for forty minutes or so, because it’s 95 degrees out today and we don’t run the air conditioning these days and we had to shut off the fan for the duration of the recording. But here are the songs we got done. Note that I decided not to downsample these files, so they run 3-4Mb each (1Mb per minute). And there are some flubs—words, notes, and at one point Chris dropped his pick.

Blue Diamond Mine

Coal Town Saturday Night

Forsaken Lover

Groundhog

The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore

Tramp on the Street

Troublesome Waters

I recommend William Catton’s Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change not so much because of the facts it brings to light—probably you’re familiar with just about all of them—or because of Catton’s specific interpretation of them, but because of the analytical concepts that Catton introduces. Most of them are simple and obvious (after they’ve been pointed out, anyway), but taken together they make it clear that the standard pat answers that both liberal and conservative Christians give to questions about ecological crisis are not good enough.

Catton’s terms are so important to his argument that he has put a mini-glossary on the cover of his book, and provided a more complete one in the back of the book. Here are the central definitions, from which you can pretty much reconstruct Catton’s understanding of how the world works.

• Carrying capacity: the maximum population of a given species which a particular habitat can support indefinitely (under specified technology and organization, in the case of the human species).

• Phantom carrying capacity: illusory or extremely precarious capacity of an environment to support a life form or a way of life; that portion of a population that cannot be permanently supported when temporarily available resources become unavailable.

• Temporary carrying capacity: combination of actual and phantom carrying capacity; the population that a habitat can support for a short time only (until the supply of some exhaustible resource runs out which the species depends on).

• Carrying capacity deficit (surplus): the condition wherein the permanent ability of a given habitat to support a given form of life falls short of (exceeds) the quantity of that form already in existence.

• Drawdown: method of extending carrying capacity, an inherently temporary expedient by which life opportunities for a species are temporarily increased by extracting from the environment for use by that species a significant fraction of an accumulated resource that is not being replaced as fast as it its drawn down.

• Takeover: method of extended carrying capacity which increases opportunities for one species by reducing opportunities for competing species.

• Ghost acreage: the additional farmland a given nation would need in order to supply that net portion of the food or fuel it uses but does not obtain from contemporary growth of organisms within its borders—e.g. from net imports of agricultural products, from oceanic fisheries, from fossil fuels.

• Overshoot: the condition of having exceeded for the time being the permanent carrying capacity of the habitat.

• Age of Exuberance: the centuries of growth and progress that followed the sudden enlargement of habitat available to Europeans as a result of voyages of discovery; a period of expansion when a species takes exuberant advantage of the abundant opportunities in an eminently suitable but previously inaccessible habitat.

• Myth of limitlessness: the belief (more implicit than explicit, perhaps) that the world’s resources are sufficient to support any conceivable human population engaged in any conceivable way of life for any conceivable duration; derivatively, the belief that a given resource is inexhaustible or that substitutes can always be found.

• Cornucopian paradigm: a view of past and future human progress that disregards the carrying capacity concept, pays no attention to the finiteness of the world or to differences between takeover and drawdown, and accepts uncritically the myth of limitlessness.

• Cargoism: faith that technological progress will stave off major institutional change, even in a post-exuberant world; the equivalent among people of industrial nations to the cargo cults of the Melanesian islanders.

Given these terms, here is how my thinking about ecology runs after reading Catton’s book:

• For any given mixture of technologies and cultures, there is a maximum population that the Earth can sustain.

• That maximum can be increased (or decreased, I suppose) by a change in either technologies (e.g. plant cultivation, mettalurgy, tools, firearms) or cultures.

• When the population grows past the sustainable maximum, such overshoot can be maintained for some finite amount of time through either takeover (e.g. discovery of the New World) or drawdown (e.g. turning fossil fuel into food).

• Civilizations large (e.g. Europe) and small (e.g. Easter island) have crashed after a period of overshoot; twice in the last millennium the population of Europe declined after a crash.

• Contrary to popular belief, technological innovation has rarely come to the rescue and saved us from the effects of overshoot; rather, the innovation tends to come first (e.g. plant cultivation, mettalurgy, tools, firearms), increasing carrying capacity, which is then slowly soaked up by population growth.

• The huge growth in population over the past two hundred years correlates pretty closely to our ability and willingness to draw down finite resources (settling the New World, turning fossil fuel into food).

• The resources we have been taking over or drawing down show signs of nearing exhaustion (peak oil, no more land to bring into agricultural production)

• Some of the technological innovations that promised to increasing carrying capacity have backfired (industrial agriculture, the green revolution, biofuels); most of the rest are speculative, and their practicality has yet to be demonstrated.

• Once takeover and drawdown are no longer possible, population will be forced within actual carrying capacity, which may or may not exceed the current population of the Earth.

And given all that, I’m still looking for a thoughtful Christian answer to this question: is it ever wise to put bounds on our fruitfulness that God hasn’t put there himself?

Recently we’ve made heavy use of interlibrary loan at our little local library. Partly because it’s easy—our pastor’s wife is in charge of it, and she’ll even drop the books off to us at church or when she is passing by. And partly because there are a lot of books that we’d like to take a look at once; sometimes we’re trying to decide whether to buy a copy, and sometimes we know we won’t want to own one. Example: Hungry Planet, the book of gorgeous pictures showing how families around the world eat. It was great fun to look at and very thought-provoking, but not a book we’d be likely to revisit often.

I requested a copy of David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History through interlibrary loan because I didn’t expect it to be that interesting, but I still wanted to learn something about how prices have varied over the last millennium. It turned out to be much better than I expected. I’m still not sure I want to own a copy, but it’s tempting.

One thing I like about the book is that although it is very fat (550 pages), the body of the text runs only half that, about 250 pages, and some of that is occupied by charts and graphs. The rest is taken up by fifty pages of appendices looking at specific topics in more detail, fifty pages of notes, and 150 pages (!) of annotated bibliography covering primary and secondary sources. Almost like a DVD with lots and lots of extras. Fischer’s point is a straightforward one, and he manages to demonstrate how it holds true over the course of 800 years of history while still keeping things readable. I found myself skimming the text quickly, making mental note of the more intriguing facts he used to make his case, knowing it would be easy to come back and read more closely about a particular stretch of time if I wanted to.

Fischer’s point is roughly this: prices in history seem to follow a pattern in which a long stretch of stability (which he calls an equilibrium) is followed by a long stretch of instability (which he calls a revolution). During the revolution real wages drop, i.e. the gap between wages and prices increases, until the disparity can no longer be endured and some crisis restores equilibrium. He does not call this alternation a cycle, because there are too many differences between the successive stages to call it a strict pattern; rather he calls them “waves,” and invokes Mark Twain’s observation that although history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme.

Decent price and wage data begin in the 1100s, and here is how Fischer maps out the waves (each bullet gets a chapter):

First Wave

• The medieval price revolution, 1180-1350
• The crisis of the fourteenth century, 1300-1400
• The equilibrium of the Renaissance, 1400-1470

Second Wave

• The price revolution of the sixteenth century, 1470-1590
• The crisis of the seventeenth century, 1590-1660
• The equilibrium of the Enlightenment, 1660-1730

Third Wave

• The price revolution of the eighteenth century, 1730-1789
• The revolutionary crisis, 1789-1820
• The equilibrium of the Victorian era, 1820-1896

Fourth Wave

• The price revolution of the twentieth century, 1896-
• Our troubled times

Even in this breakdown of events there are interesting things to consider, e.g. that each equilibrium was considered a golden era. In fact, one of Fischer’s claims is that during an equilibrium people get fat, happy, and optimistic enough about the future to begin increasing the sizes of their families, leading to demand which begins to outstrip supply, leading to a growing disparity between wages and prices, leading to a crisis. (Fischer also claims that the data do not support the monetarist claim that expansion of the money supply is the primary cause of rising prices, but instead that it is a response to rising prices.)

I recommend a quick read of the body of Fischer’s book to get a solid understanding of both how good things can be when they are good, and how bad things can get when they are bad. The earlier crises were really, really bad for most of the population; one point in favor of global trade is that it has tended to mitigate the levels of misery that are experienced during a crisis. Fischer gives the example of one town where grain prices had soared to four times the equilibrium level, while in another town not too far away (but far enough that there was no trade between them) prices had actually dropped below the equilibrium level because of a bountiful harvest.

It might also be good if some full-quiver proponent would consider Fischer’s claim that increasing family size regularly leads to demand outstripping supply, leading in turn to crisis. Are no bounds to be placed on our fruitfulness outside of the ones that God puts in place Himself?

Dave Black has presented us with a long list of reasons why he loves the sixteenth-century Anabaptists. There were surely giants in the earth in those days. I love them, too.

I’ve tried to avoid writing about the the unfolding economic crisis because I’m sure what I wrote would be misunderstood. My fascination with current troubles and possible explanations for them could too easily be seen as cheering for disaster. But I’m not eager for the economy to head south, something that would cause my family roughly as much pain as any other. And I’m agnostic as to when such a thing will happen, or if it will happen at all. Many other crises, several in my lifetime, have been averted (or at least delayed) by events and trends I would never have predicted at the time. So I won’t be disappointed if this turns out to be one more rough patch on the way to calmer waters; I’ll be surprised, but pleasantly.

So why study this crisis so closely? Because it is severely testing our cherished assumptions about how to structure a society, some of which have never been tested before. For many years we’ve sown the wind by setting mechanisms into motion whose long-term effects were a mystery to us; and now as the whirlwind is reaped, we have a rare opportunity to discern which of those assumptions were prudent and wise, and which were just plain foolish, which many certainly were. It may be that God chooses to spare us the full brunt of our foolishness by stepping in to mitigate its effects—but even so our foolishness will remain just as foolish, and ought to be acknowledged and avoided in the future regardless of the extent of God’s mercy toward us this time.

Dmitri Orlov has much the same outlook in his own study of economic collapse. Here’s one of the blurbs for his book Reinventing Collapse:

Orlov’s Russian perspective on the American collapse is valuable not just for its predictions, but for its attitude: economic collapse is not an unthinkable horror, but a routine and fascinating part of history, and if you find yourself in one you should look around.

In his introduction, Orlov explains his project this way:

I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eyewitness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse and this has given me the necessary insights to describe what the American collapse will look like. It has been a couple of years since I started writing on the subject of economic collapse as it occurred in the Soviet Union and as it is likely to occur here in the United States. Thus far, I remain reasonably content with my predictions: all the pieces of the collapse scenario I imagined are lining up, slowly but surely. […]

Let us imagine that collapsing a modern military-industrial superpower is like making soup: chop up some ingredients, apply heat and stir. The ingredients I like to put in my superpower collapse soup are: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget and ballooning foreign debt. […] It took a couple of decades for the United States to catch up [to the Soviet Union], but now all the ingredients are in the pot and starting to simmer.

Let us not even try to imagine that this will all just blow over. Make no mistake about it: this soup will be served, and it will not be tasty! My soup-based method of predicting superpower collapse may not please a scholar or an expert or an activist (as I mentioned, I am none of these) but it is probably rigorous enough to adequately warn and equip an innocent bystander. I am not too interested in constructing rigorous scientific models and producing forecasts. Nor do I wish to set agendas, promote reforms or take part in protests. Try to form a picture in your mind: it is a superpower, it is huge, it is powerful, and it is going to come crashing down. You or me trying to do something about it would have the same effect as you or me wiggling our toes at a tsunami. Nor do I wish to force my opinions on you, so please form your own. But I do want to guide your imagination by providing a lot of real world detail about an actual economic collapse that has recently transpired, along with some honest, apples-to-apples, oranges-to-oranges comparisons between the United States and the Soviet Union, to serve as a foundation for setting some commonsense expectations and making your own plans, separately from the happy toe-wiggling masses.

People generally find it hard to act on knowledge that contradicts their everyday experience. The experience must come first, even if it is second-hand; hence all the support groups for people who want to change their lives or their habits. There are plenty of books on subjects similar to this one, complete with tables of figures, charts, graphs and diagrams, that argue for or against this or that thesis, initiative or proposal. This, I hope you will be happy to find, is not one of them. My goal is to take various important aspects of the Soviet post-collapse experience and to recast them in an American context, allowing you to imagine what will become of your surroundings, your situation, and your options. I hope to add a lot of detail to what, I would hazard to guess, is currently something of a white spot on your cognitive map.

And as the book unfolds Orlov provides many, many such helpful details. More important, though he approaches the matter with a rare objectivity, a lighthearted cynicism that helps the reader clear his head of conventional wisdom and take a fresh look at why events unfold as they do. For example, he points out repeatedly how the Soviet Union’s inability to provide its people with cheap, reliable consumer goods turned out to be a blessing because it forced the people to rely on their own resources to create and maintain tools, gardens, and such; Westerners, on the other hand, have been rendered relatively helpless by cheap, easily available goods that meet any and every need, and will be hard pressed to meet those needs when such goods evaporate.

Although this is a review of Orlov’s book, the first thing you’ll want to know is that the book is mostly a compilation of these internet writings:

• Closing the Collapse Gap (slide presentation)
• Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century
• Thriving in the Age of Collapse
• The Five Stages of Collapse
• Surviving a Financial Collapse: The Basics: Part One, Part Two, Part Three
• Our Village
• Club Orlov (weblog)

Actually, my favorite of these pieces, Our Village, barely makes an appearance in the book. It describes post-collapse life in a Russian village, Soykino, where Orlov’s family owns property. Even if you have no interest in Orlov’s overall project, this essay is worth a look. It ends with a simple passage that will warm an agrarian heart:

Natasha and I are very happy that Soykino exists, and that our family owns a house there. Simple and humble as it is, it has much to offer: community, nature, shelter, and food.

As I mentioned, the collapse of the Soviet economy was barely detectable in Soykino. Reasoning by analogy, if some of the more pessimistic (or, as more and more of us think, realistic) predictions come true, and the developed portions of the United States become completely dysfunctional, much more so than they are presently, a village such as Soykino, if one existed, would remain similarly unaffected. And if you owned a house there, you could live there, and be unaffected as well.

Upon arriving, you would no doubt have to explain to the other residents what happened: “You see, the economy collapsed, and now there is nothing more for me to do out there.” And they would say: “No! Really? That’s a pretty big thing, isn’t it?” And you would say: “Huge! Could you please pass the pickled mushrooms?”