Non-negotiables

CG and Madcap Mum have taken up a meme, to list ten things that are non-negotiable for you. I have been mulling it over, but like MCM, I'm not coming up with much. I think that might have something to do with the couple of non-negotiables that I did come up with.

1. Never give up on anyone.

I think I might be able to shorten this one to "Never give up," which is good too, but it might miss the point. If somebody else has as one of their non-negotiables something like "the American way of life," well, I disagree, but I still can't give up on that person. And that makes it difficult for me to say that anything is non-negotiable, because I want to leave myself room to negotiate.

2. Reality.

You know, things like gravity and friction and weather. I won't plan my life on the assumption that there's some fabulous breakthrough energy source to be found, if only I will just be a good consumer and stimulate our energy-guzzling economy to race even faster to fill the R&D coffers to bring on that breakthrough before there's nothing left to consume. I won't daydream about climate change expanding agriculture northward onto thin forest soils, peatland, and bare rock. It doesn't matter what I declare to be non-negotiable in my life, if reality won't negotiate either. Reality wins.

Falling Slowly

Does it matter? Sometimes I picture a future world where there are debates about whether the rich farmland, large cities, and rainforests seen in a few old pictures ever really existed, or whether they were imagined by prophets dreaming of heaven.

Via Contrary Goddess and Sharon (jewishfarmer):

ENVIRONMENT: Warming May Trigger Agricultural Collapse

The study referred to in the above article is reported in detail in William Cline's new book, Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country. A look at the Peterson Institute's "In Brief" overview of the book shows that the more optimistic estimates of future agricultural production rely heavily on carbon fertilisation offsetting the negative effects of high temperatures (not to mention a fortuitous escape from all sorts of other harmful effects such as water shortages and severe weather events). Carbon fertilisation? I must look for an update on the dark side of that issue: hidden hunger.

Yes, the fall may be too slow for many to notice. And if so, the emotional suffering may be much less that we would expect, because few will know what has been lost. Even as they starve, people may not know that there was ever much hope of anything else.

Rolling Stone on How to Keep Rolling

Read this first.
Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles : Rolling Stone

Then browse the links here, and tell me - does it not sound a bit like a celebration of the many benefits of starvation as compared to poisoning and heatstroke?

Ah, but the money is in the answer to the question: who starves?

The Latest from Percy Schmeiser

Through the Environment News Service (see sidebar), I just happened upon an intriguing new video:

Soil: The Secret Solution to Global Warming

from an intriguing new (to me) website:

Quantum Shift TV

In fact, Internet TV is new to me, and I haven't been able to get past a download hitch at about 10 minutes into the video. The first nine minutes had some frustrating questionable generalizations, and some familiar faces whose pronouncements I take with a few grains of salt, but the overall direction seemed plausible and I wanted to hear some more. Any tips on getting the entire video to download?

Frost and Drought

I may have lost some tomato plants last night, even though I had them covered. No big problem - I knew it was a gamble, and I went ahead and set some out because I had lots of extra transplants to keep as replacements. But it got me thinking about last frost dates.

We had some very early warmth this spring. Farmers were out seeding in late April, and I would say that's about a month ahead of the traditional seeding time for this area. The ground dried out, and I got worried about drought. Then it started to rain, and I don't trust my cracked gauge, but Mom says they have had 5 inches in the hills since May 9th, while the average for the whole month is only 2. But before all that happened, at the end of April, I was gardening with drought in mind. I refused Garth's offer of rototilling and in fact refrained from digging the beds at all, to conserve moisture. As I started planting early vegetables, I went to fetch water from the ditch near our yard and found that it was already dry. I took my bike and trailer and hauled a tub of water from a vernal pool over on the east side of the 604. I was worried, but full of hopes that my earliest-ever garden planting might help get plants well established before a summer drought hit hard.

Last year I talked to many people in this area who said the crops turned out better than they expected, considering how dry it was in the latter part of the summer. One farmer friend agreed with my speculation that the early spring and early planting had allowed the crops to get a better root system established, so they weathered the drought better than in former years.

But as my tomatoes show, early planting is a gamble. I don't know much about frost tolerance of the common field crops in this area, but I know there are times when fields have to be reseeded because an early crop was killed by frost. As our springs get warmer, and droughts become more frequent (as predicted due to climate change), farmers may try to adapt by planting earlier. But what about frost? How are the last frost dates changing?

I pulled out my CD of climate data for Western Canada and checked what was available for our area. Carlyle had max/min temperature data from 1922 to 1996 (with one year missing, 1962). I plotted last spring dates with temperatures less than or equal to 0ºC.

Now, where is my old statistics text book? I vaguely remember a lot of cautions about interpretation and testing where time series are concerned, but to me this graph seems to confirm my suspicion that last spring frost dates have not simply moved earlier. They have become more variable, with earlier dates contributing almost all the new variation, but late dates still occurring frequently.

What does that mean for adaptation? In my garden, I can plant things in succession, I can hold back extra transplants as replacements, and so on. But in a farm operation with thousands of acres under cultivation, what is to be done? Can farmers absorb the costs of having to reseed fields one year in six, say, or one year in four? Can they choose their planting dates strategically and be prepared for reseeding operations, or do they have to get it all in as quickly as possible and get back to their off-farm jobs? I wonder.

I also wonder about spring weather patterns in terms of soil temperatures and growing degree days and the overall shape of the warming. My second planting of peas has not appeared yet, and I think it's been ten days. Did the recent cold and cloudy spell chill the soil and rot the seed? How does this spring compare to the springs we used to get? Was a steady warming more the norm? I will have to ponder how to analyse my climate data for that.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, and speaking of adaptation, I forgot to mention that whole area of adaptation that most people never think about, where there will definitely be problems: adaptation by every other species except human beings and their little collection of manipulated plants and animals. Are we already seeing the effects? What about that die-off of poplar in the hills in the '80s? The experts blame insects, but the locals say it was a combination of drought stress and a late frost. What about the decline in bees across North America? Insects can adapt fairly quickly because of their short generation time, but pollinators are closely co-evolved with plants, and some plants take a long time to reproduce. These changes are happening incredibly rapidly when compared to previous evolutionary history. Can genetic adaptation keep up?

The Disconnect

Here on the plains south of the Moose Mountains, there are two main industries: agriculture and oil. When you need money to keep farming, you go work on the rigs.

There are some proud farmers and ranchers who get by with what they can earn from their land, and sometimes fight a losing battle to keep the oil wells off it. There are some people here only for the oilfield work, who have little or no connection to any farm in the area. But for many people, the two industries have formed interwoven strands of their lifestyle for generations.

Recently I have heard of people quitting farming to work full time in the oilfield. One said his only regret was that he didn't do it sooner. Others carry on, quite literally using their oilfield income to keep their farms going.

The problem is the rising cost of just about everything except farm produce. A farm can't be run as a stable business if the costs keep going up while the revenue stays flat. Some farmers have been coping by expanding their acreage, spreading some of their costs over a larger area of production and hoping the per-acre costs don't overwhelm the per-acre revenue. How long will that hope hold?

And why the squeeze?

I just finished reading an overview of similar problems in Montana (in Part One of Jared Diamond's book, Collapse). Diamond related a story to highlight the difficulty farmers face. At one time, if a farmer wanted to buy a truck, he would sell two cows. Now, to buy a truck, he must sell 25 cows.

To an urban person accustomed to inflation, that might not seem wrong. Prices go up. But why hasn't the price of cows gone up? Sure, the urban cost of living goes up, but so does the average wage. Back on the farm, when the cost of living and of farming goes up, what is the farmer to do? He can't just grow more cows on the same amount of land.

Reflecting on this, I realized that the problem is built into the foundations of our economy. Because our economic growth is fueled by oil (and coal and natural gas) and not by growth in biological production, there is a disconnect between the performance of the overall economy and the returns to agriculture. If the overall economy was dependent on biological production for its fuel, then the price of biological products would keep pace. Grain would be valued for the energy stored in its carbohydrates; that value would be reflected in the price of a grain-fed cow; and a farmer selling two cows could still get the same return in material goods as his father did. Instead, fossil fuels are used to squeeze more and more biological production out of less and less human labour, holding the price of those biological products low. Meanwhile all the rest of the economy is allowed to surge along on the power of fossil fuels, effectively disconnected from the reality of biological limits - for a while.

In Montana, the problem is much more acute than in this area, because land prices are rising steeply due to demand for homes and acreages in the beautiful mountain landscapes. Farmers cannot expand their operations to spread costs, because the land costs more than they can earn back by farming it, even over a lifetime. In the desirable mountain valley areas, farming is on its way out.

When I read this, I remembered Eleutheros's post, "Unlike Coin," and wondered whether a farmer who focused on direct use - growing food and fibre for his own needs rather than for the money it could earn - could persist in those Montana mountains. Rising property taxes would be a challenge. That might be overcome, but what about estate taxes? How would a direct-use homesteader pass that homestead on to a child?

How ironic that we have structured our economy to grow and grow and grow - at the expense of growing food. We are running an enormous gamble, that the unknown jackpot will contain some sort of unlimited supply of clean energy (pdf), that we will win it before the existing energy sources become inadequate or intolerable, and that energy alone will be enough of a foundation when we finally turn our attention to coping with the limits of soils, water, oceans, and climate.

UPDATE: Eleutheros has a new post about our response to limits - depressing or bracing, depending on how you want to take it.