Another Brick Falls from the Denial Wall

Insurance companies were, as far as I know, the first to recognize that the climate was changing and causing more claims for damage.  Now an iconic manufacturer is recognizing environmental problems:

“Big Company. Smaller Footprint.”

Big Company equals Big News, doesn’t it? Nope.  This story isn’t making big headlines. In fact, they released this document on October 4 and I just found it.  And I look daily.  As far as I can see, only a few have noticed this.

Why did Levi change its approach?  Reading this little article, it’s not hard to assume they, like the insurance companies, noticed significant changes.  Levi Strauss needs cotton and the water to grow cotton.  Climate change and population growth influence both.

So Levi Straus is turning several shades of Green.

It’s a lovely color.

Now the real question: Why isn’t this all over the news?  Is being environmentally correct now hopelessly politically incorrect?

Cassandra

_Live Science_

Until today, I thought Live Science was one of those eco-freak sites, but today I logged on and found this right-thinking slideshow article by Andrea Thompson:

“Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas.”

Number 6 is “Keep Worms in the Kitchen.”

Finally, someone who recognizes that compost is CRAZY! It isn’t just those funny hats that make the Amish unusual. They COMPOST. Now that’s really wacky. Next time you visit Pennsylvania or thereabouts, don’t look for horse and buggies. Instead, go their farms and ask to see their worms! If you aren’t visiting Amish country, go to your nearest organic farm. Those folks are really zany. They compost too.

Composting is so weird, isn’t it? Everyone knows worms are icky and scraps smell. That’s why God made fossil fuels. That way we don’t have to use food scraps and manure to grow crops. Every real ‘Merkin knows that the proper place for food scraps is the garbage disposal. No stinky stuff belongs in our kitchens!

Number 7 is “Change Your Diet.”

How? By avoiding red meat. I know, I know. That’s downright un’Merkin! Red meat’s the only red that’s truly red-white-and-blue. Heart disease is as ‘Merkin as a Big Mac. It’s proof of our economic dominance in the world. But if you want to be environmentally wacky and thin and healthy, well, I guess it’s your right, but it’s gonna put you on a lot of watch lists.

Incidentally, as I was cruising through this site, I found a link to the “Craziest Environmental Ideas” show right above an article titled “Want to Save the Earth? Cut Out Meat.” Live Science also has articles such as “Red Meat a Ticket to Early Grave, Harvard Says” . Huh. Maybe some enviro-health nuts do work there. Put Live Science on a watch list.

Number 3 is “Live in Trash.”

Using recycled materials to build homes. Now that’s CRAZY. Real ‘Merkins want everything to be made of rare earths and old growth trees. We USE things; we don’t REuse things. Consumption. Mega-consumption. That’s the ‘Merkin way.

And Number 1, the craziest of all, is “Ban Plastic Bags and [Incandescent] Light Bulbs.”

China and Australia are doing this. Aussies, now that’s understandable. They have a reputation for being crazy, but the Chinese? Who would have thought the Chinese even had electricity–except in the factories where they make all the stuff they ship to us?

In looking around, I now see that, once again, Live Science has all sorts of articles on recycling plastic bags and saving money with compact light bulbs. This site is definitely suspicious. Read with care if you’re a true ‘Merkin!

Oh, I forget. Real ‘Merkins don’t read.

Cassandra–feeling a bit more bitter than usual

Handbasket Report: Me, Worry?

Michael T. Snyder posted an article title “20 Reasons to Be Prepared for a Global Food Crisis” today on Seeking Alpha, a leading financial blog. It reiterates much of what I’ve been saying in many, many posts over the last year or two, so I’m reposting it here in its entirety:

In case you haven’t noticed, the world is on the verge of a horrific global food crisis. At some point, this crisis will affect you and your family. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is going to happen.

Crazy weather and horrifying natural disasters have played havoc with agricultural production in many areas of the globe over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the price of oil has begun to skyrocket. The entire global economy is predicated on the ability to use massive amounts of inexpensive oil to cheaply produce food and other goods and transport them over vast distances. Without cheap oil, the whole game changes.

Topsoil is being depleted at a staggering rate and key aquifers all over the world are being drained at an alarming pace. Global food prices are already at an all-time high and they continue to move up aggressively. So what is going to happen to our world when hundreds of millions more people cannot afford to feed themselves?

Most Americans are so accustomed to supermarkets that are absolutely packed to the gills with massive amounts of really inexpensive food that they cannot even imagine that life could be any other way. Unfortunately, that era is ending.

There are all kinds of indications that we are now entering a time when there will not be nearly enough food for everyone in the world. As competition for food supplies increases, food prices are going to go up. In fact, at some point they are going to go way up.

Let’s look at some of the key reasons why an increasing number of people believe that a massive food crisis is on the horizon.

The following are 20 signs that a horrific global food crisis is coming….

1. According to the World Bank, 44 million people around the globe have been pushed into extreme poverty since last June because of rising food prices.

2. The world is losing topsoil at an astounding rate. In fact, according to Lester Brown, “one third of the world’s cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming through natural processes”.

3. Due to U.S. ethanol subsidies, almost a third of all corn grown in the United States is now used for fuel. This is putting a lot of stress on the price of corn.

4. Due to a lack of water, some countries in the Middle East find themselves forced to almost totally rely on other nations for basic food staples. For example, it is being projected that there will be no more wheat production in Saudi Arabia by the year 2012.

5. Water tables all over the globe are being depleted at an alarming rate due to “overpumping”. According to the World Bank, there are 130 million people in China and 175 million people in India that are being fed with grain with water that is being pumped out of aquifers faster than it can be replaced. So what happens once all of that water is gone?

6. In the United States, the systematic depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer could eventually turn “America’s Breadbasket” back into the “Dust Bowl”.

6. Diseases such as UG99 wheat rust are wiping out increasingly large segments of the world food supply.

7.. The tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis in Japan have rendered vast agricultural areas in that nation unusable. In fact, there are many that believe that eventually a significant portion of northern Japan will be considered to be uninhabitable. Not only that, many are now convinced that the Japanese economy, the third largest economy in the world, is likely to totally collapse as a result of all this.

9. The price of oil may be the biggest factor on this list. The way that we produce our food is very heavily dependent on oil. The way that we transport our food is very heavily dependent on oil. When you have skyrocketing oil prices, our entire food production system becomes much more expensive. If the price of oil continues to stay high, we are going to see much higher food prices and some forms of food production will no longer make economic sense at all.

10. At some point the world could experience a very serious fertilizer shortage. According to scientists with the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative, the world is not going to have enough phosphorous to meet agricultural demand in just 30 to 40 years.

11. Food inflation is already devastating many economies around the globe. For example, India is dealing with an annual food inflation rate of 18 percent.

12. According to the United Nations, the global price of food reached a new all-time high in February.

13. According to the World Bank, the global price of food has risen 36% over the past 12 months.

14. The commodity price of wheat has approximately doubled since last summer.

15. The commodity price of corn has also about doubled since last summer.

16. The commodity price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June.

17. The commodity price of orange juice has doubled since 2009.

18. There are about 3 billion people around the globe that live on the equivalent of 2 dollars a day or less and the world was already on the verge of economic disaster before this year even began.

19. 2011 has already been one of the craziest years since World War 2. Revolutions have swept across the Middle East, the United States has gotten involved in the civil war in Libya, Europe is on the verge of a financial meltdown and the U.S. dollar is dying. None of this is good news for global food production.

20. There have been persistent rumors of shortages at some of the biggest suppliers of emergency food in the United States. The following is an excerpt from a recent “special alert” posted on Raiders News Network….

Look around you. Read the headlines. See the largest factories of food, potassium iodide, and other emergency product manufacturers literally closing their online stores and putting up signs like those on Mountain House’s Official Website and Thyrosafe’s Factory Webpage that explain, due to overwhelming demand, they are shutting down sales for the time being and hope to reopen someday.

So what does all of this mean? It means that time is short. For years, many “doom and gloomers” have been yelling and screaming that a food crisis is coming. Well, up to this point there hasn’t been much to get alarmed about. Food prices have started to rise, but the truth is that our stores are still packed to the rafters will gigantic amounts of relatively cheap food. However, you would have to be an idiot not to see the warning signs. Just look at what happened in Japan after March 11th. Store shelves were cleared out almost instantly.

It isn’t going to happen today, and it probably isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but at some point a major league food crisis is going to strike. So what are you and your family going to do then? You might want to start thinking about that.

Indeed.

I haven’t mentioned it here, but Cuba, a country many point to as the model of sustainability, is in the midst of a major drought. Here’s an overview: “Rainy Season Off to a Poor Start” The springs rains haven’t come. Water is being trucked into cities and rationed. Livestock is starving.

Have a nice day.

Cassandra

A Grain of Truth

Checked the futures prices for grain crops lately? Read the Corn and Soybean Digest? Notice how often the word “erratic” appears in farm reports lately? Remember this well known verse from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”?

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Maybe it’s time to retune this to reflect the erratic weather:

No rain, no rain, rain so fair,
And all the crops do bate;
Water, water, every where,
We cannot irrigate.

Farmers ought to know what I mean, even if “bate” isn’t in their vocabularies. These are times of drought and flood. Worldwide.

I wrote about the changing growing seasons back in “The Bottom Line Heats up on Climate Change” posted in November 2010. I suspect the Arbor Day map referenced in that post is already out of date. For example, I planted my peas in late March this year. Just a few years back, other gardeners scoffed when I planted them in early April, for northern Colorado gardeners had “always” waited until mid-April, even early May to plant.

Not any more.

Of course, that’s not really the central problem. My peas came up just fine, but all my crops suffered serious damage from a hail storm a couple of weeks back. So far, everything’s bounced back, but plants can only endure so much bad weather, and it sure looks like the natural water supply is swinging wildly.

Here in Colorado, much of the eastern plains are in serious drought while the mountain snowpack is twice normal. That meant those of us lucky enough to have irrigation rights got free irrigation water quite early as water was dumped from reservoirs in an attempt to prepare for the intense runoff as the warming days rapidly melt that mountain snow. Flooding is almost inevitable in Colorado this year.

And it ain’t just Colorado that’s worried by floods and droughts. Unfortunately, bad weather’s becoming the norm. Worldwide.

Don’t believe me? Read this from the June 5 2011, New York Times: “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself” (I posted a reprint so people can avoid the NYT’s new viewing policy, but feel free to click over to the original if you think there’s been any tinkering with the article.)

Now, back to the garden. We had free runoff water yesterday and the weedin’s gonna be easy.

Cassandrea

The Golden Rule Rules

I’ve always had a soft spot for the 1966 Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. After tension and near bloodshed, a group of New Englanders and the crew of a stranded Soviet submarine suddenly band together to save the life of a small boy in danger of falling to his death from a rooftop. What follows that scene still feels right to me. It’s still an example of the Golden Rule, something too many of us in modern America have forgotten.

Luckily, our genes still carry that rule. Johann Hari’s “The Myth of the Panicking Disaster Victim – and Why We Should Be Inspired This Week,” which came out after Japan’s disaster, provides a good overview of how human beings follow the Golden Rule during disasters. Of course, many of us expect this from the Japanese, a people well known for their polite, civil behavior. However, Hari’s essay points out that natural selection has bred empathy and reciprocity into human beings. As he says, this instinct to help shows up everywhere:

This is so cross-cultural – from Haiti to New Zealand – that it is probably part of an evolved instinct inherent to our species, and it’s not hard to see why. We now know that 60,000 years ago, the entire human race was reduced to a single tribe of 2000 human beings wandering the savannahs of Africa. That was it. That was us. If they – our ancestors – didn’t have a strong impulse to look out for each other in a crisis, you wouldn’t be reading this now.

Almost all Americans used to know the importance of following the Do Unto Others rule. As late as the middle of the 20th Century, a good many were still living lives of considerable interdependence. Even today, almost anyone who lives in an isolated area, a term that used to encompass most of America, still knows the importance of neighborliness. This helpfulness doesn’t arise out of niceness or political correctness; it comes out of necessity, a need for mutual aid, sometimes even self-preservation.

My grandparents farmed and knew this. A farm woman like her might despise a neighbor a half mile down the road, but, if that neighbor was sick and children or stock needed tending, she’d be there to help because she wanted that neighbor to do the same for her if need be. Another farmer might think his neighbor a complete fool, but he’d rush to help rescue the man’s livestock if disaster struck. Helping out in times of need–great or small–was simply the enlightened self-interest of the day.

Even now in our world of Isolated Individualism, most of us still instinctively understand humanity’s inherent need for empathy, even for self-sacrifice.

Of course a few do not. Those few with total faith in selfishness, in rugged individualism are aberrant. This ideal–or illusion–of independence, of individualism, works as long as the artificial shell of industrial society protects it. It’s when disaster strikes and the shell breaks that we once again recognize ourselves as naked, helpless, little apes.

Our greatgrandparents, grandparents, and perhaps even our parents knew of human vulnerability without needing a disaster to remind them. I grew up during that cuspish time when most Americans were becoming isolated and self-interested–suburban. I visited my grandparents farm. I knew their neighbors, but l returned to our little house with the grocery store only two blocks away. As I grew up, fewer and fewer of us had livestock or even gardens. We started relying on services. The fire department, the police, the supermarket–all were just a short drive away.

With these conveniences, neighborly cooperation faded, and many of us forgot our sense of community. But it was still there when the earth suddenly reminded us of our frail humanity. Whether they recognize it or not, the Masters of the Universe can be as vulnerable to falling buildings as anyone. Yet it is still human nature for lesser mortals to band together to dig others out.

Well, maybe not the Superman, at least if they happen to know it’s the Superman under the rubble.

Here’s Hari again:

In a disaster, very few people are on-yer-bike individualists grabbing for themselves, and they are regarded as incomprehensible by everybody else. After the 2005 tsunami, the Ayn Rand Institute – set up by the philosopher-queen of the American right – issued an appeal entitled: “U.S. Should Not Give To help Tsunami Victims.” (This was entirely consistent with her world-view: she said it was immoral to save a drowning person if there was any risk to yourself.) Even the people who every day take this callous view of victims within our own societies – the poor, the homeless, the ill – felt the need to distance themselves from this sociopathy.

Sociopathy. That’s what he calls those Randian Individualists. Are they indeed sociopathic? In some cases, I suspect this is so. Lack of empathy does suggest a clinical condition. In other cases, I suspect these Supermen are just normal humans who have become too comfortable inside their glorious shells, too sure they are Masters of the Universe and of their Fate.

Either way, if/when their shell crumbles around them, they had better hope for anonymity and the kindness of others, because if those around them know of their unwillingness to cooperate, to share, to be human, I suspect that the digging will still come, but it might be later, much later, after they’ve dug out all the others around them.

Hence, the cult of the individual carries with it its own rules of reciprocity. I don’t find them at all enticing. I want to be dug out ASAP, so my sense of self-interest means I rush to aid others. We don’t have to love or even like one another, but to survive we may well need others. That’s just reality.

Cassandra

The Magic Handbasket: Free Crap

Finally, others besides the usual doomers are starting to notice the world food problem: “20 Reasons to Be Prepared for a Global Food Crisis.”

This article by Michael T. Snyder is on today’s Seeking Alpha, one of my favorite financial sites. Snyder lists a number of issues I’ve posted about over the last year or so–water, topsoil, ethanol among them.

I read it nodding but wondered why the author didn’t address the underlying population problem. However, a good many of those who commented pointed out this link.

But then there was this comment:

You did not mention ,” my dog ate my homework” as another reason. The free market will take care of shortages as high prices cuts consumption and creates incentives to bring on new production. Unlimited demand will be curtailed by price, and limited supply will also be stimulated by price. Let the market price signal do it’s [sic–and sick as well] work. Sure there are physical constraints, and oil does raise the cost of production, though substitutes will replace them.

Cornucopians no longer amuse me. “Unlimited demand will be curtailed by price, and limited supply will also be stimulated by price”? Is “price” a new euphemism for “death”?

As I read this, I wondered if this person was just being especially sarcastic or if he actually believed in both the Free, Righteous, and Easy Economy (FREE) and the Complete Replacement Analogue for Petroleum (CRAP). So far, I see no substantial evidence that either of these exist or are likely to exist, and I have grave difficulty with anyone over the age of five who utters statements of blind, unsupported faith.

Childish utterances from adults stopped amusing me a few years ago when an extremely bright neighbor told me that we would quickly solve the crises caused by the depleteion of fossil fuels. I laughed and asked “How?” Without answering my question, but with a straight face, he just said, “Because we have to.”

Because we have to? I guess I missed the appearance of the Magic Fairy (MF) who told these folks that merely having wants and needs guarantees their gratification.

Cassandra

Corn: It’s the Food Supply, Stupid

Al Gore finally concluded ethanol isn’t a good idea and conservative sources are gloating, for example “Al Gore’s Ethanol Epiphany: He Concedes the Industry He Promoted Serves No Useful Purpose.” The problem here is that while ethanol isn’t a good idea, both Gore and many of his critics typically fail to mention one extremely significant reason the current American ethanol process is folly: CORN IS FOOD.

In fact, it’s in so many American food products, I won’t even try to list them. Just read some labels at the grocery store if you don’t believe how ubiquitous corn is.

As someone who likes to eat on a regular basis, I worry about the air, the soil, the water, and the weather it takes to produce food and the resources it takes to distribute food. I long ago decided that I’d rather eat corn than drive around with it, but the Gore reversal and the reactions to it did little to convince me that the food supply was on the minds of those in power.

It’s sure on my mind because a number of factors point to lean times–dire times–ahead. How far ahead, I don’t know. Five years? Could be, but I’m not too worried. Ten? Now I’m starting to worry. By 2030 misery, possibly even world-wide misery, looks closer to being a sure thing. By mid-century–oi. Forget corn. Google “commercial fishing 2048” or something like that and find out what a good many project.

The future does not look bright for a number of reasons, among them carbon dioxide emissions that will continue to rise for a thousand years even if we were to stop driving cars and trucks today. However, our fossil fuel use is hardly the problem that worries me most. The rising human population does. Our problem is simple. We all like to eat, and, after eating, a good many of us like to do other things, one of which results in there being too many of us.

Ask any biologist what happens when a population continues to rise. If you don’t already know the answer, I suggest you read William Catton’s 1980 book Overshoot. It’s written for non-scientists and is still the best overview of the future I’ve ever read. When populations overbreed, they then eat themselves out of house and home. Those of us who live in developed countries have been skirting this Malthusian issue for a long time now. Fossil fuel fertilizers and fossil fuel-driven machines have allowed us to produce vast quantities of food and export our surplus to those less able to exploit the planet.

Kinda looks like that’s coming to an end because of increasing confluences of climate, consumption, soil-degradation, and water shortages. What happens if Hundred Year Droughts turn into droughts that come every ten years? We certainly can’t say that Russia’s recent drought was caused by climate change. It’s quite possible it was just a routine, devastating drought, something that happens every fifty or every hundred years or so. But what if it was not? What if climate change models are right and severe droughts become more frequent. We had a nasty drought here in Colorado in 2002.

In 2010, however, the farmers in my locale are rejoicing about the weather. On the 7th of November, an article titled “Crops Yield ‘Once in a Generation’ Payoff” appeared in the Longmont Times-Call. Whether or not they believe climate change is an issue, farmers certainly believe the weather is an issue. And they believe in luck. The article outlined how in 2010 Colorado “[c]rop prices . . . fetched what one expert called ‘once in a generation’ prices.”

“You’re looking at the trifecta: Sugar prices are high; corn prices are high; if you’re a dryland wheat farmer, prices are high,” said Mike Urbano-wicz with Colorado Commodities, an organization that buys and sells crops from Colorado farmers.

“To me, it’s once in a generation to have all this happen in the same year,” Urbanowicz said.

In June, corn producers were looking at getting in the mid-$3-per-bushel for their 2010 crop.

“Four dollars (per bushel) was a goal; $5 was an absolute dream,” Urbanowicz said. Corn is already a little more than $5 a bushel and may hit as high as $6.50, according to the National Corn Growers Association.

“A month ago, we saw a huge spike, and it just seems to be hanging around,” said Kent Peppler, a fourth-generation farmer near Mead who grows wheat, alfalfa, barley and corn, his biggest crop, on about 500 acres.

Urbanowicz said the spike in corn prices is due to a couple of things: The weak U.S. dollar increased the export of corn, and growing conditions in Colorado this year have been outstanding compared to some other states, such as Illinois and Indiana. [emphasis added]

(For comparison’s sake, Colorado is projected to produce about 171 million bushels of corn this year, while the two states mentioned above combine for about 4 billion bushels between them.)

Wheat prices also spiked because of a severe drought in Russia and the Ukraine, Urbanowicz said.

That comment about the Midwest caught my eye. So what happened in the Corn Belt, in states like Illinois and Indiana? According to MarketWatch “Corn and other grains futures shot up Friday after a U.S. Department of Agriculture report pointed to the tightest supply and demand balance for corn in 14 years.”

The Agriculture Department on Friday forecast a 2010-11 corn crop 3.8% smaller than government expectations just a month ago, as a hot Midwest summer preceded by floods in June takes its toll. . . . Following flooding in June, the Corn Belt suffered from a hot summer and, more importantly, warmer-than-usual nights [emphasis added] that interfered with corn’s ability to pollinate as it normally would, he said.

“Warmer-than-usual nights.” Haven’t computer models suggested that global warming results in warmer nights even more than warmer days? Aren’t warmer nights one reason cited for the world-wide decline in the frog population? (Google keywords: frog decline warmer nights) Learning that corn too was threatened by warmer nights was not welcome news.

But again, all this could just be a routine year. It’s still possible that humans and their toys aren’t behind warmer nights and other shifts. The current food prices could just be routine. But what happens if Russia’s drought hits the United states next year?

That would be bad enough without some other factors–like supply lines. For example, with the recent admission by the International Energy Agency that we reached peak oil in 2006 the food transport factor kicks in. It’s now increasingly likely that we will find a way to continue shipping food from one place to another to avoid mass famine. At least it’s becoming clearer to people like Al Gore that ethanol is a porky boondoggle rather than the key to our fossil fuel problems. I just wish it’d become clearer to more people that a planet with fewer people is the answer to our continued survival.

The bottleneck predicted by so many–by Catton, by E. O. Wilson (Google E. O. Wilson bottleneck), by many–approacheth. In a not too distant future, it’s quite possible that famine will sweep the United States the way it routinely sweeps Africa. Sooner or later, our farming luck will run out.

Cassandra

Riding the Wave? Riding the Wake?

The first line of Chris Hedges’ “Do Not Pity the Democrats” states,

There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the press, the educational system, the financial sector, labor unions, the arts, religious institutions and our dysfunctional political parties, which can be considered democratic. The intent, design and function of these institutions, controlled by corporate money, are to bolster the hierarchical and anti-democratic power of the corporate state.

I read that and thought, hey, I’ve heard that somewhere. Oh yes, I’ve heard myself saying it. I’ve been reading it too in works like Charles Hugh Smith’s Survivial +: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation. (His blog, the source of the ideas in his book, is worth checking out too.)

The evangelical tone of Hedges’ essay suggests this chorus is rising. Other informed voices, like Smith, Archdruid Greer, Sharon Astyk, and many others, echo themes much like what Hedges advocates. It’s time to opt out, to become as independent as possible, and not just politically. We need to become what Smith calls The Remnant, what Greer calls Green Wizards. We need to do something concrete, something to keep our own little lifeboats afloat as the titanic USA sinks.

We need to flee USA Inc.

Hedges’ plea is succinct:

Investing emotional and intellectual energy in electoral politics is a waste of time. Resistance means a radical break with the formal structures of American society. We must cut as many ties with consumer society and corporations as possible. We must build a new political and economic consciousness centered on the tangible issues of sustainable agriculture, self-sufficiency and radical environmental reform.

Things are not looking good, folks. Yet when I start talking about the enormity of our problems, the perfect storm or debt, political corruption and/or gridlock, population, resource depletion, and so on, I often get reactions ranging from blank stares to surprise or even anger. When someone asks me who I’d be voting for, I now shrug my shoulders and say, “Does it matter?” If people give me a minute or so to begin to explain the concentrated effort it’d take to change anything and the virtual impossibility of concentrating American focus, people usually prove my point by losing focus and wandering back to their business as usual (BAU)lives.

Meanwhile, people like Smith call out to The Remnant. Greer calls for Green Wizards. Help yourself. Learn practical skills. Prepare for the current cultural, social, political, economic scene to get worse.

Now I’m going back to harvesting my garden, tending to my ducks, and then sitting with my books and my favorite non-commercial media sites to ponder what may be coming next. Whatever it is may come slower than I expect or in a different form, but I fear something big and dark and scary is indeed coming. I’m afraid Chris Hedges’ tone is appropriate.

Cassandra

Duck SuperMax Prison and Spa–The Details

Our duck enclosure is attached to the south side of a storage shed that sits just to the southwest of the main entry to our house. The placement allows the ducks to act as an additional early alert system should our Australian Cattle Dog be dozing in the back bedroom. Typically though, both alarms go off simultaneously. They quack; he barks; we always know when we have visitors.

The duck enclosure, built to fit the name Duck SuperMax Prison and Spa, has a metal roof and hardware cloth sides, doubled and dug in on the bottom. I also laid sandstone patio slabs around the edges of the enclosure since we have many predators, including coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks, eagles, owls, and the usual dogs and cats.

Right now, the duck yard is temporarily fenced with portable, electric poultry fence. Within the next month or so, I hope to put up the permanent fencing. Right now, I plan on regular field fence, wire left over from fencing the horse pastures. The lower couple feet will be hardware cloth to prevent duck heads from temptingly poking through the field fence. We’ll top out this fence with wooden rails so that it matches the horse fencing. I am however thinking of swagging the top rail with a few strings of little white Christmas/party lights in keeping with my theme of Prison and Spa.

The two pools, one a sheep water tank and the other a preformed decorative pond, are the main features of the Spa right now. I’m planning on building some other features for duck sunning and shading later on. I have quite a supply of old wooden posts since this summer we’ve replaced dozens of pasture posts that were broken at ground level but still five feet high. I’m sure I can design a duck cabana or two using them.

Inside the enclosure sits the duck house itself. It’s visible, but not prominent. I wanted it to be unobtrusive and plain in keeping with the prison aspect of my top security duck enclosure. Maybe stark and grim are a better descriptors. The design is based on the lovely Winston duck house found here. I wouldn’t call our version lovely. It’s built from rough exterior particle board smoothed only by many coats of paint.

The house is three feet wide, eight feet long, and not quite four feet high. With the two doors, cleaning is relatively easy. Right now, I have a large hay tarp folded and squished into the bottom. I had hoped for a better fit. It’s OK, but less than ideal since the edges of the tarp flop over, covering up part of the softwood shavings that serve as bedding. If I get a bit of free time (ha!) I hope to tailor and stitch up the ends to form something like a tray. Then, by adding a couple of handles, I could drag out the tray containing soiled shavings fairly easily. At least that’s the plan at present. Right now, the shavings are holding up well with a stir each morning.

Upon first seeing these duck facilities, our neighbor, long a major breeder of gamebirds, mostly mallards, walked into the duck enclosure and blinked. He pointed to the duck house and said, “What’s that?” I said, “The duck house.” He pointed to the roof and sides of the enclosure and said, “So what’s this?” I said, “The duck enclosure.” He waved a hand toward the roof and sides of the enclosure, then pointed back to the house and said, “That’s overkill!”

He’s a like that–a nice guy who stresses the practical. His ducks are safe indeed, but I hear them quacking frantically as coyotes drool and prowl around his pens. Our ducks huddle quietly inside their house when they feel threatened. Plus, they can not only avoid the high winds so common on the Colorado Plains, but the east and west ends of the house provide exterior shade or concentrated sun, whichever they want or need.

Before he left, our neighbor turned to my husband and said, “When’s she putting in the air conditioning?” I actually quite like this neighbor. He’s gruff, but when he first heard we had received the shipment of ducklings, he was over in an instant, bearing a large container of his specially mixed duck feed. He definitely feared we wouldn’t do well by our ducklings. Now retired, he hatched only a thousand ducklings this spring. When he was “active,” he hatched out something like twenty thousand.

I gather he’s still telling people about our ducks’ need for air conditioning.

Cassandra

Sustainability–The Fun Side

On June 10th, we received our shipment of eleven Welsh Harlequin duckings from Holderread Waterfowl Farm and Preservation Center of Corvallis, Oregon. These ducklings from Holderread’s Top Show Quality matings belong to a breed rated critically endangered by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.

Why Welsh Harlequins aren’t more popular is beyond me. Even if the breed weren’t known for its egg-laying capacity and usefulness as a leaner than typical roasting duck, the amusement factor is high. When the ducks are about to bob for greens in their little pool, for a few minutes the farm shuts down to watch.

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Two Young Gentlemen of Breeding and Fashion

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's SuperDuck!

Always Examine Water Carefully before Plunging In

All this comic relief and in another few months eggs too!

Cassandra