Ea O Ka Aina: Family

Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts

Family life without fossil fuels

SUBHEAD: A visit to the Possibility Alliance reminded me life can be slow and satisfying.

By Peter Kalmus on 7 August 2017 for Yes Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/family-life-without-fossil-fuels-slow-and-satisfying-20170807/)

Image above: Porch with swing seat and bike at Possibility Alliance homestead. From original article.

I stepped off the train in the farm town of La Plata, Missouri, with my 9-year-old son, Zane. Thomas was waiting to meet us with two well-maintained bikes, one with a trailer for our backpacks, the other with a long wooden seat for passengers, to make the 6-mile trip to the Possibility Alliance.

The PA is a 110-acre homestead run by Ethan and Sarah Hughes, who have two young daughters. Their reliance on fossil fuels is limited to trains for long-distance trips, municipal water, and a telephone landline.

They purchase bike parts, bulk grains, and tin roofing, as needed—but that’s about it.

No electricity, no gas, no cars, no planes.

With the imminent release of my book on how life using radically less fossil fuel turns out to be more satisfying, I’d been curious to visit the PA both to glean technical knowledge and—more importantly—to see whether their experience of increased joy and satisfaction matched my own.

While my stay was brief, it felt full in terms of the ingenuity, beauty, and love I experienced. The sun set as we biked from the train. A bit later, the land lit up with fireflies. With only candles to light the darkness, the stars and the quiet took center stage.

The next morning at dawn, I walked through the lush greens of gardens, orchards, pastures, and forests, then joined Ethan and other members of the community for an hour of meditation.

In addition to the Hughes family, the PA is home to two permanent members, Dan and Margaret, as well as two long-term visitors, Thomas and Maggie. Thousands of other visitors have come and gone over the years.

A few have settled on adjacent homesteads, while others left to start far-flung urban permaculture centers. All are contributing to a more beautiful and just world, as they feel uniquely called to do.

Ethan and Sarah have given away tens of thousands of trees and plants over the years—they are still in awe of nature’s abundance, the way life regenerates and propagates through time, a key difference between a tractor and a draft-horse—but perhaps more significantly, they’ve seeded the world with the people they’ve taught and inspired.

Thomas cooked all meals over ultra-efficient wood-fired rocket stoves in an outdoor kitchen, starting with multigrain porridge and autumn olive jam. (Autumn olives are considered invasive, but they do make great jam.)

Breakfast is a time for community members to check in with each other; this was especially important on the day of my visit, with a dozen visitors due for a weeklong class on post-fossil-fuel living.

Ethan shared his disappointment that after a long remission, symptoms of the Lyme disease he’d contracted 15 years earlier seemed to have returned. I was touched by this glimpse of his vulnerability, the intimacy with and reliance on the community he’d helped build.

After breakfast, Zane and I milked the PA’s four goats and helped in the garden. Dan hitched the two horses to a sledge and pulled a large log to the woodlot near the kitchen, which one new visitor and I cut with a two-person saw.

Not only was the work great exercise, it was meditative and conducive to conversation. I then split the pieces with a maul, a thoroughly enjoyable task. The fossil-fueled wood-splitter might be among the worst inventions ever created.

After a sumptuous lunch of vegetable and goat-milk soup, cornbread, and a salad of wild arugula and purslane, Ethan gave a tour that emphasized the deeply interrelated topics of natural building and gift economy.

The PA is living proof that both work, and together are indeed more satisfying than modern industry and consumerism.

After a dip in the pond and a light supper of leftover soup, Thomas, Zane, and I bicycled back to the train station. The freight trains thundering past every few minutes as we waited for Amtrak’s Southwest Chief seemed somehow just a bit larger, louder, less necessary than the day before.

The PA is a success, yet Ethan and Sarah are in the process of moving toward something new.

When they acquired the land in 2007, it had met 18 of their 20 criteria for a teaching homestead. The two unmet criteria, however, represent deep personal needs: for Ethan, to live near the ocean; and for Sarah, artistic expression through classical singing.

As these needs have called more insistently over the years, these pioneers of sustainability are discovering at a personal level what they’ve long taught others: sustainability begins by listening to the heart—“zone zero” in the language of permaculture.

They’re now searching for a community ripe for their vision of transition—someplace near the ocean and with a decent choir.

My visit with the Hugheses affirmed what I know about sustainable living. They reminded me also that the one constant of life is change. The Hugheses are restless in exploration of the good life: bold authors of the new story we desperately need. With gratitude, I wish them well.

.

The curse of the iPad

SUBHEAD: The rise of sleeplessness in young people and a praise of boredom as an indicating a need for change.

By Rob Hopkins on 7 May 2017 for Transition Network -
(https://transitionnetwork.org/news-and-blog/curse-ipad-stalks-land-praise-boredom/)

Image above: Family unit at family food franchise all on social media sights on various portable hypnosis machines. From (http://socialmediapersonalrelationships.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-social-media-changed-family-dynamic.html).

Last night I watched the latest episode of Panorama, ‘Sleepless Britain’. It explored the problems of sleeplessness faced by many families, with visits to hospital caused by poor sleep having tripled in the last 10 years. A generation of young people not getting as much sleep as they should be is having knock-on impacts in terms of obesity, family breakup, health and education.

It has been shown that poor sleep can reduce academic performance by up to two school years, and many young people are now increasingly reliant on prescription medicines to enable them to get a good night’s sleep.

One of the key reasons the programme identified behind this is the explosion in the use of electronic devices, mostly iPads and smartphones, just before sleep. The blue light from such devices suppresses our body’s ability to create melatonin, the hormone which helps us get to sleep.

The programme followed several families as they tried to introduce an ‘electronic curfew’ of no screens in the hour before bed, and a more regular bedtime routine, with mixed success.

One of the things the programme didn’t touch on, and which struck me while watching it, was how our culture has developed a deep terror of the idea of ever being bored. It’s as though every waking minute has to be filled with some kind of stimulation, the “intensification of nervous stimulation” which Matthew B Crawford in The World Beyond Your Head argues is increasingly underpinning our world.

For many young people, the idea of an hour before bed where you have no screens, read a book, draw, meditate, take a long bath or just look out of the window, feels like a ridiculous waste of their time.

And yet boredom really matters. Many parents seem terrified of their kids ever being bored. That somehow, bored kids represent a parental failure. A paper in the journal Behavioural Sciences by Shane Bench and Heather Lench (I wonder if they chose to collaborate on it because their surnames rhymed so beautifully) called ‘On the Function of Boredom’, concludes that:

“Boredom provides a valuable adaptive function by signaling it is time to pursue a new goal”

I’m not suggesting that our kids should always be bored witless, rather that late night screens are a symptom of our devaluing time in which we are not nervously stimulated in one way or another. If our kids say they are bored, rather than handing them the iPad, perhaps we’d be better to just suggest they sit with that feeling for a while, and see what arises instead.

It’s as though we are always suppressing that moment, rather than sitting with it and seeing what awaits us on the other side.

Some, at least, of the time currently dedicated to swiping up, swiping down, and sending text messages which could just as easily form the basis of an actual conversation the following day, could be spent daydreaming. Like boredom, daydreaming is something that gets bad press these days.

Michael Gove I’m sure hates daydreaming with a passion (I think it was the only thing at school that I excelled in), and his influence over education has resulted in less and less time for it. Break times are being cut back in schools around the world as more time is demanded for teaching academic subjects. As Jonah Lehrer writes in an article called The Virtues of Daydreaming:

“It turns out that whenever we are slightly bored—when reality isn’t quite enough for us—we begin exploring our own associations, contemplating counterfactuals and fictive scenarios that only exist within the head”

While Freud dismissed daydreaming as “infantile”, more recent research has come to think of it as an “essential cognitive tool”. He references research by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler (who we’ll be publishing an interview with soon here) who argue that “creative solutions may be facilitated specifically by simple external tasks that maximize mind-wandering”.

Have you ever found yourself wondering who wrote a particular song, or scored a particular goal, and then 2 hours later the answer just ‘popped into your head’? Our brains have an amazing ability to work on problems without our being consciously aware of them. As Lehrer puts it:

“Question(s) need to marinate in the mind, “incubating” in those subterranean parts of the brain we can barely control”

So what are the kinds of simple tasks that facilitate this kind of thinking? Lehrer describes them as being tasks which “consume just enough attention to keep us occupied, while leaving plenty of mental resources left over for errant daydreams”.

So, not television, iPads, texting or homework, but rather the kinds of things which, sadly, have been largely purged from most family homes. Washing up, preparing food, kneading bread, knitting, gardening, sewing. Playing games together. Time without noise, entertainment, stimulation.

Activities which keep enough of our brains free for daydreaming.

And sleep, of course, which is the time when our brain makes sense of, and files away the day’s varied inputs, rather like librarians working night shifts to get all the books back on the shelves in the right places ready for the next day.

It’s not for nothing that Kierkegaard called sleep “the height of genius”. As Catherine Hill, a consultant pediatrician at Southampton children’s hospital, puts it in the Panorama program:

“If you could manufacture a pill that could improve your cognitive function, that improved your emotional regulation, that stopped you reaching for the biscuit tin in the afternoon, you’d be a millionaire. That is what sleep can help you with. It’s free, and available to us all”

And it’s not just kids for whom all this matters. Many adults are sleep deprived too. Perhaps I have just come up with the campaign idea with the least likelihood of mass engagement, but it deserves its place alongside the other great issues of our time.

“What do we want?” “The right to be bored! To have time to look out of the window! To chew over the day’s events while doing the dishes!” “When do we want it?” “Now!” I’d be there, on that particular demo.

The beauty, of course, is that it needs no permission, just a personal decision that this stuff matters.

The beauty of it though is that steps towards being a family that spends more time together with less distractions, that listens to each other rather than to YouTube videos, that cooks together, sharing skills, recipes and stories, that puts away the iPads and reaches for the boardgames, is going to be happier and healthier anyway.

As Lehrer puts it, daydreaming allows us to “to invent additional possibilities”. And goodness knows we need those, whatever age we are …

Miles to Go Before We Sleep

SUBHEAD: I have spent half my life trying to stop or slow down that which now comes onrushing like a wave so tall that it blots out the sun.

By William Pitt on 24 November 2016 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38515-miles-to-go-before-we-sleep)

Image above: A father and child in a frightening landscape. Viggo Mortensen stars in the 2009 postapocalyptic thriller based on Cormac McCarthy's Pultzer Prize-winning novel "The Road". From (http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/08/survival/the-road-movie-text).

I took my daughter for a long walk under the low November sun, and it turned into an adventure. We are hedged by deep forest to all points on the compass here in the great granite north, home to deer runs that spider-web the fallen pine needles, ghostly moose like towering mystics in the far field, a family of porcupines, one cat-eating coyote and the occasional ominous bear. Serious stuff.

Before our walk, my daughter was content to contend with the lawn that greens the verge of the dark and deep, but Daddy was with her this day, and that meant pressing the edge.

Over the ancient stone wall we went, into the thicket of pines where she learned to snap off the dead branches lest they claw at her eyes, then deeper, over the moss and the deadfalls laid down by a windstorm and further, into the places where the sun only hints at a kiss, her plowing forward and me always aware of the surround, where true north is, the way back to the house.

She found her favorite place in that secret space: Bifurcated trees. Trees with two, three, four, five full trunks growing up and out of one base like a splayed hand, like a crown. She would find one and crawl into the base, the hollow where all the fingers reached up and out toward the sky.

She stood there timeless, three feet of eternity conducting the energy passing through her, speechless, rigid in bliss. She was in the palm of a living thing, and if she didn't know it, the tree did. I felt it, too. I watched a tree sing to my daughter as she stood in its elder grasp, and she heard it full well.

I am thankful for that.

Thankfulness is a hard dollar to make these days. He Who Shall Not Be Named Here Today hasn't yet taken the oath of office, and already the deep stain of his impending presidency marks us all. It is difficult to locate gratitude in this vortex of shame, confusion, hate and greed, but this is an orderly transition of power, right?

He won, everyone else lost, and never mind the shenanigans from overseas and right down the block. We are in the pipe now, five by five, charging into a future that reeks of the past.

Native Americans are being attacked with "non-lethal" concussion grenades and rubber bullets for protecting their water rights out in North Dakota, all in the lead-up to Thanksgiving -- a holiday which, after all, is about celebrating the United States' "heritage."

A new creature now walks the land, most clearly visible on televisions tuned to "news" networks. No zoologist has labeled it yet, so I just call it the "Yeahbut."

Every time a fascist, a racist or an all-out Nazi is tapped for a Cabinet position in the looming administration, all the apple-polishers on the screen say, "Yeah, but how bad can they really be?" or "Yeah, but that was a long time ago" or "Yeah, but those people don't vote anyway," and we are all a little worse for the wear in the stench of the Yeahbut's passage.

Forgiveness is divine, it is said, but watching the TV people exonerate themselves for the ruin they gleefully foisted upon us in the name of ratings and advertising dollars makes me glad, for their sake, that I am a peaceful man.

I am so tired. I have spent half my life trying to stop or slow down that which now comes onrushing like a wave so tall that it blots out the sun.

Yet I remember my daughter standing in that tree, in her simple glory, and all of it shimmers into shards of purpose, and I am thankful to know I have a few good fights left in me. I am thankful for my good right arm and what I will do within its reach.

I will not be still. I will not be silent. I will volunteer at a food bank to help those who will feel the grind of these coming years most keenly. I will volunteer to be an escort at a women's clinic because my daughter has rights.

I will make it known that my home is a sanctuary for anyone who fears being unjustly thrown out of the country. If they try to run Kobach's registry of Muslims, I will be first in line to sign my name. I will do that, and more.

Through it all, some of me will ever be in the forest with my daughter. I am in a horde of leaves amid the hushed susurrations of wind through evergreens with a little girl who knows nothing of sorrow yet as she stands in a throne of wise bark. I feel the low jolt passing from trunk to her hand to trunk, and I know why I am here.

When next we pass over the ancient stone wall into that sacred shrouded space, I will whisper to her the lines from her favorite bedtime poem:

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep."

And I will mean it. I am thankful for this small patch upon which I make my stand. This far, no farther, and not one step back. Happy Thanksgiving.

• William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.

Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I’m thankful this Thanksgiving that...

SUBHEAD: We can still join with our neighbors to share a meal, a few drinks and a few laughs and then clean up the ensuing mess.

By Brian Miller on 23 November 2016 for Winged Elm Farm -

(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2016/11/23/ten-reasons-im-thankful-this-thaksgiving/)

Image above: "Lord thank you for this turkey" cartoon by Steve Benson in 2015. From (http://theweek.com/cartoons/591095/political-cartoon-donald-trump-thanksgiving-cartoonists).

I’m thankful this Thanksgiving that …

The severe drought has made us grateful for the water we have stored in our cisterns and has made us more thoughtful about our usage and plans for conservation.
Several years of culling to improve our flock of sheep has paid off. The market wethers are fat and healthy. The ewes are pregnant and lambing season is still a couple of months away.
Our hoop house is complete, loaded with greens, and warm on a cold day.
Cindy, as my partner, continues to inspire me with her energy, skills, and willingness to share this life.
My father, after suffering a stroke this year, is still with us at 89. He continues to find the time to volunteer each week at a local church helping feed the needy.
My mother’s eldest sister is still alive and well at 96, the last surviving stalk of that line. She reminds me through her continuing penchant for reading that one’s intellect is a gift to keep and nourish.
The Republic still stands even as those on the right and the left trumpet its demise.
My blogging friend Clem, with his insufferable positive outlook, reminds me to not herald the end of the world, just yet.
My friend Rayna harvested enough pawpaw fruit this year for Cindy to make pawpaw crème brûlée for Thanksgiving dinner.
My brothers and I (and a brother-in-law) managed to find the time for a recent get-together. A weekend in the north Louisiana woods eating good food and sitting by a fire is a wonderful tonic for the soul.

Is Capitalism killing you?

SUBHEAD: Income sharers combine their wealth to be able to cooperatively make economic decisions.

By Matt Stannard on 6 October 2016 for Occupy.com -
(http://www.occupy.com/article/capitalism-killing-you-income-sharing-could-save-our-lives)

Image above: A meeting with Ocuppy.com and Commonomics USA making a presentation. From original article.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away,” Hugo Award-winning author John Scalzi wrote in a personal blog post over a decade ago.

“Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house... Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise... Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap... Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.”

Economic insecurity is the American nightmare. It kills us earlier, messes up our mental health, saps the life out of us. Since Scalzi’s 2005 post, we’ve learned that more than 60 percent of us can’t afford a $500 emergency – which roughly translates to hoping the toothache goes away. That’s a pretty raw deal in exchange for an economic system that’s also killing the planet.

And only rarely can we count on others to help us out. They’re either broke themselves, or profiting from our financial instability.

“Being poor,” Scalzi wrote, “is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.”

But there are groups of Americans who are turning that indifference on its head. Within the larger intentional communities movement are a growing number of egalitarian, income-sharing communities, whose members combine their wealth and income to create spaces where people make economic decisions cooperatively, rely on one another and a democratic policymaking process for security, and cease to consider finances—or their financial challenges—the responsibility of lone individuals.

The financial families they create range from a half-dozen to nearly a hundred people, in locations from urban Baltimore, Portland and Washington D.C. to rural Missouri and Virginia.

In mainstream society, poverty is a tremendous waste of human resources, including time and health.

“The human potential that is lost is massive,” says Sky Blue, Executive Director of the Fellowship for Intentional Community and a second-generation member of Twin Oaks, the nation’s largest income-sharing community.

If you’re opposed to capitalism and this waste of potential, Sky tells me, “there’s an imperative to share income.” Its proponents say it works, and they have evidence: People in such communities can live comfortably on as little as $5,000 per-person per-year; if people get too old or too sick to work, they receive support from others in the community and the care-time devoted to them is not a zero-sum game like it is with families in the mainstream economy.

The idea of people (apart from our immediate family) co-owning virtually everything with us is far, far away even from liberal visions of economic egalitarianism. Americans don’t generally share, at least not at a level you can base an entire economy on. At best, in favorable political seasons, we re-distribute.

But that’s not enough for income-sharing adherents. They’re even more radical than Marxists. “We’re going beyond ‘owning the means of production,’” Valerie Renwick-Porter, a writer and yoga teacher at Twin Oaks, tells me. “What we’re doing is about owning every aspect of our lives.”

Although income-sharing communities differ in many of their day-to-day logistics, they generally share a number of traits. Income earned, and value produced, by members generally goes directly into the community budget. The community can then scale the cost of all its basic obligations and members’ individual needs; things are always less expensive when you can organize people into larger cooperative systems.

Community resources such as land, buildings, vehicles, are collectively owned. Individuals have their individual things (the community doesn’t own your underpants), but there are often rules and norms to discourage the classism of conspicuous consumption.

And typically, there are cooperative work enterprises in the communities, complementing the shared wealth and providing on-site work opportunities for members.

Variations exist. Some communities only partially share income. Some share expenses but not income. The common denominator is that in these communities, nobody considers their wealth and property wholly their own.

Potential members must apply and get accepted into the communities; the provisional period is careful and deliberative.

Members can be expelled; the due process for that to occur is extensive. The communities can often work with members who have personal debt or financial obligations, but there are limits, and everything is done with careful conversation. “We don’t give everybody a blank check,” Valerie says. Nor, she says, does income sharing “divide it down to the penny.”

Since members must inevitably interact with the outside world, income-sharing makes such interaction easier, creating, Sky says, “a bubble with a semi-permeable membrane” where people receive significant financial security, help others achieve that security, all the while aware that they are not alone.

Income-replacing work, like food production, maintenance, and caring for others, is given the economic weight it deserves, rather than being marginalized by a system that discounts much of that productive labor.

It’s not a perfect system. Income-sharing can reveal a microcosm of the good and bad behaviors in society. Property transfer policies and other procedures for negotiating between personal and community property can be challenging.

Above all, Sky says, Americans view private property as sacred and talking about personal finances is verboten. “It’s very hard to let go of that way of living even with the best of ideals or intentions,” Valerie adds. “It doesn’t make sense because all of your assumptions come from a different paradigm.”

But the success and growing interest in income-sharing communities suggests that at least some Americans can make the leap of faith. The case for material sharing doesn’t require us to tattoo hammers and sickles on our shoulders, distribute copies of the Little Red Book, or storm any Winter Palaces. The case is very simple: We save resources, and make better use of them, when we share.

Members of income-sharing communities can work fewer hours than those in the mainstream economy, and achieve a higher level of material security in those hours. Participation in democratic decision making also helps people become ethical and other-oriented. The added exigencies of economic and ecological crises call for widespread modeling of community income-sharing. Starting to share now could help us dismantle oppressive systems large and small.

Perhaps most importantly, these communities already exist, meaning people can join them or build communities modeled after existing ones rather than waiting for some vanguard revolutionary party to overthrow capitalism first.

“You can just make a choice to reorganize your life around compassion and solidarity and cooperation,” G. Paul Blundell, a seed-exchange specialist and member of Compersia in Washington D.C. says in a short video [http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/501005/income-sharing-commune/] about that community.

“You don't have to wait for the rest of the world to come along to do that.”

.

Rooted

SUBHEAD: Rootedness can be summarized in a longing to connect with nature, place and people.

By Chris Sunderland on 9 September 2016 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-08-09/rooted)

Image above: A magnificent rooted tree. From (https://facetsofcounseling.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/earths-grounding-and-the-roots-of-life/).

With the climate emergency now breaking upon the world, some may wonder whether human society is going to be capable of an effective response. It seems that our current toolkit is threefold.

First there is the political dimension. The Green party is making substantial progress and other parties are lining up their own positions in regard to climate change.

Second are the organizations, like the Transition Movement, where thousands of small scale projects are showing the way to a low energy future.

Third comes the activists, promoting disinvestment away from fossil fuels and opposing fracking. Each of these movements represents a dimension of our response to the ecological crisis with its own distinctive means of approach and each has real success to report, but the scale and urgency of the environmental emergency forces us to ask hard questions.

Are these things enough?

Can we rely on politics to solve this, or is the whole system simply too slow and cumbersome? Why are the activist voices so muted in this age of dread danger?

Can a set of small scale experiments, as witnessed so remarkably in the Transition movement, really shift public perception? Or even, can all these things combined actually do the business and lead us into a better harmony with the earth?

I have come to the opinion that we are set to fail as a human species unless we can embrace one further dimension of our response to the ecological crisis.

And that is the faith dimension. I say ‘faith’ rather than religion, because, in my opinion, the major religions of the world are currently failing in this area. I also use the term ‘faith’ to imply something deeper than a simple strategy for change, something that relates more to our being than our actions and which arises from a deep longing in our hearts.

To introduce my reasoning I would like to take a step back in time.

It is now nearly fifty years since Lynn White published his short paper entitled ‘The historical roots of our ecological crisis’ pointing his finger at the Christian faith for promoting attitudes of earth domination and anthropocentrism and blaming it for our prevailing attitude to the natural world.

It seemed a slightly strange charge to make at the time, because the church of the 1960’s was losing its hold on public consciousness and it was hard to conceive that it could have had such a deep and lasting effect on society.

Yet more recent studies of the human mind show that the structure of our minds changes continually in response to the set of stimuli¹ around us. It is clear that through the course of human history we can lose sensitivity to some things and gain sensitivity to others. It is therefore very credible that a religion that attains a public following may nurture one set of moral sympathies while closing down on others and that this may have substantial and lasting impacts on public policy.

This ability to modulate our moral sensitivity may be one of the most important and least recognised properties of faith in society.

White asserted that Christianity was the most anthropocentric religion the world had ever seen. It was a shocking claim addressed, as it was, to members of a society that wanted to believe its historic faith was essentially good, but it raised vital questions.

In Cornwall there are about a hundred natural springs. One of these wells is to be found at, what is now, a National Trust property called Llanhydrock.

Imagine with me, how these springs may have been seen by ancient cultures.

Maybe at first, the fresh water bubbling up from underground reservoirs is perceived by the sensitive imagination as both important and wonderful. The community that grows around the well knows its need of fresh water and senses that the spring’s continual flow is essential to the life of the community.

The people may not document this. They may not even say it. But they know it.

Without this spring their community would not exist. They also may sense the importance of the cleanliness of water. They will have experienced how water from rivers and streams is prone to upstream contamination.

Here is fresh, clean and pure water, flowing continually. The people come each day to collect their water. The place becomes a place of gathering.

The deep sense of importance of this well is known at a subconscious level and finds an outlet in religious imagination, or inspiration. It may feel like a gift. It may feel like its properties need to be guarded, perhaps by a divine being.

So it may have been that a religious imagination gave rise to stories of the well’s origins in order to express such things about its importance to the community that were known at the subconscious level, and as a result, the place came to be invested with religious significance and to become ‘sacred’, meaning set apart, inviolable and a portal to the divine or ‘other’.

Records suggest that the well at Llanhydrock was most likely a pagan shrine in its origins, but was later adopted by the monks of Bodmin and rededicated to the Celtic Saint ‘St ‘ydroch’.

This type of ‘adoption’ of sacred springs was a common practice of the church. It was also an example of anthropocentrism whereby something of mystical value in relation to nature, was replaced by the veneration of a human being.

Such humanisation of the shrine subtly bound the community into the Christian religious fold with its norms and practices.

The Celtic interpretation of the place in due course gave way to Roman Catholic mores and then to the Reformation. Some say that the Protestant Reformation stood for the sweeping away of the sacred itself. Holiness in England, was now to be found in the text, that is the Bible, and in the state, with the King declaring himself head of the Church.

After the dissolution of the monasteries, Llanhydrock was closed as a religious community and became the seat of the Robartes family. They came to own around one third of Cornwall. The well now stands almost forgotten, as little more than a garden feature.

That little vignette of history may give an insight into deep changes in religious sensibility that have taken place in the history of England, and across many of those countries influenced by it.

The reverence for the well at Llanhydroch originated in faith, associated with deep unarticulated values, experience of life ‘beyond words’, and religious sensibility. The shared values, in the case of the well, are as simple as ‘we are the community that need this water’.

The religious sensibility came to inhabit the place by a process of imagination that has been repeated by religions across the world. Such sacred sites did not need to ‘teach’ their sacredness, as an abstract belief system.

Like all authentic religion, it was passed on by imitation. People, who wanted to be in the group, became part of the community and naturally adopted its beliefs. In this sense religion acts like music and values², in being passed on by an imitative process.

People want to be members of the group. Their pro-social leanings make them want to take on board its understandings of the world. So they embrace the sacredness of the spring and come to ‘believe’ in it.

This anthropomorphic tendency, witnessed by the history of Llanhydroch, has been part and parcel of Judaeo-Christianity from the time of Judaism’s very first struggles with Baal and the Ashtoreth and the need to contend against abhorrent practices like child sacrifice, but anthropocentrism was dramatically accentuated by Christianity’s identification of divinity with a human being.

This has been the genius of Christianity in terms of making the divine feel accessible, but it may also have been its undoing in terms of its relationship with the natural world.³

Anthropocentrism is still very apparent in the church of today, being reinforced by the set services and readings of the church. Week by week the worshipper is presented with a human-focused conception of the world and its challenges.

For example, it is hard to find a single meaningful reference to the natural world in the weekly Anglican liturgy apart from a perfunctory acknowledgement of God who made the world in the creed.

Lynn White further proposed that Christian teaching, arising from the first chapter of Genesis, had led to a widespread attitude in Western Society justifying human domination of the earth.

He referred to the Genesis narrative which tells of the seven days of creation, climaxing in the creation of the human being as ‘the image of God’ and accompanied by the command:

‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon it’.

Subsequent commentators have tried to argue that these words were not meant in their domineering sense but as a more benign ‘stewardship’ over all things, but this is to miss the point. The assessment of White’s critique concerns how these words were received by people at the time, not how they should have been interpreted.⁴

It turns out that there is a strong case that these words were actually important in the rise of science and technology and all that has flowed from that in terms of our relationship to the earth.

They contributed to a scientific mindset, which, even now, continues to be tainted with arrogance towards the earth.

Francis Bacon is acknowledged to be an influential, early scientific visionary and populariser of scientific method. He was one of the first to really grasp the importance of rigorous, wide ranging experiment working in a dynamic relationship with an appropriate theory.

Useful theories would be those that interrogated observations and predicted further experiments. He saw the potential for his method to sweep away so many of the high level and useless theories, or ‘preposterous philosophies’ of his day.

Bacon lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when England had been through its church reformation, when Puritanism was in the ascendancy and people were free to imagine new forms of society without some of the constraints of the past.

This was also the age when the Bible was in the foreground of public policy. Dreams of the future were based on biblically justified visions and literal rather than metaphorical readings of the Bible were favoured.

So it was that Francis Bacon dreamt of a future where, through his new method, human beings would ‘conquer’ nature. He talks about science having the ability to ‘to storm and occupy her (nature’s) castles and strongholds and extend the bounds of human empire as far as God Almighty in his goodness shall permit’.⁵

And his justification for this was a way of reading Genesis, whereby science was helping humankind recover from the frustrations of our existence after ‘the Fall’, restoring us to the original vision of Genesis Chapter One where human beings were magnificently powerful and ruled over all things.⁶

He described this as the ‘Masculine Birth of Time’ with ‘masculine’ denoting the rationality of this new world as opposed to the supposedly feminine world of feelings.

Bacon may have been a pioneer in scientific development but his imagery about the ideal human relationship to nature is strangely domineering and he justifies it through his interpretation of the Genesis narrative.

His views were popular in his day and would be taken on by nascent scientific bodies like The Royal Society⁷ as well as colonizers like the New England Company, who wanted to ‘subdue’ and ‘civilise’ their new possessions as quickly as possible.

Since Bacon’s day the role of religion in supporting scientific endeavor has declined, yet it is arguable that that domineering attitude towards nature, established by Bacon, has been passed on to today’s much more secular society so that scientists, engineers and those modern colonizers, the free market fundamentalists, approach the world with an objectivity divorced from any proper fellow feeling that would arise from being participants in the natural order.

In the fifty years that have followed White’s paper, the church has had plenty of time to prove him wrong. Yet, tragically to my mind, it has failed to do so.

We have seen church leaders like Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury issue strong calls about our responsibilities towards climate change, but the awful truth is these statements do not translate to the grass roots and a dull apathy prevails in most congregations towards environmental concerns.

It is worth noting that Lynn White defined the ecological problem in religious terms. This, in itself, is a contentious thing for many in a secular age. He said:

‘More science and technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.’

As I understand it, White was not saying there was anything wrong with scientific method per se, but there was something deeply wrong with the attitude towards the natural world that frequently accompanies scientific interventions.

Changing attitudes can be construed as a religious problem.

With this in mind I will close this essay with some proposals for the recognition of a new spirituality that can act as an antidote to the more poisonous elements of today’s world, like our consumerism, individualism, boredom, destruction of nature and loss of community life. It forges a set of values that allow us to stand against the tide of the free market and create better marks of progress.

I call this inner disposition by the word “Rooted” and it is based on a three-fold longing for connection that I think many people may recognise within themselves.

Firstly, we long to connect again with the natural world. We are searching for ways of life that are in a better harmony with the earth. We believe a new harmony can be found and shape our lives around this search. Some people make substantial sacrifices in this pursuit, doing with little money, exploring radical forms of community living and new enterprise that may shift the dominant patterns of human society.

Secondly, the pursuit of rootedness has to do with the love of a place or places. Reconnecting with the natural world must be expressed in dedicated practice of some kind and this necessarily creates an attachment to particular places.

We care about those places where we have lived and labored. We also care about the great diversity of life in these places that we have observed and come to value and will work to safeguard this.

Thirdly, we value human community life as something precious, which needs to be actively nurtured in our attitudes and practice. We long to go about the world knowing that we belong, as members of a vibrant and inclusive community, recognizing and welcoming the great diversity of humanity as part of the great diversity of the natural world.

So there it is, summarized in a longing to connect with nature, place and people. It is a spirituality for our age that can give shape to our life’s path, helping to form our sense of identity and create our friendships.

It is not a religion, because it has no rules, no membership and no prescribed set of beliefs in the divine.

It is also, for that reason, not a threat to religion and could be embraced by religious and secular people without discrimination.

It could also become a movement, if people chose to make it so. It is the fourth dimension.

This is not a plea for any sort of return to a primitive existence, or a denial of science and technology, or even a denial of city living, which may be the most sustainable way of life for the large numbers of human beings currently on earth, but it is a recognition that we need to find ways of feeling and expressing this sense of being ‘rooted’ within the life of the modern city.

So, we need to discover the natural world, even in this world of cars and tarmac and learn to cherish it with a sacred duty. We need to search for a deeper sense of human community and mutual responsibility for the natural world even within the diverse and creative dynamics of city life.

In my home city of Bristol we have a burgeoning underclass of people who are selfconsciously looking for a new way of life, who prize ‘community’ in a broad and inclusive sense and actively seek harmony with the natural world. These are the ‘rooted’ people. Their spirituality is shaped by their search for a different way of life.

They ‘believe’ another way is possible and are committed to try to live this out. Cities have very similar dynamics all across the world. If we can crack what it means to live as a sustainable city region, we may have the answer to the global problem. And its heart may be in changing our attitude to the world around us.

If we were to place a rediscovery of rootedness at the heart of our modern agenda, we would find a multitude of creative ways of relating to nature and to each other that were deeply enriching to our humanity, while encouraging a way of life in harmony with the earth.

Endnotes
¹Susan Greenfield Mind Change Penguin Random House 2014
²Ian McGilchrist The Master and his Emissary Yale University Press 2009
³Chris Sunderland Rise up with wings like eagles Chapter Eight Earth Books, forthcoming publication 2016
⁴Peter Harrison Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early Modern Science, and the Exploitation of Nature Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Bond University 1999
⁵Mary Midgely Science and Poetry Routledge 2001 p56ff
⁶Harrison ibid
⁷Mary Midgely Science and Poetry Routledge 2001 p 62
Chris' new book, Rise Up with Wings Like Eagles, will be published by Earth Books in December of 2016.

.

Spinning Wheels

SUBHEAD: Is any effort to reform the food system is doomed to operate within the confines of the larger system?

[IB Publisher's note: We don't think so - however, unfortunately, the fledgling small farm movement will not be large enough to serve the middle class when the bottom falls out of the big-ag food delivery system.]

By Brian Miller on 2 November 2015 for Winged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2015/11/02/spinning-wheels/)

Image above: A produce booth at the Palm Beach Gardens Farmer's Market. Can this system serve the middle class? From (http://farmersmarketsflorida.com/).

Periodically I feel the urge to write about farm economics, but I never quite figure out where to begin or what it encompasses. If I were to focus strictly on the profit/loss of our 70-acre farm, the picture might be too grim. To focus only on the rewards, the picture would be too rosy.

An endless amount is written these days about the small farm revolution, the explosion of farmer’s markets, and the localization of the American palate — a market destined for a middle class that each year dwindles in size, dwindles in spending power. Which leaves me wondering, who is buying all of these $7 a dozen, specially curated eggs?

Part of the problem with the small farm renaissance, as I see it, is that its success is partly measured by a share in a marketplace created to favor consolidation and lead to practices that are the antithesis of sustainable or at least careful stewardship.

More important, its success seems based specifically on a species of wealth derived from consumerism.

I really shouldn’t compare the prototypical small farm customer to a crack addict. But I will say that so much of our consumer society is built on providing a momentary high.

Which means that any effort to reform the food system is doomed to operate within the confines of the larger system that gave it birth, one based on providing that “high” to increase consumption.

Likewise, the larger economy thrives on providing a purchasable identity.

Create a consumerist buzz centered on small, idyllic plots of land, sustainability, and local food and you risk ginning up interest in hobby farms by bored, wealthy city dwellers, generating a publishing bonanza of how-to books, and building a market for those $7 a dozen, specially curated eggs.

A harsh assessment?

Perhaps, because there are a lot of great small farms and farmers, and plenty of sincere customers supporting their efforts. And there have been some great innovations to provide opportunities to support small farms, like CSAs and farmer’s markets.

And then there are the growing number of rural Americans who already lead a peak-empire life —working ad hoc jobs, bartering, growing their own gardens, raising or hunting their own meat and butchering it, living largely outside of the middle-class matrix of consumerism.

The old Wobblies had a motto: “We’re building the new society in the shell of the old.” Maybe that is the best we can shoot for at this stage in the global economy.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the middle-class small farm economy all seems too little, too late. It is too easily converted into another twee Martha Stewart aspiration for a middle class with dwindling hopes and clout.

The rubber-meets-the-road moment for all of us will be when this consumer-driven small farm moment meets the real small farm movement — a movement of descent, where we get to see who truly has the will and resources to embrace a smaller economic lifestyle, a lifestyle where a more authentic life of hard work powered by necessity shapes what we find valuable, one where identities are not for purchase.

.

Prepping for a collapse

SUBHEAD: How you can prepare for a world-wide economic crisis over the next six months.

By Brandon Smith on 9 September 2015 for Alt-Market -
(http://www.alt-market.com/articles/2690-economic-crisis-how-you-can-prepare-over-the-next-six-months)

Image above: Citizen's trying to get along in Kiev's Maiden Square after Ukrainian government was destabalized in the spring to 2014 during a "revolution" to make the country part of NATO. From (http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-c1-ukraine-stragglers-20140312-m-story.html).

[IB Publsiher's note: We hope most of you are already on a path of increasing food, water and energy independence as well as building close-hand networks of family, friends and neighbors who share your concerns. This article does not delve into energy alternatives, or how to achieve water and food independence. It focuses more on the advantages of networking with a small group of people for vital services, including medical treatment and defense. For many the idea that you will be required to defend your own turf during a major collapse is appalling. None the less, it is what is required during a major breakdown of services and a wide-spread loss of local government effectiveness - police, fire, ambulance, public works, etc. Check out what happened on the streets of Ferguson, Cairo, Kiev, or Damascus in the last few years. We are not immune. Here in Hawaii it will only take a a few weeks breakdown of of shipping services from the mainland to bring the State to its knees. Get prepared for a storm.]

I wouldn’t say that it is “never too late” to prepare for potential disaster because, obviously, the numerous economic and social catastrophes of the past have proven otherwise. There simply comes a point in time in which the ignorant and presumptive are indeed officially screwed. I will say that we have not quite come to that point yet here in the U.S., but the window of opportunity for preparation is growing very narrow.

As expected, U.S. stocks are now revealing the underlying instability of our economy, which has been festering for several years. Extreme volatility not seen since 2008/2009 has returned, sometimes with 1000 point fluctuations positive and negative in the span of only a couple days. Current market tremors are beginning to resemble the EKG of a patient suffering a heart attack.

Stocks are a trailing indicator, meaning that when an equities crash finally becomes visible to the mainstream public, it indicates that the economic fundamentals have been broken beyond repair for quite a while. What does this mean for those people who prefer to protect themselves and their families rather than wait to be drowned like lemmings in a deluge? It means they are lucky if they have more than a few months to put their house in order.

The process of crisis preparedness is not as simple as going on a gear-buying bonanza or making a few extra trips to Costco. That is better than nothing; but really, it’s a form of half-assed prepping that creates more of an illusion of survivability rather than providing ample security in the event that financial systems malfunction.

Much of what’s listed in this article will include training and infrastructure goals far beyond the usual standards of beans, bullets and Band-Aids.

Market turmoil has only just begun to take shape around the globe; and as I explained in my last article, the situation is only going to become exponentially worse as 2015 bleeds into 2016.

I certainly cannot say for certain how long our system will remain “stable,” primarily because our current collapse could easily move faster or slower through the influence of outside or engineered events (a slower progression without any black swan-style triggers would likely end in total breakdown within the span of a couple years, rather than a fast progression ending in the span of a few months).

What I can do is give you a conservative timeline for preparedness and offer examples of actions anyone can accomplish within that period. For now, my timeline is limited to six months or less, meaning these preparations should be undertaken with the intent to complete them in half a year. If you get more time than that, thank your lucky stars for the extension.

Find Two Family Members, Two Friends and One Neighbor Of Like Mind
Here is the bottom line: If you are going the route of the lone wolf or secret squirrel isolated from any community, then you are already dead. You might as well hand your food and supplies over to someone else with a better fighting chance. The lone wolf methodology is the worst possible strategy for survival. And if you look at almost every collapse scenario in history from Argentina to Bosnia to the Great Depression, it is always the people with strong community who end up surviving.

Going lone wolf is partially useful only if you have zero moral fortitude and you plan to rob or murder every other person you come across and then run. This is not the smartest idea either because it requires a person to constantly seek out violent contact in order to live day to day. Eventually, the lone wolf’s luck will run out no matter how vicious he is.

I’ve noticed that those people who promote lone wolf survivalism tend to lean toward moral relativism, though they rarely come right out and admit what their real plans are. I’ve also noticed that it is the lone wolves who also often attempt to shame average preppers into isolationism with claims of “OPSEC” (operations security) and warnings of neighbors ready to loot their homes at the first sign of unrest. “Don’t talk to anyone,” they say. “Your only chance is to hide.”

One should consider the possibility that the lone wolves prefer that preppers never form groups or communities because that would make their predatory strategy more successful.

Without community, you have no security beyond the hope that people will not find you by chance. You also have limited skill sets to draw from (no one has the knowledge and ability to provide all services and necessities for themselves). And you will have no ability to rebuild or extend your lines of safety, food production, health services, etc. once the opportunity arises.

If you cannot find two family members, two friends and one neighbor to work with you in the next six months, then you aren’t trying hard enough; and thus, frankly, you don’t deserve to survive. I’ve heard all the excuses before: “Everyone around me is blissfully ignorant,” “My family is addicted to their cellphones,” “All my friends are Keynesians” and so on. It doesn’t matter. No more excuses. Get it done. If I can do it, you can.

Approach Your Church, Veterans’ Hall Or Other Organization
What do you have to lose? Find an existing organization you belong to and see if you can convince them to pre-stage supplies or hold classes on vital skills. Keep your approach nonpolitical. Make it strictly about preparedness and training.

If you can motivate a church or a veterans’ hall or a homeschoolers’ club to actually go beyond their normal parameters and think critically about crisis preparedness, then you may have just saved the lives of dozens if not hundreds or people who would have been oblivious otherwise. Making the effort to approach such groups could be accomplished in weeks, let alone six months.

Learn A Trade Skill
Take the next six months and learn one valuable trade skill, meaning any skill that would allow you to produce a necessity, repair a necessity or teach a necessary knowledge set. If you cannot do this, then you will have no capability to barter in a sustainable way. Remember this: The future belongs to the producers, and only producers will thrive post-collapse.

Commit To Rifle Training At Least Once A Week
Set aside the money and the ammo to practice with your primary rifle every week for the next six months. Yes, training uses up your ammo supply; but you are far better off sending a couple thousand rounds down range to perfect your shooting ability rather than letting that ammo sit in a box doing nothing while your speed and accuracy go nowhere.

Also, think in terms of real training methods, including speed drills, movement drills, reloading and malfunction clearing, and, most importantly, team movement and communications drills. Shooting a thousand rounds from a bench at the range is truly a waste of time and money. Train in an environment that matches your expected operational conditions.

Make sure you are learning something new all the time and make sure you are actually challenged by the level of difficulty. If you are not getting frustrated, then you are not training correctly.

Create A Local Ham Network - Expand To Long Distance
A 5-watt ham radio can be had for about $40. With the flood of low-cost, Chinese-made radios on the market today, there is simply no excuse not to have one. If you want to get your ham license, then by all means do so and expand the number of available frequencies you can legally use.

If you don’t have a license, practice on non-licensed channels such as MURS channels (yes, MURS is only supposed to be operated at 1 watt or less; I won’t tattle on you to the Federal Communications Commission if you use 5 watts).

A 5-watt handheld ham radio can easily achieve 30 miles or more depending on the type of antenna used. With repeaters, hundreds of miles can be covered. With a high frequency (HF) rig, hundreds or sometimes thousands of miles can be covered without the use of repeaters (though HF radios are far more expensive).

During a national disaster, there is no guarantee that normal communications will continue. Phone and Internet connections can be lost through neglect, or they can be deliberately eliminated by government entities. A nation or community without communications is lost. Find friends and family and set up your communications network now. Over time, your network may grow to cover a vast area; but it has to start with a core, and that core is you.

Learn Basic Emergency And Combat Medical Response
We are lucky in my area to have a few people with extensive medical knowledge in our Community Preparedness Team. I have received training in multiple areas of emergency and combat medical response, and I am grateful for access to such people because there is always more to learn in this field.

If you do not have people on your team with medical experience, then you will have to seek out such classes where you can.

Local EMT classes are a good start, but these courses are very limited in scope and do not cover treatment as much as they cover the identification of particular problems. Almost no community courses I can think of delve into combat medical response. If you can’t find a private trainer in your area, then you will have to settle for Web videos.

Purchase extra supplies such as Israeli or OLAES bandages and practice using them. Learn your CAT tourniquet until you can use it in the dark. My team even shot a Christmas ham and then pumped fake blood through it to simulate a wound for our blood-stopping class.

If you already have solid people with medical training, try focusing in a niche area like dental work. At the very least, learn your trauma-response basics and store your own medical supplies. Do not assume that you will have access to a hospital when you need it.

Store At Least One Year Of Food – Then Store Extra

With your current food stores can you make it at least one year without a grocery supply source? Can you make it through at least one planting and harvest season with 2000 – 3000 available calories per person? Do you have extra food for people you might wish to help?

Imagine you or your community come across an ER surgeon during a crisis situation, but he did not prepare. Are you going to “stick it to him” and let him starve because he didn't see the danger coming, or are you going to want to keep that guy and his skill sets around? Food preparedness is not as straightforward as it seems. You have to think in terms of your own survival, yes, but also in terms of individual aid.

During a full spectrum collapse food is the key to everything. This is why governments like ours set up provisions for food confiscation. They know well that food is power. Without extra supply, communities struggle to form because people become hyper-focused on themselves and lose track of the bigger survival picture. Governments understand that if they can offer limited food to the desperate, they can control the desperate.

Do what you can to make sure there are no desperate people within your sphere of influence and you remove the establishment's best mode of control.

Plan Your Food Independence In Advance
To survive you must become your own farmer. Period. Do you know how to do this in your particular climate?

Have you accounted for pest control and bad weather conditions? Have you extended your growing season with the use of greenhouses? Are you planning your crops realistically? What provides more sustenance, a field of tomatoes or a field of potatoes?

A planting box full of lettuce or of carrots? What crops can be stored the longest and are the hardiest against poor conditions? What gives you the best bang for your buck and for your labor?

I realize that the current growing season is almost at an end, but that does not mean you can't spend the next six months planning for the next season. Condition your soil for planting now. Store extra fertilizer and compost. Be ready for pests. Learn the square foot method as well as barrel planting. Take note of the space you have and how you can best use it. Stockpile seeds for several years of planting.

Train Your Mind To Handle Crisis
Panic betrays and fear kills. The preparedness culture is built upon the ideal that one must defeat fear in order to live. How a person goes about removing uncertainty from the mind is really up to the individual.

For me, combat training and mixed martial arts is a great tool. If you get used to people trying to hurt you in a ring, it's not quite as surprising or terrifying when it happens in the real world. If you can handle physical and mental trauma in a slightly more controlled environment, then fear is less likely to take hold of you during a surprise disaster.

Six months may be enough time to enter a state of mental preparedness, it may not be, but more than anything else, this is what you should be focusing on. All other survival actions depend on it. Your ability to function personally, your ability to work with others, your ability to act when necessary, all rely on your removal of fear. Take the precious time you have now and ensure you are ready to handle whatever the future throws at you.

.

Buying the Farm

SUBHEAD: I want more farmers than there were when I came in. And I see with the organics that we can do it.

By Dean Kuipers on 26 June 2015 for Orion Magazine -
(https://orionmagazine.org/article/buying-the-farm/)

Image above: Ross Wilken, and fiancee Daniele Milazzo in Iroquois Cty, Illinois. Ross purchased 61 acres in Oct. and leases another 396 with his father, Harold. From (http://cleanyield.com/iroquois-family-farms-keeping-family-farms-going-next-generation/).

Ross Wilken, twenty-three, and his father, Harold Wilken, don’t look much like starry-eyed radicals as they inspect their fields of black beans just west of Danforth, Illinois. The hot, wet afternoon sun beats down on their greasy jeans and tired eyes like it does on any other farmer. But their twenty-three hundred acres of organic crops, surrounded by millions of acres of genetically modified corn and soybeans, are nothing short of an insurgency.

“These look really good,” says Ross, examining plants heavy with purplish pods. “I wish I had more acres in these.”

The black beans in this eighty-acre patch, just one of the Wilkens’ many nonadjacent fields scattered around the area, will fetch eighty cents per pound when sold in Munger, Michigan, and afterward might end up in your Chipotle burrito.

That’s a tall premium compared to conventional beans, which fetch about fifty cents. The Wilkens get similarly good prices for their organic wheat, corn, pumpkins, soybeans, and alfalfa hay.

So it’s no surprise this family enterprise is steadily expanding its operation in every way possible—building barns and grain bins, buying heavy equipment, experimenting with software, and taking in a son-in-law, a nephew, and a neighbor down the road as partners.

The challenge is finding the land. Like most farmers in Central Illinois, the Wilkens lease the majority of the land they farm. Now they need to buy or lease new fields to take through the three-year transition to organic. And they need to get there before Wall Street does.

New players with deep pockets have appeared in farm country—investors looking to buy up prime farmland and turn a profit on the steady upward trend of land prices and farm incomes. There have always been family offices and private investors who owned farms, but the scale has changed: in the last decade, huge pension funds, university endowments, banks, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, and new exchange-traded companies have sunk an estimated $25 billion into U.S. farmland.

That only represents about 1 percent of the $2.4 trillion in farmland in this country. But some activists already see a battle looming for the control of our nation’s food production, pitting multigenerational farmers with a long-term vision of sustainability against the short-term needs of large, conventional investment funds.

The stakes are very real. According to the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank specializing in social, economic, and environmental issues, the profits-first emphasis of these megascale investments can lead to the worst kind of absentee landlordism, resulting in badly managed farms, poor labor practices, disempowerment of farmers, and increased speculation in land prices. Investors could even choose to frack the land, or sell it to a golf course developer, if that’s more profitable than leasing to a local farmer.

This investment phenomenon shows no sign of slowing. Farmland has become a hot new asset class, and investment advisors say they’re getting loads of requests. Reports estimate there are investors with at least $10 billion looking for deals.

“These investors are looking for an asset class that gives them some real protection; in other words, a ‘real’ asset as opposed to a paper asset,” says Philippe de Lapérouse, managing director for agriculture consulting firm HighQuest Partners, which has helped drive this international phenomenon with its popular Global AgInvesting conference series. Farms are a tangible asset, but also produce dividends in the form of crops—like gold with yield.

And it’s an international phenomenon: a study by the International Land Coalition found that between 2000 and 2011, large investors bought or leased more than 500 million acres—an area eight times the size of Britain—in Africa, Asia, and South America. But de Lapérouse says there’s still plenty available, adding, “The investable universe for farmland for institutional investors is probably at about $1 trillion.” Which leads to serious questions about what investors intend to do with this land.

“As an organic farmer, we’re not interested in an investor who’s just in it for the dollar,” Harold Wilken says. “If they are, they’re not in it like us; we’re not in this for the dollar. So we don’t want to work with people who are only in it for that either.”

He’s not talking about profit; the Wilkens, father and son, are making money. He’s talking about time and the condition of the soil, environmental impacts, and the quality of the food he provides to human beings. Harold needs an investor that will put him on land he’ll never have to leave, and not force him to “mine” it—his term—for the sake of predictable profits.

When he first started to expand his organic operation about a decade ago, there was no source of money available with that kind of patience—so he had to help invent one. In 2007, he became the first farmer to team up with a new triple-bottom-line investment company called Iroquois Valley Farms.

When you ask one of our third- or fourth-generation farmers—How long do they want to be on that land?—they’re looking to stay on it for life,” says Iroquois Valley Farms (IVF) CEO David Miller from his office in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois. “They’re looking for their kids to be on that land. The capital’s got to think the same way.”

A former banker, Miller talks about Iroquois Valley Farms as a radical alternative to institutional investors—a radically profitable alternative, he is quick to point out, as his company is making “over a double-digit return on an annual basis, since the inception.” That would put it on par with the institutional funds, which are averaging, according to de Lapérouse, somewhere from 7 to 12 percent annual returns. But Miller’s approach is based on long-term capital and not on “trading capital.”

Iroquois Valley Farms, which is a certified B Corporation—a corporate structure that obligates businesses to be accountable for creating positive social and environmental impacts—does a lot of what other investors are doing in this same space: with money from high-wealth, accredited investors it buys and holds farmland, leases it to farmers, and shares in the profits in good crop years.

The difference, however, is that IVF prefers the sustainability and high crop prices of organic farms, and will weather the sometimes-lower yields and the three years required to transition a piece of ground from conventional to organic production. They will also sell a property to the tenant farmer after seven years. Or, if the farmer’s not ready to buy, will just keep on leasing it to him or her indefinitely. Allegedly, for generations.

That sort of talk, Miller says, makes his attorneys nervous. It’s not the exit favored by Wall Street, which always reserves the option to cut and run, usually at ten-year intervals. “But common-sense economics dictates that you want the farmer to have an option to buy the land that you’re leasing to him,” Miller explains. “If you don’t, it’s not sustainable agriculture. And it’s just bad business.”

There aren’t many farmland companies with similar missions today, but there are a few, including Grasslands LLC, a ranch- purchasing fund set up by holistic grazing advocate Allan Savory; and Farmland LP, a six-year-old San Francisco–based company named as one of the “Best for the World” among B Corps and one of the “World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” by Fast Company.

“We’re demonstrating that sustainable agriculture is more profitable than chemical-dependent agriculture,” says Farmland LP CEO Craig Wichner, whose company has already closed one $50 million fund and is now offering a $250 million real estate investment trust, or REIT, buying property in California and Oregon, also for accredited investors.

“We have a great business: we buy farmland, we improve how it is managed, and we improve the cash flow. But, from an environmental standpoint, from a future standpoint, we really want to have a world that works. We want people to have healthy food on the table. We want people to live in environments where they shouldn’t be afraid to live downstream from a farm—because we all do, one way or another.”

Sustainable, organic, and regenerative agriculture investment is still a small slice of the $25 billion pie in the U.S., says Renee Cheung, an independent consultant who works with companies trying to find these opportunities. That’s because, frankly, the returns aren’t yet proven.

“I don’t think that I have really come across too many sustainable farm systems where you see the returns stack up just as well as conventional ones,” Cheung says. Farmland LP and IVF are notable exceptions, but, she adds, “The organic model doesn’t necessarily match the investment profile that most traditional investors look for.”

Investors, Cheung notes, usually want to own, but not operate. They want returns in year one, not in three or four years. They want deep, established markets, and they’ll trade or ganics’ higher prices for the giant yields of big row-crop operations. Quantity over quality, basically.

Cheung points out that sustainable farming, however, is more resilient and may turn out to be the big winner in the long run. Conventional farming relies on crop subsidies, cheap oil, and draining aquifers without restraint, among other delicate conditions. When those conditions change, sustainable operations will be positioned to grow where conventional methods may fail.

Both Wichner and Miller agree with Cheung about resiliency, but they also point out that they are offering “very competitive” returns right now, even during conventional farming’s best years. “We know that it works now,” Wichner says of his system. “We’ve increased revenues per acre by 54 percent per year.” That means other ecologically minded investment firms can’t be far behind.

“When I did my due diligence, and I looked around at some of the larger companies that were doing this, I was really dismayed at the fact that they were monocropping,” says Alexandra Dest, whose investment firm in Western Massachusetts is launching a regenerative agricultural fund that will rehab conventional farmland in the Northeast and take it “beyond organic” to permaculture, biodynamics, and other systems. “I was dismayed at the way they were acquiring their land. I don’t want to be in soy and corn. I want to be in something that feeds people.”

Every one of these stories begins with a conversion experience. The idea for Iroquois Valley Farms began in 2005, when Miller bought some land from his uncle’s estate in Iroquois County, Illinois, just outside of Danforth. When he decided to take that land organic, he started talking to a cousin, who was leasing some land to Harold Wilken.

Wilken had been a conventional farmer for decades, but after a bout with cancer that he attributes directly to “chemicalized farming,” and the death of his daughter in a car accident, he went organic. He showed Miller a 142-acre farm in the area that he wanted to transition, and Miller got ten friends to ante up, buy the property, and lease it to Wilken. The LLC was born.

Today, with over $20 million in assets, IVF owns more than 3,330 acres in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Kentucky, Maine, and West Virginia—tiny compared to the massive expenditures of institutional investors, some of whom don’t bother with land purchases of less than $50 million. By contrast, IVF invests mostly via word of mouth; organic farmers bring the company parcels that are available to buy. “We now have more people coming to us with these opportunities than probably we can realistically fund,” Miller says.

That’s because he’s just as careful about taking money as he is about finding land and farmers. Any investor jumping in with IVF has to be ready for the long ride. You can’t even vote your shares for seven years. You can sell your shares, but you can’t expect the company to sell land to cover losses. It’s not the get-out-quick scenario that most investors prefer. “We’re trying to get to the point where we say, ‘Never sell the land. Unless the farmer wants to buy,’” Miller explains.

The overwhelming majority of investors trolling for grandpa’s farm isn’t looking for sustainability. And that, says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, is a very big problem. “These firms are driven to get into agriculture in order to get high returns. High returns as fast as possible,” she says. “We believe agriculture is all about sustaining livelihoods, increasing production, food security, stewardship of the land—all of that is displaced.”

Mittal’s not talking about Farmland LP or Iroquois; if they’re B Corps, they’re part of the solution, as far as she’s concerned (she herself sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, a B Corp).

She’s talking about the giants driving global agricultural investment, such as: UBS AgriVest, a division of the biggest bank in Switzerland, which owns more than half a billion dollars of farmland in the U.S. alone; Hancock Agricultural Investment Group (HAIG), a subsidiary of the biggest insurance company in Canada, which has $2.2 billion in global farmland; or the Teacher Insurance and Annuity Association—College Retirement Equities Fund, better known as TIAA-CREF, one of the world’s largest pension funds, which has $3 billion in agriculture worldwide.

After the global food crisis of 2008, land acquisition in the developing world jumped 200 percent as huge firms snapped up farmland in a kind of frenzy, with little regard to local farmers already working the land. This led the United Nations to release rules for “Responsible Agricultural Investment” in October 2014, but those have been criticized by food security activists as simply validating what they call “land grabs” that prevent local people from feeding themselves.

According to reports published by the Transnational Institute and other groups monitoring international agri-investment, these companies, and the international trade agreements that support them, are structured to insulate the investor from actual responsibility for the farm, its management, and its products. This is also true inside the U.S.

In one publicized case, farm workers on three of HAIG’s farms in Washington State sued—and won—in federal court over abusive work conditions. In court it was revealed that, using Texas public pension fund money, HAIG had contracted the farm work to a company, which subcontracted it to another company, which broke the law. Hancock claimed it wasn’t responsible. Everyone added fees all down the line and took profits, but no one wanted to be the actual “farmer.”

Mittal claims that this low level of engagement is typical of the field. “We’re talking about retirement funds, university endowment funds—they know nothing about agriculture, they know nothing about agri-quality or what foods feed communities,” she says. “What they’re looking at is the speculative values, and of course the investment gurus who say that it is better than gold.”

Wichner, who was in real estate long before launching Farmland LP, points out that a lot of these problems are not related to a new buyer coming into the space, but are problems simply attributable to conventional agriculture—using loads of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer to mine the land for maximum profits. Even small farmers can be bad farmers, he explains. “You can’t blame it all on the institutional investors,” he says. “But there’s clearly a better way of doing business.”

Both Wichner and Miller say their companies hope to sell stock in a public offering, maybe in as little as three to five years in the case of Farmland LP. Wichner sees the public offering as the ultimate triumph of a sustainable system. “That way, anyone can invest in farmland and help convert more of it to sustainably managed farmland,” he says. “And that, to us, is really the way to turn farmland back into a commons. Back into a common good.”

True to the company promise, in late 2013 Iroquois Valley Farms sold 62 acres of one of its Danforth farms to young Ross Wilken, and also bought an additional 156 acres to lease to him to transition to organic. The land includes a 2-acre homestead high up on a scenic hillside where Ross intends to build a house one day. Just twenty-three, and already a partner in a successful and expanding farming enterprise, Ross’s future is bright.

Ross wouldn’t have had this opportunity, he says, if the family hadn’t made good money in organics and gone into business with Iroquois Valley Farms. He might have been able to help his dad, but he wouldn’t have been able to own his land and make his own living.

Out on the open market, where Danforth-area dirt is going for $9,000 an acre and up, Wilken would have probably been greatly outbid by the many giant conventional farmers next door hungry for more turf, or a large conventional investor buying Illinois farms. IVF’s Young Farmer Land Access program, however, gave him nice terms. Wilken secured half of the financing for the 62 acres using a USDA Farm Service Agency loan, and got the rest from the local farmers bank.

Meanwhile, his father has the opportunity to watch his farm and farming practices pass on to another generation.

“I am a spiritual person,” says Harold Wilken, walking to the big new barn on his home farm, which is named Janie’s Farm after his daughter who died. “We’re not out here to get rich; we’re out here to make a living and to make a difference. We want to do what works for everybody.

It seems like the goal of every farmer around here is to eliminate somebody. I want more farmers than there were when I came in. And I see with the organics that we can do it.”

• Dean Kuipers is the author of Operation Bite Back and Burning Rainbow Farm. He lives in Los Angeles.

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Ea O Ka Aina

Family life without fossil fuels

The curse of the iPad

Miles to Go Before We Sleep

I’m thankful this Thanksgiving that...

Is Capitalism killing you?

Rooted

Spinning Wheels

Prepping for a collapse

Buying the Farm

FROM KAUAI HAWAII

NEWER ARTICLES

OLDER ARTICLES

TITLES IN ORDER

ADD ARTICLE

PARTIAL INDEX

GET BY EMAIL

WEEK'S VISITS