Reflections on Larry Lack’s beets

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Every so often I wake up in terror thinking about the future. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve just had a bad dream or if it has to do with having kids, which seems to amplify things a bit. But, strangely, it also seems to have a lot to do with gasoline.

I think about gasoline way too much. Not like filling up the tank and watching those electronic digits whizzing up toward the $100 mark. More like thinking about the gasoline connection when I pick up a newspaper or drive by a farmer’s field or buy something new that’s made in China.

I also get tired thinking about on fossil fuel addiction and not being able to do much about it. But there I was doing some personal research on it again last night. Like, did you know that there are 36.6 kilowatt hours of energy in a gallon of gas? Or that we can distill about 19 gallons of gas from a 42-gallon barrel of crude? Or that we go through over 1.5 billion (billion!) U.S. gallons of gasoline a day, worldwide?

But what has any of that got to do with Larry’s beets? Well, nothing as it turns out. And that nothing is notable, because my neighbours, Larry and his partner Leanne, grow their food the old fashioned way—without any gas engines or chemical fertilizers.

I’ve mentioned Larry and Leanne’s beets before. We’d invited them over for dinner, and when I told them I wanted to make borscht they offered some beets from their garden. I had some store-bought beets, too, and there was no comparison. The commercial beets were nearly tasteless while the home-grown ones almost took the roof of my mouth off with flavour. And they made a huge difference to the soup.

Larry’s beets came to mind because I was making another borscht yesterday. I had some big, beautiful, fresh-looking supermarket beets sitting in the fridge. But when I diced them up and tasted a piece I was disappointed. Again. They were almost tasteless. So I went into creative mode to make a great borscht, including adding the “secret” ingredient to liven it up: brown sugar.

Imagine having to add sugar to beet soup. Beets, or at least some types of beets, have been a source of sugar for millennia. It’s sadly ironic that my store-bought beets should be so sugar deficient.

But of course we both know that I wasn’t cooking up real beets. I was cooking up the tail end of a massive modern fossil fuel experiment. Today’s beets are grown on fields prepared by diesel tractors, enriched with fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizers, shipped on diesel trucks across the continent (or the world) and picked up from the high-tech, fossil-fuel heated supermarket by us in our gasoline powered cars.

That massive experiment was dubbed the Green Revolution and it got started just after the Second World War, which had advanced all that new fossil fuel-based technology.

According to Dale Allen Pfeiffer from his article, Eating Fossil Fuels, nearly 40 percent of earth’s land-based photosynthetic capacity has been appropriated by human beings, and that between 1950 and 1984 “world grain production increased by 250 percent.” He points out that this is an incredible increase in energy available for human consumption, and that the increase came directly through the wholesale use of fossil fuel in agriculture. He writes that by 1994 it took 400 gallons of fossil fuel a year to feed each American—a whopping 31 percent of it coming from fossil fuel-based fertilizers.

All this agricultural petro-chemistry definitely has side effects. On the positive side, we can produce more food more inexpensively and more food means more nutrition, which means generally better health and longer life spans. On the downside, with cheaper food we’re facing an epidemic of obesity and health issues. But that’s somewhat trivial compared to the environmental damage.

I won’t get into the obvious climate change and chemical pesticide issues, both of which have frightening implications for the future of life on the planet.

What caught my attention yesterday was the BBC story about wild boars dying on the Brittany coast beach in northern France. Apparently the boars died as a result of exposure to massive toxic algae blooms, similar to our red tides. As the algae washes up on the beach it rots, giving off lethal levels of toxic gas. Back in 2009 a horse and rider met a similar fate on the same beach. The rider passed out from the toxic gas but survived. His horse died. The cause? Environmentalists and government officials report that it was the result of nitrates in fertilizers running off the farm fields into the ocean.

If land-based animals are dying on the beach, one can only imagine the terror hiding under the ocean waves. But that’s another story.

The only good side of this story is we’re beginning to run out of cheap oil. The question becomes, what will we do instead? Do we stay on the same track and switch to coal and natural gas? Or do we recalibrate and return to a more local-regional agricultural economy?

Before deciding, maybe we should all make a pot of borscht and take Larry Lack’s beet taste test.

Squeezing life between the news feeds

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I tuck the kids in every night. Nothing unusual in that. But a couple of nights ago I went into the bedroom found our youngest son quietly sobbing in the dark. I gave him a hug, then waited a bit before asking, “What is it?”

“I miss Gracie,” he said.

I didn't quite expect that. Our puppy Gracie has been gone for a couple of years now, neatly buried in the woods. That was one house move ago for us—and an eon ago to a boy, I’d expect.

But life is like that, continually looking forward but rarely looking back. It reminds me of the news feed on Facebook or the news feed from any news source. The ‘new’ news just keeps on coming, replacing the old. So what happens to the old stuff?

Who knows? And there’s a whole lot of old stuff out there, especially now on the Internet. According to one site I found, there are more than 250 million websites on the Internet, and we exchange over 100 trillion (yes, trillion) e-mail messages a year—at a rate of about 300 billion a day!

What that really means is the pressure of the “now” greatly overrides the rapidly deflating memories of the past.

This has proven to be a real boon to both newscasters and politicians. With so much of the public’s attention focused on the immediate present, the sins of the past can quickly disappear. A few weeks ago the public was curious, to say the least, about the manner of Osama bin Laden’s death. Today? Meh.

This goes for pretty much everything, from the flooding here in Charlotte County to what happened to NB Power after New Brunswickers kicked out the Liberals for wanting to sell the money-bleeding utility, and elected the Conservatives on the issue.

And the list of disappearing news nationally and internationally is staggering. Instant media phenomenon Julian Assange is all but forgotten. The Gabrielle Giffords’ assassination attempt is a distant memory (who was the shooter, again?).

By way of examples, here are the top stories from 2009. A U.S. major killed 13 people and injured 30 others in a shooting rampage at a Texas military base. A plane crashed in Buffalo, NY killing 49 people and one on the ground. An Air France jet disappeared over the Atlantic taking with it 228 passengers. North Korea threatened its southern neighbour with a military strike. A German teenager shot 15 people before killing himself. “Balloon boy” never left home in a runaway helium balloon. World leaders meet in Copenhagen for climate change agreement, which fails. A California man is accused of kidnapping an 11-year-old girl, and later investigated for murdering prostitutes. And a story you might remember, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of the United States. Those were just the big stories.

So with this constant tidal wave of news, how do we concentrate on the important things that need to be addressed, without experiencing some kind of media fatigue? By that I mean the singularly important things: like the global energy crisis, which will continue to intensify until we finally run out of fossil fuel.

Sure, we cover the symptoms, such as gas prices, or reports of the number of wounded or dead in America’s longest running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we seem incapable of addressing the larger issues, such as our addiction to a fossil fuel-powered economy, and the fact that the Indians and Chinese are just now ramping up their entry into the game.

And the simple facts are compelling. Already there are over 900 million people going hungry every night on planet Earth, while the world’s automobile fleet now exceeds that number by some 10 million according to one report I read. I don’t know about you, but I find something darkly sinister in those statistics.

As the onslaught of news increases, thoughtful discourse seems to be on the decline. We seem to have no public forums in which we can discuss issues such as fossil fuel depletion, climate change and world poverty. Instead, we have the polarizing of public debate into opposing, self-defeating ideologies—and faith-based defensive positions.

This, I think, is what happens to a species that loses its direct connection to its source of survival: the earth. And just as I begin to write this column, my kids run into the house to bring me back into that connection.

“Come outside and see this,” they say, and out we go to look. And there it is, the most impossibly small baby bird lying in the grass beside a fractured bit of eggshell. From the shell colour it looks to be a robin. We search for the nest in the nearby trees, but nothing. It must have been carried from the nest and dropped there by a predator.

So, what to do? What else could we do? We put the naked thing into a makeshift tissue-paper nest under a lamp on the buffet. The kids are hunting for worms, and to our surprise it’s taken a little food.

While I’m not overly optimistic, we’ll see how it does—and keep you posted in the upcoming news feeds.

Time to decouple the corporation from the state

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The camera turned on the two girls sitting in the NASA lunar rover. Both of them flashed their instant smiles. The camera clicked twice and the smiles dropped as if they’d never existed.

And, photographic evidence to the contrary, they never had. The smiles were the professionally manufactured kind that politicians and celebrities are trained to use—eyes wide open, whitened teeth bared in a calm grin—and I marveled a bit at how these girls had learned this PR ‘secret’ so early in life.

I can only conclude that media awareness comes early to this generation. So it’s no wonder that so few of us are shocked by the news that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, and perhaps his entire media chain, has been quasi-legally but unethically hacking private e-mails and phone calls for years.

Rather ironically—given the wild ride the tabloid media has given him—the original story was helped along by none other than Hugh Grant, way back in April. When his car had broke down on the motorway he was rescued by former News of the World photographer Paul McMullan—who’d already blown the whistle on the phone-hacking story. McMullan invited Grant to visit his pub any time, and so he did, taking along a hidden tape recorder. During the “interview” McMullan dished on UK Prime Minister David Cameron and News of the World chief Rebekah Wade, who regularly went horseback riding together before his winning election.

What makes this interesting is the importance of Murdoch and his empire to getting politicians elected—from Britain’s Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to Cameron. You might call it an unholy alliance: the big media corporation and the state.

As we all know, five or six centuries ago our forebears had a similar unholy alliance: between the church and the state. Religious positions were purchased by nobles and the wealthy for their sons, a practice that continued until the time Martin Luther and the Reformation, when the roles of church and state finally began to separate—in an effort to curb corruption in both institutions.

Fast forward to today. I just stumbled across a reference to the innocuously named organization, ALEC. ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an insider lobby group aimed at deregulating State government in favour of free-market business, ostensibly to boost the bottom line. Just some right wing fringe group?

No. ALEC brings over 2000 legislative members including over 100 leading politicians together with representatives of 300 big corporations to develop and vote on new sample legislation, which is then introduced as real legislation in State legislatures across the U.S. Of the 1000 bills introduced by ALEC representatives annually, about 200 are actually passed into law.

What kind of laws? Well, they range from privatizing public education to minimizing consumers’ ability to sue drug companies to reducing corporate taxes to weakening labour laws. The kind of things that are great for corporations, but not necessarily so good for us.

But that only happens in America, right? Nope. Paul Martin’s Liberals got slaughtered because their connection to Jean Chrétien’s Quebec sponsorship scandal, which led to Jean Brault of Groupaction Marketing going to jail for 30 months and the federal bureaucrat in charge of the funds, Chuck Guité, being convicted on five counts of fraud.

And then there’s the mysterious Brian Mulroney Airbus scandal, the one where he was accused of taking $300,000 in bribes—while he was still an elected official—from Karlheinz Schrieber to steer Air Canada toward purchasing a fleet of Airbuses (which it did), and which he somehow dodged. Of course, he was duly outraged and indignant, and his lawyers ‘persuaded’ the federal government to give him a $2 million for damages. Hmm.

I’m not saying anything new here. We all know what’s going on. Corporate influence now greatly outweighs the individual voter’s influence. Whether it’s through the use of paid lobbyists to corporately funded think tanks, establishing personal power relationships with leading politicians or advancing their own candidates, corporate influence trumps open democracy.

And if I had to blame someone, it would be free marketer Milton Freidman—the guy who connected the words “capitalism” with “freedom.” A Nobel Prize winning economist, he taught at the University of Chicago for over 30 years and influenced almost everybody associated with politics and economics. Especially Ronald Reagan. Freidman’s big contribution to politics? Deregulation of business.

Well, we know how that went. Wall Street ran off with America’s investment savings and plunged the entire world into a recession as their leaders raked in multi-million dollar bonuses. In retrospect one wonders why anyone (such as his big fan Fed Chair Ben Bernanke) would want to canonize Milton as some kind of saint.

I, for one, think we’re ready for a second spiritual reformation, this time the separation of the corporation from the state. Frankly, I don’t quite know how it can be done. But there’s no doubt in my mind it will be done. Because, fake smiles all around, the alternative is simply this: fascism.

And the welding of corporatism and governance into a fascist state is a price we should all be unwilling to accept.

Have I just seen the end of America?

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Getting ready to see the last space shuttle launch event must be lot like what a pregnant woman feels going into labour; a lot of agony for a few seconds of fun. And fun it was, including the agony, I guess.

For our part going to see the last shuttle launch was a bit of a whim. Our oldest boy loves astronomy and all things space-related, so that was enough of an excuse. So we packed up into the van for the 30-plus-hour drive to Cape Canaveral.

Along the way we got to see what’s left of America after the great financial crash of 2008. The all-night radio was full of news on the jobless rate in the U.S., now at something like 9.1 percent, and the stalled growth in hiring, sputtering along at only 18,000 new jobs last month. The eeriest part of this was the deserted freeways in northern New England on July 4th. Obviously, vacationers were not travelling in droves to spend their money. When we stopped in Massachusetts at a pretty—and normally very busy—historic inn it wasn’t even half full.

The great thing about this was the customer service. The desk clerks and waitresses treated us royally. By the time we got to New York City and Long Island the effect had worn off. A late night gas fill-up in a seedy southern neighbourhood in Queens was, well, a bit scary. Since my credit card didn’t have a zip code attached, I had to go inside and deal with the locals: a couple of toughs in sleeveless T-shirts and an even tougher clerk, an unshaven Middle Easterner with bad skin in a hoodie.

This was on the way back from maybe the best (or second best) beach in North America near the tony town of Westhampton Beach. Once you find the beach the homes lining the waterfront are wonderful, all architecturally designed and strategically placed facing the sunset on large lots. And the surf crashes up mist in the fading sunlight along a sandy beach that must stretch along 10 miles of coast. Very, very nice.

Back in the van, Barack Obama was on the radio trying to cut a deal with the leaders of Congress and the Senate to get some kind of agreement on America’s budget that would cut the national debt by $4 trillion in a decade. And time is not on his side, or I should say, America’s side, as the country is poised to default on its national debt in two weeks if there’s no deal on the table.

That’s rather bleak news. The big choices are either cutting social services such as Medicare, or raising taxes. But I had to wonder, to whom does America owe this money? To the big banks they just bailed out? Or to investors in the bond market? Turns out they owe the money to pretty much everyone, including some of their own departments and, of course, the Chinese.

And Obama has a big job on his hands. Since Jimmy Carter, who brought the debt down to its lowest levels in a century and Clinton who tried, the Republicans who preceded him: Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have spent the country into a debt of coma-inducing proportions. Which is odd, considering that these arch-conservatives all achieved power by professing to have some understanding of finance. Well, I guess.

Another item in the American news was obesity. Apparently it’s still growing. And, yes, we’ve seen a lot of evidence of it as we’ve travelled south. Given the dire financial straits in the U.S. one would think that people would be eating less, not more. But fat doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. When times are tough the poor tend to eat more cheap carbohydrates, and that means building more fat. So even when they’re gaining they’re losing.

And then there’s TV. I always go into television shock on road trips, but this one was particularly bad. Every news network was obsessed with the “tot mom” acquittal. The jury found Casey Anthony not guilty of murdering her young daughter. In between news bites I watched ads for reverse mortgages, memory foam mattresses and stair climbing machines, all clear signs of an aging America, which was also on the news.

And even the Mexicans seem to be less interested in illegally crossing the U.S. border to find jobs. Things may actually be looking better for them at home. I guess that’s a real sign of the times.

But is this the end of America, I mean the end of financial dominance, the end of social dominance, the end of technical dominance in space? I don’t know.

I noticed that the natives were friendly as we passed through the Carolinas and Georgia—just before we entered the torrential rains of east coast Florida. The weather got so bad that the van’s electronics crapped out from all the water. The alternator probably got doused. But after a half-hour of waiting in the suffocating, humid heat inside the van for the engine bits to dry out, the dashboard warning light went out and we were on our way—to find a hotel.

We hadn’t booked ahead and apparently neither had a lot of others. We were cruising to find a hotel room along with literally another million people. We managed to find a great room an hour away in Orlando (of Disney World fame), which always seems to have tourist capacity in the summer.

Liftoff and aftermath

We got up at 6:00 a.m. to grab a spot on the beach to watch the takeoff of Atlantis. After some hunting we managed to find a good spot. But after spreading out the blanket and pillows, we were immediately accosted by some guy who’d got there, along with about 10,000 others, before us. He wanted to set up a table for breakfast in the spot we’d occupied. He then threatened, gently, to run us into the ocean with his SUV. And all of this without telling us what he wanted, which was for us to move.

Turns out he did us a favour. We found a much better spot on the beach with more interesting wildlife, like the family of rednecks with their kids with shaved blond Mohawks and a huge stork that started stalking us and seemed all set to carry off our baby. There were the shirtless tattooed guys drinking beer and the Muslim-American families, men in flowered shorts and thong sandals, women in full traditional dress, wrapped head to toe in black cloth.

After all of that the launch seemed like a bit of a letdown. Tiny Atlantis was 6 miles away and looked like a distant, elongated burning ball of gasoline on the horizon, and was up and into the clouds in a matter of seconds. And when it was over the crowd, which up until then had seemed kind of surly and self-absorbed, cheered and clapped half-heartedly for a minute or so, and began leaving, clogging up the dual highway. The one-hour drive back to Orlando took three. And that was it.

It was all over. Back in the hotel lobby I watched a newly grey-haired Barack Obama addressing his country, telling them there was still no deal on the budget, and a few minutes later a closeup shot of Atlantis lifting off, followed by a rather dismal CNN documentary on the future of the American space mission.

Evidently, it’s not much of a mission. Florida’s Space Coast will lose about 9,000 jobs. There are plans to develop a new vehicle by 2016, maybe. But until then American astronauts will be visiting the international space station on Russian Soyuz rockets at something like $62 million a seat. And the real hope for American space travel is the private sector, as in, companies building rockets and charging people, including the government, to send stuff up in space. It all sounds pretty sloppy and unfocused.

But I guess it’s to be expected. The real game is back here on earth. By now we all know that there’s nothing much to see in near space. For all practical purposes we’re alone on our little rock. So the investment focus is not on space but on earth: fighting resource wars around the globe, working to keep the U.S. military funded and operational.

OK. But have we just witnessed the end of America? Well, we’ve just been to the far end of America—its southern coast—and seen the decline of its dominance in space. As for the rest of the country, it’s certainly different place. Yes, there are more new cars than ever. And there are more self-centred Americans than ever. But I get the sense that there’s a lack of American focus, a drifting sense of hopelessness.

The best Americans seem to be able to do now is to settle into two angry camps, the left versus the right. Even addressing the rift between the rich and the poor seems too daunting, now, for this America, in the first stages of visible decline.

And how could it be anything other than decline given the steady corporately-fed American diet of junk food, junk media and junk consumerism? Yet, given all this commercial self-indulgence, one might think that Americans are undisciplined. But nothing could be further from the truth. Statisticians faithfully point out that Americans work longer hours and are more productive than, say, their European counterparts. Americans are an extremely disciplined people—who happen to be very good at exporting their corporate and cultural models to the rest of the world. So the reasons for America’s decline are more complex than simply blaming overconsumption.

America was built on the vision of creating a new society on the frontier. But the frontier, now including space, has disappeared, so Americans are facing the prospect of reinventing their own mythology as they become a mature culture. And therein lies the difficulty. Where can America turn for new models?

A look at past empires could provide some guidance. England today has a culture and an economy (based largely on services and finance) that closely resembles the new American direction. Today, post-empire Europe has a very different approach to the future, one that includes technical excellence, ecological concern and energy security as fundamental targets for the future.

The most significant challenge to America will be re-envisioning its role in the world, not as the global leader, but as a cooperative global participant in the world community. The end of the shuttle program may just be the beginning of that process.

Failing that, the country with the frontier myth desperately needs to discover its next frontier.

Life is a compromise—by design

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’Tis the season. Well, it’s a little past the season, but even so, I’ve been looking at sailboats again. And the question is: do I want to go for a big boat in the off-chance that we’ll do a long coastal trip, or do I want a small, easy to maintain daysailer that’s also easy on the pocketbook?

The choice of used sailboats on the Internet is staggering. And unless you have some criteria for choosing a boat, the whole shopping thing just gets completely confusing. For example, the first choice you have to make is whether you want a multi-hull boat or a monohull. If you go with the multi-hull—like a catamaran—you can expect to pay about twice as much as you would for single-hulled vessel of roughly the same size.

I like the idea of a catamaran. The main cabin sits on top of the hulls, which means your living room is much bigger and has lots of windows, so it’s a lot brighter, especially on long voyages. Cats don’t tip much in the wind, either. And that means kids and sailing newbies like the experience a whole lot more. And then there’s all that extra room below-decks in those two hulls, which usually accommodates four bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus lots of storage. Plus cats are often more than twice as fast under sail as their single-hulled cousins.

The downside? Well, I mentioned expense. Two hulls mean more materials and more cost to build, and there’s also the business of having two motors, one for each hull, adding to the cost. And then there’s the bad weather issue. Although there’s a lot of debate, catamarans have a reputation for flipping over in big storms—and staying upside down, unlike monohulls that tend to roll over and pop back upright with their deep heavy keels acting as counterweights. So a lot of folks consider monohulls to be safer.

Most people pick single-hulled vessels for two reasons. There are lots more of them, and they’re less expensive. So, if that’s the way to go, what’s the difference between a small boat and a big one besides the obvious cost-per-foot? Well, although big boats offer lots of room and amenities, they’re a much bigger commitment in terms of maintenance, portability and storage. Big boats are harder to trailer and get in and out of the water than small boats. So little boats are just a whole lot easier for the do-it-yourselfer.

And then there are the differences in design. Do you want a racing boat or a cruiser? Do you want to go off-shore in the deep scary water or mostly use it as a sunny day, fair weather friend? Do you want to sleep on the boat, party with the family or just sail it alone (leaving the wife and kids at home because they’re bored on board or simply hate the whole seasick experience)? There’s a boat design to suit just about any set of wants and needs you could imagine.

Which also means that there’s no boat that has everything rolled into one design. So every boat is a compromise. You’ve got to trade off some features to get the ones you want. Want a super-safe ocean-going boat? Well, it’ll need a heavy keel and solid construction so it likely won’t be that fast. Want a super fast boat? With its lightweight construction you can bet it won’t be the safest boat in a heavy gale.

I like this sailboat design analogy because it’s a lot like life. Life is all about compromise. If you want to live on a farm for example, you don’t have all the social amenities of the big city. If you live in a small town you don’t have nearly as many options as you would in a big city. And if you live in the city you have to keep all of your stuff locked up and you have less access to nature.

All of which leads me to consider the compromises we make to live here versus the benefits. One of the compromises in living in a pretty seaside town is dealing with its economy, which is based on tourism—since the traditional fishery has all but vanished. But that means I have to share my pretty town with 100,000 strangers every summer—including the few thousand bikers who’ll roar into town on their noisy contraptions next week to tickle the inner biker child of a few of local attraction managers and retailers.

But perhaps I’m minimizing the real compromises. Living in Charlotte County is fraught with compromises, whether one was born here or not. The limited range of opportunities can sometimes create a ‘musical chairs’ effect where people will do almost anything to compete for that one remaining opening. And then there are the constraints that are multi-generational—the “have” families on one side and the “have-nots” on the other.

Simply put, unlike the widely diverse monohull sailboat market, there isn’t a lot of choice out here. All in all, it’s a great place to be a government worker, healthcare provider or a teacher—or the inheritor of the family business.

But for those of you—especially young people—whose designs don’t quite fit here, there’s big old ocean of opportunity waiting for you out there. And you can always come back for a visit (despite the motorcycles I hear it’s a pretty good place for a vacation).

The choices and compromises may be more important than you think.