Cliche

Oh how bored I am of cliched, trite nonsense from politicians and companies.

Fiasco, really. Get on with the important things not wrangling for public opinion - do your jobs not heckling and media-baiting.

Best in class, zero fat (full of sugar), zero sugar (full of fat), it's all nonsense.

I wish people could both see through this stuff and convince those creating the mountain of bullshit that they see it and hate it.

Lies, disinformation and face-saving are disgraceful.

How can any of us trust anyone when so much is aimed at keeping us stupid?

God! (Now, don't get me started on God, ha, ha).

I've had a lovely Christmas with my wife's family out in Nova Scotia. Lovely beautiful friendly open people. And the adverts are making them BUY MORE STUFF. They are doing pretty well for the Canadian average. One-Earth footprint? Uh, no.

And me? Well... I guess I just bought a new mobile phone. Other than that, this year's been pretty much all second hand.. Not perfect. I wonder how we'd compare against the 100 Thing Challenge?

It'll be interesting to see how our new flat looks with all our stuff - currently sitting in Kara's mum's basement. And see how much new stuff (which will be second hand, too!) we'll need!

December

Snowy out, eh.

-12 degrees C today, but beautiful bright sun. Nature is providing me with frosted glass windows!


It's cold out there. So I'm mostly staying inside! I did go for a walk to the bank yesterday, though.

Kara's been on workshops about enneagrams, and I've been reading up. I'm a five. Pretty interesting, and helpful in that it reassures me that I'm not "just weird" or anything. I really just do need quiet time to myself - and that's ok!

We're going away for Christmas, out East - so I'll knock another two provinces. That'll be half way - just the prairies and Newfoundland and Labrador (plus the Territories, of course) to go. Then as soon as we come back we're moving - into our own little flat. Very little. Should be fun!

I'm doing a lot of complaining at the moment, "about Canada", which is perhaps a little unhealthy. I'm considering starting a specific "rant-blog" so I have somewhere to moan.

I don't mean climate or anything - that's fine, it's just how it is (and perhaps I should be saying the same for these other things..).

What am I talking about? The penchant for Canadians to be overpaying (in my mind) for things.

Look at internet. This is in-city where the infrastructure costs should be the same, roughly, in any large city.

	UK	Canada
10Mb cable internet	Intro: £15.25, then £20.25, unlimited downloads	$46.99, 60Gb limit
Cheapest, no prerequisite DSL	£6.49 for 10Gb limit; £13 for unlimited. "Up to" 20Mb but probably less than half that	$21.95 for 2Gb, up to 2Mb. That seems to be part of a bundle; no doubt more if you don't add a land line in
Competition	www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/ lists at least 8 suppliers for my UK postcode	Bell for DSL, Rogers for Cable. Other suppliers might be coming.

Oh yes - in Canada you have to add tax at 13%. In the UK, the VAT is included...

What have I signed up to?

I'm following the Wikileaks saga with keen interest. From the cables Wikileaks is releasing, to commentary about the Government being "my employees" and so on.

And it's got me thinking. What exactly have I signed up to - or not? In the UK there is no "constitution" per-se. The arguments about Wikileaks seem to go back and forth between whether or not they have the right to release that information that they did not perform an illegal act themselves to get.

The argument from those supporting the US government is along the lines of "it's unpatriotic, it will cost lives". The counter arugments are something like "they don't have the right to withhold this information in the first place, if they don't want to be caught then they shouldn't be doing anything illegal" - though there is also controversy that what Wikileaks is currently leaking is not of significance, just embarassing comminiques between two departments or countries about a third country.

Gadaffi and his voluptuous blonde nurse, indeed.

The core of my question is: What rights do I have? What powers does the government have, and from where and what did it derive them?

We vote in the government, this is true. It's an evolving beast, and of course it would be impossible to have a complete revolution or rethink for every generation. Laws need to change rapidly to deal with new technologies such as the internet, though they tend to be shaped to help the status quo rather than innovation and freedom.

And we live in a much fairer society than we did hundreds of years ago. But with all this new technology it is possible to see how unjust all sorts of things are. Ignorance is, to some degree, bliss.

But here's the thing: laws are shaped by the wealthy, intelligent few. They can then charge vast sums of money to unravel and contest those laws in court. If, say, I decide I want to grow cannabis, or invent something that has a patent vaguely associated with some other thing developed years ago (see the current patent wars involving Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, the mobile phone manufacturers, etc, etc...) I am *screwed* - as an individual. "The law" or "those companies" can squash me before I can think twice.

They can afford to employ the people who shape those laws. I just want to (insert whatever thing here). I want to buy a derived, out of copyright drug that has been available for years - only to find some company has ever-so-slightly improved it and patented it, and the yearly cost will go from hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds.

"Protecting the investment of the company" - right. Since when has the economic success of the company been more important than the wellbeing of vulnerable individuals?

But of course - business lobbies government for their own good. Individuals, outside of revolution, find that hard to do. And of course, when they do take power into their own hands, tend to do stupid things and not know when to stop.

So here's the question: What, exactly, gives the government the right to impose its will on me - in anything?

All I want from the government is, mostly, to be left alone. I accept some form of taxation is necessary - schools (and ideally University, for those ready to learn - perhaps at 20, or 25, or 30) need to be funded, pavements, roads, and the government itself needs to be paid for. I like having emergency services, and hospitals, and parks, and national parks.

But I have paramount objections to nuclear weapons, the war in Iraq, the way that various levels of government waste money. I object to the fact that the government pays contractors who then use that money to lobby for their industry. I object to the fact that the largest companies employ accountants that enable them to avoid large portions of the taxes that they should pay, where private individuals have no chance of avoiding them.

So where did I sign? Where did I agree to all this - where did I even learn that there was an "all this" to which I have agreed?

There needs to be a lot more "power of recall" for MPs, I feel. Instead of elections every 4 years a system of rolling elections. A combination of average approval ratings that, if they fall too low, triggers a local election, combined with a percentage threshold so that if - just for argument's sake - 50.1% of the people request it in a given week, an election is triggered irrespective of the approval rating.

This combined with a better system of representation and you would have a much closer link between the government and the governed.

Cities

I just went for a walk. After a day in front of the computer, I just needed to get out...

So I walked down our road, to one of the main roads near here, along, up a medium sized street, and then down a fairly quiet one until I came to a park.

The park is just a wedge between one road and a hill, with one tennis court and a children's playground, plus some grass and a few statues of dogs...

Hmm, I thought to myself through the buzz of traffic and the wail of sirens.

Hmm.

I don't want to live in a city. I really, really don't. Looking at all the houses in various states of repair, some with beautiful circular windows, others very run down... When I look out of a window, what do I want to see? Someone else's house (be it well kept or falling down)?

There are trees in Ottawa, and lots of fearless squirrels (as well as a fearless youth practising jumps on his skateboard in the road!), but there is mostly tarmac, concrete, and...

I'm not meaning to single Ottawa out for abuse. I just happen to be here. Southend, where I grew up, is in many ways no better (except it has the beautiful wonderful glorious sea, and the center is pedestrianised).

Well, aside from completely irrelevent things - about Javascript, SQL and the like - those are my thoughts for today!

Free stuff?

Tody i ota free rollp kybard n thepost.

I am typin on t now.

Ihno idea wh it was nt to me.

I hae o idea why iteven exiss.

Last Night

Two comments.

One, Last Night is a good Canadian film - I saw it on the flight over to Vancouver. I'd really recommend it!

That's a complete aside - I just thought of it because I'm going to mention what happened last night.

Last night I went to a "Computers for Communities" social evening - C4C being an Ottawa not for profit organisation that gets computers from businesses at the end of their lifecycle, refurbishes them, and then places them with families that wouldn't otherwise have access to one.

It was *so* nice for me to spend an evening with geeks - real, true to life geeks. Talking about partition sizes, the pros and cons of operating systems, and so on. It renewed my faith in humanity, to some level - people are generally decent. But it asks the question - if people are generally decent, how come we are collectively so hellbent on over-exploiting any resource that comes our way?

And how do we marry the two - getting to decent people, and getting them to do lots of decent things?

Fair

I'm constantly trying to pin down my value system, my morality, and give it a name.

I think it boils down to fairness. And I think I can try to describe it.

I buy organic milk, not because I *believe* in the whole organic system. I try to dry my clothing outside and not in a tumble dryer because it is wasteful to do otherwise. I prefer to cycle than drive not because it is good excercise, or more fun.

What?

Ok, case by case.

Organic is not perfect. But, especially for dairy, it guarantees certain things for the animals in question: access to the outdoors, and pasture for grazing, where possible (i.e. when it's not snowing outside), and generally non-cramped, "humane" living conditions. What I want is for the cow to have as good a life as is possible, bearing in mind that she is being harnessed for my use. I am grateful to her. The cleaner life, morally, would be to be strict vegan, I think, with no life harnessed to make mine easier. However, cattle as they exist today would not exist if we had not domesticated them.

The tumble dryer is even more straightforward for me. Why would I use money-electricity to do something the sun will do for me for little effort? I have never owned a dryer, though I can see that, in Canada, it is perhaps more necessary where the winters are long and cold... So, it is not fair to use that electricity to dry my clothes when any use of electricity impacts the environment (wind turbines need building, after all). 1kWh of electricity might dry one load of clothes, or power my computer for a couple of days.

Cycling is, you would think, obvious. Look at obesity rates. Look at the cost of roads. Look at the social cost of being able to jump in your car and drive away from the society where you live at 70mph/100km/h. The main thing for me is that it is unselfish to cycle. Drive if you need to (I probably have a strict sense of need, though: if where you are going is within cycling distance and anything you need will fit in a backpack, cycle). But don't block up the roads, create pollution, noise and generally waste a limited resource if you don't need to.

Is it exploitation to buy something and sell it on at 10x that purchase price? I believe it is. It should be illegal to make more than a certain %age as profit - dependent on industry sector, etc, etc. The organinc price markup is often as bad at this as conventional, and is a huge turn off for me. The practise of selling something at less than cost price but then charging more for accessories is similar, though there are situations where it is impossible to do otherwise (one example might be in video games - the cost of the console is subsidised at release due to the incredibly high development costs, but then games and accessories are priced to recoup that subsidy. Of course, when a company makes multi-million dollar profits, it does make you wonder.. but such is capitalism, and I digress).

It is not fair that things are forcibly made obsolete by, say, charging almost as much for a spare part than the cost of buying a new whatever. Visiting India showed how cheap labour makes old things "last longer" - the parts for one American's motorbike when it needed fixing was more than 10x the cost of the labour to fit the parts, and that's how it should be. Things should be made to be durable and fixable - because it is *fair* on the consumer, and promotes thriftiness, and reduces waste.

10-10-10

This last week has been a busy one. Last Sunday, on Canadian Thanksgiving, this year's 10/10 Climate Awareness event was held... events, I should say, because there were more than 7000 different events took place the world over.

The event we held in Ottawa was a great success, with maybe 50 people making it out on that most special of family days here, to listen to two mayoral candidates (the mayoral election is on the 25th of this month), a speaker on how climate change is affecting people of the First Nations, and make pledges on how they will cut their carbon emissions. We enticed them in with the promise to give people a black walnut (Juglans nigra sapling in the spring, free coffee (!) and nibbles provided by Credible Edibles.

I can't help wondering why many people chose disposable cups for their coffee, when there were real mugs sitting there as well. Certainly, the disposable ones shouldn't have been put out in the first place, but... baffling?

Both mayoral candidates made a lot of sense, and the first - Clive Doucet - made some telling points. How can we expect change if we continue to vote for the same old same old, for the people who have huge donations made to them by big business? What can we do to ensure the sane people assume roles of power when it seems most people are happy trusting the people who are most capable of reassuring them - in a game where the leaders are the people with most confidence, but a blind aversion to risk?

Sure, many of those people fail, their enterprises fail, but... still, the people most likely to be at the reins of the things that do succeed are those maniacs with blind confidence in whatever it is they believe in. There are shades of grey, but it is only seen as weakness to admit it.

I must admit my personal empathy with the charitable organisations that spearhead these campaigns is low. One email from the Fearless Leader of the 350 campaign spreads doom and gloom; the next, explaining why they cut ties with the 10:10 campaign (well, ok, the exploding people video might have been a bit much... Or, it would have been ok if it was a bit more humorous).

And it all feels like a bit of a money grab. Charities wage corporate war on each other to gain "market share". Maybe the government should oversee all charitable giving, to ensure it goes to the right place and doesn't get wasted.

Er. Well. Maybe not.

Anyway, our landlord/housemate got back from a trip to a conference on sustainability in Denver and promptly turned on the heating system, so I'm now warm and cozy at 21 degrees C. The weather has turned from bright and cold to wet and cold, so the fact I broke the washing line trying to get the last bit of solar power for this year is at once less important but more ironic.

Vancouver

So, I'm back home in Ottawa, after 6 days in Vancouver.

It's a nice, compact city (where we were, anyway - in the West End, near the water), with good cycle lanes (and more hills than Ottawa), lots of nice restaurants (we had Italian, Kenyan, Japanese and Ukrainian). It's more expensive than here, especially to buy housing.

I was working at the convention centre there, which is plush, modern, and generally a good place to have an exhibition - from my point of view.

The nicest bit, actually, was leaving - taking the skytrain (which is mostly underground) out to the airport I could see rivers, and huge amounts of lumber floating. Then on the aeroplane flying home, the view of the city, the mountains, and then the abrupt end as the mountains became the prairies were all amazing. The mountains - snow capped, as far as the eye could see for a long time - were beautiful. I was listening to and half watching "This Movie is Broken" and really enjoying the music at the time.

Ottawa seems very bland in comparison. Is the concrete somehow more concretey? Or is it just.. the sea, the beautiful sea?

11,000 days

I am a little over 11,000 days old.

Quite what this milestone means I don't know. This morning I woke up in a city on the other side of the planet from the one I was born in, cycled to work in the early morning light, and drank a gooood cup of coffee.

I'm sitting at registration for an exhibition, looking at banks of printers and PCs, badge stock and shiny metal. People are making connections, making deals. There are thousands of other souls nearby.

The seagulls tidy up the streets, but also mess them up. Seaplanes come and go from the harbour.

What is life?

Dave's World

Dave's World is very simple.

If I'm tired I sleep, if I'm awake I lie in bed warm and cosy then get up.

If I'm hungry, I eat, if I'm not engrossed in something else. If I get really hungry, then I eat.

I think about things a lot, and try to do things that make sense. I want chickens not because chickens are cool (though, they are), but because they fertilise the soil and lay beautiful eggs.

If life were simple, would it be no fun?

Obsolete

Yesterday I sold a computer.

An "old" computer - about 8 years, give or take. A Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz with half a gigabyte of RAM, etc, etc. It would probably have cost $750.

It still works. I installed Linux on it, and it boots, runs the latest version of Firefox - no problem.

But it was only "worth" $50 yesterday.

Hardware sales drive software sales; software sales drive hardware sales. It is in the interests of those writing software to keep bringing out new releases with more "features" (bloat), and those making hardware to make things faster to keep that bloat at bay.

It's not that easy, of course. Most users can do as much today with an iPhone, for example, as with that PC. Miniaturisation is amazing.

And in technology, a lot of things simply are *better* now - there is a lot of plastic junk, for sure, but Windows 7 is much better than XP, and the newest Ubuntu is very usable (at least, it was for me on the older hardware I installed it on - the Open Source folks have had time to get all the drivers in place so it just worked from the install CD..).

8 years ago, where were we? Well, a Pentium 4 1.8 - pretty inefficient. In 2001 I got an iBook G3/700MHz which was kinda cool, but kinda slow. The following year I got a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a 1.6GHz Celeron-M processor that was much faster. I guess I was just getting in to iTunes.

The web had intellitext pop-up advertising, but it was much leaner than today - broadband was available, but I didn't get it at home until 2003.

The truth is that, if you are just wanting to browse the web and send emails, you can use a Pentium 3 or original Athlon processor and be just fine (if your computer is not bogged down with bloat). My mother uses a Pentium 3/1.4GHz (which ironically is probably faster than the P4/1.8 I sold yesterday...).

And the crazy thing is that you can buy a Netbook for a couple of hundred dollars - that is, a small laptop. How can the used value of a desktop hold up, when you can get something that weighs a tenth as much, with screen, battery, warranty for so little?

It's a conundrum for me. I know the current model (make money; make more stuff, sell more stuff, make more money) promotes consumerism. I suppose this is where "real cost of" comes in - the cost of the $50 desktop to the environment is net $0 - it's already been made. Yes, it will need recycling, but of course it is better for it to be used than for a new netbook to be built.

I bought a printer last week, and paid a $5 recycling tax on it. I wonder how much relation that bears to the cost of recycling, or if it is just a flat percentage of the purchase cost? The printer was on sale ($70 or so for a printer/scanner... with wireless connectivity), does that mean the cost of recycling is also on sale? I guess it would be "too expensive" to do a proper analysis to see what the true cost of recycling would be for each product. I should research this.

Round and Red

Seed saving. What a magical thing.

Tomatoes. Also magical.

Aha! I have a plan! I'll save seed from this lovely delicious heirloom tomato!

Firstly... get seeds out of tomato. Ok.

Put them in a glass or jar bowl or something, add some water and cover with something porous. Leave for 3-4 days until the seeds have dropped to the bottom, there is mold on top.

Skim off the gunk, and add water; decant off more gunk until there are just seeds left.

Rinse the seeds in a fine sieve.

Dry the seeds for 1-3 days in a bowl or plate; move the seeds twice a day so they don't stick together and dry evenly.

Put them in an envelope in a jar until the time comes to plant some more!

I've just put the seeds into a glass and covered with scrap paper. I'll let you know how it goes!!

City bliss?

I've been off the farm for 2 1/2 weeks now. Initially "condo-sitting" with no internet access, leading to many trips to Timothy's Coffee on Laurier Avenue East, but now in a house share - just me, my wife (oh yeah, I got married too..!), and a friend of my wife who owns the house.

I have luxury. I have a desk, and a chair, and the internet on tap. Water, as well, is on tap. As I don't have to go out so much, I don't have to see all the cars and trucks round town, but I get the benefit of nice roads to run or cycle on. We're not quite sure how long we'll be here, but hopefully I'll get some spinach growing soon. Kara can cycle to work. I can walk to the sandwich shop or cycle to the supermarket (but I *really* need to get to the market on Saturday, which is a little further away, I think).

We're broke, and paying a city-rate rental price is painful until we both have incomes, but... I can see why many many people think city living is more sustainable than rural. We could sell the car and be fine - car insurance is excruciatingly expensive here compared to the UK.

It's the end of August and the sun is still out for much of the time (except on our honeymoon weekend, when it rained constantly... but it's ok, that was only wedding 1 of 3, where wedding 3 is actually a honeymoon to the UK...).

Life is good!

Biodynamics

I found this interesting reading, from my old Permaculture teacher in Ireland. I don't do with Graham to the limit of his beliefs, but I certainly like that he questions things that many eco folks accept apparently unquestioningly.

In many ways, it's a hard call. Many people "need" religion or structure or something in their life to make the infinity of the universe managable. And certainly, treating the land with respect is better than monoculture. Is it "wrong" to believe in something false if little or no harm comes of it?

When does that belief become a Holy War?

For me, the simple truth is that we are finite, limited - we cannot understand everything. We should be careful in what we do, what we change, what we espouse. We don't have the knowledge to know the outcomes of our actions. So perhaps our actions should be limited - do the necessary, and no more.

But where then is the meaning to our lives - to express, to make art, to grow?

It's a paradox. For me, it is simple - find small joys, and be humble. In that, it is not my right to "change society".

Will this lead to the end of life as we know it? Seeing that end in sight, should I try to avert it? Or just live each day in beauty and peace, enjoying life, light, the breeze?

If the fact is that, if everyone lived as I do, the environment would be in little or no danger, do I stay as I am and be content, or try and take a message "out there" - changing myself in the attempt to change the world?

Being aware of this question, I suspect the only true answer (for me) is the former - to accept, and be, rather than to rail.

Farm Farewells

I have left the farm. Amicably. Lots has happened in the last few weeks. There was a conflict that I was not involved in, which led to one intern leaving; this in turn led to a couple arriving who wanted to stay all the time through until the end of the season plus another person coming to replace the intern that left.

What did that mean? That I could leave without causing undue strain on the other people on the farm.

It's a blessing in many ways. Trying to sort out life here, be with my fiancee, get stuff done AND work a full week on a farm that was an hour or so from Ottawa was too much - I was getting more and more tired. I feel I have learned the lion's share of what I needed to, and can let other people learn a lot from the farm, too. I feel a need to relax for a little bit, and integrate.

So now I'm living in a flat in Ottawa for a couple of weeks, making use of the internet, and comfort. I don't have to feed the pigs, and I don't have to go outside to use the toilet, shower, or kitchen. I can lie in, or stay up late, and read.

Mostly, I can think. You'd imagine that being on a farm would give you plenty of time to think, and in some ways it did. But I feel it was more a time of ideas, sensations flowing in. Now I have time to integrate it. To see what I liked and what I disliked.

I'm always hungry, but that will no doubt change over the next few days as my body realises the continual work has ceased. Hopefully I'll put on some weight.

I've also become a very strict non-vegetarian. What does that mean? I'm mainly vegetarian, but if I know exactly where meat has come from, and that it was raised in the best of conditions - outdoors, relatively free - then I will eat it. I'll see how this goes. Ideally, I'll be raising meat of my own next year.

So much to say that I don't know how to. Ottawa is a strange place. I've been *very* sheltered in the 4 months I've been in Canada - less so since I got a car, but actually living in a city is certainly different.

Juniper Farm is a place of hard work, and this year of blue skies, wildlife, and not so wild life too. It's funny, though, because I don't exactly feel like I miss it. Yes, I want to grow food and raise animals. I'm not sure I have the drive to make a living from it, though.

And of course in the next few months Canada will become a very different place, a land of ice and snow. Will I yearn for green things, frogs and dragonflies, pigs and chickens?

Busy

Harvest is in full swing - today, basil, carrots and tomatoes for me, plus courgettes, aubergines, lettuce, cabbage (to go in saurkraut), turnips; bush beans we're getting three times a week; cucumbers, kale, chard, parsley and all manner of other things are there when we need them.

I need a break! Well, that might happen. The winds of change are blowing, the farm feels different and there is a lot going on. I'm thinking about life here, settling down, what I want from life. How I want to grow (in all senses - Polyculture rather than market gardening? What do *I* want to become?). Today I got a SIM card for my mobile phone - after a blissful 4 months without. Thankfully the farm doesn't get service from this operator, Rogers (who use the same network technology as Europe so my phone works with their network; Bell, the other major provider, uses something different that won't...).

I'm tired, really tired. Work is tiring of itself, but there is so much more in trying to get settled into life here when it's not settled at all.

But it's good. It'll work out, the sun is shining and the raspberries are very very tasty!

I have been reading a book called The End of Food by Paul Roberts. It discusses many things, one of which being that the Organic Food Movement has been co-opted by the food industry, and isn't that much better in sustainability terms; another being that a large goods lorry driving food is much more efficient than a number of farmers driving pickup trucks the same distance - the example it gives is 312 miles from California's Salinas Valley to Reno being better than farmers driving their pickups 20 miles.

Small, organic, local... ideally embedded in the heart of the community. Walking distance, and with all the seasonal help.

The other thing it mentions is the word Polyculture, similar to Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, and the example given in Roberts' book is also in Japan - putting ducklings in a rice paddy, then duckweed and underneath loach (a fish), then following the removal of ducks then rice, vegetables are planted in place. Not one thing followed by another, but a number of mutually supportive systems. Beauty in the cycles.

Will I buy a minivan (in Canadian speak; in the UK I suppose it would be a people carrier, but a large one, on a pickup truck chassis) this weekend, or just the fork, hoe and rake I truly need to grow food?

We'll see.

Slack

No blogging for a LONG while now. It's been a busy few weeks - my fiancee is now back in Canada which is fantastic, I've got two markets under my belt, we've had another heatwave...

Life is good. We're a good team of workers, getting through the jobs quite quickly and efficiently. My body feels great - sure there are aches and pains, but nothing serious. And yesterday we had a great market - we sold out of most things, people were interested and enthusiastic about what we had (though many had some of the things in their own gardens that we'd had for a while - less interest in lettuce, for example, but more in cucumbers. It's about having things that people here don't have in their gardens yet).

Today, my day off, I'm trying to organise visa, work permit, residency application stuff. I got ripped off getting passport photos at Black's Photography. $20 for the first PAIR then $10 for each pair after, amazing!

It's interesting what is cheap here and what is expensive compared to the UK. Lots of stuff is "service-expensive" - such as buying or selling a house, getting photographs, etc. Coffee is cheap... :)

The Runt of the Litter

Poor Bonnie isn't growing much. Juniper is concerned enough that she spoke to the vet, who told her to collect stool samples to see if she has some worm or another.

After a couple of days of watching without results, Bonnie finally "delivered" to Lindsay yesterday. So I guess we wait a couple of days to see if there really is anything wrong with her, or if she's just a dainty/picky eater and a runt. The good news (as a vegetarian) is that, if she does turn out to be a runt, I think I have convinced Alex and Juniper to keep her as a pet!

The irony of Clyde trying to eat my leg this morning was not lost. Why shouldn't he be inclined to, considering his fate? He's a fine looking porker, too - big, boarish, healthy looking and very keen to get to food. I'm not sure my trousers or my crocs would provide much nourishment, though...

Last night we had a fire, with Alex on the fiddle, Jen on the guitar, Juniper playing drums, and me on the pvc-didgeridoo. This didge isn't quite as good as the one I had in Ireland but it does work. The more I play the more I want to get a decent one. The fireflies were out again - absolutely stunning - as were the stars. One of my strongest desires is to always live somewhere that the night sky is truly visible. Absolutely breathtaking.

In many ways, this is no normal job: working outside, working with living things, getting earth under your fingernails and ingrained on your skin. But in other ways it's similar: the weekends go past too quickly! Still, next week will be a fun one, with a visit to another farm on Tuesday, a trip to Ottawa on Thursday, and my first market on Saturday!

How natural is farming, anyway?

Today I helped to tie up tomatoes and cucumbers, and prune them. This involves removing leaves and budding fruit to maximise yield and quality.

Tomatoes would normally go all over the ground, and the weight of the fruit bends the stem over until the fruit touches the ground and then goes rotten to release the seeds. But we don't want that - we want delicious, not-mouldy fruit!

It's the level of manipulation that bothers me, somehow. With rhubarb, you stuff it in thr ground, weed a bit, then pull off a few stalks when the plant has established itself. With spinach, you stuff it in the ground (actually unless you're doing aquaponics you do that to most plants at some stage!!), and then just harvest the leaves. But with the tomatoes and cucumbers, we're screening them to exclude cucumber beetles (actually this is a shame because it means we're hand pollinating the tomatoes!), manually pulling them up a string of baler twine (even removing the natural vines from the cucumber as it redirects energy from growing fruit), removing all but the bits we want - pretty much every other cucumber is removed so that the ones left get nice and long...

Growing is an art, but there is a lot of science in there. It feels very manipulative to me, "unnatural" to some degree. Not wild. Am I a wild man? No.. not really (!). In nature there is no mess, everything cycles. Was that the first change, going from hunter-gatherers to farmers, breaking cycles and beginning the journey to motorways, plastic, and muzak?

A permaculture principle seems to be only take what you need. With organic vegetable growing, the focus is still on earning money - taking as much as possible from a set area of land. Doing it in a good way, but still doing the capitalist thing - trying to maximise, within a set of rules.

There were fireflies on Friday last. Bumblebees bumble about. Snakes look confused when excited interns huddle around.

Rain

Finally, the rain came - with thunder and lightning on Tuesday night. The plants love it, both "weed" and desirable alike. We spent a lot of the week weeding out barnyard grass, that arrived on the farm in horse manure, and didn't get broken down during the composting process...

Bonnie, our female piglet, seemed to be losing ground in terms of weight gain versus her brother, Clyde. In fact, she seemed gaunt at the start of the week, and we thought maybe she has worms - so we are adding some diatomaceous earth to their feed. I'm having to keep Clyde out of her food - he is so much larger that he bullies her out of the way. She's seeming a little better these last couple of days - fingers crossed.

Friday is our harvest day, for the markets that go on in Wakefield and Chelsea, so we grabbed radishes, spinach, lettuce, bok choi, rhubarb. There has been a LOT of work close to the ground this week, and my back is a little achey. Still, I went for a run at the end of the day and that felt fantastic!

The wildlife is amazing - butterflies, dragonflies, horse and deer flies, blackflies, mosquitoes, frogs, spiders, snakes, various birds, and last night a real treat - fireflies! Absolutely beautiful. And then sleep.. and a Saturday morning lie in - to 8:10! Which really felt great!

Now I'm sat in town, doing "computer stuff" and drinking a nice cup of Earl Grey. My ecological footprint is still no doubt way above that of your average Indian or African, but I feel pretty comfortable with the current lifestyle - composting toilet, outdoor kitchen, fresh veg from the garden. Ok, so... I just bought a car. It's liberating, being able to get to town when I want, not just on Thursdays and Saturdays. But there is no infrastructure for public transport here whatsoever - there is only one commuter bus from Ottawa to Wakefield per day, and getting from Wakefield to the farm is an hour's bike ride - at least!

Well. No point beating myself over the head. I'm changing, I'm helping to grow food for 80 families (the CSA) and however many more (at market).

The night sky is beautiful, the lakes and rivers are beautiful - the world is beautiful. It's great to really be able to see it.

Weather

The weather in Canada has been:

Torrential rain in Alberta
Snow in Manitoba
36 degrees C plus with forest fires in Quebec
Drought and heat warnings in Toronto and Ottawa

Wow.

Plastic Mulch, and All Things Ambiguous

What a complicated set of choices a farmer has to navigate his or her way through!

This week, Alex and Jen put down biodegradable plastic mulch on 10 or 15 beds, which would become the home of tomato, courgette, squash and watermelon plants outside.

Alex says that mulched plants will produce between two and four times as much as non-mulched plants. But he also mentioned that how much the plastic truly degrades is questionable, and then there is the energy cost in making the mulch - "best" would be no plastic whatsoever, but for a farmer who needs to make a living from the produce they sell (as opposed to through eco-tourism, running courses, or whatever) it's an easy decision. For $120 you can buy normal plastic, $460 biodegradable, plus the investment of an implement to place the plastic (basically a roller with earth clearers, the spool of plastic, then earth replacers - so the plastic goes down and then gets held down with earth), and then just two people for half a day you have rows and rows of mulched beds.

How much energy is used? How harmful to the environment? What if it was 50% better than the non-degradable plastic, would that be ok? 30% better? 80%?

It's really hard to gauge these things, I feel. I'd love to be a zero fossil fuel farmer, to be "purist" but it's just not "practical" because of the world we live in etc etc.

But it's all choices. It should be empowering, but I find the fact that real world stuff means we aren't able to make the best choices without impoverishing ourselves (this is entirely subjective of course! Is not having a car, or a TV, impoverishing? Or is it just not having the money to be able to make the choice not to buy a car or TV that is the problem?).

"I would be a fool to accept a yield of half for my courgettes, squash, and watermelons just because I don't want to buy one roll of biodegradable plastic" - discuss!

Musings

So. I've been at Ferme Juniper Farm for two weeks. It's a bit more intense than at Wheelbarrow farm - start at 7:30, work til 12, then again from 2 til 5:30. They don't really go in for tea breaks, so the morning seems really long - but the work is good.

So far, I have helped to: seed lots of things into trays, germinate squash using aluminium foil pie trays, kitchen roll, and a turned-off freezer with a 60W lightbulb in (works really well - it keeps the seeds at the right humidity and temperature. Also, it means you only plant the good seeds!); I have helped to build a pigsty, plant 8,000 onions and 6,000 leeks, as well as harvesting radishes from the polytunnels.

I'm living in a huuuge tent, and we three interns share a small cabin with woodburner and lean-to kitchen, with outdoor shower. It snowed one night, and it's been sub-zero a couple of times - pretty chilly! Sleeping with a sleeping bag, blanket, duvet, long-johns and a warm hat on is great, though, and the birds are amazing in the mornings.

The best thing is that we eat food from the ground, every day. They have done a big bulk food order for us too which is great, but the best thing is the fresh spinach, leeks, radishes and rocket; and the promise of all the stuff we are seeding and planting out right now.

Last weekend we had an adventure collecting two piglets which we will raise to just under 100Kg and then (gulp) slaughter. I'm still pretty sure I won't eat them - it just seems wrong.

Note to all would-be pig herders: don't let your new piglets out into their enclosure, just put them in the sty for a few days to acclimatise and calm down after the traumatic journey to your farm! Ours bolted straight at, and under and out of, the newly placed electric fence. One did, anyway. Three times. We had fun chasing her.

My fellow interns, Lyndsay and Jen, as well as Alex and Juniper - the owners of the farm - are great. Lovely lovely people all, with great visions, experience and ideals. It's fantastic to feel like a family so quickly. We eat lunch together at Alex & Juniper's house three times a week, and dinner once, so community really is there. It feels doable. I'm thinking about co-ownership of land - how that might work out.

Just one other family, perhaps, on a 100-acre plot? Or 5-6 families, each with 10-15 acres, eating communally but working their own dreams on their plot? Sharing tools, labour and dreams?

So, the 4 of us working full time on the farm (Juniper works when she can, but her baby boy Shilo takes up much of her time and energy!) will be pretty much providing food for 75 CSA shares, plus two markets a week. Maybe enough for 200 people? 1:50 farmers to rest of population seems pretty good!

Still, I feel drawn to focussing less on just food production for us humies, and more biodiversity for all living things. Perhaps we can grow a few things for cash, and then leave large swathes of lightly-managed forest, wildflower meadows and so on, to be a haven for insects, lizards, and so on.

Farming is certainly hard work, but I'm settling in to it very happily. It feels right to be doing it. I'm loving Juniper farm, but really looking forward to getting a place of my own! If anyone has a couple of hundred thousand dollars they don't need...

Two other thoughts. One: The blackflies love me. More than anyone else on the farm, probably including baby Shilo.

Two: Farmers need Stuff. It was easy, giving away furniture, clothes and so on when leaving the UK. As a farmer, I'll need a shed full of tools; either a tractor or horse/s (I'm seriously considering working horses, if I can apprentice to someone), plus implements; greenhouses and/or polytunnels; boxes if I'm going to run a CSA scheme. Wheelbarrows, hoes, watering cans and irrigation systems; row cover, knives, spades, forks, water butts, cable, posts, barns, coops, freezers; saws, hammers, nails, screws.... as well as a room of computer bits, of course!!

Well. It's a lot to think on, that's for sure.

Postings won't come that often as internet is pretty limited on the farm, but that's ok. If you wonder what I'm doing, well, I'll be outside with my hands, and sometimes knees and elbows, in the soil. Planting, harvesting, weeding. Listening to the birds, staring at the sky. At peace, pretty much. How lucky I am.

Time for a change (again)

Tomorrow I start at the farm I'll be at all summer. The last couple of weeks have been great. I left Tony's place on Tuesday the 25th and went to Uxbridge, where I picked up a UHaul moving van.

Ohh that's an aside. Here, a truck could be a pickup truck/ute, a van; a trailer could be a trailer or a caravan (a caravan is a model of car). I'm sure there are more. A van usually means a people carrier.

Ahem. So I drove the van to Barrie and swapped my UK driving license for an Ontario one, then drove on to my father-in-law's house, who is moving and gave us a load of stuff. So we loaded up, did some admin and took the second free car I'd been offered down to get some papers checked out... then it turns out the car would cost thousands to get through its safety check. Argh.

Anyway, onwards - I decided to drive on up to Ottawa the same day. The vans are all petrol rather than diesel, and really nice to drive actually.

Since getting to my mother-in-law's house I have seen a couple of cars, a couple of houses, and now I'm staying at my sister-in-law's with her two young children which is great fun! Ohh man, and with fast internet!

Well, I guess this isn't so interesting. There are lots of 100-ish acre farms for $230,000 or so nearish to Ottawa, where we could do "anything" - farm, start an ecovillage or retreat center or workshop space or permaculture heaven. The possibilities are almost too great, but learning this summer should focus my thoughts, and local government restrictions should help (!) too!

Tomorrow should be fun - seeing where I'll be living and what I'll be working with. Hard work, but true. It'll be winter before I know it!

Life

I just went down to give the chicks - destined to be butchered in a few short months - some water.

I feel so compromised. I'm enjoying looking after the animals here more than any other part - the pigs are friendly, fun, interesting animals to be around, and the hens are always entertaining. While I don't find the chicks quite as cute as my fellow intern, I'm really enjoying seeing them grow. They are so different now than a week ago. They really do look like beautiful fluffy chicks, but you can see the chicken-ness of them too - the way they drink, the way they eat...

We were planting out onions grown from seed today. That was fine, though it tends to make my back ache because of all the bending over. Onions don't have much in the way of roots at this age and size, being just a single green stem-leaf going down, often as a single root. Fiddly to plant. And of course they are alive, living things in my care. But... it's just not the same as scratching a pig and seeing it enjoy the attention, seeing it be curious as you come over, seeing it hoover up plants in a new enclosure...

But of course - of course - raising animals involves harvesting them in the same way as plants are harvested. If you have annual plants, you kill them when you pull them from the ground in the same way as the meat chickens will be killed. If you have perennials, parts of the plant will be taken, excessive spreading will be stopped (as in the raspberry canes we cut back, or the strawberries we dug up), in the same way that you might remove a kid from a nanny goat to keep her producing milk.

Life leads to death; it is the one sensible outcome of it. Nothing else. I know this.

Maybe I just need to grow up and accept it. The funny thing is, I'm not afraid of doing the actual killing - I'm not that squeamish. It's just the fact that the 5 little pigs are destined to become bacon not lovely old-aged boars (well, they get more boorish as they grow, I guess!)... they feel a little bit like friends, like a pet. I keep needling Tony when he eats bacon - oh, what was this pig called? Not in spite, just to get a clearer understanding of how his mind works with this.

I can visualise me keeping a herd of goats and a flock of chickens a lot more readily than I can see me planting rows upon rows of onions. But how can I do that if I don't want to eat meat?

It's a conundrum.

Dinner time!

Life on the farm seems to revolve around two things: Breakfast and dinner for the animals. And they really appreciate being fed, too - especially the boar who salivates from the minute he sees the bucket of food heading his way.

It's been all change this week; the 5 piglets are on their own, and their mum is in with the boar (making him extra pushy, and feeding them hard work - get your snouts out of the bucket so I can tip it out, please!). The red pig is much better after her dreadful giving birth, but probably destined to be sausages in a month or two - good if you like sausages in buns at farmers' markets!

The laying chickens haven't moved, but they seem to like me better now - sometimes 6 or 8 of them will stand and look at me when I'm in the barn. I assume this is because I bring them food... Anyway, we also have about 27 chicks which area meat birds, currently living in a large plastic tub. They smell odd - not entirely unpleasant, but not entirely pleasant either. A sort of sweet stench. Tony's dad is redecorating the kitchen, so actually going from the chemical paint smell in there to the natural animal smell in the conservatory is quite nice!

And as for us, well, dinner time comes after their dinner times. Yesterday it was pizza (but because the pizza shop was shutting, they only had pepperoni, which of course I won't eat - so I made do with carrots from here and houmous, some cheese, and corn bread... yummy! Oh and a bowl of cereal after, heh).

And every day we're working on things that will go into other people's dinners throughout the year. Today, more dessert, actually - transplanting and weeding strawberries.

Yum yum yum!

Sowing seeds

It feels so good doing it. I'm actually here, mulching, raking, hoeing, and sowing! In Ireland we'd, all 40 of us, stand round and see a 5 minute demo of hoeing. Here, I have to hoe the polytunnel, rows of spinach and kale that have overwintered, sow lettuce and tomatoes and peppers and and and...

I don't even have to think, too much, about what I'm learning because it's all going in bit by bit, by body action (though I am making notes - less relevant here as I'll only be here a month, more where I'll be for most of the season).

The red sow who was having trouble.. continued to have trouble. Tony gave her penicillin and helped remove stillborn piglets from her, but she managed to tread on and kill the remaining live ones. Such a shame, as at least 3 looked good for a couple of days. She seemed very unwell for a while but is doing much better now, thankfully. The other mother is doing fine and is up and about, looking dandy, with her litter of 8. And the older 5 are getting more curious and entertaining.

I am, however, having thoughts of veganism. Not that the animals here are kept badly - they aren't, at all. I'm wondering if keeping animals in cages, ever, is really the right thing to do. Do I really think keeping a cow in milk production is right/fair/natural?

It'll take me a while to work this out, I think. I love cheese. I drink milk in all my hot drinks. I'm eating a lot of eggs at the moment, too...!

On Friday we have some meat birds coming (as day old chicks - I can't wait to see them!), and are trying to get one hen to incubate a clutch of eggs, so there's plenty going on here!

My Life as an Organic Farmer: Day 3

What a day. I'm on Tony's farm near Uxbridge, Ontario. Tony has lots of vegetables, chickens for eggs (with meat birds coming this month), and pigs. Three sows and one boar, one sow ("Cow" - yes, that is her name) with 5 two month old piglets, one that was very heavily pregnant and almost unable to stand (I'll call her Red) - and expected to give birth shortly - and the other that wasn't expected to give birth for another 3 weeks (Blondie).

Well. Red made a pretty poor mother, and probably accidentally killed 4-5 of her piglets with one stillborn - leaving her with 5. Tony was in with her this morning, trying to help. I went down to feed the boar and the other two ladies, but was surprised to find Blondie not that interested in her food.

So as I was coming back up the field I went round to have a look in her sty to find that she'd given birth too, and was making a much better mum than Red! She had 9, one of which died, but leaving 8 suckling piglets (though 3 have cuts on them from where they have been trodden on my mum - this is normal, I believe, though sows seem to learn from doing!).

So Cow is now a grandmother (Red and Blondie being her children), and Tony is a lot happier - he was rather sad with Red making a bad fist of things, but cheered up when I told him what I'd discovered!

In other news - the weather here is beautiful, and I got sunburned a bit on my first day. There was a party last night, with a bonfire outside though later it got windy and the fire had to be put out. I've been feeding the pigs, chickens, planting out and potting up, amongst other things.

It's really lovely here!

Interview with James Lovelock

I've been wanting to read the Gaia books for a while but not managed to get round to it... hopefully I will when I have the space to acquire a few more books rather than living out of a backpack!

Anyway, the John Humphries did an interview with James Lovelock that was broadcast yesterday here.

I like it. While I believe "we should" be changing our behaviour, and rapidly, I now accept that how humanity has grown is entirely "natural" in terms of energy availability, and that the changes I would like to see are "unnatural" or, perhaps, enlightened.

We need an immediate reason to change, and we don't have one that appeals to our sense of urgency - Tesco's will still be there tomorrow, and petrol isn't going to run out this week, this month, or this year.

I also realise and accept that, even though I feel I am relatively well aware of the issues concerning our planet, I would probably still be doing an office job if not for a number of converging factors - feeling a need for change is a large one, but catalysed by disliking the whole that is office life as someone not quite a programmer not quite anything specific had a large effect, meeting my fiancee had a huge effect... how can I expect other people who don't have as many pushes and pulls to be interested?

Society will, most likely, collapse when a lack of resources becomes acute, and not before. When life can go on as normal, it will probably do so.

Lovelock's 20-30 years (before significant change) is interesting - further into the future than I'd thought, considering most scientists seem to place peak oil at sometime between 2008 and 2016.

Interesting times are a'comin'!

Off we go

This is It. My last day in England. Tomorrow I finally go to Canada.

The last couple of weeks have been great - seeing friends, seeing the country that I'm leaving. I've been to Lincolnshire, Essex, London, and Bristol; in cars, trains, coaches and busses; eaten Indian, Italian and good British roast potatoes; drunk plenty of tea. I've talked a lot - about what I've been up to, where I'm going, and why.

I feel pretty positive - my friends are a good bunch, and while not all eco-warriors, awareness is rising, thoughtfulness is there. And I feel I'm on the right path - growing food is in my family, I like being busy and being outside. So. No regrets. Today is the final chapter of one story, tomorrow the first chapter in another.

Home?

I spent most of Wednesday travelling: From Karlskrona to Copenhagen on the train, then Copenhagen to London on a plane (my own hypocracy astounds me... 1/3 the price of a coach ticket, and 1.5 hours flying instead of nearly 2 days on the bus notwithstanding), and finally up to my dad's place, nearish to Boston.

My dad is one of a kind, in some ways. His current interest is in Fuchsias - he has, he thinks, 676 or so different varieties in his huge greenhouse (with perhaps 20,000 Fuchsia plants, plus others...). The place is a mess, but that's normal - there are 10-15 cars and vans in various states of disrepair, crates of plant pots, scaffolding planks, a 2,500 litre water tank and a ginormous wood burner that will eventually heat the large greenhouse (for there are other greenhouses, too!).

On Thursday I helped with potting up plugs into pots... a little bit. And today I wielded a mattock, helping my dad's partner put in a path to the greenhouse for when "Lincolnshire Fuchsia World" opens to the public (in a few weeks, I think).

Well, it's good experience for me. The most striking things for me were:

1. How soft my hands are. Moving large concrete paving slabs for the path has left my fingers scraped and scratched. It'll be interesting to see what they are like in 6 months!

2. Mypex is horrible stuff. The strands get everywhere!

3. I must not take on too much at once, or accumulate junk. Neat, tidy, sufficient. No overpromising, no "oh sure if it's free and I'll figure out a use for it later".

4. A hot cup of tea is so much better after some hard work!

"Waste"

On Tuesday I visited an e-waste preprocessing facility in Brakne-Hoby, near Ronneby, with some MSLS students.

After a talk on the business (Stena being part of the same group as the ferry company), we had a tour of the plant.

I have written a bit of an essay on this, but the summary is this:

Producer responsibility for waste means the waste processing company has a contract with each waste producer (i.e. the original manufacturer), rather than the city/town/council (commun in Swedish, I think).

About half of the stuff going to the recycling centre is working.

The contract the processor has says no salvage: everything must be recycled through melting down and being sold on as raw materials.

The end result: Hundreds of pounds of perfectly good, working computer parts are scrapped. Turned back into copper and gold, rather than being used in second hand computers.

This just further reinforced the idea that, when the paradigm is crazy (money/growth), crazy solutions to problems abound, even when the will is good.

Ventilation in Large Buildings

Today was interesting. I tagged along to a lecture about how large building (offices, schools, universities) air conditioning systems work. They talked about CAV (constant air volume), VAV (variable air volume) and dynamic systems (I forget the acronym) - basically how technology has moved from constantly circulating air, to air circulating based on demand - saving energy by not having to provide fresh, heated air into a room with nobody breathing it.

It's the solution to the problem of how to get many hundreds of people into a large enclosed space, keep them at optimum operating temperature and oxygen levels, all day long, all year round. Of course, that is what the company wants - maximum efficiency of all the parts in the machine.

I don't want to be critical of them - the guys who came in and talked were engaged, clear thinkers in their fields. And, with their systems, you only heat/cool the areas where people are.

I couldn't help wondering.. can't we be outside on the hot days, work less in the winter. Of course, there will always be a need for some large buildings - but perhaps not for business. For learning centres, government-level bureaucracy, but...

Well. It was interesting, anyway. We had a tour of the university's new building, looking specifically at the environmental controls - large heat exchangers (basically large wheels of thin aluminium fins, rotating slowly to gain heat from one flow of air and release it back to another - on a cold day, keeping the warmth already inside the building in, preheating the incoming cold air, and vice versa on hot days), huge pipes, ducts, filters.

I'll think of it when I'm in my tent, and wonder: where would I rather be?

Classic case...

...of curing a symptom not a problem: here.

Problem? Supermarkets reject cauliflowers for being not the perfect size, shape or ripeness.

Solution? Get all the farmers to buy robots.

Err..

Entertainment

BBC Radio 4 is currently playing John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men - the first episode still available on the web for another week or so, here. I first read this book maybe 15 years ago, and the story stuck with me... I'll be actively searching for more Steinbeck in secondhand bookshops when I'm in London later in the month!!

And how do you rate this... as well as listening to Henry David Thoreau, reading Steinbeck, and generally having pure thoughts, I have been captivated by... the new(er) Battlestar Galactica. Not the series from before I was born (!), the 2003-current franchise.

It's TV sci-fi. There are "but that's so unrealistic!!!" moments. It's not a truly epic, connected, believable world (that, say, Stephen Donaldson puts together for his books, or Kim Stanley Robinson). But it's entertaining.

Why do I mention it? Part of me thinks I shouldn't be watching "that kind of stuff" but like most things, I suppose, the only problem comes without balance, or a lack of awareness. If I was to watch TV all day every day it'd be a problem. And perhaps everyone having a TV, and the internet - allowing society to be fragmented because you don't have to talk to real people very much... hmm.

I guess the thing is that working in an office puts unnatural strains on a person, in addition to the natural ones of group dynamics. It's tiring - just living in that world is draining. So the whole of our culture is built around the twin foundations of work (for economic growth) and getting away from work (well.. also for economic growth.. because the people at work are working to get people to buy stuff.. and the end of that chain is for the people not working to buy stuff). Insanity? We do x because y, and we do y because x, more and more, more and more.

So Battlestar Galactica is good. The fact it is, ultimately, only made to sell advertising time on TV is bad (the program is good; the system that dictates which programs can be made is bad, because it doesn't care intrinsically about the program, just the effect the program will have on other things).

Today was a beautiful day - warm, and I stood outside and felt the sun on my skin.

Living Without Money, the 100 Thing Challenge

Two things that have made me think a lot are the following websites:

Living Without Money

and

100 Thing Challenge

Now, I'm in a position to sort-of do both. I've been living with many fewer than 100 things for the past year, I'd say, but from April I'll be interning on organic farms in Canada, mostly in Quebec, near the Gatineau Park. In reality I won't be truly living without money, as on the website it talks about not doing things in return for other things - I'll be working on the farm in return for education, as well as bed and board.

Nonetheless, I think it'll be interesting if I set myself the challenge of not spending any money during the internship.

I'll be sleeping in a one of these, sharing cooking facilities with other interns, and generally living the good life - eating food grown on the farm, living close to the land and nature, and all for no financial gain!

This year is going to be incredible!!

Mindfulness Monday, Best Laid Plans...

I had a lovely weekend, beginning with dinner at friends on Friday night, a movie on Saturday (Juno - not as great as I'd thought, but ok), and a birthday party on Sunday. Kara and I had great quality time together, and everything felt pretty nice.

This morning I got up, and decided to be mindful, and to try and make all Mondays Mindful - as an excercise, to try and get me to be more mindful and present, generally.

This was going well until - disaster - the computer starts behaving oddly. Now, I am at a loss as to explain why this annoyed me *so much*. But it did.

Fascinating to watch - while trying to be mindful, and seeing myself being thoroughly pissed off with a piece of inanimate plastic/metal/silicon.

Well, there's only one solution to these problems.

Fried eggs on toast with a cup of tea.

Mmmm.

Mind games and MMORPGs

For a long time, I played the hugely successful World of Warcraft. Eventually it got boring, but it has a huge player base still.

Watching this video and reading this article certain links between threat/response and the addictiveness of certain things become clear - I had "known" them but not had the right language for them.

If you look at the "five social qualities" that Rock talks about - status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness ("scarf") - I can see how WoW certainly pushes a lot of feel-good buttons.

Status: As the game goes on, your character gains levels, skills, better weapons and armour; you will gain experience of the dungeons and encounters in the game, and if you play well be someone that others will want to play with. If you prefer to play player vs player, kills will allow you to get better (and better looking!) equipment, titles, and so on.

Certainty: One of the biggest complaints with MMORPGs is that they can become "grind-fests" - you get a quest to go somewhere, kill a certain number of enemies, and return. But the brain likes this certainty - it doesn't have to think too hard about what to do.

Autonomy: I'm not quite sure that this correlates exactly, but you are free to quest alone, pvp alone, etc, if being part of a guild becomes too much..

Relatedness: Perhaps this is the least developed in WoW... This is "friend or foe". It's pretty easy to tell, I guess - green name floating above a character is friendly, red is hostile! A big skull in the character portrait means "this thing is much higher level than you; it will kill you in a couple of seconds!"

Fairness: This is perhaps the area that has been worked on most. Initially with WoW at least, bosses in dungeons dropped "loot" from a loot table - so you, as a healer, might do the same dungeon 20 times, and never have the piece of loot best suited to your character drop (for a rogue, a good dagger; for a healer, a nice staff, etc). Lately, though, all characters might get a token for completing a dungeon, which can then be traded in when enough have been acquired.

In short, WoW creates a comfortable, familliar world in which some rules of normality are removed, but others are skewed in order to create a reward-response (and hence keep players playing and paying!)

Much as with Money Saving Expert's Martin Lewis, it's not that what is happening in the world is of-itself bad, it's just that people don't realise that... banks are there to make money FROM you, not FOR you; supermarkets are trying to encourage you to buy more than you intended to; and so on. The object of commercial TV is to sell advertising time, not primarily to create quality programming - that is the vehicle by which they sell the advertising time.

They really, really should teach this stuff in school. Because currently, everyone is at a disadvantage by not knowning - people are enslaved by money, to buy the things that make them think they keep their status, to all these things that wouldn't matter if we became aware en masse that our evolution has left us with these triggers that are entirely unsuited to "modern life".

Well, that has little to do with MMORPGs, except that clever people have designed games that give us feelings of security, certainty etc, pushing all those neuro-buttons to make us feel warm and fuzzy (Hammer of Smiting +3! YEAH!).

Happy gaming!

Life in Sweden

It's great being here in Sweden. Except the snow. I'm bored of winter, roll on spring!

What do I get up to? Well, a couple of times I have gone out to Skarva ecofarm and shop, to help out painting a room that will house some merchandise but also a place for fika, which is a tea or coffee break but usually with food and a bit of a chat too... the room is mostly done, we are on the second coat of possibly three; then a floor can go in, etc etc. It's good to be out, doing something physical!!

Today I made pancakes, collected twigs and leaves and catkins for a ceremonial altar that will be the centerpiece of a workshop that's being held over the next few days.. I chatted about farming, listened to people's stories, and talked about sustainability. I also ran down to the train station to collect a couple of the hosts of the aforementioned workshop - too much chatting, oops!

Life is good, but I still find it hard getting up in the mornings, and am tired early at night (i.e., now!) - I wonder if something is amiss in my diet, or that my body is simply so addicted to the stimulants caffeine and sugar that I am unable to function for long days without them.

So here I am, for another month, perhaps. Then it all changes again. But, there is only now. Worry not about the past, think not on the future, just be aware of the present.

The present is pretty good, all told.

1 year ago today....

It's been a whole year of reduction: on the 11th of February last year, Kara and I left our place in South Normanton, and embarked on a journey of discovery and change.

How am I doing? In terms of reduction? Well, I currently only have the stuff with me I can carry on my back, plus a desk I bought second hand last week. True, at Kara's place here in Sweden there is more stuff I'm able to use like cups and spoons and chairs and a bed, but the apartment is pretty sparse; most of the stuff will go back to the charity shops it came from when she leaves, anyway.

I don't have a car, but I'm most likely to get one as soon as I get to Canada. And I'll be reunited with a load of my stuff - that we sent to Canada from the UK, last year.

I've been listening to Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" and it is wonderful, a great story telling of the beauty of simplicity. It is plain to me, now, how little I need. Having lots of clothing only means less frequent clothes washing. Having, as HDT puts it, lumps of limestone on one's desk only leads to more dusting...!

Tonight I have been to pottery class, which is lovely. Making the feet on three pieces I started last week, plus making one other from scratch. Part of me is saying I'm crazy making these things here, that will be so hard to take with me, but it's fun doing the making, even if the things get broken or lost.

During the day, I have been doing a little work for my old company, which I am of course enjoying - learning new bits of programming, solving problems. But tomorrow I'm going to paint walls. Hurrah!

There is so much to know, if you choose to, but after a point it's just clutter. Waking up to the birds singing, watching the stars, dreaming - these things are magical. Every child knows it.

1 year ago today, was I wiser or more foolish? Was I younger at heart or older? Happier or sadder? Better or worse? It doesn't matter - I can't travel back, become who I was. I can't even remember most of the day, though I do remember walking out, carrying our heavy packs, taking the bus and being outraged at paying £1 for less than a minute's ride to the station...

I don't even think it was the start. There is no true beginning, just a clearing haze of awareness. I wonder if death will be different, but I suppose it depends on how and when you die.

And one year from now? Well!

The Joy of a Warm House

Here in Sweden I'm staying in an apartment; two bedrooms, kitchen, lounge. The place is always warm - you can't turn the heating off, just down. It's always warm - such a difference compared to the house I was living in in Ireland.

I think I may have mentioned it before, but they have municipal composting (not as good as composting your own, but then this is an apartment - there is nowhere for a compost heap), good recycling so little goes to landfill.

It's snowy outside. I live about 20 minutes walk from town, and maybe 10 from the supermarket. There is an eco-farm a half-hour bus ride away, but this costs about £4 for a return trip which is a shame. Many of the students here help out there, planting and harvesting, and I might be involved with some things going on there in the following weeks...

And the internet. Oh, man the internet is good here. Like, fast.

If I wanted to live in a town, this one would be a pretty good choice - amenities close by, good community, eco projects happening. I bought what seems at the moment to be the perfect desk at a charity shop yesterday for... 30 Krona. Which is £2.57. Amazing. And a nice hat, to replace the one I lost on my trip over here, for 10 Krona - 86p.

Wow.

So now I'm cooking up some beans for tea, in the lovely warm, doing a bit of knitting, a bit of reading.

Mmm!

Preachiness and Geekiness

Everyone hates preachiness, right? I know I do. But I'm also aware that I come across as very judgemental, often.

I enjoyed this piece on the BBC - especially the bit about Gore and Bush - basically saying that, while the Democrats often have the correct statistics and ideas on their side, they don't have the ability to connect with voters.

So for my own inane example:

"I don't eat fast food or supermarket hamburgers, or any other beef product, because of the amount of hormones, antibiotics and such pumped into the cattle, as well as the deplorable conditions many beef cattle are kept in."

"Yeah, but I like hamburgers... they taste good."

What's the alternative? If the science is right, and that we are on the brink of a massive, unprecedented ecosystem failure along with peak oil, changing seasons, and so on, how do we get this across to the majority of people who are worried about day-to-day matters?

"Listen, there is a 17.3% chance that, if we don't reduce our Carbon emissions to below 1990 levels in the next 10 years, 20% or more of the species alive on earth today might not make it through."

Or..

"Yah listen to all those climate deniers. They wouldn't know what it's like living in the real world, they don't care - they've got armed guards to protect them when the world all goes to hell. They don't care about us - we gotta take care of ourselves! Yeah! Free the cattle! Free the chickens!"

Er. I don't know. Perhaps Avatar is having a good effect. Perhaps nothing is likely to happen society-wise until something (big) environment-wise happens (and we have to hope it'll not be too late). Perhaps the current system will adapt itself fast enough, and it'll all blow over...

Who knows! But, it's lovely today, and that's something to be grateful for!

Vegetarianism

I've been a veggie for a long time now, since about 2001. I think it's time to shift my self-definition, perhaps stop grouping myself at all (though it's useful in some situations, I suppose).

What has changed? It depends on which way you look at it. But the crux of the matter is this: today I bought a can of sardines.

I plan on eating them later.

Why? Sardines are listed as one of the most sustainable fish: going by this link, I will most likely not be affecting biodiversity, the environment and so on by eating the occasional sardine. One person eating less or no beef will itself not make much impact, but the total impact of current beef production is huge. As shown in Food, Inc., much food in supermarkets will have been raised or grown "unnaturally" or unsustainably in one way or another - be it antibiotics, perpetual light or darkness (to encourage more eating and faster growth), being fed on crops not eaten by that animal in nature, herbicides and pesticides, patenting of seeds.. the list goes on.

So. I feel I can, in good conscience, eat the occasional sardine, thus improving my health. I will be buying organic veg from farmers markets (and growing my own, as much as I can, when the growing season begins). But perhaps I will also be eating road kill once in a while.

It's a minefield. I wish to make a positive impact on the planet - for the world to end up better after my life than it would have been had I never lived. If I was to live on a normal, western, supermarket diet I feel this would be impossible.

Of course, if every vegetarian in the world suddenly started eating a can or two of sardines a day, I'd probably have to change my tune - the problem is when everyone does the same thing at once, leading to booms and busts, the collapse of fish stocks, the dustbowl, the housing bubble... well, you get the idea.

So.. anyone for pilchards on toast?

How does the world work?

There are an awful lot of businesses out there, doing an awful lot of different things. My understanding is that almost all of these end up being supported by individuals.

For example, a company makes computer chips, which are used to make servers, which are used to sell things to individuals. Or, if not to individuals, then to another company, that manufactures wash room supplies. Whatever that company does, whoever it serves, at the end of the chain must come a product or service that individuals outside a work environment buys.

The only exception I can think of to this would be something like preservation and reforestation charities - they "produce" nothing to sell to people, though of course what they are "producing" is "valuable".

What does this mean? Firstly, I suppose, that there is a lot of "make-work" - so much is done for no good reason. The entire business world could be streamlined, simplified, and designed.. of course this would lead to mass loss of jobs. But, perhaps many roles could be shifted from unhealthy office ones, to food growing without the use of chemicals, and so on.

Secondly, how fragile the whole system is - it makes perfect sense that, in a recession, things look grim. Individuals spend less, meaning companies have less to spend, meaning... it's not a resilient, supporting circle, but a tall tower ready to topple and crash (or a bubble ready to burst, if you prefer).

If you want to think of a pyramid, with the basics necessary for life at the bottom - ie, food production - then think of this. If you look at it as the number of people working in food production, it's a very oddly shaped pyramid indeed. In the UK, the average age of a farmer is 60.

If you haven't seen it, Food, Inc. is well worth a watch - who controls food? Well, if you choose to - you do. There are farmer's markets (even if many close down for a month in January - crazy!!), organic food shops, and so on.

The world works by people being ignorant of (whether by choice or not) a whole range of things. Choosing awareness might not exactly make you happy (because you can see what a mess things are in), but it's liberating. And it's true - real - not shirking your responsibilities as a beautiful powerful human being!

The 2010 Commandments

I just wonder, if we had a True Religious Leader alive today, what their commandments to mankind might be? Perhaps...

1. One Size Does Not Fit All: If everyone tries to use the same solution to a problem, unsatisfactory outcomes result.

2. Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle.

3. Think About Your Every Action: be mindful of what everything you do, does in turn to others.

4. Look at the Trees. They are beautiful, and will solve many of your problems, if allowed to take back much of the land you stole from them.

5. Money is Not Everything. In fact, Money is Not Anything.

6. You Are Not God. Look to nature and simplicity to solve your problems. Completely unnatural things tend to have repercussions, and you are not aware enough to see them all coming...

7. You are Amazing! But not so Amazing that you're worth ruining the Planet for. You are not more important than a whole species, of which perhaps 80 are going extinct per day. (Calculated from here)

8. Efficiency, Common Sense, and Fairness are the Keys. If you must have a car, have a small efficient one, and use it as little as possible. Share what you can afford to; judge what you really need carefully.

Perhaps another two to follow later...! Another 2002 almost certainly not!

Bus-tastic

So what does travel look like if you don't have access to an aeroplane?

To me, over the last couple of days, it has looked like this:

Tuesday, 14:15: Leave Kinsale for the last time, and head to Cork on the bus
16:30: Leave Cork on a bus for London
21:30: Leave Rosslare harbour on a ferry for Fishguard

Wednesday, 01:00: Back on the bus, leave Fishguard. The bus stops at various places on the way to London, but I doze-sleep through most of it.
08:00: Arrive in London. Put my backpack into left luggage, realise I've left my hat on the bus.. arrgh! Pay 20p to use the toilet at Victoria Coach Station
10:00: Go to the Victoria & Albert Museum, which is fascinating
13:30: Check in, back at Victoria Coach Station, for the next part of the journey
14:30: Depart London for Brussels
18:00? Take the eurotunnel under the English Channel. On arrival in France, our German coach driver says: "So, it's raining. Now, we stop for toilet and something to eat." - the drivers were absolutely lovely.
23:00: Arrive in Brussels. Really ugly coach station with lots of warnings about pickpockets! Toilet here is 40 Euro cents (I don't use it, but I was amazed at the cost!)
23:30: Leave Brussels, heading to Copenhagen... sleep...
Thursday, 07:00: Arrive in Hamburg, where we are delayed by an extra hour waiting for another bus to arrive
09:00: Finally leave Hamburg. Wind turbines everywhere!
12:15: Take the ferry from the continent to Zealand, which is the island on which (most of) Copenhagen lies.
13:00: Back on the bus - motoring to Copenhagen. We are late!
15:00: Switch bus in Copenhagen, to the last bus journey - to Malmo.
15:45: Arrive in Malmo, walk up to the train station and have a large hot chocolate (with cream and marshmallows), and a panini with cheese and tomato. They give me a little electronic device that flashes and beeps at me when the panini is ready. Expensive, but good. To use the toilet at Malmo train station is 10 Swedish Kronor - about 85p at the current rate!!!
17:30: Get on a train to Karlskrona. I really enjoy watching a woman playing with her corgi dog.
20:15: Finally arrive! Wow!

So what's that, 54 hours of travelling, to go what would take maybe 3 hours of actual flying. Of course, I got to wander around a museum, read, knit, and play on the PSP a little, too..

I felt pretty good at the journey's end, too - tired, but not cramped. I'd not eaten much on the journey, and had very little caffeine. I'm amazed I could read so much, actually, and not get motion sickness.

What wonderful insights have I attained? Well, it's true that fast travel distorts our perception of distance. And coach, even though nowhere near as fast as plane, is still pretty fast. Compared to, say, walking. I mean, at 20 miles a day, I wouldn't even have reached the end of County Cork, yet!

Unneccessary travel is crazy. Commuting is crazy. That's what I think. This doesn't prove or disprove it, but it certainly strengthens my sense of it.

Time for a change

So the Permaculture course here in Kinsale isn't really ticking my boxes. It is "FETAC level 5" which means it's aimed at school leavers (17 years old or so); I thought that wouldn't matter, and it'd still be interesting, hands on, and so on.

Sadly I've now reached the conclusion that it isn't teaching me enough, and I have decided to jump ship, and head to Canada to do a full season of growing there - working on an organic farm, learning through doing. I can do the studying when and wherever, but I've realised that if I can do a full season this year, I can start on my own place next year.

So, after realising it on Tuesday, and deciding it on Wednesday, I'm off - a two day busathon to take me to Sweden for a while, then to Canada for the start of the growing season - sometime in March or April, I think.

It's a shame. The community in Kinsale is great - the other people on my course are lovely, and there is lots going on here. If I was staying in Ireland or the UK, perhaps I'd stay. But... I'm not.

Packing all my stuff back into a cardboard box (to go to Canada immediately), and the two rucksacks I travelled with last year... how exciting. I'm feeling "Warriorish" - ready for action. It feels good having decided - knowing things weren't what I wanted, and making the choice.

Yeah!

Tron and Avatar

This may be too large a leap.

But the parallels between Tron and Avatar - accepting 27 years of advancement - is incredible. Or, perhaps I should say that, when watching Tron for the first time last night, I was mostly reminded of Avatar.

Guy transported bodily into alien world that only he can help save from nasty people?

Mm, ok maybe it's a stretch. And Tron is clearly much more lighthearted - cinema is more advanced. Anyone seen a film lately that isn't full of controversy, heartache, and so on? I loved My Neighbor Totoro for just that reason.

At the end of Avatar, I left not knowing what I felt. There are all sorts of messages.

So, if you take Tron, add an enviro message and current thinking on what filmgoers want (ambiguity, complex messages), you get.. Avatar.

Well.. maybe.

The Age of Stupid, Avatar, is anyone awake?

Last night I went to see Avatar in 3D, and the night before Transition Town Kinsale put on The Age of Stupid.

The thing that got me most about Avatar, apart from the 2D American marine characters, was that... it isn't fiction. Large, monstrous companies are extracting unobtanium by destroying trees that give life and shelter. Right now. And I guess the message is pretty blatant in Avatar - "they" don't care about anything except profit (which, of course, is what company directors are legally obliged to care about).

I wonder how many people will walk out of the cinema and go, oh, ok, I'm consuming too much - I'll grow my own food, and stop flying! The blue people must be allowed to live their lives! Yeah! (Well, the blue people do fly, but on the back of large blue-green dinosaurs.. but that's beside the point!)

So.. it's a good film, albeit with a heavy dose of Hollywood cheese in several places. I hope "normal people" the world over will take the underlying message, or at least what I saw as the underlying message, and move rapidly to low consumption lifestyles...

And what about The Age of Stupid? Set 45 years from now, it tells the stories of a number of people and families from the last few years - focussing, to my mind, on people choosing not to be aware of the emergency that is upon us. From an Indian businessman starting a low-cost airline because the Indian trains were, to his mind, no good (which, as I was in India last year, I find amazing - the cost, distances travelled, and sheer volume of people transported by the Indian rail system is staggeringly impressive) - despite being "aware" of climate change; to two Iraqi refugee children, having lost their father in Iraq, play-shooting and killing each other. From an English woman fighting against wind farm developments, stressing that she is aware of climate change and is doing her bit (probably by putting in energy saving lightbulbs..), to a Nigerian woman whose village has been robbed by corruption of any of the revenue from oil sales declaring that she wants to be famous, and wearing an "I love my credit card" t-shirt.

I know, it is only possible to be impartial if you don't have too many pressing concerns of your own. I am unlikely to be thrown out on the street; I have the luxury of being able to ponder these matters. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

What is the point of this blog post? I wonder. Same old message I guess - try to fly less, grow more food, convert to a wood burning stove and learn to knit...!

I am going to watch Garbage Warrior soon, about an American man making places to live out of old car tyres - good positive action.

Well, no car tyre houses here... but I have put a couple of pots onto our kitchen windowsill, parsley and mint!

Snow...

Snow in Ireland - the south coast of Ireland, no less. Very rare. And... our water is off because the pipes have frozen. Just the 4 houses or so near me, apparently - the ones a little more protected from the cold have no problems.

And school is closed. In fact, *all* schools in Ireland are closed, until Thursday at least. It's supposed to rain tonight, though. I don't quite understand why they've closed it until Thursday when things will, most likely, be fine by tomorrow but.. oh well!

Time to do slow things - knit, make soup, play in the snow (and feed the birds, who are having a rough time of it).

Happy New Year!