June 22 2019
IS TIME UP?
I always have a book or two on the go. This past week I read THE VALUE OF NOTHING, by Raj Patel, a graduate of Oxford, the London School of Economics. I bought it a decade ago.
Every day I browse the Guardian, where I got some tips how to grow old gracefully. Here are some of the suggestions: drink coffee; read a book each week; walk fast or run; meditate; take a nap; have your main meal at noon – little else until breakfast; become vegetarian; walk a dog; do bush-walking; use olive oil and turmeric; avoid TV at night; keep learning; work longer.
All easy steps, most of which I have followed for decades.
I also read, in the Atlantic, a piece by James Carroll, a former RC priest who recommends abolishing the clergy and so save the church.
And then there is ARCTIC NEWS. Oh, oh. Its heading:
But first back to Patel who analyzed the real cost of a hamburger.
He estimates the energy cost (in 2009) of the 550 million Big Macs sold in the USA at $300 million per year, producing a carbon foot print equivalent of 2.66 billion pounds of CO2. He stated that, “In addition to the carbon in the footprint, we might want to add the broader environmental impact in terms of both water use and soil degradation, together with the hidden health cost of treating diet-related illness such as diabetes and heart disease.” None of that is paid by the McDonald Corporation but by society as a whole.
So what is the REAL cost of the hamburger?
“According to a report by the Centre of Science and the Environment in India, a burger grown from beef raised on a clear-cut forest should really cost about Two Hundred Dollars.”
I singled out the hamburger, but the same is true for many food items. Take breakfast cereal: by the time it reaches the table, it has been processed from corn or wheat to a corn flake or wheat square, has traveled from farm to factory, where it is milled, dried, filled with preservers, then trucked from factory to wholesaler, from wholesaler to store, from store to customer, neatly packaged at a total cost of at least 20 energy calories for each food calorie, with hardly any nutritional value, I might add.
That process applies to much of the food stuff we eat.
The ARCTIC.
Oh: the Arctic!! We know, energy calories cause Climate Change, and Climate Change causes Climate Calamities. Brace yourself: This past week temperatures over the Arctic were high, very high, up in the 20 Celsius range. Smoke and soot from fires in the North, including Siberia, darken the ice, accelerating the melting process. Changes to the jet stream due to the rapid heating of the Arctic are causing hot air to move deep into the Arctic, including over the Laptev Sea all the way to the North Pole, while high temperatures in Siberia are warming up the water of rivers, causing warm water to flow into the Arctic Ocean. Melting ice in Greenland increases water levels threatening coastal regions.
Permafrost is no longer perma-nent.
Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.
ARCTIC NEWS reports that, “As the world keeps
increasing its carbon emissions and exports, rising in 2018 to a record 33.1 billion ton per year, the
atmospheric greenhouse gas level has now exceeded 560 ppm CO?-equivalent when methane and
nitrous oxide are included, intersecting the stability threshold of the
Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The term “climate change“ is no
longer appropriate since, what is happening in the atmosphere-ocean
system, accelerating over the last 70 years or so, is an abrupt calamity on a geological dimension,
threatening nature and human civilization. Ignoring what the science
says, the powers to be are presiding over the sixth mass extinction of species,
including humans.
“As conveyed by leading scientists: “Climate
change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose
between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too
late and bear the consequences”, writes Prof. Hans Joachim
Schellnhuber. “We’ve reached a point where we have a crisis, an
emergency, but people don’t know that”
It seems that TIME IS UP!!
So, these hamburgers and that box of cereal and all the items we eat have disastrous consequences for all of us. We either stop eating or we must pay sky high prices for alternative food products that don’t pollute or cause Climate Disasters.
Since we can’t stop eating, the only alternative is INFLATION because in the near future we are forced to pay the true price of the items we eat and the products we manufacture. Not only that, but also pay for the cost of repaying what we have borrowed from the future. Impossible. It is too late to change.
These repayments involve more than just consumer items: we have built our cities in North America on the assumption of unlimited and cheap fuel: our subdivisions and exurban settlements bear testimony to this phenomenon. Driving to work for 30-40 km one way on congested roads, has become the norm as inner core residences are too much in demand and too unaffordable. These single family dwellings on spacious lots make public transportation impossible. These neighborhoods will see drastically lower prices, thus food inflation on the one hand and property deflation on the other. The same will be true for the value of shopping centers, and of commercial real estate in general.
Return to the land? There too: too late to change.
Jobs? They should go to rural areas where small-scale farming should be the future, farming with horse and hoe, farming with sweat and backaches, farming with families and friends.
The old could be new again …………….if we are smart, which is questionable.
The wise will take measures, because this society is built on energy, the use of which has to go down to zero. If we don’t do it voluntary, the system will collapse and we have a much greater problem on our hands. Let’s face it: we have lived in a make-believe world for the last 70+ years. We have created a society built on a faulty foundation, and that includes the banking system. We also have – thanks to the almighty computer – a society so complex that the least hiccup will cause it to collapse. And collapse it will, sooner than later.
This means that we should create a fallback system.
How do you create such an animal?
I just came back from an
hour of hoeing, braving the flies, which reminded me of Ogden Nash: God in his wisdom made the fly.
And then forgot to tell us why.
You know what growing food entails? I started my garden when I was 40 years younger and had the physical stamina to travel with a wheelbarrow to the decades old manure pile some 150 meters away where, available for free: beautiful black earth. I carted scores of loads of this precious stuff, mixing it with my sandy soil. Each year I add our own compost.
I now have a vegetable garden of 45’ x 55’ (14m x 17m) divided in 8 segments of 45’x5’ each (14m x 1.5m), covering some 2,600 square feet (240m2) with pathways in between. Each year I rotate a different kind of edible: this year bed 1 has cabbages- red-white-kale-Brussels-sprouts; bed 2 red beets; beds 3, 5 and 8 potatoes; bed 4 green beans; bed 6 onions-leek, carrots with some mint in between, some rhubarb plants as well as some raspberries; bed 7 tomatoes, lettuce, basil, and other herbs.
That’s our fallback position. Yes, it takes a bit of sweat, and multiple mosquito bites, and oodles of satisfaction. Each year I learn something new. A gardener friend sprinkles bone meal in the planting groove, so I have done the same. Later I will water the plants with a blood meal solution. Yes, it calls for work, but, frankly, I love doing it.
The new truth is that nothing beats eating your own home-grown food: no carbon footprint, no chemicals, no pesticides: the real product of God’s Whole Earth.
On to the RC church and James Carrol.
He wrote in the Atlantic: “My five years in the priesthood, even in its most liberal wing, gave me a fetid taste of this caste system. Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction. The clerical system’s obsession with status thwarts even the merits of otherwise good priests and distorts the Gospels’ message of selfless love, which the Church was established to proclaim. Clericalism is both the underlying cause and the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe.
He wrote something I have often stated, “Clericalism’s origins lie not in the Gospels but in the attitudes and organizational charts of the late Roman Empire. Christianity was very different at the beginning. The first reference to the Jesus movement in a nonbiblical source comes from the Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus, writing around the same time that the Gospels were taking form. Josephus described the followers of Jesus simply as “those that loved him at the first and did not let go of their affection for him.” There was no priesthood yet, and the movement was egalitarian. Christians worshipped and broke bread in one another’s homes. But under Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, Christianity effectively became the imperial religion and took on the trappings of the empire itself. A diocese was originally a Roman administrative unit. A basilica, a monumental hall where the emperor sat in majesty, became a place of worship. A diverse and decentralized group of churches was transformed into a quasi-imperial institution—centralized and hierarchical, with the bishop of Rome reigning as a monarch. Church councils defined a single set of beliefs as orthodox, and everything else as heresy.”
Let me stop there and comment on this as a person who has attended church for close to 90 year, often twice on Sundays.
“Home churches, no clergy”. That’s what we need in these last days. The clergy are the organization’s retardants, are the ones who stick with the traditional, are the status-quo maintainers, afraid to rock the boat, cling to yesterday’s failing strategies, drive the young people away and keep the laity dumb.
Home churches can do the opposite, although fewer will participate, yet, that’s how the church grew, that’s how the people became informed, learned the Scriptures; taught themselves to articulate the message of salvation, trying new approaches, incorporating the created Word with the written word, making ‘loving one’s neighbor’ a reality.
There too: it may be too late to change.
The current model has failed; the monologues are outdated. It is time for the people in the pew to take over and become prepared for eternity as mature Christians because all denominations suffer from the same lethargy.
Enough; something else altogether: African Swine Fever.
African swine fever– the largest animal epidemic in history – is currently rampaging throughout China and other parts of Asia.
Pork prices have shot up 40% globally. This epidemic is just one more pressure on food prices; others include India’s drought and the US Midwest floods.
The disease has a similar effect on pigs as Ebola has on humans, causing massive internal hemorrhaging and very high death rate.
So far, over one million pigs in China have been culled–slaughtered, that is – to stop the spread of the disease. However, China has over 440 million pigs, half of the world’s total pig population, and experts estimate that up to 200 million pigs will have to be killed this year alone to slow down the spread of the disease.
African Swine Fever does not affect humans, but it is bound to have a devastating effect on food security in Asia, which depends on pork for much of its meat consumption. In Vietnam, for example, 75 percent of meat consumption is pork. Already, pork prices have risen by as much as forty percent globally.
To recap all this:
Vast changes are afoot, inflating the items we need to stay alive, and deflating the goods we possess. We all will be severely affected, to the point where our very survival is at stake.