A transition inflection point in retrospect

March 2020 as seen from March 2022

As with everything we’re a little behind on timing, but the garden project has officially begun. Last week I tilled up the back yard and tilled in a generous volume of compost made from sheep and goat bedding scraped out of the barn. Over the weekend I fenced in the proto- veggie garden, primarily to keep the dogs out and possibly also to keep out rabbits (might work, might not…). The dogs’ raucous presence around the house might be a sufficient deer deterrent; if not I may add an electrified top wire around the perimeter.

The total fenced-in area is about 1,150 square feet, which I estimate means about 1,000 square feet of growing area once paths are figured in. We also have three (so far) 10’x4’ raised beds, and about 5,000 square feet of scraggily hill slope space around two sides of the house where we’re planting fruit trees and some micro-terrace gardens.

By my reckoning this puts us in the “four person family food garden” territory of potential production volume according to the schema devised by bio-intensive gardening guru John Jeavons in his classic book on the subject.

That is of course potential production volume, which depends on me and us getting really good at gardening.

If we realize that potential, we’ll be producing a significant portion of our diet right here at Magpie Hollow - vegetable gardens + fruit trees + mushroom cultivation + meat (lamb/goat, pork, chicken, duck, rabbit, and deer if I’m lucky!).

Even after I earn a Black Belt in gardening we’ll still be getting much of our food from grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and through trading with neighbors. Our goal is not 100% self-sufficiency. Our goal is to do as well for ourselves as we can from our small plot of marginal land, while participating meaningfully in the local food economy of our region as producers and consumers.

---

I’m writing this near the end of March, 2022. It’s been two years since I quit my academic job and we took over the loving care of the tick-infested trash heap overgrown with hateful thorns and poison ivy that was to become Magpie Hollow.

Photo taken January 2020, when we were anxiously awaiting to qualify for a loan to buy this overgrown junk pile.

March 2020 was clearly a momentous time for everyone as COVID spread like wildfire and economies worldwide went into lockdown, initially just for “two weeks to flatten the curve.” You know the rest.

It’s clear to me in hindsight that by March 2020, irrespective of COVID, I personally had reached a critical inflection point. Looking back I call it my “put-up-or-shut-up” moment. My Mom, in her typical colorful speech, would have told me to “shit or get off the pot.”

By then I was two-and-a-half years deep into my experiment of living the full-time tenure-track academic faculty life. It was very successful experiment in the sense that the experiential data I gathered over that period pointed conclusively to that emphatically not being the life for me.

The entire time I was teaching graduate and undergraduate engineering courses I had the unrelenting feeling that we, in academia, are not preparing students even for the present, let alone the future. I felt this way long before COVID.

The simplest way I can put it is that our economic system and our whole way of life is unsustainable. It depends on ever-increasing levels of consumption of nonrenewable energy and resources. It depends on rates of consumption of renewable resources well beyond their sustainable yields, effectively making them into nonrenewable and depleting resources. And all this consumption of energy and resources generates wastes in volumes and at rates that the biosphere cannot assimilate and re-process into resources on civilization-relevant timescales. Accordingly, pollutants accumulate and cause harm, biodiversity plummets, ecosystems are degraded, and biogeochemical cycles are disrupted at large scales.

In short, we humans have overshot the carrying capacity of the biosphere and are rapidly degrading our resource base, our life-support system.

This can’t go on for much longer.

In fact, systems and institutions are breaking down all around us now. The ecological crisis isn’t coming - it’s here.

Viewed through an ecological lens, the geopolitical tensions and violence that has occurred this century, from the 20+ year “War on Terror” kicked off by 9-11 up through the brinksmanship playing out today over war between the US and Russia are the dysfunctional reactions of a civilization that is in denial about the true nature of its predicaments, and so turns to war as a distraction, an outlet for pent-up aggressions, and an attempt to regain “control.”

The financial crisis of 2008/09 and its after-effects felt today through inflation, greater indebtedness, along with further concentration of wealth, property, and power in the hands of the few are symptoms of a panicking elite, greedily grasping to get what they can get while the gettin’s good.

The COVID crisis illustrates that any localized infectious disease can rapidly become a global pandemic under economic globalization, due to dependency on an economy built on the mass transport of us and our stuff around the globe.

Resource depletion is real and more people are feeling it every day. We’re not just paying higher prices at the gas pump - we’re paying higher prices for all forms of energy. We can expect volatility in energy prices, but overall energy is becoming less affordable. Which means consumer goods are going to cost more because energy is the fundamental ingredient in the manufacture and transport of goods.

Due to volatile energy prices, financial and economic dislocations, and geopolitical tensions, global trade is breaking down. This inflames tensions and can spark further geopolitical conflict.

Supply chains for (industrial) agricultural inputs, and fertilizers in particular, are being disrupted. Fertilizer prices have already jumped in the past year and will likely continue to rise. Grocery store food prices have already risen substantially and most likely will continue to go higher.

I could go on but you get the idea. Feel free to insert your own examples and anecdotes.

The major question facing our civilization is, “To what extent are our institutions - government, business, financial, media, academia, etc. - geared to respond to the ecological crisis and make the necessary changes, in time?”

I’m afraid there’s little reason for optimism about the answer to this question.

Our institutions were shaped during the 20th century, and in particular the post-war period, to pursue continual economic growth and ever-advancing technological progress. This growth-and-progress narrative became the civil religion of our society, constantly broadcast by the media, academia, and other institutions of culture-making.

All along, the growth-and-progress narrative was assailed by numerous prescient critics, from Aldo Leopold to Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry to Edward Abbey, EF Schumacher to Dana Meadows to Herman Daly, and many other luminaries. But you may as well have tried to talk the Pope out of being Catholic.

As globalization continues to disintegrate economies will re-localize. Our institutions, including Universites, are way behind the curve on this point. There are many professional occupations that “made sense at the time” during the previous era of expansionary globalization, and for which we continue to accredit new cohorts of technocrats each year. However, many of these occupations no longer “make sense” and soon won’t be supportable in a contracting global economy. (See Peter Turchin’s work on the overproduction of elites.) Many people in the middle- and professional classes will find themselves “downwardly mobile.” That sounds bad, but it’s actually a good thing because re-localizing economies need more people involved in primary productivity activities (e.g., farming), contextualized by bioregion.

Small and medium scale food production through regenerative agriculture is set to become one of the hot new vocations, alongside a new breed of scavenger engineers skilled in repurposing infrastructure and equipment for the coming age. More on this in later newsletters…

---

Returning to our garden-to-be and other startup efforts going on at Magpie Hollow - my advice two years into this project is to echo the words of John Michael Greer: “Collapse now and avoid the rush!”

To elaborate a bit: the University and professional training that most of us have received has not prepared us for the road ahead. It prepared us for white collar siloed professional specialities in an ever-expanding economy with continually rising affluence and ever-advancing technological progress. That is not the future that is on its way, and the shuddering present is already showing major signs of divergence from the growth-and-progress vision.

We need new and different intellectual and practical skills for the road ahead. I can tell you from experience that you don’t just pop up a sustainable small farm regenerative agriculture operation overnight. It takes a lot of time, a lot of hard work, and the outcomes are uncertain.

But nonetheless I feel in my bones that this is absolutely the most important thing I could be doing with my life. We need a lot more people doing stuff like this. And it is one helluva an awesome adventure.

So if you feel the inclination, get going right away! I promise you won’t regret starting as early as you possibly can.