The Greening of Gavin

Archives for July 2010

The Four Horsemen

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I often mention The Four Horsemen in some of my posts, which I use as an analogy for societal collapse.  I am not a religious man and you can believe what you want to believe, however according to Wikipedia, the Book of Revelation, chapter 6 describes them as follows;

“Jesus Christ opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons forth the four beasts that ride on white, red, black, and pale-green horses symbolising conquest (or pestilence), war, famine, and death, respectively. The Christian apocalyptic vision is that the four horsemen are to set a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgement.”

I am not a big fan of the horsemen, and hope they never, ever, come riding over the hill.  So that leads me to the subject of this post.  One of the comments on my last post was left by Samantha in OZ who said;

“Hi Gavin,

I’m very curious to know, when “the four horsemen ride over the hill”, where do you imagine you will be buying the chicken feed, lye, olive oil, coconut oil, etc that your soap making and egg production depend on?

If the supermarket is no longer selling soap, why would it still be selling industrially-produced soap-making ingredients such as lye and olive oil?

I mean no offence by asking these questions – I am genuinely keen to understand your line of reasoning (which is obviously shared by very many people).”

Thanks for your comment Samantha, and no offence taken.  You pose a great question, and here is my line of reasoning.

You are absolutely right that supermarkets will be the first to run out of supplies in the event of a crisis.  We have seen how fragile our ‘just in time logistic system’ can be, and I described such an events in my post, Nine Meals from Anarchy.  This post describes events that may happen when the oil crunch eventuates, and ways to prepare for these types of disruptions.

As for your specific question, lets look at them one by one.

Chicken feed.  Chooks eat seed bought from the feed store that is true, however they do eat many other things as well.  They eat greens, kitchen scraps, worms, bugs, cockroaches, lawn clippings, meat, and just about anything else you throw into their yard.  I am sure that if push comes to shove, I will be able to muster up enough free feed for my little darlings, and if I can’t, I will just have to thin the flock, thereby producing a few good meals for my family, until they get to a manageable flock size where I can feed them.  This will be a last resort, as the eggs are far more valuable  as a reliable source of protein, rather than their meat.

Lye.  The Romans made soap over 2000 years ago, and they produced lye by pouring water through wood ash filtered through straw.  I have been doing a bit of research and came up with this cool link on how to make your own lye at Wikihow.com.  It looks fairly simple, and I have a few large plastic buckets with taps that will do fine for the barrel.  I also have a few neighbours who have wood burning stoves, so getting wood ash will not be a problem in the short term.

Oils.  Soap can be made just about any oil or fat.  We have quite a few olive groves around here so in the short term getting olive oil would not be an issue, however in the longer term I would resort to tallow which is rendered animal fat.  It makes a hard, but usable soap, and once again very similar to the type that the Romans used to make.

These three examples aside Samantha, you highlight something that people should have a good think about.  Other ways I have prepared is to educate my family to better understand what may be coming down the track, and teach my kids the skills to grow their own food, be independent, think for themselves, and be able to build things from scratch.  I have collected quite a few how-to books myself that have helped me learn to do some of the projects around my home like basic carpentry, build a chook house, build garden beds all with hand tools. 

Also, I believe that self sufficiency is a myth.  You need strong communities with various skills to see you through.  I hope that in my small way, I have taken steps towards building those communities but still have a long way to go.

So, what would you, the reader, do if the supermarket shelves became bare after a disaster, whether it be for a short term or a longer, prolonged period of time?  Could you cope, and are you prepared?  Think not only the physical, but mental preparation as well.  It may or may not eventuate in our lifetime, but I am just as curious as Samantha.  Let me know in a comment about some of the simple things you have done to prepare for unforeseen (or foreseen) circumstances that maybe well outside of your sphere of control? 

Living In Another World – Gav’s Response

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This post goes out to Mia who blogs at “Becoming a Good Human“, and all those who commented.  Don’t despair, because I feel like that sometimes as well.

She describes how she feels that she is becoming disconnected from society and quotes a passage from Dave Pollard’s blog “How To Save The World“;

“But I’m beginning to think it’s not so much the limits of language as that, having rejected every notion of civilization culture, I no longer have anything to talk about with most people.

When I’m out in public I often listen to conversations, and what I hear is nothing but vapid time-wasting, echo-chamber reassurances, regurgitated propaganda, sob stories, unactionable rhetoric, appalling misinformation, self-aggrandizement, gossip, manipulation and denigration of others. I hear no new ideas or insights, no cogent discussion of how we can prepare for, and increase our resilience in the face of, the impending sixth great extinction and the economic, energy and ecological collapses that will push that extinction into overdrive and bring down the most expansive and least sustainable civilization in our species’ short history. And what else is worth talking about?

Yet, all around me, people who have not had the luxury of time and resources, as I have, to learn how the world really works, and what is really going on, and to imagine what we might do about it, and how we might live better, carry on as if nothing much is wrong and as if everything in our unsustainable and doomed culture somehow makes sense, and will somehow continue, and get better.”

Dave is a very astute observer of the human condition we call society. I agree with both Mia and Dave, and I see it all around me.  For me, Gavin, it kind of goes like this;

A sense of loneliness, an abnormal feeling of my sanity vs the insanity around me, trivial and manipulative behaviour, football conversations, gossip, affluenza, consumerism gone wild, the same old crap regurgitated day in and day out on TV, a society distracted by everyday bullshit and girlie magazines, disconnectedness, denial, “does my bum look big in this”, shallowness, people walking around in their own iPod world with a total belief in the status quo and that the market will save us.  I want to grab people and shake some sense into them, but know I can’t, for it will make me look like someone who has escaped from the asylum.  The only problem is that we are all in the asylum already with only a few of us ready to take on the role of the Chief and through that washbasin through the window and escape the funny farm.

There is so much more that I haven’t managed to articulate, and I find it difficult to hold a conversation along any of these subjects when I know what is about to go down.  I did try to describe it once in this blog post, “Cognitive Dissonance“, and the response was overwhelming.  Others did feel like I did, which was comforting in a way.  Misery loves company, or so they say.

Long time readers will know that I totally believe that resource depletion, climate change and mass extinction is happening right now, and kind of understand why everyone one around me just doesn’t get it, or even tries to understand where we are all headed. The only positive think I know I can do is prepare, educate others, build community, and be there for one another when TSHTF.

However, one thing of late that has helped me deal with the reality we live in has been the latest book by Clive Hamilton, “Requiem For A Species – Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change”.  It has helped me transition away from blame, to just accepting that the shit storm is approaching, and there isn’t much that you or I can do about it even if with some massive miracle every government in the world suddenly set 80% emissions target and actually started to enforce them.  The world will change, and we are in for a hell of a bumpy ride before people accept things are not going to business as usual any longer.  Clive writes a very convincing argument.

Call me a fool, but I have yet to give up hope.  I will still do all the green things that I do in the hope that others will wake up and smell the oncoming storm before it hits.  I will continue to re-skill because these skills have become valuable not only to my family, but to others in my community.  I know where I am going for a bar of soap, and some fresh eggs when the four horsemen ride over the hill.

I suppose that is all anyone can do, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.  Oh, and lead from the front, because the view of the future is much nicer from up there.

Water Drama

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We had a bit of a water problem here today.  Here is how the story panned out.

Kim decided to do a bit of weeding in the front garden, and plans to do one bed a day for the next week.  As she was weeding the first bed around the garden tap, she noticed that the ground was particularly wet compared to the other beds.  The weeds were also much higher around this area as well.  She checked the tap for leaks but found none, so she began to dig a little deeper, literally!

She dug down next to the pipe connected to the tap and found that as it was galvinised pipe, it had begun to rust.  The water also began to pool as she dug deeper, which indicated that there was an underground leak.  She called me up at work to let me know and decided to turn off the mains at the meter and call a plumber.

About an hour and a half later, our regular plumber turned up, and found that the pipe had burst due to rust and he told Kim that it should have been copper.  Who ever installed it should have known not to bury steel pipe as it rusts over time.  He was worried that the horizontal pipe leading into the house might be the same, and would have to be replaced, so fingers crossed he kept digging.  Kim told me that she breathed a sigh of relief when the plumber told her that the horizontal pipe was copper so all he had to do was replace the riser, which he did.  Kim even found a nice piece of 2×4″ hardwood plank to bury and attach the tap to give it rigidity.  It was a great job and the plumber only charged her $160 for two hours work and parts including call out fee.  I was most impressed.  If the horizontal water pipe had have been galvanised instead of copper, we would have been up for thousands to replace it, and a totally trashed fruit orchard to boot.  A big well done to Kim for taking decisive action and stopping the flow.

Now, as for how much water was lost and how long it was broken for, the plumber couldn’t guess.  I did an inspection when I got home at 1530 due to a splitting headache, and found that the ground around the pipe was saturated to a radius of about 4-5 meters.  That is a lot of water, however, as there was no surface run-off, it was all saved in the soil, which is the best place for it.  Tomorrow I will dig up (pardon the pun) our last water bill for the previous reading, and do an estimate based on the current total less our daily average consumption.  That should be a fair indicator on how much soaked into the soil.  I bet I am in for a shock.

Looking on the bright side, I can see a Cox Orange Pippin apple and two Plum trees that are going to love all of that stored underground water in the spring time.  As our soil is a heavy clay, it should stay moist for a very long time.

So a lesson for all. If you see particularly tall weeds concentrated in one spot, have a deeper look into what may be causing it.  You may be in for a nasty surprise.