Tag: Sustainability

Nuclear abolition, climate change, environmental degradation, nature, peace and justice.

Categories
Writing

Overcoming Inertia

Book Bench

When I left full time work March 16 I had no expectations.

After all, there was work at two farms in spring and early summer, and fall weekend shifts at the orchard, all to keep me busy. That’s along with two days a week at the home, farm and auto supply store.

Once the farm work ended in October, my outside work schedule left me with five days a week at home. I didn’t know what to do.

I continued my habit of reading and writing in early morning. I read more full length books than I have in years. With my Social Security pension our household income rebounded to a livable amount. Our garden was the best ever and the extras from barter arrangements made a reduction in grocery expense possible. We cooked more meals at home and ate better quality food. The sum was that if I continued that direction, I could get by, and live well, but it wouldn’t be very good for my life in society. I’m not ready to settle into an easy chair and kick back during my remaining days.

I’m okay with slowing down and taking stock. It’s a luxury many people don’t have. It is time to overcome the inertia that’s settled in since October and get to work. The challenge is picking a couple of meaningful goals and bringing a reasonable level of focus to them. That’s where I’ve been stuck for a couple of months.

If I were to get a legal pad and write down tasks needing done it wouldn’t take long to fill several pages. Filling time and making lists is not the point. Finding meaningful work is the goal, work meaningful not only to me but to those around me. That is a harder planning session.

That’s where I land after 50 years of applying my driven personality to society in the workforce. What I do next is more optional than it has been since I was a teen. It will be work and I want to make sure it is the right kind of work for a sixty-something.

The remaining December days are a perfect time to set course for 2019 and beyond, and so I shall.

Categories
Home Life

Christmas 2018

Holiday Greeting – 2018

Best wishes to readers during this time of striving in a world where peace is elusive.

It’s 32 degrees in Iowa. During a tour of the yard and garden it looked like the kale might recover, but only if there is a warming spell. That’s a lot to ask on the fifth day of winter. We still have fresh in the ice box and a dozen packages in the freezer. Kale is never in short supply in our household.

We miss our daughter at Christmas. When she left home, she really left, first for Florida, then Colorado, and back to Florida. I liked Colorado better because we could leave in the morning and arrive in time for supper. Not so with Florida which is a 23-hour drive to where she does work she loves.

Since graduating from college she spent one Christmas at home, in 2010. Over the years, her absence changed things. Her job requires her to work on the holidays so we developed new patterns.

One by one, old Christmas family traditions peeled off until the holiday became centered around food and phone calls. We continue to have a bowl of chili on Christmas eve and will fix a special Christmas dinner, although the menu isn’t quite planned. We have a lot of turnips and joked serving turnips would be like getting a lump of coal in our stockings. With the right recipe, though, they might make a valued new tradition… or maybe not. Whatever personal traditions we may have had were sanded off in the woodshed of time, so anything goes.

There is redemption in the calm quiet of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It is a chance to save ourselves from errors made while living in society, to ask forgiveness from those we’ve wronged, to chart a new course through the coming years. There is hope.

My Christmas wish is for peace on earth. It is elusive, yet hope springs, and we believe it within our reach. I hope it’s within reach. I plan to work toward that end.

Best wishes to my readers for a Happy New Year!

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Very Late Fall Cookery

Garden and Farm Vegetables

With winter solstice tomorrow afternoon, it’s getting late to be calling this autumn.

There are still fresh vegetables in the ice box and plenty of ideas for what to do with them. On Monday and Tuesday I binged on YouTube videos about street food in Pakistan and India, which led me to make a batch of egg fried rice.

To begin, I am shocked by how much oil or butter is used by these street vendors. It is well known that restaurateurs use a lot of butter in cooking. Eating in diners accepts a high level of saturated fats in food. But these videos? Oh My God! A quart of vegetable oil? Two or three cups of butter? It’s enough to give a person a heart attack… literally.

In an American home we don’t use so much cooking oil yet there are lessons to be learned here. I got out the wok and spent about half an hour prepping vegetables.

I found parsley, carrots, onion, celery, turnips, kale, collards, garlic, fennel and leeks and diced them up for stir fry. There was about four cups of leftover, cooked rice, enough to use four eggs.

If I keep making this dish I need to work on seasonings. I was tempted to add red pepper flakes to the oil in the beginning but resisted the heat to see what the other flavors would lend to the experience. I kept it simple with salt, ground black pepper, ground cumin and smoked paprika. It was good without hot peppers. 

Egg Fried Rice with Local Vegetables

The rest is pretty easy. Place about four tablespoons vegetable oil in the wok and heat to temperature. Add vegetables one dish at a time in cook’s order (those needing most cooking first) reserving the parsley for finishing. Sauté and stir constantly until the vegetables begin to soften and add the eggs. Street vendors crack eggs directly into the wok, but I beat lightly in a dish and added them all at once. Stir constantly until the eggs begin to cook. Add the cumin and paprika at this point and incorporate. Add the rice and stir until the eggs are cooked and everything is incorporated and heated evenly. Add parsley and serve. Made four generous portions.

The kitchen was filled with the aroma of chopped fennel all day. In the finished dish it added a brightness that’s hard to describe. Stirring constantly helped prevent the eggs from creating a crust on the bottom of the wok and made cleanup easier. If I were to serve this as a side dish I’d reduce the number of vegetables to basic aromatics and some greens, maybe add some pine nuts. Stir fry is a flexible dish that can use up what’s on hand.

As fall turns to winter egg fried rice helped transition from ice box to pantry for food sourcing. I felt I learned from the experience of making it. In our kitchen, that’s what cooking is all about.

Categories
Environment Writing

Ice on the Lakes

Ice Skates on a Shelf

On early morning walkabout the moon and stars were out, casting silvery light on me and everything.

Yesterday a thin layer of ice rested on the lakes, its mirrored surface perfect for skating if it thickens. Based on the forecast, we’ll see more open water soon.

When our daughter was a grader and the lake froze we’d don ice skates and cut a path all the way to the other shore. When snowmobiles plowed by we could feel the ice moving up and down taking us with it. We keep the skates on a shelf in our garage.

We live in a cold middle place where it’s not quite winter and not warm enough to work long outside. Our attention turns inward and to the possibilities of next year.

The best part of the coming holidays is people engage in things. A calm quiet falls over the Johnson County Lake District. If it were snowing one could hear flakes fall.

It’s a time for planning and writing here in Big Grove. What few fresh vegetables are left in the ice box will soon be eaten up… well, except maybe the turnips. I’ve been watching videos of Indian street vendors making gigantic woks of chicken fried rice. There’s a tub of leftover rice and plenty of eggs so I’ll try that for lunch or supper. I forget eggs are chickens.

And so it goes. Vonnegut taught us death can be absurd, tragic and predictable. It seems mostly random and will eventually take us all. I’d like to get back out on the ice and cut its clear, smooth surface in long figure eights. I’d watch fish swim through the ice and hope the crazing wouldn’t result in my going to live with them. Not yet anyway.

The hope of this holiday season is we can do positive things next year. Isn’t that always the case? So it goes, and here we go. Gliding along the surface until we take a plunge, hoping for a resurgence of living each moment as best we can.

That’s optimistic. Increasingly, that’s who I want to be, who I am.

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary Writing

This is not France

Protesters on the Champs-Elysees. Photo Credit – NBC News

We see a lot of customers wearing yellow safety jackets at the home, farm and auto supply store. Mostly they seek something to complete a project.

Road crews, construction workers, and tradesmen of every kind stop in wearing the bright, reflective safety gear. It is mostly men. Usually, they are in a hurry to get back to work.

The similarities between these Iowans and the French citizens protesting an increased fuel tax seem mostly external. The French are required to carry yellow jackets in their vehicles in case of a mechanical breakdown on public streets and roads. Before I began working at the home, farm and auto supply store I thought only fire fighters wore such reflective clothing.

What makes our yellow jacketed citizens different is the Trump administration is creating massive changes in financial matters that impact them and who cares? Where are the protests? For the most part Americans play the hand dealt in subservience.

Take interest rates. On our last statement before the president was inaugurated, our annual variable interest rate was 3.00 percent on our home equity loan, indexed to the Wall Street Journal published rate. Our current rate is 4.75 percent, an increase of 58.33 percent. Where is the outrage?

Take gasoline and diesel prices. On Dec. 10, the average U.S. price of gasoline for all grades was $2.511 per gallon with diesel at $3.161. During the same week in 2016, gasoline was $2.347 and diesel $2.493. The price of gasoline increased 6.99 percent and diesel 26.80 percent under this administration. With U.S. oil production hitting record high levels last month, why aren’t gasoline and diesel prices coming down?

I don’t really expect answers because I know them. Interest rates and oil prices are just not on the financial radar for most people. They are an assumed background noise. Something that has to be dealt with, but not very often. Importantly, American businesses have learned how to change things in their favor without precipitating the kinds of protests we see in France. It is a basic part of corporate pricing policies.

The protest in France is about fuel prices. During the first Gulf War I worked for Amoco Oil Company, where we were acutely aware of the global political situation as it related to discovery, development, refining and selling our products. I managed a small trucking fleet and fuel price volatility during the war led us to implement a fuel surcharge in our contracts with customers. We weren’t the first to implement a fuel surcharge but today they are a hidden part of almost every type of delivery service. Depending on a customer’s savvy, fuel surcharges can be negotiated to produce an additional margin for operations through various pricing schemes. As suggested, it’s just not on the radar for American yellow jackets. Interest rates? You gotta be kidding me.

It’s been a long time since I was in France.  I’ve never understood their politics the way I do ours. Is Macron good or bad, or just another president in a series of controversial figures? What I do know is Americans rarely make the news for our protests. That is more newsworthy than what the yellow jackets are doing in France.

Categories
Writing

Friday Community Work Day

Autumn at Lake Macbride

Our electric clothes dryer was on the fritz.

A technician arrived Friday morning and replaced the idler pulley that had been making noise. Although long ago replaced, a washer and dryer was one of the first gifts my in-laws gave us after our wedding. A working home washer and dryer is neccessary in an American household. 

I’m glad the local company from which we bought the dryer provides service. The repair was completed well before 9 a.m., leaving the rest of the day free to occupy as I would… sort of.

After the repairman left, a neighbor who is on our well committee called to ask me to help a local well service price an upgrade to the mechanicals in our well house. He was in a nearby town and wanted to stop by enroute home to the county south of us. I said yes.

Our public water system has been using more water than anticipated when we upgraded the well about 12 years ago. Time and usage are taking a toll on the mechanicals — the pump will eventually need replacing. He secured the information needed for a proposal on a replacement pump. It was an unexpected but useful and informative interruption of the day.

Discussion of water systems with a well-known operator is a way of tracking what’s going on in the county. I enjoy this part of the work. He said he was picking up business as well service operators like the one who renovated our well exit the business.

As I showed him around the well house, we discussed the new line a subdivision west of us is running from the city to resolve the high level of arsenic in their drinking water. A couple of other subdivisions requested stubs on the line, but no one else requested service. From Thursday’s newspaper article, it’s unclear whether the city would be willing to provide water to customers beyond the initial scope of their agreement.

We also discussed the new well at the orchard where I work. The tricky part was figuring out how to drill the new well around a seven-day-a-week operation that includes a retail barn and a restaurant. They figured it out and the new well is in service.

When I returned home I sent out the notice of our regular association meeting next week along with a call for agenda items. There were other association matters to tend to which occupied my attention most of the rest of the day. The slate wasn’t really clear when I went to the kitchen to make dinner.

Working two days a week at the home, farm and auto supply store leaves me time to work in our small community. I’ve been on the association board three different times since 1995 and will finish out my term and maybe go for one more. I find the work interesting and there is plenty of it. At some point I’ll step back and let someone else lead the effort. A lot depends on how successful we are in transitioning from work to retirement during the next couple of years.

Even without a part time job there is plenty to occupy a pensioner. Staying engaged in the community is not only important to longevity, someone has to do the work. For now, I’ll be on the board to help sustain our progress and plan for the future. However, it would be great if I could leave those chores to someone else and focus solely on writing. For now, I’ll make do with early morning sessions and posting the results on this blog. However, there is a bigger project in the background, one which will occupy my time with intensity once begun. I’m looking forward to it once I finish all these existential errands.

Categories
Environment

Environmental Issues 2018-style

Earthrise by Bill Anders, Dec. 24, 1968

There was never any doubt that when Republicans won the 2016 election setbacks were in store for parts of the environmental movement that rely on government regulations.

Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation were ready with swat teams to investigate every part of the executive branch and reverse anything and everything that could be to favor business interests during the president’s first term.

The funders of these operations have plenty to celebrate going into the new year. The rest of us took a step backward.

What I’ve learned in almost 50 years of being in the environmental movement is there is no parsing the actuality of environmental degradation. A person can summarize the greenhouse effect in as few as 200 words. The impacts of global warming are available to anyone who would recognize them. There is an inevitability of climate action with the main concern being we wait until it is too late to save ourselves.

The battle over the coal industry is being fought less by environmental advocates and more by market dynamics. So many electric utilities converted to natural gas because of its current low cost and availability. Why wouldn’t a utility want a thermal energy source delivered right to their door over a mineral that had to be delivered and handled by the rail car load at greater expense? Based on the home heating conversion of coal to natural gas, ongoing when I was a child, there is no going back to coal.

Natural gas is also a problem because of greenhouse gas emissions. While solar energy installations have stalled as a result of the president’s tariff policy, the market will figure it out to use the sun and wind directly. Renewable energy will prevail in the marketplace over extraction-based energy sources. Based on the science of climate change, they have to prevail if we hope to adapt to the deteriorating environment we created.

Symbolic gestures like the Green New Deal the House of Representatives is proposing are something. However, the problem of environmental degradation won’t be solved by governments alone. We need a resurgence of green habits. It is still too easy and inexpensive for someone to hop in the car and drive 20 miles to pick up groceries to expect them to change their behavior.

Progress made on environmental issues and policy during the Obama administration was no progress at all if it could be so easily reversed by the next administration. The idea a potential Democratic president in 2021 could reverse the damage done by Republicans is a shallow hope. We have to do better than this.

As 2018 draws to a close there is much to be done to reverse the deleterious effects of a changing climate. Some of it can’t be reversed yet we can’t lose hope. Despair is a form of climate denial.

“We do not have time for despair,” Al Gore said recently. “We can’t afford the luxury of feeling discouraged. Too much is at stake.”

Inside politics and out, now is the time for climate action.

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary

Christmas is Coming

Christmas Lights

It’s been seven weeks since the end of apple season, now two weeks until Christmas. The glow has come off holiday seasons.

It’s not that I’ve become all grinchy, hidden away in a darkened lair while neighbors illuminate their homes in festive lights. I don’t know what it is but last year we didn’t even open the holiday decoration boxes and this year likely won’t either. It makes the clean up easier and there are no young children and few family members with whom to share our traditions. People turn inward this time of year and so shall we.

We make home made chili on Christmas eve and serve it with cornbread. There are special recipes and sparkling apple cider. Christmas day we’ll fix a dinner with elements of what we had for Thanksgiving — sweet potatoes, wild rice, farm vegetables, a relish plate, and a source of protein. There will be leftovers. It will be tasty and traditional.

I know what to do to make it through the holidays — contact friends and relatives and plan for next year. Write a budget, get organized for tax season, plan the garden. The world starts shutting down Christmas eve and there will be time for a long winter’s nap… or two. Time to spend writing along with restlessness and resting for what’s next in 2019… a long walk on the lake trail.

My disconnect from Christmas began with military service. The first year in Germany, no one even knew I was there except for the battalion commander’s secretary and my family. Without a telephone, before the time of personal computers, I spent the holiday alone and that broke me from family traditions. By the time New Year’s came, other officers realized I was there and tried to include me. It felt ersatz and futile.

There was a resurgence of Christmas spirit with some joyful times when we married. Even in our decoration-less home with just the two of us the day is special. That will be enough. We’ll miss having our daughter with us and will think of her as Christmas day turns to night. One year she worked the park’s fireworks display as families gathered on streets of make-believe. Someone has to make holiday memories for night visitors.

Today I return for a shift at the home, farm and auto supply store. With five days off work I’m getting cabin fever and that will dissipate as morning turns to afternoon. Socialization at work is a main reason to stay in the work force while I can. Soon the Christmas merchandise will go on clearance with bargains to be had. I might bring something home. Who knows whether our holiday lights will even work after so long in storage. I might even use them again this year because hope remains. It’s the season of hope.

Categories
Environment Living in Society

Note to my Congressman

Congressman Dave Loebsack

Dave,

Congratulations on your reelection last month and thanks for the conversation after the Second District convention.

My wish list is brief, here it is.

Create a process to audit where defense dollars go. We are spending a lot on defense, more than I believe is needed. We ought to be able to determine where this money goes. I believe we can save money. I’d bet there is enough money to pay for the president’s wall, not that we should. Please work on such accountability for the Pentagon.

Protect Social Security and Medicare. I first paid into Social Security the summer of 1968 and 50 years later depend on my Social Security pension to help pay monthly bills. Most of my friends on Medicare believe it doesn’t cover enough. However, what we have adds value to our lives. Keep these both solvent and determine a better, more cost effective way to manage them.

No doubt you are aware of the dire reports on the potential consequences of climate change on society. The New Green Deal for which Nancy Pelosi has indicated support could be part of a government effort to mitigate the consequences of global warming and climate change. It is not enough. Scientists have indicated in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that the horizon for catastrophic consequences is much closer than expected. It is time to act on climate change, and I hope you will do your part every day.

Thanks again for your representation. Best wishes for end of year holidays and an optimistic new year.

Regards, Paul

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary

What I Like About the County Seat

Old Capitol

There are things I like and dislike about nearby Iowa City which is the seat of Johnson County government. Here’s a post about what I like in no particular order.

Parking at the Administration Building The primary reason I travel to the county seat is to take care of county business. When the board of supervisors built the administration center they created ample, well-maintained parking that is always convenient once one figures out the traffic pattern of the streets surrounding it. Getting in and out to take care of business or attend a meeting has always been easy and welcoming.

Downtown Parking My reasons for visiting the downtown vector are to attend a meeting or special event, or to get service from one of the specialty shops that can only be found there. The small city near where I live can’t support a jeweler, a printer, or clothier, so the county seat is the next best bet. I opposed building the parking ramps back in the day, but today they are a stress reliever. If my wallet is emptied of bills, they will take plastic for settlement.

HyVee In our ecology of food we need a large conventional grocery store where I can find specialty items and a few staples. Located near the edge of the city, the North Dodge Street HyVee is convenient when I am in the county seat for other reasons, and not too far when I’m not. Inevitably I run into people I know there, most times multiple people in a single visit. It is not only about getting a few grocery items but about socializing. I also use the store as a place to meet people who live in the county seat.

Bookstores Because the University of Iowa is its own large population center the city is able to maintain a large independent bookstore and an equally large used bookstore. On rare occasions when I feel like shopping, Prairie Lights Bookstore and the Haunted Bookshop are usual destinations. It is hard to go inside one or the other and leave without buying a book.

Memory Repository Since 1970 I’ve spent significant time in the county seat, attending university, and afterward, living a life. We married there. Our daughter was born there. I protested the Vietnam War there. My earliest creative efforts took place there. One of my favorite places to be is having a coffee near the intersection of Market and Linn Streets. Today I make fewer new memories there. When I think of who I became after leaving home, a lot of it happened in the Johnson County seat. From time to time I need to remember that.

This list is a description of who I am in the context of geography. I understand people don’t get that excited about parking capacity. We live far enough away from the county seat for it not to be a nuisance, and close enough to get in and out quickly while conducting the business of a life. Wherever we lived there would be a county seat. I like ours just fine.