Back to work today. It rained most of the day. Some days teaching school can be quite frustrating. Today was not one of those days. The kids were good, we had an assembly, planning for an overnight class trip continued. Life as usual.
Outside the rain pelted down and like a warning of things to come. Inside we were oblivious. We engaged in some heated interesting discussion on alternative fuels and I assigned the kids a bit of work on creating a newspaper about some new future fuel. I will be interested to see what they come up with.
Could not check on the bees tonight. It was too rainy. I'm sure they're okay I found some on the compost heap eating some of the all the old wax that I had stored there. Even though it rained most of the day and last night, the blueberries and blackberries were kind of dry Underneath their bedding of mulch. I gave them water and hope they do well.
Looking out at our homestead each day I feel more and more positive at the things we're doing. The spinach is growing like mad. I'm going to have to cut some of it down and store in the freezer and share some with coworkers. Haskap berries planted last summer are blossoming and it looks like I lost only one of them. We have currents, maple trees, walnuts, strawberries, all kinds of things that are sustainable perennial and free. I'm going down to Golden Bough nursery next weekend to pick up my order of trees. Included in the order were some peach, hazelnut, pear, and other trees. They will not to produce now, but they will in the future. We should have done these types of planting 16 years ago when we moved in. History is a good teacher. A harsh teacher.
When look at how pleasant my farm is, I'm struck by the juxtaposition of it to cities in the United States. Reading a post tonight, I realize how crummy life in many American cities like Camden, Detroit, most of California is. I wonder how long it'll take before that kind of disease spreads into the Canadian economy. We are on an unsustainable path that needs to be corrected.
I used to think that buying this old farm was putting us behind the eight ball financially, getting us behind my brothers, and Rachel's family members. Nowadays I'm not so sure. I see the future appears bright. We have room, space to grow food, trees to burn for heat, fresh air to breathe. Really, what more is there to life? I'm going to turn this farm into a sustainable long-term place to live.
On the note of sustainability, I read another post about the scarcity of phosphorus. Phosphorus is a mineral that is necessary to plant growth and is mined in several areas around the world. This is needed by most farmers to continue with producing food the way they have for the last 20 or 30 years. This is not sustainable. Not only are we running out of phosphorus, it also takes energy in order to produce the phosphorus, distribute it to farms and farmers and spread on fields.
The mining of phosphorus is showing us that we are slowly approaching the peak. Once again that word Peak has crept into my posts. I need to look for ways to maintain the phosphorus levels on my property without a slow net decrease in those minerals. How can I do this sustainably? I'm not sure right now but I am going to look into it.
Something that also comes to mind when talking about Peak everything is how peak oil is really and truly to blame for the financial crisis we have experienced in the past several years. I read a book by Jeff Rubin called Your World is About To Get a Whole Lot Smaller. It's a fantastic book that my brother had, and really tied in nicely to Richard Heinberg's book called The Party's Over. Richard Heinberg's book, expounds the theory of Peak oil and how there's really no substitute for that kind of energy. He points out how our societies have been built on cheap energy, and that is the only thing that has sustained us on this upward growth pattern. Growth in the use of coal and later oil at the start of the Industrial Revolution is what really has driven population growth, economic growth, and development in general.
Jeff Rubin's book talks about how the financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by anything other than peak oil. He explains very nicely how oil is tied to everything in the economy, just as Richard Heinberg did. His theory, is that we're going to see in an increasingly violent trend of price oil price peaks and then valleys as the price drops. This will then in turn cause problems for oil producers as this volatility will limit the amount of oil research and development, as well as the development of alternative fuels. All this eventually will cause problems for our economy and for our day-to-day lives.
A video that I watched today is by an Irish fellow Tom O'Brien talks about how peak oil is tied to the economy and how we are going to see these highs and the lows and increasingly violent reactions. He explains how the European debt bubble has been caused by peak oil, and that most of the economies of Europe are in trouble and in fact so is United States. He goes into more detail about the economy, printing of money, its effect on an economy, and how they are all closely linked to oil. It is a fascinating, brief version of Jeff Rubin's book. It may open your eyes to what's really going on all around us and how there is no way out of our current debt crisis without an increase input of energy into the economy. And with no alternative energy sources on the horizon, and there is no possibility for a way out of our economic crises in the near future.
That rain I was talking about earlier just broke into a beautiful sunset. There is a bright future for those that prepare, and think about what's going on around you and not just accept the dogma that you see on the nightly news, read in the daily papers, or hear on the radio. Things are changing, be prepared to change with them.
Bee Stoic
Mark
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