Hopium and Near Term Extinction
Selected quotes from around the Net:
First, you have to have a ‘community’. The US has suburbs where most don’t even know their neighbors. Your kids know the neighbor kids but do you know their parents? I doubt it.
This ‘resilience’ kick sells books, seminars, and seeds, but it is doing little to change anything real. Huddling down in your ‘community’ is not going to save you from the earths collapse. Mother nature doesn’t care if you grow your own veggies. She is going to wipe you out with the SUV driving blimps and not look back. 9 degrees wipes out you and your family just as it does any 3rd world poor family, or the McMansion owner with 3 cars and all the other toys of wealth. The Four Horsemen are equal opportunity killers.
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What future generations? We’re on the path to extinction. Only the complete collapse of industrial civilization will help stop that, and it is most likely too late as CO2 levels have heated up the planet enough to cause runaway methane release from what once was known as the permafrost. This is the end. We have maybe — MAYBE — 20 years left, tops. Chances are we have less than 10. Then heat wave after heat wave will blast the food crops to nothing and we all get to starve. Even the very rich. We can’t buy our way out this. We can’t work our way out of this. We can make the bastards who did this to us pay though. Not that we will. We’re all going to sit back and die in ignorance, crying “why me?”
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I too have been struggling with the concept of a mass extinction. Most people are totally unaware that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction. By the time they realize that something is terribly amiss it will be way too late (it probably is already) There is a small window but it will take the concerted effort of most of the major countries in the northern hemisphere and I’m not sanguine that that is likely to happen. After the mourning a detached calm sets in. It sucks but it’s better than killing oneself now. I want to live as long as possible out of a perverse sense of curiosity to see how this thing plays out.
Those who are waiting for some kind of savior to come down through the roof are in for a long wait.
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Being head militantly in sand that human activity is contributing to climate disruption, and savagely shoving stacks and stacks of overwhelming scientific evidence right out the window has become a litmus test for party loyalty at the expense of the Republicans who actually do affirm the basic consensus the scientific community. This is not an assertion made out of pre-determined partisan intentions. It is seen clearly in congressional record seen during the floor debate on H.R. 910, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) offered an amendment that simply stated, “Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental Protection Agency that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Only one Republican broke party orthodoxy and voted in favor of the scientific findings (David Reichert of Washington state) resulting in a 240-184 defeat for the resolution. Now this is lockstep groupthink conformism of Jonestown Massacre level proportions. Republican political leaders and operatives have been lining up behind the climate science negationists like blind lemmings following each other over a cliff and falling into reckless ecocidal self-annihilation. As one of the EDF legislative experts Kusai Merchant has put it,
“The climate deniers seem to think that an act of Congress can overturn a law of nature.”
In putting blame where blame is due, The US Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars selectively went to climate-change deniers. No wonder why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.
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It will take hundreds of years for the full impacts of carbon feedback(s) to propagate through the entire climate system.
Over that period of hundreds of years, Earth will likely lose most of its species. We have set this in motion. Now, we need to take action to survive it.
Within a decade, industrial agriculture will become unstable, resulting in repeated short or even failed crops, and wide spread famine. Workers will leave jobs/cities to look for food. Without workers, the industrial products that support industrial agriculture will not be available and thus within 2 decades, industrial agriculture, as we know it, will collapse. The bottom line is always food.
A key problem is that today all farm equipment use computer chips. (And computer chips have long supply lines.) That means the whole system starts to fail when factory workers in Asia cannot afford food. Then, a soybean farmer in Brazil or the US cannot get the parts to fix their tractors to produce food for factory workers in Asia. If those tractor parts are not available, then corn, wheat, cotton, rice and other crops are also affected. If we are to maintain industrial agricultural production, we need to feed all the workers in all the supply lines that make farm equipment, farm chemicals, and all the things that a farmer needs to be productive. Economics assumes that rising food prices will always result increased food production. Drought and flood make that a bad assumption in a time of global warming. Sometimes a food shortage merely leads to runaway inflation.
Since WWII, global food production has increased as a result of a subsidy from cheap energy. Cheap energy allowed lavish use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and irrigation. (Most of the full life cycle energy cost used to grow lettuce in California and serve it in NYC, goes to pump irrigation water. Second largest energy cost goes to manufacture of chemicals and fertilizer used on the lettuce.) Since WWII, global food production has also increased as a result putting increasing amounts of land under cultivation. Today, the land most suitable for cultivation is being cultivated. At this point, cultivating additional land would result in very little additional crop production, but would require large outlays of energy for fertilizer, chemicals, infrastructure, and irrigation. This year, farmers are planting land that has not been planted since the Dust Bowel. Yes, there is vacant land, but the most productive land is in use, and the vacant land for some reason is less productive. Greenhouse/high tunnel technology changes the crop mix, it does not bring new land into production or reduce energy use. Some land in the US in 2013 is being planted more in the expectation of government crop insurance payments, than for the value of the crop. The increased production by use of marginal land has a high cost, thereby raising the average price of food.
By and large, we have over-fished our oceans. Today, our catches are supported by computer technology that find the last few fish, squid, and krill. Increased fishing is not going to replace short or failed agricultural crops caused by drought or flood. And, the price of fish protein is higher than the cost of soybean protein. Without the supply chains that produce computer chips, fishing will collapse. With Ocean Acidification, fishing is likely to collapse, anyway.
Today, much of our fish comes from aquaculture. Modern aquaculture requires crop products from industrial agriculture. If the soybean or corn crop fails, then the fish crop also fails.
Within 30 years, we are likely going to be back to substance agriculture, with crops that have not widely cultivated in the US and Europe for a long time. Without the subsidies of fossil guano and cheap fossil fuels, the economics of food production will change. Most human effort will go into food production. Civilization as we have known it for the last 200 years will no longer be tenable. We might be back to something more like Homer’s description of life, with each family dependent on the food that they grow, and most human effort going to food production (and the occasional war).
Solar might provide the energy to produce pesticides and fertilizer, but all solar technologies require huge industrial supply chains, and we are not planning to secure those supply chains in a time of social turmoil as the reality of climate change rapidly unfolds. Large supply chains mean that somebody much produce a large surplus of food to feed the supply chain.
I would love to be proved wrong on all of the above points. However, most rebuttals start by ignoring the physics of sea floor clathrates and the behavior of clathrates in some Arctic permafrost structures. Rebuttals also ignore current rates of deep ocean warming, the melting point depression of ice under pressure, and the structural changes that occur as permafrost melts. Melting permafrost tends to release carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Any climate model that does not include carbon feedback is best suited to teaching climate science to second graders. By the time students get to 5th grade, they need to know the truth – carbon feedback is a long steep curve. All policy and planning need to include risk factors such as carbon feedbacks. It may not be too late to survive, but the situation is more dire than most admit, and urgent, aggressive action will be required just to survive.
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I’ve spent a bit of time reading the science forums. I was looking for something I didn’t find.
You’d think that highly intelligent and educated people would understand the magnitude of the problem we face and the extreme difficulty that exists in trying to solve it. But I came away from my reading with the sad feeling that this is actually not true. The failure to identify interlocking dependencies within civilization was the most glaring omission or misunderstanding. Several suggested “sailing for food” would be the answer, still not realizing that acidification and rapidly declining fish stocks will make this virtually impossible. Right now, fisherman using traditional methods of fishing are having an extremely hard time surviving. They cannot reach the remaining fish far out to sea, even though they have motorized boats (and small nets or hand fishing). Many have simply given up. Of course, it will only be worse in our declining future.
It will take hundreds of years yet to fully experience the full impacts of carbon feedbacks. But we won’t be here to comprehend what we’ve set in motion. If any humans survive, they will be very primitive and lack everything they would need to comprehend the how, why, what and who was responsible. Humanity will regress to a subsistence level existence, reverting to a paleo-survival eventually, if it happens at all.
I think this is increasingly unlikely however. The reason is we are going to be unable to feed ourselves with adequate nutrition. After the die-off period (happening now), resource wars (now), industrialized agriculture collapse (now), riots (now), survivors will rapidly consume whatever nutrition they can find, killing and eating virtually everything. This period will last somewhere in the range of 10 to 30 years, depending on just how many stop-gap measures we’re able to deploy.
But after that, it’s pretty certain that none of us alive today will be around.
This is a long, but insightful read: The irreconcilable acceptance of near-term extinction. This is a must read. It’s long, but make yourself read it.
I read through this last night. Near-term extinction (NTE) is a new phrase to most people, but it simply means “we’re all going to die pretty soon now”. Drumright’s essay is how to come to terms with that. And what it means to be alive today, on the very cusp of a massive die-off.
I will probably write a follow-up of my own on this topic. The “This Means Extinction” article is science-based, words right out of their mouths, about what we’re facing. For over ten years, I’ve been accumulating bits and pieces of information about the collapse of civilization and sharing all this on this blog and two former forums. LoneWolf (Dr. Mark McMurtry) was the first person I knew that used the word “Hopium” with liberal application back around 2003. It didn’t take long for me to adopt and adapt this terminology into my own writings.
Over ten years have now passed and denial, dissent and endless buckets of hopium continue to rule. The scientific assessment of our predicament however has actually advanced quite a bit and the conclusion is quite clear. Once you remove the verticle blinders (walls on either side of the issues), scientific reticence (refusal to stake one’s career on what the data says, AND even the scientific media refusing to publish what is clearly doom), you can come up with your own conclusion that extinction definitely lies ahead.
I am of the opinion that all dialog post-acceptance of NTE is manifestly commiserative.
Drumright’s point is that we are really just talking to ourselves, refusing to accept the facts, and therefore, really just wasting our time. What little time we have left.
He’s right of course. We still have “a great many fantasies” about our responses and options seemingly available to us.
I’ll share a few paragraphs with missing ones not shown for brevity:
Here is why I think this is true.
My long definition of NTE is both descriptive yet hopelessly indistinct: It will eventually arise from a sequence of catastrophic global civic failure stemming from permanent food scarcity, as a consequence of ever-increasing extreme weather events, due to both the collapse and predictability of the Northern Hemispheric jet stream, as the temperature and pressure gradients continue to weaken in the Arctic. And lest we forget, NTE will be greatly aided and preceded by humanity’s murderous forte. It can also effectively be summed up in two words: Permanent drought!
Governments with large securities apparatuses will most likely become police states, while governments without advanced security forces will most likely collapse. Endless war between competing police states will be the only perceived surrogate for hope in a world of permanent famine. The global citizenry will willfully welcome tyranny, much in the same way we always have. And as many of us have already accredited, “what’s past is prologue” … it’s just going to be unbelievably atrocious for the world’s poor in the beginning, again, much as it is already.
Entire nations will be sacrificed upon the altar of maintaining capital flow and investment, it’s just a question of trickling economies of scale on the way down. We inhabit an utterly amoral economic system that will sacrifice all of life to sustain itself. Capitalism will double down until it, or we, cease to be. As long as there is enough energy to allow capitalists to cannibalize all perceived assets in an indebted world, then even famine on a global scale will just be a game of attrition controlled by the world’s ruling elite, in a continuous charade of paying a well-armed Peter to murder an ever-starving Paul.
It dawned on me a few years back that after over a decade of intensely attempting to collectively network with others through a myriad of preparedness schemes that I had just lost the will to survive in the collapsing world I was proselytizing. This is quite different from no longer wanting to live, for I very much love life, and have no desire to needlessly cut it short. I have just always seen living and surviving as to two separate entities. I am also at an age where I feel I’ve already taken more than my share.
I have decided after decades of feral study, without any sense of certainty, and based only on my opinion as to what is and isn’t probable, that when the Arctic sea ice is completely gone during the summer, when the earth’s Holocene epoch completely loses one of its primary thermal regulators, we are probably only a few years at best, before the ruling classes of the world realize global agriculture is untenable, and at that point, the lack of alternatives will be rather self-evident. And I simply have no desire to live through that deleterious fallout, nor do I even feel I have a right to.
That last paragraph by the way, is probably 2014, when all the Arctic sea ice will be gone in the summer. Perhaps 2015, but unlikely any farther away then that.
Just 1 or 2 years from now. Then, collapse really gets bad. Temperatures and storms will be horrific.
I’m personally convinced that this is going to come like a thief in the night. There is still very little evidence at this late hour to support any other view. Hopium, denial, scientific reticence (which although improving, is still incredibly prevalent) and plain old ignorance, ie., being “blissfully unaware” are the most common views found. The powers-that-be continue to prop up a distracting minefield of delusions and deceit, while if you look closely, their quietly panicking.
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I’ve been writing about all of these topics for over ten years as one of the most prolific writers on our coming collapse. In that time, people came and went. Almost nobody from the “old days” seems to be here anymore, but I can’t really tell.
Blog registration is nearly zero, months can go by without a single registration. You don’t have to register however to simply read the articles, so I can’t actually tell who is still here, I can only see the view counts.
Blog participation however, is nearly zero with just a tiny few who make comments from time to time. It’s pretty clear that this blog has more or less always languished for support, participation and even interest. I don’t even get any attributions from anyone who “steals” my content, ideas or assessments for their own articles, something that has been happening with increasing frequency.
I finally installed some software to monitor activity, readership and page views and slowly came to realize that yes, there were still quite a lot of readers, but zero support and near-zero participation. It’s been almost total silence from the readership for years and years now. Just a very few, less then five, who occasionally make a comment. This has caused me to really ponder what I’m doing here. I’ve come to view this blog, and what is shared within, as being far “too much” for the readership, let alone the billions of non-readers who have yet to find it. Frankly, I don’t know what any of you are doing here anymore. This is not a plea for a donation, so let’s be clear on that, please DON’T.
It’s also clear to me, that very few people are buying food now. Sales are the worst I’ve seen in 17 years. This latter point has me greatly mystified. I’ve even hired outside consultants to test my website and try to discover what is wrong. Nothing was found other then some small presentation changes which I’ve made. This isn’t 2011, or even 2012 (I was very busy). This is the “2013 famine” for the food industry. I really don’t know what’s going on with this. I’ve tried everything I can think of short of selling out to the advertising industry and scam artists out there.
I’m guessing that most of us in this business will be out of business in a few years. Price, shipping and availability will become increasingly untenable as food stocks dwindle, prices rise and government control over food stocks increases.
We’re all doomed — we get that from reading what you share with us. However, until “lights out,” why not take a break from the NTE focus and tell us more about “sustainable living” on your “Survival Acres?” You’re obviously not going to drink the Kool-Aid and toke on hopium for the next couple of years, so why not share your upcoming projects for taking care of your family like the root cellar and the greenhouse? Maybe personalize your family and location a bit more without compromising OPSEC? (For example, what are you doing to cope with your area appearing to have skipped the spring season and gone right on into summer so soon? Where are you, generally speaking?) Enter into a dialogue with each comment that allows us to continue to learn from you and what you’re doing. (Still hoping for a response from you about my greenhouse plan…)
Another idea is a Reader Poll. Why do we read you? What do we want from you? What would make us more responsive? Etc.
Just my two cents.
I’ve never been comfortable with personal details online. I’ve always thought that those who revealed their preparations, caches, supplies, plans, etc., online or on television (good grief!) was extremely foolish. My reasons should be obvious: a warehouse of food and preparations for zombie hordes…
I don’t suppose I need to reiterate the security state apparatus that monitors everything online either.
I am indeed struggling for sustainable living, but I have not found it (anywhere in the United States). This term is always misused and abused. Modern living isn’t the least bit sustainable and never will be. Anything ripped out of the ground defies the very meaning of the term. Kotke’s Final Empire made it clear, we exist because of 6″ of topsoil. Yet modern man exists because of hugely powerful machine extracting hidden minerals, elements and energy from deep holes. It’s really, really clear that we have no idea what “sustainable” really means.
But I take your point. You’d like to know what else I’m doing (working my butt off most of the time). Dug out a expansion to my pond only yesterday for example. Will be doing that for at least another week or so.
What works for me isn’t going to be replicated anywhere else other than in general terms. You need land to work on, and the time, ambition and freedom to develop it. But for every “improvement” made, you create increasing levels of complexity and dependency and move farther away from “sustainable” as a result. I’m guilty of refashioning the land to work “for me” as I feel that I must to reduce external dependencies. What I doing here is unique to this location to try and solve my own needs for sustenance.
Real sustainability would be to abandon it all, and live subsistence living wherever you are. Nobody does that (or wants to). Or we never hear about them (they don’t have computers and Internet access).
This isn’t a spectator sport to cheer on the favorite team. I think that is often what people do when they find something that fits their views and preferences online. I abhor the cult of personality too, while other love it and cultivate it. Your stories, examples, articles, links and so forth, are at least as interesting as mine could possibly be, and that’s what I meant by participation. It’s a one man show here, most of the time, and it often feels very, very futile.
You did make mention of “any other suggestions” regarding your greenhouse. Sorry, that came at a time of severe supplier disruptions and discombobulation (ie., massive headache).
Plan for benches of course. Some years ago, LoneWolf and I discussed wood greenhouses. He has quite a lot of experience with greenhouse design. He did not recommend wood. If you do use wood, paint and treat all the wood surfaces. This will make it last much longer, be easier to clean and keep down pathogens. Personally, I’ve no experience with a wood greenhouse, so am just passing this on.
Run a underground water line in too with a frost-free spigot. If you don’t move your plants out of doors in summer, shade cloth will probably be necessary. And fans. I’m already having to run my fans all day long to keep temperatures down.
I always thought that making the top panels open outward would be a good idea. This would allow a lot of heat to escape and be completely passive (no energy or motors required) if you did this manually. I may even modify my greenhouse to do this, the worst I could do is cause a leak (I think). I do have four fans for good airflow, but don’t like running the meter.
Thank you, I did digest that article too (a copy is found on NBL).
I’m not in agreement that we give up. We all know that we will die someday, but that doesn’t mean we just lay down and die now because it’s going to happen. Quite the contrary. We struggle to find meaning, value, purpose, activity today, despite knowing that we will still die.
This is perhaps the biggest issue I have with those who embrace NTE. Humans will always struggle to live, even if it is futile. It’s not until we are completely and totally resigned to death do we stop. And I don’t actually know anybody who is at that point. I’m not.
The other big glaring oversight is NTE is not a guaranteed outcome. Likely, but not guaranteed. What if some fantastic invention is developed? Or the changes in climate create other habitable areas in the north (despite known problems with soils and solar radiance)? The point being, other options may become available. It would be like the guy who, clinging to side of the cliff, having no way up or down except to jump to a certain death, only waits a few hours for rescue. When none comes, he jumps to his death, not knowing that there was a man racing to his aid with rope. He’d have been saved if he’d waited just a few more minutes.
Nobody “knows” in other words, what the outcome “is” yet. As dire as I paint it, I have not advocated giving up.
I’m learning how to do everything wrong! It’s not easy to grow your own food. In fact, I’m rather convinced that America is going to starve very quickly once the trucks stop running (or aliens invade or whatever interrupts our food supply).
Very easy to make mistakes. Simple errors can be costly. So far, the greenhouse is working as expected (and wintered just fine), but my lack of growing experience is showing. Poor soils mostly. I’ve done a lot of asking around, it’s a common problem here. I do have a “solution” now in hand, but it will be a while before I can expect an improvement to the harvest.
You wonder why we, the readers, aren’t participating more.
I can’t speak for others, but I think there are a few reason:
1. Emotional exhaustion:
I had to stop trying to convince my spouse and in-laws that we need to make major, and I mean major, changes. They are ok with a bit of gardening, but even moderate food storage gets me called a “hoarder,” etc. I had to give it a break for my sanity.
2. Economics: I had to concentrate totally on getting a better job. I succeeded. Now I have cognitive dissonance: my particular company is doing very well. I know that it’s a fluke, that I got lucky. I am back here on your forum, though, because now I will barely be able to afford to try to gain the skills and some resources that might help my small family survive. Now I need to be exceedingly careful about how to go about it. I would consider consulting with you one-on-one, even it requires paying you, in fact. Would you consider being a consultant for people like me, who have enough resources for a bit of preparation for the things going on in the economy and enviromment?
3. Paranoia: we all know, now, that the government is monitoring literally everything. One needs to do a cost-benefit analysis. Is it worth the risk to contribute to blogs like yours? Most likely, the government has bigger fish to fry that peasants like us who just want to have a chance for themselves and their family, but we see many examples in history in which totalitarian governments round up millions of dissidents. Who wants to be rounded up?
4. Time: there is limited time in life to do things. In some sense, if time is limited, it might be rational to focus totally on enjoying the present, rather than preparing for doomsday. My own partner criticizes me for worrying about the welfare of the family in the near or medium term future, and for predicting that hard times are coming. I believe that she is projecting, and is so personally scared that she blames me for being the cause of the fear, rather than the real cause, which is the insanity of our civilization.
I appreciate what you do. I need your help, and the help of others like you.
We need an AlterNet (replacement for the Internet, reading, comprehension and IQ test required) with encryption and “invitation only” participation (if you work for the government, you are automatically disqualified).
I don’t do professional consulting, sorry. Being paid would go against my ethic of offering information for “free”. Ask away.
Re: sharing of personal information. You misunderstand me — I CERTAINLY understand the “gray man” approach to dodging the zombie hordes, lol. What I’d like to know is the GENERAL area you’re located that is experiencing such warm spring temps and — here’s the teaching moment — what you’re doing on your acreage to mitigate the effects.
And that leads in to your pond enlargement. Please share pix! Will this be used for firefighting, if necessary? Is it a natural pond or did you do it yourself after you bought your acreage?
Finally, speaking of your projects, could you talk a bit about your chicken house and run area? (And pix, of course!) Other than stray dogs, how do you foil the local predators with fencing?
Concentrating on sustainability projects is a form of hopium, I suppose, but we can all learn from what you’ve done on your place to face the looming juggernaut of NTE.
Thanks for any time you care to invest in posting about what I asked.
I like how Guy says it is only going to get worse before it gets worse. Anyway, I am trying to accomplish some goals this year like running a marathon, hiking in back country, et cetera as I turn 40 soon and no one is promised tomorrow.
So I have some personal challenges of my own design to look forward to, rather than having them thrust upon me.
I kind of feel like Cassandra or maybe chicken little right now. The absurdity of the whole thing – living to consume and possess – and the resources and time consumed to continue it all at the very real cost of life on earth is mind boggling.
I think it is safe to say we are in the vast minority of people concerned about this stuff. Most people I know want safety more than freedom, modern convenience over everything else. They see nothing wrong with occupying foreign soil to keep oil flowing, meanwhile killing thousands of innocent people. That is just one of many ways oppression is all around us.
I could goon and on but I am preaching to the choir no doubt. Anyway, thanks again and Look forward to reading your next post as always!
I actually think that this a good idea and healthy. Doing what brings peace and balance into your life is always a good thing.
Fear is unhealthy. Paranoia is unhealthy (even if they ARE out to get you). Being all wrapped up in collapse is unhealthy. It’s not as if anybody can “do” anything about any of it anyway. The only “doing” is to focus on yourself and the preparations you can make. The rest is as they say, inevitable.
My my how time goes by. I hope you continue to write because for me, it was extremely useful to come across someone who thinks far out of the usual paradigm of American liberalism, which is where I started from. Your essays were an important part of my learning just how duplicitous the government, the media, and even the academic world is – totally subservient to the god of growth, and also to be able to see how deluded with “hopium” even the most prominent scientists and activists are.
I sincerely doubt our species will emerge through the bottleneck of overshoot, but I agree, there’s no reason to give up as long as we’re breathing.
Don’t get discouraged by the lack of comments. There’s something about utter doom that doesn’t encourage it – look at Des, he hardly gets any, neither do I. For some reason I get more personal emails than comments so that helps to remind me that at least a few people are interested.
Sincerely,
Gail
I hope by now that everyone that has continued to read the blog realizes that it makes absolutely no difference who is pretending in the White House. The last several clowns were acts in a well-scripted play.
It’s all the same, and only the same, but worse, year by year. What an incredible lie they have foisted upon the people!
I think it’s impossible to “reform” either party or in fact, the entire government. We need a new government, desperately. If we do not get this, they will literally kill us all (a process well underway).
I hope you keep writing too, I also enjoy your essays!
I’m not trying to ‘survive’ on this homestead any longer either. Like you, i wear myself to the bone on days i’m not seeing to the remnants of the business that paid for everything, but i’m doing it because it’s fun, and i enjoy the process and the results. Maybe there will be a big payoff in addition to the pleasure, but i’m not counting on it.
Maybe i’ll come around here more often. We’re all just passing time anyway.
Best, Ryan
Formerly Rhino on this blog
I have ordered food from you in the past. (your customer from across the border) but as we know it is difficult for me to order, or I would. I have no idea why people aren’t ordering now other than there is no extra money for a lot of people.
keep writing, we like to keep reading and learning/
I’ll enjoy the sights and sounds now because the future for amphibians is dire:
A study released Wednesday said that North American frogs, toads and other amphibious animals are disappearing so quickly that they are on track to be extinct from their natural habitats by 2033.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/23/scientists-frog-and-toad-declines-signal-of-collapse-of-the-worlds-ecosystems/
Right on track for NTE predictions, unfortunately.
“A team of researchers with the U.S. Forest Services looked at data from 1,296 counties, accounted for the influence of other variables — things like income, race, and education — and came to a simple conclusion: Having fewer trees around may be bad for your health.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/06/can-lack-of-trees-kill-you-faster.html
Admin, you’ve got to replant faster than the bugs in your area can kill your local forests. As if you didn’t have enough projects and work to do, huh?
Always too busy. Should’ve moved to the burbs with a tiny plot of land… Compared to this, it would have been (far) easier.
I like trees, that’s for sure. Not seeing too many bug damaged trees here yet, just a few, but they are noticeable. Noxious weeds are a serious problem, research into how to combat these shows really bad side effects with herbicides, and 20% vinegar is too strong (will kill other desirable growth), but limestone added is supposed to help other plants compete with the weeds. But the tractor is broken… and I don’t have a spreader. So one thing always leads to another.
Started getting my firewood today. Will need plenty more. And I started another hugelbed too. This one will be “on the ground” (no trench), just woody material buried under a mound of dirt. I want the mound for the aspen trees I’ll be planting there.