Old99 Farm, week of Dec 23 2018

We are past the solstice, shortest day of the year! yeah, wonderful.

This week we have:
- collards, carrots, cabbage
- beef: ground, stew and roasts
- pork: all cuts including smoked items
- chicken: roasting and stewing hens
- parsley
- potatoes, onions
- celeriac
- stone ground flour: wheat
- lard, rendered or minced

I’m taking orders for sides or quarters of beef, and for pork. $100 deposit for a side or a whole, $50 for a quarter. This is all meat we raised here on the farm, organic, grass fed (not pork).

I’d like to append the key points from Richard Heineberg’s recent essay on Resilience.org. It very much affirms my own thinking about how to respond as a good citizen to the climate crisis, among the rest of them.
Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few’ If all this is true, then we now face more-or-less inevitable economic, social, political, and ecological calamity.
How much harder must it be to acknowledge signs of the imminent passing of one’s entire way of life, and the extreme disruption of familiar ecosystems? It is therefore no wonder that so many of us opt for denial and distraction.
It may be possible to intervene in collapse to improve outcomes—for ourselves, our communities, our species, and thousands of other species. I like to think so.

The Big Picture (an understanding of the adaptive cycle, the role of energy, and our overshoot predicament) adds both a sense of urgency, and also a new set of priorities that are currently being neglected. Picture a mobius strip, in a box with four quandrants.

It is entirely possible,that we humans are rapidly evolving to live more peacefully in larger groups. If so, then what plan for action makes the most sense in the context of the Big Picture, given our meager organizational resources?

Post-carbon Institute, Heineberg’s outfit came up with a four-fold strategy.

1) Encourage resilience building at the community level.

2)Leave good ideas lying around.
The key to taking advantage of crises is having effective system-changing plans waiting in the wings for the ripe moment One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting adoption is permaculture. Another set consists of consensus decision-making skills.

3)Target innovators and early adopters.
Innovators are important, but the success of their efforts depends on diffusion of the innovation among early adopters, who tend to be few in number but exceptionally influential in the general population.

4)Help people grasp the Big Picture.
Discussions about the vulnerability of civilization to collapse are not for everyone. Some of us are too psychologically fragile but for those able to take in the information and still function, the Big Picture offers helpful perspective. It confirms what many of us already intuitively know. And it provides a context for strategic action.
Neuroscience also offers good news: it teaches us that cooperative impulses are rooted deep in our evolutionary past, just like competitive ones. by pulling together that we can hope to salvage and protect what is most intrinsically valuable about our world, and perhaps even
improve lives over the long term.
The one thing that is most likely to influence how our communities get through the coming meta-crisis is the quality of relationships among members. A great deal depends on whether we exhibit pro-social attitudes and responses.

Hard times are in store. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. Each day of relative normalcy that remains is an occasion for thankfulness and an opportunity for action.

Healthy eating, healthy community building, healthy outlook!
Ian and Cami