I’m watching a show on the end of
oil, which is on CineMoi rather than the national news, and drinking
coffee. There is food for thought in
there. No oil? No caffeine.
Ponder that for a bit; how much fuel does it take to get your coffee or
tea into that cup? How much does it take
to synthesize caffeine? There are
probably sound agricultural reasons we don’t have a Colorado Coffee Company,
but the USA
runs on oil and caffeine. Lose one, we
lose both, and suddenly we are no longer a world power, but a sad lot of
moping, headachy shut-ins.
Another sip, and then I shall go
work on my garden a bit. I’m trying to
cut down our dependence on other people’s vegetables and melons, other people’s
blackberries and eggs, but in the process I am using a gas-powered tiller, and
must confess it’s saving an incredible amount of labor. Otherwise the pit bulls would be hitched to a
small plow, and even they are eating kibble that comes from a manufacturer in Texas.
They’re not happy that I’ve taken
up composting. The division of our
garbage used to be recycling, bin, and dog treats. Now it is recycling, bin, composting, and dog
treats, and the compost pile reduces both from the bin side and the treat side. They’re going to be even less happy when the
chickens start eating more than chick starter; chickens make much better
compostable material out of waste than dogs do, and guess what’s happening to
more of the scraps? If the poor canines
could figure out how to lay eggs, they’d do it, I’m sure. As it is, two of them are learning to pull
and one is learning to herd chickens when it’s called for. If they’re going to live here, they have to
earn their kibble.
Though I must observe that the
manuring they give the nut trees does seem to have a positive effect.
On the larger scale, I ponder man’s
ability to invent his way out of all sorts of problems. Whale oil getting hard to find? Well, that boot-waterproofer works pretty
well for a lot of the same things. And
look at that, the methane can be useful, too.
Running out of easy-access plankton from 100 million years ago? Well, maybe our cooking oil can help out,
too. The question is, do we collect
enough energy from the sun in growing the plant sources of the cooking oil to
offset the energy burned in harvesting with the old cooking oil for fuel? Or do we have to use the energy stored 100
million years ago to survive now?
I don’t have the tools to answer
questions like that, but I’m finding that as I get older, I’m more interested
in learning about these things. I always
was, but sometimes it seems more immediate.
Perhaps it’s the side effect of motherhood; now I’m investing in someone
else’s future. So, there’s a Victory Garden of sorts, to take us out of the
demand side of the equation just a little.
I’m trying hard to develop the ability to say “No” to cheap plastic
toys, or at least to buy used ones.
Someday, maybe, my son will let me pass on some used ones to other
people, but right now he’s at the stage where he loves all his toys, no matter
how outgrown they are. A friend
suggested gathering up a bunch and storing them, not for the purpose of getting
rid of them someday, but for getting out on rainy dull days as a surprise. Absence makes the heart fonder and all that. I tried it, but he’s a scamp at finding stored
toys, it turns out. Judging by the
clutter level, it’s time to try again.
He’s a grand little recycler,
too. We found basketballs by a river on
one of Mommy’s more eco-oriented outings.
We filled two garbage bags and brought home three “new” toys, which he
and the dogs have enjoyed. I’m hoping
none of them absorbed too much river yuckiness, and the basketballs are now
falling apart sufficiently to hit the landfill after just a bit more use has
been extracted from them. The water-bomb
toy gave one dog a great deal of pleasure and me a great deal of cleanup, but
it did have one last hurrah before it, too, became landfill. There’s not much else to be done with some of
the products of our crazy culture.
On the other hand: seriously, why
do we need mass-produced water bombs?
The kid and dog had a good time with it, sure, but they could also have
a wonderful time with a magnolia cone.
Or a stick. Or several other
things that turn up in my yard for free and aren’t any harder to get out of the
carpet once shredded, speaking of energy usage.
My mechanic, after observing my
child on the loose in the waiting room for a few minutes, observed, “He’s
easily amused. That’s good.” My remark at the time was, “He is,” with an
eyeroll to indicate it wasn’t always good, but sometimes I think that’s what’s
lacking in a lot of people’s children.
They can’t amuse themselves; they need something that took a hundred
barrels of oil to produce. My kid got
half an hour’s entertainment out of someone else’s cast-off pistachio shell,
and might have gotten more if his grandmother hadn’t gone and mistaken it for
garbage.
With luck, this means he’ll be able
to solve some of the problems that are absolutely positively guaranteed to come
up in his lifetime. There’s more water
in the air (thus more snow and more flooding), and there will continue to
be. There’s more water in the oceans,
being salty and polluted, and less in the glaciers, and there will continue to
be. There’s more need to find power that
doesn’t involve burning anything, and there will continue to be. I’m gently nudging him toward interests in
practical things like agriculture, meteorology, and engineering. He seems inclined that way anyway. His father is nudging him toward more
abstract things, like logic, and our son seems inclined that way anyway also;
as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) observed, it’s much
easier to teach logic to children than to adults.
Of course, this is also going to
make him into either the weird kid or the cool kid, depending on how he plays
it and who his classmates are. I’m
hoping for the latter but trying discreetly to teach him the skills he needs to
survive the former. Gregarious little
fellow that he is—he picked up TWO girlfriends at a play area yesterday, sequentially,
as he’s also energetic enough to play three sets of kids into the ground before
getting at all tired—he may never need to deal with being the weird kid, but
instead with being the role model. I’m
not sure which is harder.
Like every mom, I spend some time
looking at my child wondering who he’s likely to be. Right now it’s not fair to guess. He’s interested in everything, energetic as
all get-out, and gregarious, but he’s also three. All of these things are perfectly
normal. It’s on me to channel the drives
rather than squash them, and at least I have a little practice in that
department. Maybe everyone should have
to train a working dog before having a kid.
I’ve also encountered the idea that before anyone can have a child, they
should be required to train a chicken.
Now that I’ve tried to take twenty of five chicks from coop to box so I
can clean, I think there’s something to that.
An obliging German shepherd can help mightily with both processes. “You want the chicks to stay in the box? Okay.
You lost the kid behind the hedge again and want me to find him? Okay.
By the way, you know chickens smell bad, right?” My dogs feel free to editorialize. Since I feel free to expect them to contribute
something to the household, fair is fair.
Still, it bothers me that although
French parenting was the talk of the town a year ago, a French take on
consumption of world resources seems to be meeting with a vast yawn. The two do go hand in hand on more than mere
Frenchness. Why are we so determined to
load our kids up with boxes that go bing, as Douglas Adams referred to them
years ago, instead of teaching them the joys of stick plus dirt, as one of my
more cosmopolitan friends advised me to do?
Is it really that much easier? In
the global, thermodynamic sense of energy, we’re now spending incredible
amounts more of it to keep our kids amused than we did when we played with
them, or when we handed them a shucks dolly to keep them out of our hair while
we put our own energy into getting food.
It makes me wonder if we’ve all gone a little nuts.
Mind you, I say this as a mother
who does use the Electronic Babysitter to keep the kid busy while I get the
food or sweep the floor, but I’m seriously considering cutting the
power—“Oopsie!”—and handing him the shucks dolly just to see what happens. It may be that our house will start suffering
more power outages in the next few months than it already does from outside
forces. If nothing else, hitting the
circuit breaker now and again might cut our bills a bit.
Speaking of, time to stop thinking
deep thoughts and go pay ‘em. Ah, modern
living.
