Fueling the Future

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.