PEAK OIL - EPOCHAL EVENT OF OUR LIVES

[sumisu]

Hello HH, Sorry for the late response, as I've been trying to prepare for the winter via my city garden. I think and know that home gardens will be part of future home food needs. Last year I had a friend who I assisted in building a garden enclosure to protect against the animal onslaught of my important food. This year was experiment; I did a lot right and a few things wrong, but overall it was a massive success. Below is the 200 square food garden enclosure. I financed the supplies for two enclosures, one for me to assist my contractor to build and one for him, so he had his son assist him.



Sadly, the world's population continued growth is about to hit the wall because of sickness due to a pandemic and Mother Nature's store of declining resources, space, and water. I have always maintained that "progress is regress in disguise." The more we advanced, the more that we wanted; it was a non-ending progression of converting desires into needs.

You, HH, and I are like voices in a desert, with our thoughts and life approaches. What is important to me? Given the choice of a brand new car versus a delivery of aged horse manure for twenty years, I would take the latter. The manure would grow a continuous supply of food while the car would eventually end up in a junk yard. Under this simple scenario, who ends up better for society? The gardener, who grows food plus supplies free tomato and pepper seedlings to ten un-retired friends, versus the person driving around and around and around?

I oversimplify things with my above example because there are billions of people living in cities, which will not be sustainable over time. Time will tell how many will die when the trucks stop delivering food to stock the big-box grocery stores. I look back to my formative years of the 1950s when people took trains into the cities for work and cities were surrounded by farms to supply food. What would have been an ideal setup was destroyed by "progress."

Whatever improved government is developed, I would hope that term limits are tightly applied. I recall when I worked in a bank and had an employee with a career of 40 years processing financial instruments. I had to evaluate her work plus her coverage of emergency help elsewhere. I had to give her a negative evaluation with the provision that she had to be cross-trained in other areas to improve her skills. Here retort was "I have 40 years experience in my job!" My retort was "you have 1 year's experience 40 times!" I cross-trained her, as she had great potential, gave her solid work evaluations that provided her a solid pension. Again, I use a simple example to highlight too much of doing the same thing repeatedly.

In a world of Peak Oil, we will be tortured into a new existence. Reality will hit and decisions will have to be made. New forms of government and of business will have to be adopted in a more narrow availability of natural resources. The warnings over population and over use of resources of the 1970s were ignored and now will have to be confronted. Where that leaves you, me and others will be dramatically in a new life form. If we return to the 1950s, the impact will be less for me versus the many enjoying the modern life. I stopped driving in 1969; I know the other side and it can be challenging.

I had a great garlic harvest, but it was last, so the planting of pole beans to affix nitrogen into the the soil for the next planting of garlic was also delayed. But the beans now have blossoms, but the nights are getting colder, so my bean harvest is not assured. There are always challenges in the soil.


One-third of my garlic harvest!


Tetsukabuto Hybrid Winter squash and pole beans