Book (and Other) Recommendations

This book is also an illustration of why academic and state-employed experts are typically extremely poor at prediction.  The domain of the expert is to explain why things happen, not to predict what will happen.  In contrast, those with practical knowledge are typically much better at relevant prediction, even if they have no idea why.  An example Dr. Scott uses is the advice the Wampanoag gave to early English American settlers on how to plant corn.  Corn, they said, should be planted when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear.  Today, we can measure soil temperature, humidity, rainfall, solar intensity, and many other variables which help us explain why corn planted at a particular time and place does well or poorly.  However, all of these explanatory variables, taken together, do not even approach the informational richness and predictive ability contained in "when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear."  The Wampanoag may not have known why oak leaves are an excellent proxy for a corn planting date, but they were very, very good at growing corn.  (Much better than us, obviously, given their total lack of reliance on petroleum-powered machinery and artificial chemicals.)

Of course, as Dr. Scott points out repeatedly, none of this means that state power or empirical measurement and efficient management are intrinsically bad.  They can be of enormous benefit, so long as we err on the side of humility in their application.

If you like this sort of thing, it's a very interesting read (or listen) and a welcome admonition to be humble in how we apply modern technological knowledge in actual practice.  

Decline And Fall
by John Michael Greer

Greer is kind of weird, unless you don't think Masonic archdruids who claim to do magic are weird, in which case...many of you live in Portland, so okay.  I eat my oatmeal with hot sauce and black pepper, you do you.  However, Greer does, I think, a very good job of essentially repackaging Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies plus a realistic outlook on the costs and benefits of resource extraction.  If you're interested, by all means read Tainter, but it's kind of dry, and Greer is both entertaining and covers pretty much all of the thought-provoking stuff, minus the academic rigor.  None of this means that Greer's (or Tainter's) predictions are necessarily correct (see above), but it is a useful exercise in examining the unexpected.  If Greer's eccentric religious beliefs concern you, in my opinion he keeps these entirely separate from this and his other books covering environmental issues.  If you're concerned that reading such a book will make you depressed about the future, then I assure you that both Tainter and Greer differentiate between the collapse of an overly-complex system and the future well-being of communities and individuals which make up that system.

Season's Greetings (2021)

My favorite Christmas carol is "Good King Wenceslas".  I very much like the St. Stephen's Day (December 26) tradition of giving to those who are less (materially) fortunate.    

I first remember learning about this carol when reading Susan Cooper's Newberry Award-winning young readers fantasy novel "The Dark is Rising", a fitting read for this time of year as its fictional events take place around the winter solstice.  The best Christmas/holiday movie of all time is, of course, Jim Henson's re-telling of O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi, "Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas".

A seasonal short cinema selection many of you may not have heard of is "Peace on Earth", the classic MGM 1939 animation produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, two of the godfathers of animated film.  It's less than 9 minutes. 

                                                                                           Neil

The Lost Colony of Roanoke: New Evidence 

This documentary follows the discovery by English archeologist Mark Horton and local Hatteras Island, NC historian Scott Dawson of evidence that the Croatoan Indians adopted the survivors of the "lost" Roanoke colony after they were abandoned by England.  Modern American mythology supposes that the relations of European settlers and American Indian nations were always adversarial or at best transactional, such as in the case of King Philip's War.  Likewise it is supposed that American Indians were entirely separate from the founding of "America" despite the clear influence especially of Iroquois political culture on early American political philosophy.  On the contrary, membership in many Indian tribes was based on linguistic and cultural commonality and was not racially exclusive, and early American political theory (and representative republicanism in general) owed a great debt to the governance methods of some of the major American Indian nations.  One of the earliest examples of this is the perverse myth that the "lost colony" of Roanoke was massacred by local Indians in retaliation against English soldiers.  By combining field expertise with local historical knowledge, Horton and Dawson uncovered evidence that the Roanoke colonists were not massacred, but were abandoned by absentee English investors and landlords and were instead peacefully adopted by and integrated into the local Croatoan tribe.  

The Storm Before the Storm

by Mike Duncan 

This was the first book written by the host of the award-winning podcast "The History of Rome".  The book is mostly historical but also follows in the popular tradition of comparing the present day United States to the Republic of Rome.  Of course, the most fitting historical analogy for the Atlanticist Empire is not with Rome but with Carthage, yet Duncan's work is still interesting.

The socioeconomic and cultural significance of food gardening in the Vladimir Region of Russia

by Leonid Sharashkin

Sharashkin's Ph.D. thesis (Missouri) is based on survey data from around 1,100 families and discusses the sustainable gardening methods and cultural norms which have produced this resilient household agriculture sector.  While not everyone will be interested in reading the whole paper, the tables and graphs may be of interest as would skimming the various sections.

From the abstract:

"Russia's family gardens currently produce over half of the country's agricultural output, while using only 6% of agricultural lands in the country. The collective output of family gardeners represents 2.3% of Russia's GDP and over $14 billion worth of products each year. With over 30 million families (approx. two thirds of the Russian population) -- both urban and rural -- owing [sic] a garden-plot, the Russian gardening movement represents what may be the most extensive self-provisioning effort anywhere in the industrially developed world." 

To say that again: more than half the food grown in Russia (and more than that of what's eaten) is grown in family gardens.  The majority of Russian households, urban and rural alike, have gardens which produce a significant amount of the food they eat.  (This includes pretty much all the potatoes eaten in Russia, for example.)  This despite years and years of living under the totalitarian Soviet regime which was explicitly hostile to independent production not controlled by the state.  

What is preventing American households from doing the same?  

So you want to be a farmer...

The following is for rising seniors (the teenagers, not you silver menu crowd), pro-active juniors, or anyone else who might be interested in getting into farming.  If you're smart, conscientious, not afraid of hard work, and want to do something useful and rewarding with your life, you've probably ruled out going to college.  

A career as a small scale farmer is unlikely to be lucrative, but you don't have to take on a crippling amount of non-dischargeable debt to complete a degree for which there are vanishingly few entry level jobs.  Most people enjoy eating food once in a while, and if you are able to produce food you can probably find a market for your farm business.  At least you and your family and friends won't go hungry.  Most Americans aren't all that worried about going hungry, which is weird if you know anything about how the FIRE economy and just-in-time inventory systems work.  Also, you really do not need to own land to start farming.  There is a lot you can do with leasing, and in fact I recommend starting out by just borrowing land for free in exchange for making improvements to it. 

I am therefore going to recommend a reading list if you think you might be interested in getting started in homesteading or farmsteading. These are books of practical knowledge for people who are ready to work hard, not pastoral romances about what a noble profession it is to be covered in dust, sunburned, and thinking longingly of the garden hose you can get a drink out of once you get to the other side of the field.

George Henderson's "Farmer's Progress" is a good book for those thinking about farming for a living.  His books are mostly out of print and difficult to find, but you can request a PDF download link from the Soil and Health Library, which is incorporated in Australia.  Under Australian law, according to the library, it is legal for them to provide copies of such books for personal research purposes; it's up to you to determine if downloading such a copy is legal in your jurisdiction.

"The Farming Ladder" is equally good.  It is the story of how Henderson made a living as a farmer in wartime England by not doing what the Ministry of Agriculture told him to.  When they told all the farmers to grow beef for the army, he kept farming a balanced mix of crops and livestock.  When the country had too much beef and the ministry of Ag begged all farmers to till their pastures and grow wheat, Henderson kept farming a balanced mix of crops and livestock.  In this way he always had something to sell and avoided the boom and bust cycles of farms that stripped out their pasture to grow crops only to desperately try to plant pasture again the next year.