Country life

As I may have mentioned from time to time, I live in a small town, a farming community. Like a lot of people here, I heat my house with wood. We do it because we can, basically. There are only three retail businesses in town: a liquor store, a seamstress (yes) and a chainsaw shop.

 

In my case, between my own wooded property, and my neighbor who owns extensive forest land and is constantly having trees fall down across his roads, I get all the firewood I need by dint of my own efforts.  I pretty much exclusively rely on deadfall, unless for some reason we're removing a tree anyway, so I'm not angering the ents. It does cost money, between patronizing the chainshaw shop, fueling and maintaining my tractor and log splitter, and having the chimney cleaned every year. It's somewhat cheaper than fossil fueled alternatives, but the main benefit is that I don't have to pay gym fees. Harvesting and processing firewood is my main form of exercise.

That's all well and good for us country folk, but it doesn't work in the cities, and therefore it doesn't work for 90% of the population. In addition to the problem of wood supply, the concentration of smoke would be a major public health problem. Out here, the chimneys are far enough apart that the smoke dissipates before it can bother anyone, and our air is actually a lot cleaner than city air that's full of automobile exhaust and smoke from oil burners. We also can buy most of our produce from the local farmers markets during the season, and some products -- eggs, salad greens, and meat if you're into it -- are available year round. Many people who aren't in the farming business do have big gardens (that includes me) and they preserve much of what they grow for the winter. It's peaceful and all the green space is good for the psyche.

However, like it or not, for the current human population to survive and our civilization to work, most people have to live in cities, and the kind of self-sufficiency that's possible in the country is just not happening in the city. We are totally dependent on a worldwide network of trade of such complexity that nobody really understands it. Somewhere there may be a thread to pull that unravels the whole thing. Closing the port of Baltimore for a few months won't bring it all down -- there's a lot of resiliency built in. But the Covid pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine -- which is actually a very small country -- put a lot of strain on the global network and people are still feeling stress from the higher prices they have to pay for basic needs. (That's why, obviously, not because of anything Joe Biden did.)

 

I'm not a doomsday prepper but I do think we need to reconfigure the economy to limit interdependence. There has to be more local and regional self-sufficiency, and alternatives to the web of interdependency in case things go wrong. One consequence of globalization was that it put a lot of people in Ohio out of work, and now they're alienated and angry. We need to do it differently.