Children

We devote much of our lives to our children, knowing they are what’s left after we’re gone. Many people pay mortgages so they can have a yard to play in, pick homes based on the quality of the schools, plan their holidays around the kids' schedule and we keep themselves healthy to make sure they remain with the kids a good long while.

For most of history, people also taught their children what they needed to know to live – hunting, farming, the family trade – expecting life in their children’s age to be much as theirs had been. For recent generations across much of the world, though, this has changed completely – as the fossil fuel boom transformed the landscape, parents assumed life in the future would be very, very different, and for a while they have been right. Old professions – farmer, cobbler, mason, miller, wright – became mere surnames and vanished from census records. The skills themselves disappeared almost completely, as parents did not pass on what they thought would be obsolete.

Our children might face a world moving in the opposite direction. The world has used more oil every twenty years than in all previous history – and eventually, that number will begin to fall. The number of people on Earth has increased exponentially, but at some point it must also fall, slowly through our will or precipitously through Nature’s. Technology has accelarated and may continue, but there might be less industry to build it, less energy to run it and less money to pay for it.

Most people I talk to -- farmers, construction workers, taxi drivers -- understand that there is an ecological and economic crisis, even if they don't understand all the details. Most people also have children. Yet web sites and publications that discuss the environment or the economy rarely talk about children, and how to train them to deal with the world we anticipate.

It doesn’t help that we’re not sure what to prepare them for. Should we teach them how to write resumes and operate software to thrive in the businesses that exist today, or will they no longer exist a few decades from now? Should we teach them bushcraft skills to survive in the wild, or will those be useless standing in the unemployment line? We could teach them the old skills of farming and village crafts, but we don’t know for certain what crafts will make a comeback – and they would have to practice them while still making a living in the present-day world of suburbs and office complexes, and which does not have a ready market for farriers and cobblers.

The best solution is probably to teach them the broad basics, and let them develop more specialized skills as interest and opportunities allow. We can’t second-guess the world, but we can give them the fundamental knowledge and attitude to react to a wide spectrum of unforeseen events. If you home-school, you can turn these into full courses – but even if you send them to a conventional school, you can continue to teach, talk and explore while making supper, driving or reading bedtime stories.

You could start with cooking. Amazingly, more than half of all Americans don’t cook anything that didn’t come out of a package, and I don’t imagine Ireland is vastly different. Show them how to put meals together with the basic trinity of vegetables, starch and protein. Show them how to sautee onions, blanch beans, sear meat and make salad dressing. They don’t have to become a master chef – they just have to cook healthy things they like.

Introduce them to growing. Let them put beans on wet paper towels and watch them grow into sprouts. Have them plant seeds in a cup, and watch it painstakingly become cress. Take them into the garden with you to look for disease, eliminate pests, trim, weed and propagate.

You could teach them to forage, to pick flowers and shoots from fields in spring and fruits and nuts from trees in the fall. Most kids are fascinated by animals, and even unbidden would hunt for crayfish or snails like Easter eggs.

Show them how to turn one food into another – milk becomes yogurt, fruit can be dried for snacks, vegetables can be pickled. To a child, there are few things more fun than pounding and playing with bread dough. To an adult, there are few things more entertaining than their look of astonishment when you uncover the hidden dough and it’s twice as large as before.

Remember that children find their own routine normal, no matter how we feel about it, and they learn things not because we think they are important, but because we repeat them over and over. Make the lessons into song lyrics, set to some catchy tune they like. Make lessons into a game or a contest.

Read to them. They don’t need to learn computer games at a young age, and they don’t need much television, but they do need to see you reading multiple subjects for pleasure.

If they are school-age, show them how money works. Demonstrate that take-out food can be made more quickly at home, for a fraction of the price. Introduce them to compound interest – lend them money at five percent interest per day, and show them how their debt doubles in a fortnight. Later, when they are old enough to have credit cards and mortgages – if such things exist -- they might remember.

Introduce them cheerfully to the notion that accidents happen, things break and the centre does not hold. It probably won’t happen, and there’s no point worrying, but we’d best know what to do just in case. My four-year-old helped me pack an emergency bag, and we recited like a nursery rhyme the items we needed: If it rains we have ponchos, masks if there’s smoke. This filters the water if pipes ever broke. My daughter did not seem frightened by the thought of an emergency – on the contrary, she seemed more secure in the knowledge that we could handle it.

The older they get, the more they should learn how the world is connected. This new gadget all your friends have – where was it made? What is that country like? How much energy does it take to ship it here? How long does it last? You might not want to introduce them to too much global tragedy too early, of course, but older children might like the opportunity to solve a mystery, and would take more seriously a conclusion they’ve reached on their own. I used to be an investigative reporter, and think everyone should be one, just for a little while – it should be a year-long course for teenagers.

Let them be curious. If they ask you questions whose answer you don’t know, be careful not to dismiss them or make something up -- I know nobody thinks they would ever do it, but we get rushed. Admit you don’t know and look it up, or teach them to do so. Don’t let them accept Wikipedia or Google’s first entry. Demonstrate that there’s nothing wrong with not knowing the answer, and there’s something very right about asking the question.

Bring them along. Let them see you shovel a community garden, shop at a boot sale (garage sale to Americans), split a bulk-food order with co-op members or speak to a neighbourhood meeting, and accept this, too, as a normal thing people do.

Finally, I try to remember that daughter is not a blog I fill with my own thoughts – she has her own interests and will, and her future is as uncertain as the world's. You can influence them as you influence your spouse, but you’re not going to make them into someone they’re not. Luckily, there are uses for every type of personality, and we will need everyone in the years ahead. Try to make your kids understand that too – we’re all in this together.

Photo: The Girl on Lough Derg.

Dublin street

Across from the zoo.

Update

Members of my group, FADA, met Saturday for our Powerdown course, and all of us -- including The Girl -- toured the abandoned car park that is to be our new garden area. We are going to assemble some people this coming weekend to build garden beds, assemble tools and install a water barrel under the drainpipe of the church next door. Between Ireland's rain and the impermeability of the tarmac, we are going to have to plan carefully for drainage -- any suggestions?

Posts will continue to be small for a while, as there is much to do.

We are also starting our food co-op, and will be buying in inexpensive bulk and distributing to the members at cost. Eventually we hope to expand it in several ways -- more products, more members, incorporating food from local gardens, a local currency based on food units -- but this is our first baby step.

Pub in Mountshannon, County Clare

More Good News

We broke ground yesterday for our new home, and demolished the dilapidated trailer in which my parents-in-law had lived for many years.

The Girl

Last night The Girl was adoring her new present, a magnifying glass, and as she crouched and inspected the floor she announced we would be Protectors.

You mean Detectives? I asked. People who solve mysteries?

Yes, De-tec-tives, she said, inspecting bits of leaf on the floor one by one, and finally announcing they must have been left by a leaf-eating monster.

Have you heard of Sherlock Holmes? I said. He was a famous detective in stories, and he carried a magnifying glass.

She loved the name Sherlock Holmes, and as she wanted to be a great detective herself, she said that from now on, "I will be Shamrock Me."

Wavering trees

Many of the trees near the lakeshore do this. I don't know why.

Star Trek and the future of science fiction

I remember a writing course in which we were challenged to create a new character, past and all. Sounds easy enough, and we took turns blurting playful answers to basic attributes.

First name, asked the teacher? “Alastair!” someone shouted. Last name? “MacAlastair!” said someone else, laughing. Lives in? “Um … New Orleans!”

The laughter died away, though, as it became a challenge to keep the story straight. If Alastair MacAlastair had fought in Vietnam, what was he doing in college today? “Uh … he is trying to rebuild his life after prison.” And why was he in prison? Each new fact gave the character added complexity, demanded more answers, reduced our ability to play around. Like life itself, each choice shuts off all others, and making no choice is a choice as well.

I thought of this while watching the new Star Trek movie, which was not Citizen Kane but was a fun day at the show. I especially found it clever that – and I don’t think this is important enough to qualify as a spoiler –that the writers chose to create an “alternative timeline,” bringing the long-beloved characters back to the beginning but jettisoning all previous canon. Batman and James Bond have also done this recently, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other cult franchises followed suit, seeing this as a way out of the corners in which they’ve written themselves.

As science fiction jumped from a fringe genre to blockbuster status in the countercultural era – say, the late 60s to the early 80s – stories that began as B-grade entertainment swelled over their banks. Star Trek, X-Men, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator – each developed near-religious followings whose members saw in these fictions a profundity they occasionally deserved. Each fiction spun off into more and more comics, books, television series and movies, and occasionally languages and commemorative porcelainware. Each simple story grew more and more fractal iterations and an increasingly crowded “universe,” until the creations threatened to collapse under the weight of their own Byzantine mythology.

For a while, the solution was more sequels and spin-offs, and in comics or books this can go on as long as there is an audience to buy them. But movies and television necessitate actors who age, until the Terminator was obviously collecting a pension and the increasingly jowly Enterprise crew kept lumbering back out of retirement. And in any medium, plots must be resolved, characters are killed off and story arcs reach the end of their feasible trajectory, leaving sequels feeling increasingly strained.

Jumping far ahead in time is also a possibility, as Star Trek did well with the Next Generation and the original Battlestar Galactica did badly with Galactica: 1980. Star Wars could have done this and spared fans much pain. Not all stories are suited to such a leap, however – Doctor Who already jumps around in time, X-Men would have to become a show about the future rather than the present, and the last two Terminator movies implicitly declared the heroism in T2 to have been in vain.

Prequels are an obvious alternative, keeping the characters and universe fresh while leaving room for new stories. But Star Trek: Enterprise, the Star Wars prequels and the recent X-Men: Wolverine movie all suffered from the same problem: how to make all these characters meet before they met and save the universe together, while also ensuring they got amnesia, were blindfolded during the action, or never left behind records of anything. It’s also just not that interesting writing a story with a foregone conclusion. As David Wong wrote in Cracked magazine, “The universe gets smaller as we find out that every page of history contains the same dozen names.”

Prequels have an additional problem: at the same time that the fictional world has gone backwards, the real world has gone forwards. The original Star Trek’s primitive special effects, heavy-handed social allegory, mini-skirted assistants and sexually irresponsible captain fit well in prime time in 1966; the 2000 prequel series never felt like it was happening earlier.

The most logical solution to all this, then, is the reboot. Batman, James Bond, Battlestar Galactica and now Star Trek have revived venerated characters and story with modern special effects and fresh actors. Writers get the best of both worlds: an already-familiar history from which to draw plot, along with the license to ignore it. Nods to the mythology can please fans, but embarrassing aspects of the original can be discarded. People who remember the original Battlestar Galactica can easily re-invest their emotion in the familiar quest for Earth, but Earth can be anything this time. Kirk and Spock’s understood relationship makes their first meeting momentous, but no one has to worry that it violates the canon of novel 23 back in 1979.

Even if other sci-fi franchises do reboot, though, it will be interesting to see what their universe will look like. Much of science fiction has been a product of its time looking much more like the year it was made than the year it is set; again, Star Trek may have been set in the 23rd century, but its sets, dialogue, costumes, score, villains and exaggerated play-fighting looked very much like 1966 Westerns or cop shows. (Relating to the title of this blog, they even used the set of Mayberry, with some tumbleweeds added, for a post-apocalyptic wasteland.)

Similarly, the original Star Wars was wildly popular partly because it hit all the right notes of 1977: young rebellion against the Man, plucky female characters, pseudo-Oriental wisdom -- and whole sections of plot and dialogue lifted from Westerns, a genre whose recent demise had left a hole in popular culture. (That scene where Luke realizes his parents are in danger? Lifted line-by-line from The Searchers.) At the same time, it did things no science fiction had ever done: it was fun, had great special effects and presented a dented, lived-in world instead of the usual spires and togas. The prequels failed partly because they kept all the wrong things: they abandoned the fun story and grimy world, but the outdated kung-fu mysticism remained, grandfathered into the mythology like Star Trek’s Cold War allegories or Clark Kent’s fedora.

Science fiction has done this for a century, extrapolating the burning headlines of the moment and offering earnest writers a soapbox. But the whole genre is rooted in changing technology -- it wouldn’t really have been possible until the last few centuries, when people could expect the future to be radically different than the past. Not coincidentally, science fiction arose as technology began to boom about a century ago, when a critical mass of people began to abandon traditional lives and skills for a crowded and frenetic urban life. Its popularity really took off in the 1960s, when consumption went into overdrive and the global energy use curve took a much steeper angle. The more rapidly society changed, the more popular sci-fi became.

But what happens when we begin to slide down the other side of the energy curve? (You knew I would get to this sooner or later.) In the next few decades we will not only not see the economy recover to what it was, we might have to rethink what “economy” means. We might experience more natural disasters until we consider them normal. We might see fuel problems increase until more and more people give up trying to get petrol.

What form will science fiction take? Movies, television and YouTube will be in trouble eventually as energy becomes scarce, but they won’t go anywhere in the next few decades -- although they might be available to fewer people. Science fiction fills the top-grossing movie lists and whole sections of the bookstore, and probably won’t go away either. But what would it look like? If it predicts a future of small farms and small towns -- like, say, Mayberry - is it science fiction anymore?

Almost all Hollywood futures fall into one of two types: the one in which most people are more prosperous, better-educated and nicer than today, surrounded by wondrous technology in starships or domed cities; and the one in which most people are eating rats out of the gutter and fighting a desperate battle to stay alive during the End of the World.

As John Michael Greer has pointed out, most people seem to believe that we will progress until we ascend as supermen to the stars, or that disaster is about to weed out the unworthy. Either way, it’s a kind of religious belief that comes directly out of Christianity –the belief that we will improve ourselves until we ascend to God, and the idea that Judgement Day will cleanse the world.

To be more specific, these are roughly the futures of two main strains of apocalyptic Christianity, called post-millennialist and pre-millennialist to their friends. To grossly over-generalise, post-millennialists believe that Christians will gradually transform the world until the Kingdom of God is established here. It can take a healthy form, like the reformers who sought to end slavery or establish labour laws, or it can take the uglier form of radicals who want to create a Shia-like theocracy in the USA, but either way, it demands that Christians change the present and create a “better” future before we ascend.

Pre-millennialists tend to believe that the world is going south fast and will be destroyed soon, with a few believers saved – either uploaded to heaven in the post-60s “Rapture” religion, or by surviving the coming Tribulation.

During the mid-20th century, as energy use skyrocketed exponentially, science fiction was definitely post-millennialist – the world was getting better and better, and soon – 1980, 1990, 2020, whatever – we would ascend to the stars as superior beings. In the 1970s, though, social unrest, oil shocks and recession darkened the global mood, and issues like overpopulation, pollution and the limits to growth percolated into the public consciousness. Also – and this was probably both cause and effect -- the pre-millennialist Rapture movement spread through Christianity, popularizing the imminent end.

Not coincidentally, science fiction got dark, dystopian and pre-millennialist fast – only a few years separate 2001: A Space Odyssey from Soylent Green. Star Wars had a few hopeful moments but didn’t predict any future – it happened “a long time ago,” remember – and most other science fiction of my generation has foreseen desperation and despair around the corner. Alien, Resident Evil, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later – they all involve everyone dying horribly except for a few survivors whose future is uncertain, and each new film boosts the death rate further.

With one exception: Star Trek. Created at the tail end of the utopian-future era, it has lingered and flourished even through decades of holocaust porn – perhaps this is the reason for its famously devoted following in a cynical age. Its vision has been diluted somewhat from Gene Roddenberry’s creation, but it continues to show a world without corporations, without poverty, without class, without even fashions. I wouldn’t choose Roddenberry’s vision of one-world socialist government to get there myself, but I’m completely behind the ideals.

As the world enters an era far more difficult than the 1970s, science fiction might lunge even further into grim survivalist epics, but – and I’m afraid to even ask this – how much darker and bloodier can they get?

On the other hand, when a crisis begins, the public mood does not always go south – sometimes, as when World War II began, people pull together in common cause, more hopeful than they would be in a time of hedonism. Movies made during the Wall Street boom of the 1920s leaned toward tragedy, and the science fiction of the time towards dystopias. Only when the Great Depression and World War II began, and the world was plunged into darkness, did people find the future hopeful and holy again. As we enter what may be the greatest crisis, Star Trek’s optimism might have reached right across the decades to find its moment again.

Of course, that optimism assumed that we would ascend to the stars soon, and now it seems we won’t. But we can still enjoy the mythology even after it has slipped the surly bonds of expectation, just as we can enjoy Lord of the Rings even if we don’t believe there were ever elves. We can love it as a fantasy, whether or not we remember that, once, it was what the future was like.

Castle near Tuamgraney

Quick poll

I have become almost accustomed to screaming economic headlines, about this country as well as the USA and others, and of course they generate much conversation. But the world looks much the same here on the ground, with only bits and pieces of change. How is your place looking these days? Does it feel like a depression or crisis, or does it feel much the same?

Feel free to respond publicly or privately, as you see fit.

Morning in the woods

Good news

As of today, my group has official use of a plot in the middle of town, right behind the town hall, to turn into a community garden.

Bluebells

Each spring here sees a remarkable sprouting of indigo across the woods: bluebells, which bloom profusely until the overhanging leaves grow back in full, and the forest floor grows dark again. Other places in the world see such an annual blossoming, but few have such uniformity, for a simple reason.

As glaciers a mile deep retreated from Ireland and plants and animals migrated up the the exposed land -- tundra, then conifers, then the cold rainforest that remained until humans -- the sea flooded in, cutting off England from the continent and Ireland from England. So England wound up with fewer plants and animals than the continent, and Ireland even less. Surprising as it sounds, rabbits and fallow deer are not native to either island -- they were brought by Normans less than a millennia ago. Red deer and roe deer made it to England, but the latter never reached Ireland. Neither, of course, did snakes.

Plants did the same: only some of the Continent's variety worked its way across the warming land before an ocean rushed in. The bluebells were one of the ones that made it.

Blacksmithing

If you want to spend a few days surrounded by scenic landscape, you could do worse than Bealkelly Wood in County Clare, Ireland. There, decades ago, an old survivalist bought land at the edge of Lough Derg, planted trees and maintained the forest, and still lives off the land today – and occasionally greets a hundred or so guests.

The land is now the site where the non-profit CELT– Centre for Environmental Living and Training – hosts courses in fishing, smithing, carving, stone building and many other traditional crafts. This past weekend, our whole family journeyed across the island to one of these events, and everyone took a different course -- my wife took copper-smithing, my mother-in-law wood carving, The Girl played with other children in a central area in view of all of us – and I tried my hand at blacksmithing.

You don’t become an expert blacksmith in a couple of days, of course, but the class bestowed the basic information and a little experience. Two very patient smiths worked with myself and three other students, walking us through the basics, correcting us and stepping in when we went wrong, until we each came away with some hand-crafted work.

In movies blacksmiths look like WWF wrestlers, dramatically slamming white-hot metal with sledgehammers. Our experience was different – a plate-sized fire, small tools and frantic tapping. The forge was an old metal hubcap, with small holes drilled in the middle, standing on a metal pipe. At the other end of the pipe was a hand-cranked blower – I don’t know what it was originally, but the smith said you could substitute the metal fan from an old Electrolux vacuum.

Our elderly teacher began each day by lighting a small fire in the middle of the hubcap, right over the holes. Once the fire was going, he placed charcoal delicately over it, and then a ring of coal around the charcoal, and the crank fan blew air through the middle to keep the fire hot. Iron-working only appeared in the last 5,000 years or so – the final 0.3 percent of the time humans have had fire – because ordinary wood fire does not heat iron enough to work, and large amounts of charcoal and air are needed. The coal, I was told, helps the fire continue but is not necessary.

The four of us quickly learned that you need to spend a great deal of time standing over the fire, with the metal part in just the right place – in the middle, above the blower and slightly buried in charcoal – to get the right temperature. Too little heat, of course, and the metal cannot be worked, but too much and it begins to “burn,” liquefying and deforming. A lot depends on the size of the metal piece – the tractor axel we put in took ages to heat, but I accidentally burned off the tines of my fork in short order.

Once the metal was glowing orange, we had to rapidly move it to the anvil without yanking it out and sending hot coals everywhere, and without burning the people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you. Once at the anvil you had only several seconds of BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM ... until it was black and solid again.

Also useful are steel vices (vises to Americans) and hefty pliers, which allowed us to grip metal while turning it – hence the twist in the fork handle. None of us wore gloves, but leather aprons and goggles were recommended against flying sparks and coals.

In the end we came away with two roasting forks – one made by me, the other won in a raffle – and a horseshoe that I’m not including in a picture. I was supposed to shape it into the head of a horse, but mine looks more like a praying mantis.:-)

Blacksmithing is one of the dozens of professions that were widespread until just the last century, now is kept alive only by a few aficionados. For thousands of years in metalworking cultures, smiths were a vital and respected role – look how common it is as a surname today. They might become vital again if the coming decades bring the turmoil we anticipate. With charcoal and tools, a smith could turn landfill scrap and old car parts into useful tools again – and as far as I know, there is no end to the number of times metal can be recycled.

When the world is no longer able to mass-produce new materials at its former rate, when there is no new plastic and fewer forests, we will have billions of tons of landfill waste. Movies like WALL-E posit garbage covering the Earth, but in real life much of that garbage would not only be reusable, but precious. Some of it will be metal – the U.S. alone will have a car for every person, and a few decades from now few of those cars will be driving. The Chinese are doing their best to buy up all this precious resource from U.S. junk dealers, along with the plastic we might need again, but hopefully enough landfills will remain to become mines.

Some of my favourite books as a teenager were Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, about human cultures scattered across space in the far future. In the pivotal novel of the series the prescient leader gradually transforms the titular desert planet into lush greenery, its Bedouin-style inhabitants, called “Fremen,” into farmers. He bids a small minority of them, however, to live in the one remaining desert as Museum Fremen, keeping the old traditions alive. He is the only one who knows that the planetary transformation is only temporary, that someday the land will become desert again, and the Museum Fremen can teach the others how to live. Weekends like this allow us to become museum people, accumulating the knowledge that our children might need.

Top photo: The fire, with a tractor axel in it. Bottom photo: the forks.

On Day

As I came home from work today, my four-year-old leaped on my back and announced it was “On Day” – she would not touch the floor itself, but would instead jump from couch to Papa to a pillow on the floor, always on something. The Girl has spoken.

She had fun with this for hours, until Papa decreed she had to be On Her Bed.

Photo: The Girl on the shore of Lough Derg this weekend.

FADA Update

My organisation, FADA, has kept me busy lately. We are working on a new web site, which I hope to show off as soon as I write content. As of this week, we have approval for the town garden that our members have worked on for so long.

We are offering “Powerdown” classes every Saturday in a rented room above a pub on the banks of the River Liffey, and I have been attending as a participant or, occasionally, as an instructor when they need someone to fill in. The DVD and course – the basics of peak oil, climate change and sustainable living -- were designed by the Dublin non-profit Cultivate, and our hope is that everyone who takes it will be able to copy the DVD and exercises, give them to their neighbours in their own communities, who can give them to their neighbours.

I’m still writing my column for the local newspaper every week, and recently wrote articles for the local Catholic magazines and the local Chamber of Commerce newsletter. The Catholic articles were mainly about how parishioners can cope with the current crisis, and why traditional community is so desperately needed.
The Chamber of Commerce article introduced the group to our initiatives – community festivals, gardens, farmers’ markets, talks, courses – as well as things we haven’t had the time or resources to do yet, like a local currency and stock market. Things that maybe a Chamber of Commerce could help with ...

Early on we created an ambitious three-year plan, now just expired, and we met Monday to create a new one. I confess impatience with vision statements and long-term agendas – I spent enough time on them in doomed third parties and non-profits. My ideal would be to see what needs doing here now and do it, with as little need for Roberts’ Rules of Order as possible. Still, plans must be made, views heard and conflicts hashed out – so we hashed until we had blessed resolution.

I recently did a half-hour radio interview on County Kildare’s main radio station – the ostensible subject was community gardens, something my group is trying to promote, but the sympathetic host and I touched on many related issues. Without sounding apocalyptic – I hope – I gave a bullet-point rundown of issues like peak oil, climate change, the economy, the self-reliance of communities past, and our good fortune in being in a position to combine the best of past and present.

As I promoted the self-reliance aspect of allotments, the host asked about the recession, an understandable preoccupation here. We talked a lot about what the future might hold, and without (I think) sounding apocalyptic I ran through the dilemmas we face. We have come to rely on a global network of strangers: arcane finance, foreign agriculture, Third-World manufacturing and a bloodstream of trucks and ships. Our local farmers cannot compete with agribusiness in Brazil, our local factories close cannot compete with Third World slave labour, and when Wall Street bankers fail, so do many of us.

I don’t know how it is on the ground anywhere but here, but I can imagine how the recession must feel back in my native USA. In my 30-odd-year lifetime my country has come down from its 1960s peak of economic boom, civic activism, community and public optimism, through a series of recessions, not-quite-recoveries and unpopular wars. Oil shocks hit my car-dependent homeland hard, neighbourhoods and families have grown more estranged, real wealth has stagnated and more and more people have come to rely on the hypothetical wealth of equity and stocks. The recent news – the revelation that those chickens would never hatch -- must come as a frightening blow after decades of insidious decline.

Here in Ireland the recession has a different flavour – the Irish have never been prosperous in modern times until just the last decade, when foreign investment turned this picturesque agrariana into a high roller. GDP per capita from one of Europe’s lowest to one of its highest, land prices increased several-fold in our region, and Ireland actually received floods of poor immigrants. But the Irish had mixed feelings about the transformation, and never expected it to last.

I said on the show what I wrote a few posts ago, however -- Irish, Americans and most Westerners are still wealthy by the standards of the recent past or the Third World. Irish are better suited for lean times than many Americans, having lived through them in living memory. I emphasized that we should be able to restore the best of the past and retain the best of the present, and that rather than trying to shore up banks and jobs we can restore the community networks and skills we will need.

The show was well received by the host and, judging from the messages, the audience. I'm told I'll be asked back.

Lough Derg

Seen from the top of a hill in County Clare this past weekend. That town in the distance is really two towns, Ballina and Killaloe, with a long stone bridge between them.

The Girl

I usually try to post once a day, but that's been shot all to heck in the last month; I'll try to be more regular next week. This weekend we are travelling to County Clare, where I'll be taking a course in blacksmithing.

The Girl wanted her hair cut short, answering objections with a solemn "It's my hair." Fair enough, I said -- she just wanted a bob cut, no blue mohawks -- and she was very pleased with it (photo pre-cut). I told her it looks beautiful -- a bit like Louise Brooks.

"Who is Luis Book?" she asked.

She was a movie star with hair like that, almost a hundred years ago, I said.

"What's a movie star?"

Somebody who was in movies, like on the telly or on computer. Groucho was a movie star -- but your hair is much better.

She went off to play, very pleased with herself. "I am a book-star," she said.

I'm glad I didn't compare it to Prince Valiant's hair -- that would have been a long conversation for this former reporter.

"Who is Prince Valiant?"

It's a comic strip about one of King Arthur's knights.

"What's a comic strip?"

They were cartoon pictures that told stories in the newspaper.

"What's a newspaper?"

The Future of Ireland

A couple of days ago I did a radio interview here, talking about -- among other things -- whether Ireland was too consumerist. Today, Rod Dreher pointed me to Christopher Caldwell's article in the Weekly Standard on the same theme.

While I was fairly positive about my adopted country, though, Caldwell paints a harsh portrait --an Ireland that has turned its back on its culture, has lost itself in hedonism, and has been hit by Europe's worst economic collapse. An excerpt:

Over the last 20 years, Ireland found riches a good substitute for its traditional culture. But now the country has been harder hit by the financial downturn than any country in Western Europe. We may be about to discover what happens when a traditionally poor country returns to poverty without its culture.

And that was before this morning's news: the Obama administration plans to discourage U.S. companies from investing in tax havens, and that's a major source of national revenue.

But things don’t look nearly so apocalyptic on the ground here, as I wrote in Rod's comments. Maybe it's just that we've been preparing for so much worse, but life doesn't look very bad or very different to me. Buses and trains have not stopped, banks have not closed, most people are working the same jobs, zombies are not roaming the streets and we've just been approved for a mortgage.

Things could always get worse, of course, but the Irish seem better prepared than most Westerners. They’ve experienced hardship within the lifetimes of most people still living – electricity and plumbing were new and not universal in the 1970s – whereas only the most elderly Americans remember such times. Few Irish expected the window of flagrant prosperity to last long, and are not indignant at the loss of entitlement. They have always been cosmopolitan even in their poverty, with cousins in distant lands, and while many came home during the Celtic Tiger, many are prepared to migrate again.

Most Irish remember their former poverty with less sentiment than those who did not live through it, but also have mixed feelings about the recent window of prosperity. Many think the country has lost some of its old tradition and community, but that recognition is a good start, and such things can be restored. Some lament their own alleged consumerism, but per capita consumption and waste remains far below that of the U.S.

The boom did multiply housing prices here, but now houses are growing affordable again. The Catholic-Protestant “Troubles” in the North largely ended a decade ago, the recent shooting a rare exception decried by both communities. Caldwell seems alarmed by Ireland’s “liberal” environmental policies, but they are moving the country a step closer to energy self-reliance.

Public transportation is widespread here – which may seem like a small thing, but in our rural area it means that people are not stranded in their homes. Pre-globalisation ways of life, like horse-drawn carriages and thatch roofs, still exist in places, common enough that they could be widely re-adopted. There is a widespread movement to deal with the Long Emergency – my group, Transition Towns and others – trying to combine ecological knowledge with the traditional skills that here, more than most places, have been kept alive.

Top photo: New office park near our home, never occupied.

Bottom photo: The view from our bedroom window.

The girl in the meadow