New Year's Resolutions for a novice subversive

Woodie Guthrie's New Years Rulin's for 1942

I'm not a big resolution maker - even less a resolution keeper, but I thought I would share some of my resolutions this year. While looking for an image for this post, I found this excerpt from Woodie Guthrie's notebook. It turns out that Woodie and I have a lot of overlap in our resolution lists except that I'm already pretty good at number 3 - "Wash teeth if any" so I left it off mine. Here are some others:

1. We've been using credit cards for practically every purchase for years, but this year I'd like to stop giving the credit card company a cut of every transaction. I'm pretty addicted to the convenience, but I'd rather not enrich a huge corporation while at the same time giving them all kinds of information about my spending.

2. On the same theme, this year I'm going to seek out places to do business where credit cards aren't even an option - the farmer's market, freecycle, the local classifieds, the local charity shop etc. I'll be looking for opportunities to support the underground economy through buying used and super-local. I admit, I've been a bit of a tax snob in the past: saying I didn't mind paying taxes because I appreciated the services we received, but now I'm so disgusted with how the government spends money that I will do my best to ensure they don't get any more of my pennies than strictly necessary.

3. I will work harder to grow, prepare and eat local food. This is really a no brainer and there's always room for improvement. I really want to increase the number of calories I produce.  I'm planning to grow a lot more potatoes.

4. I'm going to use my bike a lot more this year. I take the car to run errands because it is easier than riding and it's hard to carry groceries on a bike - but that's a problem that others have solved so not a very good excuse.

I could sum up all of my resolutions in one: I'm going to think a lot more about who benefits and who gets hurt from my activities. And I'm going to be less likely to do something if the one who benefits is a shareholder of a corporation or the one who pays is someone in a sweatshop or someone drinking polluted water or someone vulnerable to extreme weather or someone not yet born. Or, as Woodie so eloquently put it: "Wake up and fight".  This is the year of more undermining and less enabling the incredibly damaging industrial capitalist system we've been told is the only way.

Here's to a happy and rebellious 2012!

Monday Forest photo: December 26, 2011

2:00pm 1C overcast

It's looking very festive here in Monday Forest. We got several centimetres of snow yesterday, which made for a very pretty Christmas Day, and warmed even my grinchy, several-sizes-too-small heart.

The forest was alive with the song of several dozen robins, along with some chickadees, nuthatches and  a downy woodpecker. I don't recall seeing a robin at this time of year or this many robins congregated ever.

Longest night

In three hours the northern hemisphere will tilt as far away from the sun as it will get for the year. What a relief. The days will start gradually, but inevitably, to get longer, and the sun will rise higher in the sky every day.

I think I prefer the traditional name midwinter, rather than referring to this as the first day of winter, as we do now. The solstice marks such a turning point and in a few weeks the sun will start behaving much more spring-like, even if the temperatures don't. Mind you, with the weather we've had recently, we've no business calling this midwinter - the freezing rain today is really the first serious weather of the season.

Monday Forest photo: December 19, 2011

2:00pm 5C overcast

Still no snow here in Monday Forest. We had some pretty cold weather over the weekend and the pond froze hard enough for me to walk on it, but with temperatures well above freezing again, there will be no skating for a while.

Meg found something pretty interesting on our walk today, which you may not want to look at if you are squeamish. I think it is the remains of a mourning dove, though I stand to be corrected. It looks a little angelic.

DIY economic collapse: no computer hacking or explosive skills required

Some guys living in a shack in the Don Valley in Toronto during the Great Depression. They look a lot better off than the modern homeless ravine dwellers. They have teacups and books.

In my last non-housekeeping or forest photo post, I talked about the brutal truth about climate change. That if we are to limit global warming to 4C (a most dangerous level, but the lowest practical increase from where we already are), we (the world) have to level off carbon emissions soon, then drop them quickly to zero (by about 2050 or sooner). Given the huge inequities in current carbon emissions and the fact that we cannot trust governments to do the right thing, we the people are just going to have to take matters into our own hands. The only thing that has ever resulted in significant year over year reductions in carbon emissions is the fall of the Soviet Union. Therefore, I propose that anyone who is genuinely concerned about the well-being of people in poorer countries in the short term, and their own children and grandchildren in the medium and long term, should be actively working to collapse the current financial system. 

Which is, of course, the argument that conservatives have been using to avoid doing anything. It's just that they love money more than poor people or their grandchildren. And many of them are counting on being raptured before things get too warm anyway. And to supporters of any other political party - we're not going to have a prosperous, green economy, and I wish you'd stop pretending we can.

The current financial system looks ready to collapse under its own weight without any extra help from me, but I'm a pessimist by nature, and I'm not prepared to leave such things to chance. The first thing is to question some basic assumptions about how things ought to be. Like, annual economic growth of 1 - 3% is necessary and good.  Actually, annual economic growth is incompatible with a liveable planet for our kids and grandkids. The conservatives are right - reducing carbon emissions will hurt the economy, but luckily, a collapsing economy will reduce emissions. 

So, what to do. The greenest thing I ever did was quit my high paying job. Our family income dropped by more than half, and so did our spending. Canada's GDP went down accordingly. I could write a book on why I think most families should only have a maximum of one full time job each, but for the purposes of crashing the economy, the drop in family incomes and resultant spending would go a long ways. Why do I suggest quitting your job rather than just spending less? Well, for one thing, I know from experience that you are pretty much guaranteed to spend everything you make plus a little. Even if you save half your income, you have to put it somewhere, and unless it is under your mattress, it's going to be fuelling economic growth in some way. So from an anti-economic perspective it makes a lot more sense to not earn it in the first place. This also results in much lower income tax, which reduces government revenue that will eventually enter the economy.

Please don't have any more kids.  I honestly don't think that if I'd known fifteen years ago what I know now, that I would be a mom today. That would be a terrible loss for me, but my kid, like yours if you're reading this blog, has a much higher carbon footprint than the global average. We don't have enough time to reduce the world's population enough to solve our climate problems, but we can certainly work at preventing the population problem from getting worse. Besides, what sort of world would you be bringing those kids into?

Pay down debt as fast as possible, or default on it entirely. Repaid or defaulted debt takes money out of circulation and frees you from wage slavery. Debt has been the foundation of most of the world's economic growth for the last few years, so whatever you do, don't take on more.

There are major benefits of choosing a low income lifestyle. A perk of voluntarily reducing income is that having less money automatically causes you to question all forms of consumption, and you quite naturally come to the conclusion that you don't need nearly what you thought you did when you had more. All those little decisions you might have had to make about whether or not to spend money on something or other are pretty much made for you, when you don't have much to spare. It's easier to take care of a smaller house and less stuff. Family life is very pleasant indeed when everyone is not always in a rush to get to work and childcare and endless activities. The main advantage to living on less now, though, is that it is pretty much inevitable, with the approaching crises of climate, finance and energy, that very few of  us (save the usual suspects) will be more prosperous in the future than we are now. We might as well get used to living simply, so that our expectations lead rather than trail our circumstances. 

Blog housekeeping note

Yesterday I noticed that if you tried to access my blog with Chrome, you got a security message saying my site contained content from another site (that I didn't recognize) which is infected. Safari and Firefox did not raise any alarms.

I removed the blogroll, and I no longer receive the security message, so I'm assuming something in it was causing the problem. When I have some time, I'll try to find the specific link that was the problem, but in the meantime, no blogroll. Which is too bad, because I like linking to blog friends and other interesting sites.

I only recently started using Chrome because Madeleine said it was faster - which I haven't observed, but I may switch over to Chrome for it's security-mindedness.

Monday Forest photo: December 12, 2011

11:45am 5C sunny

Today was a lovely, mild day. The tiny bit of snow that is still on the ground is melting, and the birds are singing and it doesn't seem like winter at all.

It was a lot wintrier last week but still not very snowy. This was the view off the back deck.

Oh, and I know I promised my tips for bringing down the economy - sorry. Next post.