Like a storm overhead

Thursday morning it began. In the wet darkness before dawn I rode from our rural home to my day job in Dublin, listening to news on the bus speakers – a team of international financial experts had flown in to meet government leaders, and reporters demanded to know why. Six days of revelations later we have a bankrupt economy, a bailout that could top a hundred billion euros, a broken government coalition, a new planned election and a severe emergency budget. And yet everything looks the same.

That morning I felt worn out from the previous day’s work. I had taken a day off work to borrow a friends’ trailer and pick up straw bales from farmer near Maynooth, as he was the only farmer I could find that still makes the human-sized bales, now that everything is done with machinery. I wanted to stack the bales into a night soil composter, seeing if I could get the right carbon and nitrogen ratios to create the high temperatures needed to kill off pathogens.

I also took our old refrigerator to the dump – I wanted to make it into an underground cold-box, but couldn’t find someone to drain the Freon from the tubes in back, and didn’t want the chemicals seeping into the groundwater. Finally, I loaded up the trailer with mulch from the pile where the county shreds its Christmas trees, and spread it between our garden beds.

On Friday our bank admitted that its value had dropped from a high of 22 billion down to 300 million – a decline of 98.4 percent. We are withdrawing most of our money until this passes, and stocking up on more food and propane than usual. I absorbed the news riding home in the darkness, writing a letter to a local teacher – my non-profit is working with a local school to get teenagers to interview elderly residents, collecting information on the skills and resources people here had a few decades ago.

Saturday marked an emergency meeting of the government, we heard as we went to the Farmers’ Market. Later that day my Girl rode her horse around the pen under a grey winter sky, with our neighbour’s daughter the same age. The Girl took her first bad fall off a horse a few weeks ago, and I told her how proud I was that she was riding again. Today, her friend fell the same way, and while I ran in and carried her to her car, she was also shaken but unharmed.

Sunday we all listened to news pundits speculate on the IMF loan, and all agreed it would mean higher taxes and less money for health and education. But no one really knew.

For me, though, Sunday was the day I ringed the row of lilandia evergreens that border our property. My father-in-law planted them twenty years ago, and while I have taken some down with a chainsaw, we realised that the barbed-wire fence behind the trees – the only thing separating our garden from dozens of hungry cows in winter – is getting old and easily broken. We think the cows recognise the rows of trees as a barrier, and that cutting them down now would encourage them to push through the barbed wire. At the same time, we need their roots to stop taking nutrients from the soil so we can plant native fruit and nut trees. My solution was to chop the bark off all the way around the base of the tree, killing it without felling it, and we can fell them at our leisure later this winter.

Sunday my wife and mother-in-law also placed cloches over our raised garden beds, and draped fleece over them to keep the frost out. Finally, The Girl and I planted a rowan sapling in the hedgerow by the canal, filling a gap behind our rows of loganberries and raspberries.

Monday morning my mother-in-law woke me even earlier than usual, so I could kill a mouse. He crept in the warm house one day, hopefully when we left the door open, and for weeks had left our mousetraps devoid of their peanut butter but unsprung. Finally my mother-in-law reached to get the cat’s food and the mouse jumped up at her. It was very considerate of him to wait for me in the plastic bag, and I made sure the cat was fed.

That day the government split apart. For a few years now the Green Party had ruled in uneasy coalition with Fianna Fail (rhymes with tall, but looks like a bad pun), perhaps Ireland’s equivalent of the Republican Party, and with a few independents they form a ruling coalition. Since the Greens had to concede a great deal of their platform to compromise, they have been a few years of continual controversy. With the onset of the bailout they announced they were washing their hands of the coalition, effectively a vote of no confidence in their senior partner. Their actions force a general election early next year, and everyone takes for granted that this is the end of Fianna Fail’s long dominance.

That night The Girl and I watched one of her favourite programmes, the documentaries of David Attenborough. We read about trilobites and velvet worms, and then I let her watch the Marx Brothers make jokes about the Depression.

On Tuesday, the offices of at least two TDs – like MPs in Britain, or Congress members in the USA – were vandalised. After centuries of being among the world’s most famous victims of poverty, the Irish had experienced one of the world’s most remarkable economic booms, the Celtic Tiger. For a magical few years, the population of some villages quadrupled, and land values increased more than that. Hundreds of thousands of Irish built new homes, including us. The natives here were intensely proud of becoming an economic powerhouse, and while most expected that it would end, few expected it to implode so spectacularly.

On Wednesday the government announced its new budget, increasing taxes and tariffs and cutting social services. That day I met The Girl’s teacher for the annual parent-teacher conference, and bought new socks for the winter – Ireland saw an unusual cold snap last winter, and climate change experts say we could get more in the coming years.

We took off work for Thanksgiving – of course it is an ordinary day for everyone else here, but I am an American and wanted to honour it. I am grateful for the life we have, and for our great fortune.

This is what the Long Emergency feels like. It feels like screaming headlines and breaking-news interruptions and haggard pedestrians and foul moods at the office. It feels, for a while, like the end of the world. But while it happens there is still birdsong and rustling leaves, frost across the fields and fog at twilight. It feels like a storm overhead and far away, thrilling and mournful and dangerous, and we scramble to take shelter from it. It can kill many people and destroy our plans, but then it passes, and the landscape looks much the same.

It will happen to you too sometime. Maybe your money will be worthless one day, having gone from work to wealth to metal to paper to stocks to derivatives, into a realm of such abstraction that it blows away on the next breeze. Maybe all the jobs in your city will disappear one by one, the young people migrating in caravans to rumours of work far away. Maybe the electricity will go off more and more often, or the store shelves will slowly go empty. Maybe people around you, fed stories of apocalypse for two generations, will think it the end of the world.

But we can’t do anything about it. That’s something that many of us, raised on fictional stories in which people change the world, cannot accept – real things are slow, last longer than our lives, and are out of our control. People have immense power – we have scoured the surface of the planet like a forest fire, created cities that rise like mountains from the shore, and set events rolling that will not dissipate for millions of years. But as a person, each of us has very little ability to change anything.

And this is the good news about the day the world ends -- it never comes, or if it does it's like any other day. It looks like a day thick with things to do – animals to be fed, bedtime stories to read and chores that don’t wait for the next news report. For those eagerly anticipating the Rapture or the Singularity or the 2012 whatever, this is the bad news – nothing will reboot your life and take away your problems.

And after the storm passes, a few things that are forever changed, and we become accustomed to them. Soon we joke casually about the events that we feared -- the terrorist attack, devaluation, election, outage or shortage – and accept it, and forget that anything else was ever normal.

Until the next end of the world.

Public transportation 3: Horse Power

Horses and carriages clop past my Dublin office every day, and while they are mostly for tourists, a few country folk still drive them around our land. They are almost unknown across much of the Western World these days; even here they are rare enough that children point and wave when a horse goes by. A hundred years ago they might have shrugged at the ubiquitous presence of horses and run shrieking towards an automobile, and it’s possible their great-grandchildren might do the same a century from now.

When I mention the possibility of using horses in the future, mainstream folk tend to burst into … well, horse laughter. That will never be necessary, they tell me – we will just invent fusion, build electric cars, use bio-fuels as easily as we do petrol now, or create something new. Doomer blogs and forums, on the other hand, sometimes mention a return to horses, as does the odd post-apocalyptic film or novel – but too often as a defeated post-collapse fate, like moving back with your parents. Too often people in both camps treat horses as abstractions, with no sense of the work or limits involved.

Horses would be difficult to introduce into today’s traffic in most Western nations; although town and suburban drivers could get used to them as Dublin drivers do, and eventually there might be more need for horses and fewer cars. Certainly they wouldn’t be our first choice for transport of any kind; rather, governments and communities should invest in trains and streetcars, preferably electrified and powered by miles of solar panels and windmills. They could keep buses running through several methods I have mentioned – using unwanted vehicles, packing them tightly with passengers, driving more slowly, growing bio-fuels and so on. Together we could continue to move people to jobs, families, hospitals and allotments, and move dry goods across the world. All these things could happen, and we should push for them.

But let’s say, just for a moment, that they don’t. Let’s say your city doesn’t build a streetcar, that your county doesn’t double or treble the number of buses, that your national government doesn’t build new train tracks. Or let’s say these things don’t last; at some point fossil fuels will be gone, the materials and machines they created broken or corroded. If that happens we will still possess the original horse-power we had for 6,000 years – but we would need to re-learn what they can and cannot do.

The good news is that horse-drawn cars worked, not just for ancient chariots or Conestogas but for mass urban transit into the 20th century. For a hundred years, from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, Europe and America had cities of at least a million people that ran on a massive, sophisticated network of carriages and streetcars. By 1880, according to historian John H. White, Jr., US cities had 415 horse-drawn railways running, with 18,000 cars on 3,000 miles of track, carrying 1.2 billion passengers a year. Most of these lines continued decades into the age of electricity and coal, simply because the horses worked better than any other option.

Horses have several obvious advantages over cars; they require no fossil fuel imports and contribute nothing to climate change beyond the occasional burst of methane. They are not the fastest transportation option, but neither are cars in city traffic – and in a crisis, slow movement is better than none. They can mow lawns and parks for us, although they need far more food than what our urban areas could offer.

They generate rich organic fertilizer for suburban homeowners who want to grow their own food but have thin, housing-development soil. They build more of themselves in a way that diesel engines, when left together, do not, and their children can be trained and ready to work in a few years.

Of course, horses bring massive problems with them, and if we ever consider bringing them back for transportation use, we need to become familiar with their limits again. For one thing, they have the same problems we do with extreme temperatures, and refuse to work in heat waves or blizzards. Disease can also lay them up – during an epidemic of horse flu in 1872, White wrote, “American commerce nearly came to a halt,” and companies resorted to teams of oxen or humans to pull streetcars through cities. He noted that some cities used mules, which worked better in hot weather, but of course could not produce offspring.

For another, horses required a great deal of feeding; according to historian J.R. McNeil, each horse required two hectares, enough to feed eight people, so that in 1920 a quarter of American farmland used for oats to feed horses.

Horses also required massive stables in the middle of city neighbourhoods, for they could not walk long distances into town and then walk all day. Nineteenth-century stables, White wrote, had to be two or three stories high to make room for the horses, hay and grain storage, shoeing, harness repair and manure. Food and maintenance of the horses consumed up to 50 percent of the revenues from the business, not even including the cost of paying human workers.

Horses produced 10 to 20 kilos of manure per day, and as tens of thousands walked through any major city every day, the manure was thick on the street, turning into fetid swamps in the rain and noxious dust in dry spells. Historians Joel Tarr and Clay McShane write that the omnipresent manure caused widespread typhus and other diseases.

Of course, that age had many hygiene problems aside from horses. Pigs were often herded through city streets – almost half a million in Cincinnati alone, according to historian Otto Bettmann – and rubbish piled so high in the streets that old photographs show it in traffic-blocking mounds. Future urban residents might hold their streets to higher standards of hygiene. Manure can be collected in bags under horses, and residents of an area can hire workers to keep streets clean. White even relates the claim of 19th-century city officials that mules could be toilet-trained.

Certainly a horse-and-carriage future would not allow us to live with the conveniences we have become accustomed to today. In a serious crisis, though, even a slow and old-fashioned method of moving people and goods from place to place could save lives.

All this is academic, however, unless at least some small percentage of the populace learns to drive horses. Television action heroes can jump on a horse or wagon, shake the reins and gallop away, but in this world it takes years of training, and there are few teachers. The horses require training for their jobs as well, and few today are.

Such a system would require the return of several professions, in fact, most of them newly rare: smiths to make horseshoes, farriers to put them on the horse, leather-makers and leather-workers to make straps, and horse veterinarians. We would need carpenters who can build vehicles sturdy enough to hold passengers and freight and lightweight enough to be pulled. We would need iron-workers, wheel-wrights, coopers and livery workers. You might not picture call-centre supervisors and telemarketers leaping forward to become farriers and smiths, but as time goes on it might become steadier employment, and there might be fewer of the positions we have now.

Most of all, we would need to increase the number of horses. The USA, for example, has a little more than six million horses not used for racing. At the dawn of the horseless-carriage era, there were 21 million horses in the USA, for a nation with a third of today’s population. To provide services for today’s cities, then, we would need to increase the number of horses at least tenfold – probably many times more than that, for few of the existing horses are the muscular draught breeds.

This, then, is my modest proposal: if you believe that fossil fuels are running short, if you are not certain whether fusion power or a hundred new nuclear plants are around the corner, if your government is not investing in trains or trolleys, if you are sceptical that we can grow enough bio-fuels for a bus system, then I would ask what kinds of transportation you see us using in a few decades, and what you are doing to create that system.

If you have no better ideas, then I would encourage you to learn some of these skills that were so widespread and fundamental for so long, so that at least a few people in your area have such knowledge and can teach others should it become necessary. I’ll be doing the same – let me know how it goes.

Sources:

“The Centrality of the Horse to the Nineteenth-Century American City,” Joel Tarr and Clay McShane, The Making of Urban America, NY: SR Publishers, 1997.

“From Horse Power to Horsepower,” Eric Morris, Access, No. 30, Spring 2007.

Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, J.R. McNeil, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible!, Otto Bettmann, Random House,1974

“Horsecars: City Transit Before the Age of Electricity,” John H. White, Jr., Walter Havighurst Special Collections.

“Horse Power,” John H. White, Jr., American Heritage Volume 8, issue I, Summer 1992.

Public transportation 2: Hummers and booze

As mentioned last month, public transportation makes cities healthier -- US cities were healthier when they had streetcars, and light rail systems make many European cities more liveable today. America’s streetcars were ripped up decades ago, though, and light rail requires massive investments in infrastructure – money few cities have to throw around. Communities can still organise public transit, though, by using buses.

In my native country, the USA, buses are often associated with the poor, but they shouldn’t be. A recent HNTB Corporation survey found that 90 percent of Americans who live near public transportation use it at least some of the time, and 70 percent thought it a better choice than driving -- indicating that more people would use public transit if there was more of it. (Just assume I’m writing this for the most countries in general but my native USA in particular.)

For that matter, don’t assume that “the poor” are someone else. Forty-five million Americans, for example, lived below the poverty line last year– one in seven – and those are only the individuals making less than $10,800 or families making less than $22,000. Many if not most of us are struggling in some way, with too little savings and too much debt, and even many apparently prosperous families live only a few pay-checks from default.

Everyone needs to travel to the store, work or relatives’ houses, but many of us live in the country or in suburbs – especially Americans again, who can travel 20, 50, even 100 kilometres to work. Such journeys will grow more difficult in a time of less money and more expensive fuel, yet most residential areas have no factories or businesses to furnish jobs. Cars also break down, and in a crunch many will have less money to fix them or buy new ones. Nor can we indefinitely repair modern cars, with their plastic and micro-chips, as Cubans do their 1959 models.

People here in rural Ireland have long depended on taxis, and they can help carry people in an emergency. Taxis might less efficient than most cars on the road, however, for they usually take only one passenger at a time, and spend a lot of their time driving to and from pickup points. They certainly cannot substitute for vehicles that carry multiple passengers on regular routes.

In short, we will need buses of some kind, in small towns and inner cities, along country roads and motorways alike. Lots of them.

Unfortunately, many cities are cutting back their bus lines; a brief Google News search on the day I write this came up with five examples in the last month alone. Local officials could feel compelled to eliminate such services altogether as the tough times continue, in an attempt to cut costs. As someone who spends three hours a day on the bus, I have a particular concern for making sure they continue to exist, and could be made even more comfortable and reliable.

I used to cover city and county governments as a reporter in Missouri and Kansas, and while my articles made life difficult for certain politicians, I also know they are often harried, pressured, and unappreciated. I’ve tried to put myself in the place of officials and residents who want to keep public transit alive in the case of financial or fuel emergencies, and have a few projects that city or town residents might want to consider.
As city governments become increasingly cash-strapped, they will be less able to buy new buses or replacement parts. Many buses are already obviously old and in need of repairs, and officials probably put off paying for new ones until the boom times come again.

At the same time, almost 100 million Americans own SUVs or Hummers for some reason. In some years these suburban assault vehicles actually outsold cars, even though they are only half as efficient in miles-per-hour as 1920 Model Ts. Most people do not use their suburban assault vehicles for fording rapids or scaling Alaskan mountains, as in commercials, but rather for inching in and out of parking spaces. These vehicles typically have enough room for at least six people, plus enough cargo space, as Dave Barry put it, “to pick up something else, such as a herd of bison.”

Between the spike in fuel prices a few years ago and the recession today, many SUV owners are trying to rid themselves of these white elephants; look in any Buy-and-Sell section of any newspaper and you will see an explosion of such vehicles for sale, at plummeting prices.

These two problems could solve each other. the infamous mileage of SUVs and Hummers only results from the empty space in the back; fill it up with passengers and it becomes a very green choice. Local officials could buy them cheaply, or rent them to use to ferry passengers in lieu of bus lines.

If neither the city government nor the populace has money, enterprising officials could make more creative arrangements – say, giving the SUV owner use of a foreclosed property in exchange for the use of the vehicle, rather than forcing the homeless owner to sleep in it. They could agree to speak to the housing association keeping the SUV owner from putting up a chicken coop. They could agree to co-sign a residents’ mortgage in exchange for permission to use the vehicle. Ward council members and mayors might not officially have jurisdiction in these areas, but they might have some influence in their community, and as time goes on the world will become less official.

SUVs have several advantages over regular buses; for one thing, they would be more comfortable. Their ability to handle rough terrain might turn out a blessing after all, as they can continue to drive over roads in disrepair.
More importantly, since they only take eight or nine passengers at a time, they can be economical in small towns and in the country, driving routes that cannot afford 80-seat buses. Bus routes could actually be expanded in places, allowing otherwise marooned residents easy access to jobs, hospitals and food markets.
They can also vary their routes slightly to pick up passengers at home or a short walk away if needed, responding to phone calls for assistance. If a country-dweller needs to get to town and has the SUV driver’s mobile number, for example, they could ask the driver to vary their route slightly rather than walking miles to the nearest pickup point, without unduly inconveniencing other waiting passengers – an important detail for elderly and the handicapped. Pat Murphy of Community Solutions has proposed a plan similar to this, which he calls a “Smart Jitney” system.

Cash-strapped cities could also require drivers to supply their own SUV and fuel, compensating them by letting them keep riders’ fares, and freeing the local government from financial burden. If this sounds suspiciously like a taxi, it is – just a taxi that runs regular routes. Put another way, it could combine the security of bus lines with the flexibility of taxis and the fun of carpooling.

What if fuel becomes expensive even for an SUV bus service? Even then, communities can still keep their far-flung homes connected by going into the moonshine business.
Moonshine, or what the Irish call poitin (pa-CHEEN), is high-grade alcohol – ethanol -- made from grains, potatoes or some other plant. Typically the plants are brewed into beer or wine, and the brew is then heated in a vat to boil off the alcohol without boiling the water. At the top of the vat runs a thin tube, through which the alcohol vapour can escape and cool, dripping into a second container to become, hopefully, near-pure.

Many petroleum vehicles can run on alcohol instead of petrol or diesel, although it may require the engine to be adjusted. Many countries have kept their buses running with alcohol, from India in the 1930s to Brazil today, and with less money and technology than most modern Westerners. Some European nations have also had a good track record with them -- one Swedish study found that buses that switched to alcohol increased their fuel efficiency and reduced their pollution.

Alcohol remains a controversial remedy. Its fans tout its zero-carbon potential, since the emissions put into the air last season can be taken out of the air by growing the bio-fuel crops this season. This cycle of crops to fuel to crops can theoretically be sustained indefinitely, making alcohol seem a permanent solution to the fossil fuel crisis.

The down side, of course, is that making the alcohol fuel --- growing the crops, harvesting them, processing them into mush and distilling the result -- takes almost as much energy as you get from burning the alcohol, if not more. We will never run our current society on alcohol, for the same reasons we will never have a perpetual-motion machine.

If alcohol cannot do everything, however, that does not mean it cannot do anything. Five million urban residents might not find enough farmers around to power five million cars, but they might find enough to power 5,000 buses, each carrying 100 passengers over several trips a day. Crucially, though, alcohol crops can be grown and distilled locally, almost anywhere.

Many towns have unused land nearby -- vacant lots, abandoned fields and foreclosed farms – which can be used to grow fuel crops as well as food. Many areas also have large numbers of unemployed people who need something to do and could benefit from retraining, junk that can be refitted into stills, and educated people who need jobs.

Just as neighbourhoods full of unemployed people could set to work turning unused fields into kitchen gardens, so they could also grow fuel -- and since alcohol can be made from the discarded or inedible parts of plants, the two are not incompatible. Finally, leftover mash from the distilling process can be used to feed pigs or as compost – either way, the methane from decomposition can generate both heat and electricity.

Alcohol is just one example of a bio-fuel; diesel oil can be made from a variety of crops, from jatropha, sunflowers, corn, palm trees and many others – including something where you live. Distilling the alcohol or squeezing out the oil does not require the vast acreage of breweries, like the Guinness plant I work next to in Dublin; stills have been constructed out of discarded junk by prisoners, encamped GIs and mountain bootleggers, and a town or neighbourhood that includes some mechanics and engineers could do as well --- and without needing to make it drinkable.

Of course, few things are simple, and projects like this will require the cooperation of many local people. It will require neighbours to meet each other and work together regardless of their political or religious beliefs. It will require many man-hours of work, experimentation and patience, all things that have atrophied in the online era. It does, however, need to happen, and no one will do it for us.

Rebuttal to the Spectator

The Spectator ranks as one of the world’s oldest and most prominent political magazines, so I was pleased to see their web site featured a commentary on my “O’Sterity” article – and I recognised the writer, Alex Massie, from the National Review and the American Conservative. Unfortunately, Massie not only criticised my piece -- which I can handle -- but misunderstood it.

Part of the problem might be the kind of Irish we are thinking of: early on, Massie refers to a “brasher kind of Dublin 4 swell (UCD, naturally) who thought himself the business when buying a glass shoebox by the Docks for half a million or so only to find himself undone by events.” I think he’s referring to the skyscrapers built by the Dublin docks, and I work a few miles from UCD (University College of Dublin) and the wealthy Dublin 4 neighbourhood. But I’m didn’t talk to any investors in skyscrapers: I talked to rural neighbours and people who ride the bus with me – the kind of people who form the majority of the country.

None of the people I talked to expected the boom to last forever. For them the boom meant a decent job and new home, but they knew they were not receiving most of the bubble wealth, and the change from poverty to boom and back was more muted for them than for most market speculators.

Massie particularly cited the part where I said, “few people here saw the boom as normal or permanent. No leaders announced grandiose plans for a 21st-century Irish Age, or invested their new wealth in forming a global empire. As religious as Ireland has been, no one decided that Ireland was now the chosen nation of God.”

The Spectator columnist called this “just wrong” -- investors, he said, “did think the world had changed forever and so, more importantly, did Ireland's political class.” As evidence he quotes former Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern that “the boom times are getting boomier.”

Booster quotes like this, though, are found in every market in every era. Of course some investors misjudged when the boom would end. Of course politicians reassured their constituents that happy days were here to stay. Of course the recession meant offices that will never be filled and homes that will never be finished. That’s pretty much the definition of a recession. No, my point is something else entirely.

Show me the Irish government’s hundreds of military bases around the world. Show me one. Show me the list of nations Ireland has invaded since the boom, or the massive military build-up. Show me the Irish who believe that Ireland represents the culmination of human history, and that all other nations in the world revolve around Ireland as side-kicks, enemies or recipients of aid. Show me the Irish politicos who wrote, as presidential advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski did of the USA, that Ireland must extend control over its “vassal states.” Show me the Irish who believe that God had destined their nation to rule the world, to be the focus of the battle between Good and Evil in the End Times.

For a human lifetime, since the 1930s, the US government has kept a wartime economy, spending more money on the military than the other 194 countries combined. A powerful military, of course, can be a good thing – I’m pleased my native government won against the Nazis in the 1940s, and outlasted the Soviet Union in the Cold War. But the US government continues to funnel much of its enormous native wealth into controlling foreign wealth, sending our people into conflict after conflict even as the home front gets poorer.

For a while, in the mid-20th century, this plan worked: the USA remained the world’s greatest power, its per capita wealth and consumption rising ever higher. The national infrastructure, building methods, urban design, agricultural systems and everyday culture of Americans were created for a world in which the public was safe, electricity and fuel were cheap and money was plentiful. Many Americans have a deeply rooted belief both in their nation’s role as the world’s centre and protector, and in the upward march of progress. A rapidly growing minority have adopted a new kind of nationalistic Christianity that sees American politics as a mystical battleground, and looks for scapegoats when reality does not match their role-playing game.

Massie misunderstood most of all when he wrote that “Kaller's conclusion, alas, is typical of a certain Anglo-American view of Ireland: our poverty is grim but Irish poverty is charming and somehow noble…”

No, no, no. I’m not saying that the Irish are somehow destined to be poor, or that poverty is cute when practiced here. The point of the article was that we all face an age of austerity now, and the Irish are better prepared than Americans because they practiced austerity recently. Much of the everyday life and culture around here is similar to any Midwest town, but subtle differences in attitude and infrastructure make the communities more resilient against a crash. The point was that Americans could adopt some of these same practices and stand more chance of weathering the coming decades.

I think I made clear that pre-boom Ireland had deep poverty and staggering repression – I would much rather have lived in the USA than in Ireland in 1960, and Ireland did well by bringing its country into the modern world. But now the lessons should go the other way: few Americans have experience with the austerity that older Irish people grew up with, and must rediscover from scratch the attitudes and personal habits that helped people here weather the harsh economic times.

My countrymen would do well to remember that the electricity, tap water, working toilets and plentiful food they have taken for granted for four generations are gifts, which require money and energy to maintain. They should learn from people in the Third World or in older eras who have lived without such things, and as Ireland is an educated, English-speaking, culturally similar land that was a Third-World country until recently, we find this country a convenient place to learn.

Elections

Most Americans would be shocked to discover how other peoples regard them – not with admiration, or envy, or hatred, but with embarrassment. The news media here and across Europe tend to regard US elections as a comedy programme, endlessly replaying the most egregious flubs of my country’s most dubious political characters.

Yet the American election still dominates the headlines here, either because people fondly remember the America that was or simply because U.S. military and economic disasters cause trouble for everyone else. As the resident American accent in the pub, I have to field a lot of questions about the latest election news. I disappoint people by telling them that not only am I not following the campaign trail, but I've also done everything I can do avoid it.

It's not that I don't care. It's that my vote takes a few days of research, not a year of hearing gossip. Before I mail the absentee ballot, I make a list of the issues I care about and compared them to candidates’ campaign contribution and voting records — not the coverage, the records themselves — calculate my choice and move on.

I want to see the United States restore its rail system, for example, so any candidate that made some meager noises in that direction gets some meager points on my list. Period. I don't care about their race, their reproductive plumbing, their flamboyant piety or from what wacky character they are six degrees removed. I don't care about the teacup scandals that crawl across the bottom-screen news feed or the hall-of-mirrors news coverage of the coverage of the coverage. I don't want to know.

Many Americans seem to believe that democracy looks like the Super Bowl, a New Top Model, an American Idol, the Oscars or an apocalyptic smackdown. In reality, it simply should be a job interview, and you are the employer.

Forget this idea that your candidates represent two opposite ideologies. The two major parties represent slightly different alliances of investors, smashed together by the accidents of history. There is no other reason that evangelicals, for example, should be in the same camp with libertarians, or neoliberals with conservationists.

Finally, remember that change mostly happens between elections in a hundred thousand living rooms and library basements and county halls and percolates into the halls of power under sustained pressure.

No election let women vote, or created the civil rights movement, or laws to protect our air and water. These things happened because neighbors met, organized, protested, ran local candidates, went to prison — and moved and moved and moved until they were a movement. America gets better when Americans get it into their heads that they should be the ones running the country, and cajole and intimidate elites until the elites back down.

This Tuesday, pick the guy you think will back down first.

This piece was adapted from an Opinion piece I wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2008.

Photo: "Elect Casey," courtesy of the Norman Rockwell estate.

Dolmen

You can see many Stonehenge-like structures like this across Ireland, this one taller than a person. It rests on the Burren, that stark land in County Clare where the grass grows only in patches between the bare limestone. The stone itself forms jigsaw patterns all around the monument, bizarre designes etched not by humans but by water and time.

I wonder if it was the inspiration for the Stone Table in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Working before the wind and darkness arrive

We just finished one of the last three-day-weekends of the year here in Ireland, and one of the last days we can spend the weekend working outside. Soon it will be raining much of the time – it began as soon as we finished today -- and the darkness will spread across the day until, at Christmas, we will have almost eighteen hours of country night.

So we had much to do. On Saturday I took The Girl to a birthday party at a child’s play centre that opened up in an old warehouse nearby. Then the power went out for a couple of hours, and while the sun from the skylights allowed the kids to keep playing, it meant no food or drinks – for they were all made by electric machine, and no one could make food any other way.

I also filled the last garden bed of the year – each one is about five metres by one metre, so filling it with three tonnes of earth takes at least a day. We also planted a chestnut tree at the back corner of our land, in front off where the beehives are to go, and we hope the tree will bless us or some future resident with its protein.

On Sunday we planted another tree, a plum, near our house – but when we started digging for it we hit a mass of builders’ rubble left over from our house construction. We fished out about twenty bricks, blocks and stones, and under it all was a broad concrete slab we could not fish out. I finally took a sledgehammer to it, and it came out in pieces.

Today was Chainsaw Day, the day to take down the lilandia evergreens that ring our property. My late father-in-law planted them when he moved here 20 years ago, and they grew quickly and gave him the privacy he wanted. For us, though, they make the sun-facing side of our property a thick four-metre-high wall of dark green, and yield no fruit, nuts or other productive material -- except, now, firewood.

Lilandia put out many side branches that must be removed one by one to even see the trunk, much less tie it in rope or begin cutting it, so it was slow going. But we got several trees down, with several more to go – and then to replace them, one by one, with apples, hazels and other productive natives. It will mean suddenly being exposed to the winter winds that sweep across the Bog of Allen, but we hope the extra sun will make up for that, and our new trees will grow in time.

We only cleared enough today for a small gap in the dark evergreens, but it was enough space to plant our little rowan. As we retired for the evening, we left the sapling, its autumn leaves a glittering orange and gold, with the sunset flooding in behind it through the gap. It looked like a burning candle, keeping the darkness at bay.

Sheep on the Curragh

A few days ago, I talked about the village markets people used to have here, and thought I would explain where the animals came from. This is a sheep next to, I think, a meeting-house on the Curragh, used since Roman Times for communal grazing. Sheep, pigs and cows do not belong to massive agribusiness factories here; they often belong to smallholders, and you will see them in the space of a backyard. We drive past our neighbours -- some of whom own several acres, some small plots of perhaps half an acre -- and most have animals of some kind.

This used to be even more common a few decades ago; a reporter on RTE, Ireland's main news programme, recently remarked that the large amount of green space in Dublin resulted from the large number of people who had cows or goats in their back gardens, and cattle drives from our county to theirs were being held into the 1950s.

Council estates, built by the new revolutionary government after the revolution, were the size they were so that every family could have their own cow. Indeed, that's how American suburbs began -- that's the point of having a grassy lawn in front.

Note the size of the smallholdings -- the postcards of Ireland show picturesque and empty fields, but some of these fields are less than an acre. My backyard in Missouri covered perhaps a quarter of an (only slightly different) American acre, and our next door neighbour's was larger still. Most American backyards I have seen could hold animals easily, and remove the need for a lawnmower.

One woman said many families in her neighbourhood had goats, even though they didn't have the space to feed all of them. So the children walked the goats on leashes in the evenings, like you walk your dog around your streets, and it would graze the side of the road, the parks or vacant lots, or any number of other grassy spaces.

Neighbourhoods in wartime Britain kept pigs in a lot near their homes, and employed boys -- who might not have been able to find food or shelter otherwise -- to look after them. The kitchen waste from all the homes went straight to the pigs, who turned them to meat.

As more and more suburbanites struggle to pay the mortgages, animals might be a good way to keep the lawns mowed and meat on the table, if only people could get used to the idea again.

Such projects might require some cooperation among neighbours, if only in not protesting when you get your chickens, or in understanding that animal poo is actually a good resource. To keep animals together, as people did in wartime Britain, would also be a great benefit to many people in, say, my native Missouri.

Unfortunately, propose such a project and many people would look at you like you stepped off the mothership. There are no models for such neighbourly behaviour in any of our fashion magazines, our nightly television dramas, or any of our pop culture.

Furthermore, many in my country have a religious belief that neighbours can never work together; it's a theory called the Tragedy of the Commons, which states that, if farmers try to graze sheep in a field, each farmer will try to gain the upper hand, resulting in conflict and control by a few.

I grew up thinking the idea was from Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius, so widely did it permate pop culture, and so reverently was it invoked. I was shocked to find that it dates back two years before I was born, to 1968.

To the author of the Tragedy of the Commons, I present Exhibit A: The Curragh. Used for community grazing continuously for 2,000 years.

Village markets

We just finished watching 1960s footage of the animal markets in Irish villages. It was a world many older people here remember -- even my wife, for such markets were still going on in County Clare in the 1970s when she was a girl -- but has almost vanished today.

At the markets, all the local farmers brought their animals -- pigs, cows and sheep -- to the village for buying and selling. Often the haggling was not done between simply two people -- a respected local man would act as intermediary, helping them reach an agreement -- sometimes even taking the hands of the two local men and touching them together repeatedly, encouraging them to shake hands.

More interesting were the faces of the farmers at the auction -- many would simply twitch, wink or briefly gesture with a finger, and the auctioneer would understand that they had bid.

The highlight, though, was watching the farmers load the animals into their cars -- of course no one had much money and few people had the animal trailers seen today. Instead, they would simply push them into their cars -- into the back of a station wagon with straw scattered around the bottom, or into the back seats. Most amazingly, one farmer managed to get a cow into the boot (trunk) of his car -- seemingly cruel, but perhaps more calming for the animal than riding in an open trailer.

We also saw footage of Aran islanders, still wearing their traditional hand-sewn leather moccasins and knitted wool jumpers, hauling a cow out to sea in a canoe. They were paddling out to meet a ferry that could haul the cow up by a rope and straps, but since there were no docks there, the cow had to meet them in the water.

It was obviously rough work, but it kept everyone in meat and milk for the year, and with little money or fuel to go around. Many struggling people today could benefit from sheep and pigs, to turning their grass and kitchen waste into wool and meat -- even city-dwellers could do so, as wartime Londoners did. Scenes like this could play out in suburbs today, or in the near future.

Photo: The village of Cong in County Clare. Villages around here seemed a lot more lively before everyone got cars and televisions.

Riding the rails

My day job sent me to the Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany last week, and amid the frantic schmoozing that such events require I was able to steal away for a bit and enjoy the city again. Frankfurt, my wife and mother-in-law’s hometown, remains a pleasure to visit, with museums, parks, great restaurants, shops and the kind of tree-lined neighbourhoods that movies use as shorthand for innocent beginnings and happy endings.

One reason it’s great to visit, though, was that you can actually get to the museums, shops and neighbourhoods quickly and easily, using buses, trams, trains, subways, and sub-subways that run under the first set of subways. Even a visitor with limited German and no car has the freedom to go almost anywhere they fancy; imagine, by contrast, speaking no English and trying to navigate Phoenix or Des Moines.

Of course wasn’t all museums and parks; certainly there were industrial and warehouse districts too, necessary but less of an attraction, and for all I know there may have been slums somewhere. In any area I visited, though, the streets were lovely, the traffic was light and the sidewalks thick with walkers, bicycles, café tables and vendors. Most importantly, they felt like neighbourhoods threaded with capillary streets, rather than buildings built alongside highways. In short, Frankfurt looks like American cities used to.

It’s difficult to imagine many of the cities in my native Midwest –rivers and lakes of asphalt that fall out of sight only with the curvature of the Earth – as they were a lifetime ago. For more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to as late as the 1950s, most US cities were networked with a web of streetcars – first powered by horse teams, then electric cables – that acted as a circulatory system from one end of a city to the other, and across the generations.

Read accounts of day-to-day life in streetcar-era America – or just a city that still has them, in Europe or the Third World today -- and you see how subtly such transport changes the feel of cities. Homes in old neighbourhoods appear remarkably cosy and close together – not just slums, but upscale houses as well – because they didn’t need garages or an oil-soaked car park. People left their homes and entered the world, not their SUVs. Cities could be compact, keeping food production close to food consumption and limiting, for each resident, what would later be called an “ecological footprint.”

Streetcars seem slow to modern eyes only because we compare them to a car on the motorway; compare them to a car in the city and they may have been faster. One of the Dublin lines ran out to the suburb of Lucan a hundred years ago, and passed through town at 25 miles an hour -- a goodly speed in Lucan's daily traffic jams today.

Children could play in the street, for there were few cars. Streets in old photos appear clean and graffiti-free, not because people were necessarily more angelic in 1840 or 1940, but because thousands of people walked on them every day, so vandals had little privacy – and once graffiti was there, someone was more likely to clean it up or complain to city officials.

My grandparents met and fell in love while riding the St. Louis streetcar together, shortly before Judy Garland would sing a love song to that city’s public transportation system in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis. At that point the system had been running for almost a century, and similar systems, according to Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, ran in every American city with more than 10,000 people. According to historian Bradford Snell, 90 percent of all trips in the 1920s were by rail; only 10 percent of Americans needed a car. It echoes what my grandmother used to say, that no one she knew needed to drive.

After World War II, however, my country’s cities were transformed; most of the streetcar lines were reduced, sold, cancelled and destroyed, many by a coalition of car, tire, oil and truck companies. Those companies -- Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, General Motors, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Federal Engineering Corp, Mack Manufacturing (of Mack Trucks) and the streetcar companies they bought up -- were found guilty of criminal conspiracy in 1951, and fined $5,000 each.

Snell believes the corporations were not just trying to monopolise streetcar lines – the actual charge – but consciously conspiring to transform America to a car-dependent society, and of course succeeded. Backing him up is Noam Chomsky, who accuses the corporations of committing “the largest social engineering experiment in human history.” On the other hand, writers like O’Toole maintain that rails were a “disaster,” and that market forces made them obsolete.

Certainly cars and highways were expanding during the cheap-oil window, and many rail systems were ripped up in Europe as well – Dublin used to have a network of streetcars as well that vanished around the same time. At the same time, it seems doubtful that oil, car and tire companies were buying up their competition in the hopes of expanding it. When they bought out the streetcars they didn’t just tighten belts – they destroyed the infrastructure, ripping the rails out of the streets and paving over their grooves, effectively salting the earth.

Today, unless you live in New York or some other pocket of public transport, getting around a US city presents a genuine challenge. Light rail is rare, and even bus lines can be limited, unreliable and expensive. Finding a job, getting clothes for an interview, getting to a temp assignment – all are extremely difficult without a car. Car payments, insurance and petrol can take up a sizable chunk of one’s paycheck, locking many people into an unending cycle.

Most older Americans I know used to walk everywhere, or at least to the bus or streetcar and back, getting exercise and meeting their neighbours. Today, Americans are infamous for their unwillingness to walk – I have talked to more than one European who said they tried to walk along an American street and drew rubberneckers, or were stopped by police.

Our cities are now built around the fact that there is about one car for every American. Half of all urban space exists for cars, the other half for people. Many newer suburbs don’t have sidewalks, since the expectation is that people will leave their homes mainly to get inside cars. Many new minivans have televisions, a feature that assumes children will spend a hefty chunk of their childhood in the back seat.

In my own country, a few cities have tried to restore pieces of the old transportation system, with light rail instead of streetcars – Minneapolis has the Hiawatha Line, St. Louis the MetroLink. But most of these are, or were until recently, single lines. They were a blessed relief for thousands who wanted to use them, but they ran from point A to point B without any other rail lines around. No one, when building the highway system, thought of building a highway that would run only from point A to point B without connecting to any other roads.

Even these lines only came about after decades of bickering in city councils and planning boards. Minneapolis’ Hiawatha line, for example, lingered for years in legal limbo, and while it has been wildly popular with most residents in its first six years of use, it retains the hatred of a few. Anti-rail activists paid for billboards across the city featuring the train line against a red star – perhaps implying that having freedom from traffic was like being in Soviet Russia – and even now the occasional candidate runs on a platform of ripping the rails out.

The few accidents – about one a year, when a driver foolishly tries to drive in front of an oncoming train -- have made screaming headlines and memorials from anti-rail groups, while the thousands of car-on-car accidents in the same city are not used as an argument against more roads.

Critics of such public transportation lines claim that the trains are mostly empty, a claim easily disproved by anyone who’s ever tried to squeeze onto one. Even if that were true, for example, no one ever points out that the cars on the highway are also mostly empty.

Another charge made against streetcars and light rail, and the usual excuse for the post-war destruction, is that they don’t make money. But how much money did the road in front of your house make last year? How much money does our asphalt make, or our electric wires, or our sewage pipes? The questions are ridiculous because these are not moneymaking enterprises; they are basic infrastructure, one of the legitimate reasons for paying taxes or having a government.

One problem is that recent light rail projects – again, take Minneapolis for example – committed to an ambitious plan involving house demolitions, rerouted streets, and earth berms and walls to protect nearby homeowners from having to see a colourful train go by or hear its electric hum. As impressive as the Hiawatha line is, other cash-strapped cities might look at that project’s $700-million bill and write off the idea of light rail altogether. But other cities don’t need to buy real estate and tear a path through neighbourhoods to build public rail. Your city, and every city, already has hundreds of light rail paths already cleared for rails, running like arteries to all the major population and business centres --- they’re called roads.

Take Dublin, whose Luas line runs right through the city’s crowded shopping district. Like Minneapolis or St. Louis, Dublin built back its rail system recently, a small but happy fraction of the network it once had. Here, though, officials here set rails right into the asphalt like streetcar rails, and the train runs down the city streets – which are also narrower than most American streets and turn tight corners.

Conservative activists Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind, in their 2002 paper Bring Back the Streetcars!, said looking at old photos of streetcar cities “is almost painful. It reminds us of a world we had, and have lost. But it does more than that. From the standpoint of public transportation, it points not only to the past, but also to a possible future.”

Almost two dozen US cities are considering streetcar systems, according to recent news reports, and such projects could be a godsend for restoring the urban communities, low carbon emissions and easy transportation that we used to have. They could pull together political groups that never imagined having common cause; urban activists who want to revive urban neighbourhoods, suburbanites hit by waves of recession and fuel prices, environmentalists who like the potential for zero emissions. To lobby city and county hall, however, these groups would have to accept a responsibility from which many Americans have fled; to work with people who believe different things than you do.

Unfortunately, streetcar or light rail projects grow more difficult each year; unless the world discovers a surprising new source of energy or a new bubble propels the US economy aloft again, cities are unlikely to build new subways or Els, and new ground-level transport will have to endure a volatile market, lack of funding and spotty delivery of supplies and replacement equipment.

Buses, of course, service every major city, and in abundance can fill the streetcar gap. Anyone who rode buses in a variety of cities, however, can tell you that many bus systems struggle as well. As mentioned, some bus lines habitually run late or not at all. They can be expensive for the financially-strapped people most likely to need them. In many places they carry a stigma of poverty. Many cities lack bus lanes to allow buses to bypass traffic, meaning that bus rides are no faster than driving one’s own car.

Of course, most US states will struggle even to maintain the existing bus or light rail lines, even as the need for them grows. Most state and local governments are desperately scrambling for new ways to cut corners – turning out streetlights at night, shortening the public school week, shutting down services. Cities across the Western world are shaving off their basic transportation services as well, and they will be the first to go in a crisis.

Which is a perfect reason for anyone reading this, whatever your party or position on the political map, to learn to be an activist. City and regional governments are often harried, unappreciated and malleable in a way that the federal government is not. This is an issue that anarchist Noam Chomsky and Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich can both get behind, and so could Tea Parties, Green Parties and many other parties in your area. All of you deserve to have at least as much freedom and mobility as American city-dwellers enjoyed in pioneer days.

Otherwise, what little we have will disappear while we fight over other things, until the next economic dip or fuel crisis turns every neighbourhood into an island.
Next week: tips for keeping the public transportation system alive in a bankrupt city.

Resources:

Documents of court case UNITED STATES, v. NATIONAL CITY LINES, Inc., et al.
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/186/186.F2d.562.9943-9953.html

Bring Back the Streetcars! A Conservative Vision of Tomorrow’s Transportation, by Paul Weyrich and William Lind, 2002
http://www.apta.com/resources/reportsandpublications/Documents/weyrich4.pdf

“The StreetCar Conspiracy: How General Motors Deliberately Destroyed Public Transit,” by Bradford Snell, The New Electric Railway Journal, Autumn 1995.
http://www.lovearth.net/gmdeliberatelydestroyed.htm

O'Toole, Randal (2006). "A Desire Named Streetcar How Federal Subsidies Encourage Wasteful Local Transit Systems" (pdf). Cato Institute. (559): 1–16. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa559.pdf.

Span, Guy "Paving the Way for Buses-The Great GM Streetcar Conspiracy" Part 1 || Part 2, San Francisco Bay Crosssings.

“22 Cities that May Have New Streetcar Lines Within 2 Years,” Scientific American, 18 April 2010:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=22-cities-that-may-have-new-streetc-2010-04

Photos, top to bottom:
The Frankfurt S-Bahn. Photo courtesy of WikiCommons.
St. Louis circa 1925 - photo courtesy of skyscraperpage.com.
Map of the St. Louis streetcar system circa 1940 -- the distance from north to south is about 25 miles. Public Domain.
Map of the Dublin streetcar system, circa 1920 - map covers a similar area. Public Domain.
Los Angeles today. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce.
1950s streetcar in Howth, outside Dublin, in the 1950s. Public Domain.
The Hiawatha light rail in Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of WikiCommons.

Pub near our home

Across from where we take The Girl horse riding -- apparently it's the name of that general spot.

I will be on a business trip for the rest of the week, and will respond to e-mails and resume blogging when I return.

Update

In lieu of more extensive blogging, here is an update of what we have been doing lately.

Pickling: radishes, cabbage, cucumbers, gherkins and onions.

Drying: Calendula flowers (poor man’s saffron), poppy heads, sage, bay, beans, peas and onions

Jamming: Strawberries

Syruping: Elderberries

Boxing: Chicory roots in crates of earth for winter salad

Sprouting: mung beans and clover seeds

Making: milk into yogurt, yogurt into cheese

Boozing: berries into liqueur, elderberries into wine.

Photo: Our neighbour driving his old car past our house.

Alone

I don't often link to other people's blogs, but this blog by Bill Sepmeier does a good job of describing how difficult it is to be "off the grid" in any meaningful sense.

Because of my writing and the taglines often posted below it by the Daily, I am known locally for “living off the grid," Sepmeier writes.

It’s true, to a degree. Over the past several years I have built and installed enough renewable electric power systems at my home and office to provide all of the electricity I need to live and work as I do, where I do. There are many grids in modern life however, and living without them is not a simple matter, even if one’s personal lifestyle systems; one’s house, hearth and energy supply are sustainable and, compared to most, irrevocable.

As long as people have been dissatisfied with the direction of mainstream society, they have desired to be self-sufficiency, from the Irish monks at Skellig Michael or Glendalough, to the Shakers or New Harmony colonists in 19th-century USA. In recent years, it seems, the desire has increased, undoubtedly because people understand the mainstream society will not continue its exponential growth for much longer. And if we were used to the life of 19th-century settlers, we could do so easily: set us loose in a Wal-Mart of inexpensive tools and dry goods, give us a car for cheap and fast transportation, and we could make a homestead easily.

The problem for us, of course, is that adopting such a life would be hardship. It would be for me, too -- I want medicine when I am sick, daily showers, deodorant. Most people have little experience even cooking meals, much less planting seeds, growing vegetables or caring for animals. Most of us are spectacularly ill-equipped for a "self-sufficient" life -- it only arises as a goal in the minds of people who see it as an ideal in the misty distance, as children might think of being married.

Thankfully, we don’t need to. Little House on the Prairie images aside, most pioneers did not travel alone across the prairie – they moved in long wagon trains with the intention of forming communities when they settled. Irish monks, Shakers, Oenidans – none of them aspired to live and die alone, but with others who believed as they did. We, with our inexperience at traditional living, need such company far more than they did, and need self-sufficiency far less.

A friend of mine used to work with County Waterford farmer John Seymour, who ranks with Wendell Berry as an idol of Greens, back-to-the-land evangelicals, crunchy cons and others. Seymour wrote the book – many books – on self-sufficiency, and my friend was shocked to hear Seymour say that he had placed too much emphasis on that idea. What he should have emphasized more, he said, was mutual sufficiency. Most of us now already live lonely lives, and we aspire to make them lonelier, believing that such a life could ever be sufficient.

Photo: The girl at an altar in the ruined cathedral atop the Rock of Cashel.

The Cave

The Girl and I took a tour of Ailwee Cave, discovered by a farmer on the Burren and kept secret for decades. It formed from the torrent and disappearance of the meltwater from Ice Age glaciers, water that bore tunnels and cathedrals in the center of the mountain.

One section had a hollow in the floor, the sleeping spot for generations of bears, while another was a vertical striping of limestone, like a pipe organ.

This is a waterfall, several metres high, that pours through the cave.

Carpooling

Across my native USA, I whenever neighbours or townspeople lobby for more bus and rail services, pundits and politicians usually sputter something like this:

Trains and buses are a waste of taxpayers’ money. There’s no reason for them to exist. Look at the ones we have now – they’re mostly empty.

Anyone who’s ridden a bus or train recently knows that’s not even remotely true. Buses and trains are often filled to capacity, here and in America – I’m writing this from a tight squeeze in a packed double-decker. Even if those critics were right, however, they never apply that same logic to cars, for they never say:

Asphalt is a waste of taxpayers’ money, and so are highway overpasses, parking garages, car parks, traffic signals, streetlights, traffic cops and auto company bailouts. Look at the cars we have now – they’re mostly empty.

Passengers might be the most under-appreciated factor in how much fuel and money you waste. As I write this, for example, a business headline boasts of Toyota’s multi-million-dollar plan to boost fuel efficiency by 25 percent, with the usual discussion of what this will mean for the economy and the climate. Any of us, however, can boost the efficiency of our cars by several hundred percent instantly, with no additional expense or technology, simply by getting more people in the car.

This fact is also forgotten when we judge car owners by the wastefulness of their vehicles. An SUV is a spectacularly inefficient machine compared to a Prius, for example, but pack that Dodge Durango full of people and suddenly it is greener than the electric hybrid driven alone.

To use another example, your bus could be less efficient than an SUV in kilometers-per-litre, yet all of you bus passengers are making one of the greenest transportation choices around, thanks to the fact that so many seats are filled.

One of the easiest ways of cutting your expenses, fuel and carbon footprint, then, is simply to share rides with other people. Since most of us travel similar routes from clusters of houses to clusters of offices, there is no reason why carpooling should not work for most of us.

According to the website carfinance.ie, the average car in Ireland, driven 10,000 kilometers a year, will cost 1,750 euros in petrol. Divide that by four people, however, and you each save 1,300 a year. Carpooling could even pay for itself, if you propose to friends and co-workers that they pay you slightly more than the cost of fuel, as compensation for driving a little out of your way.

Some people might think they want to listen to music or a podcast on the way rather than talk to other people, and there’s no reason you can’t do even if the car is crowded. Most people, however, could do with more company. A June 2006 study in the American Sociological Review found that the number of close friends people say they have fell by a third in the previous 20 years. Most people don’t go to poker nights or Kiwanis meetings anymore, and the number of people who know their neighbours has also fallen, but the number of hours spent commuting has more than doubled in the last few decades. Most studies show us lonelier and more stressed than people of previous generations, probably because we spend less and less of our lives being the social animals we evolved to be, and more and more staring at glowing rectangles.

Perhaps this paranoia about human company is one reason so few of us have taken up carpooling, no matter how much money they would save. A brief internet search shows that while more web sites encourage people to carpool, many people seem fearful of meeting strangers. “How could I possibly trust that the people … I’d travel with are honest guys and not awful criminals?” asked one blogger – sentiments typical of many comments on the subject, even though criminals are unlikely to use a morning carpooling route as their cover for a nefarious plan.

I suspect those glowing rectangles are keeping us from each other in more ways than one. To some extent in Europe, but especially in my own USA, news shows focus on lurid murders rather than the state of local water or this year’s crops, until people forgot that news could be anything else. Nightly television dramas tell stories of cops and lawyers, serial killers and torturers, until we accept that this is what drama should be. Europeans watch American shows and think of my country as a violent and dangerous place – and Americans think of their own country that way. The crime rate has been declining for decades, and yet we have become more and more afraid.

Contrast this with the 1930s or 40s, when regular people carpooled, hitchhiked and picked up hitchhikers, and movies and other media showed this as normal. In wartime USA and Britain carpooling, like many other self-sufficient activities, was declared a patriotic duty – propaganda posters warned against people who selfishly took up a whole car to themselves, or who let the troops down by wasting energy. Hollywood movies showed stars carpooling, Dr. Seuss drew cartoons about how many people you could pack in a car, scoutmasters gave speeches about saving fuel and money.

Nor did the posters approach carpooling as a nice way to enjoy the morning or as a hip new part of eco-fashion; rather, they could be stern in a way that few advertisements are today. “Hitler rides in the empty seat,” said one typical poster. People need this. We are counting on you.

Today we face another emergency. It’s not exactly war, and not like any previous Depression. It does have a home front, though, and could benefit from some of the same solutions that were understood to be so sensible, for so long.

Great Irish names

Best place names we saw on our journey:

The village of Cong (Pronounced like the Eighth Wonder of the World.)

The village of Cloonboo (pronounced just like it's spelled)

The town of Lisdoonvarna

… and finally,
The River Suck.

The Journey West

Last weekend we went to the West of Ireland, where The Girl and I spent a full day driving through Conemara, the pastoral land to the north of Galway Bay. We meandered over the rugged countryside, stopping often to picnic, run around, take pictures, feed birds or climb hills.

We then went south through Galway to the stark and windswept moonscape of the Burren, where the one of Cromwell’s generals once complained there was not enough soil to bury a man there, enough water to drown him or enough rope to hang him. The advance and retreat of ice ages and the tapping of meltwater carved the limestone rock into ripples, eddies or strange marbled designs, or eaten vast caves through the bellies of the mountains.

At Ailwee we saw a bird show at the Raptor Center, which delighted The Girl. The organisation takes in birds that have been injured or captured in the underground animal market, breeds them and trains them to perform in the shows that fund the place.

A bit up the trail is the entrance to Ailwee Cave, which trails for kilometres under the rock – an Irish farmer discovered it in the 1940s and kept it secret for the next thirty years, finally selling it to people who made it a tourist attraction. The Girl found the cave itself a bit scary -- underground cliffs, dripping ceilings, claustrophobic walkways – and, for one moment when the lights went out, total blackness. She put on a brave face, but held me tightly, and I didn’t mind --- she won’t do that forever.

Near the caves we saw the Poulambrone Dolmen, one of the many stone tables built by Celts long ago, like a piece of Stonehenge. The Girl absorbed the stories I told her about the people long ago, but was more interested in playing hopscotch across the jigsaw patterns in the ground.

I wanted to see the Cliffs of Moher for the first time, but The Girl was tired and rain had begun, so we headed back. I visited the Cliffs of Moher ten years ago when I first came to Ireland, but never saw them – it was so foggy that I couldn’t see three metres in front of me, and I wasn’t walking too close to the Cliffs. The Irish have a different sense of public safety than most Americans – in front of a sheer drop of fatal height, I recall only a small sign saying, “Warning: Cliff is dangerous. Stay back.” No fence, no railing – not walking off the cliff is considered your responsibility. Giving the driving winds there, I wasn’t bringing The Girl too close either.

The next day we saw Ireland’s national Museum of Country Life, dedicated to preserving the images and crafts of the old ways of Irish life. It’s a fascinating place, and I recommend it to anyone passing through that area of Ireland, with one caveat: for a museum devoted to preserving the customs and crafts of country people here, perhaps they could have created a building that looks less like something by I.M. Pei.

One advantage to living in Ireland is that a more traditional way of life was preserved longer than in other places, simply because people couldn’t afford anything else, so museums like this have clothing, tools, shoes, chicken coops, ropes, fishing nets and dozens of other items made entirely by hand, but from only a few generations ago. The last people to live with almost no technology here when Jimmy Stewart was making movies, so places like this have recordings, interviews, and film footage. Such places become even more interesting if you, like us, believe that we need to keep such knowledge alive.

Tea

When I and several others were helping build the cob house in County Clare a few years ago, we paused for a cup of tea -- the Irish are the biggest tea drinkers in the world per capita, and a “cuppa” is the standard break from work or polite invitation.

As we headed back to the shelter for tea, though, some of the Irish workers did something curious -- they gathered wild plants from the meadow as they walked and chatted, arriving at the shelter with arms full. They quickly rinsed the plants, dropped them into a pitcher and poured boiling water over them, and in a few minutes had instant herbal tea.

Teas can be made from almost any edible leaf, flower or fruit, but a few are particularly well-suited:

• Mint grows wild in forests and hedgerows, and is one of the easiest crops for amateurs – as the saying goes, you drop the seeds in soil and jump back. Its cooling tea is much used in warmer climates like Morocco, helping people without air conditioning stay as cool as possible. If you live somewhere like the Deep South or Missouri, as I used to, you might want to try this – it won’t be the same as central air, but it might help as you cut back – or someday lose it suddenly.

• Clover: The white and purple flowers are ubiquitous across the summer fields of Europe and America, and the flowers and leaves can be gathered for a delicious tea.

• Dandelion makes a good, nutritious tea without the bitter flavor of dandelion leaves. It also acts as a diuretic, as you can tell from “piss-a-bed” and other folk names for the herb. I’m told the roots can also be roasted, ground and made into something like coffee – feel free to write me if you try it.

• Bramble: Our hedgerows and fences are covered in thorny brambles, and not only do they offer natural barbed-wire security all year long and blackberries in autumn, but the spring shoots make a blackberry-scented tea loaded with vitamin C.

• Nettles: I have several plastic bins filled with nettle tea, which I make by picking nettle shoots and drying them – you can do it the old-fashioned way, over a stove or fire, or the modern lazy way with a microwave. Nettle tea’s strong flavor works well for me, as my modern American palate likes stronger flavours, and it can be used for vitamins all winter long. It has many purported medical properties as well, often prescribed in older times for asthma and other ailments.

• Chamomile flowers create a famously relaxing tea, as does valerian.

• Fennel, dill and anise – all licorice-flavoured plants – make teas that help upset stomachs.

• Sage, oregano, thyme and many other herbs can all be made into strongly-flavoured teas.

• Echinacea flowers, which grow in Ireland, are reputed to help stave off colds, although the effects are disputed. If they do turn out to work, though, the flowers are probably better than store-bought pills – they are free and, as it turns out, Echinacea pills often have no Echinacea at all.

• Linden or lime leaves make great tea in spring, when they are shoots.

• St. John’s Wort is said to work as an anti-depressant, although its effects are as disputed as Echinacea.

You don’t need to make just one kind of tea – take a variety of herbs and mix them together, perhaps with a bit of honey or fruit juice. Remember that you generally need a lot of leaves to give boiling water taste and colour – black tea comes from a particularly strong-tasting plant, further strengthened by being smoked, dried and powdered. With living leaves fresh off the vine or stalk, pack them into a jar or container almost to the rim before pouring boiling water over them.

Most of these, of course, make a slightly green tea that tastes very different than black tea, and would not take milk. One exception is rooibos or redbush, which tastes and looks very like black tea, takes milk and is naturally caffeine-free. It’s available in most stores in tea bags, so try it if you feel like tea in the evenings.

You can make your own tea blends out of conventional black tea, of course. Earl Grey, for example, is black tea with a bit of bergamot oil. If you feel experimentitive, add different kinds of juice or plants to regular tea and see what you like. Whatever you make, it will probably be nearly free and better for you than soda or any of the varieties of fake juice on the market.

Photo: The field next to our house -- chamomile, poppies, comfrey, borrage, mint, catmint and sorrel.



P.S. Still have only sporadic internet. Will post when can. Thanks for patience.