Ireland during the Emergency

Some time ago I was able to sit down with a gentleman named Jack who lives near me, and he let me record him and publish the conversation, although he asked that his last name not be used.

Me: So you were born in 1922?

Jack: Yes, that’s right – I was born the year the Irish State was formed, and the way things are going, I might be around after it’s fallen apart.

Me: Do you remember the early years of the country? Did that time affect your family?

Jack: No, we were a mixed family – my father was Scottish, and my mother was from this locality. She had worked in Scotland for a number of years, prior to the First World War, and had married him. But after the war there was wholesale unemployment in England and Scotland – all the factories had closed. So they decided to take their chances here, but there were no jobs here either, because there was a civil war on.

The only thing you could get a job in was you could apply for the police force or the army. My father applied for both and the army called him in. So he was a soldier.

Me: He was Scottish and fighting in the Irish Civil War?

Jack: Yes, but that didn’t last too long. The incoming government was stronger than the rebels. But he was 1922 to 1947 in the Irish Army.

Me: When you were growing up, did you have a garden? Did most people?

Jack: Everyone depended on their gardens. Everyone around here, most of the men spent their days hunting, and if they got a rabbit, they had meat for dinner, and if they didn’t get a rabbit, there was no meat. 

Me: Were there enough rabbits?

Jack: There are usually enough rabbits to go around.

Once in 1922, there were men on the dole looking for work. I often saw three men with a packet of Woodbines – and they would stand in a row and each take a puff of the cigarette. Then a rope factory started in 1932 – this English company, Rigby Jones. Now they were very successful for a time – have since gone out of business, of course. But then things picked up.

Me: How did people get by if the men were out hunting?

Jack: Most people had a garden. The standard of living was very low, but the same was true in Scotland and England.

Me: How much land did most people have?

Jack: About half an acre each.

Me: And what did they grow?

Jack: They grew potatoes and cabbages, and most people kept pigs.

Me: So how did people get things like shoes or clothes?

Jack: Well, you look at school photos, and half the children were in their bare feet. They trotted in bare feet for about three months. But there was no broken glass on the roads then. 

There was no transport. We would take bicycles to Rathangan or so – younger people wouldn’t dream of doing that now. That’s 20 miles.

Me: How long did it take to ride 20 miles?

Jack: You left here at half seven, and got there at half eight.

Me: What proportion of the people had bicycles?

Jack: Nearly everyone went around on a bicycle, everywhere -- you had to. But life went on just as it does now. 

Pronounced HOO-gul-kul-tur

Originally appeared in the KIldare Nationalist newspaper. Photo courtesy of Mark at Permaculture.com.au. 

A while back I wrote about how we built raised beds for our garden, and when they rotted, rebuilt them in brick. Many permaculture gardeners, however, build a different kind of raised bed, one that involves using no walls at all.

The technique, called hugelkultur (HOO-gul-kul-tur), has the advantage of being simple to understand and easy to make, and lasting a long time. Hugelkultur beds basically involve piling wood – usually dried logs of various sizes – into a single ridge, piling vegetation, cardboard or newspaper over that, and finally a layer of soil on top. 

As the wood at the centre is slowly consumed by fungi, it absorbs and holds dozens of times its weight in water, creating a reservoir for the plant roots around it. As it decomposes it releases heat, extending the growing season. The decomposing wood, looking like a fine Swiss cheese under the soil, helps aerate the ground as well. Finally, as the wood breaks down into nutrients, its slow decay feeds the soil and anything growing on it.

Since the soil and garden plants are draped over logs, they also greatly increase the surface area for a garden, allowing gardeners to grow many more plants on the same ground. They also greatly increase the types of plants that can be grown near each other, as the top of the ridges will better suit sun-loving plants, while thirsty plants that can tolerate flooding will be more suited to the hollows between ridges. Such ridges are also an excellent way to stave off erosion and flooding, if you build them on a slope parallel to the side of the hill.

One risk in a hugelkultur is that the rotting wood might lock up nitrogen, so many gardeners prefer using large logs, buried deeply, so that the decay and nitrogen loss will be more gradual. Some also add high-nitrogen crops like nettles or comfrey over the logs and below the soil to offset the loss, or plant legumes or other nitrogen-fixing plants. Permaculture gardeners say that large ridges built over sizeable logs, or several logs, can offer a constant supply of nutrients for two decades. 

Be careful what woods you plant; if it is aggressive coppice tree, like willow, make sure it is well dead and dried, or you’ll get willow sprouting from your ridge. Also, most texts on the subject warn against using woods loaded with natural pesticides, anti-fungal chemicals and the like – cedar, black walnut, black locust – but you’re not likely to find those in Ireland anyway.

Creating hugelkultur takes carbon out of the atmosphere in a few ways; it takes trees that are mostly carbon sucked out of the atmosphere, and sequesters them underground; and it encourages the growth of many plants that will, themselves, suck more carbon out of the air. In other words, it’s a win-win for the climate.

Hugelkultur beds can be built quite high, and some gardeners said they built theirs more than two metres tall, piling up the wood almost vertically and draping vegetation and soil over it. Some bolster the sides with pallets to keep them in place, but I wouldn’t recommend using them as the basis for the ridge, tempting as that might be – pallet wood is often sprayed with chemicals that you don’t want in your food.

Raised beds like this are more work at the beginning, but a lot less as time goes on, and can largely be left alone for years. Some gardeners recommend planting mostly perennials, which can keep producing crops year after year – and can keep building up the ridge as parts of the plants die off and become soil again. The plants’ roots also keep the soil in place, so rain doesn’t collapse the ridge.

Best of all, this garden uses scrap material that many people already have on their property, and are often trying to get rid of. Many of us clear brush or have to cut down trees or branches on our property, weeds and grass clippings they want to use, and spare soil not good enough for the regular garden. Hugelkultur uses all these things and combines them into something useful that can benefit your garden for years to come.

Bicyclopolis

All futuristic fiction is really about the present; during the technological boom years of the early 20^th century, writers extrapolated those trends into a space-faring techno-utopia, and when the social and ecological costs of that boom caught up with us in the late 20^th century, dystopian fiction took over our collective imagination with increasingly horrific futures. I’m in my 40s, and almost no science fiction in my lifetime has ever predicted anything good for my future grandchildren.

Doomer porn, however, has limited appeal and shelf life; you can only get so miserable before there’s nowhere to go and no point. One of the most appealing subsets of speculative fiction, then, is what we might call the “good old future,” where our descendants have come through a crisis and created a better world that looks a lot like the past. I can personally recommend James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand and John Michael Greer’s Retropia and Star’s Reach, and I have on my reading list similar works like John Seymour’s Retrieved from the Future, Per Fagereng’s Jack Moloney’s Century, and Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.  

All these stories depict a home-town, human-sized, largely healthy future, and that’s exactly what we need to see right now. Most activism these days, on the left and right alike, warn that we only have a short time to stop collapse, and scream that “we” must do “something” or it will be “too late” – a message that is frustratingly vague, and leaves open the question of what happens when it’s too late. 

What we desperately need are stories of people who roll up their sleeves and use their hands-on skills to fix problems. What we need is a wholesome depiction of sustainable, healthy communities that are able to do most of what our towns do now, just relying on the craftsmanship of their local working people rather than trucks shipping in supplies from Third-World factories. We need to meet characters going through their daily lives in a world that do things the old-fashioned way, and see that their lives are not very different than ours.

Oh, and to portray their urban landscapes and machines in vivid detail, this fictional future should ideally be drawn as a comic book.

Thankfully, we have just the man to do this in Ken Avidor, who has been drawing comics and illustrations about a sustainable future for decades, as well as covering the politics of his native Minnesota. Avidor illustrated the first article I ever wrote on fossil fuels some 15 years ago, as well as James Howard Kunstler’s web site. His comic strip Roadkill Bill lampooned our modern consumer culture, taking on subjects like obesity, rubbish, traffic and government spending – which doesn’t sound like the most obvious subject for a talking-animal cartoon, but Avidor made it entertaining.

Nothing he has done thus far, however, matches the ambition of Bicyclopolis, which uses the basic Back-to-the-Future premise of a young point-of-view character, an old and wacky inventor, and a time travel machine as a plot device to show off his design of a small-town, pedal-powered future in the Midwest USA.

In this future, fossil fuels have become more difficult to obtain – meaning not just less driving and flying, but fewer imported products, less infrastructure repair and intermittent electricity. Climate change has turned much of the American West into desert, and most people live in isolated settlements in oases. Bicyclopolis, founded by Civil War re-enactors and bike mechanics who had the skills to build a new world, is a plausible model of a self-sufficient community, and Avidor has fun planning the details of how such a town would operate.

In contrast to many writers who imagine a future devoid of technology, Avidor recognises that many modern inventions – pedal-powered gears and chains, for example – could be used to create windmills, water pumps, irrigation systems, vehicles and machines. Junk from the nearby rubbish dump furnishes them with metal that can be re-forged or melted and re-shaped into useful things, while plants like dandelions and milkweed can be made into rubber substitutes. His fictional village even has sports stadiums, bands and pubs, all using locally-made products.

Avidor’s creations have always been idealistic and instructional but never unrealistic or perfect; in the course of the novel Bicyclopolis endures a war with a neighbouring tribe,  sabotage by domestic dissidents and a crackdown on dissent. Many of his characters are limited or misguided, but always recognisably human; as strange as it sounds when describing a graphic novel, none of these characters are mere cartoons. 

His fictional community also must deal with a future in which climate change has turned much of the American West into desert, and human garbage has continued to accumulate in dangerous floating junk in the oceans. The plastic rubbish on land gets swept up in the winds that whip across the now-desert landscape, so that travellers are hit by “bag storms,” whirling masses of bits of shopping bags and other bits of decades-old plastic.

Avidor inserts his own idols into his future, with writers like Kunstler, Dmitri Orlov, Jane Jacobs and Ivan Illich getting statues along the streets of his sustainable community. He does the same with his longtime nemesis and former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann; he had written an entire graphic novel, “False Witness,” about her career, and here he depicts the villains as “Bachmannite militias,” and a “Bachmannite priesthood.” Some of his other villains look suspiciously specific as well, and I suspect would look familiar to anyone who knows Minnesota politics.

At a time when the media flood us with messages of despair, works like Bicyclopolis provide an antidote; a simple, earnest story of a believably sustainable town. It would make a good companion to World Made By Hand or Retropia for adults, or a good introduction to the issues for teens – some of the scenes of collapse or warfare would be a bit much for children. And while Avidor’s environmental concerns would cause most people to place his work on “the left,” he, like Kunstler or Orlov, does not fit easily into political boxes, and his depiction of an armed small town defending itself against imposed progress would resonate with many conservatives as well.

To see some of the artwork or order the book, go to http://bicyclopolis.com.