Remembering the pandemics that came before

Recently I was able to interview another one of my elderly neighbours -- by phone this time -- and he told me all about the dangers of tuberculosis in Ireland in the 1950s, along with the Spanish Flu of 1918. We forget how fortunate we are.

Relaxing during a pandemic

This covers some of the same ground as the article, but I'm hoping people find it useful. Stay safe everyone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCMXz8FXABU&t=5s

Article published in American Conservative

For those who haven't yet been informed, most of my articles are not moving to the new web site and host of my ongoing projects, Old School School. I'll continue to update this site periodically.

Also, the American Conservative published my breakdown of the Irish election and the rise of Sinn Fein as our newest political force - read all about it here.

I'm continuing to interview elderly Irish about traditional ways of life: you can read the latest part of my interview with Jack here, talking about keeping cows and horses. 

I've also published my interview with my neighbour Angela, talking about a traditional childhood -- you can watch it here.

Finally, Mother Earth News has published my piece on preserving butter in an Irish bog - you can read the article here, watch the video here, and see the piece about it on British television here. It's an hour long, but my piece is mentioned around the 5:45 mark.

Featured on QI

I think it turned out pretty well.

Bog butter

I have a new project I'll be announcing soon, but first: I mentioned a while ago that the BBC programme QI, former hosted by Stephen Fry and now by Sandi Toksvig, will be featuring my bog butter experiment on the show. With that in mind, I thought I'd rewrite and extend this piece a bit. 

When most people picture Ireland, they picture green fields and old stone walls, and that’s true of some places. Ireland also has lots of bog, though – the Bog of Allen, where we live, stretches almost a thousand square kilometres across several counties. Bogs are difficult to get through – they have few roads or villages even today – so they could be isolated, mysterious places, where characters in folktales met giants and fairies, a place where a starving and subjugated people could hide, or hide things.

A bog is a natural wetland, like a swamp or marsh – the difference is that the water is very acidic, so most kinds of plants can’t grow there – but peat moss does very well. Vast areas get covered in peat moss, and as layers of moss die off new layers grow over them, so you get gradually thickening layers of organic matter. In most circumstances it would just decay and become soil, like most things that die – but it’s soaking in dark, acidic water where fungi, insects, even most bacteria can’t survive, so it doesn’t decompose.

Over thousands of years it gets squeezed into a dark red solid called peat, or “turf” here in Ireland. For centuries this was the main fuel here, and kept many a potato farmer warm on a chill evening. That’s why this canal was built in the 1700s – turf was strip-mined from the bog, dried, loaded on carts, pulled by donkeys on these rails, and loaded here on barges to be brought to warm the houses of Dublin. The history and future of turf as a source of energy deserves its own video, but the point here is: Dead things buried in the bog don’t rot, so it’s an ideal place to store things.

People around here still fish out trees that fell in centuries ago and carve their wood into ornaments; the bog-water stained the wood almost black, but it’s still wood. Turf-cutters here find human bodies sacrificed by Druids thousands of years ago, their skins blackened and cured like leather but with their faces still recognisable. This might have been the inspiration for the dead marshes in Lord of the Rings, where you could still see the bodies of the dead under the water.

So people dig up many things from the past in the bog and meant to come back for -- necklaces, coins, tools, swords, 1,200-year-old prayer-books. And sometimes they find stores of food, up to 3,000 years old and not only intact, but edible. Specifically, they find butter.

Bizarre as that sounds, more than 430 caches of butter have been found in the bog, some small as fists, some big as barrels. The aforementioned 3,000-year-old butter weighed more than 35 kilos, the size of a child. And many of the apparently very adventurers discoverers any such discoveries have been eaten, and were reported to be delicious.

This doesn’t even count all the buried gastronomic treasure still waiting out there. Since we can suppose that people buried their butter to unearth and eat it later, and usually did so, these hundreds of finds must represent the small proportion of times that their owners died or the locations forgotten. This must have been a rather commonplace activity.

So why butter, you ask? A surprising number of foods around the world are preserved by being buried in the ground, but they are usually dried foods in arid climates (cheese in Italy), or sub-Arctic countries where the ground is freezing (salmon in Sweden), or where the food is meant to ferment in some way (eggs in China). In this case it’s waterlogged ground, it would probably disintegrate in the water over time unless it’s naturally waterproof, like fat.

This might have been done with meat as well; Archaeologist Daniel C. Fisher buried various meats in a frozen pond and a peat bog for comparison, and found that after a year, the meat buried in the bog had no more bacteria than the frozen meat. If this sounds gross, keep in mind that fast-food burger you last ate might have been more than a year old.  

Also, butter makes a valuable and high-calorie food for poor agrarian people; with it you can fry food or preserve things like potted meats. It was also taxed in medieval times, so burying it could have been a kind of tax evasion.

The constantly-cold Irish bog would keep the butter solid, and it would only age like cheese; in fact, the one taste-tested by Irish schoolchildren was said to taste like well-aged cheese. Some people might simply have liked the taste.

I like to experiment with old ways of preserving food; I learned how to preserve fruit over winter, how to preserve eggs in lime-water or isinglass, how to pickle vegetables or learn which mushrooms are edible. But in all those things I had people around to show me; lots of my older neighbours still make their own jam or wine. I don’t know of anyone who’s ever tried this who could show me how. Thankfully, it’s pretty straightforward – all you need is to access to one of the world’s peat bogs, and I happen to live in the middle of one.  

My daughter and I made some butter at home, which anyone can do; you just pour milk and cream into a jar, put on some music and start shaking. We couldn’t fill it more than a quarter full or we would just get whipped cream, so we had to do this many times to get the three pounds . At some point the sound of the sloshing changes, and you get a solid clump of butter in the middle of the liquid. Traditionally Irish housewives would pat the butter dry of its remaining liquids, but we simply clarified it. 

Then we froze it to keep it solid, wrapped it in cheesecloth and a rope, walked about ten minutes from our house into the bog. I paced the steps first in one direction and then another to make sure I would remember the spot, and tied the rope to a nearby tree to I could find it again.

Seventeen months later we dug up the butter, and while the picture looks pretty disgusting, once we washed it off and unwrapped it the butter looked much the same – a little darker yellow and with an earthy smell, but not rancid.  

The taste was similar – recognizably butter, with a slightly earthy, cheesy flavour a bit like parmesan; it was particularly good over popcorn. It wasn’t something most modern people would choose to eat regularly, but for people who faced periodic famines, it was an ideal store for lean times.

Of course, this butter was only in the bog for 17 months, and the effects are probably very different over 3,000 years. So I’m burying more butter for a longer period of time – dozens of kilos -- and planning to unearth it in about three to five years, some further down the road. If anyone wants to buy some in advance, you can be one of the few people in the world who can say they had this ancient food.

The last of his generation

It’s been an eventful few weeks, but before I wrote about anything else, I wanted to note the passing of my grandfather. A few years ago I wrote a piece commemorating my great-aunt Imy, leaving my grandfather the last of his generation. As much as I will miss him, I’m blessed to be one of the few men in their 40s who had a living grandfather – many of my peers don’t have living parents – and that he stayed with us into his mid-90s and passed quickly, surrounded by a large and loving family.

One of my first memories – I couldn’t have been more than four – was of fishing with my grandfather in a rowboat on a warm summer lake, catching bluegill and throwing them back. Then we were caught in a surprise shower, and I remember watching with alarm the water collecting around our boots, and the view of the distant shore disappearing around us, replaced on all sides by grey sheets of rain. My grandfather calmly rowed us to safety, and we trudged home.  

I remember staying at my grandparents’ house, watching him staying up late reading or laying out blueprints; I remember his voice carrying over the crowd as he played cards with cousins and neighbours; griping at recalcitrant vegetables that he grew in the backyard; taking part in his local library board or Kiwanis; meeting and becoming friends with his neighbours wherever he lived. He was the kind of civic American that Robert Putnam wrote about in Bowling Alone, the kind we don't have enough of anymore. 

He grew up during the Great Depression, entered the Army in World War II, trained as a mechanic and repaired airplanes during the war. When the war ended he studied to be an engineer on the GI Bill, met my grandmother, married her and had my father, all in what must have been a whirlwind few years. 

They didn’t start out with much; he used to tell me how their low-rent neighbourhood flooded one summer, and their apartment was knee-deep in water. He had to keep the furniture raised on blocks and store his clothes on upper shelves, he said, and a neighbour with a boat came along every morning and took him to work, but he went to work all the same.

Eventually he founded his own surveying and engineering company, and surveyed the foundations for what would become Busch Stadium and the St. Louis Arch. He and my late grandmother had three more children -- my amazing aunts -- and the family eventually swelled with children and grandchildren.  

I came back to Ireland with a stack of things he left me – his slide rule, his pipe, his book of Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics, his Carl Sandburg biography of Lincoln. And a lot of memories. I couldn’t make it to America for the wake, but apparently hundreds of people came, including people who hadn’t seen him in many decades. He left quite an impression in this world, and his passing is the end of an era.  

Traveling in the UK

My friends' homestead in the Welsh mountains. 

I traveled through the UK a few weeks ago visiting friends, all of whom were living remarkable lives and making the world better in their own way. One couple in rural Wales, for example, have a background in studying climate change, and wanted to live a more sustainable life; to do this, they turned a secluded hollow of the Welsh mountains into self-reliant homesteads.

They bought land with several friends of theirs, divided it among them, and each grow their own food, raise animals, keep bees, and created ties with the local Welsh community. They built homes out of timber frames and straw-bale walls. Straw sounds like a strange building material, but actually has tremendous potential for the future; when compressed into bales it is as strong as wood, and is no more or less flammable. It is also cheap, does not require cutting trees, and is an excellent insulator. My friends built a timber frame -- although similar structures could be made from other materials – and the straw bales formed the walls. Once a waterproof plaster coated the outside, no one could tell that the house was made of straw, and the bales were protected from moisture.

The very friendly pub in Pembroke, Wales

While in London I met with a group of people who met through John Michael Greer's blog, and who meet occasionally to share their experiences and ideas. They were all from the UK, mostly London -- I was the only one coming from Ireland -- and were working through different community groups and political parties to prepare their communities for the difficult times ahead. On this occasion we also listened to an interesting journalist, who had spent a great deal of time in the jungles of Guyana reporting on the tribal/gang warfare taking place there.

I was only able to visit them because I was taking a ferry and train to London, which pollutes a lot less than flying in a plane. Air travel has become so quick and convenient that many people treat it as driving a car, but all that flying is catching up with us, as it’s a major contributor to climate change. Taking a train uses a lot less fuel, even  if it takes longer, and it allows you to stop along the way, visit friends, and actually see the beaches and green cliffs of the country you’re visiting.

Many people go to other countries and stay at hotels, but I prefer hostels, which this weekend offered me a bunk and locker for only 12 pounds a night. Most hostels require visitors to sleep in rooms with several other people, but this is not as difficult as it might sound; most hostel guests respect the privacy and sleeping habits of others and, as they are spending the day working or having fun, use their rooms only for sleeping.

Hostels also offer the chance to mingle with other guests in a way that hotels do not. Since most people in hostels use their rooms only for sleeping, and spend their time at the hostel sitting in common rooms, hostel guests have the opportunity to chat with young or otherwise adventurous visitors from many countries, many of whom have great stories to tell.

One of the plaques you see everywhere in London.
There's history on every corner. 

You might think that seeing a foreign city would be expensive, and every city is different. In many cities, though, the most amazing sites are the statues, buildings, rivers, bridges and public parks, and those are almost always free. Touring them, also, does not have to be expensive; I rented a bicycle in London for two pounds a day, and got to see a lot of neighbourhoods with more ease than I would with a car, and with more freedom than I would with a bus tour.

On earlier trips I made a point of seeing Shakespeare at the Globe -- I got to see the infamous version of Titus Andronicus where audience members fainted and had to be carted away in ambulances. Another time I got very inexpensive tickets to Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, with Kiera Knightly and Elizabeth Moss. Still other times I toured the Natural History Museum, like a cathedral to the natural wonders of the world, or the many exhibits at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This time I wasn't seeking out tourist attractions, but looking to enjoy the varying neighbourhoods of London up close. 

The only tourist attraction I really saw -- almost by accident, stumbling across it -- was Abbey Road, the crossing of the famous Beatles album cover -- which is not much to see, honestly, and misguided visitors have defaced the surrounding area with graffiti. You wouldn't want to live anywhere near it. 

The lost chances of the Greens, part III

This is a bit delayed -- I've been travelling to Wales and London, and will write more about that shortly 

Kaller: I’ve been to a lot of rallies, both before and after I became a journalist, and it always amazed me that so many people there considered themselves to be, because they were fighting the takeover of big corporations, anti-capitalist. I’d read The Wealth of Nations, and

Gilman: Written before corporations existed …

Kaller: Yes, and I believed that, by opposing things like corporate monopolies, I am being extremely capitalist.

"Smith came out of a very Christian society, where the moral rules of how you did things were never questioned ... And that was the framework within which he saw the market operating. When you hit the limit of those rules, the free market no longer applies."

Gilman: I would agree with you on that. Yes, it’s totally oversimplified by people who don’t know the history. I have an economics major, so I know a little bit about the emergence of economic theory, and it is a far cry from what neoconservatives today talk about. The whole nature of the world has changed, and the rise of corporations – one of the big inventions of industrialism, equal to the internal-combustion engine, or perhaps more fundamental. That is a much bigger picture than just Marxism vs. capitalism, or capitalism vs. socialism.

If we were living in Adam Smith’s world, we wouldn’t be doing badly at all; the Greens would be right at home.

Smith came out of a very Christian society, where the moral rules of how you did things were never questioned. That was God’s Word, and I don’t think even Adam Smith questioned God’s Word. And that was the framework within which he saw the market operating. When you hit the limit of those rules, the free market no longer applies.

But nowadays, God is the free market. Instead of the divine hand, the invisible hand of the marketplace is the hand of God.

Kaller: People describe it the same way; people will dismiss any problem by saying “The Market will take care of it.”

Gilman: And a truly free market has almost never existed, if you mean the classic definition of a free market. And it certainly doesn’t exist today; the entire advertising industry is an effort to subvert the free market.

Kaller: Government gives huge subsidies to corporations to keep going, there is a tax structure that allows people to .. well, you know all this.

Gilman: Yes, and I think we’d be in very close agreement on this.

Kaller: What are some of the things the Greens predicted early on that are now happening?

Gilman: The limits to growth. Greens, along with all the rest of the world, have been very slow to move ahead with limiting population, because no one knows how to do it, except that it’s obvious that the more you educate women, the growth of population immediately slows down. The limits of the planet, I think, is the main thing.

Kaller: In the last few decades, have you ever seen anything happen – like, say, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the changes in American politics, the 9-11 attacks, or the Iraq War, and say, ‘That’s the kind of thing this person was talking about way back when.’?”

Gilman: I see it continually. The fact that we are running out of oil – there’s the limits to growth right there … The other thing that I have personally been involved with is the peace movement. And the Greens immediately picked up on the fact that we can’t have wars anymore. We’ll only destroy ourselves. And that was a fairly universal understanding among thinkers at that time. We had the atomic bomb; forget war from here on. And that is only one possibility right now. Weapons of mass destruction, if unleashed, will destroy everybody – they are not going to be controllable. And I think that’s been recognized pretty much since World War II among any forward-looking or fundamental thinkers.

"If we were living in Adam Smith’s world, we wouldn’t be doing badly at all; the Greens would be right at home."

Kaller: And yet, when I read things by the peace movement, I think how enthusiastically I agree, and yet I’m frustrated by a lack of practical implementation. How much of that did you see?

Gilman: An enormous amount. I guess I see this in a very big framework of science and where is the human species going, and I do see us as being in a crisis. I believe we are living in a collapsing civilization. And that makes it very hard to gain perspective, because it is happening so fast in so many areas of our lives, all around us, that to see exactly what is happening is very hard.

I think the fundamentalist movements throughout the world – Christian, Muslim, Jewish (and there are a lot of very fundamentalist Jews – I’m not aware of any really fundamentalist Buddhists, but they must exist, and certainly in Sri Lanka they are far from pacifist) – and the return to familiar beliefs is a panic reaction, something to hold on to, to give people a sense of security in a world that is collapsing, that they can’t understand and that seems completely out of control.

And of course that only precipitates more violence, because anyone who feels they have an exclusive lock on the truth is going to end up fighting somebody else who feels they have an exclusive lock on the truth. There is no possibility of a peaceful world as long as that is the prevailing type. I’m optimistic enough to think that eventually that will play itself out, but how exactly, I don’t know.

The Lost Chances of the Greens, part II

Kaller: Would you say that Greens everywhere are in favour of a more localized economy?

Gilman: I don’t know about that. I would suspect that’s true, because it’s almost forced by the idea of a more Earth-friendly society. On the other hand, I don’t know what Green Parties in other countries are doing. Certainly in this country, that is true, and is something I’ve worked for in Minnesota, a more localized economy.

Kaller: When I looked at the early issues of the North Country Anvil [a 1970s publication Gilman edited in rural Minnesota], I found it interesting. How integral would you say that was to the early Green Movement?

Gilman: I’d say a good many of them were integral.

[Gilman went on to describe some of the early Greens, mostly farmers and homesteaders from various Christian denominations; I didn’t want to publicise their names without permission.]

They were Luddites; back-to-the-landers, and that particular aspect of the Anvil, carries over to the Green movement … [but] the Greens function on the Internet, and they are not Luddites in the sense of wanting to go back to the land; that was a function of the 1960s and 1970s, especially here in the Midwest. It may not have been as strong elsewhere, but I suspect it was – certainly in New England it was. That was one aspect of the Anvil.

Kaller: It felt like such a rural publication.

Gilman: One of the things that interested me was that it is a rural voice for the Green movement, whereas many others like Murray Bookchin were very much urban.

Kaller: When you were talking about these early ideas -- systems theory and the Club of Rome – how many people were paying attention? How big was this movement?

Gilman: It would be impossible for me to say; I was very much on the fringes of it. I was reading a lot of books, but I wasn’t involved; I was raising kids. I was not involved as an activist in any way.

Kaller: But you were interested early on.

Gilman:Yes, I became interested in the mid-1970s, and my reading went back before that. But through the 60s I was “nesting,” as they say, working full-time and raising a family, and that does keep one a little busy.

Kaller: I know (chuckle). I was trying to get a feel for how small the number of people were, and what kind of people.

Gilman: One key person whose work I read a good bit of, and went to several conferences with, was William Irwin Thompson – and I won’t blame you if you’ve never heard of him. I have a number of his books up there; he came out of the Sixties. His first and best-known book was The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, the rest were less well-known and less interesting.

In any case, I joined his Lindisfarne Association, and went a number of seminars and conferences, where I met some very interesting people. Mary Catherine Bateson – I never met Gregory, but his daughter Mary Catherine was at many of these conferences – and people like Wendell Berry and his wife, and a number of very Green-leaning people. They were also anti-capitalist, also, but again it’s a much broader thing than capitalist vs. socialist.

The lost chances of the Greens, part 1

In a nursing home in St. Paul, Minnesota last year, a 91-year-old Quaker named Rhoda Gilman died, and her death was barely noted -- which is a shame, because she led a fascinating life. She wrote several excellent books on American history, raised a family, ran for lieutenant governor of that state in 2002, and was one of the early leaders of the Green movement in America … and lived through one of the great and unappreciated lost chances of world history.

That’s a sweeping statement, I know, but let me explain.  

By “Green movement,” I don’t mean simply the Green Party – although she helped found that organisation – or the environmental movement. The word “environmentalist” has been applied to many things, from activist celebrities to the latest expensive eco-fad. The movement I’m thinking of has rarely been noticed by mainstream media, or else has been called many names: back-to-the-land-ism, bio-regionalism, deep ecology and many other labels. The best word for it, though, in the purely dictionary sense, would be “conservative.”

I’m referring to a diverse movement of people casting aside the stereotypes of left and right, who mostly live on homesteads and revive traditional ways of life. Most are private and stay under the radar of the internet for a reason, but I know many of them on homesteads across the USA, the UK and Ireland. Rather than take their inspirations from celebrity environmentalism, they embraced a radical traditionalism, following figures like economist  E. F. Schumacher, theologians like Ivan Illich or Father Thomas Berry, and do-it-yourselfers like John Seymour. Many were quite religious – sometimes conservative Catholics like Schumacher, Illich or Berry, some Lutheran or Mennonite, some Quakers like Gilman. And they began to appear just as the world was becoming aware, on a mass scale, of issues like pollution, climate change and consumerism. There was once a time, though, when Christians forming their own communities in the country talked to, and were sometimes the same people as, the ecologists and libertarians doing the same.

"I saw it as an alternative to the identity politics that were already springing up and dividing people. Women, blacks, gay people, American Indians, now Asians ... Identity politics is made to order to divide and conquer. I saw the Green Movement as bridging all of those, and responding to the basic problems ..."

-- Rhoda Gilman 

Unfortunately, all Greens were branded as “far-left,” and the growing evangelical movement of the time “far-right” – both simplistic and somewhat inaccurate labels. During a crucial window of history, when we had a chance to really avert any serious climate change and manage an orderly rearranging of civilisation  rather than a catastrophic decline, Green ideals failed to catch on among the larger and politically powerful Christian movements.

About 15 years ago,  I sat down with Gilman in her apartment to talk about the early years of the Greens, and of what could have been.  

Kaller: One of the reasons I wanted to do this is because, in the popular media when the name Green comes up, everyone in mainstream political ideology talks about them in very specific terms: ultra-leftists, split off from the Democrats, made Gore lose.

Gilman: And environmentalists.

Kaller: Yes, and I’ve heard that even from some people who joined the Greens recently, people who believed this stereotype and liked it. So I’d like to publicise the actual beliefs of the Greens and where they came from.

Gilman: I can’t speak for Europe, I only know this country. In 1970 there was the Club of Rome report from Donella Meadows, in 1973 the Catholic economist E.F. Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful, in 1979 the scientist James Lovelock published Gaia, and people like Arne Naess and Murray Bookchin expanded on their ideas. Bookchin was part of the very early Green movement here, in social ecology, and was part of the left wing of the Green Movement when it was first founded in this country.

My own feeling is that ecology as we know it today is based on systems theory. Norbert Wiener wrote The Human Use of Human Beings in the 1950s, and then Gregory Bateson applied some of those same ideas to nature.

Kaller: Could you tell me more about them?

Gilman: Weiner was an early computer man, and is fairly well-known; if you look him up on the Internet you’ll get the whole story. Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist, and for a while the husband of Margaret Mead. He was also very interdisciplinary, applying systems theory to evolution. I have several of his books here – Steps To an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature are probably his best-known. The intellectual currents of the time were leading towards the Green movement, and Bateson was close to Schumacher …

The intellectual roots of the Green Movement are right there. Donella Meadows died just recently, but her work on the Club of Rome report in 1970 was the one that created the term “limits to growth.” I see that as much more integral to the Green movement than, say, the Sierra Club or Save the Whales.

Environmental organizations tackle a problem or group of problems. These seekers went to the basic problems with our industrial society that are going to have to change because the planet can’t support it. That is, to me, the essence of the Green Movement.

I joined the Green Party – or the Green Movement, before it was a party, early on – because it was the one umbrella group that faced the whole problem of the need for change, rather than joining the Left. The socialists and communists still worked within the framework of an industrial society. The Greens said, “We’ve got to question the whole thing.”

Also, in this country, politically, I saw it as an alternative to the identity politics that were already springing up and dividing people. Women, blacks, gay people, American Indians, now Asians – at that time Asians weren’t in the picture yet. Identity politics is made to order to divide and conquer. I saw the Green Movement as bridging all of those, and responding to the basic problems facing our industrial civilization.

That’s why it’s international. It’s facing the problems not of a country or even a system like capitalism, it’s facing the problems of the entire planet.