The White Elephant Exception

The Beacon is prolific this year, and we’re losing a lot of apples because we can’t keep up. Barbara and I pick them and gather windfalls, with -- say -- six person hours going to gathering and sorting maybe five bushels. Thursday night I had a serious juicing session, cutting apples, tossing spoiled pieces, and running pieces, mostly quarters, through the Champion juicer. Three hours yielded a little less than two gallons.

It was discouraging to see what value the apples put on my labor. Sometime in the future, I’ll network with other urban apple growers, and use larger equipment, saving time. Better planning may shorten the time we spend gathering by getting me up in the tree early, and avoiding windfalls, which are more likely to spoil, and require more time spent sorting. I may get ahead of the curve this year with the grapes and the Haralson, whose apples are supposed to be better after a light frost.

But what is labor worth? A former career had me driving and dispatching interstate buses. With a motor coach, you can take forty-five people and their luggage one mile for less than a dollar, assuming four-buck diesel. Let’s have the bus break down a mile from the terminal, and walk the passengers and their luggage in at two miles per hour. Let’s be generous, and say the fuel cost a whole dollar. Split the dollar forty-five ways. That’s about four point forty-four cents per hour.

The comparison is absurd, because no one could live in this economy on four cents an hour, but there are people, some in desparate circumstances, some in non-cash economies, who live on less. The poorest Americans are richer than two thirds of the world’s people, and increasingly that two thirds is are aware of how well we live. Saying that many of them are indignant would probably not be putting it too strongly. (No comment on class issues within the US, beyond a prediction that the reality I just described will reduce wealth unevenly.)

The US amounts to five percent of the world’s population, and we use something like a quarter of its wealth, sometimes frivolously, often carelessly. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d like to beg an indulgence from the people whose share of the world’s goods helps keep me in the pleasant style to which I have become accustomed.

We’ve built an infrastructure that demands a disproportionate share of the Earth’s wealth. If we live, henceforth, with utmost rectitude and thrift, individuals will still have the cost of operating within this extravagant playground. Give us a generation or two to learn to live well and change our way of life. Some of us have a vision of how all human beings can live harmonious and becoming lives into the distant future.

Step On A Crack...

I finally got the weeds pulled from the cracks, and used the hose for a little hydraulic mining and final clean up. The pavement got nice and clean. My feet were bare, and whenever I felt a piece of grit underfoot, my inner nag would go off about tracks on its nice clean floor. Three boxes of salt, and the brine from three jars of moldy pickles went into the cracks -- low-tech herbicide. I await dry pavement before filling cracks with the gooey residue of Carboniferous-Period ferns.

I wish I had carried the Wild Edibles field guide as I weeded. I’d murder a plant, and wonder, "What the heck was that?" Then I’d think, I can’t interrupt to go look it up. The plant I’m most curious about came in clumps, with lots of slender stalks growing from fat, tender roots. Those were impossible to pull. Each one of those, boy, left part of itself behind.

I finished almost in time for Democracy Now. Caught up during “For the 64th Time: No More Nuclear War,” Daniel Ellsberg, Frida Berrigan, and Pervez Hoodbhoy, commemorating the 64th anniversary of the nuclear destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Saturday, Secretary of State Clinton said that the Indo-US Nuclear Agreement wasn’t conditional on India’s signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the Agreement, India says it will keep its civil and military nuclear facilities separate and place all its civilian reactors under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. The US will transfer technology and expertise, to India, and help out financially.

India has at least forty nuclear weapons, and no more than 110. It tested its first in 1974. It has begun a fleet of nuclear submarines. Pakistan is its chief rival, although India and China have a history, and look out for certain neighbors to its west.

Can a society keep its military and civilian nukes separate? If nothing else, there’s social feedback, with both sides conditioning people’s images of themselves as nuclear players, for good or bad. Civilian and military engineers will know each other at university, and instructors will have both in the same classes.

There were cities devastated by conventional weapons during World War II -- Tokyo and Dresden most notably -- but those firestorms took fleets of bombers and lots of bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki each suffered from a single weapon, dropped from one B-29. Nuclear weapons are attractive because they make total destruction economical.

On the civilian side, nuclear power promises to keep us rich and fat after oil, and reduce greenhouse gases. The net energy of any alternative to fossil fuels is less than what the thing produces. It takes energy to build a power plant, deliver fuel, monitor the thing, and -- in the case of nuclear power -- keep it safe for longer than Homo s. has existed so far. Maybe nuclear pays, but the margin is smaller than you think. Besides, if we use new technology to prolong the current orgy of television and internal combustion, we will never grow up, never fully realize the potential of the gray stuff behind our eyes, our birthright. Conservation, radical conservation, will spare us the energy cost of building many of any kind of energy source, and preserve more liberty. (There is another point of view that tempts me, but I don't have the vocabulary to evaluate it, yet. It's exponent here, Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, believes that nuclear power and genetically modified crops are compassionately necessary, maybe critical to human survival.)

The Beacon apples are ripe and abundant, with a big grape harvest hard on its heels. We're starting to pick and preserve.