Wintersong
Just a brief post to thank readers on my website and on Substack for a bunch of great comments and recommendations under my last post. I’m in book-writing overdrive at the moment so apologies for not responding. However, today I finished the first draft of Chapter 6 so I thought a quick peep over the parapet would be in order.
The basic structure of my life has been pretty simple of late. Get up. Eat something. Light the (sustainable) woodstove. Check on the (sustainable) sheep. Write. Eat something again. Write some more. Eat some more. Read. Go to bed. Recently we had a couple of snowfalls and, unusually for these parts, the temperature stayed around zero or below for about a week, so I’ve been looking out of my window onto an enchanted snowy landscape. Our resident barn owl has been flitting around the house, along with a green woodpecker that seems to have an endless fascination for the ground just outside my window, while flocks of goldfinches come and go, feasting on the teasels. In the evening I’ve watched the orange glow from the woodstove reflecting in the snow outside, and felt that life is pretty good. When it comes down to it, I’m just hopelessly cottagecore.
While the basic structure of my life has been pretty simple – well, the writing, not so much. But that’s a whole other story. Which hopefully you’ll be buying from your local bookshop in the autumn.
In relation to themes of interest to me regarding the book to put out here for comment, I’m still interested in discussions about modern monetary theory and related matters. Thanks also to Chris for this comment. My interim conclusion at the moment remains ‘close, but no cigar’. But further thoughts welcome.
I’m also still interested in agrarian futures in the US Midwest. That’s one helluva lot of farmland you’ve got there. But … water, climate, politics … where’s it all gonna lead?
I’m continuing to track the great farm inheritance tax debate on social media. One such conversation went something like this:
Non-farmer: You’re telling me that your land has a paper value of £3 million, but you’re only earning £30k annually from it? Don’t lie!
Farmers: We’re not.
Non-farmer: Then you’re crazy. Sell the land and invest the £3 million. You’ll be much better off.
Farmers: Yeah, but someone needs to produce food.
Non-farmer: Oh, get off your high horse.
I know this is a bit simplistic, but I can’t help feeling that the disparity between the £3 million and the £30k gives a little quantitative fix on roughly how unsustainable the present economy is. Thoughts?
Tomorrow, I’m giving myself a day off from writing and will be felling the lower part of our Italian alder windbreak next to the nut orchard, partly as a grey squirrel defence strategy (I hate to be protectionist, but damn those American imports!) Also to replant with hybrid willows as a firewood pollard rotation. Good for (sustainable) firewood, but not good for monetizing land productivity. Thoughts? Oh sorry, same question.
Also, I just enjoyed reading Ashley Fitzgerald’s essay In defense of cronyism, which has a lot of resonances. Thoughts? (Different question this time).
I may not pop up again for a few weeks, but thanks as ever for reading and commenting, and I hope to meet you here again soon. I’ll leave you in a moment with the list of current books I’m reading, re-reading or have just read, most of them suggested by you lot. Who needs a book club, when I have you? But just to say, I enjoy hosting practical discussions here about things like nitrogen volatilization from urine in compost toilet systems, even while my head is mostly in abstruse political matters … and thankfully not in the head. My wife has recently been doing a standup comedy act focused mostly around our compost toilet, but she’s yet to work the issue of nitrogen volatilization into the gags. Weird, because it can certainly make you gag. Ciao.
Stephanie Kelton The Deficit Myth
Jem Bendell Breaking Together
Marshall Sahlins The New Science of the Enchanted Universe
Manon Steffan Ros The Blue Book of Nebo
Brenna Bhandar Colonial Lives of Property
Claire North Notes from the Burning Age
Ralph Adams Cram Walled Towns
David Graeber & Marshall Sahlins On Kings
Larry Siedentop Inventing the Individual
Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue
Aristotle (surname needed?) The Politics
I live in Ohio, the easternmost part of the Midwest. Urban sprawl and logistics hubs (Amazon distribution and other trucking) is eating up farmland around the cities, pushing up the price of land while tax abatements erode the public coffers. A lot of the farming, especially in the Northwestern part of Ohio, is locked into the corn-/soybean-CAFO economy. There are some promising urban and para-urban ag initiatives, but they’re a game for young folks, which leaves the sustainability an open question. Farmers are aging out, and the generation gap will require a huge bridge, both economic and cultural. We do still have an Amish population that continues to farm, at least something of a counterweight to the industrial model. For more details, check in with the (Wendell) Berry Center in Kentucky— not Midwest, exactly, but a great resource.
I used to live in the Midwest. This book helped me too understand more about the Midwest and modern farming: "Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry".