Kind of Scarey, the Food Crisis

It's kind of scarey, the way the world is turning today, with food riots and high prices and the price of gas going sky high. In the face of higher food prices, the news said speculators were buying up large quantities of food, and holding it, hoping the prices will go even higher. You wonder how some people sleep at night, the way they behave.

I saw a clip on the financial channel. The man was urging people to buy stocks in companies that exploit the labor force to a high extent, not investing even in companies operating in China and India, but advising investors to search out companies operating in the extremely poor countries, where there is no oversight on labor or environmental practises. This is an American television channel, advising viewers this way, to make money. This astounding, really, and sad, and scarey.

Our world is built atop use of the gasoline engine and petroleum products. We should have sought out alternatives long ago. A slow transition would have been easier on the entire world. We have to drive to jobs miles and miles away. Our food is shipped in by truck and all our goods, too. Many of us live too far from work, schools, food outlets to walk to get what we need and where we need to go. And now, our system, based on oil, is collapsing, as high prices of oil force up the price of food and everything else. We're over a barrel, an oil barrel.

I hope our inventiveness will save us now. We need people working on alternatives, affordable ones, around the clock.

I'm planting a garden, a vegetable garden, if the weather ever stops freezing anything I plant. I'm glad I held off, although it wasn't planned, my planting procrastination. Urban chicken farming I believe will again become the norm. (hold the roosters please).

Maybe more families will plant small gardens and enlist the kids to help, getting them away from the boob tube as a result. Maybe we'll all walk more, too. Maybe some of the changes will be good for us.

Maybe neighborhoods and communities will become more centralized around local markets and goods.

The downtown office manager at the city council womans' nonprofit took in the cat abandoned down near their office after her spay. I dropped her off at the woman's house Friday evening.

She has bee homes hung on her porch. Not for honey bees, but for another type of bee that also polinates. She and her husband make them out of six inch diameter by 8 or so inch long pieces of birch. They use birch because the bees like birch over other more smelly woods. They drill small two inch long holes in the ends of the birch piece. The bees make their homes in the holes, and lay their eggs inside, and pack the holes with mud. They live their short summer lives, then crawl inside the hole in the fall and die. The eggs hatch in the spring and cycle repeats. I'm going to hang some of these under my eaves for these polinators and I'm going to try to keep them around by planting some Cosmos and other polinator attractors.

Ideas out there for attracting bees? We need bees, that's for sure. And we need to put away those chemical backpacks spraying dead everything alive. I ran into so many women who said their husbands were salivating at the chance to get out and spray weeds and bugs this spring. In the process, we kill too many good things, like honey bees, and the insects birds eat and contaminating the seeds the birds eat, too, leaving them nothing. We have to remember the good things die with those we don't want.

I am reminded of the windrowing season upcoming, on the grass seed production lots. Winrowing is the way crops are cut, including grass seed, which is not a food crop but a product, and seems to waste a whole lot of land that could be used to grow food. I suppose people need their grass lawns and ball park grass and golf course grass, etc, however. And hay is a byproduct of grass seed production, that goes to feed livestock and people's hobby horses. Well anyhow.

Those bladed winrowers maim so many animals and birds I have come to call harvest season the season of death. They cut the legs off fawns, cats, and birds, like pheasants, wild turkeys, etc, any ground nesting bird, right at the time these animals and birds have young and try to defend their young. It's horrible.

I can't even look into the fields at such a time of year, having found so many of the animals maimed by these machines. I wish there would be advances and since it is such a huge problem, it seems like by now there would have been advances on the machines that would startle up and out wildlife and birds in their path. Wildlife when threatened will huddle down, try to blend into the environment, holding very still, and not run, in the daylight hours, to survive threat. They get mowed under, limbs cut off, I don't want to think about it.

Someone else warned me about mid valley dirt. I was telling her I was trying to find dirt to make a garden and joked about carrying a shovel and going into fields at night to dig some up. She said "You don't want dirt from a field around these parts for a garden. The dirt is dead, killed by all the chemicals the farmers use." She told me not to dig up dirt from around here and expect it to grow anything. That surprised me. Can't be true, can it?

Well anyhow, it's a scary world these days. Uncertain and there is a lot of hunger and suffering. I still believe the bottom line is there are too many people on earth. I know, we industrialized nations use more than our share of the earth's resources.

There was also something on the news about a village somewhere, I didn't even catch where. The glacier they rely on for water and life, has receded hundreds of feet, and now they are considering how they will survive when the water is limited or gone.

I hear these stories around the world and I do feel guilt about even driving here in the US, like we're impervious to what we do and how it affects the rest of the people living on the globe. I hear this and that about global warming, are humans to blame, or aren't we. Sure, it'd be great if we are not and I can understand why there would be pressure to keep it quiet if we are to blame and political reasons to keep the science down if we are to blame. I am not a scientist and I don't know what to believe. It's hard to know, being just an everyday person. But seeing pictures of melting glaciers and all, it's hard not to believe somethings changing fast.

I start thinking our time of plenty might be nearing an end, and sometimes I wonder if we really are the cause of global warming, will there be consequences for what we have done in creating suffering for others in this world. I wonder why churches aren't calling for change, as a moral issue, among politicians and their own members, and I wonder why we aren't getting on this rapidly.

Well anyhow, I don't know anymore. There is so much violence in our world. The food crisis will spark even more. I don't know the answers. But I wish those financial channel people wouldn't act so mean and selfish by their talk about investing in companies operating in impoverished countries where the labor market can be exploited and I wish, in the face of people starving, that food speculators could get some soul and not stockpile food to drive prices even higher. That's just evil.