Chapter One

[ljgeoff]

approx. 3616 words
One

I bit at my hand trying to tease out a small splinter stuck in the soft, webbed part between my thumb and first finger. My teeth are old, lightly chipped and worn on the edges, but the splinter was big enough that I was able to grab it. I spit it out with a soft thpppt and let the hammer in my other hand slip through my fingers into the loose dirt and autumn leaves at my feet. Sucking on the small wound, I surveyed my progress.

I was building a small greenhouse onto the back of my old, intercity Arts and Crafts bungalow. A big kitchen window faced the back yard and the south sun, and I was building the greenhouse against this window; eight feet tall, eight feet long and six feet deep. In the past week, I'd gathered up a minivan load of old, used windows from a couple of freecyclers and a pile wooden pallets from the side of the road.

My husband Mike peered at me from the kitchen window and grimaced. This was one of my crazy ideas but it hadn't set us back much, so he was only emitting slight disapproval, a small frown playing across his brow. I grinned up at him.

I'm a plan-maker. a dreamer that doesn't usually bring any of those dreamy plans to fruition. I have a journal full of cool ideas and "if only we had the money" projects and a basement full of this-and-that. Where many women have boxes of unused sewing fabric, stacks of dusty cook books and piles of lovely yarn, I've got a leaning tower of 2X4s, gardening starter pots, a big pile of old used tires and the odd bag of cement.

If it was only a greenhouse, Mike would be much more behind the project. But what I'd pitched at him, eyes over-bright and hands shaping the air, was a small bioponics system -- a mini fish farm and hydroponic system that would require pumps, filters, water lines, hydroponic clay pellets, nutrients and fish food. I could practically see the dollar signs floating in Mike's eyes.

"Why now," he had complained. "It's almost October. You're gonna try farming fish and growing plants outside in winter, in Michigan? Does that make sense to you?"

I smiled knowing that this was a rhetorical question. "Think of it as a science project," I murmured and patted his arm in understanding. He sighed, beleaguered, and I kissed his temple where the hair was just going grey.


Bioponics was an idea I'd been playing with for a while. In 2005, Mike was sent to Iraq with his National Guard unit. In 2006, I was caught up in the emotions of Mike coming home from Iraq -- and dealing with a man subtly changed by that experience. But in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, about three hundred miles north of Chicago, one can't help but notice when it rains in December. By 2009, I had read through much of the IPCC fourth assessment report (AR4) and was just coming to terms with what that report and many other studies were suggesting.

In April of 2009, I wrote in my journal: Lovelock is predicting a 90% die off of humanity this century. But most of his peers think he's bonkers, so hopefully they're right and he's wrong.

Lately I've begun to think: What if Lovelock was right?


I hate grocery shopping. I'm too old for it. I keep seeing the prices from the 80's and 90's superimposed across the current prices. I fed my kids on a dollar a pound hamburger and chicken breasts, a gallon of milk for a little over two bucks and a dollar for a box of no-name breakfast cereal. Sure, I make a little more money now than back then but not that much more -- and when you figure in what the dollar is worth today compared to then, I make less. It sucks.

"Get me some chips?" Luke, my thirteen year old son, lives on Doritos and ramen. He peered at me over the screen of his laptop

"And applesauce," I suggested. Luke rolled his eyes but shrugged. I decided to push it. "Applesauce first, ok?"

He let out a sigh and his eyes went back to the monitor. "Whatev, mom."

"Why don't you come with me?" I bent to zip the coat of my four year old grandson, tugging at it as he danced with impatience and then tied the shoe of his three year old brother.

"Not with them," Luke said, still looking at the screen but nose crinkled in distaste for his nephews.

"Whatev, Luke!" I sighed and rolled my eyes.

Luke grinned a touché. "Don't forget the chips?"

"What are you going to do when there's no more chips?" I said it lightly; it was a game that we played.

"Probably die," he muttered, punching at his keyboard. My breath caught for a moment but I steadied myself. "Corn flour, water, salt and oil. I can pull off chips."

I was watching him closely and he knew it. A small grin lifted one side of his mouth: Mom, I'm just playing. "I'm gonna hold you to that."

Internally, I added learn how to make tortillas to the endless list that ran through my head.

World civilization is built on the pillars of corn, wheat, rice, and beans. We also eat a lot of potatoes, millet and oats. There is nothing that whispers "revolution" more fiercely than an empty belly. Especially your kids' empty bellies. And though we're growing more food than we've ever grown, bringing in record harvests again and again, famine continues to sweep across the globe.

In 2008, food prices skyrocketed right when the weather was going crazy in my little home town. It wasn't a coincidence. But no one I knew seemed especially concerned about what the weather was doing to the world harvests. I started thinking about it, really noticing how people around me, my neighbors and family, felt about food -- something that you have to get, you have to budget for it but it's just there -- every day, we open up the cupboard and try to figure out what to make for supper.

What would happen if it wasn't there?

USians aren't used to being hungry. The whole idea of being hungry freaks us right out. The closest we've come to famine was the Great Depression, and according to the current Integrated Food Security Phase Classification even the poorest of the poor during the Great Depression was only "food stressed."

In 2014, John Johnston, running as a representative for the Indiana 10th District seat, commented about the poor on Facebook: "no one has the guts to just let them wither and die."

I don't think that USian poor would wither and die. I think that they'd riot. I think that they'd steal food. I think that they'd attack the people who they felt were taking their piece of the pie.

"It won't come to that." Mike and I were talking in the car. "You think the politicians don't know this stuff? You think that the big business guys don't know it? People'll be fed."

"But..." I looked out the car window and watched a flourishing corn field stream past. "What if there just isn't enough? What if it gets hot at the wrong time and the corn doesn't pollinate? What if it rains too much and the wheat rots in the field? What if everything happens at once?"

Mike glanced at me and then put his eyes back on the road. He shrugged. "There'll be prison camps before there'll be nationwide riots. The guys in charge won't let a bunch of bottom feeders call the shots."

"Bottom feeders." I watched his face. "We'll all be bottom feeders at this rate. The gap between the rich and the poor was one of the main causes of the Arab Spring."

"This isn't Tunisia or even Egypt." His face went dark. "This is the U. S. A." His fingers tapped the steering wheel along with the initials. "Do you know how much food we grow? Things will have to get really bad before we won’t be able to feed ourselves. Before then, though…”

“We won’t be able to export,” I finished.

“Yep,” he nodded. “The countries that rely on imports will starve. His shoulders moved uneasily, “ More like, they’ll go to war or implode. It’s gonna be bad.”

I shuddered and watched the corn fields fly by.

Sociologists and economists assure us that we grow enough food. The farmers agree; Malthus was proven wrong when our ability to grow food outpaced our exponential population growth. We don't have famines because there's not enough food on the planet; we have famines because the food we grow isn't getting to everyone.

The idea that famine in this day and age isn't caused by food shortages is a hard lump to swallow, but it's a very well documented fact. The real problem is that poor people don't have enough money to buy food. Sociologists call this a distribution problem.

In December of 2002, the New York Times ran the headline: Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots. What happened is that the farmer's lobbies kept the wheat rotting in Punjab State while the poor in neighboring states tried to eat bread made of foraged wild grass seeds. I remember seeing pictures of US farmers during the Great Depression pouring milk onto the ground. There was a glut of milk on the market because so many people couldn't afford to buy it any more. Waste, useless waste -- like all the people displaced from their homes by foreclosures, and empty homes falling into ruin because no one had the credit to buy them.

It just about drives me crazy.

In 2010, I started to plan. Or, as we say among ourselves, Plan. It’s simple, really -- get a little piece of property, grow food, raise some chickens and goats, do a little beekeeping. So far, we haven’t had the money to put toward any land, but I started a vegetable garden in the empty lot across the street from our house.

This year we got a bumper crop of cabbage and zucchini.


The day I’d begun it, I stalled out on the greenhouse project because I couldn't find the ladder and then it got dark. The next five days were filled with work and making supper and laundry and dishes and … and … and. Too much ands.

Mike and I have seven sons: two from his first marriage who mostly lived with their mom, one from my first marriage, three we had together and one that got picked up along the way.

We adopted our son Jerome as an adult. He grew up in a depressingly large number of different foster care homes and was living on the street when his girlfriend got pregnant. She had the baby, was living here and there and then got pregnant again.

I heard about her from a client I was with, when the client’s grandson’s girlfriend was talking about this cousin of hers who was living in a shelter in Denver with a six month old baby and one on the way. Mike and I had an extra room, one thing led to another and now we have another son and two grandkids. The mom is still around on the sidelines, but Mike and I have guardianship of the kids, Trentyn and Zary, and their dad Jerome lives with us, too.

Our son Sam, his wife Kayla and their two year old daughter Torrin moved in with us last spring. They were hoping to get jobs, save money and get their own place in a few months, but it’s been eight months and they’ll probably be here for a while longer.

So that’s five adults, a teenager and three toddlers in a three bedroom, one bath, 1920’s intercity bungalow. It’s been a little stressful.

“Look,” I said. “All I’m asking is for everyone to pitch in! If everyone did just fifteen or twenty minutes a day -- a load of dishes, a quick wipe-down of the bathroom, the cat boxes -- we’d at least keep it livable.”

I was sitting on the couch, fingertips massaging my temples. Mike was standing, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Nobody’s gonna do anything if you don’t make them,” he said.

“Why? We’re adults, damnit! This is where we live. This is our refuge, our home.” I was almost crying, I was so frustrated. “I just want to be able to wake up and be able to get a cup of coffee. A clean cup and a spoon.”

“You know,” Mike’s voice was tight with his own frustration, “you talk about the end of the world, how things will go to shit and we’ll have to band together. How are we going to band together if you can’t even get the chores done?

You want to be the matriarch? Then be it. Run this house. Get stuff done.”

“You are adults!” I waved my hands at him. “What do you want me to do? Threaten you? Nag and harangue?”

He just looked at me, stoney eyed. I had no idea of what he was thinking. This man who I’d loved and lived with for twenty five years. I shook my head as the weight of not understanding pressed down.

“A matriarch?” I croaked. “I’m nothing. I've never been anything. I go to work, I cook and clean. I try to … love what I am and what we have.” I was crying now, trying not to because he hates that. “Matriarch? I make these plans, Mike. But really, do you know what’s going to happen? I do! I’m going to sit helplessly while the world falls apart and watch my grandchildren starve in my old age.”

He stood over me, not touching, while I tried to stop crying. “You’ll be what you choose to be,” he finally said. Then he sighed and went upstairs.

I sat on the couch, elbows on knees, and rested my face in my hands. After a while, I got up and did some dishes.


The current projection by the best computer models available is that the earth will most likely see a rise of at least two degrees celsius by 2030, and there’s a good chance that we’ll see a three degree celsius increase by 2050. This will happen whether we decrease our use of fossil fuels or not -- it’s what the scientists call “in the pipeline” because of heat that’s built up in the oceans, and feedbacks from things like loss of arctic albedo and increase methane release from melting tundra.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report was published in March of 2014, it included the synthesis of some 1700 scientific studies of what those two or three degrees will do to world agriculture.

What the synthesis explains is that we are already seeing decreases in agriculture due to heat waves, unexpected cold fronts, drought, flood and storm surge from rising seas. These decreases in yield will become worse as the climate becomes more erratic. By 2030 or so, we’ll see regular crop failures and as we pass the three degree mark, modern agriculture will begin to fail altogether.

How will that happen? Well, look at corn: a lovely plant, a grass that has built nations and nourished billions. It has two periods during its growth that are especially vulnerable to drought, heat and insect infestation. When the corn is about chest high, what’s called the 12-leaf collar stage, the potential kernel row number is determined. The number of kernels in each of those rows is set between this 12-leaf collar stage and about a week before the silks emerge.

The two week period before the silks emerge is when the plant is most sensitive to drought. For each day that the plant is wilting, yield is decreased by three or four percent.

Each kernel of corn is attached to a piece of corn silk. The pollen is produced at the top of the plant and winds blow the pollen down onto the silks. Have you ever got an ear of corn with kernels missing for the end? That’s an ear of corn that didn’t get it’s full dose of pollen.

Pollen has a thin outer membrane that’s susceptible to heat and low humidity. Heat above 95° F will desiccate corn pollen, especially if it’s also dry.

What corn and most other crops need, must have, is mild temperatures and regular rain. Scientists, some might call them mad scientists, are playing with the genetics of corn to help it withstand drought and heat, and make it less tasty to insects and invulnerable to pesticides.

There are lots of problems with genetically modified crops, not the least being that the modifications only last a couple of years before the insects catch up and with erratic weather, modifying for this years’ drought won’t help against next years’ flood. But it’s the research on rogue “jumping genes” that gives me the willies -- genetically modified genes called transposons, constructs that are designed to jump into genomes. It hasn’t been proved that these genes can cross into humans or other animals, but these genes have been found in the soil that the GMO corn is growing.


I have three garden beds dug into the vacant lot across the street from our house. About ten years ago, the vacant house on this lot burned down and the city tore it down and bulldozed the dirt around. The soil was so crappy that I decided to try the double-dug method of gardening -- I dug the soil down two feet, sifted out the rocks, old tin cans, and broken pottery and added a lot of good homemade compost. I’ve got three long beds, about a meter and a half wide and seven meters long.

I was out after breakfast, putting the garden to bed; pulling up old weeds, the wilted zucchini vine that had been so productive this summer and harvesting the last of the cabbage. It was a warm day for autumn and I’d laid my coat off in the grass.

There really is nothing like pulling food up from the ground, nothing like eating and feeding to your children something that you've harvested or gathered. The double-dug earth was so soft that most of the weeds were easily pulled. Sometimes I needed to push the garden fork in to get at the really deep, tough ones.

While I was cleaning up the corn stalks, I found a small ear that had been missed. Curious, I pulled back the husk and found it full of large, perfect kernels. I set it down with the cabbages.

At the end of the bed was a big burdock that I’d let go through the summer and should have harvested a month ago but now would do. I pushed off from the ground and brushed at my knees. When I turned around to go back home for the spade, Mike was there, coming down the front steps.

I put my hands around my mouth and shouted, “Mike! Grab the spade!”

He looked at me, head cocked to the side, and then nodded. While he was coming over, I took up the garden fork and began to loosen up the soil around the burdock.

Mike came to where I was working and began digging. “What are we doing?”

“Harvesting burdock,” I said with a grunt.

“You gonna feed us a bur plant?”

“This is great stuff,” I objected. “The root has a sweet, earthy flavor. Great in soups, stews and stir fries. But I like to make tea out of it.”

We’d dug down about a foot and were starting to get in each other’s way. “How much of this thing do you want?” Mike stabbed down with the spade.

I shrugged, “It probably goes down another foot or two, but you can cut it off anytime.” I knelt next to the hole we’d dug, trying to see what he was doing without getting brained by the shovel. With a couple of heavy thunks, Mike cut the top of the root free and I hauled it out of the hole.

“Come to mamma,” I murmured.

“I like to see you like this,” Mike said. He sat down next to me and lifted his face to the sun.

“Like what?”

“Happy.” His foot brushed at one of the cabbages. “Never seen a woman so happy about a couple of moth eaten cabbages.”

“Don’t be dissin’ my cabbages,” I cautioned, bumping him with my shoulder.

He didn't say anything but his face was soft, almost serene. I leaned toward him and put a dirt-stained hand on his thigh. His jeans were old ones, stained with motor grease and paint.

His foot nudged the cabbages again. “What’re you going to make?”

“Sauerkraut,” I said. “Cole slaw.”

“Let’s have that thing you make with the cabbage, mushrooms and wild rice.” His eyelids fluttered and he sent me a look. Are you okay?

“Yeah,” I agreed. Yeah.

We sat until the ground was too cold and then pulled each other up. Mike gathered up the garden fork and spade and I loaded the cabbages, ear of corn and the burdock into my coat and we walked back to the house.

Chapter Two