August 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
(Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0679314837

At some point, my aunt asked me to review something happy in order to help assuage my cousin, who apparently is going through what I went through a year or so ago and is suffering a bit of the “PEAK OIL IS HAPPENING TO US AND CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO COLLAPSE AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE IN A ROAD WARRIOR-LIKE WASTELAND!” And my mom, after I handed her my copy of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (because I thought she might appreciate the info therein), asked, “This isn’t going to make me depressed, is it?”

Yeah, I guess there’s a lot of gloom and depression mixed in with environmental books nowadays, because (depending on who the author is) it’s either too late or almost too late to fix things in the world, and while that may be the actual state of affairs, it’s not exceptionally heartening to have it repeatedly hammered into your skull. This review, then, is for my cousin, mother and anyone else who may want to read a book review of something inspiring a certain degree of hope.

The premise of The 100 Mile Diet is simple: a couple decide that all they’ll eat for a year are those things which can be produced within a 100 mile radius of where they live. The premise provides ample opportunity for elitism, snobbiness and hard-linery to proliferate in the book and could have easily turned into a proscription for Righteous Living, but it is miraculously devoid of more or less any of that, instead making its case as a sensible suggestion. This is a marked difference from the usual doomsaying environmental bestsellers who seem to think that telling you “IF YOU DON’T LIVE YOUR LIFE THIS WAY, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” is a practical and non-alienating course of action. In fact, without trying to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT: they make it through the year), at the end of the book they go back to eating some of the things they weren’t allowed to. But that’s essentially Alisa Smith and JB McKinnon’s point: for all of us to move into an ethical future is for all of us to live as ethically as we can and do the best we can; not to embrace some unrealistic hairshirt environmental dogma which requires us to martyr ourselves for unattainable goals that nobody else cares about.

No, there is no coffee grown within a hundred miles of Vancouver (which, coincidentally, is where I’m from and where Smith and McKinnon are based). But there are free trade and ethical choices you can make in your coffee consumption. Or black tea. Or chocolate. Because again, no one is asking you to be a monk—just do what you can. What the book does encourage, though, is putting in the footwork and not giving up in your quest for viable alternatives. By putting themselves in a situation where they couldn’t bend the rules, they were forced to keep looking for things like wheat, which—despite the lack of grain farmers on BC’s coast—they eventually found. Yes, we who occupy the Vancouver/Victoria area tend to be a little spoiled in our options, because most things can be grown in our neck of the woods, but wherever there have been permanent settlements of humans, there have been the means to thrive locally. Of course, that equation has become pretty skewed with the rise of the metropoli—you can’t feed a city of 1,000,000+ on purely organic, locally raised food (not under our current structure, anyway)—but the general principle is sound.

But why, you wonder to yourself, would I want to eat locally in the first place—what’s the point? Well, there are a few of them.

- Locally grown food is more nutritious. It’s not that organic produce has a bigger selection of vitamins or nutrients than vegetables grown on industrial farms, but local produce is generally picked much closer to its sale date than the stuff in your supermarket. Since produce accumulates nutrients as it approaches ripeness, it only makes sense that a tomato picked the day before it’s sold will be more nutritious that one that’s picked and shipped when it’s still green.
- Locally grown food is likely to be more ecologically sound. Some small-scale farmers use toxic pesticides and chemically-laden fertilizer, but not all of them do, and if you’re buying from the grower personally, you can ask what their standards and practices are yourself. Plus, on a very basic level, locally grown food is good for the environment because growing things benefits the environment. I hope I don’t have to explain this point.
- Buying local is also good for the economy—your local economy. It will probably cost more to shop that way, yeah, but if and when post-peak oil becomes a reality, food prices will start to go through the roof regardless, and I’d rather pay higher prices and support someone I know on a first-hand basis because I buy from them all the time than funnel my hard-earned food dollars into a faceless corporation’s coffers in exchange for some comparatively bland food.
- Which brings us ’round to the last (and possibly most) compelling reason: locally-grown food tastes better. It does. Seriously. Vegetables are delicious enough to eat steamed with maybe a touch of butter. Dishes in general require very little seasoning due to their nearly overwhelming natural flavours. No, the stuff we’re used to eating in packages isn’t what food is supposed to taste like—it’s a “good enough” approximation of a home-cooked meal. Somewhere along the line, though, we forgot what scratch-cooked food was actually like and accepted the food corporations’ assertions that what they were giving us was the real deal—besides, it was faster and even if it wasn’t excellent it was still, well, good enough. But the thing you have to prepare yourself for is that once you start eating local food, “good enough” isn’t good enough. You may keep eating it, but you’ll likely come to view it as filler in between the meals made with organic veggies and meat.

And what if you’re in a position where you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or its equivalent? The 100 Mile Diet also has buckets of inspiration to go around. Thanks to the non-preachy, non-guilt laden approach, you may find yourself inclined to do some gardening by the time you’re done… or bee-keeping… or cheese-making… or salt-distilling… or, for that matter, any combination of the above. None of these are impossible, and not all of them are necessarily very hard. We (as a culture) had most of the skills it takes to do those things up until 100 years ago or so—we’ve just forgotten them in the meantime. Smith and McKinnon have written a book encouraging us to reacquire them, and I’d encourage you to do the same. Moreover, I encourage you to do it for purely selfish reasons (on your part) but toward an altruistic end. You may or may not contribute to the ultimate salvation of our world by buying local food, but you’ll certainly contribute to the betterment of your diet and palate by doing so. To paraphrase Buckley’s, it tastes awesome and it works.

August 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I don’t want children. Ever. Neither does Carla. On either our first or second date, we had a conversation that went something like this:

Chris: Babies?
Carla: No babies.
Chris & Carla: *whew*

There are a variety of reasons for this decision, not the least of which is that I’m pretty sure I’d be a bad dad. I’m not looking for reassurances, here–my dad is a stubborn bastard with periodic rage issues and I can see some of those qualities in myself. Carla and I are also not ready to give up as much of our lives as we’d have to (a couple of decades or so) in order to raise another human being. But the overriding reason not to breed, for me, has always been the fact that there’s too many people on the planet already. I’ve watched the population soar in my lifetime and the thought of bringing yet another person into an already overcrowded world smacks slightly of insanity. I mean, if you all want to have babies, that’s your choice; I understand the biological imperative, but the more children brought into the world, the larger the ecological disservice done to the planet–an argument borne out by this blog entry.

Yes, thank you for sorting your recycling and driving a hybrid car. Now, for your next environmental contribution, please stop making more babies.

August 4th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Picture of Light
Director: Peter Mettler
(Microcinema)
 

Most documentaries have a straightforward mission. They shoot footage of something and intend to present to you the thing’s reality. It’s a visual dissection, stripping mystery from the subject in a clinical manner. Picture of Light is a different type of film. Ostensibly about the aurora borealis, the documentary follows a film crew to Churchill, Manitoba where they attempt to film the Northern Lights. What emerges, though, is a much more enigmatic piece which explores the landscape of the north, the psyches of the people who live there and the lights themselves. Despite the fact that an astronaut is filmed in the space shuttle giving an explanation of the phenomenon, his words still do not fully concretize the footage and the lights playing across the screen appear to owe as much from Inuit folk tales as they do from science. Science’s hold over winter on the tundra seems tenuous at best and as sparks shoot through the air inside a train car the elements willfully defy any attempt at rationalization.

There is certainly breathtaking footage of the aurora contained in Picture of Light, but almost more notable are the snapshots of humanity not often seen—of people living on the edge of civilization (the edge of the world, as they put it). People who develop a symbiotic relationship with their dogteam (without one, the other will die), and people who will put a bullet through their exterior wall to watch snow seep in through the knothole and develop in drifts across the floor, simply to relieve the monotony. And then there are the scenes of the frigid snow, the endless cold, the trackless waste, impermeable and unstoppable, majestic and terrible in its own right, possessed of its own very real and unpredictable personality.

Picture of Light is a singular film, haunting and evocative, not explicit in any regard. It shows you what the landscape has to offer, then leaves you to your own conclusions. Perhaps it’s best to accept its offering without putting too much weight of explanation on it, perhaps its best to appreciate the north for what it is without trying to unravel its mysteries.

July 24th, 2009 by Chris Eng

And following hot on the heels of my little rant on IKEA a couple of days back were two news stories about the box chain on The Consumerist:

- The first details how a breastfeeding woman in Brooklyn was forced to take her shame (and baby) into the washroom and think about what she’d done (or until she was done feeding her baby, whichever came first), despite state laws that say she doesn’t have to do that. Oh, then the security guards gave her a metaphorical kick in the ass on the way out, just–I guess–in case she was thinking about coming back in the future.
- The second (and this is the one that kills me) is on a report in the latest issue of The Atlantic which names IKEA as “the least sustainable retailer on the planet”. Literally a good 75% of my household furniture comes from IKEA. Excuse me a minute while I throw up a little in my mouth.

July 22nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

I love IKEA. Love it. And putting aside any discussion of my relationship to big box shopping for another day (which I do intend to explore in-depth in the future), I have always appreciated IKEA’s general attitude, as well as their meatballs.

It’s tradition for my wife and I (as well as all our friends) to scarf down some Swedish meatballs every time we make the trip out to the suburbs and yesterday was no exception. However, instead of being presented with the standard ceramic plate/steel cutlery/glassware combination, this time we got paper plates, plastic forks and paper cups.

Now, it was Carla who brought up the fact that IKEA’s reason for using actual, washable dishes is because they’re trying to project a more bistro-like atmosphere as opposed to any environmental imperative, and I understand that in a slipping economy every dollar counts and paying full-time dishwashing staff isn’t the cheapest thing in the world, but there’s a cost for the disposable supplies, and part of the cost is my peace of mind. Switching over to disposable dishes will put a massive amount of refuse into our landfills. I’m not going to say it’s more than McDonald’s or any of the other fast food chains out there, but they’ve been using throw-away wrappers all along. It’s not great that we’ve become inured to that particular wastefulness, but it’s certainly what we expect from them. IKEA, on the other hand, felt like more of a haven away from that. Their furniture, while cheap, is kind of classy (well, more classy than any of the other furniture warehouses, if not necessarily better-constructed) and it felt like their cafeteria was striving for that, too—it’s not fantastic food, but it’s cheap and it’s respectable. And I’ve got to say that a lot of that respectability just flew out the window for me.

I mean, the meatballs are good, don’t get me wrong—but if you’re going to dollop a bunch of guilt on top of them next to the lingonberry sauce and I’m going to have to worry about what I’m doing to the environment before I go and buy my cheap picture frames and DVD storage boxes, well, I’ll buy the meatballs frozen and take them home to cook. At least I know in my house they’ve got a part-time dishwasher. His name is Chris Eng, which I understand is half-Chinese for ‘common sense’.

July 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I managed to spend three consecutive days this week gaming. Tabletop gaming, by which I mean board games, card games and roleplaying games (or ‘RPGs’). You know—dice rolling, good times. What you may not have known is that by playing D&D and throwing those funny dice all those years (assuming you have been), you were contributing to the welfare of the planet. It’s true. There are several reasons why, but let’s start with the obvious one:

1) Tabletop games don’t use electricity. You don’t need to plug in your D&D books or your Monopoly board. You don’t need to hook them up to the TV (unless you’re playing Scene It or one of those other DVD games, but we’ll put those aside) and you don’t need to have anything in order to play them except for friends and enough light to see by. They are, in most regards, an environmentally sound choice. In comparison, computer video games suck power from the CPU and monitor, and console games need a TV and video game system. For that matter, consoles also often suck power even when they aren’t turned on (not a lot, but consider how many consoles are plugged in around the world right this minute). And what are you going to do if the power cuts out and you’re in the middle of an adventure? If you’re playing a console/PC game, probably curse loudly and start yelling about the fact that the last save point was over a half hour ago. If you’re playing tabletop, grab some candles and keep going.

2) Tabletop games are social. “But,” the Halo fans splutter, “video games are social!” Yes, some of them are. MMOs, in particular, lend themselves quite well to social events, like raids—but you’re still talking about voice chatting, not actual face-to-face interaction. And even when things get out of control in a D&D game (which I’ve seen happen), you generally don’t say things to people in front of you that you might to someone over your headset. For proof of this, please refer to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Having a 13 year-old boy yell “faggot” over and over at you during literally any given Xbox Live game isn’t socializing, no matter what you say. In the latest episode of THAC0 (a entertaining gaming and geek culture podcast to which I listen on a regular basis), they discussed their reasons for tabletop gaming and the most quoted reason was their social aspect. Roleplaying is collaborative storytelling—it’s necessarily social—and since the limits on what your character can do are literally the limits of your imagination, you are automatically assured of more options than any MMO out there.

3) Tabletop games encourage literacy. Roleplaying games sure do. What, you’re telling me you’re gonna play D&D without being able to read? You can’t—the two go hand-in-hand. For this reason, RPGs are great for kids with learning disabilities. They might not want to read generally because of the amount of work involved, but if you’re simultaneously encouraging their imagination through gaming, it gives them added incentive to push through the rulebooks. This, in turn, is imparting necessary skills to kids who might otherwise gloss over them.

4) Tabletop gaming encourages cognitive thinking. Strategy is a huge part of board games. C’mon—chess? It’s nothing but strategy. People spend their entire lives focused on developing that one new chess strategy nobody else has ever thought of. I’m not sure doing that is particularly healthy, but strategic thought, problem solving and thinking outside the box are more skills that can’t necessarily be taught but can certainly be fostered via gaming. RPGs also teach those skills, but in a less-structured way. While chess has very rigidly defined rules about how any of the pieces might move in a given situation, RPGs don’t—you solve a problem with the equipment your character has on-hand and whatever plan seems most likely for them to follow. Group strategizing in RPGs can actually be pretty time-consuming overall, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun—taking time to plan and then watching how your plan simultaneously comes together and goes awry is one of the principal pleasures of the hobby.

5) Tabletop gaming encourages concentration. I learned how to paint lead miniatures this week. Somehow, over the years, this became one of those quintessentially geeky areas of expertise that I never managed to pick up. To be fair, when I was a kid, I tried it, but since I didn’t have anyone to teach me even the most basic steps, my minis ended up looking like glazed shite and I stopped shortly after I started. This time around, I had an awesome instructor in my friend Neil, who paints regularly. As you can see, the results were much more satisfactory:

Yeah, the picture is kind of washed out, but you get a sense of it. This particular mini took me five hours to paint. Most professional painters (or ones who seriously pursue it as a hobby, anyway) will spend much longer than that on a single figure. It’s a long time committment on a tiny scale and it forces you to both look at the details and to pull back to see how it looks from a distance. It definitely promotes concentration and (maybe surprisingly) is quite relaxing.

6) Dollar for dollar, tabletop games give better value. A copy of Arkham Horror may cost the same as one of Prototype (for any given system), but I pretty much guarantee you’ll get better value from Arkham. Assuming you enjoy the game and treat the pieces with respect, it will last you quite possibly the rest of your life. Your new video game will last you until one of a few things happens: maybe you’ll get bored of it, maybe you’ll plough through it in epic time and not look at it again, maybe your system will become obsolete. Yes, you can absolutely get bored of tabletop games, but the well-designed ones stand the test of time. If I asked you to play a hit video game from twenty years ago and tell me how it stacks up to a next gen console release, what do you think you’d say? Sure, I play old video games, but I’m ancient (in video gaming terms) so I have nostalgia for Wizard of Wor and Infocom. But when gaming nostalgia requires that you either save every single console system you’ve ever owned (which can take up a ludicrous amount of space) or, in the case of computer games, that you continue to download patches so that you can play older games on newer OSes, it becomes a chore and starts requiring an outlay or either time or storage space. Even downloading ROMs for your favourite games requires that you update your software on a semi-regular basis. Scrabble, on the other hand, takes up exactly the same amount of space it always has and is maintenance-free.

Yeah, tabletop games have their drawbacks. Board game boards are made from carboard and many of them contain an ASSLOAD of plastic pieces; roleplaying books are made from paper (and hence dead trees). But nothing is cost-free. I mean, if you want a gaming experience with no environmental drawbacks, you could sit around with your friends in the dark and play “What Number Am I Thinking Of?”, but the replay value is poor and the next time Gaming Night rolls around your friends will just conveniently forget to invite you. If you are genuinely concerned about the pieces and packaging, though, I recommend you check out Cheapass Games. Hell, listen to their production strategy:

“Cheapass Games come with the bare essentials: boards, cards, and rulebooks. If you need anything else, we’ll tell you. And it’s probably something you can scrounge from a game you already own, or buy at a hobby store for less than “they” are charging you for it. Heck, if you need to, you can even buy the parts from us. And once you’ve assembled your collection of generic small parts, you can use them for every new Cheapass Game. We’ve standardized our designs so your gaming toolbox will last.”

And their games are fun. ‘Kill Dr. Lucky’, their flagship game, has easily as much replay value as anything in the $30+ price range, yet comes to around $10. Like their name says: cheapass, and hence better value.

I’m not going to tell you which tabletop games are the best—everyone out there has different tastes and there are games to cater to all of them—but I will encourage you to go down to your local games shop (most of which keep playable demo copies of the most popular and fun games) and try out something new. Because if we all work together, tabletop gaming will be on its way to saving the world… one die roll at a time.

July 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

This amused me.

January 25th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Yoda: “I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.”
Obi-Wan: “He will learn patience.”
Me: “Obi-Wan, you’d better be right, because my impatience is slowly creeping toward the far end of the spectrum.”

Just one of the many problems that Generations X-onward have had to contend with is that we’ve never had to wait for anything. Ever. That doesn’t sound like a problem, I know, but it means that we’ve been gifted with an extremely stunted sense of proportion. In the days before cell phones, if you wanted to talk to someone you had to wait until they were at home to call. No instant messaging, no texting, no emails. Before downloading, you had to wait until something was available to the mass market before you could listen to/watch/read it—assuming you could find a store in your area that carried it. If you wanted to buy a house, you saved for a down-payment and talked to a loan officer at the bank.

Things have changed. Now we live in an age of immediate wish fulfillment. You want to talk to your friend? If they’re even slightly plugged-in, you can probably have everything but their precise GPS location at a moment’s notice—and maybe that too. Looking for that new album/movie/book? It’s as close as minutes, even seconds away online—less time than it would take to put on your shoes and coat if you were going to look for it in stores. And, up until recently in the States, you could write your own references for a mortgage with no money down. Why wait for anything? The world never stops rotating, and your life shouldn’t be dependent on things like the rising and setting of the sun. We’ve beaten the system; the rules no longer apply to us. In short, we want—and get—everything now.

I made a monumental life decision a few months back: to move out to the sticks and learn to garden and live naturally—so why don’t I get to do any of that immediately? I know I set a five year goal to own property, and it seemed reasonable at the time, but I want to be doing it now! What’s the hold-up?

Okay, I understand I can’t afford the property, but why can’t I go out and garden?! Oh yeah. The seasons. Right.

I learn skills primarily by doing. I love to read, but if I’m learning something physical I need some hands-on experience. And consequently, if I want to learn how to, say, garden, I have to get out there and work the soil myself. If I’m not doing that—if I’m just reading about gardening, I feel in some regards like I’m not doing anything at all. It’s not the most reasonable perspective—there’s a hell of a lot of information out there that I could be assimilating and keeping on file—but having chosen my new path, I want to set it into motion. It’s more than a little unfortunate on the timing front, though, what with planting season still another few months off. Still, I’m trying to set the prejudices of a generation and deal with the fact I’m not going to be learning much horticulture until the spring.

Which brings us back to patience. The world doesn’t stop spinning, but it does rotate on an annual clock and my constantly stimulated North American, 21st Century, ‘Net savvy self is going to have to get used to the cycles of the year again, because when I plant my first crop (wherever that may be, I don’t have a yard at the moment), I’ll have to wait for the plants to sprout, then grow, then ripen. And if I haven’t shored up my expectations by that point, there’s going to be a rude awakening—one I’m sure I’ll end up texting you about.

January 2nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

I try and keep a log (admittedly more mental than physical) of the songs and writings I find inspirational in working toward my greenpunk goals. ‘Shangri-La’ by the Kinks sums up my feelings on suburbia and its accompanying lifestyle better than most other works I can think of.

Now that you’ve found your paradise
This is your kingdom to command
You can go outside and polish your car
Or sit by the fire in your Shangri-La
Here is your reward for working so hard
Gone are the lavatories in the back yard
Gone are the days when you dreamed of that car
You just want to sit in your Shangri-La
 
Put on your slippers and sit by the fire
You’ve reached your top and you just cant get any higher
You’re in your place and you know where you are
In your Shangri-La
Sit back in your old rocking chair
You need not worry, you need not care
You cant go anywhere
Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La
 
The little man who gets the train
Got a mortgage hanging over his head
But he’s too scared to complain
‘Cause he’s conditioned that way
Time goes by and he pays off his debts
Got a TV set and a radio
For seven shillings a week
Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La
 
And all the houses in the street have got a name
‘Cause all the houses in the street they look the same
Same chimney pots, same little cars, same window panes
The neighbors call to tell you things that you should know
They say their lines, they drink their tea, and then they go
They tell your business in another Shangri-La
The gas bills and the water rates and payments on the car
Too scared to think about how insecure you are
Life ain’t so happy in your little Shangri-La
Shangri-La, Shangri-La la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
 
Put on your slippers and sit by the fire
You’ve reached your top and you just cant get any higher
You’re in your place and you know where you are
In your Shangri-La
Sit back in your old rocking chair
You need not worry, you need not care
You cant go anywhere
Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La

 
And just in case that needed any reinforcement, I’d like to cite Lili Taylor in Say Anything, who, in one of her Joe Songs, also summed up my feelings on the matter quite nicely.

That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be, never be me, no.
 
That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be me,
That’ll never be, never be me, no
 
No. Never. No, never, ever, ever. Don’t you ever think it!

December 13th, 2008 by Chris Eng

“Not only am I not learning, I’m forgetting stuff I used to know. ”
- Milhouse

I was thinking about The Joy of Cooking the other day and how baffling parts of it were to me growing up. “Why,” I thought to myself in dumbfounded bemusement, “do they tell you how to skin and gut animals in here? Do people still do that?” The short answer being yes, just not in as great numbers as they used to.

And that’s the thing of it: the contents of The Joy of Cooking were a standard repository of kitchen practice and advice from 50 or 60 years ago. In half a century, the collective knowledge and wisdom related to food preparation in Western culture has degraded immensely. Catastrophically, really. Witness the CitiGroup ad from earlier this year, featuring a woman standing in a kitchen where every available bit of cupboard space is filled with clothes, about which she proudly boasts: “I don’t cook. So I made my eat-in kitchen a fabulous walk-in closet.” Which isn’t to say it’s a woman’s place to be in the kitchen skinning possums and baking pies and men should be out shooting said possums with their 12 gauge. Not at all. But it is to say that we generally have no idea where our food comes from or the steps it takes to bring it to the table anymore, and even the act of cooking a simple meal is arduous and confusing to the better part of a generation.

If most of our food is already prepared and comes from a box, bag, bottle or can, what will that mean if the cost of shipping the food to the cities from its origin points around the globe becomes so expensive it’s untenable to continue buying it on a daily basis? It means people will have to resort to buying their food locally—fresh food, untouched by preservatives and still in its component parts. And the generation that’s going to have to put it together is the one demanding Kraft Cheese & Macaroni in already assembled microwaveable packages because the original kind takes too much effort and/or skill to prepare.

This loss of knowledge and wisdom is touched upon in a recent essay by Dorothy Woodend. In it, Woodend specifically adresses the concept of what might happen to coming generations if there’s some kind of large-scale emergency spurred on by a global oil crisis. All the skills useful in such a situation (which our grandparents might have known and practiced) are being forgotten and abandoned at such a rapid pace that in a few generations there will be very little first-hand knowledge left to be passed down.

“Still,” as one of my co-workers argued, while we discussed this the other day, “we’ve never been in a situation like we are now, where almost limitless information is available on every conceivable subject at the touch of our fingertips.” Which is true as far as it goes, but Woodend has a convenient and succinct rejoinder for that: “Information is not knowledge, nor even close to wisdom.” And that drives to the heart of the matter. If you want to build a house, you can find blueprints for any one you want, but they won’t teach you the proper way to use your tools. Even if you find good books on foundation-laying, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, tiling, shingling and all of the other trades that go into house-building, you still won’t have the accumulated tips and advice accumulated by doing the same job over the course of your life—the wisdom gained by being an expert in one’s field. That’s what will take the most time to regain, should we find ourself at a point where our culture needs this wisdom again.

And those are my plans for the short term: read up on the various subjects I’m interested in as much as possible, then seek out someone able to impart first-hand knowledge of them. In the case of farming, there’s a number of places around the Lower Mainland that accept volunteers (though not for a few months, at the moment—December/January isn’t really the ideal crop-growing season), and in the case of cooking, there’s Carla. I’m not an awful cook, but she knows tricks and shortcuts around the kitchen that would help me out immeasurably over the course of my life, and conveniently enough lives in the same house as me. In point of fact, there are experts out there willing to give you practical, hands-on training in almost any almost any field you could want—some for money (in places like community colleges), some not—but we have to get our D.I.Y. drives back up and running and quit handing all our problems off to the next person in line. Yes, there’s too much out there to be an expert or even a jack-of-all-trades in every field, but we can learn enough to feel like accomplished, capable and responsible people in our own lives, and maybe the reclamation of that responsibility—and the decision not to fill our kitchen with Manolos—is one of the most responsible acts we can currently strive for.