Kerrplunk

This weekend I went to the Golden Gate chapter of the California Rare Fruit Grower’s Scion Exchange, and if that is gobbledegook to you you are not alone but you are also missing out.

Plants can do many things humans cannot. One of the most useful properties possessed by many plants is the ability to be propagated asexually from cuttings. (Of course, if you have plants that you don’t want that are capable of propagating themselves asexually, like for instance invasive blackberry, it can also be one of the most annoying properties.) The simplest way to use this property is by cutting a piece off a plant you want, say a neighbor’s superior fig tree, and potting it up with a degree of care. Skill and luck both play a role in getting the cutting to root properly, but once it does it is a new plant that is genetically identical to the one it was taken from. Certain plants do this well–figs are one of the easiest. A side benefit is that many plants propagated this way tend to bear fruit earlier than those started from seed. In some cases, though, their lifespan may be shorter—the plant’s age doesn’t reset to zero the day you take the cutting.

Many fruit trees are not so cavalier about bits getting broken off and stuck in the ground. All is not lost, however—the ancient technology of grafting permits the gardener with a little skill and a lot of chutzpah to cut a piece of a plant and surgically attach it to another, compatible plant. This can be done for many reasons—apple trees don’t produce true from seed, for instance, so all named varieties have been produced by grafting cuttings onto an apple rootstock. If you have an apple tree that produces apples good enough to eat, chances are it was grafted—look at the trunk close to the soil line for a bulge or irregularity in the bark.

Then again, you might have an apple tree that produces two or more varieties, also through the magic of grafting—you can graft a branch onto an established tree to produce a different variety of the same fruit. In fact, because stone fruit are often compatible with each other, some gardeners with small yards benefit from a “fruit salad” tree that bears plums, apricots, and nectarines throughout the spring and summer.

Grafting is a skill that any gardener can develop. It takes attention to cleanliness and detail, and tools such as a sharp grafting knife and some grafter’s tape or parafilm. There are good videos to get you started (peruse the right hand column for more). Not every gardener wants to graft, but if you want to grow fruit trees and you have limited space, it’s an excellent tool in your toolkit.

For the community garden I’ve been volunteering with, I brought back several figs to start from cuttings, as well as pepino dulce, goji, a superior variety of loquat discovered by Katie Wong that she calls Doxie’s Delight (it produced loquats as big as hen’s eggs in her East Bay yard, and there is a loquat seedling sprouting in the garden that needs to be moved anyway), some pluots to try grafting onto a plum or apricot tree, and a couple varieties of apple to try on our apple tree. It’s a $4 donation to get in the door, and scionwood is free. You can pay $3 for rootstock and $3 for custom grafting to be done for you. If you’re in the Bay Area and have never been to the Scion Exchange, keep an eye out for announcements next January. If you live in a different region, look for a scion exchange near you… FOR SCIONS!

Every so often I find it productive to leave a blog completely fallow for several months–or a couple of years–and then come back to it, possibly because I’m afraid regular posting might gain me an audience that I would feel an obligation to. It has probably been long enough that most people have wandered off by now.

I am presently living in a cooperative household in the SF Bay Area, where I’ve been building an earth oven, keeping a tiny flocklet of urban chickens, and growing vegetables. Our next door neighbor is a character with stories as long as your arm about his rough past and world travels, an unbelievable 30% of which may be true. I am engaging with a permaculture course, observing and interacting and hopefully strengthening my teaching repertoire slightly, and I am an interpretive naturalist at an ecological learning center. My living situation is virtually perfect except that it’s a little more expensive than I’d like, and my work situation is virtually perfect except that it doesn’t make me quite enough to live on. This is normal for these times, a situation which quite a lot of people are justifiably angry about. That just anger can be harnessed toward some beautiful productivity, but insofar as it is directed towards reforming the present broken system, it will not change overnight that which people are angry about.

I aspire to be part of the 100%, I told my friend—the 100% with enough healthy food to eat, enough clean water for drinking and bathing, safe enough places to live, and enough access to decent health care. I see that our system is designed not to deliver that. My earlier dream was to be part of building alternative systems that would allow people to gradually withdraw their support from the broken system so that it could collapse relatively painlessly. Now I believe that until the old system collapses, the majority of people will not cut themselves loose from it. I’m throwing in with those who call themselves the 99% in hopes that doing so will help to model potential new systems and allow the old to crumble with as little suffering as possible. But these are going to be uneasy times for most of us.

In the midst of this, permaculture offers what Sharon Astyk (after Pat Meadows) has called the theory of anyway: Whether or not oil is peaking, economy is collapsing, climate is warming, wouldn’t you rather be growing food and having fun with your neighbors, spending less money and more time, wasting less and having more? Would you rather dwell on scare-city or a-bun-dance? If we would rather be living this way anyway, what’s stopping us?

I’ve just returned to the Bay Area from my trip to Florida by train, and I can report that while the US passenger rail system is, in the words of one Russian visitor whose acquaintance I made on the trip, “primitive” in comparison to that of other countries, it beats flying by miles.

Taking the train will not get you to your destination as fast as flying, at least if you’re traveling across the continent, as I was. On the other hand, that extra time is time to get valuable work done. For staying connected while traveling by train, I bought an inexpensive mobile broadband device with a monthly, no-contract plan, and had sufficient internet connection to get work done and stay in touch with friends and family. I had time and space to get up and move around. The food was excellent, and when I didn’t want to pay slightly high prices for dining car meals, I ate some of the healthy food I was able to bring aboard with me. I took two large carry-on bags and two personal items and checked three bags, and I paid no extra fees for any of my baggage. Security procedures were unobtrusive and did not threaten my health or personal privacy. All the train staff have been friendly and responsive. Train travelers are also on the whole a pleasant group of people, and I talked with a number of interesting people, some of whom have become valued friends and business connections.

I purchased a sleeper car for two nights of the trip to Florida. But on the way back, I decided to try traveling in coach the whole way. I’m glad I did—I actually had a fine experience traveling in coach. When I had a neighbor in the seat next to me, I simply slept in the sightseeing lounge with earplugs and a blindfold, and when I didn’t, I found stretching out diagonally across two seats almost as comfortable as a bed. For comfort, even first-class airline seats can’t match the roominess of coach seats on a train, and being able to move freely about the train for the entire journey is a real benefit for me. If you do choose to get a sleeper, your meals are paid for and you have access to showers on the train. It’s worth getting a sleeper if you absolutely need to lie flat to sleep, or if you really want full privacy.

On a train, you see the country in a way you can’t from the window of a plane. Not only do you have the experience of traveling through the landscape rather than looking at it like a Google satellite photo, but you can get out at stations across the country and take photos, take a smoke break if you’re a smoker, or just stretch your legs and do yoga. We also had historical guides traveling with us who described the history of the land as we traveled over the Sierra Nevada range.

Traveling by air is truly unsustainable. We simply can’t support a nation of business and leisure travelers dependent on consuming the shocking amounts of our limited fossil fuel energy required to lift a metal box thirty five thousand feet into the air and propel it across the country in a few hours. Passenger trains are usually much more efficient, even though our outdated trains tend to depend on diesel, and they could be lower impact and more pleasant still if some of the money we spend subsidizing our dying system of air travel and keeping up an unnecessarily cumbersome highway system were only redirected to modernizing our trains. More and more workers will no doubt use telecommuting for business instead of flying to meetings, and more and more travelers should try taking the train.

This is the long version of my response to today’s prompt on Advise the Advisor, which is about innovation:

Innovation doesn’t just happen in the world of the Internet. The biggest need for American innovation exists in some of the very oldest industries.

Food security is my biggest present concern. With industrial agriculture threatened by climate change, fossil fuel decline, and its own unsustainable practices, Americans are seeking sustainable, low-cost solutions they can be personally involved in. Innovative solutions include yard-sharing programs that connect apartment-dwellers with time to garden with homeowners who have the space to plant vegetables, urban farmers who use organic intensive cultivation techniques to grow thousands of pounds of food in a small lot, and peri-urban farms who offer their sustainably-grown produce direct to nearby city consumers through CSA subscriptions.

But the problem is still immense. America has too few farmers, and the farmers we have are on average past retirement age. Current regulations reinforce the unsustainable practices that are leading us to the edge of destruction. And government is making the problem worse, with regulations that favor big agribusiness and make it harder for local producers to reach consumers. We spend too much taxpayer money subsidizing the unsustainable practices of the past—funding cheap, inedible corn that makes livestock sick, gives our children diabetes, and rips nutrients out of the soil so they must be replaced with tons of fossil fuel-based fertilizer.

In their book A Nation of Farmers, Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton state we need fifty to a hundred million new small farmers by the end of this decade to pick up where our retiring generation of farmers is leaving off and ensure our food future. These new farmers will need to be using new practices rooted in low-input, diverse farm ecosystems that minimize the use of fossil fuels. They will need to raise not just one crop, but many, carefully chosen so that the waste products of one crop support the others. They will need to be farming in urban and suburban landscapes as much as rural ones. They’ll need support from the government, investing money into strengthening our food system and providing sustainable and rewarding livelihoods for more Americans. And they’ll need a change in our regulations to make it easier and more affordable for small producers to produce and distribute safe food to more Americans. For example, rather than tough restrictions on milk sales that assume everyone selling milk is operating an industrial-scale confinement dairy factory, we need flexible rules that address the actual risks of contamination at different scales of production. By making these changes in the way we support new, innovative models of farming, we’ll enable creative, hardworking Americans to build rewarding livelihoods solving America’s food security challenges.

GMO crops are not a good solution to our food crisis. GMO crops are generally engineered not to produce viable seed. In order to replant crops, farmers have to buy their seed again and again every year from the same biotech company. If there is a problem with that company—and their reliance on fossil fuel energy and unproven technology, as well as government subsidies, make it a certainty that there will be a problem at some point in the future—then all the farmers who rely on that company for seed will have nothing to plant, nothing to grow, and nothing to feed America. Just like in any investment, we need a diversified portfolio. So legislation that makes it impossible to protect organic agriculture from GMO contamination threatens the future of America’s food supply—regardless of whether eating GMO crops poses a threat to the health of Americans. We can’t afford to become reliant on this technology, not when the fundamental resource needed for its production—fossil fuels—is threatened. For this reason I believe the recent deregulation of GMO alfalfa is a terrible mistake—one that hinders the ability of American farmers to explore other innovative, diversified solutions to our agricultural sustainability problems.

I ask the White House to join me in supporting small farmers experimenting with innovative new models of food security. Support Americans engaged in such exciting new projects as the Dervaes family farm, a 1/10th acre plot in Pasadena that produces more than THREE TONS of food per year, with no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Support trials of permaculture methods, farming systems that use the natural interactions of plant and animal species to return fertility to the soil without the addition of chemical fertilizers, that control pests with their natural predators rather than with chemical poisons, and that produce an abundance of food on less land by growing different crops together in ways that sustainably increase productivity. Support efforts like those of The Land Institute to breed perennial wheat, so that we can minimize tillage and protect the fertility of American soil.

What do you have to say to the White House today?

I plan to do this every week, for every new prompt. Let’s see how long I can keep it up—and how long it takes me to get through. Will you join me?

I’ve been flipping through this book online as I’ve been researching drought-tolerant plants suitable for creating a silvipasture system for goats and chickens. My plan is to design a management-intensive multicell pasture for dairy goats and a dual-purpose chicken flock that will increase soil fertility while providing excellent milk, meat, and egg production, support good animal health and happiness, and do so in a small space.

The rationale for this mixed-species management-intensive grazing plan is as follows: Goats and chickens are each vulnerable to different sets of parasites. Parasite load on pasture is a big problem for goats. Chickens, however, can consume goat parasites with impunity, and in fact actually benefit from being grazed on a pasture with mammal manure and the insects that feed on it, which in turn make good food for the chickens. For their part, the goats benefit from decreased parasite load and fewer flies. Both goats and chickens benefit from mixed pasture and browse although in different ways—goats prefer to eat shrub and tree leaves and bark, while chickens prefer the growing tips of new grass. But goats also eat some grass and forbs and chickens can benefit from the fruit and seeds of many shrubs. An ecosystem consisting of mixed grasses, forbs, and woody shrubs and trees tends to be more resilient and productive when impacted by animals than an ecosystem of grass alone. This is especially true when plants are selected with care for their mutually beneficial interactions. Animal grazing in such ecosystems benefits plants, animals, and soils most when animals are moved through the pasture, allowing enough time for the plants to rest and recover before they face grazing and browsing again. The benefits of management-intensive grazing are widely accepted and include more robust animal health as well as decreased carbon emissions and even carbon sequestration in soils. Factors to consider in developing a schedule for goat/chicken pasture rotation include grass and forb regrowth periods as well as fly larva and other parasite hatch cycles, factors that will vary depending on climate, plant selection, and season of the year. In some regions a combination of rotation and mixture of plant species may reduce the need for supplemental feed to virtually none.

Limiting factors to management intensive pasture systems include the expense of fencing and the variability of pasture regrowth, which creates the need for close supervision of livestock rotation by a skilled manager. While the former may be mitigated by the use of inexpensive portable electric fencing, there is no substitute for the latter. Limitations of mixing shrubs with grasses include possibly a greater expense to establish, the relative slow growth of some shrubs, and the potential to shade out desired grass and forbs. These limitations can be overcome by carefully selecting complementary shrubs and pasture species, using those that are affordable and suited to your site, and choosing shrubs that grow rapidly.

These are some shrub species I’ve been considering for our site and the benefits and challenges they offer:

(more…)

With all the snowstorms blanketing much of the US right now, I feel a bit guilty that I’m still visiting family in Florida, where I grew up and where it is a cool 72ºF/22ºC outside.  On top of that I’m hearing that in the Southwest, natural gas shortages are leaving many homes without heat. (One Twitterer complains that President Obama caused the shortage by blocking drilling for natural gas and oil; I think this person misses the point that the shortage is caused by the unaccustomed cold weather shutting down refining and distribution facilities.)

We can’t rely on fossil fuels for long—natural gas peak production may be a few years further off than the crude oil peak, which by all reasonable accounts is either here or imminent. With all the attention the generation of electricity gets in the media—and there’s no denying solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind turbine electricity sells pageviews—one of the most crucial problems we will have to face in our transition off fossil fuels is heating our homes.

It is becoming more and more apparent to everyone with the sense and knowledge to see it that global warming climate change weirding doesn’t mean six fewer months of winter. It means more severe weather all around—worse storms, worse droughts, worse snows, and worse summers. So planning for heating our homes is still going to be a major challenge. We need solutions that will keep us as warm as we need to be, without making the pollution and climate change problems worse. And surprisingly I think a big part of that is going to be firewood.

But we’ll need to manage our firewood in ways that don’t just sustain the status quo but actually help regenerate the land we’re part of. And a big part of this, I believe, is going to be establishing coppice systems.

Coppice is the practice of cutting trees so that they resprout from the stumps. Famously, Europeans and Native Americans have practiced coppice silviculture for firewood, basketry, and building materials. Willow is an especially favored species for basketry and certain types of building—the wattle and daub houses of ancient Britain come to mind. But willow makes lousy firewood. So what species coppice well and make good firewood?

Alder, ash, and black locust are all good coppice trees, resprouting easily from stumps and growing quickly. Ash is very good firewood. Reports differ on alder and black locust, and I suspect the efficiency of one’s stove will have a lot to do with how completely these woods combust (on which more later). One species I’d like to highlight, especially for people in the southwestern US right now, is Parkinsonia aculeata, also known as horsebean, jerusalem thorn, and blue palo verde, among other common names.

What’s good about this tree? Well, for one thing, it’s drought tolerant. The effects of global climate change on local rainfall patterns is not yet known, but it’s possible that areas that already get very little rainfall will get even less, and some areas with moderate rainfall will become drier while others will become much wetter. For the desert southwest and arid parts of California, Parkinsonia aculeata could be very useful. It is partly cold hardy, tolerating temperatures down to 18ºF/-7ºC. It is also leguminous, with the potential to restore nitrogen to the soil, although I believe this has not been studied in this particular plant. And when cut it regrows from the stump. It is also good bee forage, attracting pollinators with its bright yellow flowers. Its main drawback is that it can be invasive—because it propagates readily from seed or from cuttings, it’s hard to control. Arid environments help to control its reproduction from seed; it shouldn’t be planted in areas where there is more water than it needs. And here’s where another benefit of this plant comes in handy—it makes excellent goat browse. Livestock eat its leaves and seed-containing pods, and the fresh pods have a sweet edible pulp.

How might you manage this plant, given its tendency to become invasive in areas where it gets more water than it needs?

Well, first, I’d avoid planting Parkinsonia aculeata in moist meadows, streambanks, or near ponds or irrigation. Dry upland slopes are a better place. Second, cut it back on a regular basis for wood, and don’t plant more than you can use. Don’t leave fresh cuttings lying around on top of fertile soil. Finally, graze goats through the planting on a rotating basis so they can browse back new growth and seedlings and eat some of the edible seed pods. Pigs might also enjoy the pods and would probably disturb the ground under established trees to discourage new seedlings, but be careful they don’t rip up the roots of the established trees you’re coppicing.

It’s also important to get back to wood stoves that can efficiently and cleanly burn small-diameter firewood. If we aggravate our air pollution woes with particulates from incomplete burning, we’ll make our situation much worse. If we exacerbate the problem of carbon release by burning up existing trees and releasing their carbon without planting enough new trees to store the carbon we’re releasing and then some, we’ll make our situation much worse.

We’re running out of the carbon trust fund we’ve inherited in the form of fossil fuels, and we need a wise plan to help us live within our ecological means.

Just a short note to say I’m very pleased with the students in my introduction to permaculture course at New College of Florida this January. As so often happens in permaculture learning encounters, I learned as much from them as they did from me. They presented their final project today and I could tell it was exciting, inspiring, and new for their faculty. The project is on the way to implementation over the next year—I am very excited for them and hope they have a lot of fun with it.

While visiting the state I grew up in, I’ve made the acquaintance of a few delicious wild foods that I’d like to introduce to you.

Sea Purslane—Sesuvium portulacastrum

Sea purslane grows on sunny beaches and salt flats, often near mangroves. It is a low-growing groundcover with fleshy, succulent leaves. It takes up salt from the soil, giving its leaves a pleasant, salt taste and crunch that will delight pickle lovers. It propagates easily from cuttings and prefers sun and sandy soil. Since it is a very salt tolerant plant, it can be used where salt is a problem. Growing it and removing it (by eating it, for example, rather than composting it in place) may help remediate salty soils. Just remember that plants that take up salt may also take up other minerals, some of which may be dangerous. Use it sparingly as a treat or a garnish.

Wild/Creeping Cucumber—Melothria pendula

This plant, with its cute mini-watermelon-like fruits, is widely listed as toxic. When the fruits ripen to black, they may have a laxative effect, but even the ripe fruits have been eaten by people of the West Indies and Central America. The unripe fruits are safely eaten by many people—including me—who find their cucumber flavor tasty. Many people add them to salads. The vines can be vigorous and can take over a large area if not pruned back regularly. It will thrive along your fences, especially in sandy, low-lying or marshy areas. The vines are said to be suitable livestock forage, however.

Natal Plum—Carissa macrocarpa

This is actually a South African plant, an exotic that can sometimes escape cultivation in South Florida. It is often grown for its glossy ornamental foliage and pretty, fragrant white flowers that resemble jasmine, but it is also thorny and makes a good hedge to deter intruders, if you’re in need of that sort of thing. It tolerates partial shade but does better in full sun. Its fruit is reputed to be delicious—I had my eye on one growing along a sidewalk, but before the fruit were ripe, the homeowners pruned back all the branches drastically and I missed my chance to ask them for one. The plant has a milky latex, and all parts other than the fruit are said to be poisonous.

As always, if you decide to try new wild foods, try a little bit at a time first to detect if you’re sensitive to it, and eat only plants growing in uncontaminated soil that have not been sprayed with pesticides or herbicides.

Via Ran Prieur, I’ve been directed to this post by Professor Nassim Taleb introducing the concept of “antifragility”—the property of systems to flourish in circumstances of disorder. In summary, it suggests that the opposite of fragility, the tendency to collapse due to change or disorder, is not robustness, or the resistance to collapsing due to change or disorder. It is antifragility—the tendency to benefit from change and disorder, to thrive and improve in health when circumstances vary wildly.

Taleb’s examples are not necessarily the most compelling to me—he suggests that in Greek mythology, an example of fragility is the Sword of Damocles, robustness is the Phoenix, and antifragility is the Hydra. Directed research, he says, is fragile, but doesn’t say why; opportunistic research is robust, but stochastic tinkering is antifragile. Some examples seem to be based on nothing more than the author’s simple prejudice (“Ways of thinking: Fragile—Modernity, Robust—Medieval Europe, Antifragile—Ancient Mediterranean.” What does this even mean?) Most familiar to my thinking process is his representation of modern industrial society as fragile, ancient settlements (I’m imagining the cities of Harappa as an example, which lasted virtually unchanged for 500 years before disappearing with no sign of catastrophic collapse) as robust, and the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle as antifragile. Let’s talk about this example a little bit.

It is common to think of our industrial lifestyle as permanent, compared to past civilizations (which by definition don’t exist anymore) and nomadic hunting and gathering peoples (most of whom have been either wiped out or forced into some stable mode of participation with global industrialism). But this is a fallacy. We have been a global industrial society for perhaps 200 years. Rome, as a Republic and an Empire, which is everyone’s favorite example of how civilizations collapse, lasted 900 years, with a sharp transition in the middle from a constitutional republic to an expansive principate. Hunting and gathering were humanity’s main means of subsistence from the appearance of humanity (let’s say 1.8 million years ago) until at least 10,000 years ago, when agriculture began gradually to take over in most parts of the world. But the lifestyle itself persists even into the industrial era. Even if we manage to sustain industrialism for another 200 years in the face of the end of accessible fossil fuels, global climate change, and the failure of our economic systems to distribute necessary goods and services in a sustainable and resilient way, we can’t consider the experiment a success in terms of longevity as compared even to the Roman civilization, let alone to the hunter-gatherer model. Global industrialism depends on high energy expenditures and infinite growth, two conditions that simply cannot be maintained for long. The jury is simply still out on whether we will be able to make this system robust enough to withstand the conditions of the immediate future.

But in another sense we could describe the modern system as one that has emerged specifically to take advantage of conditions of abrupt change. The cascade of scientific development and industrial invention that resulted from the discovery and exploitation of concentrated fossil fuels could be seen as itself an example of antifragility—a creative, immediately useful adaptation to changing conditions. The speed of social change made possible by the exploitation of fossil energy has enabled us to capitalize on environmental changes in ways we never had available to us before. And yet it makes us fragile to an environmental change that we foresee, but at the moment have no idea how to respond to—the unavailability of those selfsame fuels. So it’s possible that fragility and antifragility are not opposites at all, but characteristics a system can possess in varying measures, and only with respect to certain conditions. A system might be antifragile with respect to climate change but fragile with respect to habitat loss. A system that simply changes dramatically and somewhat randomly in response to external change, with no particular care for whether that change is adaptive or destructive, would seem to have a high potential for both fragility and antifragility.

Perhaps the clearest example of antifragility is one that I do not see in Taleb’s table—evolution.

When living systems are disturbed by outside change, individuals expressing variations that offer greater survival and reproductive potential to the changed conditions survive and reproduce, and those that do not may die out or fail to pass on their genetic contributions. On the whole evolution appears to respond more rapidly in conditions characterized by environmental change and disorder. When environmental conditions are stable over long periods of time, selective pressure likewise changes little. Less pressure-driven random mutations that survive longer due to relatively constant conditions could have a detrimental effect on the species as a whole. The resilience of living systems depends on changing conditions.

But environmental change, to produce beneficial effects on living systems, has to occur within the constraints of what the system is able to tolerate without collapse. If changes come too quickly or are too extreme or sweeping, populations tend not to last long enough to evolve adaptation.

Dr. Taleb introduces an interesting concept—antifragility, fluxophilia, whatever you want to call it. But I think his characterization of it as the opposite of fragility perhaps oversimplifies the very complex reactions of creatively adapting systems to change. If we understand better the conditions that promote creative adaptation to change, we can use that to promote the development of more antifragile or fluxophilic human systems. I believe in a changing environment, this would promote greater resilience. What characteristics promote fluxophilia? How do emergent systems develop and strengthen this property?

I would suggest that they are process driven rather than rules driven. An example of what I’m calling “rules driven” is the common model of disaster preparedness—decide what potential changes you are likely to face, come up with a policy to respond to it, test the policy in a controlled simulation scenario, and then enforce adherence to the policy. An example of a process driven alternative might be the Superstruct game/modeling process advanced by the Institute for the Future. (FD: My friend works for this organization; she’s the one with purple hair.) In this game, the public at large was invited to imagine a future of upheaval and drastic—even disastrous—change. IFTF game developers offered general scenarios for the public to respond to, but the details were largely left to the imagination. Over 6800 people registered as participants, though undoubtedly some of them (FD: like myself) probably did little to contribute to the scenarios. However, among them, they created around 1000 stories about these future scenarios, which IFTF researchers have been mining for information about how people are likely to react to real change and using as a springboard to research the responses most likely to be productive.

A year ago this New Year’s Day, I had no idea where I would be in another two months.

After a year of dreaming about quitting my perfectly good office job and saying goodbye to my great boss just so I could immerse myself completely in the study of permaculture and sustainable food production, I’d finally realized that nothing ever happens tomorrow, it can only happen today. I talked with my boss and won her support, and made my today come sooner than I thought possible. I tightened my belt and saved enough money to give myself a safety net, and started sending out applications to all the internship programs I had wistfully researched before. I found a permaculture design certificate course that I could afford to take while wrapping up my work. On New Year’s, the deadline I’d set (and already extended twice) to transition out of my job breathed down my neck—but I still hadn’t settled on my ideal internship site. It wasn’t until February, when I visited Emerald Earth, that I would realize I’d found my place.

I spent seven months at Emerald Earth, a community focused on natural building training and permaculture, and learned so much about growing food, caring for animals, and tending the wild. I couldn’t wait for the next step. At the Hoes Down hosted by Full Belly Farm in October I was still wondering where my new knowledge would take me next.

It was there I met Nate. Our immediate connection was exciting, but I didn’t then imagine that just a few short months later we’d be building a solid business plan and embarking on a land search.

This past New Year’s Day, I realized I had brought myself full circle. Again, I don’t know where precisely I’ll be located in the next couple of months—but this time, I know I’ll be working for my farm. Our farm.

Uncertainty is always a bit stressful. But it’s also a time of wonderful mystery. The next few years could look like anything from here. I can make a few predictions with confidence—it will be a lot of hard work, the rewards will be 100% worth it, and it will be a bigger adventure than any I’ve undertaken yet.