Chasing Pat McCormick, and other stuff...

Only foreigners and half-baked Americans fall for McCormick's tricks...I mean he hires dumb guys like you to work for him, and when it comes time to pay off, he takes a powder.
--Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948

I used to reserve this space for environmental writing and confined purely personal stuff to MySpace. But, MySpace is kind of boring to me, and I write what I can on the environment elsewhere. So, there's both a need and a venue, which means that the rebirth of this place is meant entirely as a personal electronic diary, but one that I don't really care about hiding from anyone.

One of the things I'm currently pursuing is $200. Someone owes me that amount, and like all things $200, it's both a large amount of cash to me yet something also that I'm willing to risk at the expense of a little knowledge broadening. That is to say, I assume there is the very real possibility that the person who owes me this money will never pay, and in fact this has been a running risk. It's not that I consider this person terribly dishonest, only personally incompetent.

We have entered a phase in our relationship where I suspect that this client has pulled a McCormick, which is to have contracted out work that cannot be paid for and from which he/she is dodging responsibility. See above. In the film, the deadbeat was beaten and his money taken from his wallet. In real life, I've noticed from following the online exploits of other freelance writers new and inventive ways of collecting debts. Apparently I'm not the only person who suffers the indignity of a client who pulls a McCormick.

We'll see where this ends.

John Dingell Day

Here in Michigan, we've been asked to recognize today as John Dingell Day, in honor of John Dingell, who is now the longest-serving representative in the history of Congress. He's also a Democrat and represents a portion of the highly urbanized area near Detroit.

Here is the thing I think is most interesting about John Dingell -- progressives today dislike him intensely over his position on fuel economy standards, while ignoring that basically every progressive advance over the last five decades had John Dingell standing somewhere near its center. It's a fulfillment of a very old criticism of basically any movement that it will eat its own.

I came to politics, and especially progressive politics, in large part because of the work John Dingell has done. That is, I became an environmentalist because I enjoy spending time outside, and much of that is rooted in a trip I took out West while in high school. There, we spent time in national parks and wilderness areas set aside for protection by the federal government so that people would have a place to go find adventure, self-fulfillment, and to a certain extent reconnect with the natural world.

At the time, my interest in environmental issues had less to do with pollutants and chemicals than it did in protecting our dwindling number of natural places left free from development. Some of those places were protected under the Wilderness Act of 1964, which had as one of its chief Congressional architects John Dingell. In fact, Dingell has had his hands on most every major piece of environmental legislation since, including the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Protection Act.

It is true that Dingell has not been particularly aggressive on climate change, and helped to enable uncreative thinking among Detroit's automakers. On the other hand, CAFE standards -- which he's been criticized for holding up increases to -- haven't succeeded in reducing our dependence of foreign oil, evidenced by the fact that 30 years after they were adopted, we're now more dependent on foreign oil than ever. The reason for that isn't the fault of Detroit, but of how the nation as a whole has built its way of life. Criticism for supporting that rests on a great many more shoulders than John Dingell's.

The great irony is that undoubtedly a sizable number of people who have harshly criticized him over the last couple of years came to environmentalism and ultimately progressive politics by the same road that I did -- hiking in American wilderness areas, which inspired a reverence in nature and humility -- and now assail as unproductive and dinosaur-like the legislative legacy of the architect of that road.

Transportation, this summer, and that presidential election

The Republican plan to address high gas prices can be distilled down into one word -- drill. Oh, there's stuff in there about nuclear power (how this will impact gas prices is anyone's guess), but they're mostly so set on drilling that they've taken to throwing a now-week-long temper tantrum on the floor of the House, hoping to force Congress back into session (or, just generate headlines).

Meanwhile, despite our lack of drilling in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf ... the worldwide price of oil continues to drop. Analysts are starting to suggest that the price might be correcting itself thanks to a strengthening dollar and lower demand.

The connection? There is none, which is the point. For the last three months, Republicans and their mouthpieces in the media have been shrieking at the top of their lungs that we need more supply to bring prices down. It's made no difference whether that new supply would actually bridge the gap between projected increases in demand vs. extra supply (it wouldn't) ... it's been all about drill, drill, drill.

Naturally, they were wrong, and after I read this Bob Novak column mocking the idea that speculation, I began to think that maybe speculation was playing a bigger role than I'd previously thought. Apparently, I can add this to the growing body of evidence supporting my hypothesis that when Bob Novak asserts something as fact that it is not. Nothing today is different than what it was last week -- we still have the same sources of unrest in the Middle East and South America, and although demand is dropping, it's not dropping so significantly that oil would fall that far that fast. From the same article:

Oil's fall is all the more stunning given current affairs. Russia, the world's second-biggest oil producer, invaded its neighbor Georgia on Friday. The United States and Europe are poised to impose more economic sanctions on oil-rich Iran. And a pipeline in volatile Central Asia that carries vital global oil supplies exploded this week.

It's stunning only if you remove as a potential cause the artificial inflating of oil futures by speculators.

Unfortunately, the same problems exposed by the oil spike remain. What it did was expose how flimsy is the foundation of our lifestyle, and how dependent we are on petroleum. You hear the word addiction tossed around a lot to describe this, and it fits.

We've also been presented evidence with how completely shallow and content-free our presidential campaign has become. I allude to the Paris Hilton video, naturally, and her moronic suggestion that we can drill to satisfy demand until alternative energy comes into more widespread use (that this, in turn, is being hailed as intelligent tells you the sorry state of our national awareness).

Since this was apparently a scare rather than the real thing (a drill, if you will), then the question is what we do today to prepare for when oil becomes scare. And, oh yeah, we probably ought to start doing something about global warming while we're at it.

That means something a great deal more adult than what we've gotten. Rather than discussing public transportation and how our communities are organized, and the wisdom of relying entirely on commerce carried by a finite resource, we've gotten temper tantrums in darkened buildings and Paris Hilton back into our national consciousness. I'd say that's just about as definitive proof as anything that when oil really does become scarce enough to permanently push prices up that we're fucked.

Pickling green beans

I'm not sure how I wound up with so many green beans all at once. Okay, I do know. It was last week, in picking up my share from one of the two community supported agriculture farms I own a summer share in. The woman who I split the share with is currently off on vacation with her husband, so I got the entire thing.

At the bottom was a huge bag of green beans. All mine. Score!

A couple of years ago, I found myself swimming in even more beans, and late-August, early-September was spent furiously blanching and freezing beans and tomatoes. It was actually very fortuitous ... I got laid off about a month later, and the bagged tomatoes got me through the winter (pasta every week!).

The beans were a different story. They tended to develop freezer burn quickly, and got soggy too quickly for my liking.

At the same time, I'd decided that what I really wanted to do was to learn how to can them. Canning, I'm led to believe, opens up a great deal more options, like making your own spaghetti sauce and salsa ahead of time, without the worries of freezer burn. The problem? Alas, no canning supplies.

Last summer, the story was swapped on its head. I got ahold of some canning supplies from a now-ex-stepmother (bye, Bev!), but my garden plot was in a shady area and didn't produce a great deal.

To bring this story quickly to the present, I'm about to launch into my first ever-attempt to can vegetables. Actually, I'm pickling green beans. I don't know if there's a difference, but as far as I can discern, the processes are basically the same.

I'm assuming, based on what I've read and what seems to make sense, sterilizing everything is the most important step. At least, it's that way when you brew your own beer, and I can see why the same principles would apply. Something I read said it wasn't so important to pre-boil things, but the canning supplies I got my hands on (thanks, Bev!) were pretty dirty. In fact, a dead fly was lying in the bottom of a jar.

This is a three-boil process. I'm boiling water right now to sterilize jars and lid ring. Then, there's boiling the actual pickling agent (vinegar, salt, water). Finally, there's the final bath to seal the lids on.

I have eight jars that I can use. More to the point, I have eight lids to screw on, but lots and lots of jar rings and jars. (Updated here) After trimming the beans and washing them off, it looks like I'll only need five.

I've got five heads of garlic set aside, plus the three serrano peppers I've harvested from my garden and a green pepper that's been sitting around asking what it could do to help. Those will go into the jars of beans, along with some dill seed from the head I bought at the farmers market last week.

The water for sterilizing the jars is currently heating to a boil, then I'll move onto throwing the garlic, dill, peppers and beans into the jars while pickling agent heats. Add the pickling agent, screw on the lids, and bathe in boiling water for a few minutes to seal the jar lids. It's time consuming, getting all that water to boil, but we'll find out in a couple of weeks if things are nearly as easy as I thought.

The bass that binds us

(Quick note: I’ve actually gotten a few e-mails over the last couple of days asking me for more content here … didn’t think anyone was actually paying attention. There is indeed much to write about, from energy to food. Perhaps I can piece off a spare few moments and address some of the growing pile of unfinished business.)

The Two Hearted Ale was kind of warm when I finished it off. The bottle, coming out of the cup holder I’d built into the riverbank was covered with sand and grit. I’d just released a 20-inch smallmouth bass, the largest fish I’d ever caught in the Chippewa River, not so much throwing it back in as letting it slide off the sand. I had no net and the thing was frankly too big, and my head too full of beer, for me to lift it and look at it.

My first instinct was to keep it and filet it. The boy has been bugging me all summer to do precisely that – when we catch something big enough, to eat it. On the other hand, the sign at the entrance to this place had made clear that both beer and bikes were prohibited, even though I had both. I wasn’t sure if it’d mentioned fishing specifically, and violating game management restrictions seemed, to me, more important than prohibitions against bicycles and beer.

I know people who won’t eat the fish out of the river. There’s no good reason why not to. Aside from some agricultural run-off upstream, the river’s water is spring-fed and clean (that’s why trout do well upriver). I wish to eat fish from the river for a very simple reason … because I wish to depend on the river in some small way for my own survival.

My relationship with the Chippewa runs deep. I have canoed its length, and know its physical form. I have slept alongside its banks and drank its waters (after running it through a filter, of course). It provides water for my community, and I have used that water to grow food. I have recreated in it, and I have cooled myself in the summer. I have contemplated while on and alongside it. The only thing that I have yet to do is feed myself from it. The river is familiar to me; the waters are my home waters. I wish to make this relationship complete.

It seems strange that we have a river teeming with fish running through a community of 40,000 people afraid to eat fish from it for no good reason. I tell people that I fish its waters, and their first reaction is to look at me askance. They ask me if I eat the fish as if I am insane. When I tell them that the water is clean and the fish not at all a danger to health, most people look at me with a great deal of dubiousness.

These people have, in fact, given up on the river, if they ever felt connected to it. It is okay to drive past, and to look at, and to rest by, but when it comes to nourishing yourself from, they would prefer to have their fish trucked in from elsewhere. It is a very sad thing to me that this is the case.

I wish that people would not accept that they live near a river for which they have such deep-seated reservations about eating its resident fish. It is perhaps a sign of things that it is automatically assumed that fish from a nearby river are unfit for consumption. One wonders if people assume that pollution does not occur elsewhere, that fish from places you cannot see are somehow cleaner and more fit to eat.

To me, it is vastly superior to insist that the water in which I fish be clean enough that I can eat without worry. In fact, I don’t understand how people are willing to accept less.

Chairman of the Board

For the last year and a half, or so, I've been serving on the board of directors for our local hippie grocery store -- GreenTree Cooperative Grocery Store. For the last year, I've been the board's vice chairman. Last night (or Wednesday night, since this post will probably be finished after midnight), I became the board's chairman.

This is part announcement, part disclaimer; as was the revelation the other day that I've done some light P.R. work for a local community supported agriculture (CSA) project (I'm a member of another one). It's not a position I necessarily sought out, because the person who was the chair was perhaps one of the most excellent, natural leaders it's been my pleasure to serve with. But, she'd also been doing it for a long time, and it was kind of the natural progression, I suppose, for me to move up the chain when she decided that she wanted to step down. But, let the record show that when I speak here, I speak not for the cooperative but for myself but that the things read here may be indeed influenced by the fact that I'm the chairman of a cooperative grocery board.

Summer of Yum!

Lunch today (well, part of it):

The contents of the salad are, lumped by source, as follows:

Mixed greens, sliced radish, green onion, carrot, and chopped carrot top from Swier Family Farms, one of the Community Supported Agriculture I'm a member of this year (I'm involved in two, and doing a little light PR work for them). They made their first delivery of the season yesterday, and I got green onion, carrots, mixed greens, and radishes out of it. I hear from the second -- Maggie's Farm (both of them are west of town) -- that they're seeing pea pods ripening, which is good because I didn't grow any this year and the boy is fond of them.

There are also clover sprouts in there, which came from my windowsill. I grew two tablespoons of seeds and the project was so prolific, the finished product is currently basically spread out all over my kitchen. I even topped my lunchtime bratwurst (leftover from grilling last night), and them ... not bad.

There are also some basil leaves in there, which came off my front porch. I was a bit nervous about the basil plant, and then it got warm and muggy and the plant is now both big and deep, lustrous green.

Meanwhile, I staked my tomatoes last week, and have to get back to my garden -- hopefully today -- to get the rest of the plants transferred to the ground.