So the weather is going crazy-what's the worst that can happen?

So the weather is going crazy

So the weather is going crazy-what's the worst that can happen?

It seems to many, this year, that the weather is going crazy. Abnormal events keep recurring as a tumble of dominoes.  Droughts, floods, gales and hurricanes. Of course we have always had them, but are they growing worse, more erratic?

 Life behind the mines would have been bearable for a while for those who started off with an agricultural or horticultural background, such as Blaisemill and Belacot, the first a communal self sufficient holding and the second a small farming community. For those without this knowledge a good supply of books and reasonable intelligence would maybe be enough to see a small community through a few years. There were many small communities who survived in The Sefuty Chronicles.

However, life, real life, has a habit of stacking bad fortune against a good. We are mostly, in the Western world, fortified against natural disasters; if there’s a bad growing season we have to spend more on food as prices rise, in a few words we can summon food across the globe to fill our empty shelves. If some particularly nasty bug, disease, or blight attacks our crops we have an endless array of chemical solutions to aid us, if we over graze our agricultural land we have an endless supply of chemical fertilizers to help us boost the yields

If these solutions run out?

What happens then behind those mines, when the sun doesn’t shine day after day after day, as happened here in the UK in the summer of 2012. Our farmers were brought to their knees and spiraling costs sent many out of business. 

How does the livestock cope when cold winds howl from the north and the east, when snow drifts into sold coffins for animals on the hillsides , when a whole generation of new lambs freeze hardly before they have drawn their first breath, as has happened in recent winters?

What happens to our hard working and intrepid farmers in the wet years, when rivers overflow and wash away the topsoil, or, as is happening this year in Somerset, the floods remain so long, all vegetation dies and there is no grazing, no crops for the next couple of year?

 The year your livestock succumb to disease such a foot and mouth or swine diseas?. Can you afford to keep livestock, if the food supplies are low? But, if you don’t have livestock and you can’t leave your area, because of land mines, what happens when the crops fail? The continuing effects of selling livestock in a famine can be seen year after year in those countries who already struggle on the edge.

In 2012 when it rained all summer I tried to sow seeds in the garden, they rotted before they could come up, the crop yield was low, miserable, I tried to gather what few crops there were, a matter of going out in sou'wester and gumboots. It was frustrating, irritating, but not actually catastrophic because the greengrocers in the village could fill in the gaps for me.

How long can we continue to rely on the artificial to keep the natural alive and thriving.?  We may be painting ourselves into a corner.

Behind the mines, a bad harvest, at the very least, means you’re lacking nutritionally, your energy levels will dip dangerously low and at worst means famine and eventual death from starvation. It is not hard to see how despair and desperation could lead to suicide or a complete giving up on any hope, or faith that rescue would eventually come.

When does one, in fact, give up on the rescue? When do you look around you and start to look for the components of an equation for life? When do you look at your available land, your available manpower, and begin to calculate just how large a population can be sustained on through the bad years.

When do you start putting a value on each person in the community?

Next week: How my character's dealt with the problem of population v food supply 

The magic of seeds, cleverness of mankind

 

Many of you are gardeners; some may even be grander persons working a small holding, a farm.  There are  indisputably many who know so much more than I do on the usefulness of seeds.

I fell in love with this particular magic quite late in life, back in the late 70s after having already fulfilled my first grand ambition in life of travelling around the world.  I had come home determined to grow some herbs and create beautiful soap -  don’t ask, another tale altogether - my parents were gardener’s but more of the plants-man type than the seed growing ones. In fact they mostly cursed seeds , the most likely offenders being those prolific weeds which seem to pursue personal vendettas against plants-men.(please do not respond with PC speak - man/men as in human kind)

I opened a packet of lavender seeds - tiny insignificant seed and scattered them forth onto small pots of earth. I followed instructions - I am good at written instructions - and waited impatiently.

Everyone warned me they may not all grow, maybe I’d be disappointed.

I am willing to swear they did all grow, dozens and yet more dozens of tiny lavender bushes peeped out at me.  Seeds, earth and water - now if that’s not magic I don’t know what is.  Yours truly was hooked on a line stretching to the next century.  Flushed with success I threw seeds at every available patch and pot of earth, they grew, they grew. Not all with the 100% of those first but they hustled and bustled their way to the sunshine. I am still indulging.

I needed to know more, I read everything I could find on the seeds, the growing the tending. It led me of course as all my wanders appeared to do down the path of the world, the globes, the planet.  Seeds I found were the staff of life not bread, as I had always been led to believe. 

No seeds, no life.

Well of course it isn’t that simple I know, I know, no need to chastise me.  After I could say it about water

No water, no seeds, no life

Or oxygen and carbon dioxide and warmth and. . . . and . . . and. . . but you get my drift.

In the wonderful way time elongates back into the mists of caves and bearskins I discovered those wonderful heroes of mine (early man) knew all about seeds, all about the tending the harvesting the use of them. 

Clever, clever, early man.

When did the apes notice the effect of seeds and the next meal I wonder?

   

When did early man suddenly decide to crush some seeds, leave them lying around and then cook the rising concoctions  and slice their bread, I wonder?

         When were we ever so clever again, as early man was?

So we have a magic seed to rival Jack’s - happy and content in which ever patch of land it had opened roots. Bathed in sunshine and just enough warmth to suit whatever plant it is destined to become.  Stop for a bit, think about it, a tiny seed with the whole of the grown plant within it.  Magic.

But we know the climate has changed many times, so those warm lands may be icy one day, those icy wastes of now may have been tropical forests at some time.  Now here’s the real magic, those insignificant tiny cases of life are not just that - they have more magic hidden within those casings than we can ever dream of.

They can adapt, they can change their DNA to suit themselves. 

Well, yes, we can do that, but we are big, we are supposedly sapient - although I do have my doubts on that point:)  Seeds are just things to curse because they have decided the rose garden is the correct place for them

They adapt and early man noticed this, they gathered the strongest of their early crops each year to sow again the next and over millennium the plants being grown for food changed almost beyond recognition, always suiting their conditions.  The magic of the seeds and the cleverness of early man combined.

Now, I fear, the cleverness of man has begun to tamper rather than go with the flow.  Now it is not enough to take those best suited to conditions but to take them and ensure their ever changing seeds can no longer change.  Infertile food crops? What is that about?

Apart, of course, more money for huge companies who control the seeds. As weather and soil conditions change, where are the generations of seeds which magically adapt. 

To breed super crops to feed the billions seems like such a good idea.

To deny farmers the ability to find the new stronger generations is not.

To cut costs to the farmer and thereby supposedly the cost to the billions sounds laudable but

To create miles of mono-culture, which can be devastated in one new disease is not.

Late, very late in the day, seed banks are being set up as insurance against the worst, however, they are climate controlled by man made means - if the lights go out what then? Small voices sounding sense, warning of trouble ahead, battle against company’s greed and self righteous mantra of feeding the starving millions.

At the moment there is more than enough food being grown in the world to feed everyone. 

The millions starve because they have no power

They starve because those that have, waste/throw away over half the food produced

They starve because of our ignorance and greed.

Let those magic seeds feed the world, they can do it, if inherited and learnt wisdom are allowed to tend them. Let man’s knowledge help but it should always be partnership between magic and man. 

World Building: Drawing board? what drawing board

When I started the Sefuty Chronicles I had no very clear idea of the world I was writing about.  However, before I was half way through Ellen’s Tale I realised I would have to find out and fairly quickly.  I had an impression, of my own making, of the downsides of climate change; I needed to find out how realistic these were.

Apart from checking climate change scenarios the most important idea was how my survivors outside the city walls would fare.  I grew up here in the UK after the 2^nd world war with a romantic mental picture of farming.  Story book farms with cows, milked by hand! sheep, an odd pig complete with little pink piglets  eating scraps from the table. Dozens of chickens in the yard, ducks on the pond, and jolly fat farmers and their families.  It was a place of endless sunny days and the whole family would bring in the hay on the back of a hay wagon pulled by a shire horse, settle down to cream teas and merrymaking.  It never seemed to rain, harvests never flattened by the wind, never frozen into the ground by ice and snow.

Of course I became aware through my growing that life is different from the books.  However when I started writing I still had the mixed farm in mind.  All I had to do post climate change was eliminate the tractors and land rovers and bring back that Shire horse wasn’t it? Simple? Well no.  There may not have been fossil fuel any more, but neither would there have been many Shire horses, they are almost gone now.  I went back to medieval times to see if there were clues on survival for my country folk to be found there.  It seemed easy.  Take away the feudal lord of the manner and the tithes due to him and the church.  Calculate how much of everything they grew and survived on. 

As I researched it was with growing dismay I remembered I had put rings of landmines around every settlement.  In the ‘olden’ days they shared the heavy draught animals, as today expensive tractors may be shared, between villages and farms.  They exchanged foodstuffs they had with that they didn’t at markets.  They would share the bull, the ram. Between communities.  I had taken that mobility a way with never a second thought.

I searched self sufficiency books of the now, the articles and books about the past.  I travelled back as far as the Stone Age.  But everywhere the greatest difference was the mobility the other ages had.  I had myself, that year, in my garden, a plague of snails which demolished an entire harvest of cabbages before even the Cabbage White could get to them, and I realised that, all through the ages, harvests fail for so many reasons. While I continued buying cabbages from the village shop my survivors would not be able. 

While you can live without cabbage until the next season my research had been throwing up disasters a plenty with universal starvation from a ‘poor’ season.  It is of course always going on, we do though in this country think of famine and plagues of insects as happening somewhere else.  I had to try and think the impossible.  How would they survive without the ability to seek further afield, how would they survive if the weather wasn’t kind for a whole growing season.  What would then change in the ordering of societies as they faced this constant challenge to live? 

In my anthropology studies I had been fascinated at how environment and climate dictated so much of the social differences we find puzzling in our dealings with ‘others’  now I would have to work out if our social conventions could remain intact within the maelstrom of such a catastrophe.  It seemed the more I thought of one thing, i.e. how to farm, I saw the dominoes of consequence tipping, falling and sometimes landing lying askew.

It always came back to food.  Everything about the survivor’s way of life would begin with the security of their food.  As with the City I had placed Ellen in, food security was to be all.  However the world Ellen inhabited had the science and the wherewithal to secure the feeding of the survivors, had a certain mobility to travel further afield.  Not depending only on themselves they had an army to defend them.  My wilderness survivors had no science, and land mines not an army.  It was not a case of back to the drawing board as it was evident in writing my ‘short story’ of Ellen I had not visited a drawing board at all!


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