Self Sufficiency: Resilience, Country Living, Growing Food; Plausible Near Future Disruption: Power Outages, Food Shortage, High Prices

Self Sufficiency:

Resilience,

Country Living,

Growing Food,

Plausible, Near Future, Disruption:

Power Outages,

Food Shortage,

High Prices

By Alan Detwiler

Smashwords addition

Copyright 2017 Alan Detwiler

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for encouraging the hard work of ebook authors

Green Bank Observatory. World's largest fully steerable single aperture antenna.

Table of Contents

1. Year 2030

2. 2020 Claude's garden

3. 2020 Big trench

4. 2021 January

5. 2022, August

6. 2022, September

7. 2022, October

8. 2022, November

9. 2023 Alien dna

10. 2025 Birth

11. 2025, August

12. 2026 Lucy

13. 2027 Lucy's development

14. 2029 Strawberry

15. 2029 Forgotten skills

16. 2030 Climate change

17. 2033 Big snow

18. 2034

19. 2035 After the snow

20. 2036 Three aliens

21. 2038 Lucy's physiology

22. 2039 Claude's idea

23. 2039 Normal circulation

24. 2039, July dreams

25. 2040 SteadyTherm

26. 2041 Catastrophes

27. 2042 Encyclopedia

28. 2043 Aliens' eating

29. 2044 Creativity

30. 2044 Perceptions Gate

31. 2045 Horizon expansion

32. 2045 Encyclopedia

33. 2046 Encyclopedia

34. 2047 Second encyclopedia

35. 2057 Book of Life

36. 2057 Gene culling

37. 2057 Quatsol society

38. 2058 Climate

39. 2058 Quatsol technology

40. 2058 Climate oscillation

41. 2059 Hike

42. 2059 Psychic

43. 2059 Claude's character

44. 2059 Lucy's personality

45. 2059 Dulcimer festival

46. 2059 Claude's place

47. 2060 Ideas

48. 2060 Earth EDGE

49. 2060 Claude's visit

50. 2060 Resource depletion

51. 2061 Food prices

52. 2063 Quatsol initiative

53. 2070 Homegrown

54. 2070 Memorial day

55. 2072 Preparation

56. 2072 Drought

57. 2072 Austerity

58. 2074 Pandemic

59. 2074 No power

60. 2074 Retro

61. 2075 Self sufficiency

62. 2075 Joy

63. 2075 Shelter

64. 2075 Food

65. 2075 Differences

66. 2075 Pandemic wanes

67. 2075 Proposers

68. 2075 A visit to a zoo

69. 2075 Neighbors

70. 2075 Claude's web site

71. 2075 Translating

72. 2076 Translation progress

73. 2076 Adaptation

74. 2077 Conclusion

75. Chronology of major and notable developments in the period 2015 to 2085

76. Climate summary

77. Bibliography

1. Year 2030

Earth has a band of lush forest around the equator where warm temperature and abundant rainfall make an ideal environment for growing crops. Three other climate zones can be identified. Both north and south of the lush tropical zone are zones of hot desert with vast areas unsuited for crops because of a lack of rainfall and irrigation water. Extending out 1000 miles around each pole is the cold polar zone. Between the desert and the polar region is a temperate region about 1000 miles wide. It is an area with moderate temperatures and rainfall suitable for growing crops during the warm summer season.

Decades ago, the temperate areas had been larger. Circulation patterns in the atmosphere had shifted causing desert regions to expand, encroaching onto the temperate regions. The world's grain growing areas had shrunk and are still shrinking. Production of the major grain crops rice, wheat, corn, oats, and barley are decreasing.

Warming temperatures have increased the rainfall needs of crops. Mildly dry areas, areas that formerly had been able to grow drought tolerant crops, have been abandoned, turning into what could properly be called desert. Production of somewhat drought tolerant sorghum, sesame, and millet have decreased and continue to decrease as desert areas expand, taking over more of the best agricultural land.

Crops with high water needs became more and more restricted to smaller geographical areas. Rice production fell, as did production of many vegetables and fruit.

Earth's climate had become more volatile over the last 30 years or so. Droughts became more frequent, sometimes covering large areas. Famines ravaged increasingly larger numbers of people, especially subsistence farmers living near desert regions, most of their food coming from the family's garden.

A hotter atmosphere and warmer ocean water carry more energy. Heat energy feeds storms, making them larger, more powerful, and more frequent. Wind and storm damage is a common spectacle, especially in the tropical regions, but also in the temperate regions. In some parts of the world seeking shelter at the sound of storm warning sirens is almost as common as trips to the grocery store.

Global warming had started decades earlier. Carbon based fuels supplied the energy to power machinery and supply energy for heating and electrical devices. Carbon dioxide from the burnt fuel accumulated in the atmosphere. It was suspected that rising CO2 levels were causing a rise in temperature worldwide.

At first technology was used to adapt to rising global temperature. Genetic engineering produced plants that could tolerate the changing climate.

The consensus of opinion at the start of the climate problems was that it would be less costly to adapt to climate change than to stop burning carbon. Switching to other forms of energy use would involve replacing most of the electricity generating equipment on the planet, replacing the transportation and travel vehicles, rebuilding factories, and revamping or replacing homes and other building.

Scientists had forecast the climate problems before they happened. Some experts argued that it would be best to avoid climate changes by abandoning the burning of carbon - that everyone would be better off paying the enormous costs of making the switch to the use of other energy sources. The scientists had predicted that the cost of not making the switch would be even greater. It seems the prediction is coming true.

Decades earlier, many scientists were speculating that in the future, electricity production might have to come from other sources, if we were to avoid changing earth's climate. Carbon burning would have to stop because the carbon going into the atmosphere would make global warming worse.

Some climatologists thought that production of electricity from sunlight and wind might not be feasible because of diminishing average wind speed and increasing cloudiness. The amount of water in the atmosphere had been closely monitored for over one hundred years. So far, a fairly steady rise had occurred throughout most of those years. That trend is continuing. A majority of climatologists predict that the tropics will continue to become cooler and polar regions will continue to warm because of the insulating effect of the atmospheric water vapor. Heat loss in the polar regions will be reduced. In the tropical regions, heat gain from solar radiation will be partially blocked. Even though storms had become more severe, average wind velocities are diminishing as temperature differences in the climate zones diminish. Production of electricity from wind is becoming less impractical. Increased water vapor and clouds in the atmosphere are hampering the production of electricity from sunlight.

There are various theories about increased CO2 and what climate changes that will cause. There is the theory that climate changes will not produce great negative effects. There are predictions that positive effects of global warming will outweigh negative effects. Warmer temperatures increase the growth of crops in regions that had previously been cooler than optimum. CO2 is a chemical needed by plants. CO2 stimulates growth. Higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase crop growth and yields. But over the last decade crop production has been decreasing. When temperatures rise, crops need more rain. Rainfall has not increased sufficiently.

The expense of reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere is great. Over the last several decades, majority opinion has not changed. To stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere might cause more hardship than continuing with the present ways. There seems to be no clear, good way to deal with the issue of global warming. So, no significant reductions in CO2 emission have yet to be adopted as of 2030.

Like many people, Claude had become very concerned about his own contribution to global warming. He wonders about using hot water to bath with. He thinks to himself, There's a lump of coal burning at the power plant making the electricity that heats bath water. CO2 is going into the atmosphere from that burning lump of coal. Ten billion other people have their lumps of coal burning to heat their bath water. All that CO2 warming the planet is withering the plants that feed us and making the heat of summer oppressive. By our own doing, we have largely become confined to air conditioned enclosures, forcing our separation from nature even farther, making us even more oblivious to our folly.

It seems to Claude that we need to take drastic action to stop putting CO2 into the air. We should already have made the needed changes. The consequences of climate changes so far are serious. Claude guesses that the experts who predict even more serious changes are probably right.

Some important steps have been achieved in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Most Americans, including Claude, drive a plug-in electric vehicle, so do, Europeans, Chinese, and Indians. 20 percent of electric power in U.S. comes from nuclear, 20 percent from natural gas, 10 percent from solar, 10 percent from wind, and 10 percent from hydroelectric. But 30 percent still comes from coal. Only five percent of the C02 from the coal-fired generating plants is being captured and sequestered underground. The sequestering process is too expensive to be used more extensively. So coal has not been phased out. It is needed to provide generating capacity when the sun is not shinning and the wind is not blowing. Most of the rest of the industrialized world is doing no better than the U.S. in stopping C02 emissions. Atmospheric C02 content is still rising.

Claude grew up on his family's farm in Oregon. Life was good on that small farm. Cooperation between family members provided the basic necessities of living. Food came from the garden. The house was heated by firewood cut from the surrounding woods. Emphasis was on self sufficiency, frugality, and appreciating what necessities and comforts the family's collective efforts produced. It was not an idyllic life filled with contentment and free of dissatisfaction. Chores were sometimes physically tiring and often long and tedious. The bothers that happened in everyone's lives, such as illnesses and emotional stresses, were part on life on that farm. But there on that small farm Claude's family somehow shared an attitude... somehow inspired each other to keep a deep-down central belief that life was good, that satisfaction and all the other better aspects of existence were what mattered most and would rightly be given the most attention.

The farm's main crop had been strawberries. The climate of the area had been well suited for growing strawberries - enough rain and the right temperatures. But over the last several decades the region's climate had warmed and become drier so that berry farming was no longer profitable. The hotter, drier climate seemed unsuited to profitably producing any fruit or vegetable crop. A carefully tended garden could still produce abundant food for a family, but there was no profitable way to manage a plot large enough to provide an adequate income. The family farm continued on as a homestead, providing home, sustenance, and a way of life. But the family farm could no longer provide an adequate income.

So, after graduating from high school, Claude went off to the nearest state university and took classes in electronics and computer science. After graduating from the university, Claude returned to the family farm. He took a job at a nearby government facility. The facility had been created a couple of years ago. Its function was to receive and record radio waves coming from extraterrestrial sources.

Claude's work at the center was tending the computers that processed and recorded the signals picked up by the center's dish antennas, steel and aluminum structures 40- to 100-meters across. The center had one 100 meter dish and four 40-meter dishes, each fully aimable. The antennas were designed to receive transmissions that might come from intelligent beings in distant solar systems. Seven other almost identical centers were distributed more or less evenly throughout the world.

A central headquarters did planning of operations, and analysed received signals. The headquarters was in Charlottesville, Virginia. A high speed dedicated phone line ran from the branch where Claude worked to the Virginia headquarters. Whenever an analyzer program determined that a possible intelligent signal had been received from space, the signal was sent to headquarters using the dedicated phone line. That happened typically every few months or so. The personnel at headquarters would study those signals to determine if the origin might be intelligent beings sending information out for whatever purpose.

A few times the signals had been complex and structured enough that the researchers suspected they were sent by extra terrestrial intelligences. But each of those times the duration of the data stream had been short, just a fraction of a second. The structure of the voltage level ratios seemed non random. But at the same time, the voltage levels had no recognizable pattern suggesting an intelligent source. One of the headquarter's workers described one data sequence as being similar to an electric guitar rift from a rock music arrangement.

Claude got a bit of an emotional lift from that characterization because he had experimented with playing guitar for a few years in his younger years. And he often felt the desire to take it up again as a hobby. If only he thought, there were ten of him, he would have enough time for that indulgence.

Among scientists there was a general consensus that human activities caused global warming. Claude expected that global warming would get worse, droughts to get worse, and food shortages to get worse. Human nature would keep the process going. For the most part, people tend to deal with short term concerns and give long term planning a lower priority. Day after day, they use automobiles, air conditioning, central heating, and the other causes of global warming in order to deal with immediate concerns. Day after day becomes year after year and decade after decade. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere steadily increases.

Temperatures rise so slowly and agricultural practices change so slowly that most people barely notice. Few people are concerned enough to give up their use of automobiles, air conditioning, central heating and their other contributions to global warming. Only experts notice climate change. But society as a whole must adapt quickly and sufficiently if suffering is to be avoided. It seemed that would not happen.

Agriculture has adapted well enough so far hasn't it? Air conditioning keeps our homes and cars comfortable. Is the increased temperatures actually important enough to give up what makes our lives comfortable and enjoyable? So what if temperatures rise another 10 or 20 degrees? We can buy food produced in northern Canada. Heck, they can ship food here from Siberia and the Arctic Circle if they have to. And the ocean won't dry out. We can eat farmed salmon, lobster, and sushi. Just crank up the AC and don't be a Chicken Little.

It was not that Claude was cynical and pessimistic about human nature in general. He understood how people struggled to succeed. How it took their time and energy to achieve their goals, and to deal with their situations. Little time and determination was left to deal with global warming. Especially if the solutions would make their lives even more difficult and perhaps make achieving their goals impossible. How could a person hold a job without driving a car to get to their workplace? How could a person endure an under-heated or under-cooled home and still have the health and energy to work 40 hours a week? Sure vacation travel puts more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but that's only once a year. How can a college student preparing for a career put in the long, draining study hours without basic comforts? Occasional indulgences of day trips and weekend getaways are necessary to make up for the tedium of less than enthralling curricula, right? Anyway, who knows how global warming will turn out? It might end up being something that people adapt to without serious consequences. Global warming could transition into steady average temperature or even global cooling. Claude understood all that. He accepted it without cynicism. Instead he prepared for an uncertain future.

2. 2020 Claude's garden

Very few people in Claude's area of the country had more than very small gardens to supply a small part of their vegetable needs. The summer heat and dryness made large gardens impractical. The expense of drilling an adequate well to supply a large garden was more than what could be justified.

A century ago the weather in the area was much more favorable for gardening. It was common for backyard gardens to supply most of a family's vegetables. Then, in the early 1900s industrial agriculture, efficient shipping, and refrigeration made food cheap. Gardening did not seem practical to many people.

Now, in the 2020s, high food prices make vegetable gardening worthwhile for many people. But over the last couple of decades, Claude's geographical area has been dealt hotter and drier summers from the mix of regional changes that are part of global warming. Farmers and gardeners adapted at first. But as the decades passed and summer heat and dryness continued to increase, gradually the practices of farming and gardening in Claude's area decreased until practically none remained.

Claude's gardening practices allowed him to grow most of his own vegetables and fruit. In addition to using rainwater runoff from the buildings on his property, Claude used vinyl tarpaulins laid out on sloping ground to direct rainwater to his crops. Average total rainfall was less than what had fallen decades ago but downpours were more common. The higher global temperatures charged the atmosphere with more moisture and energy and that increased the average size and strength of low pressure systems that pumped moisture up from southern, wetter, and hotter latitudes. When the moisture laden air circulates north and is cooled, the moisture drops out as rain, often in heavy downpours. With normal farming practices the soaked ground too quickly dries in the summer heat.

In the region where Claude is living, the soil is about a foot deep in most places. Under that is a layer of soft rock locally called shale. The water available to plants is almost exclusively in the soil that lays on top of the shale. That one foot layer could go from soggy to too dry in a week's time in the 90 degree plus temperatures now common during the summer months.

To keep enough moisture in the soil to support vegetable and fruit plants, Claude had increased the soil depth by scraping the soil temporarily out of the way, digging a 3-feet wide, 2-feet deep trench in the shale and then filling the trench with soil. The resulting 3-feet deep layer of soil, once soaked, took much longer to dry out than the usual one-foot thick layer of soil. To get that much soil soaked, it was necessary to concentrate the water from rainfalls so that rain from a large area was all directed to the soil-filled trench. To do that, Claude spread the shale taken from the trench into a sloping layer adjacent to the trench. He laid a vinyl tarpaulin on the sloping area to cause rain water to flow into the 3-foot deep, soil-filled trench.

The problem of frost early in the growing season had become worse as the size and strength of high pressure systems had increased. Climatologists and meteorologists attribute the problem to the heat charged atmosphere. As the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increases, CO2 reflects back the heat that radiates out from the ground surface. The hotter surface heats up the air near the surface. Heat energy pushes the air molecules apart, the air expands and it becomes lighter. Gravity acts like a pump pulling the cooler and heavier, high altitude air down. Warmer, lighter air is displaced upward. The up and down movement drives the rotation of geographically large air masses, like the water going down a bathtub drain. The rotating air masses sometimes move hot air north from southern latitudes. Almost as often cold air from more northern latitudes is brought into the region. The cold air, being drier, lets more heat radiate out into space. The combination of cold air coming from the north plus more heat radiating from the surface, makes late spring frost a major problem for food plant production in the area where Claude lives and in many other areas of the world. Although average temperatures are higher in the spring, temperature swings are also greater. Paradoxically, global warming has increased the number of late frost in the spring and early frost in the fall.

Another compounding factor is the shrinking arctic ice cap and a warmer north polar region. There is now a smaller temperature different between the arctic and the northern hemisphere's mid latitudes. That results in a weaker jet stream. A strong, fast moving jet stream served to separate polar and north latitude weather systems. Now the weaker jet stream tends to have a more meandering path that more often dips far to the south and north. Cold artic air travels far to the south in the bulges extending to the south. Warmer southern air pushes northward in bulges extending northward. The bulges often stay in place for days or weeks causing extended periods of seasonally unusual cold or warm weather.

The southern U.S. has been hotter and drier. Vegetable and fruit production is shifting northward. That scenario includes the production of the staple crops of corn, wheat, and soybeans. Canada has replaced the U.S. as the major producer of soybeans and grain.

The farmers of the Midwest are adapting by growing heat and drought tolerant crops that tolerate the now hotter, drier summers. Black-eyed peas have replaced soybeans, sorghum has replaced corn, and millet is replacing wheat in some areas. Production per acre is lower but for farmers recent food price increases largely make up for the higher cost of producing those crops.

Claude has a dozen or so peanut plants in his garden. It is not practical to grow peanuts in his area of the country - not yet anyway. Peanuts require a longer season of hot weather, now more typical of the climate a few hundred miles to the south. But the optimum growing conditions for peanuts has been moving north at the rate of ten miles a year. Peanuts can be grown in Claude's area now with some special cultural practices. The yields are less than what is typical farther south. But that ten miles per year advance could speed up suddenly. Nobody knows. Some experts are predicting fast change.

3. 2020 Big trench

It is Sunday morning. Claude had decided he needed to get away from his computer. He had been thinking about making a soil filled trench larger than the one he is now using to grow vegetables. The trench he is now using is 3-feet wide and 3-feet deep. He had dug the trench using a shovel and a wheelbarrow. It had been done a little at a time, because it was physically demanding and required about 20 hours for every 8 linear feet of trench. Today, Claude starts a trench 12-feet wide and 3-feet deep. It would be 60-feet long. The trench would be much too big to do by hand, not in a single year anyway. This time he will use his fifty-year-old tractor. First he will use a double shear plow to little by little move the soil off of a twenty-four-foot wide and sixty-foot long area. Then using the plow, he will break up the underlying shale. The broken up shale will be removed with a scoop attachment to the tractor.

Even using the tractor, it is not a fast process. Each pass with the plow moves a two-foot wide strip of soil one-foot to the side. Before starting, Claude roughly calculated the time that would be required. Twelve passes to cover the area, 2- minutes per pass, twenty-four times over to clear the bulk of the soil away, for a total of about eight-hours time.

His estimate turns out to be about right. Including half-an-hour for lunch, he finishes in just under eight-hours. In late afternoon he switches to using a snow blade to remove soil loosened, but left behind by the plow. After an hour of working with the snow-blade, he switches to the scoop implement to remove the remaining soil that is too hard for the snow blade. The snow blade rides on top of hard soil without moving it. The scoop cuts into hard soil and collects about six cubic feet with each scoopful which Claude dumps on the heap made by the plow and the snow-blade. After the soil is cleared away, there is 20-inches of shale to remove. The shale in Claude's locality is a soft rock that had been formed thousands of years ago by sediments in the runoff of melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. The shale is in many pieces varying greatly in size from a few feet to fractions of an inch. The combination of the fractures and the relative brittleness of shale, makes the shale just breakable enough for a plow to penetrate. Claude breaks up a layer about 8-inches deep with his plow, then uses the scoop attachment on the tractor to move the shale off to the side. That mound of shale will be formed into a sloping watershed for summer thunderstorms. The rainwater will provide the garden with water during the hottest part of the summer when, typically, the garden would otherwise be severely damaged by a lack of sufficient water.

At the end of the day, as he works, it is getting dark just before 9 p.m. He has half the scoop work done. The rest of the work has to wait for another day.

Claude works on the ditch each evening for an hour or so for the following week. He normally does not work Saturdays at the Center. On Saturdays he begins working on the ditch around 8:00 a.m. The ditch is now two feet deep. Half of that is shale that he dumped off to the side of the ditch opposite the side with the heap of topsoil. The plow is heavy duty and it needs to be, to stand up to the hard shale that strongly resisted breaking, threatening to push the heavy steel implement beyond its limit. By the end of the day, the ditch is at the planned width and depth. Claude is thankful and a little surprised that nothing on his equipment has broken. It has taken probably a little over twenty-four hours to dig the ditch. Claude guesses it might have taken fifty times that long to do the job with hand tools. That realization is enough to give Claude a good feeling. That and having succeeded with a plan that beforehand seemed uncertain of success, he rightly feels pleased and happy with the accomplishment.

The next morning, Claude flattens the pile of broken up shale using the snow blade implement attached to his tractor. Each pass of the snow blade across the top of the shale pile moves a layer of the broken up shale to the side, flattening and widening the pile of broken up shale, making the pile a couple of inches lower in heighth. The shale pile gradually forms a gently sloped surface with the low side toward the twelve-foot-wide ditch. After that, Claude fills the ditch with alternating layers of top soil and plant material - tree limbs, briers, weeds, grass and any other such materials that he can most easily gather. He reasons that the plant material will greatly increase the ability of the soil to quickly absorb a flood of water from a heavy summer downpour. The decaying plant material will also serve as slow release fertilizer providing the nutrients needed for any garden plants he chooses to grow for perhaps the next ten years.

It is July, too late to start most garden vegetables. Next year he will grow vegetables on the soil in the trench. In early summer, before dry weather begins hindering the growth of the vegetables, he will lay a vinyl tarpaulin on the shale. It will direct rain water to the soil in the ditch. Hopefully the summer rains will be frequent enough and substantial enough to keep the garden soil moist enough for the plants to thrive. Three feet of topsoil will stay moist much longer than the typical ten-inches that is normal in that area of the country. The tarpaulin is twelve feet wide, the width of the ditch. So the water from the tarp plus the rain falling on the soil in the ditch will total two times the amount of rain water otherwise wetting the ditch's soil. Most of the run off from the tarp will soak the ground of the garden nearest to the tarpulin's lower edge, so that area should have an especially good supply of water.

It was a lot of effort making the ditch and even more effort filling the ditch with alternating layers of plant material and soil. But growing vegetables in Claude's locality is becoming difficult because of the increasing summer temperatures that parch ten-inches of topsoil quickly, too quickly for garden plants to produce worthwhile amounts of vegetables. There is no irrigation water available. The well on Claude's property does not produce enough water for more than just a small portion of his garden. Drilling another well would cost over 20 thousand dollars. Decades ago in Claude's locally, a two hundred-feet-deep well was adequate to supply a household. The underground water table has dropped for several reasons. Annual rainfall has decreased. Evaporation of rainfall has increased, caused by higher temperatures, so less water is added to underground reserves. Pumping of ground water by residents has increased over the decades further lowering the water table. Now, four hundred-feet deep wells are standard. To supply enough water for Claude's forty- by sixty-foot garden would likely require a depth of six hundred-feet, an expensive proposition.

For the last several years, Claude had been using a smaller topsoil-filled trench to grow potatoes and other vegetables. That ditch was three-feet wide, three-feet deep and thirty-two-feet long. He had dug the ditch by hand over a period of two years. The ditch is along the side of a large storage shed. Rain runoff from the shed's roof wets the soil in the ditch. The deep trench/roof/runoff combination has enabled him to get high yields of potatoes and vegetables. Without the extra water and deeper soil, crop yields would be far from worthwhile.

The twelve-feet by sixty-feet trench will make it practical to grow more vegetables - vegetables that need to grow through the summer in order to mature a crop. Next year Claude will use the trench to grow squash, melons, kale, corn, peanuts and beans.

Claude's motivation for growing his own food is partly economic. Prices of vegetables in particular and food in general have increased steadily as global warming forces food production to stop or drastically adapt in many geographic areas. In the northern hemisphere, in general, climate patterns are shifting northward. The central U.S. is now more like what the southern U.S. had been a couple of decades ago. Most crops require a particular climate, so growers in most areas have been forced to stop production or switch to crops suited to the new conditions. Switching to new crops requires different equipment, and knowledge. The expenses of farming rise and efficiency lowers. In most cases new, drought-tolerant crops do not yield quantities equal to previously grown crops. Average production per acre declines. Prices rise dramatically.

It is the people of poorer countries that suffer most. Those countries have less money to build irrigation systems and less finances to import food. Famine and starvation increase. Armed conflicts increase as discontent and disagreement over water and resource rights become more acute.

In affluent countries, low income people spend a greater portion of their income on food. The poor often have to choose between buying groceries, medical care, and paying utility bills. Claude has adequate income from his job at the Center to buy the food he needs, so far anyway. Some scientists are warning that the climate and food situation will get worse, possibly much worse. It is a possibility that Claude took seriously. Claude figures that no one is smart enough to know what is going to happen. If food production is disrupted much further, his homegrown food could become as valuable as the income from his job.

The trench is done. It has been filled with soil and plant material that will decay to fertilize vegetables for at least several years to come. The trench reassures Claude. Thinking of it gives him a good feeling. He has done something that might make his life a lot easier and lot more pleasant. Even if the climate does not change further to reduce the availability of food, he has faced the issue. He has done what he thinks is best to deal with the situation. With that deep topsoil and rainwater catchment Claude can grow all his own vegetables and melons.

Claude has developed a great sense of emotional satisfaction and pleasure from gardening and orcharding. Whatever happens with climate change and regional and global food supplies, he can grow some nice vegetables in the three-foot-thick, rain-moistened soil, assuming things do not get too severe.

4. 2021 January

It is mid January in Oregon. Temperatures lately have been typical for that time of year - highs in the mid twenties. There is no outside work that has more than minor priority. The inside, household-related work that has priority, had been completed.

Claude spends most of his free time this time of year reading at the computer. He spends many days the same way. He reads for an hour or two and becomes tired, sleeps an hour, reads an hour or two again and then needs to sleep again. Often the cycle repeats to fill up the entire day.

Some positive results come from his efforts. Claude has researched the health effects of eating more than typical amounts of vitamin E and C. He reads about new discoveries of the benefits of other food compounds. He is changing his diet to include more of the foods that contain the health benefiting substances.

Researchers are discovering that eating a carefully chosen diet slows many of the changes that aging people develop - a decline in the ability to hear, see, taste, and generally function as well as they did in the middle of their lives. Moreover, avoiding over consumption of the macronutrients, carbohydrates, oil, and protein, lessens cumulative tissue damage. Claude has found that changing and improving his diet is both interesting and enjoyable. He enjoys the increased attention that his mind automatically builds up each time he tries out a new recipe. He enjoys the 'cerebral reward', as he calls it, of knowing that what he is eating is helping him keep the mental and physical abilities that add pleasure to his life.

Dietitians and nutritionists are slowly coming to a consensus that changes in diet, physical activity, and other doable changes will likely increase a person's life by 10 to 30 years. And not only a longer life, but it is generally believed that such healthy practices will improve mood and vigor and so improve all manners of enjoyment.

Claude pays close attention to meals. He schedules meals according to time of day and how many hours it has been since his last meal. He has meal scheduling down to a formula. Time to next meal = 5 waking hours if last meal was light, 6 hours if last meal was medium and 8 hours if last meal was large. Every hour spent sleeping is counted as 1 half of a waking hour. He even has definitions for light, medium, and large meals according to how many ounces of fruit and vegetable and grain and etc. He assumes his formulas are right by the feeling of hunger that sets in when the next meal is due. It is a 'gut hungry' feeling, stronger and more appetite stimulating than the 'stomach hungry' feeling that precedes it. Claude uses the empty stomach hunger as an opportunity to enjoy a drink of tea, cocoa, or a morning coffee - all relatively low calorie, and so not violating his meal schedules. Having an enjoyable and filling drink lets him comfortably stretch out his meal-eating regime to a less calorie per day scenario. Delaying the next meal by an hour or two has the considerable benefit of increasing appetite. Food is more enjoyed. The healthier foods especially are more enjoyed. Fruits, vegetables, and whole foods taste better. Knowing that a food us particularly healthful further increases its enjoyment. His scheme works out well to maximize his enjoyment of the pleasures of eat and drink. That scheme also serves to reduce the amount of food eaten so that calories-in do not exceed calories-out. He watches his weight by pinching the layer of fat on his abdomen. If it is more that half an inch, he slightly reduces the high calorie food in his diet: starch, oil, and sugar. He keeps protein pretty much constant at about an ounce of meat per meal plus whatever protein is in his regular portion of a quarter cup boiled grain and one third cup beans. That by his reckoning is the amount of protein his body needs, the amount that best keeps his body in the best condition. He strictly avoids snacks and proudly admires his keeping a healthy pattern of eating. It is gratifying for him to do what he can to maximize his health. Maintaining good health, for him, seems to be the single most effective way to most enjoy living.

Claude's choices of what to eat are outside of the typical diet. He chooses food that is the most healthy, that can be had from the local stores and from his garden. He mixes together combinations of fruit, vegetable, grain, beans, nuts and seeds in uncommon combinations using sometimes uncommon preparation methods. Some of the food he eats would be considered by the average person as being unappetizing. Most people wince at the thought of eating things that Claude finds to be quite pleasant. Once in a while, Claude eats raw pumpkin, sometimes eats small pieces of orange peel, and at times makes a dessert from tea leaf that he gets from used tea bags - mixed with cocoa and sugar.

Claude enjoys trying recipes that are unfamiliar. In fact, for him, if a food is unfamiliar, that in itself is something to be enjoyed. He likes to tell people, who comment on his peculiar eating habits, that a large part of his enjoyment of eating is knowing that what he is eating is contributing to his health and therefore is contributing to his being able to enjoy all the other pleasures in living. That simple reason for enjoying food gives his diet a lot of character. His diet is unusual, some would say eccentric. Claude feels his strategies for choosing what to eat are an achievement to be proud of.

Claude uses a food processor, a lot. He figures that often the reason vegetables are cooked is that cooking softens vegetables so they need less chewing, and sometimes to improve taste and decrease toxins. So when cooking is not needed to improve taste or neutralize toxins, why not skip cooking and give the food a quick chopping to a fine particle size in a $40-dollar kitchen appliance from Walmart. Then mix ingredients to get good flavor. A 4-ounce serving of raw pumpkin can be turned into a puree in a couple of minutes. As best he can surmise, usually the raw food is higher in vitamins.

Claude has a theory that pureed vegetables might be much more healthy than the usual chunks-softened-by-cooking texture of most traditionally prepared vegetables. Stomach acid and digestive enzymes will more quickly and thoroughly react with the small particles of food that make up a puree. Nutrients will be absorbed more completely, before bacteria degrade the nutrients. Taste is maximized because interaction with taste buds and olfactory receptors is enhanced. However, displeasureable taste from natural food toxins will likewise be more noticeable. To compensate, you switch to preparation methods and strategies that eliminate or reduce those toxins - so there is less damage to the body from the slew of toxins known to occur naturally in practically all vegetables. Strong tasting vegetables such as parsnips and rutabaga can be boiled and the water drained away to remove most of the bitterness, and presumably toxins. Another strategy is to just eat less of a bitter vegetable. Claude usually limits a serving of raw spinach or lettuce to just an ounce or two.

Claude has another theory about why digestion and absorption of nutrients should take place quickly. So the carbohydrates, oils, and proteins will be less available to increase bacteria, yeast and other micro organisms in the small intestines. Micro organism there are pathogens and cause excess gas, discomfort, and produce toxins that damage the intestinal walls. Some of the toxins get absorbed into the bloodstream to cause damage to the rest of the body.

That's why over-eating makes you sick, Claude has said. Fermentation belongs in the large intestine, it is made to handle it.

Claude found that once he got used to the different tastes and textures, in many cases, raw foods taste just as good as cooked food. Some raw foods taste better. He never roasts peanuts, seeds, and nuts. Cooked fruit from a can loses a lot of flavor because it has been cooked. The texture of pureed food takes some getting used to, but, to Claude, pureed food has its own appeal. Pureed food does not require the time and effort of chewing, does not have pieces that get stuck between teeth, there is no danger of an recalcitrant piece going down the throat, and pureed food gives Claude a feeling of satisfaction because the food is likely healthier.

Canned green beans are bland compared to how Claude cooks the ones he eats. He puts them in a metal bowl with no water. He puts half a cup of water into a pressure cooker, sets the bowl in the cooker, heats the cooker to bring the pressure up to full, and lets the beans cook on low heat and full pressure for 20 minutes. After the green beans cool, he purees them in a food processor for a couple of minutes. The result is maximum flavor. Flavor is not lost because the beans are not immersed in water while they cook. Most things that Claude eats go through that process - steam heat under pressure/puree in a food processor.

Claude also ascribes to the theory that a many-item diet is the most healthy because it provides the widest array of beneficial nutrients. Eating eight different foods per meal more likely provides a person with each of the many needed nutrients. To make meal preparation simple, Claude normally prepares about eight servings of a particular food at a time, one preparation per meal. That is simple enough. One serving of that preparation is eaten at one meal, the other seven servings are put into a closed container and put into the refrigerator. He usually has eight such containers in the fridge, gets out all eight for every meal, and takes one serving out of each container, placing one serving into each of eight small bowls. That gives him eight different foods at each meal, enough variety so that eating eight servings of the same food for eight meals running does not seem boring. Claude enjoys the idea that his system of maximizing nutrition is likely keeping him healthier and therefore happier.

Claude sometimes thinks about the changes he has gone through. There are the changes that happen to most people - learning to read for example. And there are other changes. His attitude toward sex and romance have changed rather quickly. He had been married for 23 years when his marriage ended. His wife was the first to come to the conclusion that they would be better off if the relationship ended. The breakup of the marriage was the most painful thing that Claude had ever gone through, worse than when his father had died almost 3 decades before. The marriage had been more than sex and romance. Sex and romance were a part of a deeper, long term relationship. When the marriage ended Claude decided that sex, romance, and involved relationships are not worth the trouble. He keeps romance out of his thoughts as much as possible. He has other goals and concerns. Claude feels he is better off to not let romantic longings be of much concern.

Today Claude is feeling thoughtful - as if his nervous system is turned up just a little more than normal. He wonders about questions like how would a civilization from another solar system go about contacting earth. And why would they want to.

The Center's computers have been running for months without any significant problems, so he is relaxed about what he is doing and it seems there is no need to put his full attention to his work.

Claude indulges himself by letting