Places 📍
📽️ Videos
Like the rural poor but not really 🐐
Often a lot of internet videos of homesteaders and farmers, have their properties all prettied up for the cameras. The manure piles well hidden, the mud and muck washed away, the pungent smells of life and death not lost in the transmission of the camera’s photos.
When I was out canvassing in Plattsburgh and surrounding towns like Beekmantown and Peru, I was pretty much in the standard rural/suburbanite neighborhoods with the endless chipboard houses covered with off-white vinyl and colored sand asphalt roofs. Plastic that shows the mud and muck, UV destruction. Same old grid-tied houses, with weekly garbage hauling, flush toilets going to sewage or septic tank with the poop and paper stored for landfill disposal. Some considered by those to be modern suburban houses, others rundown old trailers. But not really homesteads with goats, hogs, sheep or cattle even if at times the tangy smell of manure hung over the air from nearby dairies which are out spreading this time of year with the corn chopped.
To be fair, the neighborhoods I was walking were walkable and suburban or rural villages. Or trailer parks. They were the places where Democrats live who have priorities besides keeping their guns and being left alone with their livestock and trash fires. Many did have wood stoves, and there was the occasional “modern” log house, and I saw actually quite a nice one out on Cumberland Head with a steel roof, still hardly the backwoods off-grid cabin I toured back in college many years ago, when people were still using lead acid batteries, compact florescents and those big old Outback Inverters with separate charger controllers, and solar was still expensive and boutique technology. I know such places exist in the Greater Plattsburgh, but I wasn’t going to visit such places in search of Democrats. Most of those places are really in the backwoods, up in hills in the remote parts of Altona, Blackbrook, Dannemora, and other towns well hidden from the road.
I get it’s New York State with the burn ban, and I was never in a real rural area. And I do know those places exist, even if they aren’t as common as the places that fill your Zillow feed, at least until you disable that program on your phone. No everything is that typical vinyl commercial crap, sold as beautiful, colorful and sometimes sustainable plastic even when it’s not. But most of what I saw was a mixature of wealthy houses along the lake, very suburban neighborhoods, and trailer parks – which very much had the big televisions, high-speed internet, weekly trash pickup and just as much junk as the wealthy residents.
I do romanticize a lot about the nobel savage, as if most of the poor lived on homesteads without overflowing weekly trash baskets full of plastics, where houses weren’t wrapped in plastic, where processed food wrapped loaded with saturated fat and sugar in colorful packaging wasn’t the dominant form of sustenance. Places that might smell of manure or burnt plastic occasionally, but are vastly more sustainable than those with weekly trash service and unlimited coal and gas fired electricity. Where the poor eat real food, because they had no other option, as they couldn’t afford the cheap crap constantly being forced down our throats by the advertisers. Where toxic vinyl wasn’t the norm, where wood and logs weren’t seen as too quaint even for the rural home. Where people have land, where whatever nuisance they create by everyday living has basically no impact on anyone else. There is some of that town in the of Plattsburgh but not really.
A rural Pleasant Valley Sunday 🏡 🐐
‘Rows of house that all the same, and no one seems to care.” – The Monkies, A Pleasant Valley Sunday.
I want to believe at one level that most rural people live in cabins and homesteads where they are for a large part self sufficient. But I’ve come to realize the more a study the countryside, look at what houses are out there on the market and how people actually live – that’s more of an exception then reality.
Most rural people are essentially just suburbanites with long commutes. Indeed, much of rural population lives in hamlets and villages, not remote farmsteads with goats, hogs and cattle – and gardens that feed themselves most of the year. Most rural people who have burn barrels where legal essentially produce and use them for trash like weekly suburban garbage hauling. Most have high speed internet and big televisions. Most rural houses are heated with oil or propane, with perfect climate control year round. Most rural houses are grid-tied with the only practical limitation on energy consumed being how much the rural homeowner wants to pay.
It’s not to say there ain’t homesteaders or off-gridders out there, especially on the back roads. There are places in the hills and hollows were people are a lot more self-sufficient. But my idea that rural living is profoundly different then the typical suburban life is as much a fantasy as a reality. I equate the odd ball, with how things are in my imagination. There are some real backwoods dairymen and DIYs but most have Apple iPhone and modern technology. It’s only the exceptional that do it differently.
Cows and carbon footprints 🐮 👣
🐮 👣The other night I heard the tired old claim that beef is really bad for the environment as it has a high carbon footprint. How can that be? Cows don’t consume oil to stay alive although diesel is used in cattle trailers, tractors hauling feed, bailing hay and spreading manure.
But what the activist types are really saying is cows digest grass and dried grass in the form of hay and as part of the conversion of grass to energy they chew their cud and in part loose some of the material that escapes their mouths as methane. Some manure also breaks down as methane when in an oxygen deprived environment like a slurry tank.
Methane is a moderately powerful green house gas. It’s 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide although it lasts only about a decade in the atmosphere before hydroxyl radicals break it down into carbon dioxide. Far lower of an impact then much more powerful warming gases like common refrigerants such as the CFCs and their HFC replacements. At the same time new grass is being grown to feed cows, so they are absorbing the carbon dioxide at the same rate it’s being broke down by the methane. Ultimately, farming is a carbon neutral activity, bar fuel used in tractors or trucks.
The carbon footprint of beef and cattle more generally is grossly over estimated, because while methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide, ultimately most farming activity is carbon neutral, as crops absorb in the carbon that livestock exhale and methane they burp up. Moreover, many cattle get a significant portion of their feed from grazing pastures that requires minimal diesel-fired equipment work to maintain. Grazing might have an initially higher greenhouse output, as grass produces more methane when burped up compared to other feeds, but because grass is absorbing carbon constantly, it’s ultimately carbon neutral.
Beef and dairy might be more of a climate concern where new land is being developed, forests converted into crop land. But with the increasing efficiency of crop and livestock production, it’s rare that forests are being converted to farm or grazing land at least in the first world. But in contrast, farms are being replaced with housing and commercial use, that bring in more vehicles, more buildings to heat, and more wildlife habitat forever displaced. Burped methane from grass isn’t warming the planet, burning fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal is.
