It Could Happen Here Weekly 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Welcome to It could Happen

(00:27):
Here the show where I had to change the introduction
because Sophie said it would confuse people. So now we're
just doing the boring thing and saying the actual name
of the show, which is it could Happen Here. Um.
It's a show about the fact that the society is
kind of falling apart or changing, depending on your perspective
of things, and people need to prepare for what's coming,

(00:48):
which is a world of greater instability and economic collapse
and rising authoritarianism and increasing fights in order to reverse
and stymy all of those terrible things. UM. And you know,
one of the things I've seen in some early feedback
from um other stuff I've done on other shows, and
also from earlier episodes of this is people who will

(01:10):
go like, Hey, everything you're saying about mutual aid is rad,
but I live in X town in whatever state, and
there's there's nothing here. There's not not an organized left.
I don't I don't know of any mutual aid groups. Um,
how can I get involved? Or like, how could I
start my own organization and try to get people involved?
And then the another thing we get asked a lot

(01:30):
is like, Hey, what you're saying about building resiliency and
preparing for difficult times, gardening and whatnot sounds great, But
I'm poor as ship and I live in a tiny
apartment um or whatever. I I have no resources or
no room. Um, even if you're not none of enough money,
like I'm in the middle of some horribly dense city.
So this week we're gonna be talking around those subjects

(01:53):
in a number of different ways. And to kind of
kick us off, I've got, of course, Garrison with me.
Woke come up at nine in the morning. How are
you doing, Garrison ungodly early? Yeah, it's it's it's hideous,
it's hideous. Um. And then Margaret Killjoy, who's up at
a much more reasonable hour because time zones are a
wild ass thing. Margaret, How do you? How do we?

(02:15):
How do we introduce you? You're an author, you're a
writer of fiction. You host a podcast called Live Like
the World Is Dying, right, and you've had me on
and you talk about a lot of the same things
we talked about, and it could happen here. We're actually
shamelessly stealing your your your podcast in order to make
it corporate and sold out. How are you doing, Margaret,

(02:37):
I'm excited to be part of the corporate, sold out podcast, um,
and and actually very glad that you all do a
wider audience thing. But um, I think that is a
decent way to introduce me. I do a lot of
different things, and I've been doing also, like organizing and
trying to seek radical political change for about twenty years. Yes,

(03:00):
degrees of success. Actually mostly not to any success, because
we actually still live in maybe a worse society than
we were in two years ago. Yeah. I tell people
that I dropped out of college to ride freight trains
and overthrow the government, and I wasn't good at either
of those things. I mean, you have all your limbs,

(03:22):
that's true. I do have all of my limbs. Yeah,
and you're not in prison, um, which is really all
anyone can ask of the universe. Um. So, you have
started a number of organizations in your career as an
activist in kind of that hat. And I guess let's
start with like, yes, somebody who lives in a place,

(03:43):
there's no kind of really really organized left. There's probably
not in a lot of these places much of even
like a democratic party. There's certainly not mutual aid efforts. UM.
And I do think that there's a well, well, mutual
aid as a concept is is pretty firmly rooted an anarchism.
There's mutual aid kind of organizations that are are not
particularly leftist or at least people doing stuff like that.

(04:05):
Like I think a good recent example will be the
Occasion Navy, who did a lot of rescues after the
most recent set of hurricanes, where certainly not a left
or an anarchist organization, but a lot of what they're
doing is um is a community aiding itself. UM So,
I don't know where where do we where? Where do
you want to start here? Well, I guess I mean

(04:25):
specifically in disaster times, you don't necessarily work with the
people that you would assume that you're expecting to work with.
And you know, one of the one of the stories
that really sticks with me is like a friend of
mine who's this, you know, um train riding anarchist with
covered in tattoos and and all of that. And during
flood relief in eastern North Carolina was like flying into

(04:46):
storms and small planes with libertarians because the people who
are willing to fly small planes into storms and own
planes tend to be the more libertarian side of things.
And so here's anarchists and libertarians working together to get
people what they need. And one of the things that
I try, because this is one of the biggest questions
I think that the left faces, and you know, people

(05:09):
trying to make the world better faces, is how do
we get people involved? And also how do people get
involved if no one's helping them get involved? And um,
I don't have all the answers about it, but it's
something that I I think about obsessively some a lot.
And one of the things that I really try and
focus on with people as people say, well, I want
to be prepared, and you talk about community being a
very important part of apparedness, but I don't feel like

(05:30):
I have a community, because we live in a very
isolated society. And one of the main things I try
and remind people though, is that in the same way
that property relations break down, like someone's like, oh, I
don't have any stuff, and if the apocalypse comes, what
will I do? And like, well, the kind of the
answer is that like, once property relations break down, there's
a lot of stuff and it's very people. There will
be much stuff around, Like warehouses exist full of stuff

(05:54):
and yeah, Amazon warehouses are going to become like fun boxes. Yeah, exactly,
slash fortified outposts alleged yea. And community is the same way,
not that you would go raid community, but instead that
um some people. Yeah, that's true. And but you can
you can create community in times of crisis in a
way that's actually harder to do when the existing social

(06:17):
order exists. And and the the thing I always say
uses my my dumb example of this about how people
come together during times of crisis is you know, when
I'm waiting for the bus and you know, some city
or something, and no one talks to each other if
you don't know each other until the bus is like
five minutes late, and then everyone is comparing notes about
where they think they saw the bus last and everyone's

(06:38):
friends and sharing snacks and things. You know. So in
some ways, I'm like, be optimistic if you don't already
no community. Yeah, And I think there's also things you
can do that don't necessarily cost a lot of money
to both kind of build resiliency and kind of community connections. Now,
one of those things I've had a lot of friends

(06:59):
in difference at ease work for there. There will be
different farming co ops, right, and generally the arrangement is
you volunteer some sort of time helping them with you know,
there's a lot of ship work on farms, and in
return you generally get some amount of produce or whatever.
But really what you're getting is practical experience growing food,
and you're meeting the kind of people who are interested

(07:20):
in growing their own food, and you know, those kind
of connections can be really helpful when things get worse.
And so I think it doesn't necessarily it doesn't have
to cost much to to try building community now, or
to at least try putting yourself in some of the
spaces where the kind of people you might want to
be in, the kind of people you you might want

(07:43):
to know when things get worse might be Yeah, and
there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of like opportunities.
The world kind of wants you to volunteer, you know,
there's all of these things that if you reach out
to people and you're like, hey, I don't have any connections,
but I'm interested olunteering, there are types of organizations that
do interesting things that are open to that. You know,

(08:05):
I kind of maybe it's terrible, but whenever my friends,
especially my friends were in their twenties or something who
we don't really feel kind of lost and without direction
for a while, I'm like, go sit in a tree,
like go join direct action environmentalist groups that are desperate
for people to come live their lives in this like
self sustaining community. That is incredibly traumatic and hard to do.

(08:29):
And I don't necessarily recommend this to everybody, but you know,
it's a thing that you can do, is that you
can go participate in in different movements, some of which
do want strangers, you know, some of which don't write. Um,
you can't show up to everything and be like why
aren't you including me? You're a bunch of assholes. Yeah,
And um, I don't know. So when when it comes

(08:51):
to actually like trying to start something, um like like
like going out and accepting, Okay, there's not maybe I can't.
I can't leave my family behind and go to a
tree set. But I would like to, you know, start
a community engaging in something direct Maybe that's not illegal
direct action, maybe it is. It's none of my business. Um,

(09:15):
how do you recommend people just kind of start organizations?
Find people avoid pitfalls? Like you know, if you've got
to make your own mutual aid group because there's not
one in your town and you you wanna. I mean,
people have expressed a desire to understand how to do that.
So I'm you know, I've never I'm not an organizer.
I'm barely a journalist. I am curious for your thoughts

(09:36):
on that. Well, okay, so as my own caveat is,
I'm no longer an organizer. I spent much of my
twenties being part of organizations, and then I finally, um
realize that I can just kind of do whatever I
want and then figure out how to plug that into
other people's things. But I will say the the main
way I've heard this expressed and I believe in, is
that we should do if you want to start getting involved,

(09:57):
is you think about what you're good at and where
you think about what you want to be good at,
and then you think about the problems that you're facing,
and then you think about how to apply what you're
good at to the problems that you're facing. So if
you're sitting there and you're like, well, I'm a I'm
a really good illustrator, right, I'm not. I'm a terrible illustrator.
But let's say you're a good illustrator, and then you
you could basically reach out to organizations that maybe you

(10:19):
aren't even close and be like, hey, I'm an illustrator.
Is there anything I can do for you? All? Um?
But if what you want to do is start an
organization locally, it's okay to start small and build up.
It's okay to you know, it's kind of a if
you build it, they will come kind of thing in general,
like if you start, if you figure out what you

(10:40):
need to do, you know, we want to distribute supplies, right,
then you just do it like you just. Um, even
if you start by yourself or ideally you kind of
start with yourself and a couple of friends that you
drag into it, and then you see what gets inertia
like rather than like forcing, rather than starting off, don't
start off by writing your by laws. Um, you know,

(11:01):
maybe start with an idea of like if you have
a cool name that you want to use, like sometimes
that's great to start with, like a hook, and like
starting a band or something. You know you'd start with
like the thing that brings everyone together, which is sometimes
a clever name, but but mostly you just start by
doing it. And um, you know. One of the one
of the ways that's longest standing that people can get
involved with locally or start locally, and there's a lot

(11:23):
of resources about how to do it is is Food
Not Bombs. Food Not Bombs is a a mutual aid
project that's existed and I wish I knew off the
top of my head since when I want to say,
the late seventies, but I really couldn't tell you. And
it's just food. It's just organizing food to give to
people in public. And it's actually wild how illegal it
is in some places, Like people get arrested for Food
No Bombs all the time in Florida in a couple

(11:44):
of other places. But yeah, we talked about them in
the first part of the season, because there have been
a couple of point. I don't think nationally the FBI
is talked about them as a terror threat, but like
in the Austin Field office, and I think one or
two other places they've been like discussed as a terrorist
threat for handing out food. I've had like helicopters flying
overhead and like riots around the corner and stuffed for
for handing out food with food ut bombs. Yeah, it's uh,

(12:07):
they missed the second half of the name. I guess,
I don't know. I don't know. I think maybe if
we were to create bombs, not food, we we might
not get as much police attention. But that's just a
seery Yeah, well what everyone says that we need food
and no one says this. No one would ever say this,
no one would ever believe this. But we need food
and bombs. You food and bombs, yea, bombs for some

(12:28):
food for others. We don't judge. We provide explosives and
we provide food. Yeah, okay, So if you can, I
think if you can, you start by working, You figure
out what you're good at. You find a group of
people that are interested in accomplishing the same thing who
maybe have similar skill sets or different skill sets, and
you figure out what you can do, and you start

(12:49):
doing it, and you organize calling people and being like, hey,
well you donate to us, or getting all your friends
together to give you stuff to to redistribute or whatever, right,
putting out calls on social media for things to redistribute.
You know, most structures start grassroots, and most of the
time they kind of tend to do best when they're
grassroots instead of becoming a little more codified. So, if possible,

(13:11):
do that. But if you're just you, um, sometimes tying
into existing organizations is a thing worth doing. And if
there's nothing locally, you can look at things a little
further away, or you can look at things that are
on maybe on a national level. But there's a lot
of dangers in joining existing organizations and structures, and I guess,
I guess I would say there's like three types of danger,

(13:33):
and one is that you talked about all the time.
And thanks for bringing into the leftist vocabulary the word grifter.
I never heard anyone use the word grifter until your podcast.
It's the most important word in the American English for sure.
We live in a fucking grifter Republic. It's incredible and
we always have this isn't new, Yeah, but we need

(13:53):
more words because we also need the word for people
who are looking for useful idiots. And there's a lot
of social movie mints and not to be like I
I support the Left. I think that what we're attempting
to do is very worthwhile, and I like us more
than the other side by a fair amount. But there's
a lot of things that there's a lot of problems
with the Left, and one of them is that people

(14:14):
are looking either to just have you as a body
with no decision making power and no autonomy, which doesn't
actually build a better world because you're just stop being
a cog in their machine and become a cog in
our machine. Right. And then there's also people who are
kind of um looking for useful idiots canon fodder, like

(14:35):
people to hang around while they while they do stuff,
or you know, and I don't want to go to
hard bodies to stand out in front of cop shops sometimes, yeah,
and even like you know, even like movements that I
really care about that might do a lot of like
non violence of this obedience, although I don't I'm not
particularly I'm not passed this personally, but you know, it's
a very useful strategy non violence of these obedience. But

(14:57):
sometimes they're like, oh, you're young and new, lock your
self to this thing, get arrested. And I would definitely
say to people, don't get arrested on purpose at your
first actions, like, don't be anyone else's cannon fodder until
you feel like you are part of the decision making
and part of like like you really matter and like

(15:18):
then then don't um do dangerous things for other people's projects,
like the ship that states do that's so messed up
is is turn human bodies into resources that then get
sacrificed for unclear ends. Um, And unless you feel like
you have some sort of like there are times we're

(15:39):
being arrested is necessary and helpful, but unless unless you
feel you fully understand not just why you're doing it,
but also that like you you you're not being told
to do it, you have autonomy and like, I'm going
to do this thing that I know will end in
my arrest because I like, I don't know. That's probably
like I think most people in that position know this,

(16:00):
but I definitely have encountered some uncomfortable situations in the past,
I'm sure similar to once you Have, where it did
seem like people were kind of being pushed to take
that risk for reasons they didn't fully understand or in
a situation they didn't fully grock you know, yeah, which

(16:21):
which gets at one of the things that when I
talk about how I think this is the biggest problem,
not not the cannon fodder issue, but the getting people
involved is the biggest issue I think we currently face
because there's so many people who want to be involved
right now, because the world is even worse than usual
and um and it's hitting groups of people who haven't

(16:42):
been hit by before. And people are often also looking
for a sense of community. And there's a thing that
people we don't talk about enough when people are getting involved.
There's two different reasons people get involved, and both are
entirely valid, and one is to fix things and another
is to find to break of the isolation that they
live in in their daily lives. Um and we need

(17:04):
to be aware of that when we talk about how
to onboard people, and we need to be aware about that.
If you are getting involved, you should think about your
own desires. Are you looking for community and if so,
you can find it within radical action, right. Um. But
if you are doing that, then you especially need to
be on guard against peer pressure because it's a really

(17:27):
easy way to feel like you're involved with things is
to go hang out with people who are all doing
a really scary thing. And and that's beautiful. And I
absolutely did that when I when I first got involved
in anarchism, I I and politics in general. I I
joined in head first, and you know, spend a night
in jail within the first couple of months, and I

(17:47):
don't have any particular regrets about that. And I found
community in a way that I had never had in
my life because of how isolated our society is. But
that's not the only reason to to go do these
and that is I mean, I think a lot of
people experienced that last year during the George Floyd protests.
It's the kind of I mean, it's the thing we've
talked about on in the first season. If it could

(18:09):
happen here that times like that this war does this too,
can actually provide meaning that that people have lacked. And
a lot of it is that community that like community
of sufferers, the trauma bonding um that feels like the
most important thing, even because maybe it is the most
important thing you've ever done. I think in a lot
of cases it is. Um. But that's also mind altering

(18:32):
and it um. It can lead to situations that are
not entirely dissimilar to cults. UM. I'm not saying that
they are cults, because cults are number one. With cult
there's generally going to be like a leader and a
in such but like, there are things that happened that
that draw people into cults that are just human things,
their aspects in some cases, as I've said before, of

(18:52):
like a good party, um. But there are cults like
aspects to the kind of groups that form in these
traumatic situations that can lead people to start making really
poor decisions. UM. And and so you have to really
you always have to be kind of analyzing not just
what you're doing, but what's going on in your own head,

(19:13):
in the head of the heads of the people around you. UM.
That's that's just always important. But I think particularly when
you're when you're trying to do something new and different
in a lot of ways, bigger than anything you've done before.
Do you have any specific advice for like kind of
avoiding the cults of personality that sometimes form in new organizations. Yeah,

(19:37):
so you have both informal and formal structures can both
cause problems with cult of personality. There are these brilliant
essays that I haven't read like twenty years that come
from the feminist movement, and one of them is called
the Tyranny of structural Lessness. And as best as I remember,
these are very short essays. As best I remember, the
Tyranny of structurallessness says, if you don't have a formal
structure in your organization, you're going to have this informal

(19:58):
leader who basically tells everyone to do and that's a
problem and and it's a very important piece, and I
believe it comes from a Marxist feminist perspective, but I'm
not certain. And then there was an anarchist feminist response
around the same time, maybe I'm not sure, called the
Tyranny of tyranny that was like, yes, that's true. And
also when you have a formal structure and put someone

(20:20):
in charge there in charge, and that has other problems too.
And I think that it's just we we have to
be aware of both of these things. That, um, you
know the fact that most movements are very decentralized in
grassroots as as huge advantages, right, but it does have
problems of causing informal cults of personality. Um. Podcasting is

(20:41):
a big part of this problem. Um. And actually, I
really appreciate that you're not an organizer like frankly, And
it's part of why I'm not an organizer on some
level is because when people read the books that someone
writes or listen to someone's voice all the time, it
is very influential, right, And being aware of that and

(21:02):
therefore not exerting that power is a very good thing. Um.
And but there's okay, so the other thing, like when
I worry about like people getting involved with like don't
get peer pressured into stuff when you first join. There's
also this thing that is needs to be talked about
and maybe I'll have talked about this some previously, but entrapment.

(21:23):
Entrapment is a huge problem, and specifically the FEDS tend
to look for young idealist activists who can be peer
pressured into actions that they may or may not have
otherwise ideologically agreed with, like hey, let's go blow up
a bridge or let's go blow up a damn and

(21:44):
and this doesn't just happen to the left. It happens
m oh, yeah, it's all around. Yeah for sure. Like
there's that case of the guys who are trying to
kidnap the governor of was it Michigan. A lot of
that was informants who were there's a lot there's You
can debate heavily whether or not it was entrapment. Obviously,

(22:04):
what we we might consider entrapment morally often isn't entrapment
legally because the FBI does know where the lines are legally,
but that doesn't mean it isn't morally entrapment, right, And
they do that a lot, and they usually succeed um, well,
they may not usually succeeded, though they usually succeeded the case,
and entrapment defenses are hard to succeed with. And so really,

(22:30):
just like an thinking about it, I think developing your
own moral compass and sticking to it is one of
the single most important things that a new activist can
can do. And not to be afraid of radical action
necessarily like militant action, but but be wary of it.
Um But then again, I mean in terms of like

(22:52):
being wary of what the other thing to avoid doing
is like accusing each other like fed jacketing, like being like, oh,
well that person is doing the same thing a FED
might do, like wink wink. You know. Um, it's a
really complicated an annoying game to play, and if you're
just getting involved, you're gonna have to learn how to
get it play this game of not fed jacketing and

(23:13):
also not um falling into stuff. And it's annoying because
you probably have to kind of learn some of the stuff,
even if all you want to do is give away blankets.
You know, if you want to tie what you're doing
to a larger ideological structure, then it's going to come
up that you need to be aware of how repression

(23:35):
applies to that larger ideological structure. Yeah, like all this
is very useful specifically if you're trying to find something
kind of pre existing um or you know, looking you know,
or you know, starting something in the bigger city where
you have like connections can be made to other existing organizations.

(23:56):
And I'm trying to think, you know, there's a lot
of people who live in more like rural areas. It's
not much like a liberal or like, you know, especially
left is kind of slubculture. How would how would you
recommend people who live in those kind of scenarios try
to start building this community. Woudn't say like they only
have like a few friends? Um, what what steps do
you think people can take if they have more, you know,

(24:19):
a secluded set up? So it is harder. And I
live in a red area close to a blue area, right,
And I do most of my organizing and as much
as I do organizing within the the nearby small hippie city,
even though theoretically the thing that I care the most
about is connections to my immediate neighbors. Right. Um, that

(24:42):
is harder, And it is harder for a lot of
different reasons, especially if you have cultural differences between you
and the people that you're around. Right, Like I'm a
trans woman and I've live around a lot of like
farms and stuff, right And and previously this wasn't a
problem before Trump, This what kind just wasn't a problem
after Trump. Now, all of a sudden, the fact that
I'm trans as like an attack against people in a

(25:04):
way that it never used to be. And and so
now they all have an opinion about the fact that
we're an address. But still at the end of the day,
I would say that most of the people that I'm
around are actually totally chill. Like there's a vocal minority
of really horrid people, right, um. But even the people

(25:24):
who might be and might have even like voted for
Trump or whatever, um, are not necessarily, at least along
my own identity lines. Also white are not necessarily going
to give me ship. And you know, I can go
talk to them in address and they might be sort
of confused, and they might not be. But if you
have more culturally in common with the people around you,
then there is a lot of room that you can

(25:45):
start working on from there. And this actually ties into
something that I think applies to people across the board,
which is we have this especially new activists, but also
including people who've been in it for a long time.
And this like real arrogance about the fact that we're
like right, And when you want to change the world,
you need a certain amount of arrogance, need a certain
amount of like I mean, I literally believe we need
to not have a government or capitalism, and these are

(26:05):
very major changes to our existing structure, just a huge
amount of arrogance to that. Although not having a government
is slightly less of a major change now than it
was a couple of years ago. It's true, and also
like something like sometimes, actually it's funny. I used that
it more in common with these neighbors, but then all
the libertarians went, goddamn authoritarian. That bummed the funk out

(26:26):
of me. Yeah, there's there's some good ones still. There's
like again, there's the there's the there's the taking your
private plane and do a disaster area libertarians and God
bless him totally, And you know, they're like, they just
don't want them. You know. It's like my dad is
sort of on the libertarian side of things and keeps
twenty dollar bills and the visor of his truck to

(26:46):
give to people flying signs, and he just doesn't want
the government redistributing his money. He doesn't mind redistributing his money. Yeah,
And I'm like, all right, I don't have any real
objection to that. He's also no longer anyway. If you
come at people with this attitude of like I'm right
and you're wrong, the kind of people that you can
get to join your side by saying I'm right and

(27:07):
you're wrong are not the people you want. You want
people who challenge authority, including the authority of people who
claim there should be authority, and and so just actually
listening to people and like hearing people out and um,
when possible, avoiding drawing lines between people is one of
the main ways to connect with people across either cultural

(27:29):
divides or especially political divides. And this this can't always happen, right,
Like I walk down the street and address and someone
like called me a bad word, Like I'm not going
to be like, I understand why you think to call
me that, And I understand how like me dressed this
way kind of challenges your sense of masculinity that you've
been brought up into is the only way that you

(27:50):
can hold yourself strong in a very hard world. No,
I don't do that. I um scream funck you and
chase them. Um, I would ever chase anyone with a knife.
I think that's not legal, So I wouldn't do that,
but um, you know that might work. And you know,
like fun those people, I don't care what they have

(28:10):
to say. No, of course not. And it when I
think one of the things that I don't know twitter
brain has done is that like when you when you
talk about reaching out and talking to people who you know,
don't agree with you, aren't aren't on your side ideologically,
there's folks who will kind of assume, like, oh, so
you're saying I should like try to be friendly with

(28:31):
people who would have murder me. Like, No, I'm not
saying that. I'm not saying that, like, as a transperson
or black person, you should go talk to um, a
militant anti LGBT activist or a fucking klansman or something.
I'm saying that, like, that's not within the broad I'm
saying what you need to recognize. But what I think
is important to recognize, especially if you're when we talk
about like post you know, collapse or whatever, is that

(28:54):
within broad political tendency. So I'm not talking about like
fascist or whatever, but I'm talking about like liberal, role conservative, progressive,
very broad political tendencies. You have roughly the same percentage
of people who are ship. So in an anarchist group,
the amount of people who are shitty is going to
be similar to the amount of the general population that
are shitty. It's the same with every political tendency. But

(29:16):
the corollary to that is, again within broad tendencies, you'll
find roughly the same amount of people who are basically
rad and maybe yeah, there's some they have their brain
got poisoned with dis info and they believe some stupid
shit and they vote like an asshole. But you know,
they'll stop their car if they see someone in an accident,
and they keep a fucking medical kit in their bag,
and you know there that it's the it's the it's

(29:38):
the ship that you know. I talk a lot about this,
the stabbing on the Portland Max train. Well, the two
people who who died confronting that asshole. Um, we're a
republican retired veteran and a far left social justice activist
and they both you know, put their bodies on the lines.
I think that like when we talk about like being

(29:59):
willing to kind of talk with people who are who
are not on the same ideological boat as you, that's
that's what I mean. Not you should make nice with
the people who want to exterminate you, like suck those people. Yeah,
because the thing you're looking for, the thing I'm looking
for is the Republican who's going to, hopefully, instead of

(30:19):
dying to saw alongside me, successfully defeat the you know,
actual far right person. But yeah, yeah, totally and and
I think that that actually is part of the It's
not always the answer for every person who's isolated, right,
everyone who's socially isolated, but it is part of it.
If you're trying to organize with people where you say
you're the only leftist or the only anarchist in your area,

(30:42):
then maybe you don't start. And this is actually funny.
I'm very into being very public about my political ideology
so that people know what bias is UM coming into
things with. But but maybe you don't start your rural
Mutuo aid project calling it the Rural Mutuo Aid Project,
or maybe you do, and maybe you you just start
doing it and you find people who are willing to
have the same goals and means as you, and and

(31:04):
I think you can do alongside of that, you can
also just be really public about what you believe. I mean,
you know, um again, as an anarchist, I end up
working with like church groups and things that I don't
necessarily agree with on a lot of a lot of things.
But they're not mad when I'm like, oh, I'm an anarchist,
They're just like, huh, okay, I'm a church person or

(31:25):
what you know, and like Okay, I'm not. I don't
expect different of them, and they don't expect different of me.
And we we know what we have in common and
what we don't to a certain degree, and then we
work on what we have in common and so airing
and so this is both true if you're within the
movement and you're hoping to try and solve this problem
for other people. But I also think it's going to
be true for people who are trying to build things

(31:47):
in areas where they don't have, where they don't feel
like the part of something larger is airing on the
side of inclusion versus exclusion and not And like you're
talking about, it's about airing on the side of not
always include everyone, not always committing to a hard and
fast rules out. Yeah, totally. Yeah, be be open to
the fact that people can surprise you in ways that
aren't terrifying. Yeah. Also, because you get terrified enough by

(32:11):
enough like people who you think are on your side
that you're like, oh, yeah, I'm sad you all don'to
the the ad pivots in this show, because you can
do it. We can do it, we can yea, we
can cut it in During one of the long awkward pauses.
Go for it, and we'll keep all this up to
it in, but we'll actually cut the actual so you'll

(32:32):
hear it. It's like Finnigan's Wake. You're going to hear
it out of order, okay, And I hopefully you all
be able to figure out the second half of it,
but the first. The first half is anyone who claims
to have all the answers is selling you something. Oh
uh huh yeah, oh oh you know who else is
selling you something? Is that the ads go listen to

(32:53):
the Guico Geico or or Jesus. We've had some bad
ones lately. Um, there's that s os Cuba show that
sounds we're rough. Uh. There was that one that was
just like God. It was just like this is the
concept of we are sponsored by God. I think I've
gotten like Walmart and McDonald's on your show before. Remember

(33:16):
it's the people's food. Oh yeah, organized actually try to
organize around the Walmart. That could be very so. Anyway,
here's ads. If someone is trying to start something new
inside one of these more secluded areas and like they
have decided like yeah, I'm willing to do something. I'm

(33:37):
willing to actually just like start it. How how would
you recommend they try to figure out what some of
the like biggest needs of the community are that they
can actually tackle, Like how how does someone find out
what to do with their mutual aid because they can
like commit like, yeah, I can do something around supply,
something around this, you know, whatever we like. How does
one try to actually gauge what is trying to tackle?

(34:01):
I guess it depends on whether you feel like you're
totally Like if in my head, if I'm totally inside
a nun Assie community, but an area, right, I probably
kind of know because I'm also experiencing whatever the thing is.
But if I'm if I'm a little bit detached from it,
then I do need to like do kind of you know.
The sort of traditional method is I think it's called

(34:22):
listening projects. I've never actually personally done a listening project.
I've been around many people who do. Where you basically
like sometimes you go door to door and you're like, hey,
what's up, Like what do you need? Like what's going on?
You know? Um, But like say, for example, in the
area that I live, there is a a rural organizing.
It's not the actual rural organizing project, which is a
specific structure. But there is a rural mutual aid group

(34:45):
in the largely red area that I live in that's
run by by leftists and they, I think that largely
they did a lot of like firewood delivery, for example,
because a lot of the areas around here are heated
by woodstove. And you have a lot of poverty in
rural areas. And of course poverty looks very different in
rural areas versus urban areas. And you know, one of

(35:07):
the advantages of being rural poor. There's many disadvantages, like
lack of access to certain types of services, right, Um,
But one of the sometimes advantages of rural poverty, as
I understand it, I'm not specifically an expert, um, is
do you have space? Right? You just don't have stuff
for money, and so you can have stuff if people

(35:27):
give you stuff, so you can like story your firewood
and so. And then also because it's this very specific
tangible thing, people can get really excited about, like, oh,
I can chop firewood, or maybe even I can't chop
firewood because my legs busted because I work in the
paper mill or whatever, but I can. But I got
a trailer on my truck, you know, um, and I
can haul that. And people get really excited when there's

(35:48):
like things that they specifically are good at, especially things
that I kind of have alienated them from other people
that they're that they're good at, that they can then
participate in. And so, which isn't totally answer your question,
but I would say if anyone specifically is in a
rural situation is looking to start a mutual a group,
look at the Rural Organizing Project. Yes, I don't believe

(36:10):
that they specifically do rural mutual aid organizing, but they
talk a lot about what it means to be an
organizer within areas that are largely controlled by the far right,
but are not. It's not like the people are all
far right, they're just controlled by the far right, you know. Yeah,
the people actually there, once you talk to them, might
actually be a lot more reasonable than like the media

(36:32):
influencers who are part of this you know, same thing. Yeah,
and it is. It is one of those things. This
is a topic we're drifting too. But it's when we
drift to regularly on this show, we're like, when I
talk with conservatives, it's it's not uncommon that I can
without especially if I don't start by mentioning anarchy, I
can get them to agree to a lot of the

(36:54):
things I believe, which is like, yeah, maybe people don't
need to be governed. Maybe that doesn't work out good.
Maybe uh, politicians are corrupt and should have less power,
And like that doesn't mean that you're gonna you're gonna
get them on the barricades with you. Um, because any
productive kind of relationship starts from like a base of
shared interests and it's not a useless endeavor to engage

(37:17):
in kind of trying to subtly. You know, if you
if you feel out people around you who are ideologically
not particularly similar to you, but also decent people, Um,
you can kind of try and work in some some
something you've not not just some common ground, but you
can try and get them to see that they agree

(37:37):
with you one more than they think, um, and that
that has an effect of changing the way people think
about the world. It really does. Yeah, and you but
you also have to go into it open to yes,
maybe maybe it's not going to change your opinion about
the way the economy should be structured or the way
that sure works, right, but you know, you definitely have
to go into it with a I can now understand

(38:00):
why you drive a big pickup truck that burns a
lot of gas or whatever whatever thing. You might be
coming into it thinking yeah, or at least it might
help you understand why they believe or do certain things
outside of you know, Dave Reuben broke their brain because
they got on YouTube at the wrong time. I don't know, Margaret,

(38:22):
did you have anything else you wanted to really get into.
I guess to. One of the other questions that you
all brought up was about preparedness, like maybe kind of
almost in the inverse situation where let's say that you
live in a small apartment and you want to be
prepared and in which case maybe you have better access
to community. Maybe you don't write a lot of people
who live in the city are just as isolated socially

(38:43):
as people elsewhere, But at least you kind of have,
like there's a little bit more easy access to ways
to break out of certain types of isolation if you
put work into it, because there's more likely to be
groups around that are that are public that you can
go interface with. Um. But in terms of like actual preparedness,
you have the inverse problem, right of if you live

(39:03):
rural you might have room to store beans and rice,
and if you live in the city you might not write. Um,
but I I will say it's the other thing that
I find people The two things that people talk to
me about I think you all run into also is
that people are either I don't have any community or
I don't have any money in space. Yeah. And so

(39:24):
if you don't have any money in space, I mean,
I mean in some ways, it's like, well, maybe your
focus isn't like stockpiling stuff. Stockpiling and stuff is like
the single most overrated part of individual or community preparedness. Um.
I mean I do it, but you know it's because
I M my brain works that way. Um. But also

(39:46):
the level of like stuff that you might be looking
for might be a lot less than like, like you know,
it's like prepper media is filled with like here's how
to build a bunk or under your pool, and I'm like, what, Yeah,
there's there's so many levels mean, somebody other things that
you should be doing before you go to that stitch. Yeah. Yeah,

(40:06):
I mean, like, don't get me wrong, if I had
a pool, I'd be stoked. And if I had absolutely,
I'd be even more stoked. I'd be so happy. Yeah.
But but you know what it's like, it's the first
five gallon bucket of like dried food you store is
far and away more important than the tent, right, and like,
so just having a five gallon jerry can ful of

(40:29):
water so that you're like, you know, what, if the
water turns off or we have a boil advisory, which
happens all the time, I'm good for a couple of days, right,
Because most of the time people think about preparedness as like,
I'm preparing for the end times, and usually what it
is is the end times are real slow and chunky
and crumbles, that's the word. Um. And so you're just

(40:51):
really looking to like smooth out interruptions, and a lot
of that can be done very cheaply and honestly, when
when you start storing your fifth five gallon jerry can
of water, you're not storying it for you anymore. You're
storying it for your neighbor. Yea, yeah, And that's good,
but not exactly not the first step, you know. Yeah,
it's it's better to prepare for if you have like
a week's worth of power outages or a week's worth

(41:12):
of the water not working right, And those are more
incremental steps because we're not just gonna drop off and
have no water forever starting in a month, right, Probably not,
but we mean very like there's gonna be there's enough
remaining systems that that they want to fix it. You know,
it's more likely that some some disasters gonna happen that
we're gonna have, you know, a week worth of stuff gone,

(41:34):
you know, and that's the thing that's actually more more
reasonable to prep for. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, well, Margaret,
where can Where can the good people and hopefully not
the bad people, but statistically some of them will suck
find you? Um, the good people can find me on

(41:55):
I have a podcast called Like the World Is Dying,
which they can listen to you on if they would like,
and it's about individual community preparedness. I also am on
Twitter way too much, at Magpie kill Joy, Instagram, at
Margaret Killjoy, my websites Birds before the Storm dot net
or Margaret Killjoy dot com and that has like a
list of all the books that I have out And

(42:16):
I have a new book, an old book being reissued
that is coming out in November from a k Press.
The book is called A Country of Ghosts and it's
an anarchist utopian book because I was sick of people
being like but how would an anarchist society work? And
I was like, you know what, I wrote a book,
damn straight. Um. It also has a plot, so it's
not fancy kind of bougie with yours. If you write

(42:41):
a plot, you get the wall. Plots allowed only post
structural literature. Well, okay, so this has actually happened to
anarchist fiction writers before Buds of Mara was this anarchist
fiction writer. Um oh, I can't remember where from I'm

(43:02):
gonna this is terribly embarrassing. But he moved to England
from a colonized African country. Uma, what did Rhodesia become?
This is the most embarrassing. So it became a Zimbabwe right, Okay? Yeah, yeah,
so he was from there and then everyone and he
moved to London until he realized that they're a bunch
of racists and he would like breaksh it at awards

(43:24):
ceremonies and then go back home. But he was a
squatter for a while in the eighties, but he wasn't
writing in the proper post colonial like Marxist realist tradition,
because instead he was writing postmodern fiction, which is stuck,
get it and terrible. So he just like was like,
I don't care, and so he's great. That is that

(43:44):
is anyway, I love to see it. Um, that's the episode.
That's the episode go out and right, postmodern destruc jump
on a train. But that too, Yeah, probably also a
bad idea. I talked to somebody who lost their legs
doing that once. Anyway, episodes over welcome this is it

(44:21):
could happen here daily. Uh. This week we are focusing
on different ways to actually start doing things. You know,
we've talked a lot about ideas, and we like you know,
made some broad recommendations um and you know, had people
on to give specific insights and you know, different things.
But we're trying to focus this week and then you

(44:42):
know more in the future. Is like, if you're brand
new to this sort of thing, how to actually start
doing stuff. And one of the things we talked about
a lot is a lot of almost everyone we've interviewed
has mentioned us at some point that trying to get
more active in the things you're consuming and the things
that you're eating. And one of the ways to do
that is by just literally growing your own food. I

(45:06):
went when I was growing up, I mean my grandparents operate,
I mean like they stop right like like like like
a large, large farm. Now they operate kind of like
a farm that just like feeds them. So whenever I'm
at my grandparents in Canada, usually we you know, we
just eat all the food they grow, whether that be
like produce. Um. They also do like their own hunting,
They make their own sausage, like you know, they preserve meats.

(45:29):
So like, I kind of grew up around this type
of thing because just how self reliant some of my
family is. But not everyone may have this kind of background,
and so you know, this idea of growing your own
food can feel maybe a little bit daunting. Um. And
to help us talk about food and then eventually soil
and other kind of things, I have invited a guest

(45:52):
on from another kind of podcast in this that operates
in the same rough, rough framework, I would say, probably
are how to how to kind of slowly improve improve
the world? Um uh do I won't explain who you
are and what's your what your what your project is? Sure?
So my name is Andy. I'm the post of The

(46:14):
Poor Pole's Almanac. We're a podcast that's focused on thinking
about after collapse, how do we things like climate change
and collapse impact things like food systems, and what can
we do today to prepare for what's coming in the future. Yeah,
I feel like it's not not a coincidence that all

(46:34):
of these different kind of projects are getting more popular
around the same time, because we're looking at the world
and being like, huh, this doesn't seem very sustainable, so
we better we better start figuring out what to do
with all these systems kind of slowly, you know, start
losing parts. I want to talk about kind of food today.

(46:55):
I want to want to maybe branch off into like
a few different directions. Branch that's a plant plant plant
pun um, what a branch off in a few different directions,
both like you know, what do you do if you
have like your own house and yard, or maybe you're
like more ruled you have lots of space, and then
also kind of the inverse of like let's say you
lived in, like I don know, a cramped city apartment.

(47:17):
Different things that you can do. Let's probably start with
like the rule just to like give a you know,
a more like base background. You know, you have more
of like a standard set up for what you're able
to do. If someone's never grown anything before, they've never
like maybe they've had like one house plant, but like
they've never grown anything. What what do you think is
the best first like preparation steps before you actually you know,

(47:39):
go and start buying seeds and stuff. Sure, so when
it comes to growing food, it's really not that complicated.
Chances are if you have a front yard we're talking
about someplace that's pretty rural, assuming that climate is in
someplace super dry, you're generally going to be thinking about
growing food someplace where grass probably already grows. So if

(48:00):
grass is already grown there, you know things can grow there.
And really that's that's as simple as it can be.
It can be more complicated. We can start talking about
things like soil pH and nutrients and all of these
other things, but really, when it comes down to it,
if you put a seed in the ground and the
temperature is not too warm or cold, and it gets
rained but not too much rain, the plant's going to grow.

(48:23):
And if you've got some say a couple of acres,
and you want to cut out a little section of
it to grow some food. Uh that that's as simple
as it really can be. And you can go to
whatever store and buy seats. So like that, that's a
good place to start. And obviously depending on where you live,
you want to think about things like lead in the

(48:43):
in the soil if you live someplace near an old house,
or maybe if you're near some place where there was manufacturing.
And one of the things to keep in mind is
that a lot of older settlements, even if there isn't
a factory there now, it's very possible there was a
factory years ago it's been demoed and you never even
knew was there. So it's really important if you do

(49:04):
live in someplace that has that manufacturing background or an
old house to really check for things like lead in
the soil because that can be really dangerous. And there's yeah,
a very accessible like soil testing kits available that stares
on online. Okay, yeah, it's like I think fifteen dollars.
You can have soil sample taken and you can find

(49:24):
out everything that's in it, just like the pH and
you know if it's too acidic and things like that.
So yeah, you you figure out you want to you
want to start growing stuff you have you have some space,
whether it be like a front yard or maybe like
even like an open field if you're lucky, Um, what
kind of what kind of stuff do you think? You know?
Should I just jump in and buy any kind of

(49:46):
seed that looks fun, or should I like start with
specific things. I don't know. It's like if I really
like potatoes, or just go to potatoes, if I really
like cauliflowers, just to cauliflower. What's kind of the if
I'm brand new, what's the different things that would be
wor first drawing out? So generally speaking, you really want
to think about what your climate is and I think

(50:07):
that's one of the things that gets missed a lot
of times as you want to grow things. So like
I live in New England, growing say, watermelon is really
a challenge in a lot of ways because you have
to think about the length of my season versus the
length it takes for a watermelon to be a full
sized fruit for you to eat. So depending on where
you live, the one thing you need to keep in
mind is what that length of your season is. Now,

(50:30):
to get back to the main subject that the podcast
talking about, things like climate change and collapse. That season
is changing rapidly. Right now. We're adding days, so the
seasons are getting longer, but also we're having weird cold
snaps later and later into spring, so what might have
been a traditional season no longer really applies anymore. So

(50:51):
if you're thinking about this is your first year, you
don't want to grow anything that might be right at
the cusp of um being in your season, Or you
don't want to are plant inside and then have to
move it outside and you have to know whether or
not it has a tap root and all these other
things to make sure that you don't damage the plant.
Then you definitely want to grow something with a shorter season,

(51:11):
things like um. Cold weather plants, lettuces, broccolis, cauliflowers, things
like that will generally do pretty good in short seasons,
but they don't really do well in really warm climates.
So if you're in say Florida, it's gonna be really
difficult UM. But that that's kind of how you want
to start thinking about those processes. Learning what the cold

(51:32):
season plants are, what the warm season plants are, where
you fit in in terms of the zone that you
live within, and again starting to think about Okay, the
last couple of years, when did we get the last frost?
Because it's not what it might say ten years ago
is your average last frost, Those days are pretty much gone.
I know here in Portland we're currently growing a lot

(51:53):
of potatoes and that's been that's been kind of our
our our big haul. Also, tomatoes did very good this year,
particularly because of our big heat domes they got we
got the tomatoes did so much better than what they
what they usually do. We've like canned so many tomatoes
just because we just we have so many more than
what we're used to that I do find that interesting,

(52:16):
being like, you know, climate change obviously being generally a
net bad, but you know, in some cases for growing
it's gonna make certain crops easier to grow, but you know,
other crops will be harder to grow. It's something I
wanted to talk more about in the first five heavily
scripted It could happen here season two episodes. It's like,
particularly how different growing regions are going to shift up

(52:37):
and how like you know, Canada for instance, is going
to have a lot more agriculture in the next years
just because so many, so many climates are slowly inching upwards.
But you know, even in places like Georgia and other
places where different if we know specific plants are growing,
all that stuff is gonna be changing. Obviously, this is
affecting coffee and how we're getting less and less it's

(53:00):
based and land that's actually able to grow coffee because
basically plants, you know, growers have to move their plants
up a mountain every year in order to make the
coffee actually work, which is why it's gonna We're just
gonna run up the space. Um So, yeah, that is
obviously the more negative sides of things California lack of
rainwater and just and just lack of rain. Yeah absolutely, rain,

(53:21):
yeah absolutely, And that brings up a really important point
that you know, you're talking about moving the coffee trees
further and further up a mountain as the areas that
are considered prime agricultural areas moves north for us, you
have to think about the infrastructural challenges that brings. So
it's not just you're going to grow the crops in
one place, but the infrastructure, the trains, all these different

(53:44):
things don't exist in the places where you'll be able
to grow those foods. So speaking of something you know
around that rough kind of idea is like, if someone's
never never done this before, they're out to go get stuff,
where would you where would someone like that fine seeds? Um,
Let's say that they don't let's say they don't use
the internet's tons um whereabouts where you think they'll go

(54:06):
and get cauliflower seeds or carrot seeds if they if
they want to start doing this stuff. Yeah, So there's
a bunch of different growers that offer seeds. And one
of the things to keep in mind with annuals is
that it does make sense if you can to buy
them locally, because what within a couple of generations, plants
will start evolving towards local conditions. It's it's really beneficial,

(54:27):
especially with like I said, with climate change, to start
thinking about how can we integrate our food systems into
the ecological conditions where we live, and that ecology includes
the climate. So we have to continuously more thoughtfully start
thinking about these things and how we grow food and
where those foods come from in order to really be
able to deal with and mitigate the effects of climate change.

(54:49):
So a great resources Johnny's seed they do a lot
of really good work and there they have good quality stuff.
And there's a bunch of seed companies out there that
have done some really problem matic stuff that I won't
go into or talk about, but they're these guys, as
far as I'm aware, are pretty good. So I would
definitely recommend them. Awesome. Yeah, their website is just Johnny

(55:12):
Seeds dot com. Just for everyone who's looking that up
at it's Johnny with a Y. Good for Johnny with
a Y. Great. All right, Let's now, let's say someone
lives in a downtown apartment in a metropolitan area. They
don't have immediate access to you know, tons of dirt
or you know, grass, but they want to start kind

(55:34):
of growing some stuff. If if you were in that position,
what would you start doing? And to that, I want
to to part that that would be somebody with a
balcony where they have access to like even like a
little pattio area or those and then without yeah, sure,
So there's a bunch of different things you can do.
Starting with if you have a balcony, you can start

(55:55):
thinking about getting pots, filling them up with soil, amending
that soil is needed as you add plants, and again
the general rule is to think about how big a
plant gets, and how big a plant gets is how
big its root system is going to get. I mean,
that's not accurate by any means, but it's just a
good rule of thumb to think about as you're doing
something like this, and you know, if you have a

(56:18):
tiny pot, then something that gets big is not going
to work. Might be better for a lettuce or whatever.
And there's a bunch of different places you can look
online for how to grow things on balconies and things
like that. You can also, and this is really dependent
on money, is start thinking about out things like grow lights,
which really are not that complicated once you start learning
a bit about them, hydroponics, which comes with their own

(56:40):
challenges because at the end of the day, while it's
nice to be able to grow food in your house,
you're still relying on extractive processes. So you know your
nutrients are coming from fossil fuel essentially, So that's just
something to be aware of. It's probably still better than
the alternative of buying food on the shelf, but it
is something to be aware of in that process that

(57:01):
it's not really a sustainable quote unquote practice, got it?
And what are some of the go twos for a
balcony garden that you would recommend for people that are
just starting out. Definitely, those leafy greens are a good
place to start. They grow small, they have smaller roots systems.
Most times, things like lettuces don't need a ton of

(57:22):
sun to grow super well. As long as they get
a decent amount, they'll be fine. They're not like a
tomato that's gonna like be desperately looking for that that
sun and that energy. So those smaller greens are generally
a better option. Great. Yeah, I was able to grow
kale and like a pot this of this winter and

(57:42):
it was great. Yeah, Kale is a great one here
in New England. It's really nice because you can grow
it under glass during the winter, so even if you
get a cold spell, it will stay just warm enough
to make it pretty much throughout the winter. All right, Now,
I have no balcony. I only have, you know, two
small windows, you know I have. I have like a

(58:03):
counter and stuff, you know, I can like can set
up stuff, but I do not have tons of outdoor access.
But I I would like to stop buying dil every
time I go to the store, because I use it
in my homemade ranch dressing. Now can I just buy
those like pre pre podded stuff and just water them
or kind of like if if if I want to
get more in depth, what are they? You know, some

(58:24):
things that are beyond that, but not you know, making this,
you know, making this giant set up. So you could
be creative and do something that's less than eagle. And
there's this practice known as guerrilla gardening. I was I
was gonna mention girly grillly gardening soon. Yeah. Sure, So

(58:46):
this is like something that works really well, and there's
a bunch of different ways you can do it, and
it really depends on your local conditions and what can
grow out in the wild and needs a lot of
maintenance and what doesn't. And I don't know the Pacific
Northwest a well, but it is warm enough that I
think theyll would probably do fine, and it is wet
enough that bill would probably do fine. So you could

(59:06):
just go anywhere where there's green space that nobody checks
things and just drop some plants in. You could start
seedlings in your house and bring them where you want
to harvest it later, and it's on your walk to
work or where you get coffee or whatever. Drop it
in the ground, make sure the roots are you know,
not bound up, and make sure it's got a nice
watered wrench right when you put it in the ground

(59:27):
so it starts adjusting. And that's you know, that's that's
the first step in something as simple as gerla agriculture.
One of the first things that we tried to do
when I got kind of started in you know, the
you know Portland's kind of more lefty seed was you know,
ideas for you know, building a community garden somewhere. And yeah,

(59:49):
because there is just a lot of dirt, especially like
Portland's specifically lucky just because we just have so much
green space. Uh, there's a lot of places to to
start grill gardening. Just start doing our own little community garden.
Do you do you have any alleged experience in guerrilla gardening. Yes,

(01:00:09):
So if you're on Instagram, I post a bit about
some of the guerrilla gardening stuff that I do. UM.
I generally focus on guerrilla gardening, not necessarily for my
own consumption, but more for ecological mitigation for damage from
um clear cutting and things like that. So I go
out and try to plant things that are native to

(01:00:30):
regions and try to bring them back a little bit.
So that's one of the challenges that we see here
on the East Coast is not only are our cities
not really designed with green space and mind and for
community gardens, I almost never recommend them just because in
places like Boston they're hard to get into and a
lot of major cities like you can be on wait

(01:00:50):
lists for years, So that's not really a short term
solution or a solution for a lot of people that
are rather transient where you might move communities every three
or four or five years. Um. So like guerrilla gardening
works really great for those folks because you can do
it when you want and how you want. Nothing says
community like a waitlist, right No. Like, in terms of

(01:01:14):
community gardens, I think you know, there's been a lot
of people asking about how they get involved in mutual
aiden stuff, especially if they don't have like friends or
like they don't have many friends or connections to activism.
I think one of the best ways to start anything
like that is just all you need is like yourself
and maybe one or two other people that you know
to just start a community garden somewhere. And that's a
very very nice on ramp into like community organizing. Absolutely

(01:01:38):
back in Portland when I used to live in the Southwest,
there was there's just whole like community plots that are
like you know, more like official but still pretty like decentralized.
That you could just basically go up to one of
the bank at plots and just start planting food in
this community setting, and like once a month all of
the different gardeners would like get together and talk about

(01:01:59):
what their going and stuff, and they you know, could
trade produce. Be like I'm growing I'm growing pumpkins, You're
growing butternut squash. I want one of your squash. I
want one of your pumpkins. Right, you can like that
kind of stuff. Um or if you know, if you
end up having with having like a larger hole, you
can just give it out to random people. It turns
out people might like receiving fresh produce. That could be

(01:02:22):
another way of making friends and making connections. If you're
kind of isolated in the city and you only have
one or two other people, you can't start start a
new community garden somewhere in the city just like scope
out of spot, start growing and then and to speak
to that you know, One of the things is that
if you act like your official and you're supposed to

(01:02:43):
be there and you know you're supposed to be there,
people generally don't really question you, especially when it comes
to plants. Like if I go to like a median
and go plant some trees, Like as long as I
act like I know what I'm doing and like don't
look like I'm trying to be sneaky, no one ever
questions me. And that's the key thing, is to really
make it clear that like, you know you're supposed to

(01:03:03):
be there when whenever I eventually I'll put together an
episode on like urban stealth and stuff. And there's nothing
more powerful than like a hive is vest just an
incredibly powerful tool for making people glaze over you and
think you're a professional. It's a music or in this case,
like when I'm doing what I do, you know, I'll

(01:03:23):
borrow someone's old beat up pickup truck and throw a
couple of big trees in the back, and like you
see that pulled over on the side of the road
with its hazard lights on, Nobody's going to question that.
It's like a town or a city, and if somebody
from the town shows up as I'm from the DPW
or whatever. Yeah, there's it's incredibly incredibly useful. Um and yeah,
but like getting to know you know, if you're like

(01:03:44):
I don't know where to find a local you know,
I don't know how to like where I would pick
a local community garden spot, be like you should like
get to know your local area. It's in another great
way of figuring out how to start doing any mutulate
or anything. It's like, you need to know where you
live and like, what's what's around you? Who others who
you know? Maybe in your search to find the community
garden you might find one that already exists. If you're

(01:04:05):
unfamiliar with your you know, with if you're in a
metropolitan area or if you're more out in the middle
of nowhere, you may not know what's around you. And
I mean looking out to see what's actually in the
community is one of the first big steps to have
any kind of and that plays out also in ecology.
So you know, if you're in a city, most cities
have public forest parks, whatever it might be. And part

(01:04:29):
of not knowing what's around you, or knowing rather what's
around you is starting to identify the plants that are
already around you. And while there's been a lot of
action in terms of thinking about things like foraging, UM,
there's there's a ton of opportunity for us to start
looking at foods that we don't traditionally think of foods
but produce a ton of calories. So something like oaks.

(01:04:52):
Oaks are across the United States. I don't think there's
any state without oak trees and acorns can be a
huge part of anyone's die if they're willing to take
the time and more and about them. And that's not
something that's radical or anything. It's something that's been done
for thousands of years. It's just in in our lifetime,
in our parents lifetime, that that knowledge and that experience

(01:05:13):
has been mostly lost. But it's not something that's weird
or unaccessible or any of those types of things. Absolutely, UM,
I think this is actually a decent cutting off point
for this episode and then the next in in in
the In the next episode in the feed here we
will focus more on ecology UM books, more on soil,

(01:05:35):
and maybe get into like permaculture and some other kind
of stuff because I would love to learn more about
you know, specific soil stuff and you know different, you
know more insight to our current like growing situation overall
as like a country and how you know stuff is changing.
But um, would you like to plug anything really to
you or any other like resources on this topic before
we head out? Absolutely so we are a podcast. Go

(01:05:59):
check us out prols dot com or Spotify. Wherever you're
listening to this podcast, you can go check out some
of our work. We're also on Instagram and Facebook like
everyone else, and you can go follow us over there. Fantastic. Um.
If you want to keep up to date on stuff
for this show, you can follow cool Zone cool Zone
Media and Happen Here pod on Twitter and Instagram and

(01:06:20):
you can catch more It could happen here daily in
this feed. Uh, see you tomorrow. Bye, It's soil tom Hello,

(01:06:46):
welcome to it could happen here. We're talking about we're
talking about dirt today, big big, big dirt fans here.
We love, we love dirt, we love soil. Um And
to help us talk about soil, dirt, ecology, growing for
forging all of this kind of stuff, we have Andy

(01:07:08):
from the Poor Pearl's Almanac podcast about you know what
to do after you know stuff kind of crumbles away
slowly kind of kind of like kind of like our podcast. Um,
and we're not like our soil hopefully. Well I got
some bad news for you there. Some of us are
not great at cultivating soil, which is what we are

(01:07:28):
talking about today is how to avoid getting a lot
of void, Like, how can we help help against our
soil just blowing away? Um? Yeah, that is that is
That is our discussion. I I wrapped up like a
week of research on California specific climate and drought and
what all the farmers are doing. Um, and a lot

(01:07:48):
of their soil is blowing away and so far their
solution to that is just spray more water on it,
which the problem is there's not tons of water. Um,
so let's talk about dirt. Let's talk about soil. I
will hand it over to the residents. Soy boy, the
soil expert here, because I don't know what I'm talking

(01:08:09):
about with dirt. My puns are getting famous, I know
I have. That was that was just that I was
just ripping, ripping off of a title of one of
his episodes. So that's not original. Blame him for the pond. Sorry,
I do that a lot. So in terms of building soil.
There's it's really a basic idea of how to do it,

(01:08:32):
and it generally comes down to understanding what a soil
needs and how to let the soil build through rest
and generally speaking, when we plant our annual crops, what
happens is you put your tomato plants in the ground,
whatever it might be. You've got a great harvest, you
you know, let them die, clear them out, and then
the next year maybe you throw some more compost on it,

(01:08:54):
or maybe you're like, I just don't want time, I
won't do it, and you'll grow and you might have
a pretty decent crop again. Then usually by like the
third year, you start to notice that your plants just
aren't doing as well, like all the nutrients and the
minerals have started to get taken out of the soil.
So you can either continuously add new material to it,
which comes from somewhere doesn't seem very sustainable. Yeah, it's

(01:09:15):
absolutely not sustainable. And the alternative is to think about
how can I build up that soil without doing that,
And there's a couple of different ways we can do that.
The soil can get built from things like cover crops,
so we can add cover crops. Generally things like nitrogen
fixing plants, clovers, hairy vetch, and a number of others

(01:09:37):
that we can use to help fix nitrogen into the soil.
Or we can add other things to add biomass. So
certain grasses and things like that can be planted and
they'll mine deep into the soil to pull up nutrients
when they die off, or you can cut them down
they start breaking down, they return those nutrients back, but
they're on the top soil now, So that's another way

(01:09:57):
we can do it. Alternatively, we're talking about a little
bit more land. You can take advantage of using animals
so chickens, rabbits, cheap cows, whatever it might be, reintroduce
nutrients back into the soil through things like rotational grazing.
And there's a you know that, that's a whole other
subject of you know, how different methods are better or

(01:10:20):
worse for fixing nitrogen and all the other nutrients back
into the soil, and um we can talk about it.
I don't know if you want to spend an hour
talking about it. I assume that that definitely depends on
the scale of your operation. I would assume absolutely, and
you can do that on a smaller scale, not necessarily cows,
but like chickens can. Chickens can be run through chicken tractors,

(01:10:42):
which can be as small as you know, three ft
by six ft. And we're making Yeah, we were making
some fertilizer a few months ago and basically we braked up,
well I did. I watched as people did this because
I was lazy. I watched people as rake up tons
of sheep shit um because there we have there's a

(01:11:05):
little sheep set up, and they were just raking up
all the ship and putting into a pile of dirt.
And now it's been like a it's been like a
month or two, and we should have some okay fertilizer
by now, which we can you know, use however we
see fit. But chickens, chickens, chickens as well, not not

(01:11:25):
everyone probably has sheep or access to sheep um, but
chickens are surprisingly easy to get. Yeah, and depending on
the city or in uh you can live in pretty
dense places and still legally have chickens. You might have
to get comfortable with the idea of slaughtering a rooster,
but other than that, you know, there's it's funny because
what you'll see is like in the early spring, everyone
gets chickens, and then by like July u on on

(01:11:49):
Craigslist or Facebook or Instagram, everyone's like, free rooster to
good home because they can't slaughter themselves. Uh. Yeah, I've
had I've had to watch a few roosters get the
get the old old acts. There was there was this
one rooster that would always wake up as we were

(01:12:11):
all going to bed. We would have like we have
like a movie night, um, and we're like going to
bed at four am, and that's when the rooster starts.
We're like no, we're trying to sleep, and we're like,
we need to kill that rooster. It's time. It's time.
One bad day to be like I cannot listen to
that sound again. At least at least it went to

(01:12:33):
some good use. Yeah, anyway, back to dirt. Yeah, let's
see where we keep talking about reintroducing stuff via you know,
chemical means I mean, or or just using animals and stuff,
or or rotating plants. Yeah. So there's a bunch of
different ways you can do it, and obviously it's all
defined by what your site needs. You know. The way

(01:12:54):
we're talking at this point has been mostly about like
you already have a garden and that soil needs to
be amended to improve it. But if you're working with,
say a site that has almost no top soil. So
for example, a friend of mine out in California lives
near a highway and they scraped all the top soil
around the highway to build up the highway. So now

(01:13:15):
there's no top soil, it's just garbage. So how do
you build that soil up? And there's a bunch of
different ways we can do that, whether it's through taking
advantage of free resources like um mulch. Like if you
see a tree getting cut down and they chip it
all up, those guys have to pay to get rid
of it most of the time, or they get paid
just enough to cover their gas. So if you see

(01:13:36):
it down the street and say, hey, you want to
drop it off in my house, they'll happily do it. Yeah.
We we just found out there is this business in
Portland that you can email them to do a chip
drop where they take all of their mulch and wood
chips and drop them off in your driveway and it's
completely free. You you you you don't need to pay
for it. You can just schedule them to drop it
off anywhere. And a short aside, we also found out

(01:13:59):
that they don't quire address verification, so you can do
this as a prank. Um, you can find out where
the mayor lives, um or where I don't know a
particularly bad person lives. Let's say he wears armor and
he brutalizes people and threatens them with guns while having
a badge. You can find out if you know where
he lives, you can just deliver tons of wood chips

(01:14:20):
right right on this driveway. Um. And and they have
a rule on their website is once a delivery has
been initiated, it's like once the truck leaves you know,
their office, it cannot be stopped. There's no way, there's
no way preventing it. And they don't contact the house beforehand,
no way preventing it. Just a random, random wood chip
drop anywhere in any driveway. It's a magical system. But

(01:14:42):
you can also just use this for you know, getting
wood chips to help grow things. Yeah, and well, just
such an underrated medium. It's like really good for like
water retention and helping soil not dry out too fast.
It's it's not just like aesthetically nice looking and accessible.
It's also like really good for the plants. So I'll
add to caveats to that, And the first is that
it's really important to know what species you're dealing with

(01:15:04):
that are the wood chips, because certain species have chemicals
on them that will reduce growth or stop it completely.
So like black walnuts are really well known and on
the East Coast as having what's called juglone, And there's
a bunch of different species that again are probably unique
to where you live that you should just be aware of.

(01:15:24):
And the second one is that mulch and wood chips
are fantastic for your garden. However, the one drawback is
that for the wood chips to break down, they actually
utilize a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. So
that's just so you may have a bit of a
nitrogen problem or some kind of nitrogen fixing, so it
would be more important to think about cover crops and

(01:15:46):
either adding freshman compost or whatever it might be help
offset some of that nitrogen absorption. So so it's not
it's a great resource, it's just not perfect. You just
have to be aware of the limitations of it. I
would like to touch on why we're in a bit
of a pickle, like what what what what have we

(01:16:06):
done agriculturally to kind of make our soil so unfragile?
Like what what did we do wrong? Um on? Like
even on a larger scale, and how how might someone
like me who just has a small set up, you know,
not make the same mistakes in my own personal garden. Sure,
so the beginning of the food system becoming what it

(01:16:29):
is today really started with oil. Um access to things
like petrochemicals allowed us to start rethinking about how we
grew food and forgetting about traditional methods summarily, things like
using the newer I mean, you think about it. You eat,
all the nutrients go out the sewer and then they

(01:16:50):
never go back into the soil. And we're constantly taking
from the same soils year after year. And the only
way we continue to produce is because we're dumping chem
coals enforcing the soil, which is just a medium at
this point. It's just dirt, it's not soil, and we're
just making it grow food because we're adding the chemicals
the plants need. But we've destroyed things like the bacterial community,

(01:17:12):
the fungag community, all these different things that are so
crucial for our food systems to be resilient in terms
of how can we move forward. Building that soil is
super important and understanding these cycles of where our food
comes from. The biggest challenge really is that we're trying
to create ethical food systems under an inethical economic model. Sure, so,

(01:17:36):
like you'll see, like permaculture is like a really big
thing today and for a lot of good reasons because
it challenges that methodology. However, because of things like capitalism,
we can't really have an honest conversation about the fact
that a lot of people will tell you you can
make money doing permaculture, and some people do, but it's

(01:17:57):
not it's not really what people think. Like there's no
way to ethically grow food and not have the problems
of yeah, you're you're facing or competing with somebody that
doesn't have any ethical guidelines or framework that you have
to compete with. And I mean, there's plenty of things
we can say that there are problems with permaculture, and

(01:18:18):
if you want, we can talk about that further. But
this is the primary reason why we can't really fundamentally
rethink our food system until things either fall apart or
capitalism no longer exists, or there are major subsidies for
these alternatives, whatever it might be. Yeah, let's see, Like
is even something like would you even say, just like

(01:18:41):
someone buying pre made fertilizers should be avoided in that case,
Like would you would you rather you know, someone trying
to make it ourselves, and like what's cheaper you know,
like it is just buying fertilizers or cheaper than I
would actually make it yourself. There's another kind of problem
with these types of things that it turns out, you know,
the way to make things better might cost some people
more money, you know than people who don't really have

(01:19:01):
as many resources. You know, just like a regular person
who's trying to do this, you know, they don't have
as much money, and would would just buying pre made
chemicals you know, easier and cheaper than doing work to
kind of build it up more like quote unquote naturally,
I mean, obviously, I think under capitalism, anything that's efficient
in terms of time and um taking advantage of things

(01:19:24):
like scalability, which you know, mining nutrients is always going
to be more efficient when you're doing it on a
massive global scale, Like you really can't compete dollar for dollar.
And that's at least with what I do with the
poor pros almanac. We don't really focus on that and
instead say this is how things should be, and how
do we do that and when do we need to

(01:19:46):
start doing that if we know that what exists today
isn't sustainable and that ultimately this is gonna fall apart
in some capacity. Yeah, you talked more about like trees specifically,
and I would love to love to hear them more
about that, you know, outside of just you know, making
your own like edible garden, doing doing other kind of

(01:20:06):
ecology related related work. Sure, so trees have you know,
so many benefits outside of the fact that they can
produce food. Um, we could look at things like how
they can manage a landscape and reduce temperature extremes, the
way they can maintain soil quality because of UM, reducing

(01:20:27):
things like runoff from major storms, which are happening more
and more frequently. YEA. Further, like I said, they do
produce food, and they sometimes they produce food for us,
sometimes they produce food for our livestock. UM. Additionally, there's
a process called silver pasture, which is essentially when you
think of a farm, you think of a cow walking
around in a field. Instead that cows walking around and

(01:20:51):
a managed forest, and the forest floor gets enough sunlight
to grow grass, so you're getting the benefits of the
grass as well as the trees, and you can either
be using those trees for lumber or for food crops
or whatever it might be, and you're getting the best
of both worlds. And in a lot of ways, the
civil pastor's system more accurately represents the way the landscape

(01:21:13):
had been managed, especially here in the northeast and generally
the East coast, by indigenous people. Um, you know, they
weren't using cows. They were doing prescribed burns and things
like that. But those environments are actually better for things
like a deer, which like to like to exist on
like the margins of forests where they're getting the best
of both worlds. So that was how they managed a

(01:21:35):
wild Essentially, they're wild grazing the native species. Yeah, we
just I'm just trying to think there's like we we
don't really have anything like that on a on a
large scale anymore. We've we've just jumped right into like
the the field and pasture thing. Yeah, I mean you
think about it, it it makes sense that we haven't because

(01:21:56):
of the fact that to do that requires individual reality.
In terms of how we manage a landscape, you can't
run a machine through sable pasture. You can't just make
like a template and apply to every situation. Everything is
much more unique based on their individual environment and ecosystem. Yeah,
and then it becomes less efficient to manage in terms
of how we manage things as a successional thing where

(01:22:18):
we have you go through the field and you seat
it with a giant machine, because you can do it
faster that way, you can add whatever amendments you need
more quickly when it's just a flat piece of land
with nothing in the way, so on and so on.
It's just it doesn't It goes right in the face
of how we think of efficiency, despite the fact, through
its diversity, it's more resilient to what's coming in terms

(01:22:41):
of climate change, especially the logs run. Yeah. Yeah. In
the last episode we talked a bit about grilling gardening.
Can this like intersect with with this idea of like
growing in the forest? Um is there? You know, I
assume there's like a decent cross over there. Absolutely, So,
generally speaking, lot of people that are into silvil pasture

(01:23:01):
are also thinking about things like tree crops. And one
of the things that I really focus on is thinking
about foods that we don't traditionally think of as foods,
or at least not as like staple crops. So like,
while people might be familiar with kind of the odd
fruits like per simmons, you might know what a persimmon is.
You might have one or two, or maybe make per
simmon bread. That's not usually a large part of anyone's diet, no,

(01:23:25):
And that's like, that's the challenge that we really have
is while people like to incorporate these types of things
in permaculture into you know, how they think about their
relationship with the environment, Like nobody's giving up their toast
in the morning, and that's you know, a third of
your diet or whatever it might be. And that's where
we need to fundamentally shift how we think about food.
So you're saying that we need to change in order

(01:23:47):
to address these large systemic issues that have caused many problems.
We need to change the way we extract resources from
the earth and maybe reevaluate how much we do. So yeah,
I mean, you know, it's it's no small feet, is
what I'm saying. I know, I'm just saying, like, you know,
that's the this specific thing around like food and diet

(01:24:07):
is the same route problem we have with climate change
on a larger scale of like just doing you know,
progress for progress's sake without realizing that this is not
a sustainable way to do things. And infinite growing and
like infinite expansion maybe is a bad idea. Yeah, maybe
it has some consequence. Who has some consequences? Who would

(01:24:29):
have thought that infinite growth on a finite planet wasn't sustainable? Oops? Yeah.
The point that I'm really trying to drive home is
that we really need to rethink what food looks like
and it has to be in a meaningful way that
it can't just be those odds and ends, and that
the thing I think people forget is that food is

(01:24:50):
a huge component of our culture and our identity. Absolutely
think about food and identity. The reason why our identity
surrounded around food is because food is the byproduct of
the environment that we live in, and it's you know,
for it's been a couple of generations and we went
from the reason why Italians e x y z s
because that's what grows there. Two, I eat this because

(01:25:11):
my family does, but I don't know why. And that's
the way those things relate to one another has been
completely lost, and we need to figure out how to
do that again. Can you point to any examples of
these things you're talking about of, like you know, of
systems existing now or in the past that of kind
of shown these methods of viewing food and viewing you know,

(01:25:35):
growing and soil cultivation. So like any indigenous practice. And
like we say indigenous, and we usually mean like North
America or South America or Australia. But even if you
look across Europe, you know, before capitalism kind of got
its clause into the rest of Europe or all of Europe, like,

(01:25:56):
there were plenty of indigenous practices and in some places
they continue and the way that people lived um reflected
the needs of their ecology and how people could relate
to that ecology. The reason why Nordic countries have high
amounts of meat in their diet is because of what
grows there and what how they can utilize what grows

(01:26:17):
there to feed themselves through animals and things like that.
M Yeah, I mean that is that is generally what
we hear is you know, look at the various indigenous
methods of growing um and how they how they fed
people in their media the area, and thinking like, how
can we take those similar ideas and scale it up?
Because I mean, they weren't growing food for seven billion people.

(01:26:40):
But I know, like, we grow way too much food
for what for many people, maybe not too much food,
just we distribute it in a very unefficient way because
we don't do it for what we need. We do
it for profits, and like we we we throw away
so much food that we grow, as you know, globally um.
But I know when I think of these more like
older methods of growing food, it's it's harder for me

(01:27:01):
to picture that, you know, feeding an entire city, right,
And I don't know what the solution is here. This
isn't really the thing I focus on a lot. But
is there a way to kind of scale up these
like smaller skill things that you know, people can do
in their own yards on any kind of mass level
or is that just kind of rely back on this
thing thing we've need to like re reevaluate how much
we consume and how we consume it. So I think

(01:27:23):
there's a little bit of both. I think we do
need to reevaluate what we're consuming and the volume that
we're consuming as well as um, you know, the the
waste specifically in terms of those two things that we
tend to lose a lot of food that otherwise is
useful um. But also there is a lot of opportunity
and wild places like maybe New York City, because of

(01:27:46):
the development around the city, might not there might not
be any way possible to grow food, like within the
metropolitan or even the region. We know that, like, and
this is something I probably should have checked before the
at but it's something like there's four acres of arable
land for every person on Earth, and four acres is

(01:28:06):
like that's plenty. That's plenty. That's absolutely plenty. UM. But like,
one of the things that's really important is to start
thinking about how we can decentralize these systems in order
to have those clusters of places where those things are
more um capable of growing and handling the production that's necessary.

(01:28:27):
And so maybe rethink about what what urbanization really should
be and what it should look like. And you know,
in the future, while things may seem like well, you
can't ask people to leave New York City as climate
change worsens in our food systems startt to fall apart,
that might be a much easier conversation to have, while
today that seems kind of radical. Yeah, and at the

(01:28:48):
very least, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't make any
more New York cities. Absolutely. Um, is there any like
resources online that you can point to that talks more
about these types of topics or like books, sally anything
in this general was growing on the growing side of
things and then like the more like ecology side of things.
So Tom Wessels has this really great book called The

(01:29:08):
Myth of Progress, which talks about complex system science and
essentially what that is is decentralization and um, the benefits
of having diversity within a community and in fact that
any any power that's you know, centered in one specific
place ends up having imbalances and has less resiliency, and

(01:29:29):
that plays until it's focused around ecology. But I think
it's really helpful, especially if you're an anarchist. I think
you can through the lens. Yeah. Yeah, so that that's
definitely one place to look in terms of like growing food.
I don't know if there's really any books that really
address it. From this perspective of climate change and decentralization.
But there's plenty of work online about silver pasture and

(01:29:53):
you know, food force, any of these types of things.
YouTube has like a vast array of resources, And of
course if you're interested in this kind of stuff, you
can come check us out on our podcast or proslamanac we. Uh,
the entire show is pretty much around this subject matter,
so you want to learn more about it and check
it out. Yeah, absolutely definitely, UM if this specific topic,

(01:30:16):
you have a wonderful catalog of stuff discussing this, UM
and I just want to thank you they and thank
you so much for coming on this show to kind
of talk about these topics. You know, me and Robert
and you know Chris, we more of like a background
and like history and that kind of thing. We are.
We are not super avid plant people, like we're trying

(01:30:36):
to start growing more stuff to our ourselves personally, but
I'm definitely not educated to talk on this, and I'm
very very happy that you were able to when you're
generous with your time and knowledge. So thank you, Thank
you so much. Yeah, definitely check out their show on
you know, wherever you get your podcasts and You can
follow this show Twitter, on Instagram at cool Zone Media

(01:31:00):
you and happen here pod um any any any final
final notes. Grow some food, Yeah, grow some food. Grows
some food. That is what if I've asked that question
a lot and that answer has come up many times.
Just growth, grow food. Okay, grows food. What spicy pumpkins?

(01:31:38):
It was it was clipping where it's not clipping. You
just don't like me saying, what's spicy my pumpkins? But
I said it and it can't be unsaid. It was clipping.
This is it could happen Here a daily podcast about
the end of some things and the beginning of other things.
And right now it's an episode about the beginning of fall.
Because it's officially fall and I'm drinking a pumpkin spice

(01:31:58):
black coffee for you. It's also not officially fall yet.
It may it may be officially fall by the time
this podcast comes legally fall when I have my first
pumpkin spice black coffee of the year and it's cool outside.
That's because you're a monster. It's because I'm a happy
man who is enjoying a fall beverage. On this episode today,
we have, of course Garrison Garrison, Hello, Hi Garrison. Are

(01:32:21):
you doing. I'm doing fine great. We also have my
friends be in a lane b E lane. You you
you were on the show recently to talk about terrorism
a year ago. Ye, recently. Everything before yesterday is a
year ago. And uh and now you're on to talk
about surviving. Yeah. Yeah, like crafty surviving punk. Yeah. We

(01:32:46):
we brought made it this far. You on because you
were like two of the most useful skill filled people
that I know. You're both wilderness survival instructors, primitive skill
instructors for a while, and you have a small farm
in a town that I won't name, and you do
all sorts of cool ship like storing food and making
arrows and other things that are alleged. And what I

(01:33:08):
like about that is that, you know, we talk about
like collapse and and things falling apart. There's this kind
of like I don't know, almost like mimetic obsession with
like I want to get out into the woods and
away from the city, and that's the only way to survive,
and like the reality of the situations, that's a terrible
way to survive. It's awful. There's nobody in the wood.
There's nobody in the woods and people and it's you know,

(01:33:28):
there's there are there are a small chunk of the
human race that is capable with with just themselves of
like surviving in the middle of nowhere with nobody. But
there's even among that population, there's a small fraction who
are capable of doing that and not shooting themselves after
a long enough period of time, and you wouldn't want
to meet that person generally. Well, And I think the

(01:33:49):
other the other thing about that is like the sort
of fetishization of of you know, individualists survival skills is
based on this idea that what people when people were
like living off the land, that they were doing it
by themselves alone. Community. There's very few people that survived

(01:34:11):
alone for a long time, and even of the people
that had the skills, like even she wandered out of
the woods after I think eight years of being by
himself and was finally like fuck it. He was the
last of a indigenous group in California where everyone else
in his tribe had been basically with been genocided and

(01:34:34):
him and like the last like five people went off
and hid for very good reason. Um And then after
disease and stuff, then it was just him, and he
spent I forget how many years by himself, and after
a while he finally was like, fuck it, being by
myself is not worth it, and he came out, and
it was just after the turn of the century, and

(01:34:56):
so he ended up being adopted by a bunch of
anthropologists and spending the rest of his time in San Francisco.
It's actually where we get most of a lot of
like the anthropological knowledge of how to make arrows, because
he was very much like, I'm the last of my group,
so I will actually show people how to do flint
napping and how I make arrows and how I hunt
and yeah, and that's but I mean, and that's there's

(01:35:19):
kind of the point there that like, with all of
those skills, being one of that very small number of people,
who could you drop that guy alone with nothing in
the woods and he'll figure it out. He didn't want
to do that because it's miserable. He in fact went
into San Francisco and was like, well, white people wiped
out my entire gonna make friends with these anthropologists that

(01:35:42):
live with them and teach them what I know. Yeah, again,
a lot of the folks who are kind of reaching
out online being like, hey, I don't have a lot
in the way of money. I'm never gonna be able
to move to the woods and buy a farm or something. Well,
you don't. You don't really need to, And like if
shi it really does hit the fan. Where you live,
there's probably parks, unless it's Detroit, UM, in which case
there's abandoned Walmart's. Like you can make it work, like

(01:36:04):
there's it's so So this is an episode about kind
of the skills that you can acquire and build for
not a lot of money, more or less wherever you
live that will help you build resiliency UM, but also
build resiliency is part of a community, as opposed to
living in the woods with a knife, sleeping under mud.
There's a great short story that you'll turned me onto

(01:36:25):
by Cory Doctor in a book of short stories called Radicalized.
That was was it just called The Mask of the
Red Death? I mean that's called The Master. Yeah. The
original Mask of the Red Death is set obviously during UM.
I'm sure everybody read it in high school, like right,
It's is set during the Bubonic Plague with these rich
people who like decided just hold up in party to
escape the plague and they all die of the plague.

(01:36:46):
And doctors is a bunch of like libertarians, survivalist crypto
bros who build a fortress in the desert in order
to survive the end of days. And it turns out
that like a bunch of bad stuff happens, like there's
disease and in civil conflict, but like people figure it out,
and all of the crypto bros die shooting themselves to
death because the water system. It's obvious from the start

(01:37:10):
what's going and everybody who comes along to help them,
they start shooting because you will just wait until you're dead,
because you're shooting yourself because your water is bad. I
think we all have, we all have elements of some
libertarian tendencies in US, which you know, it's not bad
to learn self reliance, and it's certainly not not even
bad to want to like live outside of the city.

(01:37:30):
But in a lot of ways, living in a living
in an urban environment surrounded by a community, depending on
the situation, can be even more resilient because like, yeah,
an isolated farm instead there's benefits to but also it's
really easy to surround and just shoot people who were
living on their farm in the middle of nowhere. If
ship really does hit the fani happening, it happens all
the time. It happened in like Al Salvador and ship

(01:37:52):
when they had their economic crash. So, I don't know,
where do you want to Where do you guys want
to start? Oh? I know you had a couple of
different things that you want the want to talk about,
Like preserving food is a big one, and then I
mean making stuff and doing things is kind of they're
sort of different. Where would you like to actually start
with that? I think we can start with kind of
the d I Y element, branching off of our original

(01:38:14):
discussion on primitive skills, and then in like parts two,
we can go more into like food and like sting
like in like foraging, um and preservation and stuff. Cool.
I mean, so d I why um? I guess now
there's a lot of stuff about, Like there's I don't know,
there's all this stuff of like survival skills and all

(01:38:35):
this stuff, and both of us kind of came into
the idea of making stuff and doing things by being
punks um. And it's kind of yeah, having no money,
but also just their d I Y like do it
Yourself was a very like kind of nineties punk thing
that came into the mainstream. Like I actually was pulling

(01:38:55):
out some of my old books, and I think it's
funny to see the like progression because I have, you know,
the really lovely like Food Not Lawns that goes into
a whole pile of really fantastic things that came out
that I don't know. The first Food Not Lawns house
I saw at the Town as in was in like
two thousand five or six, but this book came out

(01:39:18):
in two thousand and six. But it was this entire
movement of like making community and doing and like how
to do stuff yourself on your front lawn. Yeah, and
then I have from eleven the bus d i Y
Guide to Life that includes everything from like how to
do worm composting to how to make your own makeup
and like finance the house. And that's that's like the magazine, right. Yes,

(01:39:40):
So it's kind of interesting because it definitely like was
the thing that I watched come into the mainstream. But
you know, it started as a lot of punks trying
to figure out how to do things because they had
no money and but also different from a lot of
you know, like woodworking or draft books that really are

(01:40:01):
you know by these seven thousand dollars worth of tools
and now you too can learn Yes. And there's also
there's also an ethos behind it, right that, like before
I was, I came at it first and foremost through
being like a bike punk in the in the late
nineties early two thousand's, being a bike punk, and the

(01:40:22):
idea of like the d I y ethos was less
about the grid is going to collapse and like everything
is going to fall apart and you're going to need
to survive by the skin of your teeth, and it
was a lot more, you know, at the tail end
of the nineties and like the sort of golden era
of neoliberal capitalism and office space and that whole cultural moment,

(01:40:45):
the idea that life was alienated and shitty and it
felt better to know how to do things that you
needed in your day to day life for yourself, using
stuff you had made yourself or gotten from your community members.
Yet resiliency is less about knowing you have a pile
of dried food in the house and know more about
looking at fresh food and knowing, I know how to

(01:41:07):
make that last the winter yeah, And it's been interesting
to see the way that like as that has gotten
kind of mainstreamed into like, you know, the the what
is it primitive. There's a bunch of different like primitive
x y Z YouTube channels that get lots of shot
wreck and ship, and as that all gets mainstreamed, there's
this idea of like expertise that creeps back into it.

(01:41:30):
And d I Y was like firmly committed to the
idea that everybody could learn stuff and listening to somebody
who said they were an expert was a trap. And
a lot of that was coming out of like the
seventies when there was all of the like you know,
CULTI lifestyle ship that was like, hey, look we're gonna
teach you how to change your life, and yeah, we're

(01:41:51):
gonna we're gonna buy up all this land and Antelope,
Oregon and and so d I Y was exactly not
that it was like their's skills and you can and
skills and the Internet doesn't really exist yet or not really,
so you can read books about it and you can
have skills fare because there wasn't Twitter. We also all
had a lot more time on our hands. But there's

(01:42:12):
also like expertise was something that was handy to have,
you know, like if I needed to rebuild my wheel
on my bike and respoke it, somebody who knew how
to do it, And so it's good to have a
couple of people who had really intense, deep knowledge of skills.
But the idea that you would ask someone like I

(01:42:34):
need to change my bike tire two because I popped
it with everyone would have been kind of like really
really like everyone should know how to do basic stuff
and it's and it's okay. Like the whole you know,
Jack of all Trades was is as a desirable goal,
like it's okay to dabble in a million little things
and be kind of mediocre, but have a sort of

(01:42:56):
baseline understanding of a bunch of stuff. Now, you know,
they places that I kind of think that we went
too far. But also, you know, before the American Healthcare Act,
we all definitely did a lot of at home medcare
that we should not have. But there's also a lot
of low stakes places that I think people have gotten

(01:43:17):
away from just practicing and trying all sorts of crafty
stuff as an ethos that is actually really good and
there's no harm to learning things like you're not going
to quote anything, and the only thing that's going to
happen is you will have more skills and more to
offer the people around you. There's this idea under capitalism
that we should all specialize because that is like the

(01:43:37):
most profit generating thing to do is just specialize anything
that makes you the most money. But it's like, not
only is it like not the best in a dangerous
situation to only know how to do one thing that
makes you money, but it's like it's not particularly good
for your soul either. And there's also lots of different
behavioral psychology, like group analysis of if you present people

(01:44:01):
with a situation that they feel unprepared for and there's
a person that they identify as an expert in a
group who they can defer to pretty much every time,
the group that's like, oh, we'll defer to this one
expert because they know everything and we'll just do whatever
they say ends up making worse decisions. Then if you

(01:44:22):
have a group where everybody feels like, oh, well, I
like I can at least get a handle on what's
going on and we can all talk through it and
like make make calls deferring to experts doesn't necessarily help
you know that there's obviously cases we've mentioned medical care already,
where like there's actually knowledge is very important. Skill sets

(01:44:45):
are very important. But the idea that there's people who
are just like, yeah, inherently more knowledgeable of things that
you couldn't possibly understand. Is so where where do you
recommend Like people's like, like like, you've got a bunch of
books right now, and obviously, if you can afford books,
that's a good call. A lot of these books on

(01:45:09):
a preserving food and like growing stuff on your lawn,
but even if you don't have a lawn, you can still, Like,
there's certain like one thing that strikes me because we've
been canning and pickling a bunch lately, is you know,
different vegetables and fruits and whatnot are cheaper at different
points in the year. And even if you live in
an apartment in the inner city and will never have
more than a garden box at best, you can buy

(01:45:31):
food when it's cheap and preserve it um and not
only save yourself a little bit of money, but you
can like also, uh, you'll you'll understand every time you
encounter preserved food and like a grocery store. You'll be
looking at a thing that you know where it comes from.
It's not just like a mystery jar of preserved food
that was made by some process of science. So I

(01:45:53):
don't know, I'm interested in, like where you guys someone
coming in having only uh specialized and whatever it is
allowed them to pay the rent? Where Where where's your
where's your recommended start point? For people? UM, I think
it's picking something that is low stakes that you enjoy.
Like honestly, one of my friends, um, her entry into

(01:46:17):
doing d I Y stuff was, you know, she had
lots of makeup and everything, and she was like, I'm
going to make body scrubs? How do I do that?
And you know, looked up how to make body scrubs?
How to make you know. A lot of it is,
oh getting salt and grinding up rosemary that she found
in someone's front yard and putting it together, you know,
but just something simple that you enjoy, that you would

(01:46:41):
love to be able to, you know, have a little
bit more say over because it's most basic. A lot
of the d I Y stuff is you can make
something very specific to what you like. So for myself,
actually one of the first things I ever started doing
was in high school, just altering clothing. I had an
old yeah, I had an old thirty dollar junk practice

(01:47:07):
uh like kids sewing machine and just the cheapest one
that Sears used to sell, and could definitely just take
that and start putting scenes in an altar clothing. And
like this shirt is now a T shirt, it was
long sleep before. And that also ties in with you know,
d I I just to sound like old punks for

(01:47:28):
a minute. That d I I definitely also came out
of things like the riot girl scene in a big way,
and like the attention to like body awareness and like
moving away from body negativity and the recognition that as
a general rule, off the rack clothes are not and
certainly twenty years ago were extra not actually designed to

(01:47:52):
fit most people's bodies, and it was hard to find
clothes that fit you right. And yeah, so like sewing
was a big one. Bikes because we were broken, didn't
have cars, so figuring out how to fix bikes and
you know, everything that mechanically happens on a bike is
right there and you can see it happen, and it
maybe requires a screwdriver and then eventually maybe some other

(01:48:14):
tools but there's lots of and there's three resources. A
lot most cities I've spent any amount of time and
you can find like you can find like a community
bike shop where if you have to pay anything, it's
very minimal, And a lot of cases are just sort
of like show up and you know there's space to use.
Yeah when um, Like I know in Santa Cruz there
was the bike Church. In Portland there's the bike Farm

(01:48:36):
and yeah, and Philly there was also a bike church
because it turns out the basements of churches are are
There were a couple of spots like that in Dallas
and it's uh yeah. And I think it is like
this mix of, like with the body scrub stuff, like
what is something that appeals to you that you you're
interested in? And also what is with the bike stuff,
what is something that's like just doggedly practical, Like you

(01:48:56):
get a bike, you need a bike to get around,
you should probably know how to ship on it. I
think the reason I say you should pick something that
appeals to you especially is because a big thing with
d I Y was that you're doing it yourself, and
there are so many skills that are valuable to learn
from other people. It is wonderful to craft in community,

(01:49:18):
it is wonderful to work with other people in community.
It's wonderful to teach skills and gain them. But also
I've seen this growing idea with the as specialization for
so many things, especially services comes in that people are
always like, oh, wow, knitting, I've always wanted to learn.

(01:49:39):
I need to take a class in that, or I
need to And it's really important, I think, for people
to realize that you can learn things. We are very
good at learning things, and you don't necessarily need a
teacher for more complex things you do. But starting with
something that you really like and that you find really interesting,
you've already thought about it. So when you start with

(01:50:00):
you know, for my friends, starting with making bath salts
and face masks and stuff, it was something she had
already been thinking about quite a bit and thinking about stuff.
So when she started looking at recipes to mix and
looking on the internet and looking at ingredients, it was
saying she already cared about. So it's easier to learn
something that you are interested in, and it's easier to

(01:50:20):
learn something that you want to do. But we are
all capable of learning for ourselves, not every single thing,
but especially just for craft projects. And so starting with
that so that you can pick up a book, or
you can read an article, or you can watch a
YouTube video and you don't need to take some like
hundred and fifty dollar a weekend class before you can. It's,

(01:50:43):
you know, a big part of the resiliency building. Like
something you may scoff like when you're thinking about survivalism
and talking about like making bath scrubs, but a lot
of the skills you would learn putting that together are
useful in making like a salve or making like a soap,
making soap things that you actually need. Like when I
was traveling, I lived on the road, like out of

(01:51:05):
a car and out of backpacks, off and on all
over the world for years, and I would make my
own medicated because we would get we would be get
cuts and scrapes and rashes, and we were poor as
ship and often there weren't doctors where we were. So
I learned how to use things like plantain and comfrey
and yarrow and like bees wax and stuff in order
to to make medicated savs. And it it was something
that interested me. But like there's also a lot of

(01:51:26):
like there's there's a number of roots into learning that
sort of thing. And if you're learning how to make
again something as simple as like a face scrub, learning
where to find that information for free learning some of
like the basic techniques in order to do that. The
learning how to learn is is applicable in a wider
variety of skill sets, and it I think it's so

(01:51:48):
important to focus on what are you what are you
interested in first, as as opposed to just being like
okay at first, Now I have to learn how to
like splint a broken arm, because like the ship's gonna
hit the fans, like well, to be focus on something
that's more exciting to you first, and and and and
build time in your life to learn things. That's an
enjoyable process. One of the first things I did, like
years ago, was I learned to sew, specifically to make

(01:52:11):
a cause play because you know so, so I would
just I would make me and my whole family different
outfits for comic Con. So every year I would, I
would sew us whole whole new things. But then not
only taught me sewing, it taught me how to do
like like vacuum forming to molding, how to use like
a heat gun, how to use like all these other
types of tools. Um, how do you like molding and casting?

(01:52:32):
Like all of these types of things I learned just
wanting to make silly costumes. But now they're like, you know,
useful and a lot, a lot, a lot of other ways.
And that can be that can be expensive at the
high end when you're like vacuum forming and stuff your
storm trooper armor. But the the cheapest side of that
thing again, you can get a basic hand sewing kit
for like five dollars from a Walmart. And there's also

(01:52:55):
makers and there's maker spaces and like YouTube will do
the teaching, you know, have to pay for a teacher.
The Taliban learned how to fly helicopters. On YouTube, you
can learn how to fix your pants. And then I
think also you mentioned specialization before. It's come up a
couple of times, um, and there is you know, the
idea of specialization. The rationale behind specialization is, oh, well,

(01:53:16):
you'll be better at it because that's what you do
all the time. But that cuts both ways, because if
you only do one thing all the time, then as
you know, whatever the maximum threshold of your abilities is
that's required of you that becomes your baseline, like whatever
in your day to day life, whatever it is that
you're being asked to do, that's what you feel capable of.

(01:53:38):
And on the flip side, there's with with the d
I I approach with like teaching yourself ship, learning interesting ship.
It's also practical and important and useful to be like
this is a thing that I'm gonna do on a
regular basis, so I'll get better at it. But also
it's not you know, there was you know, the whole
idea of there's what you do and then there's your job,

(01:53:59):
and that these need not be the same thing, because
you want to be able to think, think through things
in a way that's not the way you're supposed to
process things to make your boss happy. That is not
what you do when you clock. And you are more
than your career, more than your career, and and and
your skill set need not be purely extracted, as you know,

(01:54:21):
not just like Okay, I have to go do the
thing in order to make money, and then everything else
is consumption, like you can you can transition like we're
and this is not a societal level solution because we
talk a lot about like, well, yeah, you're not gonna
You're not gonna make small personal changes to fix climate change,
but changing your own particular attitude on how you approach

(01:54:41):
the world from one that is I I produce and
that I consume to to when we're you're thinking more
about resiliency and what do I know how to do
and what can I learn how to do? UM is
helpful in a variety of ways. On the note of
you know, the transfer ability of skills and recognizing that

(01:55:02):
you already do things on a day to day basis
that requires specialized knowledge and require skill sets. UM. One
of the things that I try and trot out at
every possible opportunity. I worked with somebody in one of
those volunteer bike shop spaces down New Orleans years ago, UM,
and the whole purpose of that particular space was to
make the skill set of bike repair more accessible to

(01:55:26):
a population that relied on bikes to get places. And
one of the folks I worked there with was like
a very fami lady and was great because we would
have young girls come into the shop and be like,
my bike doesn't work. Somebody fixed my bike. My bike
doesn't work. I don't know how to fix a bike,
and she was the one who would just be like,

(01:55:46):
your tires flat and they'd be like, yeah, I don't
know how to fix it. Can you fix it? And
she'd be like, well, you're wearing press on nails, right,
and I'd be like yeah, like cool, how do you
put on your press on nails? And they'd walked through
the steps of like, well, you sand your nails and
then you put the glue on your nails, and then
you hold the press on nails on your fingernails for
a little while and let them set, and then you're
going to go. And she's like, great, you've just described

(01:56:08):
exactly how you patch a bike inner tube. So now
we just need to get the bike inner tube out,
and here's the part that corresponds to your nail, and
here's the part that corresponse like, here's the glue, and
here's the you know, it's the same process. We just
have to get the bike inner two out and then
back in again. But you already know how to do
the part where you make the bike could work again.
And that does hit on another important like you know,

(01:56:28):
apocalypse or whatever survival point where again all of our
like fiction and movies focuses on like knowing how to
use a gun, or like being a woodsman. One of
the most useful skills, maybe the most useful skill you
can have in any disaster situation, is being able to
teach people, like like knowing how to understand figure out
what people know, and how to get them the additional
information they need in order to be more resilient and competent,

(01:56:52):
because you're always better in a community of people who
know to handle their ship than alone. And it builds
on itself too. You know, we both come from different backgrounds,
but as we've been together and with the different trainings
that we've had in just life, the projects that we
take on have become more and more complex. So you know,
where I used to like to practice gardening and stuff

(01:57:15):
and doing a little bit of woodworking and things, and
now you know, we're doing various construction projects that we're
kind of self taught, and we have some various home
depot books on how to do them. But it's it
doesn't feel nearly as intimidating because we've done steps to
go to it, and because it's not an all or nothing,
you don't have to suddenly be like I'm going to
d I why my entire life. Like I definitely get

(01:57:38):
that way sometimes where I'm like, I want to one
day have everything in my house be made by someone
that I know or myself, and it's really lovely to
know crafts people or to you know, make do sit
down at a pottery wheel and make your own bowls
or whatever. But a lot of it is about practicing
stuff when it's not an emergency so that when you
later on have need or you have the ability, you

(01:58:01):
have the time, like you can do a bunch of
different things. So you know, we refloored the room that
we're in right now the process, but we didn't get
there from nothing. And we've both done lots of different
construction and measuring and other things in little bits just
for fun, for work, for other stuff beforehand. And a

(01:58:24):
lot of these projects are things that are fun to
do as a one off as a project. I've done,
you know, embroidery with my kids just for fun, not
because they need to suddenly embroider all of their clothing
or they have to sew everything, but it's because it's
a fun thing to do on a rainy day, or

(01:58:46):
you know, try fixing a book, not because there's no
ability to go on Amazon and order another book. But hey, look,
I just we didn't add one thing to the landfill waste,
and we don't have to fix all of the stuff
we have. It's a one time prep but then later
on when stuff's falling apart, or when we have supply
chain issues, or when stuff's not there, it's handy to know, like, oh,

(01:59:08):
you know what, Like we're having water rationing right now,
because during the one of the droughts I grew up
in California, we had water rationing and it was my
mom hauled out of the basement my grandmother's old ringer
machine and we were doing the laundry and that because
it could conserved a hell of a lot of water
and you could use the same water for load after load.
It's good to just have those things just kind of

(01:59:31):
on hand that you've tried, because when an emergency hits,
you don't want to be trying to search the internet
are looking for something because you've never done it before
and now it's necessary. And it's it's again to the
point of like how the how collapse really looks versus
how it's often pictured. You're not trying to replicate when
you're when you're doing your own laundry that way, you're

(01:59:51):
not trying to replace civilization. You're patching a hole, like
and and that's a lot of building resiliency is knowing
that you have. It's like it's being able to fix
a bike tire, it's pat ching a hole. And I
do want to acknowledge that, like this is a little
bit more outside of the dead center of mainstream in
you know, the United States and some other like wealthy

(02:00:13):
industrialized countries. And it's not like it has never stopped
being the way most people in the world kind of.
I have one story to tell from these people I
was billeted with in Iraq. These these guys were like
pulling people out of air strike craters every day, and
we wanted to watch TV. One nine. We were in
like a bombed out mosque that Isis had been using,

(02:00:35):
and they had a refrigerator that worked in a TV
that Isis had cut the chords with. And this guy
just started pulling chords out of the fridge in about
five minutes, had the TV working, had like hooked it,
lashed everything together. It was like he wasn't a TV
repairment or refridge. He just knew how electricity and ship
worked and was able to figure out like, Okay, I
can just put all this ship together, We're good to go.

(02:00:55):
And and just also to loop back around to the
whole like survival mentality a little bit. One of the
things that like people that we've worked with, people who
like have been in emergency situations that require, you know,
complex skill sets and things of one of the big
things is to have a role that you are competent

(02:01:19):
in that you are ready to fulfill. So you don't
have to figure out your first step. You can get moving.
You can figure out your first step. So for example,
in the you know, the supply chain issues that hit
at the start of COVID and are recurring, um, the
idea of like oh there's no way to like there's

(02:01:42):
no laundry soap. Say okay, well we've got borax and
these other making soda borax, right, we can we can
make our own laundry detergent in a pinch and it'll
work well enough. Cool. Don't have to have that be
the thing that stresses us out and like adds to
our like paralysis. Yeah, and get a huge part of

(02:02:05):
it is even how you approach the problem it's not
freaking out like, oh my god, there's no laundry soap,
how am I going to clean and close? It's being like, oh,
there's no laundry soap, I'm gonna go online because we
still have that and try to figure out either other
things that can make laundry soap that there are, And
like it's it's accepting. Like you talk about like wanting
to be competent in a role, you don't have to
know what that is from the start, as long as

(02:02:26):
like the starting point isn't I'm going to be the
medic I'm going to be this, I'm gonna be the
food or it's like no, I'm going to start learning
how to do things I don't know how to do,
and over a period of time, if I am dedicated
that I will figure out the thing that I want
to get most competent at. Yeah, because I mean, none
of none of what we've been talking about in terms

(02:02:47):
of the various crafts and projects that we've undertaken are
things that are like our primary function in the world.
It's just like, well, at some point it seemed like
it was worth new, and so we did some of it,
and then we kept doing it now, and there's always
pretty good. Literally everything we've talked about. There's the you're

(02:03:09):
a I don't know, bougie hipster version of like doing
it expensively. Even with like woodworking, there could be a
dirt cheap. I built a table for almost nothing when
I was younger because it was like, well, I found
this would that the city chopped down, and I bought
sand paper and staying for fifteen dollars, and then I
got like a fucking base for my Ikea and I
had a functional table and I figured it out using YouTube.

(02:03:31):
And it's you know, not as good a table as
I could have made if I had ten or thousands
of dollars in woodworking tools, but I had a table
for years because of it um and it's it's accepting
the because I think people do get freaked out. There's
such an emphasis on like having the gear, getting the equipment,
stockpiling things, and like really stockpiling competency is better because yeah,

(02:03:54):
and I think the Amazon wish list ability to just
be like, oh, I want this specific thing, I can
in three seconds look it up online and find the
exact thing that I want definitely pushes in the opposite
direction and makes people a little less resilient in that
capacity because there's less of that idea that you can
just have stuff. And I would just say, if people
want to get started with it, it's really pick something

(02:04:16):
low stakes, pick something simple, because you build the abilities,
you build the ability to learn. And um, I hadn't
explained to me once. It's like a hangar. Every skill
you get X as a hangar, and having really basic,
simple things is actually super necessary because even even the

(02:04:38):
like hardcore primitive skills. I have some amazing books that
I bought when I was eighteen, and I remember I
had them and I looked through and I read it
and I was like, this is like reading magic. I
understand absolutely none of it. And after a few years
of doing things, not even necessarily a traditional skills, but

(02:05:01):
just things, practicing stuff, picking stuff, there was so much
more framework that I had that I looked through and
suddenly there was stuff concepts that I could hang all
of these incredible skills on. And we're like, oh, that
never made sense to me. I understand it now because
I've done simpler things and starting with thing that doesn't

(02:05:24):
seem like overwhelming to learn something simple and something something
most stakes something that if you utterly mess it up,
if you have a what are the like like the
regrets the like craft epic craft failed that it's okay,
it's not a big deal because failing is part of learning.
And so pick things that it's okay to fail at

(02:05:45):
as your as your projects and and don't as many
of us did in the late nineties and early two
thousand's when we didn't have health insurance of any description,
you know, experiment on ourselves and our friends with herbs
because we didn't have healthcare access to dr avoid doing
that is not low stakes. Yeah, I'm about to go
do open surgery on my own infected wound now that

(02:06:08):
you've told me this, and I'm really excited, really excited.
I got I got an exact deal, I got some vodka.
At least we're good to go. No, the key is
really hot glue, same as surgical stitch. I have not
because then it sterilizes the wound, really doesn't stick to anything.

(02:06:31):
This is how I know you are not a crafter.
Is hot glue does not anything. You just you squirt
it in there, You get it in there real good,
and then you cover it with with superglue. I do
have a grandpa that has blue plug in the world.
I would put superglue in first. I do have a
grandpa that has used superglue so many times to glue
his body back together. It is actually that's very funny.

(02:06:54):
It's effective at that. Anyway, here's our medical advice. Yeah,
don't do it of the things that were just said.
But if you do want to learn how to do suitsus,
you can find guides where people do it on Chicken,
which is how if you're an e M T you
learn how to do it. And it's that's a that
is a skill you can build for very little money.
That's useful and you don't have to start on your
friends bodies. And I will put in a plug for like,

(02:07:17):
wilderness first aid courses are not cheap and there are
some real good ones out there, and as a as
like a baseline that is a real handy and helps
you think about things creatively because wilderness first aid unlike
an ambulance driver. An ambulance driver is driving in a
box with all the tools they need, and wilderness first
aid the assumption is don't have a box. You don't

(02:07:40):
have to and so you have to work it out
probably you know, uh, some plantain or something or some
the right fucking kind of sap. There's like ship you
can use which we will not proceed to attempt to
lift off here and provide medical advice. Don't go to
a doctor, No use playing needles, make your own needle

(02:08:02):
t do craft books, cure your COVID, find a bee
hive and start sucking. And the other sources are any
other sources have a great book called Making Stuff and
Doing Things from way back in the day. Definitely recommend
that one. Um country know how, like there's some a

(02:08:24):
lot of old craft books actually, UM, the entire back
collection of the Mother Earth magazine skills stuff like I
have definitely made any setting magazine, not Emma Goldman's anarchists newspaper,
but I've definitely made solar powered dehydrators out of cardboard
boxes and saran rap from the from Mother Earth magazine stuff.

(02:08:48):
And it's absolutely fantastic. The just old school guide books, UM,
and but also anything that's listened as like d I
Y guides that have stuff that you would like to
make and like to do are great. The library is great.
Use the library. Research librarians at the library are great
and if you're like, I'm trying to learn how to
do this thing? Can you help me find books on it?

(02:09:10):
Research librarians at the library they have doctorates in how
to help you do that, and that's they just sit
at desks all day waiting for me. And what you'll
learn from them about how to answer those questions for
yourself is also useful in the long run. We'll go
out and make a reflux. Still is that legal? Well, no,

(02:09:31):
not in most places. But it's easy. You just need
a box inside of a box and you pour old
beer in the center box and that's like saran wrap
on what's avoiding star evation? My autonomous neighborhood collectives? Uh?

(02:10:05):
This is it could happen here a podcast about things
not being as good as they are and trying to
make them better. I'm Robert Evans my co host today
as many days Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people,
high people, Garrison. What are we? What are we? What
do we? What do we? What do we? What do we?
What do we do? What do we do? What are
we doing today? Thank you? We are going to be

(02:10:35):
having a discussion on um food and food preservation and
finding do you mean like putting in the freezer. Well,
what if the freezer is not working. The freezer is
always working. This is America's never breaking. The power goes
out for two weeks. Well, that's one of our guests

(02:10:58):
for today. Uh my friends be in a Lane, um,
who you've heard earlier this week and who We're going
to talk about food storage and particularly again our focus
this week is, like we keep getting a lot of
people being like I have no money or very little
money or very little space. I'm not gonna be able
to grow things. How can I possibly, you know, gather food,

(02:11:18):
store food, like build resiliency. I don't have any any
kind of farmland. And the good news is, no matter
where you live, things that are edible grow, and you
can get those things and you can find ways to
make them last longer than they would if you just
kept them in a sack. And that's a pretty cool
thing to do. So I'm going to hand it over
to be in a Lane. I love that. Okay, I

(02:11:40):
don't have much space, I don't have much money. Was
kind of how I got into doing canning in the
first place. For myself. I used to be very very poor.
I was on food stamps. I had no money. I
was a broke punk, and one of my friends was like,
oh man, there's this farmer at the farmer's market it

(02:12:00):
and if you help them clean up, they'll let you
take away whatever leftover produce they have that they don't want,
so you can just load up a bag with produce.
All you gotta do is help them load the truck
at the end of the day. So that's what I
did every single Wednesday for the next five years, no

(02:12:20):
matter what come, hell or high water. But with that
that also came there's you started realizing that there's gluts
and then lacks of things. Um much like you know,
everything that's happening in society now, just in general. There
was seasons when there was nothing but you were It
was easy to at the end of a farmer's market

(02:12:41):
day walk home with a fifty pound flat of tomatoes,
and you know times of the year where it was
nothing but cabbage and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot.
And canning was great because it helped to equal out
when I could get things without having to dive into
the you know, sixty books a month, I got in
food stamps and spend it at the farmer's market on

(02:13:02):
that instead, I could use it to have a variety
of vegetables or canned goods or other things in order
to flavor my raman. Yeah. I first came at this
kind of from working on farms, where similarly there are gluts.
There are times of year where you literally cannot eat
melons fast enough, and everybody who works on farms talked

(02:13:25):
about getting the melon ships because you're eating as many
melons as you possibly can, and it turns out that
doesn't always agree with you. Um and uh. And then
you know there's the time of year where well, if
you want to eat some month old potatoes and some
two month old squash and maybe some storage cabbage, great,

(02:13:46):
and otherwise there's no produce to be had. So preserving
food is well, there's a lot of different ways to
do it, and it seems really intense a lot of
the time because people talk about like batchuli is um,
you're going to die of botulism if you have home
canned food. And so first off, there's just to dispel
a lot of myths about things, there's actually really really

(02:14:10):
really low instances of bauchul is is um Um. I'm
not going to say it doesn't happen, But there's actually
very few cases of bauchuli is um per year, and
a lot of them are from industrial canned goods. Don't
eat a can if it's bowing out in the sides
of the top, Throw the can, well bury the can,

(02:14:31):
bury it in the woods far away. But then also
beyond canning, there's a lot of different ways of food preservation.
You know, you were joking about, like, but don't toss
it in the freezer. I don't know. I toss a
lot of things in the freezer. Shouldn't not a bad idea? Yeah,
I mean, we got all sorts of animals from the
farm in the freezer right now. We've got a lot
of blueberries because a couple of squirrels. Yeah that was

(02:14:55):
a random thing. Um, just just some squirrels on the
side side squirl for squirrel for heat is, But yeah,
they were. It's not that having a freezer is a
bad idea. It's just that the freezer depends on you know,
having power, or at least having a backup power source
or a generator or or or um and in the

(02:15:20):
case that you don't have access to those things or
can't afford to get a whole extra freezer and that
fills up a substantial part of or can't afford power
the freezer. Um you know, we we definitely saw this
past winter with the power outages that were caused by um,
you know, in clement weather, and it suddenly became very

(02:15:43):
hard to acquire dry ice because dry ice will keep
stuff cold for longer. But everybody who's gone camping and
use dry ice and they're cooler knows that. So as
soon as there's an interruption in people's ability to refrigerate
their food, the entire regional stock of dry ice is
going to disappear. So what we're looking at more in

(02:16:06):
what we're talking about today is a little bit more
like the things that you don't need to keep anywhere,
but like a cabinet that maybe doesn't get boiling hot,
and if it's sort of a room temperature cabinet, you
can store a lot of stuff. I've personally found the
backs of closets, like, think about all of the areas
that you don't clean that you're like, I just shove

(02:16:28):
things back here and hope that they disappear because I
don't actually care about them, or like the backs of
broom closets. UM that actually for a long time was
my place where I would store canned goods because you
can just stack the palettes of jars, the flats of them.
Because if you buy jars from this supermarket, UM buy
mar canning stores anywhere Safe Way has them, Walmart has them,

(02:16:51):
you can. They're not expensive. You can just they come
in a little square flat and so after I would
fill them, I just put them all back in there
and then I could just stack those as a little
tower and then you know, hand them out as gifts
for the rest of the year, which was also definitely
saying that you do when you have absolutely no money
and people are like, oh, we're having a New Year's
Eve party and you're like, I brought you jam, and

(02:17:13):
they're like, oh, great, blueberry lovely. But it's nice as
something to be you can give people beyond canning, because sometimes,
like right now, it's incredibly hard to find the metal
lids that go on canning jars or in some cases
the jars. That's actually was recently looking for more jar

(02:17:33):
lids and ended up buying flats of jars instead, because
as four different stores told me, there's a supply chain
disruption in getting jar lids. There's also a lot of
ways that you can preserve stuff with drying. You can
also do a lot with salt, vinegar and sugar preserving
as well, so that you don't necessarily need the resealable

(02:17:56):
jars or like new lids for that. So there's a
bunch of different methods um lact of fermentation as well,
like fermenting things. So what would you like to talk
about first? Let's start with just like what is what
is the actual process of canning beyond like just dumping
stuff into a can and sealing it. Um. So there's
canning by itself is ceiling jars with heat. So that was,

(02:18:21):
oh God, really really came into its own around like
World War two was like industrial canning. And the thing
about it is even within canning, there's two different types.
There's low heat and high heat canning. Low heat is
actually just boiling water temperature, and high heat you actually
need to go above the temperature of boiling water. So

(02:18:46):
you can pressure can. Um, you need a pressure cooker.
They terrify me. I don't pressure can because I haven't
quite gotten over the images of when they explode and
give people steam burns. I know plenty of people who
do pressure can and it's great for them. You can
pressure can at high heat anything. You can toss raw
fish or raw meat in oil and jars or in

(02:19:08):
water in jars, and you can pressure can it and
it will cook and seal the jars and it is
very safe. Low temperature canning is still relying on one
of the other methods like salt, sugar, acid for the
to keep down bacteria. So all it does, though is
it makes the same so you can do this with
or without canning. It just makes the jars keep a

(02:19:29):
lot longer because it preserves them. So it's the process
of you take a jar and then you either use
a clean ring. If you're using those latching reusable jars
with these nice rings on them that you can use
over and over again, really handy when there are supply
chain disruptions to know that you can reuse your jar
and ring. We're talking about like the Mason jars that

(02:19:50):
you you you would get in UH bars that are
too expensive five years ago. They would pour your terrible
I P A in them. Yeah, but you can use
them for other things too. These are the well there's
two there's the jars that have a lid that is
attached and it lay and so those have a those
have a rubber gas that you can and as long

(02:20:13):
as you keep those oiled and clean, you can reuse
those for years. They do eventually wear out, but they
use a long time. Others is Mason or ball canning jars,
and those actually have a two piece top. They have
a middle ring that you just need to make sure
it's not like horrifically dented or rusted through. It's reusable
for a very long time. And then you have a lid,

(02:20:33):
and the lid can only really they are recommended to
only use once I've re used them, like twice used
to can once you can like once it's canned and
you you can take stuff out, put it back on.
You don't have to like replace the lid every time
you get some preserves out. Yeah, but the tiny piece
of rubber that is what steals it is very thin,
and so it's not very reusable for multiple can't batches

(02:20:56):
of food and true to farm. You know, if you
go looking around in you know, rummage sales, vintage stores, whatever,
you will probably find either very cheap or very overpriced.
Some of those old hinged jars and tons of Mason jars.
And tons of Mason jars, you will often need to

(02:21:18):
replace either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order
to make them safe to star food in. But in
either case, whether you're using the little the mason or
ball jars that you'll find in lots of stores or
the big latching ones, um, the jars are the more
expensive spots things. The lids and the rubber rings are

(02:21:39):
more inexpensive to replace. So if you can find them
at Goodwill, if you can find them at Goodwill bins
or all the places, it's great, you should always grab them.
Jars are never a bad idea. So canning there's a
million different ways to can. I do a lot of jam, jellies, pickles,

(02:22:02):
and tomatoes, which are all things that are cammed that
are preserved either with acid or sugar. In either case, um,
James and jelly is being sugar and pickles and stuff
being acid. Yes, those are my two favorites. They're very
simple to learn, and then you can always expand recipes
and everything else. Um. But with pickles and tomatoes and
other things, having the PHB very acidic is what actually

(02:22:26):
does the preservation of the food and keeps down fungus
is molds, bacterias and stuff. And with jams and jellies,
the natural acidity of the fruit mixed with a lot
of sugar is what keeps the fruits from going bad
or anything. And the great thing about canning fruit is that,
like when you when you're thinking about what is the

(02:22:47):
greatest number of free calories available to most people in
a city during the seasons where fruit grows, it's often
going to be fruit, and like you you'd be surprised.
Like where you can do like Los Angeles where I
used to live, there was much of the year, like
seven eight months you could fill your arms with fruit
if you knew where to go. And there's an app
called Falling Fruit that you can use to find people

(02:23:08):
mark like where different trees are a lot of Like
you'll be surprised. Even if you think, like, well, there's
no fruit in my area, try falling Fruit. You you
may find that out. Actually there's a shipload of fruit.
And I just was not looking or as you often find,
I didn't realize that was an edible plant. I assume
those berries were. We're not food, and they can be
and and that's a lot of like free you know

(02:23:29):
when you especially when you're making preserves that's really colorically dense,
and and that also ties in with in the sort
of survival utility aspect of this, because like canning is fun,
and harvesting fruit it's fun, and having stuff you made
to steel pomegranates from rich people's houses do it, sure, absolutely,
I mean, but part of part of the other thing

(02:23:50):
to think about here is that like providing yourself with
a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like
there's you get an assortment of stuff so you know
you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly, the
most expensive in terms of carbon output, the most expensive
in terms of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends

(02:24:14):
to come from the stuff that's you know, been shipped
up from Argentina because it's not in season up here.
While you're getting grapes in January, right and blueberries, you
can actually watch them move all the way down the
northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season until
they're like growing them down in Chile right before they
start being able to grow them again. So yeah, so
just thinking about like the things that are available when

(02:24:36):
they are available, um. And you'll see this all the time,
like the good florage spots. When they're available, there will
be crowds of people all they're all collecting stuff UM
and getting to know some of the things that you
like and that grow near you, and what time of
year they come into season, and maybe forming some relationships

(02:24:59):
with people and being like, hey, I noticed you have
a chestnut tree in your backyard. Can I come and
harvest chestnuts? Hey, you have this kind of oak? Can
I come and get acorns from you? Because I want
to do a leeching project. Hey, I was grabbing apples
and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns. I
didn't know that you could do anything with acorns. What

(02:25:20):
is what are you doing with all those acorns? And
one of the greatest things too, is that a good
fruit tree makes a lot of fruit. So much so
you know, we have a little plum that's near our house.
It's a little plum tree and since this year we
managed to get to it before the raccoon did that
likes to clamber over the roof. We got about two

(02:25:43):
and fifty pounds of plums off of the small fruit
tree and it is not very big. It has a
footprint of maybe about ten ft in diameter of the
widest part of the tree. But it drops quite a
bit of fruit, especially if we get to it before
it all drops on the ground and our cars in
the driveway and the walkway and the cat and the cat.
But if we get to it, it's a lot. So honestly,

(02:26:06):
I set aside about a fifty pound tub that was like, Okay,
we're gonna make some jam. We're gonna dry some of these,
we're going to do things with it, and the rest
we're able to give to friends. We toss some of
the free fridges, we toss some all. You know, we
handed out because one good fruit tree makes a lot.
So when you see fruit trees around town, when you
walk under someone's cherry tree, it's okay to ask for

(02:26:29):
fruit too, because I don't know anyone that uses every
single piece of fruit off of any other fruit trees.
And you know, one of the things that you will
see is that um a lot of cities try to
discourage people from planting fruit trees along roads very cisely
because when they come into fruit, they produce so much

(02:26:50):
fruit that it causes a problem. Also, it's a good
way to form relationships in your neighborhood. You say like, hey,
we have a whole bunch of plums, we have a
ton of whatever is dropping all over your front yard.
And then your neighbors may be like, oh, those weirdos
who were collecting fruit that one time. This tree in

(02:27:11):
my backyard that's about to drop all this stuff. I'll
let them know and maybe they'll come so I don't
have to clean it up afterwards. Yeah, which is again
like people, we talk a lot about the importance of
building like community resiliency and community self defense, and folks
act like, well, how do I actually do that? Well,
that's maybe that's a start for you. Maybe the start
is like you get to know what do they have?
What do I have? And then you start talking about like, well,

(02:27:31):
I'm gonta can some stuff. Do you want to learn
how to can? You're like, oh, well, I was going
to dry at east do you want to learn it? Like,
or do you want to borrow a dehydrator? And then
you're making connections that are very practical and also social
in your area. Also one plug, we've talked a little
bit about the process of canning dehydrators are great and
are pretty affordable, and they're not expensive, yeah, like I

(02:27:53):
think you know, for sixty to eighty bucks, you can
usually get a decent dehydrator. And if you don't have one,
but you have an oven, if you put things on
a baking rack very low heat, you can just put it.
I would just turn my oven onto warm, and you
can lay out things in your oven. I have a
nicer oven now that won't let me do this, But

(02:28:14):
when I used to live in my first junkie apartment,
I would literally just stick a metal spoon, like a
one of my big cooking spoons in the door of
the ovens so that it would open, and that would
just vent all of the steam of whatever I was
drying in the oven. So and meanwhile, if you live
in say a really dry climate or a climate where

(02:28:34):
you have a really dry stretch of time when fruit
is in season, and you have window screens and an
area where you can make sure there's a steady breeze
flowing across your your fruit, cut it thin, lay it
out in the sun. And that's why there's so much
sun dried X, Y and Z. That's really expensive. When
you go to dram Joe's or whatever. And it's you know,

(02:28:55):
it's not just a matter we shouldn't just say that
like this is you have to forage for all this stuff,
like it can be a matter of like, well, during
these months, beef is is much cheaper, It's half as
much as it will be later. I'm going to buy
beef when it's cheap, and I'm going to make jerky now,
and then I will have protein when I can't afford
to purchase protein or as much protein later. In the air,

(02:29:16):
speaking of jerky, I mean like one of the just
in the vein of you know, building your own dehydrator
or something. One other thing that h that that I've
done is you can just get a you know, a
decent box fan and some furnace filters and strap them
all together and that can very successfully dry out jerky.
Um so D dehydrators. There's a lot of different ways

(02:29:37):
to Yeah, it is literally just kind of warm or
less in some cases, and air that is moving, and
it's it's like everything we've been talking about. There's the
you can buy very expensive dehydrators if you want to,
if you want to get a primo jerky making together,
you can you can make that a real expensive thing,

(02:29:59):
or you can do it for like trash, like with
with discarded crap that you find around in people's like
take piles. And I think also the other thing to
think about we're talking about it's not all foraging, is
to think about we've been talking about supply chain disruptions,
but also one of the things in our current circumstances
is the weird gluts and excesses and surpluses that are

(02:30:22):
produced by our supply chains. And again, one of the
big ways that I learned about food preservation was food
not bombs and food preservation and also just food preparation
was food not bombs way back in the day, like
you need a special sound every time on specifically it
could happen here someone mentions food not bombs. At this point,

(02:30:43):
that was my entry back when I was just kind
of a liberally journalist guy to like anarchist practice. Was
like every protest I go to, there's these like krusty
punks handing out sandwiches, um, and then they have neat stickers.
I wonder what's going on here and well, and one
of the important things about food not bombs is that
food not bombs has sort of two different ways that

(02:31:05):
you obtain food for food not bombs. One is you
form relationships with first farmers, Yeah, people who are going
to have a lot of food, a lot of supply
coming in and there's stuff they're not going to be
able to use, either because it's ugly or you know,

(02:31:26):
it's carrots that look like dicks and they don't feel
comfortable putting the carrots that look like dicks on the shop.
Or Yeah, so you have your relationships with like local
businesses and local suppliers who aren't going to be able
to sell or use some of their stuff. And right
day old bread, we are a bakery and we pride

(02:31:46):
ourselves on fresh bread, so we're going to give our
day olds and it makes us feel good as liberals
to give it to food not bombs. And then on
the flip side, there's the the fact that the supply
chain is designed to produce these excesses, but then if
it can't make money off of them, dispose of them.
That's where you end up with you know, cop scarting,
copscarding dumpsters for example, don't dumpster from the cops that

(02:32:10):
the cop guarded dumpsters. Those are the other dumpsters go
to other dumpsters. It's infuriating, it's very frustrating. I get
the desire to yell at the cop. But there will
you can find dumpsters that are started. If you are
a store or restaurant, you're legally protected to let people
go through your dumpster. Yeah, not to you. Yeah, during

(02:32:32):
the Clinton administration, there's legislation that was passed that straight
up said, like at a federal level, if you present
I think the wording is seemingly wholesome and healthful food
two people for free, even if it has PASTI expiration date,
that you are legally protected because it's dumb to throw
out food just because the thing that stamped on the

(02:32:54):
package has expired. Now that does mean if you pick
up some meat that's expired and the I could just puffy,
don't eat that. And also there are also local ordinances
and local laws that do restrict that more because there
are places where people get arrested for handing out food
to like you know, homeless people and whatnot. But you know,
check your local laws before doing anything is radical and

(02:33:15):
violent as giving out as giving out free food to
poor people. Yeah, there are these gluts um and there
are these points where the supply chain is going to
dump huge amounts of stuff into the system. For example,
right now, we just talked about how canning supplies are
kind of in short supply right now, which is weird.
I guarantee you that that means in a couple of

(02:33:35):
months there's going to be tons of canning supplies everywhere.
Or you know, when there were power outages in Portland,
then there was a bunch of stuff, even stuff that
doesn't need to be refrigerated, was getting thrown out if
it was stored in the refrigerated section. Yeah, because stores
have their specific protocols about like oh well if this

(02:33:56):
is left, if this freezer is unplugged, we have to
throw out everything in the freezer. Never mind that a
bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says right
there on it does not require refrigeration or only refrigerate
after opening, referat after opening. So think about like where
are your local systems going to produce these huge bloods
or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year,

(02:34:18):
you know, you maybe corn goes down to like fifteen
cents an ear or five cents an ear at the
end of at the at the end of August, right,
so maybe you can get a whole ton of corn
and then you can dry it. Like you know, when
I was a kid, we lived in California, and we
were not doing a ton of canning. I did not

(02:34:39):
grow up canning. I didn't grow up preserving food. I
didn't in that type of way. But one thing that
my mom would do is when our little mire lemon
tree was covered in lemons, she would just juice a
whole pile of them and then poured into ice cube
trays and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags,
and then we had, you know, we would make lemonade

(02:35:01):
all year round. And her recipe literally called for three
lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff as she
had it measured out, and so she would just pop
those in and that would just live in the refrigerator
all year round. Was just constant lemonade. One other plug
in terms of preserving stuff that I want to talk
a little bit about, but with the disclaimer that I

(02:35:22):
am by no means an expert um. One of the
other things that you know, the punks of Yesteryear, with
their food not bombs houses got really excited about was
things like crowd and kombucha um and there are some
really great resources out there, specifically um Wild Fermentation and
the Art of Fermentation, which are both by a guy
named Sander Cats on how to ferment food without you

(02:35:47):
you know, you're using naturally occurring bacteria and fermentation as
a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means of
deliberate food storage that human beings have, and you can
do it with a wide variety of things. And so again,
if you're faced with one of those gluts where you

(02:36:08):
have a ton of stuff and nowhere you can store
it in your refrigerated storage areas, there's probably a way
you can jam it, you can dry it, you can
ferment it, you can you know, make vinegar out of it.
And you can find guides for all of this for
free online. Like all of this is accessible if you
have a phone. There are people in people putting up

(02:36:28):
videos on YouTube where you can watch them do it too.
To make it. You do not have to purchase books
in order to learn. There's also a lot of ways,
you know, you can make cold storages in your backyard.
You can definitely, like I have a lot of guides
on how to make your own roots sellers than very
small spaces and do things because as long as you're
not having your food produce the thing that makes it

(02:36:50):
that makes your food go bad. There's a lot of
different ways that you can prevent food spoilage but that
you can learn from. But honestly, crowd and caning are
probably some of the quickest and easiest. And as a
general rule, um, you know, similarly, if you don't have
access to building a garden, you probably also don't have
access to like digging a root seller. That being said,

(02:37:13):
if you have a room or a space in your
house where you can reliably keep it cool and dark
like below, I don't know, seventy degrees dark. Yeah, like closets,
there's probably a spot in your basement if you live
in a house where you have a basement, or if
you live in a basement, because if you live in
a situation, um, it's pretty easy. And for that matter,

(02:37:38):
when we talk about like roots sellers, there are totally
some d I y schematics for literally digging a like
three foot cube hole in your yard and sinking in
something to line it, and then that's where you store stuff.
Because if you dig down a few feet below ground.
It stays fifty degrees your round. Yeah, and I get

(02:38:02):
like when you hear again, we keep coming back to this. Like,
I think a lot of people get overwhelmed or get
very anxious when they think about trying to build resiliency
because they live in a tiny apartment, they don't have
much in the way of money. The important one of
the most important things to understand that like a lot
of people, no matter how poor you are, poorer than you,
have been doing this kind of stuff for generations. Like

(02:38:23):
it's why most of our grandparents survived the thirties. Yeah,
And I think one thing that people have a misinterpretation
of with canning and stuff is that they are going
to put stuff up and they're gonna like put up
their cans and their jars and then they will eventually
build this. You know, I have food for twelve years
buried here. Nothing has that great of a shelf life.

(02:38:45):
I mean, I've definitely pulled out some jerim that was
from definitely didn't do that this year that I had
forgotten in the back of a cupboard and eating it
and it's fine. It's fine, but usually a couple three years,
couple but The idea of canning and preserving was not
that you are saving food in case the sky falls

(02:39:06):
in and everyone is doomed. The reason that people preserve
food was to extend the bounty of a harvest season
for a few additional weeks or months. And if you
think about it that way, you're extending what you have
two times when it would be more enjoyable to eat
it when it feels special. No, I mean, it's like jam.
A big part of the reason for jam is there's

(02:39:27):
really important nutrients in fruit that maybe you can't get
in the dead of winter, but you can if you
have jam. Just to be a farm nerd for a minute,
because Robert, I know that you are a huge fan
of pumpkin spice. Oh. The reason that I had my
first cup of the season today, amazing monster. The reason
that pumpkins and cinnamon and apples and baking goods, baked

(02:39:51):
goods with reasons in them, are all like a big
deal and are all like apples are a fruit that
if you put apples in say a barrel, there's the
saying about one bad apple. Because if you make sure
that an apple isn't rotting and you put it in
a cool, dark space with decent ventilation, apples will keep

(02:40:12):
for a very long time. Squash are a big deal.
Pumpkins are a big deal around this time of year
because buttercup squash, for example, and butter not squash are
both storage squash. They taste better if they have been
sitting in a dark storage area for like two months.
Then they have metabolized more of their starches into sugars,

(02:40:33):
and their tastier. A lot of a lot of like squash, root, vegetables,
all of that sort of stuff that you associate with,
you know, all harvest season is specifically storage crops, because
I'm originally from New England. That's the time of year
where you stop being able to get food out of
the ground and everything freezes and dies, and then it

(02:40:56):
doesn't start up again until April, and you need a
way to like keep eating in the meantime. And also, though,
let's just remember that a lot of preserved foods are
also meat, not just because they are a substitutor because
they're staying the harvest, but because in order to preserve
the food and keep the nutrients you have to go

(02:41:17):
through a process. You want to have the salt be
too high or the acidity be too high, or the
sugar content be too high, or the water content be
too low to enable bacterial growth, and so that the
fruits and vegetables and meats or whatever don't rock. But
that means that you get so many awesome and different
flavors that you would never you know, grapes, grapes are great.

(02:41:37):
Whatever grapes preserved in wine vinegar. That sounds really cool.
You can do that, and then you have a completely
different thing that you normally don't eat, you know, dried
dried figs, apple chips, like. You also get a whole
new variety of foods that are not just extending in harvest,
but are also other things to eat. You know, my
kids are not going to toss a whole pile of

(02:41:59):
fresh in their backpacks sometimes because it squishes at the
bottom of their backpacks and I find it weeks later,
and it's absolutely terrifying fortunate. On the other hand, a
bunch of you know, dried dried prunes, plums and stuff
from the garden that dried out. They'll take baggies of those,
and if I find them a month later because they
didn't eat them, it isn't the end of the world

(02:42:21):
either and and again like there's a lot of fun stuff,
Like you know, yeah, grapes by themselves are are fine.
You can also turn grapes into stuff that will help
you preserve other stuff. And raisins in baked goods. If
you've ever had a loaf of raisin bread and a
loaf of white bread in the same bread box, the

(02:42:45):
white bread will mold first. Raisins are actually a preservative.
It's why people started putting raisins in bread. Yeah, and
I think we should we should close out, but I
kind of wanted to do that by circling back to
the overall topic of this week, which is like building resilia. See,
when you don't have much in the way of money
or resources. And one of the things that you may
not think of his building resiliency is exactly what you

(02:43:06):
were talking about being in in you aline paying attention
to what is available, what time of the year, what
is cheap, what time of the year, what is like
when do the gluts happen, and when do the shortages happen?
Because that doesn't actually cost any money. You don't even
have to buy things, like you're already you're all always
going to be going out to the store to get
food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an eye on understanding

(02:43:27):
what is available growing naturally and what is available in
the economy, because that connects you more to the environment
you live in, to the climate as it changes um
into your community, all of which make you more resilient,
and none of which costs you a dime. It just
costs you attention. Also just a plug for you know,
people who have access to the ecosystems where this is relevant.

(02:43:50):
Things like shellfish licenses are great. I'm not going to
tell anyone that they should, you know, seek out sport
fishing as a means of obtaining calories. On the other hand,
in Oregon, at least for I think it's five five bucks,
nine bucks. Oh, it's up to ten bucks now. But
so for ten bucks get a shellfish license. You go

(02:44:10):
down to a cove and you rape cockles for an hour,
and then you have, you know, an enormous amount of
food that you can do all of the preservation that
we've talked about. You can also just make chowder and
freeze it, you know whatever. But there's a lot of
ways to to cheaply obtain calories from out in the world. Yeah,

(02:44:32):
all right, well that's going to do it for us today. Um.
Until next time, remember experiment on your friends with different
medical care treatments. Don't do that. Although on the other hand,
look up the if you are in the Pacific Northwest,
there is the Portland Fruit Tree Project up here, which
goes around and connects gleaners with fruit trees that need

(02:44:55):
to be gleaned. Um, so people who have over abundant
trees that they don't want all the stuff. That's a
really great resource in other cities, I'm sure there's other things.
And also the Falling Fruit Map, so you can go
online and if there's not already one in your area.
They also make it really easy to be able to
chart and put in trees in your area. So if

(02:45:17):
it's saying that you're excited about and you love identifying trees,
you can go in and actually start charting your neighborhood.
Also figure out how to identify, you know, five wild
plants that grow in your area that you can eat,
because it's always nice to have more variety and it's
fun to be out on a walk and be like,
oh cool, now I have a thing that I can

(02:45:39):
toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah, And
we've talked about how there's like the poor version of
the cheap version. There's also like the centrist version and
the radical version of that. The centrist version is like,
I just want to know, like what kind of edible
fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical version
is I'm going to start guerrilla grows of edible foods
on like available in my area. I'm gonna seed ball
some ship. I'm gonna like very to get insurgent with

(02:46:01):
my yeah, to prepare food. Yeah. Things that grow riz
only take root real easy in the ecosystems they like
and are real hard to get rid of once they
get crime gardens. I'm not going to say people should
tear out the random trees that cities plant and then replace.
No one can say that, But it's possible to do

(02:46:23):
trees didn't make food with trees that did make food
in the same spot, probably nobody would notice except the
people who got and there would be more free calories
in your area. If you know the kind of things
that have been happening in the last several years continue
to happen, all right, that's the episode. That's the episode Hey,

(02:46:51):
We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the universe. It Could
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcast from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here,
updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources.

(02:47:13):
Thanks for listening.

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