Chapter 21 — The Visiting Team
A serial novel in the form of correspondence among a family while the world as we know it collapses around us. I recommend you start at the Introduction:
https://readmedium.com/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313
But you can start anywhere you want.
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Chapter 21:
Printed on Computer Paper (hand-delivered by Charlie):
Dear Benjamin,
Your Grandma and I were really glad to get your second letter. Really glad. Our lives have been so crazy since the coup, but it puts life in perspective every time we remember that you are in a prison camp up north. It makes our work down here even more important.
Spring has started to come to our township. Everyone is out tapping maple trees, and we are starting plants in a big collective greenhouse that we are heating a night with a wood stove. People are making garden plans and repairing equipment. It is really nice to not be so cold.
Last week I was visited by another helicopter one morning. I thought at first it might be General Stewart, finally come to try to make a deal. We haven’t seen or heard anything from him or from anybody from the city since we shot down all his drones. I think we scared him, or maybe he just put us on the back burner while he trains up and arms his private army. Anyway, I thought it might be him again, but it wasn’t. It was a team of military scientists from the Circle. They had come up from Chicago on the train and then flown out to our place from a Circle base somewhere around Eau Claire, bypassing General Stewart.
When they arrived, we asked them to join us for breakfast, and we made sure to include all the best food we had. We brought out hot coffee (supplies are running low!), bacon, fried eggs, apple crisp, oatmeal, and French toast with maple syrup. We served them in the toasty warm dining hall, with tablecloths on the table. All of the people in our little commune were present in clean clothes, looking well fed. The students of your grandma’s school served the meal and also talked to the team members about their schooling.
After breakfast, we went for a drive to visit some of the other farms in the township. We used up some of the precious biodiesel, but I thought it was worth it. On the drive, they told me they were amazed at the breakfast. They could not stop talking about it. There were many foods that have been off the rations in Chicago for months, including fresh eggs, coffee and cream for the coffee, and maple syrup. They were equally amazed that we had electricity, heat, and fuel for our vehicles. The stories they had been told were that the rural areas are largely primitive and primal. I hated to burst their bubble. I told them that we were not the exception. All throughout Western Wisconsin there are people in organized communities, who make sure that everyone in the community has access to enough food, fuel, and other basic supplies.
We visited one of my Amish neighbors, who welcomed them warmly with a hearty lunch. We saw the icebox refrigerator that they use and the sustainable tools they use for woodworking and farming. They have a small bakery and convert the wheat that another neighbor has grown into breads and rolls and sweet baked goods. They sent a package of goodies with the scientists.
We visited another neighbor who has a relatively large conventional dairy farm. They have had a hard time with cuts to the electric grid, but they have a solar array and a diesel generator that covers the basic needs. The farmer spoke about how the loss of the market for dairy has made their farm life change dramatically. They have allowed most of their dairy herd to dry up or left the calves to take all of the cows’ milk. The few cows that they are still milking have provided milk for the local community, and they are also stockpiling cheese and butter. They spoke about the fear they feel for the coming growing season. They are accustomed to using chemical fertilizers and herbicides to grow corn and soybeans. They don’t think they could sustain their current scale of production without the use of chemicals. They also spoke about how much fuel their tractors and combines use. Their reserves will not be enough for them to make it through spring planting.
The scientists spoke with the farm family about some possible solutions. The farmer said that the only way they could farm without chemicals and fossil fuel would be to be at a drastically smaller scale. They could use manure to fertilize and use their tractors much more sparingly. The farmer said he remembered his great-grandpa used horses to cultivate the crops instead of a tractor, but that was when their farm was 160 acres, not 1600 acres like it is now. He told the scientists that he could also see grazing the cows more and growing more hay and fewer crops that require tractors and chemicals. I came away from the meeting feeling more hopeful than I had been before. I had no idea how the conventional farmer would make the transition, but the lesson that I keep learning is that rural people are even more resourceful, resilient, and reliable than I had first thought. I actually have more confidence every day. At the end of the visit, the farm family gifted the scientists with a big wheel of cheese and 20 pounds of butter.
The visiting scientists were floored by their visit. We went back to our farm, and the scientists spoke with me and some other community leaders at length. We told them about the gift economy and about building an interconnected community by trusting people and focusing on abundance rather than scarcity. We told them about how each of us has skills and assets that are useful to the whole, and if we pool our intelligence and resources, we will have plenty. We told them that we discovered that the gift group has to be small enough so everyone knows everyone and feels a sense of obligation but big enough that there is a diversity of people who are contributing members. We told them that when we have a gift group that is sized right, we can make most decisions based on consensus.
They were especially interested in your grandma’s school. We are up to 15 young adults who live here on the farm and take on all sorts of projects. They are a learning community of people who apply what they learn immediately to the needs of the farm and the community. The students cook and clean and provide labor on the farm, and the families send along food and supplies to make sure the young people don’t eat us out of house and home. The students are having a positive effect on the farm and in the community as a whole; they spend hours creating crafts and foods to contribute to the gift group. Their contributions and creativity are valued by everyone in the township. We have the various parents and elders in the community who take turns living with us and teaching the young people what they know. These mini-courses are so popular that we invite adults in the township to join in when they are able. The visiting team was impressed by how invested and responsible these young adults are. I am reminded every day that young people are capable, resourceful, and creative, and it gives me hope for you and your prison camp.
The visiting team was especially curious about us because they had assumed that the rural areas would quickly depopulate when the services were withdrawn. Instead, they said, many rural areas are doing better than the cities. The cities are places where people are cold, miserable, and underfed. The scientists had thought that they could grow protein-rich fake meat inside factories. They had thought that they could convert city warehouses into indoor hydroponic grow-factories for year-round vegetables. They had thought that technology could provide us with a way forward into a population-dense low carbon future. That is proving hard to realize for many reasons.
They told us that they had heard about the success of rural Western Wisconsin, but they had not really understood the full implications until they visited with us. There is one scientist who is most interested in our community. She is named Teresa. I can’t place her ethnic background, but she sounds like she is from New York. She is young, and she speaks fast. Teresa explained that she was part of the military’s Threat Detection Team that recommended the coup against the PFL. She said that based on the impact of Stormzilla and the mega fires, climate change had finally produced a lethal blow to the U.S. economy and infrastructure. In order to recover, we could not risk further inaction on climate change, so they recommended the coup.
Teresa explained that the military scientists have identified the excessive use of fossil fuels as the main cause of climate change. The scientists made recommendations early on to the ruling Circle about how to minimize the threat posed by climate change. They recommended that because life in rural areas requires too much fossil fuel per person, it is “unsustainable.” Their solution was to move people to the cities, where they could use public transportation and walk. They also recommended pushing people into a vegetarian diet, which would reduce their climate impact. They recommended eliminating air travel, except in cases of extreme need. They recommended moving with all possible haste to 100 percent renewable energy. Finally, they recommended rationing heating fuel to only give people enough to heat 250 square feet per person in a well-insulated home.
The Circle followed their recommendations, but in order to carry them out, they had to suspend civil liberties and impose martial law. They assigned different generals to command different cities and carry out the changes. Each general was given leeway in his or her methods, although all generals carried out the chip tracker program. The chips were supposed to help people track their rations. The scientists, Teresa said, could not have anticipated that some of the generals would become sources of terror for the people. They did not anticipate that generals would use the chips to track people’s locations and attempt to control them. Their recommendations assumed that the generals and the people who worked for them would not act in self-interest. The rogue generals are now being identified. They pose the new greatest threat to the U.S.A., and the scientists have marked General Stewart as one of the worst of the rogue generals. They are here to meet us but also to find out as much as they can about General Stewart.
I decided to trust Teresa. We got to talk about General Stewart. I told her about the secret police and the re-education camps. I told her about the Mothers of the Disappeared. I showed her the issues of the VeRU that Carol sent to me, and I gave her copies of your letters from the prison camp. I told her that Stewart is training his own private army.
I went on to say that in my opinion implanting the chips in people is not right. We should be able to trust people instead. I also suggested that taking away all firearms may not be necessary. I also said that we don’t need to be 100% vegetarian in order to have a positive impact on the climate. With holistic rotational grazing, even cows can be good for the planet. I said to her that if people would not have to have the chips implanted and would not have to give up their meat and guns, then maybe we could reunite the urban and rural areas without having to fight. I said we could help.
I also told her that she might be able to replicate the success of the gift groups in the cities. There is much that could be done by growing food and making things in and around the cities. I told her that technology might be useful but to not give up on the wisdom of rural people. We spoke about how much we have learned from our neighbors, including the Amish and the Native Americans. I suggested that the diversity of the cities might be their strength. We may need to have austerity in order to encourage change, but we don’t need to dehumanize people and force them to live in fear.
She told me that there was not one rural person on the Threat Detection Team. She apologized for the prejudice inherent in their initial recommendations. She also said that they had grossly underestimated the capabilities of rural people, that she sees a flowering of independence and creativity across the country in the rural areas. There are teams of scientists right now visiting many rural communities where success is happening despite the conditions. They are going to join to make a new set of recommendations to the Circle.
After all the conversations, it was already well past dark. They radioed to their base that they were going to stay the night. We found them warm beds and fed them a good dinner. When they left in the morning, I made sure to ask them to restore the Internet, too. I am hopeful.
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Next chapter:
https://readmedium.com/chapter-22-hasta-la-victoria-siempre-9448c0ea4ff5
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