Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

It seems like everyone on this planet, from Zambian government officials (who have refused GMO seeds during a famine) to Russian spies (who kill each other over their boss’ natural gas policy) recognize that the fossil fuel-powered world that’s got us to this point is terminal. Maybe it has 50 years, maybe 20, maybe 100 left in its life cycle. It’s been a great run: oil turned the United States, for example, from a nation of farmers into the Jetsons. But it’s clear now that anyone who likes his or her laptop and minivan has got to figure out another way to power them.

And Liking Our Stuff is just the point: it seems to me that most Americans, even the good-hearted ones with “boy I’d like to reduce my personal dependence on oil” coming out of their lips the way relief pitchers spew sunflower seeds, aren’t willing to give up their amenities. They (and by this I also mean I) don’t want a “long emergency” wherein life gets horrifyingly manual and they, for instance, find themselves hand plowing beans on their front lawn, irrigating with water they collected from their roof. Well, actually, I don’t mind the manual agriculture, as long as I can come inside to Netflix.

Americans, I’ve discovered in an ongoing, 36-year-long experiment, are human. They want the little things in life: plasma TVs; computerized, auto-brew coffee makers, 20 minute showers, unbelievably inexpensive food harvested by people they simultaneously don’t want in the country (food which is, even when organic, also fossil fuel-powered via fertilizers and jet-fuel distribution networks that get your bananas to Duluth from Ecuador, your oranges from California to Providence).

I actually realized at a pretty young age that the impressively detached, oil-fueled way we lived and ate didn’t make lasting sense. See, I was born with the obstreperous belief that food should taste good. I was thought of as a “bad eater” as a kid because I could wait out my whole family at the dinner table in a stand-off over a charcoal briquette being billed as “steak.” Actually, I was a great eater of actual food. I vividly recall trying to squeeze a baseball of a tomato in a Long Island, New York supermarket when I was about nine. It wouldn’t budge. I tried bashing it against the ground, throwing it at a shopping cart, and even jumping on it. Since I’ve started growing tomatoes myself, I know that no matter what I try, they come off the vine succulent and almost overpoweringly delicious. You have to genetically modify a “tomato” in order to make it that much of a rock. Which is exactly the intent: attractively orange but impossibly durable “fruit” doesn’t get damaged in shipment from Chilean hothouses via several thousand gallons of jet fuel. It’s all about the Monsanto stock price.

I figure most people reading this site probably already know this. So what the last eighteen months of my life, this blog, and my next book attempt to answer is:

Can a regular American kick his addiction to oil and live more locally while still dancing to thumping subwoofers and not looking like a refugee from a Rainbow Gathering?

Not that there’s anything wrong with Rainbow Gatherings. But in 2007 and 2008, natty dreads and push-started VW buses aren’t going to convince a Soccer Mom in a minivan in Duluth to actually explore lifestyle options that don’t kill The Planet and everything on it.

Rather than preaching to the converted, rather then presenting an extremely uncomfortable lifestyle unattainable (and undesirable) by most, I’d rather see 200 million people take first steps back from heedless growth and consumption than a few thousand take radical steps.

I’m trying to reach Homer Simpson, and by that I mean people like myself.

Pass the Duff.

Or at least the fermented goat’s milk.

I’ve moved to New Mexico, both because I love it and because I thought it would have some of the best solar power potential on the planet (Global Warming choose to flood me in for my first two months, but more on that below.) Over the course of a year and a half, I’ve been trying to raise goats and chickens for milk and eggs, barter locally for as many staples as possible, grow veggies from ancient, local seeds, convert my remote desert ranch to solar power, and drive on straight vegetable oil, all while not:

-Getting eaten by a mountain lion
-Electrocuting myself or blowing myself up
-Starving, or
-Otherwise dying of physical causes or embarrassment in front of the
locals.

My principal benchmark for progress is my stereo system: After doing journalism on five continents and living for five years in Alaska, I’ve realized I, too, am a fan of all-American pursuits like homemade sushi and thumping subwoofers. If my music can be powered by the sun, and still make UN-fearing ranchers in neighboring Arizona complain about bass lines interrupting their sleep, I’ll consider this experiment a success. Even if my two Mensa-smart goats keep raiding my rose bushes, before getting in through the cat door and hopping on my bed.

The book I’ve written about this experience (at least the first one) is called Farewell, My Subaru. You can order it now and get on the mailing list for updates to this blog.

Here on this site I’ll be giving regular updates about the effort on the Funky Butte Ranch – the roughly equal successes and misadventures involved in solar and carbon-neutral living in an interconnected Cosmos. On the home page are the four most recent dispatches. At the bottom of the page, you can link to earlier dispatches.

Of course, everything in life, even geopolitics, and especially crapping in a composting toilet and shivering in imperfectly heated solar showers in pursuit of one’s geopolitics, is personal. Any lifestyle changes I make affect how I see a little slice of the Cosmos – actually from here on the Funky Butte Ranch I can see a big slice of it – at least of our Galaxy. I’ve never seen stars like New Mexico stars.

What I’ve realized is that my attempts to start living a less oil-dependent life are inextricably linked to my personal life, my spiritual life, and, I’m sorry to report for those who aspire to Green living but aren’t in the Republican tax bracket, my financial life. I guess what I’m saying is that, for personal and planetary reasons, I hope this experiment works out, and maybe even serves as a Regular Human guide (even if it’s a guide as to what not to do).

As long as I continue to survive the mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and HANTA virus potential, I’ll keep posting Dispatches herein.

You can leap into this blog at any point – it’s all vamping on various adventures involved in this theme of whether practical green living and loving is feasible if you’re an modern western Homo sapien with neither unlimited resources nor professional skills in areas like plumbing, wiring, flood management, horticulture, building, auto mechanics, dealing with right wing crazies and close minded lefties and animal husbandry.

I’m sure I’ll learn from your responses and suggestions as well.

-Doug, somewhere in the American Southwest