The current financial crisis is first and foremost an ecological crisis. I'm still working on that, I can't get a formal handle on it, the "proof" still eludes me. Like proof of water eludes the fish. But Wendell Berry, in his essay on education, writes about how milk producers and milk drinkers need to speak about cows that make too much milk badly. About intuition. Cows that make too much milk are not something that only Monsanto biologists can discuss, but everyone who drinks milk, eats cheese or wears shoes made of leather or shoes that should be made of leather. Anyone that lives in those communities. [And related, we can no longer figure that "fair process" or "due process" produces good results, rather more the opposite, but I digress from my digression.]

Gail, I don't know that you were pessimistic. Zero degrees of separation. Volatility. It's already way "out of control". Hell, our economic system is designed to be "out of control". It's supposed

I suspect your preditions were optimistic. If only because what you and I don't see. We can't factor that in. Other than the suspicion that matters will be worse than we expect. Like the ice. Every dollar, less ice.

Talk to anyone in the 501C3 world. Precious few understand what's going on, but the narrative is the same. No money. Big cuts. Or the munis. No money. Big cuts. [States are different - hey, they are getting all this cash from Obama that they can spend on THIS YEAR'S OPERATING EXPENSES.]

Debt for operating expenses.

My girl, CFO at a largish community C3 is asking about "swadeshi". Yeah.

We're in the crash so we don't see the crash. It's well advanced. Right now, Maine is about to lose 150K acres of organic dairy because of the tanking of milk prices due to bankruptcies in the commodity milk chain. Milk. The budget is already 20% down and running up against all sorts of fixed constraints.

The network needs to be taken down. Keeping it up, $1T, $2T, $4T - hey, geometric growth in bailouts??? Doubling time of what, two months? All those charts at the newscientist a couple of months back - the use of every resource gone geometric. HAL 9000 can't handle that.

And it's not like our monetary system might not work in the near future. It's pretty clear that it has not been working - or that it's been "working" in a destructive manner - for some time. At least the 70s, though the trajectory goes back beyond that. Some literature suggests the concept of permagrowth didn't really get institutionalized until Post WW2. ["Friendly Fascism", Gross among them, also Henry Wallace] I'm not so sure that it's not the human condition, but I am sure that until about that time there were important figures that recognized scale. And now it's only Nate and Herman and Kirkpatrick.

We're not about to go into overshoot. We've been in overshoot since Apollo 13.

Me? I've got 5 trays of test-seedlings under the lights today. Different seedling soil mixes. All saved seed.

cfm, half-farmer in Gray, ME