Will Without Oil

Sorry for the long delay, but real life intrudes.

My grandparents are okay. My grandfather just had a bad cough, so they went to the hospital. Unfortunately, their local hospital had been quietly taken over by the military. For "security reasons," they weren't allowed to call out of the hospital (and neither of them have cell phones). Eventually, they were able to talk a visiting friend into calling the rest of the family from their place. He's fine now, after a serious round of antibiotics. They couldn't actually leave the hospital until he was done with the antibiotics because they wouldn't allow any antibiotics outside the hospital.

On a personal level, I've been sick as well, although not sick enough that I had to go to the hospital. I don't know if it's that people aren't heating their homes as much, poorer nutrition, or what, but everyone seems to be sicker this winter than in winters past. Hopefully, that'll improve as we ramp up local food production and have more time to prepare.

I don't know that that'll ever happen, though. Now that gas prices are trending down and distribution has stabilized, people have started reverting to their old behaviors. Not all of them, of course (you don't see any SUVs anymore), but many of them (commuting to work). It appears that it wasn't the absolute cost of gas that changed behavior, it was how quickly the price and availability changed. If the government had been able to smooth that over (maybe by releasing more oil from our reserves), then I wonder if people would have changed their behavior at all.

First, the good news. BloomingHOURS has been an incredible success! The farmers at the market were more than willing to accept BloomingHOURS since it meant they could give change back at least partially in BloomingHOURS. Since the market is the primary place that BloomingHOURS can be used, they know that the money will be coming back to them. Many of them have also been using the money to pay for people to help them on the farm. It's too late for planting, but there's still weeding and picking to do. Some people have also started to preserve food for the winter. Others think that the food situation will be sorted out by then, but that seems unlikely. The university has also signed on and will be using a small amount of the bills. I expect that other local businesses will follow suit.

It hasn't made a huge difference in the economy around here, although it might eventually, but people do seem more hopeful in general. I haven't seen any more empty houses recently. I don't know if it's the case throughout the city, but the local currency has given the people I know a greater sense that things are being done and that progress is being made. Losing our oil supplies hasn't ended civilization, just changed it.

And now for the bad news. I haven't heard from my grandparents in a while and I don't know what I'm going to be able to do if something's happened to them. My grandmother's been sick for a while, so it's entirely possible that they've just moved to the hospital and haven't been able to get to a phone. They're in New Mexico, though, so if they do need help, I don't know if I'll be able to go. There's the gas problem of course (and the rumors of cops taking people to FEMA camps if they find them far from home), but even more so, my community here needs me. I don't know if I can really leave for even a couple of weeks. My parents are even further away than I am, so I don't know if they'll be able to do anything either.

My family is spread all over the country. It was a little annoying back when it was easy to fly but now it's unmanageable. If we don't move closer together, we'll hardly ever see each other.

For now, though, I'm just hoping that my grandparents are all right.

I don't have much to say today (big news to come, though), but I want to make sure that people are thinking about winter. There's not much you can plant at this point, but now would be a good time to start thinking about canning and curing. This is especially important given the current shortage and the prospect of further shortages to come.

Good luck, everyone!

Even though Bloomington is a Green Zone, it's not easy. A lot of people have lost their jobs or been forced to drop back to part-time. Most people have taken up the slack by helping their neighbors or trying to replace things they'd usually buy with their own labor (like Fraternity Row growing food). That's worked well enough so far, but nobody's totally self-sufficient.

For a while, there was a lot of trading going on. In our neighborhood, there was a retired engineer who had been an amateur carpenter for years. He wandered around the neighborhood fixing things up in return for veggies. To be honest, I think he mostly did it to be doing something, since he couldn't be getting much food that way. There was also an unofficial trading area at a corner house with a big porch. People would head over every evening and bring whatever food they'd been able to grow or procure and swap for what they wanted.

It worked pretty well for a while, since there was enough food coming in that people were mostly trading for incidental items: strawberries for dessert, some fresh vegetables, even the occasional local beef or pork.

In the past couple of weeks, that hasn't been enough. As the Red and Yellow Zones spread, it's been harder to get necessities. There's a lot of emergency relief being sent to those areas, which means that we can't depend on external resources and help. Barter works okay, but it gets more and more tedious the more things you need. At one point, we were spending more time trading for what we wanted than we were growing the food in the first place!

Luckily, Maggie remembered BloomingHOURS. They were never all that popular, but back in '99, a group of folks started up a currency for Bloomington, the HOUR. HOURS were set to be worth $10 (the average cost of an hour of work in our county), with HALF HOUR and QUARTER HOUR bills available as well. My favorite part is the "In Each Other We Trust" imprint on them.



For some reason, people have been hesitant to pay (or in some cases, accept payment!) for things they don't think of as their jobs. In addition, many of the wealthiest people in the area have fled to other countries, taking a lot of currency out of the economy. With the high unemployment, it seemed like a perfect time to try and reintroduce the local currency.

Of course, we couldn't do it alone. Maggie talked to the members of the Local Growers Guild (famers and businesses) and convinced them to accept BloomingHOURS. Then, we talked to the organizers of the farmers market and convinced them to make acceptance of BloomingHOURS a requirement to get a space at the market. I feel a little bad about that, since it doesn't really give most farmers a choice. The market is the only place most of them are able to sell what they have.

On the other hand, a local currency can really kickstart a community, so hopefully they'll see benefits from it soon enough. We also got some people to agree to work for an hour per BloomingHOUR at any local farm willing to pay them (as long as Maggie and I provide transportation; once again, thanks to the grease car!), which should ease any bad feelings. Lots of farmers are having to work harder since they can't use all the chemicals they're used to, so the additional labor should be useful.

It's too early to know if it'll make a real difference, but I'm optimistic (as usual). Local currencies can not only provide a needed boost to our economy, they can really foster a sense of community.

I think you'll find that a local currency will help everyone realize that we're in this together on a local scale as well as a global one. If there's a local currency in your area (or a country near you), see if you can get involved. Encourage businesses to accept it, use it to pay for chores, or maybe even help expand it into a nearby city!

Yesterday morning, tonamel without oil and I headed out to the farmers market to pick up ingredients for a big dinner. We finished building a greenhouse with BUGS (the Bloomington Urban Greenhouse Society) and felt like celebrating. We'd also heard that there were fresh strawberries (first of the season), so we wanted to get there before they sold out.



( Strawberries and pot roast? I must know more! )

It's late so I'm not going to make a full entry, but I ran across this article and thought others might be interested.

It seems that Congress is starting to take a closer look at the oil industry. It probably won't change much at this point, but at least we'll know who to blame as the world falls apart...

It looks like we weren't the only ones thinking about moving. A house near ours was just declared abandoned. I just hope they were able to get where they were going and didn't get rerouted to a FEMA camp.



As theheretic pointed out in my last post, this isn't the first time there's been a migration to or from cities. I think there's a pretty significant difference here, though. For one thing, Red vs. Green isn't Country vs. City. In most ways, cities have been hit harder, at least in the short term. For another, and this is the more important over the long view, there aren't any walls. Walls represent the kind of insular thinking that makes the Red Zones so dangerous. It's not about keeping you and yours safe at the expense of others. It's about maintaining community, part of which includes welcoming new members.

Speaking of the country, if you think food costs a lot now, wait until the bees disappear. Yet another reason to love bees.

You've probably guessed already based on what I've been talking about recently, but let's make it official. Maggie and I are staying in Bloomington, at least for the near future. What really made up our minds was dessum9's post about Green Zones and Red Zones. What makes some parts of the country so much worse than others?

A lot of it has to be regional differences. Suburbs that just aren't set up for pedestrians, desert areas that rely more heavily on transported foods, those kinds of things. Some of it, though, has got to be the people.

When I started up my business, I read a lot of books about entrepreneurship, including Good to Great, a novel about how companies change from good companies to great, lasting ones. One of the key differences between the good and great companies were how they dealt with adversity. The great companies were realistic about the problems they faced, but had a "we'll get through this" attitude.

I think that's what makes a lot of the difference between the Red Zones and the Green Zones. In the Green Zones, people recognize that things are getting bad, but we know that we'll get through this. Like miawithoutoil says, shortages are nothing new. The UK and to a lesser extent the US had to deal with similar things during World War II. That doesn't mean it'll be easy, but we can get through this too.

In the Red Zones, people have given up. They're going into emergency mode, where they can't look past their immediate, knee-jerk safety reactions. They separate themselves from their community, which just makes things harder on them and on everyone around them. There are still good people in Red Zones, of course. They're just not the ones setting the tone.

And that's why we're staying here. If we leave, that's one less couple striving to keep Bloomington a Green Zone. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. All that's required to descend into a Red Zone is for the best to fall silent.

Instead of heading into the country, we're going to work to bring the country here to Bloomington. There's a group setting up greenhouses in vacant lots across town and I'm sure they could use some help. And maybe, just maybe, all we really need to feel optimistic is to do something that helps.

It seems like it's still business as usual in Washington. Politicians are still beholden big oil even now that it's obvious that big oil is a sinking ship. Naturally, people aren't happy about that.

Around here, that unhappiness took the form of a protest downtown. When I walked by in the morning, there were twenty or thirty people of all ages camped on the lawn in the town square. They were holding signs, but it was eerily silent for a protest. It was as if everyone was just tired of the whole situation.

When I went by again in the afternoon, I stopped to join them. There were a hundred or so people at that point, including many of the people I'd seen earlier. There were also some cops standing around, but they seemed to sympathize with the crowd so it was pretty low-key.

What surprised me most was how quickly the protest was organized. The news had just broken the day before. Talking to the folks there reminded me that there are a lot of liberals (hippy and otherwise) in town. They've done a lot of protesting recently, so they're organized and they know who to talk to.

It got me thinking. If you heard about something and needed to get some people together to respond, be it a fire, a bad law being passed, or even a disaster, would you be able to respond? Could you get enough people together to make a difference? Or are you relying on other people to get it done?

The problem with letting other people take the lead is that when you do run into something like the current crisis, you don't have a personal safety net. The most important thing you can do to prepare before a crisis is to keep in touch with people who can get things done. I think that involves practicing too. Maybe it's not that important to protest a minor bill or to demonstrate against the war in Iraq as a message in itself, but it'll pay off down the road when something really important happens.

Few people know that most of the soaps and shampoos they use are actually detergents (and thus petroleum based). The minerals in water differs significantly across the country, which means that different types of soap work better in different places. For the longest time, this meant that regional soaps really were better than national ones. Once chemists figured out how to create super-powered petroleum-based detergents, though, companies were able to brute force the differences and sell one thing across the entire country.

Not only does this mean that our cleanliness is now closely connected to our petroleum dependence, but it's bad for the water (and maybe even our health). Luckily, making local soap is pretty easy, albeit time-consuming. I recommend getting some folks together and hosting a soap-making party one afternoon, since there's a lot of stirring. To keep the stirring theme going, you could also make ice-cream by hand.

But back to soap. You'll need to set aside some common household implements for soap use. Once they've touched lye, you're not going to want to use them to cook anything else.

You'll need:

• a stainless-steel pot


• a stainless-steel stirring spoon with a long handle


• a tub or mold (this'll determine the shape of your soap, so try to get something without ridges)


• a serrated cutting knife


• gloves and goggles! Lye is bad stuff, so don't mess around


• a bowl for lye


• two candy thermometers

Apart from the hardware, you're going to need water, lye, and oil/fat. The lye you can get at most hardware stores in the drain cleaner aisle. It comes in little bottles kind of like aspirin. For "fat," I recommend starting with olive oil. Okay, so it's technically not without oil, but it's still sans petroleum :). You can use other vegetable oils, but usually in mixture with other things. You can also use different types of animal fat, but then you have to render it out. It's easier just to use vegetable oil, so that's what we'll do.

Different soap recipes call for differing amounts of fat, water, and lye, but here's a simple one:

• 12 ounces of olive oil


• 2.1 ounces of lye


• 6 ounces of water

You can scale the recipe up, but I wouldn't try scaling it down. If you have exceptionally hard water, you can try increasing the amount of lye a little as well. Eventually, you'll hit on a ratio of lye to fat that works well for your area.

Now for the stirring party! Well... almost. First, carefully mix the lye and water by pouring the lye into the water. Set it aside with a thermometer in it. It should be pretty hot at this point (~120-130F)! Now, heat your oil up to about 110F in the pot. Check to see if the lye/water mixture has cooled to 110F yet. If not, you can put the bowl in a sink with cold water and ice cubes in it.

Once the two mixtures are both within 5 degrees of 110F, carefully add the lye mixture to the oil. This will start the saponification (soap-making) process. Take the pot outside and start stirring!

This part takes a while (45 minutes to an hour, depending on the type of oil used). You're looking for what soapies call 'trace'. Basically, this means that your mixture has attained the consistency of a thin pudding. If you pull your spoon out of the mixture and it slowly drizzles back down, you're there.

Once you've got trace, you can pour your soap into the tub (or molds if you got fancy). Set them aside to solidify, which takes 3-5 days.

After they're solid, pop out the blocks and cut into appropriately-sized squares. It should look like soap at this point, but be careful! There might still be a little lye left behind. The saponification process isn't complete either. You'll need to set the squares aside for 4-6 weeks to finish drying. If you just used olive oil, you can probably get away with drying them for a little less time.

To test out your soap, just chip off a piece and try using it! If it tingles a lot or burns a little, there's still too much lye in it and it needs to dry out more. If it tingles a little or not at all, you've got your own soap!

If you're feeling fancy, you can melt it down at this point and add colors and scents and pour it into molds. It only takes a day or two to re-solidify so you don't lose much time in the process.

It's not worth it to make tiny batches of soap (and gets harder if you get a recipe much smaller), so I recommend trading it with other people. Maybe you can get some candles or fresh produce from a neighbor!

Happy cleaning!