Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
The National Weather Service has issued a freeze warning for tomorrow night. I made my rounds this evening as the birds were bedding down in the arbor vitae trees. Some blooming things will bite the dust in tomorrow’s freeze. Others, such as the camellias, will survive, but winter shabbiness will start to set in. I lit the pilot in propane fireplace. I had the last fresh pesto from the garden’s basil before it freezes. Summer is gone. Here in the Appalachian foothills, it was a good summer.
My attempts during the spring of this year to get an early garden going under a cold frame were pretty much a total failure. I’m not sure why. But my guess would be that the soil was just too cold for good germination, because spring was unusually cold and dry. Now I’m using the cold frame to try to get winter crop of greens under the cold frame. So far, so good.
Ken sowed the mustard while he was here, after he cleared the summer weeds out of the garden. There’s a bit of lettuce and even some celery seed mixed in. I have no idea how the celery will do, but we figured that it would be a nice experiment. Germination was excellent, and growth has been rapid. When hard freezes arrive, I’ll have to drain the drip irrigation system. But I’ll use the drip for as long as I can.
When the garden fades, sprouting season begins for indoor sprouts. I’m using the LED grow lights that I bought last winter for basil to give the sprouts some extra light.
Speaking of light, it’s a shame that our modern lives give us little reason to be outdoors under the night sky. And, even if we were, light pollution would ruin the effect. Thought it’s a poor substitute for the primeval night sky, my bedroom windows keep me aware of the night sky. Though the projector clock shows the time, I’ve learned to estimate the time by the position of the stars outside the window. In this photo, the bright light on the window frames is the full hunter moon on October 21. The moon is still in the east, left of the windows.
These are all iPhone 12 photos. Though my my big Nikon is a better camera for most purposes, the iPhone makes a very handy camera.
Poached pear. Click here for high-resolution version.
Though it’s mid-October, it was nice for Ken to be able to have some abbey-grown foods while he was here for a five-day visit — persimmon pudding from persimmons he picked from the wild persimmon trees that grow in the yard, a poached pear from the abbey’s orchard, pesto from basil still growing in the garden, and tomato soup and tomato sauce from tomatoes I grew and canned.
I wish I had known about poached pears a long time ago. I’ve been getting pears from the orchard for several years now, but they’re as hard as a rock. I’ve come to understand fairly late in life that pears as hard as rocks are normal, and that the fix is to poach them. I poached these pears in tawny port, with some spices. I had bought the tawny port by accident and didn’t know what to do with it, because I greatly prefer ruby port. Problem solved.
Persimmon pudding. Click here for high-resolution version.
The gorilla Ndakasi, shortly before she died in the arms of her keeper, Andre Bauma. Source: Virunga National Park via Twitter.
Ndasaki was 14 years old when she died, after a long illness, according to the BBC. When Ndasaki was a baby, her mother was killed by poachers. Andre Bauma, who remained her keeper at a gorilla orphanage, rescued Ndasaki, who was clinging to her mother’s body.
Every culture that I am aware of teaches that animals are a lower form of life than human beings. The life of any human being, no matter how vile or violent that human life may be, is held to be of more value than the life of any animal, no matter how rare or intelligent or majestic that animal may be.
Most of us, I feel sure, have loved animals whose lives we valued much more than the lives of many — or most! — of the humans around us. It’s only because we are never forced to make a trade that this attitude is never put to the test.
Societies are increasingly squeamish about our treatment of animals. However, a serious rethinking of our treatment of animals has yet to occur. A week ago, there were reports that the president of South Korea is considering a ban on eating dogs. Worsening environmental problems, along with the development of “cultured” meats, are encouraging us to rethink our costly habit of eating meat. But this is not happening fast enough. What government wants to be the first to start regulating and closing down the meat industry, while mandating the substitution of cultured meats? The uproar will be horrendous, most of it coming from the sort of people who consider even mask mandates during pandemics to be a heinous offense against their liberty.
A better sort of human beings will have two choices of philosophical reasons for not eating animals and switching to cultured meats.
The first is the utilitarian case: Our planet can no longer handle the inefficiency and filth of the meat industry. Though the cost of imitation meat is much too high today, that cost will surely come down as the cultured meat industry develops and scales up. At some point, cultured meat should cost much less than “farmed” meat, because it is much more efficient. Philosophers tend to use longer words when smaller ones will do. “Utilitarian” just means “useful.” It would be useful to human beings if their burgers were cheaper and just as good, and if human communities were less polluted by vast hog farms, massive chicken operations, and cattle feed lots, all of which are disgusting to human beings and turn the human stomach for the purpose of making human food.
The second is a moral case, rooted in the rights of animals: the right to habitat, the right to life and to live according to their instincts, the right not to be incarcerated and treated cruelly, and the right not to suffer and die for the sake of human dinner plates. This is their planet, too. Dare I suggest, to use a loaded term, that animals have natural rights? I do.
Readers of this blog are aware that I am persuaded by John Rawls’ theory of justice and that I believe that Rawls has rendered the utilitarian moral philosophies of the Enlightenment now obsolete. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls was aware that many of the principles he lays out can be extrapolated to animals. As I read Rawls, he practically begs other philosophers to do the work of applying justice as fairness to animals, with any adjustments that may be necessary. Rawls says explicitly that he does not mean for his theory to apply to the question of “right conduct in regard to animals and the rest of nature.” The question, to Rawls, if there is a difference between the moral status of animals and the moral status of humans, is whether animals possess “the capacity for a sense of justice.” He writes, “Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil.” But otherwise Rawls steers clear and writes that the moral status of animals is “outside the scope of the theory of justice.”1
As for utilitarianism, animals didn’t stand a chance, even to the best of minds. The kindly Edinburgher David Hume, writing in 1751 in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, has this to say in the section on justice:
“Were there a species of creatures, intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is, that we should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on the one side, and servile obedience on the other. Whatever we covet, they must instantly resign: Our permission is the only tenure, by which they hold their possessions: Our compassion and kindness the only check, by which they curb our lawless will: And as no inconvenience ever results from the exercise of a power, so firmly established in nature, the restraints of justice and property, being totally useless, would never have place in so unequal a confederacy. This is plainly the situation of men, in regard to animals.”2
I have said that I consider utiliarianism obsolete. Many don’t. It’s almost certainly true that, as utilitarian philosophies were developed during the Enlightenment, they advanced the causes of fairness and justice. I would argue, though, that the faults of utilitarianism have been blocking human progress for a long time. Utilitarians — or some of them, at least — could find room in utilitarianism even for slavery, on the grounds that it is useful (and therefore good) to enslave the few if the many are better off for it. Right-wing political and moral philosophy today is deeply rooted in utilitarianism, though there is much deceit involved. For example, there is the constant argument that light regulation and the preferential treatment of the rich is just, even if it is unequal, because it “floats all boats.” Even if the utilitarian case is sound, the deceit destroys the right-wing case, because further enriching the rich does not float all boats.
One of the side effects of political turmoil in the U.S. is that it drowns out conversations about progress that we ought to be having. The European Union has invested modest amounts of public money in research on cultured meats. Singapore has already brought a product to market. The United States is lagging. Vox, in May 2021, wrote that animal agriculture is completely missing from President Biden’s infrastructure and climate plan. Even so, there was right-wing screeching about a Biden “burger ban,” just one example of how right-wing obstruction prevents us from having conversations that we ought to be having.
Why is gorilla poaching still going on in Africa, where deforestation and other factors have been so devastating? As far as I can tell, it’s partly because some people eat gorillas. Some are sold to go live in cages.
My personal position, I think, would be seen by many people as radical. I would start from the position that the moral status of animals is in no way different from our own, and then see who has arguments good enough to force me to retreat. For example, why might the moral status of an overpopulation of rats in the New York City subways be different from the moral status of wild tule elk at California’s Point Reyes? One might argue, for example, that where animal overpopulation is a threat to the health of human beings, human beings have a right to defend themselves, just as a brown bear has a right to defend her cubs from an overpopulation of humans. Nor would I argue that our partiality to dogs and cats is somehow hypocritical, because dogs and cats are compatible with human families and become members of human families. Having domesticated them and bred them to live in human families, we now have a duty to every cat and dog that is born to sustain them as lifelong members of human families.
Ndasaki’s life and her life story are important because she compels us to see things to which we are usually blind. Ndasaki’s story is much like the story of Cecil the lion, who was killed by poachers in 2015. Cecil’s death caused an outbreak of shaming in social media, along the lines of “how dare you be more concerned about the death of one animal than [fill in the blank with some other cause].” I wrote about Cecil here, arguing that we’re entirely capable of concern about more than one injustice at a time. The sad thing is that, because we are usually blind and distracted, people with causes must compete with other causes to draw attention to their own cause, as though caring about a lion or a gorilla somehow makes us care less about injustice against humans.
But the death of a gorilla does not distract us from other matters of justice. Ndasaki’s story doesn’t distract us from Cecil’s story; the death of a gorilla reminds us of the death of a lion. Ndasaki’s death reminds us that we have a lot to think about, a lot to talk about, and a lot of things to roll up our sleeves and do. And even where collective action remains obstructed by the kind of people whose uncaring attitudes and sorry thinking diminishes the moral value — not to mention the usefulness — of their own unexamined lives, we can still make changes in our own everyday lives that make the world a little bit better.
Notes:
1. Rawls, A Theory of Justice. See the third entry under “animals” in the book’s index. This is page 448 in my 1999 Harvard Belknap edition.
2. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Section III, “Of Justice,” Part 1.
Another note: Yesterday, a neighbor’s milk cow was hit by a car and killed while they were herding their cows and a calf from pasture to pasture along a country road. Today, the calf broke through two fences to try to get to the place where her mother was killed. The calf was frantic. It took several people to catch the calf, tie her, and, to use Kay’s word, incarcerate the calf in a stock trailer where she is safe. The calf, Kay said, is too traumatized to eat. We are in denial if we can’t see how aware even young animals are.
Persimmon season has started. Ken picked (and shook trees) for only a little while this morning and got more than enough for the first persimmon pudding of the year. This is only about a tenth, Ken said, of what we’ll get this year just from the persimmon trees in the yard. We’ll make a video next week on the process of harvesting them, pulping them, and making persimmon pudding.
Ken is on a college speaking tour, by the way, and is here at the abbey for a few days before he returns to Scotland.
Tomato bisque from tomatoes I grew and canned
Nature was not kind to everyone this summer. There were terrifying fires in California and Australia, and deadly floods in the United States, Europe, and Asia. But here in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, it was like 1950 again. The temperature here in my woods never exceeded 94F. Heavy rain sometimes washed ruts in the road (which a neighbor quickly repairs with his tractor), but rainfall was good, though the spring was a bit dry and cold. It has been at least eight months since a power outage that lasted more than two seconds. With a little help from the irrigation system, the 2021 garden was great. Not every summer, I’m afraid, will be so nice.
The poplar tree that overhangs the deck seems to have had a growth spurt. All summer long, half the deck was in shade, with a deck umbrella no longer needed. I don’t think I’ve eaten indoors more than four times since early spring.
One of the many remarkable things about this planet is how the seasons change in the temperate zones. This means we get not only changes in the weather, but also changes in what we eat. After months of buying hardly any produce and relying on the garden, the perennial vegetables are back on the menu. By perennial, I mean winter vegetables and the things that can be profitably shipped from one climate zone to another. My twenty jars of canned tomatoes will extend the memory of the 2021 garden for most of the winter. Most of the tomatoes, I think, will go into soups.
Speaking of soups, I have found that the “warming zone” on my glasstop stove is a great place for simmering soups. With the warming zone set to high, my favorite copper pot will hold a soup at about 192F, a very good simmer temperature.
As for the weather, the Atlantic hurricane season is not over. So it’s not too late for nature to knock us around here, a couple of hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.
The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars. Jo Marchant, Dutton, 2020. 388 pages.
Marchant is concerned about how modern people and our cultures have lost touch with the sky. Paradoxically, we think of ourselves as living in a larger world than our ancestors. But in truth, by cutting ourselves off from the sky, we live in a much smaller world.
This process of cutting ourselves off has a long history that began centuries before GPS and light pollution. The invention of clocks, for example, in the Middle Ages, meant that people no longer had to look up at the sky to estimate the time. The regimentation of our lives made possible by clocks is something that never occurs to us, but Marchant covers clocks in the fourth chapter, “Faith,” in which she relates how the development of clocks had a great deal to do with the church, specifically the need of the Benedictine monasteries to be more precise in carrying out their 24-hour cycle of rituals.
Marchant starts with paleolithic cave drawings and works forward in time: sites such as Stonehenge, then Babylon, Egypt, Ptolemy, clocks and the middle ages, ocean navigation, the development of modern astronomy, and the interaction even today of plant and animal life with the celestial world.
This is not an academic book; it’s a survey rather than an in-depth exploration of any of its topics. But the book’s extensive notes provide a good list of sources for further reading. There also is an index. The book will serve as a good reference. It will end up on my best bookshelf.
When I was a young’un growing up in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, corn of the type one wants for corn on the cob was called roastnears. I learned in school, around the fifth grade, that roastnears means roasting ears. Back then, I thought of that as just the way people talked. Now I would see it as a bit of the Southern Appalachian dialect.
I don’t try to grow corn here. It takes up too much room in the garden, and the raccoons pull it down and steal it. This summer, neighbors have given me corn. But there is no shortage of it. All through late summer, grocery stores sell it in large quantities, very fresh, for 20 cents to 50 cents an ear.
I would never boil it, not least because who wants all that heat in the kitchen in high summer. Roasting it in foil on an outdoor grill is easiest. But it’s more fun to roast it in the shucks. Peel the shucks back on the raw ear of corn, remove the silks, apply some olive oil, and fold the shucks back over the corn. About 22 minutes in a hot covered grill should do it. Apply as much butter and salt as your conscience will permit.
Canning is serious work. But it’s very satisfying to put up vegetables for the cold winter that you yourself grew during the hot summer. I canned tomatoes today. I have so many tomatoes that I probably will need to do it again.
I worked on the deck to the keep the heat out of the house, using a gas cooker fired with propane. But it was remarkably cool this morning — 64F when I started working about 7:30 a.m., and 75F when I finished about 11. A cool breeze was blowing out of the woods. A hummingbird hovered for a while to watch what I was doing. She must have been attracted by all the red.
For what it’s worth, my pressure canner is an All American model 915. It holds seven quart jars. Normally I am pretty good at estimating quantities. But I had no idea how many quarts my pile of tomatoes would make. I ended up with a lot of tomatoes left over. From those I will make sauce, and put it up in pint jars, if I can find some pint jars. This is not the best time of year to buy canning supplies, because some places are running out. If you have space to store things for the future, a good supply of canning jars and lids would be good stuff to stock.
Boiling water for blanching the skins off the tomatoes
Ready to pack the jars
I allowed almost three hours for the pressure cooker to cool.
Finally done
I already had decided that, if the squirrels left me any apples this year, then instead of making a big apple pie that I’d have to eat all by myself, I’d make fried apple pies, with a vow to eat no more than one a day. The squirrels did leave me some apples, I did make fried apple pies today (two of them), and I ate only one.
I’m an old hand at making apple pies. If I’ve ever made fried apple pies, though, I don’t remember doing it. I Googled for some guidance. The recipes are all over the map. To my taste, some of the recipes sounded terrible — for example, the ones that call for canned biscuit dough for the crust. Even homemade biscuit dough sounds terrible, to me, as a crust for fried apple pies. Some recipes call for sheets of store-bought puff pastry. No way. I settled on a Scottish-style hot-water crust, not least because I wanted to practice making hot-water crusts using the pasta machine that I bought a few weeks ago.
I did what I usually do: I consulted a number of recipes to clarify the concept, then I did the job according to my own judgment without really measuring anything. The hot-water crust turned out beautifully, and the pasta machine worked very well for the job. My rolling-pin skills are not the best. The pasta machine, on the other hand, turned out beautiful rectangles of even, sturdy dough that could easily be cut for rectangular fried pies. I minced the apples, added sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a little corn starch, and cooked the filling until the corn starch thickened. After frying the pies in about three-quarters of an inch of oil (about 350 degrees) and turning them once, I put them on paper towels for a few minutes and then transferred them to a cooling rack.
Now that I think I’m competent with hot-water crusts, I’m sure there will be lots of savory little main-dish pies this winter. Another virtue of hot-water crust is that it’s frugal with oil or butter (I used a little butter today) and lower in calories, unlike my usual pie crusts, in which I use quite a lot of olive oil.
My next experiment with hot-water crust will be making some little pies to be baked rather than fried.
