Ed. note: This piece was posted on the author’s website on August 30, 2023.
The Blueberry Moon is full tomorrow. It is the second full moon of August 2023, so it’s a blue moon. I don’t know where August went this year. Seems I was just writing for the full Hay Moon at the beginning of the month, and here it is, a full lunation gone. Not only has the moon waned and waxed, but we’ve moved through hay mowing season and most of the berry harvest. There may still be some blackberries later in September; but the cane fruits are largely done, gooseberries and currants are long gone, and the blueberry harvest was negligible, finished before the Blueberry Moon showed its new crescent smile. There was one late July week of self-pick berries at the orchard closest to my town. I saw a few local pints in the co-op early in August. My own bushes produced a garnish for my oatmeal, but they’re still young so that might not be a reflection on the year. However, I’ve seen none at farm stands around central Vermont, and that probably is a good indication of how things went.
This year has been miserable for everybody attempting to grow food. The co-op is struggling to stock local veg. There are roots and greenhouse-grown greens, but the usual opulent piles of peaches and plums and cherries never appeared. There are Maine potatoes, but nothing from closer farms; and I’ve seen no onions, though the garlic harvest seems to be average. There are few local farms producing eggplants, chiles and sweet peppers, but this year even the tomatoes are coming from Ohio and places further afield. What is more disturbing is that it is almost September and the local apple harvest has not yet materialized, at least not in the usual overwhelming abundance. I have five mature trees, all of which were thick with flowers in early May, and yet only one has apples — rather tiny apples. I know other growers are seeing similar reductions in yield.
A recent headline in the local paper announced that Vermont farmers in flood zones are estimating lost income from July’s storms at over $12 million, with over 18,000 acres damaged. These data were collected in a survey conducted by the state’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets in an effort to assess need for relief. Farmers were still submitting survey responses up until yesterday, 28 August, so undoubtedly the mid-month estimates will be well below the total need. However, thus far the USDA has granted just $4 million to the state to aid farmers. With so many other states clamoring for the same finite pool of relief funds, it is unclear whether substantially more will be coming to Vermont.
But the flood was not the only disaster for farmers this year. The lack of apples and many other fruits can’t be blamed on flooding. Orchards aren’t typically located in flood-prone areas, since most types of fruit trees and bushes require better drainage than can be found in lowland meadows. But orchards are definitely suffering this year. It was a very dry spring and there was little snow-melt banked in the soil to supply the trees as they struggled to put out leaves. Then May saw not one, but two hard freezes after most trees were in blossom. My trees had nearly finished blooming by the second freeze. The one that still had flowers lost most of the open blooms, but there were still many closed buds and these opened after it warmed up. This is the only tree that has apples now. My trees are in a fairly sheltered location and at lower elevation than many orchards in Vermont. Those growing higher or in more exposed locations were unquestionably harder hit than my trees. I saw reports claiming that some orchards had 100% loss on their trees after the freeze.
June was also difficult. It became very hot and, while total rainfall was only slightly higher than normal for June, the rains were continuous. We had showers every two to three days. This kind of weather pattern is welcome in the spring when annuals are beginning to grow and perennials are leafing out, but it is less useful in June. Wheat and other grains need at least a day or so of dry weather before harvest, and hay can’t be baled until it is thoroughly dried out. Tomatoes and many other garden fruits don’t like continual wet weather. Tomatoes, in particular, need a thorough soaking now and then, but prefer a dry soil around their roots in between those sporadic waterings. And everything molds more readily in damp weather. When leaves never get a chance to dry out, fungi run rampant. (This is why you shouldn’t water in the evening unless you use a drip system at the soil level.)
Then came July… And since the Fourth of July, we have had perhaps a half dozen days without heavy rain.
If at least $12 million is needed just to cover the flood, I imagine the total losses from this season to be at least ten to twenty times that. If you factor in the poor maple harvest, 2023 losses might be as high as $300 million. These numbers are supported by a definite reduction in farm produce offered for sale around my town. Aside from the co-op’s struggle to fill its produce bins from local or regional suppliers, the local farmers’ markets are a bitter joke.
The Wednesday evening market in my town used to fill up the block-long pedestrian way leading to downtown with a variety of stalls and tables selling everything from raw fleece and wool yarn to forty pound pumpkins (what you do with that I have no idea…). The market had barely opened for the season before the flood forced its relocation to the small common at the edge of downtown, a space that can hold less than half the usual vendors when it is at full capacity. But even that tiny space has not yet been full this year. There are perhaps four or five tents each week. None of them had veg either time I ventured down there. Most were selling some variant of arts and crafts. One was selling hemp products and had a small cooler of eggs sitting to the side of the table; I bought a dozen just because I wanted to have some reason to give someone money. I drive by that common on the way home from work every day. I have not yet seen a stall that obviously has fruits or vegetables for sale. I haven’t been back since early August.
I’ve been bemoaning my own garden and basement woes, but I have to stress that what I am going through is barely a footnote to the disasters all around me. I still have a house and a garden. I will have a sizable harvest of garlic and onions, roots and potatoes, perhaps even tomatoes if the recent sunshine holds for a few more days. I lost some things to the flood, but nothing of real consequence for my life. I lost the harvest of a few trees of apples, but I have one tree filled with more than I need of its tart little fruits. I could probably field a fairly robust market table from what I have on this quarter acre today. But I have a friend who has forty acres of what is normally a diverse mix of orchard fruits and market veg, and she can’t fill a table with produce. She only just opened her roadside farm stand, selling sweet corn and string beans and eggs, but she is pinning her hopes in her squash fields. She usually has ten to fifteen farmhands this time of year, a mix of paid kids and a few older volunteers. She has already let most of the seasonal hired help go. (I’ve been put on notice: if the squash come through, she’s going to need more hands… I only half-jokingly suggested I’d work for butternuts.)
And to give all this even more perspective… Vermont has suffered a miserable growing season and many Vermonters lost a great deal to the flood. Some lost their home and everything in it. But only two people lost their lives, and very few lost their jobs. This is astonishing, given the number of businesses that were shuttered for most of the last eight weeks. Some are still not open. Yes, we may have lost quite a lot, but our losses are marginal compared to the many dozens of people killed in the Maui fire and the billions of dollars of devastation in flooding elsewhere in this country. Similarly, farm losses across the country are measured not in tens of millions, but in billions. Net income from US farming is expected to drop by $30.5 billion, an 18.2% loss over 2022, which was itself not a good year. I’m sure Vermont is in that estimate, but we only add a bit to the decimal places of that number. And these few horrific numbers barely scrape the surface of loss in the US, with even greater horrors mounting everywhere else in the world. (Can Canada even measure the damages sustained in this year’s fires…)
These numbers show that we are in the age of the disaster capitalism described by Naomi Klein after she witnessed the response to Katrina. There has always been more income in the breaking of human lives than in maintaining them. In truth, the 20th century surge in disposable products and planned obsolescence was nothing but extracting profits from breakdown. Similarly, our economy was strongest as it pulled itself out of the devastation of World War II. As long as there are resources and cheap labor somewhere, somebody will profit over our loss. What is different now is that nearly resources and cheap labor are being funneled into this economics of disaster with little left to sustain actual lives.
Farm production expenses, payments made for seed, fertilizer, mechanization and other forms of labor, remediation and rehabilitation of land and livestock, all expenses that used to be contained in the farm and are now outsourced to industry, are expected to increase by $18.2 billion in 2023 to $459.5 billion. When a farm is functioning properly, when there are no disasters from flood to soil degradation to disease to mechanical breakdowns, it has little expense besides labor — which is largely done by the farm household. Seed and breeding stock flow from the previous year. Soil fertility is maintained by farm practices such as field rotation and collecting and spreading animal wastes — which are not wastes, but fertilizer resources. There are floods and droughts, but a farm with sufficient diversity can absorb losses in one field by gains in others. There are also better ways to manage water flows — from hedge maintenance to terracing to simply not plowing all land into easily weathered straight furrows and planting one crop with one specific moisture need. But in any case these numbers show that more money is being made in the degradation of farming than in actual food production. When you factor in the production of ethanol, which accounts for somewhere between 20-40% of grain production in the US (numbers that are dependent on who is producing the data), there is even less net revenue to actual food production — but more for industry! This is how we are fueling disaster capitalism.
The other thing these numbers show is that our taxes in the form of government relief funds — from FEMA to farm assistance to welfare payments made to the laborers whose devalued work does not cover basic expenses — are supporting this disaster capitalism. We are paying industry to remediate the damages largely caused by industry. Most of that farm relief will go to pay sunk costs lost in the flood. Little will go to the farmer. I suspect none will go to laborers who have no work. We use welfare to support them. Industry supports no actual people and little actual production of needs in all these disasters. Instead, industry takes its billions in revenue from the losses and breakdowns in our culture and on our planet.
We are in disaster capitalism and have been for a long while. I believe that capitalism has always been intrinsically tied to disaster and destruction, whether natural or engineered, but not many people share my views — because my views are from the edge spaces, the bottom and sides of this system. I sit outside and can see things that those dependent on this capitalist system for privilege and wealth do not, or can not. Upton Sinclair’s quip about the inverse relationship between a man’s paycheck and his ability to comprehend any given issue is the duct tape that holds capitalism together in these increasingly disastrous times — increasingly disastrous because of capitalism, whether the result of inadvertent externality or planned waste and breakdown. This system can only survive if enough people refuse to see that its basic function is destruction. Though of course it can also only survive if there are cheap resources and labor to mine for disaster remediation, and we are now entering the stage of late capitalism that has no more cheap things to turn into waste. Capital is feeding on itself, struggling to bring in revenues that can cover its increased costs — costs like fires and floods, scarce resources and a debilitated workforce wracked by disaster. The system needs all the propaganda it can muster to keep telling itself that it is alive and well, keeping those men with dependent paychecks blind to its demise.
But there are people who do not depend on the system, and we can see it for what it is. We are busy trying to meet our own needs and care for our neighbors, human and otherwise, without industry. We are the shadow economy and we are a fairly robust system. If you are eating local farm produce, you are part of that shadow economy. If you make your own clothes or buy from local producers, you are part of that shadow economy. If you make repairs and maintain your home and the things in it using largely locally sourced materials and local handy-folk labor — cash under the table, of course — then you are part of that shadow economy. In fact, I’d wager that many if not most of your body’s needs are met outside of capitalism even if you live in places where few of your needs are produced. How does your apartment get cleaned? Who cares for your children? Who fixes your car, does your dry cleaning, mends your computer? Most of these basic needs are met by people, not industry. This is the shadow economy, and it has always been the real ways people live and work and meet their needs. It is the necessary shadow of capitalism — which, on balance, creates need.
If you live in Vermont — which has a highly robust shadow economy, larger than capitalism, certainly responsible for meeting more Vermont needs than capitalism — then your life is maintained outside the disaster economy. Though we are starting to feel more like a salvage economy — picking up the refuse of capitalism and repurposing it for ourselves. We are surrounded by brokenness. We are shell-shocked by loss. We are suffering the consequences of capitalism along with the rest of the world.
Loss is ubiquitous now. What I am suffering is suffering, make no mistake. It feels like a protracted drowning. But it is nothing compared to the magnitude of suffering even within a few miles from my home. And all of Vermont is actually doing quite well in comparison with the rest of this country, stellar compared to many parts of the world. This is still a mostly functional society in a mostly comfortable climate with most of its biophysical system still intact. Beaten up and limping along, it’s true, but not yet drawn and quartered by disaster. Vermont is doing ok. Mostly. Other places are most emphatically not.
William Gibson once said that the future is already here, though unevenly distributed. I think it’s time to amend that quote. The future, the time of consequences, the days when all the past due bills from this ravaged planet have gone to collection in undeniable terms, is here and it is everywhere. Only those who are hiding in the blanket cave under the table, fingers plugging their ears, eyes squeezed shut tight, clothespins on their noses, screaming at the top of their lung capacity, are unable to admit that they, too, are suffering loss. Nobody — not rich, not privileged, not epically stupid pundits and politicians — nobody is unaffected. Loss is everywhere and it is overwhelming. We are all drowning in it. It may manifest as the conflagration that wipes out your city or it may be a sudden lack of apples, but there is loss at all scales everywhere.
The future Earth is here… and she is collecting our overdue bills with interest…
So don’t worry overmuch about me. I’m sure you have your own at least equally devastating calamities to endure. Just like everyone else on this planet. And anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or insensate — and probably dependent on those untruths for his paycheck.
Still… thank heavens this growing season is almost over! Almost makes the loss of August a good thing.
