The Snow Moon is certainly living up to its name this year. But then, the Wolf Moon was snowy also. In fact, there have been only a handful of days in 2025 when it was not snowing here in central Vermont — and only a couple days above freezing. So the garden is deeply buried under white mounds, and spring is nowhere in sight.
My first seedlings appear (Image: T. Larkum)
Still, it feels like time to get the growing season underway. I have been receiving gardening catalogs in the mail every week for months now. My pantry is empty, but for a bin of potatoes. The freezer still holds a good deal of food, and that is what I am eating now. But I don’t like frozen food. In fact, I don’t really know anyone who does. I would much prefer to store the garden harvest whole and uncooked, cured in the sun, not in boiling water where much of the nutrition and flavor get leached out even in just a few minutes. Freezing is how I deal with not having a root cellar… yet.
That is the goal though. I don’t think there is any future that will not be improved by having food storage that is not dependent on electricity. I think we will reach the point where not much energy-dependent storage of food will be possible within my lifetime. Some days I think the grid is going to give out right about the same time my body decides that it is no longer up to things like building resilience. So I feel the urgency to build now before I run out of energy. But also before this economy runs out of energy. And I sort of think that might happen first… Because it is happening already.
The clock is ticking on so many things. Long-distance shipping, relentless burning, and dwindling resources, especially dwindling reserves of affordable resources — meaning cost effective, profitable, cheap — these things are already faltering. That is what this increased cost of everything is all about. We are running out of the affordable material bases of our economy, and so our economy is contracting. Money can not buy as much as it once did simply because there is not as much to buy. Relative to contracting material supply, money has lost its value. And material supply is contracting quickly, maybe not in absolute terms, but in affordable terms. There may be plenty of oil to sustain drilling in the Arctic, but it will take almost as much in energy to extract oil in those adverse conditions as we will get out of burning it. This is true of everything. There may be deposits. But all the easy-access and high quality materials are gone. For what is left, the cost of extracting resources is more than the benefit in using them — even if you calculate benefit as a capitalist does and ignore all the externalities like maintaining a viable planet.
Read more: Resilience