You’ve been “blinking” the situation in the Middle East – and like us – I bet you don’t like it one bit either. We’re going to ramble a bit – think of it like getting out and walking the land for a bit. Because when you walk the land, it’s easier to ground in what matters.
Good Land Needs Good Water
You need water and a bit of soil. With good management – but now we’re sneaking around where the Middle East hasn’t mattered since 1970 when Scoop Jackson told me as a young reporter “Keep your eyes on Hormuz. It may blow in your lifetime.”
That’s because Scoop – and people of his generation – knew that oil was coming – and was already here. They had been around through the Dust Bowl and Great Depression.
In fact – most people don’t know this – but Scoop was a lifelong champion of public power who laid the foundation for the region’s modern hydroelectric and energy framework. His most significant legislative achievement was spearheading the Pacific Northwest Power Act of 1980, which fundamentally defined the operations and responsibilities of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA).
Civilians who live in the A/C bubble easily forget that Grand Coulee was about power (to make aluminum and refine plutonium at Hanford, WA) as it was about making irrigation. Depression memories haunted and that brings us to the first viewpoint.
Water is the BIG SIGNAL on Food
Get sufficient even in a few small ways with your water- and keep going that way if you can. Industrial farming sounded like a great idea – and it was – once upon a time. There was a time no one would dare attack water. Sadly, those times are gone. See Iran’s threats.
See the pattern emerging in the Middle East? Hate has overrun sufficiency. Everyone gets a check. But the fact is, one of these days, someone will get pissed enough, and an attack on desalination plants could kill a million, easy.
Remember, I lived in the Cayman Islands for a couple of years. All the water there is desal, rain capture into cisterns, or imported as bottled. It rains in the Caribbean – a lot. Owen Roberts airport (GCM) gets 55-57 inches of rain a year. A lot like East Texas in a wet year.
Island life with a clean roof on the windward side, and a 25,000 gallon cistern? A family lives well. Not the case in the Middle East. Average annual rainfall in Dubai is a dusty 3 to 3.5 inches per year.
Water Sufficiency Matters (or here comes War)
Engineering hats on, everyone? K&E yellow slip stick in the leather scabbard? Let’s kick this up after memorizing that 100 mm is about 4 inches.
Using Dubai’s roughly 87 mm/year rainfall, even a generous 80% collection efficiency, and just 100 liters/person/day — modest by rich-country standards — one person would need about 524 square meters of perfect catchment area. That dog don’t hunt.
With roughly 3.9 million people, that implies about 2,045 square kilometers of dedicated catchment, or about half of Dubai’s entire emirate land area, just for basic human water — not farming, industry, landscaping, cooling, construction, tourism, or food production. At a bare emergency standard of 20 liters/day, it still takes about 105 square meters per person. And that’s without backing out huge evaporative losses.
That’s the brutal arithmetic: rainfall capture alone cannot make Dubai-style population density self-sufficient. No way in hell.
The place works because of desalination, energy sales from oil and gas, imports, pipelines, finance, and global logistics — not because the local hydrology can carry the human load
Which makes the UN/Euro sermonizing about sustainability ring a little hollow: much of the modern world is already a stack of engineered exceptions, and Europe is busy becoming the new Lost Continent while lecturing everyone else about lifeboat etiquette. It’s a revival tent meeting for the Elites.
[Insert: Blood pressure drop pause]
OK. [resume]
The entire World is crazy: catering to nationalist and religionists in situ – unwriting continued unsustainable humaning levels. Just dandy.
We only bring up such boring realities when we’re out in the shop working.
I mean, how audacious of us to mention U.N. stupidity. World Banksters feed into that “money is the only metric” BS.
Keep the U.N around long enough? Like all good socialists, they will come for your resources and mine. All to ensure energy domination of the seas of sand. Just to hit an increasingly hollow monetization goal of fake “growth?” Sorry I started down this path.
The old man grumbling is only warming up. Because systems that don’t make sense die. Are you and me the only people to read World History? For the kids, I should explain. Since there’s no school on weekends (and there should be).
Industrialization & Economics Kill
Ah. Zimbabwe. Which was once upon a time Rhodesia when I first “worked it” on 40-meter CW as a 14-year-old ham. Neat place for first peoples there. But then the rich westerners came in, cut deals, and eventually what had been sustainable became a kind of Hell Lite. From The African Collection.
Oh, it can change, but who’d buy into that? Because the same (wrong headed) cattle policies (still held by much of BLM here in the USA) ruined agriculture everywhere, not just in Zimbabwe.
Until, that is, Allan Savory came along.
The Savory Difference
Allan Savory began demonstrating that properly managed herd movement could actually reverse desertification. His argument — controversial at first, but increasingly respected — was that overgrazing was often less damaging than under-managed grazing.
Large herd animals historically moved in dense packs under predator pressure, trampling organic matter into soil, fertilizing ground naturally, breaking capped surfaces, and then moving on before vegetation was all destroyed.
Savory’s “holistic planned grazing” approach attempts to mimic those ancient movement patterns using cattle rotations, timing, recovery intervals, and careful land observation. In parts of Africa where land had become dry, crusted, and nearly sterile, managed herds helped restore grasses, improve water retention, reduce runoff, and gradually rebuild living soil. It’s one of those reminders that sometimes the answer to ecological collapse is not removing animals from the system — but learning how nature managed them before humans got clever.
I think this was in my book Downsizing, or it’s an oversight. The old chuck wagons of the West? On the trail four months, or longer. Draft animals fertilizing the trail as they went.
Modernity can’t stand that. Everyone’s entitled to a big SUV, an air conditioned bunkhouse (with Starlink) and that means? Infrastructure.
Savory works, but it takes people on the land. Not on the Tundra 4x4s.
Where Modernity Failed?
When you get “back to the land” it quickly becomes apparent. There is damn near as much to be unlearned as there is to learn about farming with nature. Open your World View to the Chapter of Twain and read Verse 10: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Better Call Soil
We have done traditional dirt gardening in the past – and we may bring back a small dirt patch this fall. But it won’t be for the purposes of cloning industrial farming’s mistakes. Glyphosate-ready crap? Um, no.
It takes less than an hour a day if you roll up your sleeves. A couple of off the shelf hydroponic rigs. Then transplant to dirt (in season). Then a greenhouse to make your own “seasoning.”
A simple water catchment system, couple of rain barrels to water it, solar panels to power it, and raised beds with clean soil and modest organic fertilizer, though I do love my Osmocote.
There’s the balance: right there! I use Osmocote. I have had modern eye and hernia surgery. Ludd is dead. Not my bok choi, though.
The bok choi is ready to be harvested – I started with an Asian soup for dinner Thursday with tons of fresh bok choi, small strips of ham, a handful of egg noodles, and a dash of oyster sauce and hoisin to round it out.
Here’s the thing: When I pull up the rest of the bok choi? That (sunshine side) planter will immediately become home to three (small, sweet) watermelons. The netting is already there for them to climb. It will take a month or two to melonize, but they like the heat and that’s what we have lots of.
Takeaway? You have to learn to live with nature – and if it’s not in “ideal weather zones” you bend on a few turns of engineering. Which has been our approach. Start by reading up on (south facing) greenhouses versus Dutch (glass oven) greenhouses. Think there’s a reason China has a 2,500 year culture?
Tom Toms
Remember our electroculture experiments? I wrote them up on the Peoplenomics side a month or three back (time blurs). About 3- weeks ago, I had to turn off my frequency generator. The grow rate has gotten completely out of hand – hitting the greenhouse roof. Extra grow light time ended.
The 2/3rds height plant on the left was a control group. Not enough data – yet. But flowers are setting all over the place in the netting – so we figure about a month out from mozzarella, basil, and fresh slicers (with burgundy, of course!).
In that picture (above left of the towering toms) are some insanely growing yellow squash. Sometimes I feel like a lion-tamer, trying to get them interested in the 2″ netting I put up. And flowers? Nearly as big as your hand. This is what happens when you get the soil, temp, pH, nutrition, light timing, all synched up with heritage seeds.
It’s rewarding in a “Fire a sautee pan for me!” way.
Same netting continues over the cukes but they aren’t as ornery about training.
And wrapping up the foodening projects for now, the peas are having a problem getting on the netting installed just for them. Aging and a pea problem, you say? Is there a UREologist in the house?
My AI in the dell tells me the peas will go vertical any minute. I just need to be patient.
Sustainable Dilettantes
Obviously, this isn’t enough food to sustain Elaine and me. But, we have a new Atwoods opening in Palestine, Texas any minute. And that will give Tractor Supply a run. If you’ve never done the the Atwoods thing, my buddy Dan (who claims to be a redneck) says it’s a peak moment in life to explore one.
I’m not so sure Atwoods can compete with going through old-time ship breakers, like Zeidel’s in Tacoma, or a few of the ones down near Portland on the Columbia as a kid in the early sixties. But I was not shopping chick and chicken food then. Maybe I should bring Elaine to hold the credit cards.
Foodening by Objective
Our goal is to get serious greenhouse production rolling year-round. Not to save a lot of money, though after the first year or three of kitting out, that could happen.
No, this is more like the stomach’s version of what F/U money was to the wallet. Self sufficiency feels good. The kind that once you own it outright is a little more difficult to take away from you.
And as long as it’s raining? You back the old farm pickup out into the rain because Nature will wash it, if Ure too busy.
Wherever that is, Get Rain
We’ve been doing long-form versions of “blinking” news for a couple of decades. And the metrology choices made back then are the exact same ones we would use today, facing another major move.
That says something. (I mean besides Ure older!)
Yeah, we sure are. But the F/U of no bills and the flying F/U from having a route to a meal? Feels pretty good. Keeps the blood pressure down. Hysteria matters less when you own the ground you stand on.
As long as you’re bright enough to figure out that if you have more people than water, an involuntary military or financial conflict will be along soon enough. Remarkably, the world is full of people who can’t figure that out…
Elaine and I crossed the 26 years married mark this weekend. T-bones and home grown hydroponic Romaine seems a fair plan.
Write when you see how sustainable systems are a better deal than extractive systems,
George@Ure.net