I am seriously telling people in drought stricken suburbs, cities and towns to collect any large rubbish bins or industrial size builder’s tubs and place them around your back garden. Even put them under your rain pipes.

Even in California, where people rarely use public transport let alone grow their own food, the governor announced CA officially drought effected. And that means water restrictions like we have here in Australia. In time anything outdoors you won’t be able to water. So get the bins and tubs now, catch the water now, as and when you can use it for plants.

Get or make stepping shelves and place them along your back fence. Cover them in flower pots and fill with organic soil enriched by the organic waste you now have (mulch it in the back garden). Seriously, food has gone up 20% here the last month, rice has doubled.

Petrol is around $6.95 a gallon here in Australia (June 2008) and in the UK already $10.45 a gallon… yes all you Americans who are lobbying your government to reduce your small $4.00 a gallon fuel cost you imagine will cripple your economy… thanks to wars like Iraq we are all in fact paying a far higher price than any of you. The US has among the world’s cheapest fuel and if the American government foolishly subsidised it’s fuel even further you’d never prepare for the end of oil (the independent experts relay that we’ve already reached peak oil), you’ll never build the public transport infrastructures which could save you, and in the end a government bankrupted by subsidising fuel will only have to throw its hands up sooner or later and your leap in price would be an even bigger catastrophe when you are paying what the rest of us do.
Here in Melbourne, we have the infrastructure – public transport is great here. But houses requiring petrol cars to get to work and shops have plummetted in price by around 30% (2008) and likely to go further. Those on the railway lines, bus routes, tram lines are highly sought after, over priced, hard to get and rents have increased so dramatically we are having ‘rent auctions‘ with many people ending up at the back of the queue, risking homelessness.

High fuel means food will rocket in price. You CAN grow food in your garden, safely, with good nutrition, even later feed the scraps to a couple of chickens. Those who have no garden, consider growing on your window sills, balconies, flat roofs. Even if you only grow herbs, you would have something to barter with others growing other things.

But a good growing food garden takes 2 years to really get established. Your own urine is one of the greatest nitrogen rich fertilisers but water it down 10-1 so you don’t burn the plants and use it within 24 hours or you’ll overdo it on the ammonia. Unless you’re a vegetarian, don’t put faeces on your plants unless you want to get seriously ill.

Got someone with special needs in the family? Great to help them grown their own small garden to tend. You can even propagate and sell baby plants (plants make babies 😉 to those wanting to also grow their own food.

Now is the time but water storage is key. Do you have hard rubbish curbside collections? People putting out plastic buckets, containers, pots etc for rubbish? Grab them, grab all you can. Plastic pots are now $1.50 each but people remember them as useless. When we have to grow our own food to subsidise shopping costs and the fuel to get there, those who threw all these pots and tubs out will kick themselves. If you see them out in the rubbish, collect them, seriously. They will pay you back.

Collect bottles and jars too and calico and cloth bags and good quality lidded tins. Plastic containers will become very expensive (they’re made from petrol) and those jars and bottles will help you store your own food when out of season, the cloth bags will help you carry shopping and wrap food and the tins will help you store larger foods.

Those of you living in areas of flood as common now with global warming as those areas effected by drought, well it’s time to convert that loft, build that patio garden up on the roof and basically treat the ground level as you might if you lived in Venice. Life goes on – upstairs. Building a house in a flood area? Remember the stilts. In a wheelchair? Remember to build a ramp to go upstairs. It may save your life and your lifestyle.

Economies in a squeeze cut back on jobs, especially when business owners have to pay high prices too, higher rents, higher energy costs. Think your job is secure? Wouldn’t hurt to start your own free website now (www.wordpress.com is a good, advert free start) and look at how you can build a self employment portfolio (what are the RANGE of things you CAN do and market which might remain in demand in your local community or which you can do remotely – ie via internet or video conferencing – with limited travel?).

If you have smidgeons of skills, maybe nows the time to turn those hobbies into potential careers just in case. And if you aren’t going to have a wage, can you rely on the promise of welfare? The cost of the Iraq war has run into currently (2008) $528,000,000,000 billion dollars of US government debt. 30,000 (2008) of returning soldiers from Iraq come back injured (4100 dead – 2008 figures) . Many of these injured soldiers will be so wounded their needs may place a significant burden on the US welfare system. And republican nominee and ex war veteran, Senator John Mc Cain, strongly supports the (illegal) Iraq war and would have the Iraq war run for 100 years if necessary .

So maybe don’t expect education and welfare sectors to remain stable, let alone boosted. Ultimately it may be the unemployed, single parents, the elderly, those with developmental and learning disabilities, those with mental health and physical disabilities who are not veterans, who may pay find themselves with less and less services, even on reduced or squeezed out of welfare payments.

Are you prepared? Without income what are your housing plans? How will you make most use of the accommodation and skills you have? What do you have to barter? Food will be the new gold.

Already word is leaking that the overuse of soil, fast growth commercial fertilisers (and who knows re GM crops) our food has 75% less of the minerals and nutrients of the same foods grown in the 60s and 70s. To quote the findings of the 1992 Earth Summit:

1992 Earth Summit Statistics

1992 Earth Summit Report* indicate that the mineral content of the world’s farm and range land soil has decreased dramatically.

Percentage of Mineral Depletion From Soil During The Past 100 Years, By Continent:

North America	85% **
South America	76%
Asia	76%
Africa	74%
Europe	72%
Australia	55

Without these essential minerals, we can’t metabolise many of the vitamins in our food… they are just wasted. That means even if the starch, fat and protein levels are high, a mass of starving brains. Could this add to the burden of those who inherited tendencies toward gut, immune and metabolic disorders?

Today we have 1 in 150 children on the autism spectrum (2008), a percentage of which have these health issues (note, there are also those with autism who don’t have significant health issues). And then our societies have never been so polluted, fueled largely by our own consumer greed driving manufacturers to pour formaldehyde, lead, mercury and fluoride into our waterways, the same one’s which feed the foods we eat. Fluoride is sold commercially as a rat poison. It strips the lining of the gut. Yet we’ve bought propaganda that it’s ok to stick it in our mouths daily on the basis that it can harden tooth enamel. Sure, minimally, but at what cost if we swallow it? An epidemic of gut disorders? Vulnerable groups with metabolic disorders whose already vulnerable detox functions are overwhelmed and end up brain starved and over run by stored toxins? Twas greed which did it guv…ours.

We can change these things, if we understand them, if we know we are not pawns in this, we are active participants and we can choose what we support, what we buy, how we adapt. We are not powerless.

--
Donna Williams *)
author, artist, screenwriter, composer.

Ever the arty Autie.
http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.auties.org