It's been a while since there's been sufficient time for the luxury of penning a blog entry. Spring and the repercussions of the emergence of SARS-CoV2 had resulted in long, albeit generally highly productive days, around the farm.
Being in a rural setting, with our other business affairs having been organized virtually for two decades, and having always homeschooled the kids, SARS-CoV2 and the increasing array of conditions it can cause have resulted little direct impact on our lives. It has, however, given us cause to reflect upon how fortunate we are, to revisit our mission at Sophia, and in a sense served as a wake-up call for us to redouble our efforts and to complete sustainability and self-sufficiency projects that have been left half baked, in some cases for years.
SARS-CoV2 has sicked, injured, and killed thousands, but through all of this the lights have stayed on, phones and the Internet have remained up, markets and the domestic supply chains have performed amazingly well, and mass communications have continued to bore holes into hearts and minds. But what if those things weren't the case? What if supply chains were widely disrupted for weeks or months? What if large swaths of the grid were down for similar periods of time? What if the global positioning constellations suffered significant damage (hint: 4G/LTE/5G cell systems depend on clock synchronization derived from the same systems that are used for navigation)? We're overdue for another Carrington Event. Less severe storms in 1921 and 1960 caused progressively more damage and disruption as society became more dependent upon technology; a much, much smaller geomagnetic storm in 1989 took down power over most of Quebec, and in July 2012 a solar superstorm narrowly missed the earth. Certain classes of terrorist attacks could result in disruptions of similar scale and duration, and there's other forms of natural disaster and significantly worse pandemics that could cause widespread and prolonged disruption.
If past episodes that measured in handfuls of days are any indication, it would make what we've been dealing with this year look like a cakewalk.
The response of government at all levels to this pandemic reinforces some long-held beliefs: government cannot be relied upon to provide a magic wand to solve problems, one-size-fits-all solutions do not work, and at the end of the day it will be up to the individual and to small groups to figure out how to ride out the storm (whatever that storm might be), care for their neighbors, and care for their community (however they define it -- it may or may not be a collection of people thrown together by geography).
Sophia was created to perform research in sustainability, and to share our findings with others, through publications and workshops. We're better equipped than most to deal with disruption, but nowhere near where our plans call for us to be. And so the busy spring, because in addition to all of the other activities that spring brings to the farmer, we find ourselves overhauling our existing greenhouses and building more, pulling the trigger on projects intended to lead to complete energy independence on a scale sufficient not only to meet the needs of the farm, but to provide the minimum needed for our neighbors to have water and some level of light, to further improve our backup communications systems, and stepping up our targets for field restoration and forest management.
It's going to be a busy year at Sophia, but we feel as if we've been given a wake up call and a warning, and we're going to proceed with projects as if we had a gun to our collective head.
Keep safe, and look after each other.
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