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This is a small cooperative farm. We seek inspiration and guidance in the comic strip Dilbert. For job parameters and protocols, please examine Options A-H We are searching for intelligent, enthusiastic, highly motivated, hard-working people willing to dedicate their brilliant minds to challenging work in the space-age environment of Adirondack Herbs. What follows are job descriptions for positions we must urgently fill. If you feel that you might qualify, please send us your resume. A. Firewood Reader. Some recent visitors have announced they are moving in soon, but we still have some empty houses. Who's here? Shane, 35, has been here since 1991. Lots, 24--who travels a lot between here and his buffaloes in Montana--and Swan, 45, have been here since 1998. Phoebe, 27, is sometimes here and sometimes in Georgia, and may or may be not accompanied by her three year old, Jacob. Finally, Ruthie, 33, and yours truly, Matt, your Unwilling Elder Reporter from Adirondack Herbs. Yes, I would prefer not being 69, and I would prefer being elsewhere. It's not that I am tired of my friends or of the Adirondacks. The problem is that my best friend, Marina, is in Italy, and I plan to join her next year. Our farms were once based just on the sale of oriental medicinal herbs, Hydrastis canadensis (goldenseal) and Echinacea angustifolia. We use both Macs and PCs, and are very interested in alternative energy and in alternative construction methods. We have built a steel fiber ferrocement cabin. Its 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick walls are impervious to rodents. When properly insulated, the cabin needs little heat in the winter, and is cool in the summer. We plan to build more of them, and we are going to have to tile a few floors. The tiles we like best are quite expensive. So, we are going to have to build a kiln, or maybe buy--or build-- a machine to cut boulders into stone flooring. We have a solar oven --which works nicely in spring and summer--and we built a solar water heater, which in this area is not very practical. We have built a few wood-fired water heaters, which provide us with the mythical perpetual hot shower out of wood discarded at the town dump. When we have enough competent brains and able hands, we will build channel-shaped parabolic solar energy mirror collectors, to generate steam power and to melt plastic bottles into boards for our raised bed garden. In this way we could solve the micro-local plastic garbage problem--at one of our farms we have jerk neighbours who burn garbage, fortunately downwind from us. We are not averse to wind machines and to hydro power, but for now we have to limit ourselves to the most urgent and least complicated projects, so far wood-fired water heaters and winter ice refrigeration. We have heated some of our houses with surplus vegetable oil. We have tried five different methods, but we have not as yet suceeded in creating a clean, efficient, and simple enough system. It would be nice to have a practical person, blessed with engineering tendencies, to concentrate on clean energy work. We have tools and buildings, but little time. If appropriate technology is your thing, we can start a cooperative business, such as manufacturing and marketing wood-fired water heaters or distributed solar receivers, items for which there is a definite need, at millions of farms and camps. If you have your own project or business to work on, use our tools and space, and just give us a couple of hours a day, or your weekends. There is much work to be done here. There are buildings to be insulated, there are irrigation water tanks and greenhouses to be built. For your work you get a proportioned share of the farm and of the eventual returns, details later. We guarantee basic necessities: food, winter clothes, heat, private room or cabin, telephone, computer, internet, sailboat, windsurfer, tobacco if required. For full time cooperation, we could add medical insurance and car insurance. Smoking limited to outdoors or to your own cabin. We do not have an optimistic view of the reality of human and work relationships, we are Dilbert fans. We are concerned about the obstacles to cooperation created by our shared human psychological tendencies. We are probably the only species that normally suffers from self-destructiveness and denial. When animals smell fire they start worrying. We don't. We just get another beer, and reject the unpleasant thought that our world may be on fire. I understand that the lemmings' drive to the sea is an unusual panicky event related to lack of food, while it's the best fed amongst us, who deliberately embark on self-destructive enterprises. Stuff like picking fights with our nicest neighbors, day after day humiliating mates and work associates, poisoning our own food, air, and water, "forgetting" to water the animals, building nuclear power stations, letting the dog run out on the road to get killed, burning plastic garbage, smoking in the face of the children, investing the mortgage money in the horses, pissing against the wind, or invading very hot countries. Why do we do it? "Because Father knows best .." Why? "Because." World trends are not very positive. In his article The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age, Richard Duncan writes: "The impending Post-Industrial Stone Age is a tragedy because it really isn't inevitable. There's no absolute reason why we couldn't live in material sufficiency on this planet for millions of years. But prudence isn't our forte. 'Even our success becomes failure.' And, in a way, it's not our fault. Long ago Natural Selection dealt us a bad hand-we're sexually prolific, tribal, short-term and self-centered. And after thousands of years of trying, Culture hasn't changed that. And there is no sign that She will." In a non-authoritarian system like ours here at Adirondack Herbs, since we have friendly neighbours and do not feel surrounded by enemy tribes, there is a tendency towards argument and inefficiency. In our species, we have solidarity in wartime, but in the absence of deadly enemies we tend to fight our own best friends. Should you consider working with us, we want you to read our detailed reports of everything that has gone wrong here in the past. It's better to learn from our friends' mistakes than to insist on finding out how it feels to fall into the very same stupid trap. We have friendly neighbours because we try not to be jerks. Many young and middle aged folks, especially after they have suffered humiliation or mental damage, will try anything just to attract attention. By being loud, by getting drunk, by making scenes, by putting on very uncomfortable weird outfits, by placing aggressive bumper stickers on their car. Some will try to project an attitude of "devil may care" by not tying up their shoelaces--they think it will get them noticed at the mall. So we try to avoid inviting jerks to live with us, and when the neighbours behave like jerks, we ignore it. When they shot our geese, we didn't shoot their animals. When they hit our dog, and didn't even stop, we did not go and scream at them. So now all neighbours have enemies across the road or across the creek, while we don't. To the neighbours who burn garbage, we offer to take in their plastic bottles and toys. What's the alternative? Call in the police and make sworn enemies. Still, we must warn you now, we do hold on to certain odd beliefs. Most people spray and swat at mosquitoes after letting them into the house. We are weird, we believe in putting tight-fitting screens without holes on windows and doors. We believe in closing doors. Normal people do not believe that closing doors is important. They think it's nice, but not very important. We think they are sloppy, we think they will be doing sloppy work tomorrow, unless they learn to close all doors today, and all the time, not most of the time. We believe that if a screen has a hole, we ought to reach for the glue gun and patch that hole right now, instead of planning to replace the screen sometime, maybe next week. Another odd beliefs of ours: if a mosquito gets through the screen after you fixed it, then you didn't fix it. We believe that house fires are not AoG's (Acts Of God). No, we believe that house fires are ASP's(Acts of Sloppy People). Normal people fertilize, lime, and spray insecticide because they believe, they feel, they know, everyone knows it must be done. Divine inspiration. We are uninspired, we lime if the Ph meter tells us we need it. Except for roof rafters, floor-built walls, and picture fromes, we use screws and battery drills, not nails and hammers. We are weird. Normal people use nails, especially when building temporary structures that must be taken apart soon. If we take down a board, we remove the screws, because it takes seconds and because we can re-use both wood and screws. Normal people leave nails on, because nails are hard to pull out. They are men of faith, they know that they, their kids, and their dog will never step on the nailed boards which they judiciously throw on the ground here and there. Besides, they know that George is coming to pick up after them. Let George do it. We are weird, we got this idea that our friends and neighbors have dead frog in their drinking water. Dead frogs? Dead frogs, I told you we are crazy. So we see that the neighbor's well cover does not fit tight. He says, "It's no problem, really. Trust me, this is a fine well, the water is good." So I see a chipmunk, a mouse, a frog, and a live snake perched on a floating stick, all down in the well. I pull them out with a sieve attached to a pole. The neighbor still thinks it's no problem, it could not happen again, lightning never strikes twice: he is a man of faith. Our own wells do have tight covers, but that does not help us, if the kids decide to take a peek down the well. They move the well cover aside, and do not put it back. You have sloppy friends, who do not watch their kids, you got dead frogs in your drinking water. Which will not kill you, but why volunteer ourselves--and the frogs--for the experience? Normal people stack their wood outdoors, under the rain and snow. It's what they call "seasoning" the firewood. In winter they hack their firewood out of the snow and ice. A neighbor says that his stove is "so good, that it burns wood and ice, no problem." Once we saw a friend of ours stack his firewood under the roof drip line, without a piece of metal roofing over the stack. He had some old roofing, but he did not worry about a little rain. We do worry about wet wood, we believe that firewood should be dried in the woodshed, not under the rain. Pretty weird ideas, I say. That's America, but if you travel to far away places you will find that in most other countries it's worse. We try to develop a less wasteful lifestyle. We have observed our Amish neighbors. They seem to have a very sensible approach to life, and we can learn a lot from them. For example, they use winter ice refrigeration, which means that their food stays cool during blackouts. Still, like everything else, also the old ways of doing things can be improved: instead of dragging muddy ice from the pond, we thought of making it on location, inside the walk-in cooler. That can be done by opening a door and blowing cold air in. By the way, we do not plan to stop using refrigerators and freezers, but we could use a winter ice cooler for our apple crop. Regards, Matt
(webmasters note; updated on Aug 31, 2003. If you cant read this updated version then your too stupid to use a comp or are one of the remaining 2% of the market that's still living in 1992 and thinks Macs are swell. Get over it, grow up, go out and get a real computer. You can also try to use IE for Mac if your not to worried that Bill Gates is trying to take over the world starting with YOUR computer.)
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