It never fails: As soon as I hang up the phone, drop the letter in the mailbox, or hit “send” on an email, I think of something I should have said, should have said differently, or shouldn’t have said at all.

So it was that after last week’s blog I wondered why I hadn’t written about Earth Day.

So far as I’m concerned, The Complete Idiot’s Guide (CIG) to Self-Sufficient Living should have been required reading for Earth Day. It could be the Earth Day Manifesto. It could be the game plan for saving the Earth. But so far as I can tell, nobody connects its self-sufficiency message with sustainability the way I do.

Anyway, in that book I wrote “I could easily say that the future started around 1970 when the first Earth Day was celebrated, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created, and Arcosanti, an experiment in urban ecological architecture, started to take shape. The Whole Earth Catalog was in its second year; Countryside was launched in late 1969; and Mother Earth News appeared in January, 1970, indicating the widespread and growing interest in self-sufficient living and sustainability. It was also the year a group of scientists began work at the New Alchemy Institute. Clearly, something was afoot.”

This was one of those “Off the beaten path” sidebars. The chapter itself is titled “Looking Back, Moving Forward,” and has sections on Arcosanti and New Alchemy. But it also notes that there are four times as many people on Spaceship Earth today as there were in 1900, and vastly more “energy slaves” that affect such things as carbon and water footprints. Compare the planet to an island where there is ample food, water and fuel for just two people. When the two become eight, something has to give.

I said, “This is the new face of self-sufficient living. It’s not an option: it’s a mandate. But is that so bad? We’ve seen enough (in the preceding 333 pages) to suggest that maybe, just maybe, a new outlook, a new Establishment, might actually be kind of neat — even fun.”

The problem is that most people still don’t see the mandate. Much worse, they don’t even take the option seriously. They don’t want anything to change: they want to keep on making progress — down the same increasingly rutted dead-end road.

The “real estate crisis” is “over.” But instead of learning some lessons about sustainability, we’re going back to the resource-gobbling over-built and over-priced castles and mansions that provide no more shelter than a sensible cottage, but at far greater cost to the planet and humanity. Since we have all that space, we have to fill it — with junk. Instead of learning to live without automobiles, we dither around with talk of MPGs and cleaner fuel and all the rest that, in the final analysis, is nothing but a delaying tactic: putting a Band-Aid on a wound that requires amputation.

Speaking of cars, we can supposedly beat the oil shortage by drilling more offshore wells. That might not look quite as attractive this week, since the Deepwater Horizon “incident” that as of now is said to be spewing 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

But that could also bring us to the claim that such accidents aren’t supposed to happen: There are safeguards and measures to prevent them. Unfortunately, in this case they didn’t work. So what happens when the same types of safeguards don’t work with, say, a nuclear power plant? How much can we trust any scientific, engineering, to say nothing of political reassurances?

Unemployment? How does taking in each other’s laundry solve any long-term problems? What kind of decent economy (let alone a decent life) can be based on a workforce of burger flippers and prison guards? Most jobs today involve toil that’s deadening to the workers, useless to society (except for supporting the artificial consumer economy), and inimical to the planet.

All of this could be avoided. The rational solutions involve not simply rejiggering what hasn’t been working on a global environmental standpoint since the Industrial Revolution got underway, but realigning priorities and setting a new course. The simple steps to these solutions have already been pioneered — by homesteaders.

I often refer to The Establishment: the manufacturers and retailers, the realtors (one of several words I refuse to capitalize,not from editorial ignorance but on principle), lawyers and politicians, credit card companies, tv shows, and ultimately your friends, neighbors, relatives and co-workers who determine how content you are with your lot in life. It’s all relative. Many people feel deprived in a 2,434 sq. ft. house (the American average) because some other people have 4,000 sq. ft. houses — even though as recently as 1950 the average American home was 983 sq. ft., and we survived just fine. (A house that’s 2-1/2 times bigger than another house uses 2-1/2 times as many resources. Or even more when there are several opulent bathrooms, gourmet kitchens, and spacious watered lawns, along with several cars, multiple televisions and computers, and oodles of appliances and gadgets to fill all that space. Oh yeah, and clothes. And shoes.)

Earth Day and most other environmentalism is about conserving and recycling without making any basic changes. Much has changed in those 40 years, but still, many people — most people — see no need for making the drastic but essential corrections. For them, being unhappy and concerned about a few current problems is preferable to readjusting their attitudes and embracing the actions required.

Even when all the water in the world has turned to oil-slicked sewage (and most inhabited areas are either very close already, or they have no water at all, not even dirty water); when all the air in the world has become unbreatheable (60% of humanity now breathes unhealthful air, at least occasionally); I’m sure some of the people who now scoff at the idea of self-sufficient sustainable living will still be ranting and raving about being denied their perceived birthright to what they deem easy living. And after 40 years of writing about it, I’m no longer interested in even talking to such people.

The simple solution is simple living. But that’s too complicated to explain here, and I’m over my word limit already. Read the book.

Continuing with writers’ behind-the-scenes stories…

Warning: If you’re one of the sensitive readers the editors of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living were protecting from naughty words, better plug your ears, cover your eyes, or simply skip this and come back next week.

CIG to Self-Sufficient Living really isn’t so much about self-sufficient living as it is about saving the planet through sane living. Most readers seem to miss that, which sorely disappoints me, because I leaned over backwards to weave that into the “self-sufficiency” theme the publisher wanted. (What makes it worse is that the very first sentence is “This book is not what you’re expecting.”)

In Chapter 1, “What’s It All About?” I list all the varieties of self-sufficiency, most of which are connected with Saving the Earth in one way or another. And I close out the chapter by saying if you don’t fit into any of those categories, maybe you’re not a crew member of Spaceship Earth. You’re just a passenger… or perhaps even a mutineer. “They refuse to accept the finite and nonrenewable nature of many of the resources we consider essential to our way of life.  They don’t believe that everything is connected to everything else, and that their actions, and inactions, have widespread repercussions. They are, in effect, mutineers. They are pissing in our ship’s freshwater casks, and we have no way to replace that drinking water. It’s time, and past time, to stop these mutineers. It’s time to become more self-sufficient.”

I wanted to emphasize, as strongly and dramatically as possible, that the most important reason for self-sufficient living is to save Spaceship Earth. That required strong language.

But in the edited version it came out “urinating.”

Although I’m an ex-Marine and have a very extensive colorful vocabulary, I’ve always been very careful about my writing. After all, my mother used to read what I wrote. But doggone it, “urinating” is such a  piddly word, where I wanted something bold and robust.

By some odd quirk, even though I had never used that word in more than 50 years of writing for publication, it turned up again in the same book. It was on page 205, in Chapter 16: “Adam and Eve Did It.” Their “Garden of Eden” was no garden: they were foragers. This chapter is about wild foods —and again, not so much about scrounging for them as a means of self-sufficient living-off-the-land, but to demonstrate how recently we have come to rely on industrial agriculture, and how easily we could go back to stalking wild asparagus after unsustainable agribusiness collapses.

The book mangles one of my father-in-law’s standard jokes. He would have said, “Some people prepare dandelions and any wild food like kidneys: they boil the piss out of them.”

Again, an editor questioned my choice of words. This time I admitted that it was merely meant to be humorous, and could easily be deleted. But I warned, “if you take out that word, leave out the entire joke, or it doesn’t make any sense.”

So what did we get in the book?

“Some people prepare dandelions and any wild food like kidneys; they boil them.” Anyone who thinks that says the same thing as the original is not an editor. An editor should know something about the function of a kidney, a little about cooking… and a whole lot more about humor.

Here’s a weird and overlong footnote: an example of why writing takes me so much longer now than it used to. It involves having a lifetime of memories, not all of which are accurate.

I vividly recall a passage from one of the first “farming” books I read. We Chose the Country was written in 1948 by Herbert Jacobs, a Madison newspaper reporter who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and was teaching at the U.W. School of Journalism when I was a student there —all of which is mentioned in CIG to SSL, for various reasons. Jacobs told of a neighbor who described how to sow alfalfa using a horn seeder— a sack suspended from your shoulder, with a long tube extending from the bottom. “You just swing it back and forth like you was pizzn.”

When I first read that in the 1940s (or so I thought) it was extremely daring language. To be honest, I distinctly remember pondering the meaning: having been brought up in a home where naughty words simply were not allowed, it took me awhile to figure it out.  I was definitely thinking of that when I wrote about the Spaceship Earth water keg problem.

So imagine my surprise (and dismay) when I decided to check the exact wording of that quote for this blog… and couldn’t find it. Here’s what that passage actually said:

“How do I work this thing?” I asked Tony.

“Nothing to it,” he said. “Swing it from side to side, slowly. Just pretend —“ and here he whispered in my ear, chuckled heartily, and whacked me on the back.

I’m absolutely certain I did not make up the word “pizzn.” However, Herb’s wife and daughter were nearby, watching the operation, so I assume that’s why Tony whispered. No doubt Katherine later asked Herb what Tony had whispered, and that’s when I heard it.

But that’s speculation, because I don’t have time to read the entire book again to solve the mystery, much as I’d like to. And I already got waylaid because I discovered that my copy belonged to my father-in-law, which means I couldn’t have read it before I met Diane, in 1953.

In addition, in the process of writing this I learned that an original copy is now worth $45, and it’s #5,087,536 on the Amazon “Best Seller” list, which makes even my 1990 book, The Place Called Attar, look pretty good, at #1,280,634.

But hey, enough of this. I gotta go.

—Jd Belanger

Friday Evening Note: Several people have told me the picture referred to in the blog posted this morning… isn’t here! My first reaction was “How the dickens did those cagey lawyers do that?” Then son John, the computer professional, said it showed up in Safari, but not Foxfire or Internet Explorer, because those two don’t recognize TIFF images. So I converted it to jpg. It lost something in the translation, but hopefully it will at least show up!

Some people seem to be fascinated by writers and their craft. I don’t know why, and I’m not one of them. But since my latest book — my eighth and no doubt last book — has just come out, it’s National Library Week, and I’m going to be at a “book signing” at the Gilman library this afternoon, this is as close as I’ll ever get to being a big-time author. So it’s a good time to share a few behind-the-scenes stories, which I’m sure every writer has.

Some concern the fabled love-hate relationship writers have with editors and publishers. Since I’ve spent my entire professional life wearing all three hats, I’ve felt relatively immune. Yet, there are moments…

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Raising Chickens was released last week, and I got my author’s copies the other day. (And this book was finished — met the three-alarm red-hot super-important deadline — last July.) One of the first things I noticed was the caption on the first picture, on page 2. “Chickens run wild in many places in the world, even in cities: on the streets, in grocery store parking lots, and sometimes in front of restaurants where a certain colonel is known for chicken of a different kind. Here are some feral chickens in downtown Panama City, Panama.”

Okay. A little bland, but nothing wrong with it — unless you know the whole story.

My point was that raising chickens ain’t rocket science. (Maybe I went overboard on this throughout the book, because the editors seemed to want to make everything 10 times more complicated than it has to be.) There are lots of places where chickens flourish on their own, even where some people try to discourage them, such as Key West Florida and much of Hawaii, as well as places where you’d least expect to see them, such as in front of a KFC. And I had a knock-your-socks-off photo to prove it, thanks to Staci Walker of Danville, Illinois.

The editors (there were seven of them) found the picture as hilarious and fitting as I did. But when they stopped laughing, they said the company lawyers would never go for it.

Not to be thwarted by such a minor detail, I contacted KFC. Their PR people had to run it through legal, of course. But when that all-important deadline came up and I hadn’t heard from them, I had to put some pressure on them. The lawyers tossed off a noncommittal “we will neither license nor give permission to use this photo.”

Well, to me, in lawyer-speak, that simply meant they didn’t want to get stuck okaying the picture. It certainly didn’t say we couldn’t use it. (And how could they stop anyone from showing a picture of an advertising sign, taken on a public sidewalk, anyway?) But I knew the Alpha (Idiot) lawyers would side with their KFC (chicken) colleagues, and with the deadline looming, I decided to fight it with my own (and only) weapon: words.

The cutline I wrote said chickens run wild in many places, even where a certain colonel is known for chicken of a different kind. But I added, “The prissy square-toed lawyers wouldn’t let me show you that picture, but here’s one of some feral chickens in downtown Panama City.” I thought that added a little more punch, and sort of an imaginary visual. But the prissy square-toed editors deleted it.

Here’s Staci Walker’s picture — the one the lawyers didn’t want you to see.

Staci Walker took this picture on Grand Cayman.

By the way, the Panama photo used in the book is credited to David Chase. His name really is Chase Davis. That is most likely my fault, which is another story, but it shows it ain’t easy being an editor.

There’s more — much, much more. I won’t bother mentioning the “contest” they’re running to find the “most popular” Idiot’s Guide. For one thing, I just found out about it, and it ends at midnight tonight (April 16). In addition, it involves becoming a “follower” of @IdiotsGuides on Twitter, which is all Greek to me, and sounds kind of fishy. But that’s nothing, compared to some of the other insider, behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on.

Maybe I should write a book. — Jd Belanger