"Plastiki": The Plastic-Bottle Boat

I'd somehow (mistakenly) assumed that once my last blog was posted, I was done with plastic debris stories, but synchronicity struck again that very night--and of course, in my world, synchronicity always has the last word. So there I was in bed with the New Yorker, when I began, quite innocently, to read John Colapinto's essay, called "Message in a Bottle," having no idea what it was even about.

Well, it's all about this man, David de Rothschild, a thirty-year-old heir to the British banking fortune and an Arctic and Antarctic adventurer, who is currently building a sixty-foot catamaran out of thousands of discarded plastic water bottles. His intention is to sail across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney, a journey of 11,000 miles, stopping en route to visit the Eastern Garbage Patch--the very same region of floating plastic trash I had just finished writing about in "The Albatross Necklace," halfway between Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. Estimated to be twice the size of Texas, this is where the slow, clockwise eddy known as the North Pacific Gyre keeps plastic debris rotating around indefinitely. The polymer particles, as they break down, are eaten by zooplankton and jellyfish and consumed by fish, eventually passing into the food chain of humans.

De Rothschild's goal, it seems, is the same one as Pam Longobardi's in "Drifters," and Cindy Waddington's in her necklaces: to make the point that humans are trashing the oceans. He also hopes to prove that by turning plastic waste into a reusable resource, it could revolutionize the shipbuilding industry. Perhaps one day we will all be riding around in bottle boats! Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the catamaran is made from recycled plastic. The boat will also produce its own energy through solar panels, wind turbines, and stationary bikes to power small, battery-run motors that can maintain several laptop computers, a GPS, and a SAT phone. Everything on the boat will be composted, so no new pollution will be added to the ocean or the atmosphere. Everything is going to be recycled, including the boat itself, after the journey.

The bottles are being made brick-like by injecting dry-ice powder into them, which turns into carbon-dioxide gas and pressurizes them, making them rigid. None of these materials have yet been tested against serious ocean waves, much less cyclones or other weather hazards. But working with unknowns is part of the adventure, according to de Rothschild. "Ignorance is bliss in these situations," he says. His adventurous spirit emboldens and impels him. It's not unlike the risks undertaken by another adventurer, Thor Heyerdahl, in 1947, when he traveled for 101 days across 4,300 miles of ocean, from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in the South Pacific, in a raft made of balsa logs lashed together with hemp ropes.

Heyerdahl called his boat the "Kon-Tiki," and in homage to Heyerdahl's journey, de Rothschild has named his bottle boat the "Plastiki." He plans on having Thor's grandaughter, and her cousin, Olav, join the small crew for part of the voyage, which he is hoping to launch some time this summer. Hopefully, too, they won't run into any pirates or they would be dead ducks. Meanwhile, de Rothschild can be often be found taking sailing lessons in San Francisco Bay. It's a good way to get your blood going, and it smells good too. I wish him well.

The Albatross Necklace

Somewhat in the manner of a triumphal cat who has dragged home the wretched dead mouse, I returned from my Lynchburg experience bearing an unlikely trophy: an outsized necklace of sausage-shaped beads, whose nebula of soft, buzzy colors I'm assuming even Andy Warhol would have loved.

The necklace looks pretty enough, seems innocent enough, until you learn its story--after which there is the inevitable spasm. Its beads are made from plastic salvaged from the guts of dead albatrosses. They have been fashioned into lei necklaces by an artist from Hawaii, Cindy Waddington, who lives on Oahu, for the Friends of Midway Atoll. The knowledge of their origin is arresting: you realize these beads contain the hushed urgency of death and it makes you flinch.

Midway Atoll consists of three islands and a shallow white sand lagoon, sheltered from the surrounding Pacific Ocean by a coral reef. It is the major breeding ground for over two million seabirds including the world's largest colonies of black-footed albatrosses--and it is also adjacent to two of the largest and most deadly concentrations of floating plastic debris. Officially the most threatened seabird species in the world, albatrosses die in unprecedented numbers partly from becoming entangled in fishing nets, and partly from ingesting marine debris, in the form of plastic that they mistake for food and then can't digest.

I acquired my necklace from Wayne Sentman, a naturalist, field biologist, and third speaker at the conference, who had brought along several of them as part of his show-and-tell eco-talk. The necklaces are available from a gift shop on Midway Atoll, now a National Wildlife Refuge and the second largest marine protected area in the world, situated 1,200 miles northwest of Honolulu. Since l994, Wayne has been conducting ecotourism trips and field programs for the Oceanic Society, to educate the public regarding habitat and species protection, at sites that include the one on Midway Atoll, as well as others in Micronesia, Africa, and South America. (More information about these adventure expeditions can be found at www.oceanicsociety.org.)

Thinking about this necklace and its distinctive role as keeper of the albatross's story--and the poisoning of the oceans--I was suddenly struck by its unlikely resonance with the idiomatic phrase "an albatross around your neck," alluding, of course, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which a sailor shoots a friendly albatross and is forced to wear its carcass around his neck as a punishment. According to Google, an albatross (around your neck) is someone or something that causes you a lot of problems and stops you from being successful. When I scrolled down further, I found some intriguing search results, suggesting that certain humans (Republicans in particular) may be as equally tough to digest, once they have entered the system, as is plastic:

"The 'Rick Warren Albatross' around Obama's Neck"..."Palin, the albatross around McCain's neck"..."Cheney is the Albatross Around George Bush's Neck"..."The Bush-Cheney Albatross Around McCain's Neck." And on and on it goes. Every culture has its own way of driving people crazy. I even found "The Obama Stimulus Plan--An Albatross around the Neck of America." With the metaphor of the albatross, politics has met its match.

Already in 1892, according to an essay in Resurgence magazine written by Mark Cocker, the naturalist W.H. Hudson was sounding the alarm about the imminent extinction of an ostrich-like bird, the rhea, from the Argentine pampas. "What a wail there would be in the world if a sudden destruction were to fall on the accumulated art-treasures of the National Gallery, the marbles in the British Museum, and contents of the King's Library," Hudson wrote in his book "The Naturalist in La Plata." He goes on to lament the significantly higher value we place on human creativity and culture than we place on the survival of other species.

Wayne and Pam Longobardi plan to collaborate in the future on several projects, one of which will be to curate an exhibition of environmental artists from around the globe, who use marine debris in their work, along with a forum to inspire possible action on the problem. So, a muscular vision of our ruined world may soon be headed your way. Will it trigger the required wake-up? The thing I love most about my new necklace is the way it bites you in the backside. As the dangers to planetary survival escalate, this one chunky little bauble, in its own subtle way, helps (if I may steal a phrase from Barbara Kingsolver) to explain our pickle. Probe it, and the path is illuminated: two hundred years of unsustainable and unmanaged growth economy that have allowed this necklace, with its implicit reproach, to exist.

Art in the Plastocene Era

Did you know that when you toss out your empty plastic bottle of shampoo it hangs around the planet for a thousand years? I learned this lurid fact from Pam Longobardi, the other artist whose work is currently being exhibited along with Sue Johnson's (see my previous post) at the Maier Museum in Lynchburg. Pam was talking about her current project entitled "Drifters," whose subject happens to be plastic rubble. The inspiration (if inspiration is indeed the correct word) for this project arrived unexpectedly, when she discovered an enormous tangle of plastic fishing nets and other plastic debris while camping at a remote beach on the southernmost tip of the Big Island in Hawaii.

Attracted at first by the astonishing spectacle of the day-glo colors--almost a hallucination--and then by the lethal implications of what she was really seeing, it did not take long for Pam to realize that she had stumbled inadvertently into what she describes as "an environmental nightmare."

These fragments--combs that have lost their teeth, battered toys that look like gnawed bones, discarded flip-flops and mangled toothbrushes--were all heavy with rabid meaning. "Do you want to expose these scenes to the light?" Annie Dillard asks in "The Writing Life." "You may locate them and leave them, or poke the spot hard till the sore bleeds on your finger, and write with that blood...you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it." Pam recognized this scene as a deadly portrait--of late capitalist global society and how we've fouled the ocean. She couldn't just leave it, but had to write with that blood for many years in order to share what she had witnessed.

She began by documenting the site with photographs and carrying out duffle bags filled with the plastic debris, intending to create art with what she'd found. Her subsequent creations made with plastic fragments are reminiscent of the work of English artist Tony Cragg, who also assembled found plastic remnants in the 1980s--but with a huge difference. Cragg's interest in plastic debris was entirely formalistic, engaged with the dazzling colors and eccentric shapes as a new form of art material. As Pam states: "In the '80s when Cragg was making pictures on the wall with garbage, plastic was fun. Now plastic is dangerous." It is the dangerous, degrading aspect of plastic that powers Pam's work, the crushing devastation hidden inside its gaudy allure.

In her by now extensive research, Pam has learned there exists in the Pacific a "garbage patch" of plastic the size of Texas. Thinking it is food, fish and birds eat these fragments, which then becomed embedded in their tissues and cause them to die. An oeceanic current called the North Pacific Gyre sweeps North, counterclockwise, up the coast of the Americas, west across the upper Arctic, south along the Asian coast, and then back toward the Hawaiian Islands--picking up debris along the way. It can take six years of riding the currents before the plastic arrives in the Gyre, and lands on that Hawaiian beach. Once there, however, it never leaves except as food ingested by members of the oceanic food chain. What was once an ordinary, functional object in human life has mutated into another kind of dark entity: trash.

"In a perverse continuation of the change of hands of commerce," Pam writes, "these objects circle the globe on oceanic currents, plied first by trade, then by trade winds....Joining Plant, Animal, and Mineral, we now must acknowledge a new kingdom, a Fourth Kingdom, the kingdom of Plastic, an army whose members never die or decompose, and threaten to outnumber all others."

On a mission of sorts, the artist is now planning a book about plastic and pollution that will encompass its artistic, scientific, and cultural aspects. In addition to her own work, the book will include essays by five other interdisciplinary contributers. More information about Pam's work can be found on her websites: www.driftwebs.com and www.pamlongbardi.com.

Virgil Meets the Duckheadtail Crocodile

Last Saturday Virgil found a new friend in, of all places, Lynchburg. I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at the Maier Museum in conjunction with an exhibition of the work of two artists, Sue Johnson and Pam Longobardi. I wasn't familiar with the work of either of them, so I was wasn't wildly enthusiastic about accepting the invitation. It turns out I was dead wrong. Fortunately the curator, Martha Johnson, gently persisted, sending me extensive documentation, and when I glimpsed the portrait of Virgil's fabulous new potential soul-mate in Sue Johnson's catalogue called "The Alternate Encyclopedia," I knew I was supposed to go--at the very least for Virgil's benefit. Virgil prides himself on his reputation for eccentricity and likes to burnish it any chance he gets, (I also received, subsequently, a folder of information from Pam Longobardi, and was also very drawn to her current project, "Drifters," but more about this in a separate post.) Meanwhile it was refreshing to leave the war zone of economic collapse and immerse myself instead in the Borges-like pantheon of Sue Johnson's creatures.

Sue describes herself as a "surrealvisionarymorphicnaturalist," who inhabits a parallel universe in which James Audubon, Max Ernst, Walt Disney, and assorted birds and animals all take tea together, like nineteenth-century dandies, at Alice's table in Wonderland. Incorporate into this cast of characters the likes of Pegasus, Peter Cottontail, and the Ugly Duckling, subject them to dissection as if they were scientific specimens, throw in a few old Bestiaries, anatomy charts, a bit of botany and genetic engineering, and you enter the eerie but utterly irresistible world of Sue Johnson's encyclopedias and cabinets of curiosities, where everything seems scientifically real, but not quite. "I'm very drawn to cross-sections," she says, "as a way of exposing things we don't normally see."

I am also drawn to her free-associative, evocative writing, as well as her images. "The Alternate Encyclopedia," for instance, also contains an alternate Table of Contents, from which I steal the following eccentric tidbits:

"Spelling bees suspended across the globe...Snakes in liquid...The last buffalo sighted ion Duluth....Common workman's wrench and deep-sea shrimp are relatives...Plastic bags prove their worth...Olive loaf aids digestion...Startling proof offered that moon is made of compressed moon-rock material...Local zoo now empty." Sue Johnson teaches at St Mary's College in MD. You can check out this work on her website for more treats at: www.suejohnson1.com

As for Virgil, he remains in awe at all those ducks reincarnated in a brother crocodile's tail. He has determined that if the ducks all quack at once, or if they whistle the entire parts of string quartets, it registers at the oceanography lab in Tokyo. Even the sound of one duck quacking is almost more than he can bear, and inspires him to dance along, something he just loves to do..

A Lesson of Buttons and Bonnets

It's still No. 1 on the hit-parade: The Economy. Forget UGH, or AARGH. This week's phrase-making addition to the vocabulary of revulsion is, well, AIG. (Pronounce it "egg," or "eck," and you'll eventually get to "ick.") Those 70-odd bonuses, paid out it would seem, with government bailout money, to CEOs, has set the entire country on fire. We could see heads rolling in the streets before it is all over. So far, we're not allowed to know the names of the recipients, because it could be their heads rolling, quite literally, given the onslaught of threats (to strangle entire families with wire coat-hangers, for instance) that have been issued by an enraged populace. This latest injustice is a stone in the public's shoe, as one NPR commentator stated, that has to be removed. That's putting it mildly; it reads to me like a possible prelude to a home-grown French Revolution--which is why Congress plans on clawing the money back through taxes.

"It seems as though it would be pretty easy to upend a bonus contract that must read something like: 'If you ruin the world economy, we’ll pay you an extra million,' " quips Maureen Dowd, Queen of Snark, in the New York Times. "What President Obama should have said to the blood-sucking bums at A.I.G.," she writes, "many of them foreigners who were working at the louche London unit, was quite simple: 'We stopped the checks. They’re immoral. If you want Americans’ hard-earned cash as a reward for burning up their jobs, homes and savings, sue me.' ”

Obama, however, still has some tricks left up his sleeve. He will probably turn the tables and use AIG as an example to catalyze public support for significant regulatory reform. Republicans, eat your heart out!

Meanwhile, it's probably no accident that every second cartoon in the New Yorker each week pertains to the economy. Infusions of humor injected into the public's stiffened jaws allow them to briefly shake, jiggle and bounce. A good laugh never hurts. So this guy comes up to a hot-dog stand on the street intending to inquire about a job. But there are already eight other men huddled under the umbrella, tongs in hand ready to serve a hot dog to the next customer. "Sorry," reads the caption. "We don't need anyone at the moment." Then there are the two women standing in front of a store front whose window is filled with sale signs of 50-75% off. "Finally!" one says to the other, a smile breaking through her furrowed brow. "Cheap is the new black!"

Synchronistically, I have to say I also enjoyed the "Shouts & Murmurs" column in the March 16th New Yorker by Paul Rudner: "Confessions of a Pilgrim Shopaholic." The narrator, one Rebecca Hamshill, is living in Plymouth Colony, having arrived there in 1626. During her first year in the New World, she traveled to Boston to purchase a thimbleful of salt, and five years later, she goes back again to get another one. "I am out of control," she reports. Her mind is consumed with nothing but thoughts of spending.

At one point, she points to the story of another profligate like herself but in the Virginia Colony, who bartered her second child to a local tradesman for a wooden button (all this could have been written by James Howard Kunstler on a good-hair day, were he more funny, but it wasn't). Other women became so envious of her button that they ripped her limbs from her torso and ate them. (AIG palookas beware! It could happen to you.) Eventually her demon of greed requires a public exorcism, presided over by the town pastor with all the villagers repeating the Lord's Prayer.

As the villagers lay their hands upon her, the demon cackles and swears: "A bonnet! Bring me another bonnet! A peaked black bonnet as fine as any widow's!" At which point, Rebecca loses consciousness. When she wakes up the next day, her demon has vanished, "gone back to his fetid underworld."

The word "underworld" unexpectedly conjures up Virgil, my alligator assistant, who arrives suddenly, smelling of hair oil and some kind of food. He nods his head in vehement approbation, and starts making the random, spontaneous remarks that are his trademark, and so often oddly appropriate.

"This is Hello Day for all those CEO political lepers," he says. "You see what can happen to folks who crave too many wooden buttons and black bonnets. My advice to you all is, do not be purposely troublesome. The mojito fountain is no longer operating as usual--so Baby, it's time to meet the bath water. If not, you too will probably be going the way of the auk and the dodo, falling into extinction."

Then, after a pause, I see Virgil step out, an ordinary alligator again, and make his way back to the terminal.

Tiptoeing through the Economic Jigsaw

Many in the top brass on Wall Street are wondering whether Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner is the right man for putting these economic bad times behind us. Being an amateur in fiscal matters myself, I'm hardly qualified to judge, but I can say this much. After watching an hour-long interview this week with Geithner on Charlie Rose, Geithner comes off as someone with phenomenal powers of persuasion.

I've watched dozens of these Rose interviews, but not once have I ever witnessed such heights of concentrated alertness from any mere mortal. Not for a nanosecond did Geithner ever unglue his eyes from those of his interlocutor sitting across the table, nor pause to search for the precise word he needed. No momentary confusion or obfuscatory verbiage ever tainted his unassailable flawlessness at every point. In Geithner's vision, the economy is like some intricate jigsaw, in which all the disparate, ailing pieces merely await the right puzzlemaster, perhaps Geithner himself, able to reassemble the parts in one suave stroke, bringing coherency out of chaos again. Completely absorbed in his words, I had to wonder if Geithner could be right--could indeed be a one-man antibody for a rogue economy, who might actually succeed in setting things right again, if we would just follow his lead. I was certainly tempted to surrender to his expertise and suggestions of inevitable recovery. But then, a short time later, I went back to my reading of James Howard Kunstler's novel, "World Made by Hand," (which I promised to blog about in my previous post), and was immediately stopped dead in my tracks with wondering: When is happy talk like Geithner's merely cosmetic? When is it useful? When is it dubious?

The contrast between Geithner and Kunstler is nothing less than startling, like a long-running movie made by two different directors. Kunstler's mortuary novel is set in a little backwater town, Union Grove, in upstate New York (where the Battenkill River runs into the Hudson). Not only has economic recovery not taken place, but a couple of unspecified terrorist attacks have destroyed several major metropolises and vaporized the Federal Government. Ocean surges during a hurricane have left parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn uninhabitable. So what is the world, as seen through Kunstler's eyes, like after collapse?

Here, from my notes as I went along, are some key elements:

"Among us survivors were many who were confused and despondent," states the main character, Robert, who has lost his wife to encephalitis, his daughter to flu (there are no antibiotics or refrigeration), and his son, who took off at age 15 and has not been seen or heard from again. It's the end of the fossil-fuel-driven economy; there are no no laws, no infrastructure, no industry, no oil, no automobiles, no radio, no TV, phones, mail, or recreational shopping, no coffee. In this scarred remnant of our previous existence, people live by fishing, trading, and carpentry. Survivalism mixes with an unrelenting sense of loss: "It was chilling to reflect on how well the world used to work and how much we'd lost...I tried to avoid nostalgia because it could destroy you." In Kunstler's anthropology of the future, those individuals whose lives happened in the old days are the ones most devastated by this scarred world that has become a salvage operation, its scattered populations making do with lumber and sheet metal collected from derelict buildings, and getting by with the good will of helpful neighbors. In short, there has been no return to "normality."

Presumably the truth lies somewhere between Geithner's "happy talk" and Kunstler's grim vision. Then again, maybe not. It's hard to know. "I've read everything on the subprime-mortgage and banking crises I can get my hands on, writes editor Graydon Carter in the current issue of Vanity Fair, "and I still don't understand much of it." (This is the hot new club of which we are all now card-carrying members.) "As far as the global economic crisis goes," Carter states, "part of me thinks that the U.S. has gone off a cliff pretty much the way Wile E. Coyote does in the Road Runner cartoons. He doesn't drop immediately; he's suspended in midair. He knows he shouldn't be out there, but he's not plunging! Filled with hope, he begins to gingerly tiptoe his way back to the ledge. He's almost made it--he's not going to fall! And then, with a puff of dust, he's gone, plummeting far, far down into the canyon. As a nation, we might just be in the tiptoeing stage: we know we've screwed up big time, but we're praying that we can get back to the ledge before gravity takes over."

One thing is sure: there's not much room left to maneuver.

Owning Up to the Mess

In a recent article by Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, she confesses that after his major speech before the Houses of Congress last week, she has finally accepted that Barack Obama really is her president. It became clear to her that whatever difficulties and debacles surround him, Obama convincingly communicates to the public that someone is at last in charge. "Someone's in the kitchen," she says. "Someone's cooking."

"Mr. Obama doesn't do jaunty," she added. "He did not leave people thinking, now I know we will defeat this calamity. But he did leave them feeling, now I know someone's in charge, finally someone's taken ownership of the mess." It's a huge relief, as Noonan says, to have someone in office who is actually minding the store, and to know that this time around, we have a President who is stepping up to the plate. I felt so exhilarated myself by this feeling of relief that I even bought a tee-shirt and a necklace of different colored, blue-glass beads--things I don't really need. For an hour or so I morphed back into being a happy, oblivious consumer, but my high spirits did not last. It didn't take much before I lapsed back into worry mode again, because I realize that no matter who is doing the cooking, we are still fucked. Even if the smartest guy in the room, bar none, serves up the Mother of All Banquets, we may not defeat this calamity. I know to say this is the mark of a "debilitating pessimism," and I will not be looked on favorably for spending time in this dismal place--it is not the way to win friends and influence people--but there it is: my dirty secret. I confess I'm not sure even (my) beloved Barack is ready to face the kind of changes we are probably in for.

The fact that we have moved out of the previous ongoing fiasco of governance into the miracle of real leadership has not stanched the massive hemorrhaging of the global financial system. On his blog, Clusterfuck Nation (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com) Kunstler, a Peak Oil expert, dares to ask the question nobody wants to ask, because the true answer may just be too death-dealing: Is the USA in recession, depression, or collapse? We're now at 340 pink slips per hour, but the debate continues to revolve around whether to call what is happening a recession or a depression. Except for a handful of folks like Kunstler, no one wants to stare down at ground zero and enlist the dreaded word: ongoing "collapse."

Looking at the world through the President's eyes, normality will return. Economic confidence will return, but "not overnight." The consumer economy will stand on its feet again and resume "growth" mode, albeit not before mammoth cash infusions and technological innovations that will make everything more environmentally sustainable. Looking at the world through Kunstler's eyes, however (a vision which is sadly closer to my own), the consumer era is over for good, and most of what has been lost in 2008 will not be recovered; in Kunstler's words, "enterprises, personal fortunes, chattels, reputations." Technology will not be able to rescue us from our fossil-fuel predicament, and we should be facing that fact, according to Kunstler, instead of imagining ways and mounting campaigns to sustain the unsustainable: "electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta," and "drive-in espresso stations...run on a combination of solar and wind power."

It's not that Kunstler doesn't support and admire Obama. He voted for him. However, "I fret about the measures he'll promote to rescue the the Status Quo....I am especially concerned," he writes, "about an infrastructure stimulus project aimed at highway improvement at the expense of public transit...[because] the car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not." The impossibility of getting car loans or paying for fuel will escalate the impending collapse of an industry already on its last legs and going into bankruptcy. Eventually, Kunstler believes even the federal government will flounder just like General Motors, Citicorp, and other giant corporations have already floundered; eventually even counties, municipalities, and states will all 'join in the bankruptcy fiesta." Maintaining public services like water systems, sewage treatments, and even food distribution will become impossible. Danger and deprivation will be the new and disturbing name of the game. It's not a pretty picture for the human race, and the end is not happy. You can understand why Obama, and the rest of America, refuses to go there. It's just too dark and desperate.

Kunstler has written a novel called "World Made by Hand, in order to give us the feel, in fictionalized form, of what that future may look like when all fantasies of the "growth economy" are long gone. I am currently reading his book, and will probably blog about it in another post. Meanwhile, in the current entry on his blog, he has this to say:

"If we're really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales....If the US government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote local, smaller-scaled farming using methods that are much less dependent on oil byproducts and capital injections."

The post-industrial, post-fossil fuel, post-technological, and post-consumer society will definitely need to have its agrarian ducks in a row, if it is going to survive.