August is canning season: in my kitchen, strawberry jam, rhubarb and ginger jam, green tomato chutney and relish, dilled carrots and garlic mushrooms.
Canning hours in the night watches there is time for reading and reflection.
This year I have been learning about world population growth.
What does all this have to do with Mountain View County?
Many of us make our living in oil, natural gas and agriculture.
Paul Chefurka is a former photojournalist, now a federal public servant.
He has made a study of the earth's carrying capacity of human population and writes that population growth has overshot the capacity of earth to provide the resources to sustain it.
The reason is that fossil fuel mechanized farming and produced chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides to enable a Green Revolution.
Population then grew from 1.2 billion in 1900 to its present 7.1 billion souls, and at the present growth rate, 9.7 billion by 2050.
Apparently we can't live with oil and we can't live without it.
Parallel with fossil fuel exploitation and the green revolution, although not part of Chefurka's analysis, the Industrial Revolution started a technology revolution that is continuing to change transportation, communication, medicine, energy and science.
Chefurka believes we have passed the turning point and face catastrophic years after which population size will stabilize at a sustainable 1.2 billion.
There is nothing left to do except to live a good life, Chefurka says – good in the Buddhist and Christian sense of right spiritual living.
Human apocalypse is unthinkable, especially in the quiet hours of jamming and pickling when the smell of the ingredients pervades the kitchen and the steam rises from the boiler.
Norse mythology envisages the twilight of the gods, Ragnarök, when those caught up in catastrophic events heroically continue the struggle for good knowing their end is inevitable.
After Ragnarök and after Chefurka's population overshoot and correction, human life revives and the earth becomes livable again.
This is a future equally for science and faith and canning.
Frank Dabbs is a veteran business and political journalist, author of three biographies, and a contributor to, researcher or editor of half a dozen books.
