Fall 2005
MLT Newsletter
Last spring came and went and while some things
popped up in our garden, a newletter wasn't one of them. While I
am much to blame, call it procrastination, I also did not receive any
articles, except for 2 from Maynards and another from a Canadian which
Ken supplied. In itself this would have been okay, except that
both ofthese authors were
featured in the last newsletter almost 12 long months ago. I am
going to be unapologetic and print them. Please send me articles!
Maynard's thought
and writings on the subject of energy and food are renown in its own
right but when combined with his lifestyle of selfsufficiency not just
in food but in home energy use in which he and Barbara rely on solar and wind power, his writing take on an acute potency with his practice matching what
he preaches! The first article was adapted by Maynard from his
keynote address to the 2005 Organic Agriculture Conference at Michigan
State University last March. The third and last article reviews 2 books
concerning the concept of “Peak Oil”. Wayne Roberts
is Toronto based writer and activist, member of The Toronto Food Policy
Council which seems aligned with MLT.
ORGANIC FARMING AND THE ORGANIC WAY OF LIFE
Maynard Kaufman
"Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness of life and things,
The divine beauty of the universe."
--Robinson Jeffers
I am very pleased to be able to
contribute some thoughts to the topic of this conference, "Growing
Michigan's Organic Future." Just as this topic stretches the word
"organic" somewhat beyond organic farming, so I will be working with a
broader definition of organic, a definition which implies the
harmonious unity of parts fitting together to make an integrated
whole. Many of us see organic farming itself in these
wholistic terms. Remember the old maxim, "feed the soil, not the
plant." I think I heard it first about 35 years ago at some kind
of organic meeting where the old guys were
muttering to each other, "Yeah, feed the soil, not the
plant." When we organic growers get our soil tested we don't
worry much about the recommendations for how many pounds of fertilizer
it would take to produce a certain yield of a crop. We use the
soil test as a general guideline which helps us monitor the health of
the soil. And we add the organic matter because we want the
biological life in the soil to thrive. We depend on that
biological activity in the soil to provide nourishment for our crops
more than on any specific plant nutrients.
I want to explore what organic farming
implies about an organic way of life. We have already seen that
it is wholistic and this implies that it is ecological, where
everything is related to everything else. There is an ecological
ethic which is rooted in our commitment to organic farming and then
proceeds from there to shape the rest of our lives, an ethic which
prompts us to work and live in harmony with nature.
Although this may sound somewhat sentimental and sloppy, I think we are
all conscious of this as a general guideline. What I want to do
is sharpen our awareness of this idea and show how extremely important
the organic way of life is as a constructive model in the larger
culture of today. Not only are we doing what makes us feel good
as farmers, we are thereby literally doing good. I'll say more
about this later.
The larger culture around us is
seriously out of balance. We are living in Dark Times; some say
End Times. The mega-corporations in control of the world are
focused primarily on making money, and in the process they are
destroying nature. Several years ago Bill McKibben wrote a book
called, The End of Nature, in which he reviewed the effects of global
warming caused by burning fossil fuels. More recently he wrote
Enough in which he warns us about the possible end of human nature
through genetic engineering. Most of us are familiar with
the recent assault on nature by corporations like Monsanto as they
replace natural seeds with engineered seeds. The novelist,
Barbara Kingsolver, has called biotechnology "a fist in the eye of
God." It is a lethal threat to biodiversity and to the stability
of ecosystems.
It may be helpful to spend a
couple of minutes to understand how this sorry state of affairs came
about. For thousands of years the regenerative power of nature
was regarded as sacred. We in this room still feel vestiges of
this: the miracle of new life in spring, for example.
Farming was accompanied with religious rituals, both to insure
fertility and because, as a direct intervention in that regenerative
power it was laden with risk. Farming was a religious activity
because it participated in the power of the sacred. (I hope you
can indulge me in this religious and theological analysis. I did
have a theological education, along with other food and agriculture
people such as Brewster Kneen and Fred Kirschenmann. Fred and I
were graduate students in the University of Chicago Divinity School at
the same time. We did learn a lot about God, but from
theologians like Paul Tillich we also learned to recognize demonic
powers in the form of capitalist exploitation.)
The Enlightenment and the
Scientific Revolution during the last three or four centuries gradually
changed the sacred understanding of agriculture and food. We
learned how plants grow. We learned that they need nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium, along with trace minerals, and we learned how
to add these to the soil to make plants grow. If weeds or insects
interfered with our plants we made pesticides to kill them. The
earlier sense of the organic unity of nature was replaced by a
mechanistic view. Personal involvement was replaced by scientific
technique. Wherever people adopted a scientific world-view, a
sense for the regenerative power of nature was lost. People moved
from the sacred to the profane.
But the worship of power did not simply
end; it was transformed. It is extremely important to understand
that as people lost a sense for the sacred power in nature they gained
a new respect for the power to control nature. The scientist in
his white lab coat replaced the priest or shaman as our contact with
the sacred. Agribusiness replaced the farmer. People were
gradually convinced they had better living through
chemistry. They became consumers of commodities in what
seemed to be a totally desacralized world.
I say "seemed to be" because the worship
of power had not ended. But the object of that worship was no
longer the sacred regenerative power in nature. Most people in
the modern world are technological optimists; they worship the power to
control nature, and this is a diabolical power. Remember how
Faust, our modern culture hero, sold his soul to the Devil as he sought
power to control and manipulate nature. The technological ability
to change nature has freed people from reliance on divine powers, but
in their ignorance and short-sightedness they have come to rely on
demonic powers. During the past quarter-century or so, this
demonic power has become fully manifest as it made a quantum leap in
economic concentration. I'm talking about the power of
trans-national corporations, who hire scientists and politicians to do
their will. They have, or will soon have, the power to control
the world. Fifty two of the one hundred largest economies in the
world are business corporations, and many are involved in food and
agriculture, the biggest industry of all.
Corporations thrive on a
reductionistic science and technology, which "reduces" reality into its
smallest components in order to manipulate it. Just as this is
destructive of natural ecosystems, it is also destructive of our
individual and social integrity. As we are harried by economic
pressures, pummelled by advertising, we are dissociated into producers
and consumers. As we sense the gap between work and leisure,
between the demands of a job and our way of life, we yearn for
wholeness and a more integrated life. I was lucky to
have had that as I grew up on a small farm, as I'm sure some of you
did. But then I went to college and graduate school to "make
something of myself." As a young college teacher, on the
verge of getting sucked into administration, I almost sold out for that
kind of worldly success. But I had bought a farm near Kalamazoo
for our home and I was eager to have more time to spend on it. So
I did a crazy thing (in the eyes of my colleagues) and started a School
of Homesteading. This got me a half-time leave of absence
from classroom teaching so I could direct the school on my farm.
In the brochure I prepared to describe this School of Homesteading I
explained that it was "a place where theory and practice can come
together. This kind of integration is also characteristic of a
life lived close to the land, for in it production and consumption, way
of life and means of livelihood, similarly come together."
Such integration is also a hallmark of the agrarian way of life.
I had made this move back to the land in
1973, along with thousands of others during that back-to-the-land
decade. It was also in 1973 that Organic Growers of Michigan was
organized, and as I participated in that I was thrown into a new
context of activities. My work with the Environmental
Studies Program on campus was amplified as I worked in the
organic farming community. My life was enriched and
fulfilled by this experience and classroom teaching became less
important. Later, when I took an early retirement from teaching
in 1986 I spent several years working with the Greens on local, state
and national levels. Although I felt that Green Politics was
important work, I gradually found it increasingly frustrating.
While the Greens gave a little lip service to local economics and to
preserving the family farm, they failed to support the efforts of a few
of us who wanted the Greens to support the development of local organic
food systems. By the way, you know why Greens are often compared
to tomatoes: first they are they are green and then they are
red! Too many urban leftists.
So in 1991 I shifted my energy from the
Green movement back to the organic movement and, more specifically,
with a few others, toward the organization of Michigan Organic Food and
Farm Alliance. I have always been so pleased with the fact
that MOFFA's board of directors early on adopted its two-fold mission
statement, and I quote: "MOFFA promotes the development of food
systems that rely on organic methods of food production and that
revitalize and sustain local communities." In a sense this
talk is an effort to spell out the relationship between organic methods
of food production and community vitality. As Wendell Berry has
reminded us, repeatedly, community grows out of a local economy.
I worry that organic farmers have
trouble developing a sense of community. In part this is because
we are geographically scattered. But, like all farmers, we are
rugged individualists. And this is good; at least farmers are not
wage slaves on the industrial assembly line, at least not until
economic pressures drive some farmers to contract with corporations to
raise livestock in confinement. Organic farmers, because they
have to think for themselves, are sometimes even more individualistic
and contentious. But even though we sometimes differ on some
issues, we know how to recognize major challenges and can unite to
confront them. This happened, for example, when the US Department
of Agriculture tried to weaken its organic standards and over 275,000
people, including most of us here, objected. We won that round!
Individualism does sometimes blind
us to the recognition that we can succeed only when we work together as
a community. This is needed in the development of marketing
coops. I can remember at least two occasions when I participated
in a series of discussions for months to organize coops, and they
failed to materialize. A 
sense
of community may be even more necessary as we work on a political level
to protect the integrity of our seeds against the contamination brought
on by the Monsantos of this world. Some of you were in East
Lansing a year ago to hear Percy Schmeiser tell of his problems with
Monsanto. We may need to join coalitions of Green Politics
and environmental groups to succeed in this. According to a very
recent report from the Center for Food Safety, Monsanto has
budgeted ten million dollars and a staff of 75 to investigate and
prosecute farmers who may have infringed on their patent
rights. These corporations are very aggressive and they are
winning. We need to stand firm in our opposition as a community.
Beyond this, community is
enjoyable for its own sake. I have been dismayed in recent years
to see the meetings of the Southwest Michigan chapter of OGM diminish
from a large social group which met for potluck dinners and other
celebratory occasions, to a much smaller association of
business-oriented growers. The organic way of life should include
a rich social dimension. We should be having a lot more parties
with home-brewed beer!
The organic way of life also includes a
profound ecological awareness, or, as I mentioned earlier, an
ecological ethic. Having rejected the chemical shortcuts
which promise quick profit, we are committed to the slow process of
working with nature as she moves through her cycles of death and
life. This presupposes a perception of wholeness which includes
the farmer and her or his techniques within the natural
process. As organic farmers we use physical tools, mental
tools (knowing how to do things) and spiritual tools, the ability to
discipline our actions as we perceive or feel how they are affecting
the environment around us. We have thus chosen not to use
chemical pesticides. As another example, some of us are
beginning to feel some concern about our dependence on the internal
conbustion engine in cars and tractors as they contribute to greenhouse
gases. Although the replacement of the internal combustion engine
is likely to be a long-term project, there are things we can do now as
we try to live in harmony with nature. It is makes no sense, for
example, to use electricity generated by fossil fuels while the sun
shines and the wind blows around us. It is feasible to live
within cyclical energy flows with local applications of renewable
energy. This has to happen, folks! Soon!!
The ecological ethic which grows out of
organic farming can help us in other respects. Our primary focus
is on the production of healthy food. But when we see the
bigger picture we know that healthy food will not be helpful, or even
stay healthy for long, in a polluted environment. Or again,
our organic farming methods will not succeed if global warming brings
with it more droughts and storms. Our small individual efforts
can be frustrated by the larger circumstances around us, and therefore
we have to work together to mitigate those larger circumstances and the
damage they do.
The focus of this conference is on
Michigan's organic future. This is a difficult topic when we feel
we are living at the end of an era. Religious fundamentalists
tell us the End Times are upon us. Secular writers warn us of
imminent ecological collapse as more and more species go extinct, they
warn us that nuclear bombs or global warming or mistakes in genetic
engineering threaten the stability of the ecosystem. The biggest
danger here is to give in to fatalism: "the world is surely going
to hell in a handbasket and there's nothing I can do about
it." This is not a fact but a cultural mood and we need to
give it a critical appraisal. I am going to suggest that for
organic farmers new possibilities may be emerging.
What do we mean when we say we are
living at the end of an era? This feeling may also be
based, in part, on a growing awareness that we are approaching the end
of the fossil fuel era. These fuels, and the machines which used
them, gave us a glorious ride for about a century, but now, with
increased global demand and limited supplies, prices are rising.
If they continue to rise, it could be the beginning of the
end. We know, in addition, that these fuels may cause
damaging changes in the climate. The costs of climate
change, which are not even included in the price, will be paid by
our children and grandchildren. This is a crushing kind of
awareness and it is not surprising that it is met by evasion and
denial. So Americans are buying more sports utility vehicles,
refusing to recognize limits. Some Americans.
Other Americans are becoming organic
farmers, keeping alive the cultural skills we need after the global
supermarket fails. As time goes by this will be increasingly
important, along with apprenticeship programs that help others to
learn. Still other good people are supporting Green
Politics, working on ecological protection and joining slow food, urban
gardening, and environmental organizations. There will be much
more of this. We are experiencing dramatic cultural shifts in our
lifetime. For example, in the past we as a society developed
technologies to protect us from the ravages of nature--the big cultural
project as I was growing up was the conquest of nature. More
recently we have learned to distrust technology and we now embrace
nature as our long-lost friend.
I want to mention here a
fascinating religious phenomenon to which I gave years of
research. The history of religions has recorded many instances of
how apocalyptic awareness in a society, or a revelation of the End,
leads to visions of a new earth. The old world dies and a new
earth is expected. After their defeat the Plains Indians did the
Ghost Dance in the course of which they would go into a trance
and have visions of the earth as it was before the white men occupied
it. Or, as another example, in the last book of the New
Testament, as the early Christians were persecuted, John was given a
revelation of the end of the world along with visions of "new heavens
and a new earth," complete with with the rivers that flowed through
paradise and the tree of life that stood there. This is a typical
apocalyptic scenario, and I think we can confidently expect that as
more people feel things are getting worse the expectation and hope for
a fresh new earth will inspire efforts to heal nature.
Advertising already appeals to our desire for natural over artificial,
free range over feedlot, and as the internal combustion engine falls
into cultural disfavor food will be advertised as "tractor-free," or
"produced with draft animal power." Religious visions can
generate unexpected cultural transformations. We may even find
that a new vision of organic integrity will open up a wonderfully rich
global culture of stewardship and sharing.
Let me confess here, in all
honesty, that the first academic paper I prepared for a nation-wide
academic conference on food and agriculture was called "Visions for the
Future of Agriculture". Beware the visionary! But
bear in mind that where there is no vision the people perish. A
fruitful vision, however, will be generated by us collectively as we
recognize that our current energy paths are leading to disaster.
As you may have noticed, I think that
large corporations are the most devastating threat we have ever had to
confront. By "we" I mean all people on the planet, but especially
organic farmers. And by "large corporations" I mean those that
seek to control energy, food and seed supplies on a global
scale. I recognize them as demonic because they are morally
sub-human but super-human in power. They have gained more rights
than we as humans have and they can practically live
forever. Their interest in food is to make money with a
basic human need. On a global scale hunger increases as more land
is enclosed by corporate interests to raise food. The people who
are driven from the land by this are deprived of work as well as land
and cannot afford the food that is produced by corporations.
Corporations have also taken over almost all organic food
companies. Only Organic Valley, out of Wisconsin, remains a
farmer-owned coop. For the next few years organic producers
have to make a choice about corporations. I know you would rather
sell nutritious food to people as directly as possible rather than sell
a commodity to a corporate-controlled market. Of course I
understand that economic necessity may force some of you to sell to the
market as well as to people directly.
It will be interesting to see the impact of
rising energy prices on energy-dependent food corporations.
For one thing, I think that local organic food systems will have a
competitive advantage over the global supermarket. Studies of
energy use in food production have argued that rising energy prices
have a multiplier effect on food prices, so that food prices will rise
even more. Smaller growers who replace fossil fuel energy with
more of their labor or with draft animals, or with biodiesel, may
prosper. And as the industrial economy continues to fail,
and the organic market grows, more and more people may want to become
organic growers.
Other factors will
contribute to the failure to the corporate food system. It is
arrogantly creating a suicide economy. Because they
have insulated themselves from negative feedback by their quest for
absolute power these megacorporations have lost any meaningful
relationship to reality and fail to recognize that their practices are
not sustainable on social or ecological grounds. Their absolute
power is their fatal weakness. But, as Brewster Kneen has pointed
out, every attempt at absolute control creates resistance:
antibiotics generate resistant bacteria, herbicides generate resistant
weeds, and the attempt to control people generates social
resistance. We see more of this in places like India, with its
millions of small farmers threatened by biotechnology. Angry
farmers sometimes gather to tear up fields of genetically engineered
plants. GMOs in food have also been rejected in European countries
where people are not as brainwashed by advertising and government
propaganda about the safety of genetically modified foods.
In his recent book, Seeds of Deception,
Jeffrey M. Smith has documented countless instances of how the Food and
Drug Administration covered up or repressed reports that GMOs in food
might create health problems, or simply refused to do adequate
testing. Political decisions were made to promote
biotechnology, and they trumped scientific considerations, not to
mention democratic procedures. The FDA scientists claim
they can see no difference between conventional and genetically
modified food. But the cattle and sheep in American barnyards
will, when given a choice, choose the natural and leave the genetically
modified corn. Could there be better science in the barnyard than
in the FDA labs? So far GMOs have been used in field crops
like cotten, corn, canola and soybeans, and they are found in much
processed food, but Jeffery Smith reported that fruit and vegetable
crops are also ready for release with GMOs. Thus the likelihood
of adverse health reactions increases. And since organic food
does not, or should not, contain GMOs, its prestige will rise.
Many problems remain.
Organic farms can be contaminated as pollen drifts from fields with
genetically modified seeds and organic farmers might even be charged
with infringing on patent rights. Several years ago the
Michigan Department of Agriculture made provisions for the registration
of organic farms so pesticide applicators could take care to avoid
them. Perhaps we should seek protection from genetic drift
along with pesticide drift. We need to be assertive. Our
presence as organic farmers is a challenge to the unholy alliance of
industry and government as we demonstrate a safer way of raising food
without pesticides or biotechnology.
I have to conclude by urging you as
organic farmers to recognize how vitally important it is that you
affirm the broader implications of organic farming. You do a
great deal more than raise good food. As you embody the organic
way of life, based on your vision of the whole picture, your dissenting
presence is a reminder that this is a democracy. The
California writer, Victor Davis Hansen, recently argued that
independent farmers were the last bastion of democracy. Now, with
the widespread adoption of GMOs by farmers, it turns out that organic
farmers are the last independent farmers. Changing circumstances
in energy, and their economic consequences, will pressure the people to
rally behind you as the new cultural heroes. The future does
belong to local organic food systems.
Ken supplied me with this Wayne Roberts article, also at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2005-02-17/news_story_p.html
HOW BOK CHOY CAN BEAT SPRAWL
WANNA SAVE GREENBELT? HELP FARMERS DUMP TIRED CROPS FOR PRODUCTS THAT APPEAL TO OUR DIVERSITY
By Wayne Roberts
Unless the Liberals tart up their greenbelt plan with some smart new policy tricks to reform agriculture, we
could end up replacing sprawl with a countryside of theme parks, hobby
farms, gated estates, boutique hotels, gravel pits and garbage dumps.
That's the danger in Bill 135, the Greenbelt Act, which is otherwise
milestone legislation. If the Libs don't begin to remake our has-been
agriculture, our struggling food producers will find better things to
do with their land, even if they can't sell to developers. And we may
discover that in the process, we have put our food security in danger.
The starting point is this – the future ain't what it used to be.
We now face the possibility of cataclysmic disruptions in the world
food system. Global agriculture, converted into a fossil fuel industry,
is dependant on cheap conventional oil that's now fast disappearing,
plentiful water that's receding by the year and fast-eroding fertile
soil.
In southern Ontario, fortune has blessed us – if only we can
learn to appreciate the gift. The artificially cheap food of the past
50 years has led us to devalue and squander our food-producing lands as
underutilized space better suited for freeways. If distant locations
become the last remaining source of our nourishment, the Golden
Horseshoe's 8 million residents will really be in trouble when future
shock hits.
So how are we going to keep our greenbelt the source of rich foods?
Some advocate reimbursing farmers for money they can no longer make by
selling their land for subdivisions. But this is wrong on many counts.
It makes greenbelt protection unaffordable, and it's unfair.
Present-day farm owners haven't paid taxes all these years on the basis
that their properties are speculative. They have paid on the basis that
what they own is farmland. If they want to treat their land as a
speculative asset, they should pay back the difference.
There is a better way to sink public money into food production so that
farms have decent real estate value – cash for infrastructure and
retraining to reward farmers for developing new markets geared to the
diverse city on the doorstep.
Much of Ontario's prime farmland has been devoted to the production of
low-value, low-value-added, homogeneous bulk commodities like corn,
potatoes, peas and beef.
If farmers want to survive on high-value land, they need to grow and
process (canning, bottling) crops that are more valuable than staples
grown much more massively and cheaply elsewhere. There are already
enough potatoes in Idaho and PEI to glut the planet, for example. Local
growers need help finding products that don't face vicious global
competition and a chronic race to where the lowest price is the law.
Instead of Old MacDonald having a farm, we now have McFarms,
industrialized, specialized rural factories chasing faraway markets and
churning out a humongous quantity of a very small variety of farmed
crops and livestock. This is agriculture based on Canada's Food Rules
and eating habits for 1952, way behind the times in every respect:
health, food fashion, ethnic food trends, pesticide use and energy
demands. What we need is a renovated agricultural system – and
the greenbelt will only be a dream until governments grasp this. Here
are my proposals aimed at retooling farming for the sophisticated city
trade.
ORGANIC GAP It's commonly estimated that 85 to 90 per cent of
premium-priced organic foods are imported. Ontario farmers are just not
up to speed in terms of servicing this growing need. Obviously we can't
grow pineapples and oranges, but apart from these, we need the
appropriate ministry to develop policy encouraging farmers to court
local consumers. The appropriate provincial minister could also ask
that Ottawa consider legal action to prohibit the import of unduly
subsidized (in terms of sub-standard labour conditions and massive
water subsidies) California produce into Canada.
ETHNIC ADVANTAGE Greenbelt farmers should be encouraged to customize
their products so they target big-city diversity. We're talking here
about massive numbers of ethnic Ontarians – over a hundred
different ethnocultural groups seeking everything from bok choy to an
Iranian barbecue condiment made from sumach.
The dogma in many ag circles is that exporting is the only way to go in
the modern world. These officials should consider that if Ontario
farmers lead the way in serving unique food needs, there are export
sales in the wings to sister communities across North America.
TOURIST TRAPS The greenbelt must become "part of the imagination of the
city dweller," Elbert van Donkersgoed, policy director of the Christian
Farmers Federation of Ontario, is fond of saying. Tourists want a nice
beach close to a restaurant strip where they can get the food they eat
at home every day. The new breed of destination travellers want to
actually experience the locality.
But agro-tourism – eating, touring and working on farms –
is coming. It's big in BC, the closest thing we have to northern Italy
or southern France. It's chugging along in the Niagara wine district,
where a brilliantly designed economy makes it more profitable to make
booze than to grow fruit.
Pleasant views don't just happen. They don't have to be manicured and
blow-dried, but they do have to be orchestrated. The province should
earmark a percentage of the provincial sales tax from tourism and from
the gas tax (there will be a reduction of trucks filled with imported
eats grinding up our roads) and give it to farmers for revamping their
business.
ENTICE NEW FARMERS To most analysts' surprise, the hippest and most
urbanized youth in world history have a hankering to farm when they
grow up. They know the bright lights of the big city, and they want to
feel some dirt in their hands, try something more personal, authentic,
real. Except for one thing: there's no way in the world they can ever
afford to buy a farm. After the second world war, the Central Mortgage
and Housing Corporation (CHMC) was launched to provide financing
assistance for first-time home-buyers. Maybe it's time for a CMHC
equivalent for rookie farmers.
PAYING FOR STEWARDSHIP There's another way to keep the greenbelt green:
paying farmers for environmental services like saving wildlife habitat,
storing carbon, keeping streams clean, maintaining scenic landscapes
and so on. This kind of investment does not sit well in our
work-obsessed culture. We worry that the kind of people who think money
grows on trees are looking for a free lunch, but we're suckers for
promoters who say money grows on baseball stadiums, convention centres,
aquariums or airline bailouts.
If the truth be known, the idea of paying farmers for environmental
services meets the test of hard-headed economics. How much does it cost
to clean drinking water contaminated by livestock manure compared to
paying farmers for the avoided cost?
Individuals, businesses and community groups can reward local farmers
who adopt high environmental standards by purchasing foods that carry
an eco label, a practice most advanced in Oregon and Minnesota.
GOVERNMENT BUYING POWER Another potential revenue stream for greenbelt
farmers could be sales to government purchasers who buy for provincial
hospitals, municipal or school cafeterias and so on. Canada and Ontario
are among the few jurisdictions that treat trade-deal limitations on
government purchasing as legitimate obligations.
SWITCH TO GRASS Farmers can be encouraged to grow energy crops:
biodiesel for car fuel, switchgrass for stove heating pellets,
manure-derived methane gas or windmills for electricity, and so on. In
fairly short order, public utilities could jump-start a
$2-billion-a-year farm industry selling clean fossil-fuel-free energy.
Switchgrass is often favoured for healing damaged or marginal lands,
which we have in abundance: about 87,000 acres of unimproved pasture in
southern Ontario would be likely candidates for switchgrass.
Switchgrass uses little water, needs no irrigation in the greenbelt and
allows most rainfall to drip down to recharge the water table below.
Because no fertilizers are used , the water that drips down is pure as
the driven snow. To thank farmers for growing such a crop, local
municipalities could direct their utilities to provide incentives for
customers who switch to pellet stoves and purchase switchgrass pellets.
The Greek philosopher Xenophon believed that "agriculture is the mother
of all arts. When it is well conducted, all other arts prosper. When it
is neglected, all other arts decline." Protecting the greenbelt means
more than blocking subdivisions. Let's hope the Liberals can see the
Chinese broccoli for the fields.
PEAK OIL AND LOCAL FOOD
Maynard Kaufman
Most of us are aware that the supply of fossil
fuels in the earth is limited and that eventually we will run out of
coal, oil, and natural gas, but very few of us are anxious about
it. Some of us learned about this from the "limits to growth"
books published thirty years ago in the early 1970s. And we soon
forgot about it. Even the knowledge that global oil production
has or may soon peak does not worry many of us. This was
predicted years ago by geologists such as M. King Hubbert whose bell
curve graph gave us the image of "peak." And even now people take
comfort from the fact that only half the oil in the ground has been
used and they are confident that our technogical expertise will have
plenty time to develop alternative sources of energy.
In the last few years, however,
researchers and writers have been giving a new urgency to the peak oil
phenomenon. Two of these books, The Party's Over by Richard
Heinberg (2004), and The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler
(2005), are reviewed below.
These books cover the same ground
in similiar ways and both argue that oil production will have peaked in
this decade. Kunstler suggests the peak may be this year (2005),
but he, and Heinberg, point out that it will only be possible to assign
the exact date after the fact since rising prices for energy may slow
economic growth and reduce demand for energy and thus delay the
peak. But if demand for oil increases, as countries like China
and India industrialize, while production decreases, we can expect
rapidly rising prices. Most of us will experience the end of oil
in the form of prices we cannot afford to pay. Both writers also
point out that the
second half of oil still in the ground is harder to get out. Much
may be left in the ground because of a negative ERoEI, less energy
returned over energy invested. Both writers also include a
chapter evaluating alternatives to oil, and many, including the
much-touted hydrogen economy, have a negative ERoEI. Most
alternatives are also dependent on the existing fossil fuel
platform. As a highly concentrated liquid fuel, oil has no ready
substitute. Conservation and energy-efficient cars and
appliances, along with renewable energy from wind and sun, may provide
energy for a slow, rather than precipituous, decline.
Both Heinberg and Kunstler argue that the
economic effects of peak oil will be fairly sudden and soon. They
provide careful reasoning to support the likelihood that industrialized
countries dependent on what had been cheap oil will suffer serious and
irreversible economic decline. In other words, they are
predicting the end of the world as we know it. And, because
Americans are used to having ever larger amounts of cheap energy, what
these writers are saying is simply incredible. We have been
told that the sky is falling ever since Chicken Little, and some
skepticism may be in order. But before we dismiss these books we
must remember that it is, or was, the fossil fuel era that is the
anomaly. The twentieth century was unique. So we are
facing not the end of the world, but a return to a more normal
world. Unfortunately, because cheap oil made cheap food possible,
the growth of population exceeded normal carrying capacity. Heinberg
includes a graph in his book (his graphs and charts are very
helpful) which shows the correlation between energy use and
population growth. It also shows global population falling from 7
billion to below 4 billion later in the twenty first century.
Kunstler includes a chapter on
"Geopolitics and the Global Oil Peak," and, while it is difficult to
speculate about the future, it is useful exercise.
Certainly the competition over oil will be intense. The invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq may be only a beginning. If and
when ordinary Americans begin to feel energy shortages they may call
for even more desperate remedies. The Bush administration
certainly seems willing to try to prolong its oil-based
empire. Such resource wars could take more lives and waste
energy. If successful they would only postpone the
inevitable end of oil, but they could fail. Our wealth is loaned
to us by foreign investments, and there is already much resentment in
the world over the fact that the United States, with less than 5% of
the world's population, uses 25% of its oil. Kunstler also has a
chapter on some of the problems related to fossil fuel use:
climate change, epidemic disease, water scarcity, and habitat
destruction, among others. All these will exacerbate problems
caused by rising energy prices and their devastating economic effects.
When we think about energy
shortages, those of us who are older remember the long lines at gas
pumps during the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Transportation will
definitely be curtailed as oil prices rise. Mass transport could
supplement private cars, so there may be options.
But it is the global food system,
in which food travels an average of 1500 miles, that will be most
decisively impacted. In addition to transportation both Heinberg
and Kunstler remind us that the industrialized food system is dependent
on fossil fuels for fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides, fuel in
tractors and for food processing. Both authors emphasize
the fact that food will have to be produced locally. And since
organic methods of production require as much as 30% less fossil fuel
energy, they will be preferable. Even less is needed when more
work is done by human labor, or by draft animals, especially in small
vegetable operations.
Heinberg, who came to this book
after writing on human ecology, has given us a tightly-organized
and clear guide to the issues involved in peak oil. Kunstler, who had
published novels and books on the folly of suburbia, wrote his book in
a more impressionistic and meandering manner. Although it
includes details that may not be accurate, his discussion of land
redistribution during the Long Emergency is important. Since land
ownership is concentrated in fewer hands, a new feudalism may
emerge. His prejudice against suburbia, however, blinds him to
the possibility of small-scale food production on larger suburban
homesites. Both books conclude with interesting chapters on what
life in the United States will or could be like after the collapse of
industrial modes of production. Both hold out the hope that
in spite of resentments and scapegoating by those who suffer the
heaviest losses, at least some areas in this country may be able to
maintain an orderly society.
Although neo-agrarian writers such as
Wendell Berry have written to promote small-scale farming and household
food production for over thirty years, it is a sad irony to realize
that this alternative to the corporate food system may be thrust upon
us rather than freely chosen. Still, the sooner that more
people chose this possibility, both as growers and eaters, the easier
it will be to manage the transition. Organizations such as MOFFA
(Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance) have been advocating local
organic food systems that revitalize and sustain local
communities. Such communities can be a safety net at a time when
hunger leads to civil unrest.
Scott Falls
Alger County, Michigan
