[permaculture] conservatism/food

Toby Hemenway toby at patternliteracy.com
Mon Feb 18 17:12:05 EST 2008


Harmon Seaver wrote:
> By 2015, China alone will need 100% of the world's oil supply. But so 
> will India. 
But that's based on a straight-line projection that China's growth will 
continue to increase at 8% a year. Expensive oil will quench--is already 
quenching--their growth in a hurry. Straight-line projections are always 
wrong. They'll get about the same share they are getting now.
> We are going to see a
> situation in the US where if you aren't growing your own food, you won't
> have any. 
I disagree. The US produces 4000 calories of food per capita per day,
and uses only 10% of its oil consumption to grow, ship, process, and 
cook all that food. That means we can use 5% of today's oil supply to 
provide a basic 2000 calorie diet in the silly, inefficient way we 
currently do it. I think we'll cut back hugely on all the stupid things 
we do with oil and wind up using the 30-50% of all energy consumption 
that was traditionally used for food production before oil.

Also, food is a low-emergy process, as HT Odum has documented. Running a 
bank or a fire department is far more complex than even our current 
wasteful way of growing food.

Researchers at Cornell showed that all the calories necessary to feed 
the 225,000 people in Rochester NY could be grown within 16 miles of the 
city on currently available land. We'll go back to locally grown food, 
suburban market gardens on all those 1/4-acre backyards farmed by people 
who have lost their commuter jobs. We've got plenty of land to grow all 
our food.

P.H. Ainsworth, in a great book called "Agriculture: A New Approach" 
(Lawrence, you'd love it) cited research showing that in 1800 one 
British farmer could feed 50 people. So the argument that it takes oil 
to feed a lot of people is oil-company propaganda.

We'll lose high emergy systems like banking, electricity, medicine, etc, 
long before we'll lose a system that can be done by anyone, with simple 
tools. Food will be the last system to fail.

I've got refs for all those numbers if anyone wants them.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com





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