Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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    Fifty Million Farmers
    by Richard Heinberg
    Twenty-Sixth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
    October 2006, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/heinberg_06.html
    Introduction by Chris Lindstrom
    Staff, E. F. Schumacher Society

           I am happy to have the privilege of introducing our final speaker 
of the day. Many of you know of Richard Heinberg and his work onthetopic of 
peak oil with its dire consequences, which amount to nothing less than the 
end of civilization as we know it. You may be thinking, “Hmm, that’s not the 
most cheerful subject to end the day’s lectures with.”. But I believe that 
what you are about to hear is a sobering and urgent call to action, not just 
because of the degradation of our life-support systems or the on-going 
corruption in our government but because we are literally running out of gas. 
Combine that with global warming, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that 
we may be approaching a “perfect storm.” But don’t leave it to the media to 
give us advance warning.

           Richard Heinberg is one of only a few individuals who have 
dedicated themselves to educating the public about peak oil and the potential 
consequences it holds for humanity and for the Earth. Thanks to his work,  
together with that ofhis colleagues, the issue of peak oil has inspired 
thousands of individuals to become active players in the effort to make the 
transition to a post-carbon world by strengthening community and revitalizing 
local economies.

           Richard Heinberg is the author of seven books, including 
TheParty’s Over; Power Down; and most recently The Oil Depletion Protocols: A 
Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse. His writing is 
clear, straightforward, and very convincing. He demonstrates a profound 
understanding of the tumultuous history that has brought us where we are 
today. A core faculty member at New College in California, he is also a 
research fellow with the Post Carbon Institute, where he has been involved 
with projects designed to minimize dependence on fossil fuel by focusing on 
the energy-generating capacity of community.

           Please welcome Richard Heinberg.

    First let me say what an honor and a delight it is to have been invited 
here to speak to you, following in the footprints of so many of my personal 
heroes and heroines, E. F. Schumacher not least among them—a list that now 
includes the previous two speakers!

     I am going to talk not only about peak oil and gas, the subject I find 
myself most identified with, but about the impacts of the related impending 
crisis upon agriculture and our national food system. Although I will be 
covering some territory that is already familiar to most of you, I ask you to 
bear with me, for I will arrive at what I think you will agree are some 
rather startling conclusions.

    There was a time not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not 
accepted, part of life. Until the nineteenth century—whether in China, 
France, India, or Britain—food came almost entirely from local sources, and 
harvests were variable. In good years there was plenty, enough for seasonal 
feasts and for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come; in 
bad years starvation cut down the poorest and the weakest—the very young, the 
old, and the sickly. Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing 
the size of the population by several percent. This was the normal condition 
of life in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.

    Today in the United States such a situation is hard to imagine. Food is 
so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than 
hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic 
foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked from 
hundreds of miles away. Many people did go hungry during the Great 
Depression, but those were times that only the elderly can recall. In the 
current regime the desperately poor may experience chronic malnutrition and 
may miss meals, but for most the dilemma is whether to find time in the day’s 
hectic schedule to go to the grocery store and take food home to cook or to 
eat out instead. As a result, fast-food restaurants proliferate: the fare may 
not be particularly nutritious, but even an hour’s earnings at minimum wage 
will buy a meal or two.

     The average family in the United States spent 20 percent of its income 
on food in 1950; today the figure is 10 percent. This is an extraordinary 
state of affairs, but because it is the only one that most of us alive today 
have ever experienced, we tend to assume that it is normal and will continue 
indefinitely. There are, however, reasons to think that our current anomalous 
abundance of inexpensive food may be only temporary; if so, present and 
future generations may become acquainted with that old, formerly familiar but 
unwelcome houseguest—famine.

    The following are four principal bases (there are others) for this gloomy 
forecast. The first has to with looming fuel shortages. I’m going to describe 
this problem in some detail because it is so central to the entire thesis 
that I’m laying before you.

    Energy is of course the key to life itself. We humans have been 
harvesting energy from our environments for as long as we have been human, 
gaining energy principally through the food we eat and exerting energy 
primarily through muscle power.

    We have seen several important energy transitions in our history, 
including the harnessing of fire, the planting of crops, and the 
domestication of animals for the purpose of capturing their muscle power. 
Throughout all of this time we were subject to the net energy principle: it 
takes energy to get energy from the environment, and costs have to be 
subtracted from gross yields. For example, it takes energy, in the form of 
food, to keep horses. As recently as 1900 something like 20 to 25 percent of 
U.S. cropland was set aside to grow food for horses. But because a horse can 
do the work of ten people, there was a net energy profit from raising and 
harnessing those horses. It was that net energy profit from agriculture and 
from animal muscle power, and occasionally from water mills or windmills, 
that made possible the construction of the complex societies that we call 
civilizations.

    We discovered fossil fuels a very long time ago, but we didn’t have a way 
to use them until we had developed metallurgy and certain basic machines; 
once we had done so, we lit a fuse on a keg of dynamite under civilization.

    Previous energy transitions pale by comparison to what has happened over 
the past two hundred years. Perhaps the easiest way to show that impact is by 
tracking human population. We had never numbered more than a few hundred 
million, even well into the medieval period, but our population achieved one 
billion by the year 1820, two billion by 1930 or so, three billion by around 
1960, four billion by the mid-1970s, five billion by the late 1980s, and six 
billion by the late 1990s. We’ve added more than half a billion additional 
humans just since 1999. This is an extraordinary success from a biological 
point of view, but of course it’s a highly perilous kind of success.

    How did we manage to do it? How did we, being just one puny species among 
millions of others, manage to take over the biosphere? The answer is, through 
the power of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels made the net-energy constraint 
temporarily irrelevant. Think about it. Have your ever run out of gas along 
the highway and had to push your car two or three yards to get it off to the 
side of the road? You know that’s hard work. Imagine pushing your car twenty 
or thirty miles. That’s the energy equivalent of roughly six to eight weeks 
of hard human labor. It’s what we get from a single gallon of gasoline for 
which we’re paying less than $2.25 right now. Imagine getting six to eight 
weeks of human labor for $2.25. You can’t do that even in China. So of course 
we’ve mechanized every possible aspect of human life to take advantage of 
that amazingly cheap energy source. We’ve been living on virtually free 
energy for the past two hundred years.

    Oil and the other fossil fuels are nonrenewable, and here is the catch: 
We started running out of oil when the very first barrel of it was extracted 
from the ground. The depletion of oil really became apparent in this country 
in 1970 when we achieved our national oil-production peak. Prior to that time 
the United States had been the world’s foremost oil-producing nation. That is 
celebrated in a wonderful television series I’m sure you are familiar with, 
the Beverly Hillbillies. Back in those days a few people were getting rich 
from exploring for and discovering oil. That’s not happening any more. The 
peak of discovery in the United States was way back in 1930. We’re finding 
very little these days, and what we do find is in extremely inhospitable 
environments, where the cost of exploration and extraction is enormously 
higher than it was only a couple of decades ago.

    Reaching the peak of domestic oil production has had enormous economic 
repercussions for our nation: we have become dependent on imports of oil. Now 
we import about 70 percent of what we use in terms of regular conventional 
oil and refined oil products. We are borrowing roughly a billion dollars a 
day to pay for those imports. We used to be a net lender to the rest of the 
world; now we are the world’s foremost net borrower. Our foreign policy has 
also changed, and we’ve developed a peculiar fascination with the parts of 
the world where much of the remaining oil lies. We now have military bases 
throughout the Middle East and central Asia. In fact, wherever there’s an oil 
well or a pipeline anywhere in the world, there’s likely to be a U.S. 
military base close by.

    Now, as costly and significant as the U.S. oil production peak has been, 
the global peak, when it inevitably occurs, is going to be far more so, and 
there are clues to suggest that it may not be so far in the future. First of 
all, we’re seeing production peaks in many other countries: Great Britain, 
Norway, Oman, Mexico; the list goes on. The majority of oil-producing nations 
now are in decline. In a very few cases that decline may be temporarily 
reversible, but in most cases, as in the United States, we are looking at a 
long, slow, inexorable decline.

    The rate at which oil is being discovered globally has been declining 
since about 1964. Moreover, most of the large fields were discovered a long 
time ago, and that’s important because not all oil fields are the same. Some 
are extremely large, but others are very small. Roughly half of all current 
oil production comes from only 120 giant and supergiant fields, all of which 
were discovered in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, a few in the 1960s, and one in 
the 1970s; the rest of the world’s oil production, the other half, comes from 
tens of thousands of much smaller oil fields, and that’s what we’re finding 
today—mere minnows. As the giant and supergiant fields go into decline, it 
becomes more and more difficult to replace their production from the smaller 
fields we’re finding today. As a result the oil industry is on a kind of 
treadmill that’s speeding up over time, and the runner is tiring. When is the 
global peak likely to occur? The answer is, no one knows for sure, but many 
analysts are lining up around a forecast date of approximately 2010. We are 
not looking at an event far in the distant future but one that is very close 
indeed.

    Can’t we simply make up for oil with alternative energy sources? There 
are alternative fossil fuels: low-grade ones like the tar sands of Canada and 
oil shale in Colorado. We can also turn coal and gas into liquid fuels. Then 
there are alternative energy sources that are renewable—solar, wind, 
geothermal, tidal, wave power, ocean thermal. In each and every case, when we 
do the analysis we find that there are inherent limits, either time limits or 
limits of scale. Very few of us, unfortunately, have been educated to 
understand energy or to properly assess energy sources.  Energy literacy 
really needs to be developed rapidly in our society, not only among the 
general population but especially among policy makers. Every energy source 
needs to be evaluated by its net-energy profit ratio, its convenience of use, 
scalability, the size of the resource base, environmental impacts, and so on. 
There are eight or nine variables that we need to take into account. When we 
do so, we find that solutions are not plentiful. There are many alternative 
energy sources, and we need to develop them as rapidly as possible, but the 
likelihood of their being able to pick up where oil is leaving off is not 
great.

    As if the peak-oil crisis were not bad enough, the United States is also 
facing a natural-gas-supply crisis. Production (or extraction) is declining 
already, despite the fact that drilling efforts have more than doubled over 
the past eight years. Currently every available drilling rig is at work, but 
because there is a shortage of trained personnel, drilling rates probably 
cannot be increased further. Ironically, natural gas in storage is now at 
record levels, and therefore prices have actually fallen significantly in 
recent months. This is due to reduced demand stemming from warmer winters 
(thanks to global warming) and reduced demand from industry because of the 
recent high prices. Much of the U.S. chemicals industry, which uses natural 
gas as a feedstock, has fled the country for good.

    Though extraction rates continue to fall, the market tells us there is no 
problem because there is no actual shortage for the moment. In just a few 
years, however, there will indeed be shortages and very definitely an 
enormous problem. This has implications for home heating, because 60 to 70 
percent of homes in the United States heat with gas. As for our electrical 
grid system, something like 90 percent of new generating capacity installed 
in the past decade is gas fired. As with oil, shortages of natural gas will 
have their impact on agriculture.

    I am not going to talk to you about the impacts of peak oil for the auto 
and trucking industries, the airlines, tourism, the plastics and chemicals 
industries, or for the national and global economy. Suffice it to say that 
the challenge for modern growth-based industrial societies will be great. Nor 
will I be talking about the Oil Depletion Protocol, which I believe will be 
the best policy tool for nations and regions to deal with this problem. My 
primary concern today is agriculture.

    Modern industrial agriculture has been described as a method of using 
soil to turn petroleum and gas into food. We use natural gas to make 
fertilizer and oil in order to fuel farm machinery as well as to power 
irrigation pumps, as a feedstock for pesticides and herbicides, in the 
maintenance of animal operations, in crop storage and drying, and for 
transportation of farm inputs and outputs. Agriculture accounts for about 17 
percent of the U.S. annual energy budget, which makes it the single largest 
consumer of petroleum products as compared to other industries. The U.S. 
military, in all of its operations, uses only about half that amount. 
Approximately 1,500 liters (350 gallons) of oil equivalents are required to 
feed each person in the United States each year, and every calorie of food 
produced requires on average ten calories of fossil-fuel inputs. This is a 
food system profoundly vulnerable, at every level, to fuel shortages and 
skyrocketing prices. Both are inevitable.

    An attempt to make up for fuel shortfalls by producing more 
biofuels—ethanol, butanol, and biodiesel—will put even more pressure on the 
food system and will likely result in a competition between food and fuel 
uses for land and other resources needed in agricultural production. Already 
17 percent of the U.S. corn crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that 
proportion is expected to rise to one-quarter, based solely on existing 
projects in development and on government mandates.

    The second factor potentially leading to famine is a shortage of farmers. 
Much of the success of industrial agriculture lies in its labor efficiency: 
far less human work is required to produce a given amount of food today than 
was the case decades ago (the actual fraction, comparing the year 2000 with 
1900, is about one-seventh). But that very success implies a growing 
vulnerability. We don’t need as many farmers as a percentage of the 
population as we used to; thus, throughout the past century most farming 
families—including hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions who would have 
preferred to maintain their rural, self-sufficient way of life—were 
economically forced to move to cities and find jobs there. Today so few 
people farm that vital knowledge of how to farm is disappearing. The average 
age of farmers in the United States is over fifty-five and approaching sixty. 
The proportion of principal farm operators younger than thirty-five has 
dropped from 15.9 percent in 1982 to 5.8 percent in 2002. Of all the dismal 
statistics I know, these are surely among the most frightening. Who will be 
growing our food twenty years from now? With less oil and gas available, we 
will need far more knowledge and muscle power devoted to food production and, 
thus, far more people on the farm, than we have currently.

    The third worrisome trend is an increasing scarcity of fresh water. Sixty 
percent of water used nationally goes toward agriculture. California’s 
Central Valley produces the substantial bulk of the nation’s fruits, nuts, 
and vegetables yet receives virtually no rainfall during summer months and 
relies overwhelmingly on irrigation. But the snowpack on the Sierra, which 
provides much of that irrigation water, is declining, thanks again to global 
warming, and the aquifer that supplies much of the rest is being drawn down 
at many times its recharge rate. If these trends continue, the Central Valley 
may be incapable of producing food in any substantial quantities within two 
or three decades. Other parts of the country are similarly overspending their 
water budgets, and very little is being done to deal with this impending 
catastrophe.

    Fourth and finally, there is the problem of global climate change. Often 
the phrase used for this is “global warming,” which implies only the fact 
that the world’s average temperature will be increasing by a couple of 
degrees or more over the next few decades. The much greater problem for 
farmers is destabilization of weather patterns. We face not just a warmer 
climate but climate chaos: droughts, floods, and stronger storms in general 
(hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms)—that is, unpredictable weather 
of all kinds. Farmers depend on relatively consistent seasonal patterns of 
rain and sun, cold and heat; a climate shift can spell the end of farmers’ 
ability to grow a crop in a given region, and even a single freak storm can 
destroy an entire year’s production. Given the fact that modern agriculture 
in this country has become highly centralized due to cheap transport and 
economies of scale (as we found out in the recent tainted spinach scare, 
almost the entire national spinach crop comes from a single valley in 
California), the damage from that freak storm is today potentially 
continental or even global in scale. We have embarked on a century in which, 
increasingly, freakish weather is normal.

    I am not pointing out these problems and their likely consequences in 
order to cause panic. As I will be proposing in a few moments, there is a 
solution to at least two of these problems, one that may also help us address 
the remaining two. It is not a simple or easy strategy, and it will require a 
coordinated and sustained national effort. But in addition to averting 
famine, this strategy may also permit us to solve a host of other seemingly 
unrelated social and environmental problems.

    Intensifying Food Production

    First, in order to get a better grasp of the problems and the solution 
being proposed, it is essential that we understand how our present 
exceptional situation of cheap abundance came about. In order to do that, we 
must go back not just a few decades but at least ten thousand years.

    The origins of agriculture are shrouded in mystery, though archaeologists 
have been whittling away at that mystery for decades. We know that 
horticulture (or gardening, from the Latin word hortus, meaning garden) began 
at somewhat different periods, independently, in at least three regions—the 
Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America. Following the end of the 
last Ice Age, roughly 12,000 years ago, much of humanity was experiencing a 
centuries-long food crisis brought on by the overhunting of the megafauna 
that had previously been at the center of the human diet. The subsequent 
domestication of plants and animals brought relative food security as well as 
the ability to support larger and more sedentary populations.

    As compared to hunting and gathering, horticulture intensified the 
process of obtaining food. Intensification (because it led to increased 
population density—i.e., more mouths to feed) then led to the need for even 
more intensification: thus, horticulture or gardening eventually led to 
agriculture (from the Latin ager, meaning field), which essentially means 
field cropping. The latter produced even more food per unit of land, thereby 
enabling more population growth, which in turn meant still more demand for 
food. I am describing a classic self-reinforcing feedback loop.

    As a social regime, horticulture did not represent a decisive break with 
hunting and gathering. Just as women had previously participated in essential 
productive activities by foraging for plants and hunting small animals, they 
now played a prominent role in planting, tending, and harvesting the 
garden—activities that were all compatible with the care of infants and small 
children. Thus, women’s status remained relatively high in most horticultural 
societies. Seasonal surpluses were relatively small, and there was no 
full-time division of labor.

    As agriculture developed—with field crops, plows, and draft 
animals—societies inevitably mutated in response. Plowing fields was men’s 
work; women were forced to stay at home and lost social power. Larger 
seasonal surpluses required management as well as protection from raiders. 
Full-time managers and specialists in violence (i.e., soldiers) proliferated 
as a result. Societies became multi-layered: wealthy ruling classes (which 
had never existed among hunter-gatherers and were rare among gardeners) sat 
atop an economic pyramid that came to include scribes, soldiers, and 
religious functionaries, supported at its base by the vastly more numerous 
peasants, who produced all the food for themselves and everyone else as well. 
Writing, mathematics, metallurgy, and ultimately the trappings of modern life 
as we know it thus followed not so much from planting in general as from 
agriculture in particular.

    As important an instance of intensification as agriculture was, in many 
respects it pales in comparison with what has occurred within the past 
century or so with the application of fossil fuels to farming. Petroleum-fed 
tractors replaced horses and oxen, freeing more land to grow food for far 
more people. The Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia from fossil 
fuels, invented just prior to World War I, has doubled the amount of nitrogen 
available to green nature, with nearly all of that increase going directly to 
food crops. New hybrid plant varieties led to higher yields, technologies for 
food storage improved radically, and fuel-fed transport systems enabled local 
surpluses to be sold not only regionally but nationally and even globally. 
Through all of these strategies, we have developed the wherewithal to feed 
seven times the population that existed at the beginning of the industrial 
revolution. In the process we have made farming uneconomical and unattractive 
to all but a few.

    That is the broad, global overview. In the United States, whose history 
as an independent nation begins at the dawn of the industrial era, the story 
of agriculture comprises three distinct periods:

    The Expansion Period (1600 to 1920): Increases in food production during 
these three centuries came simply from putting more land into production. 
Technological change played only a minor role.

    The Mechanization Period (1920 to 1970): In this half-century 
technological advances issuing from cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy 
resulted in a dramatic increase in productivity (output per worker hour). 
Meanwhile farm machinery, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, new hybrid 
crops, and synthetic fertilizers allowed for the doubling and tripling of 
crop production. Also during this time U.S. Department of Agriculture policy 
began favoring larger farms (the average farm size grew from 100 acres in 
1930 to almost 500 acres by 1990) and production for export.

    The Saturation Period (1970 to the present): In these recent decades, the 
application of still greater amounts of energy has produced smaller relative 
increases in crop yields. Meanwhile, an ever-growing amount of energy is 
being expended just to maintain the functioning of the overall system. For 
example, about 10 percent of the energy in agriculture is used to offset the 
negative effects of soil erosion, while increasing amounts of pesticides must 
be sprayed each year as pests develop resistance. In short, strategies that 
had recently produced dramatic increases in productivity became subject to 
the law of diminishing returns.

    While we were achieving miracles of productivity, agriculture’s impact on 
the natural world was also growing; indeed, it is now the single greatest 
source of human damage to the global environment. This damage takes a number 
of forms: erosion and salinization of soils; deforestation (a strategy for 
bringing more land into cultivation); fertilizer runoff (which ultimately 
creates enormous “dead zones” around the mouths of many rivers); loss of 
biodiversity; fresh water scarcity; and agrochemical pollution of water and 
soil. In sum, we created unprecedented abundance while ignoring the long-term 
consequences of our actions. This is more than a little reminiscent of how 
some previous agricultural societies—such as the Greeks, Babylonians, Romans, 
and Mayans—destroyed soil and habitat in their mania to feed growing urban 
populations and collapsed as a result.

    Fortunately, during the past century or two we have also developed the 
disciplines of archaeology, history, and ecology, which teach us how and why 
those ancient societies failed and how the diversity of the web of life 
sustains us. Thus, in principle, if we avail ourselves of this knowledge, we 
need not mindlessly repeat yet again the same time-worn tale of catastrophic 
civilizational collapse.

    The Twenty-First Century: De-Industrialization

    How might we avoid such a fate? Surely the dilemmas I have outlined are 
understood by the managers of the current industrial food system. They must 
have some solutions in mind. Indeed they do, and predictably those solutions 
involve a further intensification of the food production process. Because we 
cannot achieve much by applying more energy directly to that process, the 
most promising strategy on the horizon seems to be the genetic engineering of 
new crop varieties. If we could, for example, design crops to grow with less 
water or in unfavorable climate and soil conditions, we could perhaps find 
our way out of the current mess.

    Unfortunately, this strategy has flaws. Our collective experience so far 
with genetically modifying crops shows that glowing promises of higher yields 
or of the reduced need for herbicides have seldom been fulfilled. At the same 
time new genetic technologies carry with them the potential for horrific 
unintended consequences in the form of negative impacts on human health and 
the integrity of ecosystems. We have been gradually modifying plants and 
animals through selective breeding for millennia, but new gene-splicing 
techniques enable scientists to re-mix genomes in ways and to degrees 
impossible heretofore. One serious error could result in biological tragedy 
on an unprecedented scale. Yet even if future genetically modified commercial 
crops prove to be much more successful than past and existing ones, and even 
if we manage to avert a genetic apocalypse, the means of producing, 
distributing, and growing genetically engineered seeds is itself reliant on 
the very fuel-fed industrial system that is in question.

    Is it possible, then, that a solution lies in another direction 
altogether—perhaps in deliberately de-industrializing production but doing so 
intelligently, using information we have gained from the science of ecology 
as well as from traditional and indigenous farming methods in order to reduce 
environmental impacts while maintaining total yields at a level high enough 
to avert widespread famine? This is not an entirely new idea. As you all well 
know, the organic and ecological farming movements have been around for 
decades, but up to this point the managers of the current national and global 
systems have resisted the idea. This is no doubt largely because those 
managers are heavily influenced by giant corporations that profit from 
centralized industrial production for distant markets; nevertheless, the fact 
that we have reached the end of the era of cheap oil and gas demands that we 
re-examine the potential costs and benefits of our current trajectory and its 
alternatives.

    I believe we must and can de-industrialize agriculture. The general 
outline of what I mean by de-industrialization is simple enough: this would 
imply a radical reduction of fossil-fuel inputs to agriculture accompanied by 
an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production 
being devoted primarily to local consumption. Once again, fossil-fuel 
depletion almost ensures that this will happen, but at the same time it is 
fairly obvious that if we don’t plan for de-industrialization, the result 
could be catastrophic. It’s worth taking a moment to think about how events 
might unfold if the process is driven simply by oil and gas depletion—without 
intelligent management.

    Facing high fuel prices, family farms would declare bankruptcy in record 
numbers. Older farmers (the majority, in other words) would probably choose 
simply to retire, whether they could afford to or not; moreover, giant 
corporate farms would also confront rising costs, which they would pass along 
to consumers by way of dramatically higher food prices. Yields would begin to 
decline—in fits and starts—as weather anomalies and water shortages affected 
one crop after another.

    Meanwhile, people in the cities would also feel the effects of 
skyrocketing energy prices. Entire industries would falter, precipitating a 
general economic collapse. Massive unemployment would lead to unprecedented 
levels of homelessness and hunger. Many people would leave cities looking for 
places to live where they could grow some food. But they might find all of 
the available land already owned by banks or the government. Without 
experience in farming, even those who succeeded in gaining access to acreage 
would fail to produce much food and would ruin large tracts of land in the 
process. Eventually these problems would sort themselves out; people and 
social systems would adapt—but probably not before an immense human and 
environmental tragedy had ensued.

    I wish I could say that this forecast is exaggerated for effect, but in 
fact the actual events could be far more violent and disruptive than it is 
possible to suggest in so short a summary.

    Examples and Strategies

    Things don’t have to turn out that way. As I have already said, I believe 
that the de-industrialization of agriculture could be carried out in a way 
that is not catastrophic but instead substantially benefits society and the 
environment in the long run. But to be convinced of the thesis we need more 
than promises. We need historic examples and proven strategies. Fortunately, 
we have two of each.

    In some respects the most relevant historic example is that of Cuba’s 
Special Period. In the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, 
Cuba lost its source of cheap oil. Its industrialized agricultural system, 
which was heavily fuel dependent, immediately faltered. Very quickly Cuban 
leaders abandoned the Soviet industrial model of production, changing from a 
fuel- and petrochemical-intensive farming method to a more localized, 
labor-intensive, organic mode of production. How they did this is itself an 
interesting story. A number of eco-agronomists at Cuban universities had 
already been advocating a transition somewhat along these lines for some 
time, but they were making little or no headway. When the crisis hit, they 
were given free rein to redesign the entire Cuban food system. Had these 
academics not been persistently advocating their position in previous years, 
the nation’s fate might have been sealed.

    Heeding their advice, the Cuban government broke up large state-owned 
farms and introduced private farms, farmer co-operatives, and farmer markets. 
Cuban farmers began breeding oxen for animal traction. The Cuban people 
adopted a mainly vegetarian diet, mostly involuntarily; meat eating went from 
twice a day to twice a week. They increased their intake of vegetable sources 
of protein, and farmers decreased the growing of wheat and rice, which were 
the Green Revolution crops that required too many inputs. Urban gardens, 
including rooftop gardens, were encouraged, and today they produce 50 to 80 
percent of vegetables consumed in cities.

    Early on, it was realized that more farmers were needed and that this 
would require education. All of the nation’s colleges and universities 
quickly added courses on agronomy, and urban educational centers provided 
courses on farming. Even those who were studying to be engineers and doctors 
were required to take such courses. Many people moved from the cities to the 
country to participate in agricultural work; in some cases there were 
incentives, in others the move was forced. At the same time, wages for 
farmers were raised so that they were equal to or even higher than those for 
engineers and doctors. The result was survival. The average Cuban lost 20 
pounds of body weight, but in the long run the overall health of the nation’s 
people actually improved as a consequence. Today Cuba has a stable, slowly 
growing economy. There are few if any luxuries, but everyone has enough to 
eat. Having seen the benefit of smaller-scale organic production, Cuba’s 
leaders have decided that even if they find another source of cheap oil, they 
will maintain a commitment to their new decentralized, low-energy 
agricultural methods; moreover, the Cuban parliament declared 2006 to be the 
year of the energy revolution and has decided to pursue the goal of 
voluntarily reducing Cuba’s energy use by a further two-thirds.

    I don’t want to give the impression that Cubans sailed through the 
Special Period unscathed. Cuba was a grim place during those years, and to 
this day food is far from plentiful by U.S. standards. My point is not that 
Cuba is some sort of paradise but simply that matters could have been far 
worse.

    It could be objected that Cuba’s experience holds few lessons for our own 
nation. After all, Cuba has a very different government and climate, so we 
might question whether its experience can be extrapolated to the United 
States. Let us, then, consider an indigenous historical example:  During both 
World Wars people planted “victory gardens.” Gardening became a spontaneous 
popular movement, which (at least during World War II) the Department of 
Agriculture initially tried to suppress, believing it would compromise the 
industrialization of agriculture. It wasn’t until Eleanor Roosevelt planted a 
victory garden on the White House lawn that Agriculture Secretary Claude 
Wickard relented, and his agency decided not only to promote victory gardens 
but to take credit for them. At the height of the movement victory gardens 
were producing roughly 40 percent of our vegetables, an extraordinary 
achievement in so short a time.

    In addition to these historical precedents new techniques have been 
developed with the coming agricultural crisis in mind; two of the most 
significant are permaculture and biointensive farming. (There are others, but 
limitations of time require me to pick and choose. Let me just mention Wes 
Jackson’s efforts at The Land Institute to breed perennial grain crops, an 
exciting avenue of research to develop new food sources that should be 
supported with our collective wealth in view of the fact that he’s doing work 
on behalf of our collective survival.)

    Permaculture was developed in the late 1970s by Australian ecologists 
Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in anticipation of exactly the problem we 
see unfolding before us. Holmgren defines permaculture as “consciously 
designed landscapes that mimic the patterns and relationships found in 
nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fiber, and energy for provision 
of local needs.” Common permaculture strategies include mulching, rainwater 
capture using earthworks such as swales, composting, and the harmonious 
integration of aquaculture, horticulture, and small-scale animal operations. 
A typical permaculture farm may produce a small cash crop but concentrate 
largely on self-sufficiency and soil building. Significantly, permaculture 
has played an important role in Cuba’s adaptation to a low-energy food regime.

    Biointensive farming has been developed primarily by Californian John 
Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables. Like permaculture, it is a 
product of research begun in the 1970s. Jeavons defines biointensive farming 
(now trademarked as “Grow Biointensive”) as “. . . an organic agricultural 
system that focuses on maximum yields from the minimum area of land, while 
simultaneously improving the soil. The goal of the method is long-term 
sustainability on a closed-system basis. Because biointensive is practiced on 
a relatively small scale, it is well suited to anything from personal or 
family to community gardens, market gardens, or minifarms. It has also been 
used successfully on small scale commercial farms.”

    Because of accumulating environmental damage and fossil fuel depletion 
Jeavons, like Holmgren and Mollison, has worked for the past three decades in 
anticipation of the need for de-industrialization of food production. 
Currently biointensive farming is being taught extensively in Africa and 
South America as a sustainable alternative to globalized monocropping. The 
term “biointensive” suggests that what we are discussing here is not a 
de-intensification of food production but rather the development of 
production along entirely different lines. While both permaculture and 
biointensive farming have been shown to be capable of dramatically improving 
yields per acre, their developers clearly understand that even these methods 
will eventually fail unless we also limit demand for food by gradually and 
humanely limiting the size of the human population. Thus, given certain 
conditions it is possible for industrial nations like the United States to 
make the transition to smaller scale, nonpetroleum food production. There are 
both precedents and models; however, all of them require more farmers. That 
is the catch—and here’s where the ancillary benefits kick in.

    The Key: More Farmers!

    One way or another, re-ruralization will be the dominant social trend of 
the twenty-first century. Thirty or forty years from now—again, one way or 
another—we will see a more historically normal ratio of rural to urban 
population, with the majority once again living in small farming communities. 
More food will be produced in cities than is the case today, but cities will 
be smaller. Millions more people than today will live in the countryside 
growing food although they won’t be doing so the way farmers do it today and 
perhaps not the way farmers did it in 1900.

    Indeed, we perhaps need to redefine the term farmer. We have come to 
think of a farmer as someone with five hundred acres, a big tractor, and 
other expensive machinery. But this does not describe farmers of a hundred 
years ago, and it’s not an accurate picture of most current farmers in less 
industrialized countries; nor does it coincide with what will be needed in 
the coming decades. We should start thinking of a farmer as someone with 
three to fifty acres who uses mostly hand labor and twice a year borrows a 
small tractor that she or he fuels with ethanol or biodiesel produced on site.

    How many more farmers are we talking about? Currently the United States 
has three or four million of them, depending on how we define the term. Let’s 
again consider Cuba’s experience: in its transition away from fossil-fueled 
agriculture that nation found that it required 15 to 25 percent of its 
population to become involved in food production. In the United States in 
1900 nearly 40 percent of the population farmed whereas the current 
proportion is close to 1 percent. Do the math for yourself: Extrapolated to 
our country’s future requirements, this implies the need for a minimum of 
forty million and up to fifty million additional farmers as oil and gas 
availability declines. How soon will the need arise? Assuming that the peak 
of global oil production occurs within the next five years and that natural 
gas is already in decline in the United States, we are looking at a 
transition that must occur over the next twenty to thirty years, and it must 
begin approximately now.

    Fortunately there are some hopeful existing trends to point to. The 
stereotypical U.S. farmer is a middle-aged, Euro-American male, but the 
millions of new farmers in our future will have to include a broad mix of 
people reflecting our increasing diversity. Already the fastest growth in 
farm operators is among Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans as well as 
among female full-time farmers. Another positive trend worth noting is that 
here in the Northeast, where the soil is acidic and giant agribusiness has 
not established as much of a foothold as elsewhere, the number of small farms 
is increasing. We’ve just heard good news from the previous speaker, Will 
Raap, and it’s heartening to learn of his remarkable successes in Vermont 
based on many years of persistent, intelligent work. Young adults—not in the 
millions but at least in the hundreds—are aspiring to become permaculture or 
organic or biointensive farmers. Farmers markets and 
community-supported-agriculture farms (CSAs) are established or springing up 
throughout the region. This is somewhat the case on the Pacific coast too, 
much less so in the Midwest and South.

    What will it take to make these tentative trends predominate? Among other 
things we will need good and helpful policies. The USDA will need to cease 
supporting and encouraging industrial monocropping for export and begin 
supporting smaller farms, rewarding those that make the effort to reduce 
inputs and to grow for local consumption. In the absence of USDA policy along 
these lines we need to pursue state, county, and municipal efforts to support 
small farms in various ways—through favorable zoning, by purchasing local 
food for school lunches, and so on.

    We will also require land reform. Those millions of new farmers will need 
access to the soil, and there must be some means for assisting in making land 
available for this purpose. Conservation land trusts may be useful in this 
regard, and we might take inspiration from Indian Line Farm, a community land 
trust in nearby Great Barrington. Ultimately the giant, many-thousand-acre 
agribusiness farms are going to have to be broken up for much smaller-scale 
production. How that process will work, I don’t know. We’re going to have to 
come up with some good proposals.”

    Because so few people currently know much about farming, education will 
be essential. Universities and community colleges have both the opportunity 
and the responsibility to quickly develop programs in small-scale ecological 
farming methods, programs that also include training in other skills farmers 
will need such as marketing and formulating business plans.

    Given the fact that few if any farms are financially successful the first 
year or even the second or third, loans and grants will be necessary to help 
farmers get started. These new farmers will need higher and stabilized food 
prices. As difficult as it may be even to imagine now, food rationing may be 
required at some point in the next two or three decades. A quota system needs 
to be organized in such a way as to make sure everyone has the bare 
essentials and to support the people at the base of the food system—the 
farmers.

    Finally, we need a revitalization of farming communities and farming 
culture. I grew up in the Midwest, and there it’s very easy to see the 
devastation of small farming communities that has occurred over the decades. 
A century ago, even in the absence of the air and auto transport systems we 
now take for granted, small towns across this land strove to provide their 
citizens with lectures, concerts, libraries, and yearly chautauquas. These 
same towns have seen their best and brightest young people flee year after 
year, first for distant colleges, then for the cities, and as a result have 
become blighted, dull places. The folks left behind have done their best to 
maintain a cultural environment, but in all too many cases that now consists 
merely of a movie theater and a couple of video rental stores. If these 
places bloom once again with the arts, with culture, those who left will want 
to return. Farming communities must be interesting and attractive if we 
expect people to inhabit them and their children to want to stay there.

    If We Do This Well …

    We have been trained to admire the benefits of intensification and 
industrialization, but as I’ve already indicated, we have paid an enormous 
price for these benefits—a price that includes alienation from nature, loss 
of community and tradition, and acceptance of the anonymity and loss of 
autonomy implied by mass society. In essence, this trade-off has its origins 
in the beginnings of urbanization and agriculture.

    Could we actually regain much of what we have lost? Yes, by going back, 
at least in large part, to horticulture. Recall that the shift from 
horticulture to agriculture was, as best we can tell, a fateful turning point 
in cultural history. It represented the beginning of full-time division of 
labor, of hierarchy and patriarchy. Biointensive farming and permaculture are 
primarily horticultural rather than agricultural systems. These new 
intelligent forms of horticulture could, then, offer a viable alternative to 
a new feudalism with a new peasantry. In addition, they emphasize 
biodiversity, averting many of the environmental impacts of field cropping; 
they use various strategies to make hand labor as efficient as possible, 
minimizing toil and drudgery; and they typically slash water requirements for 
crops grown in arid regions.

    We have gotten used to a situation where most farmers rely on nonfarm 
income. As of 2002 only a bit less than 60 percent of farm operators reported 
that their primary work is on the farm. Only 9 percent of primary operators 
on farms with one operator and 10 percent on farms with multiple operators 
reported all of their income as coming from the farm. The bad side of this is 
that it means it’s hard to make a living farming these days. The good side is 
that we don’t have to think of farming as an exclusive occupation. As people 
return to small communities and to farming, they could bring with them other 
interests and means of employment.” In place of a new peasantry that spends 
all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a growing population of 
producers who are involved in the whole range of pursuits of the modern 
middle class that make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile—the arts 
and sciences, history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology.

    The re-ruralization program I am describing could, moreover, be a 
springboard for the rebirth of democracy in this nation. I do not have to 
tell this audience how, over the past few years, democracy in the United 
States has become little more than a slogan. In fact, this erosion of our 
democratic traditions has been going on for some time. As Kirkpatrick Sale 
showed in his wonderful book Human Scale, as communities grow in size, 
individuals’ abilities to influence the affairs within them tends to shrink. 
Recent sociological research now reveals that people who have the ability to 
influence policy in their communities demonstrate a much higher sense of 
satisfaction with life in general. In short, the re-ruralization of this 
country could represent the fulfillment of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an 
agrarian democracy—but without the slaves. If we do this well, it could mean 
the revitalization not only of democracy but of the family and of authentic, 
place-based culture. It could also serve as the basis for a new, genuine 
conservatism to replace the ersatz conservatism of the current ruling 
political elites.

    What I am proposing is nothing less than a new alliance among 
environmental organizations, farmers, gardeners, organizations promoting 
economic justice, the anti-globalization movement, universities and colleges, 
local businesses, churches, and other social organizations. The efforts of 
this alliance would, moreover, have to be coordinated at the international, 
national, state, and local levels. This is clearly a tall order; however, we 
are not talking merely about a good idea. This is a survival strategy.

    It may seem that I am describing and advocating a reversion to the world 
of 1800 or even of 8000 B.C. This is not really the case. We will of course 
need to relearn much of what our ancestors knew, but we have discovered a 
great deal about ecology, biology, geology, hydrology, and other relevant 
subjects in recent decades. We should be applying that knowledge—as Holmgren, 
Mollison, Jeavons, and others have done—to the all-important project of 
producing food for ourselves.

    Cultural anthropology teaches us that the way people get their food is 
the most reliable determinant of virtually all other social characteristics. 
That’s why we classify societies as hunter-gatherer, horticultural, fishing, 
animal herding, agricultural, industrial, and so on. Thus, as we build a 
different food system, we will inevitably be building a new kind of culture, 
certainly very different from industrial urbanism but probably also from what 
preceded it. As always before in human history, we will make it up as we go 
along, in response to necessity and opportunity.

    It may be that the great change I’ve been telling you about won’t take 
place until the need is more obvious and irresistibly pressing. Perhaps the 
cost of gasoline needs to rise to $10 a gallon. Perhaps unemployment will 
have to reach 10 or 20 or 40 percent, with families begging for food in the 
streets, before embattled policy makers begin to reconsider their commitment 
to industrial agriculture. Even in that case, as in Cuba, all may depend upon 
having another option already articulated. Without that, we will be left to 
the worst possible outcome.

    Rather than consigning ourselves to that fate, let us accept the current 
challenge—the next great energy transition—as an opportunity not to vainly 
try to preserve business as usual, the American Way of Life that we are told 
is not up for negotiation, but rather to re-imagine human culture from the 
ground up, using our intelligence and our passion for the welfare of coming 
generations and for the integrity of nature’s web as our primary guides.

    (This lecture drew on certain ideas earlier put forward by Knox, New 
York, farmer Sharon Astyk in her remarks at the 2006 Peak Oil and Community 
Solutions Conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and on others that emerged in 
conversation with Pat Murphy of Community Service and Julian Darley of the 
Post Carbon Institute.)
    Excerpts from the Question Period

                For those of us who want to read more about what’s happened 
in Cuba in the agricultural/horticultural area, can you cite some references 
that we could go to?

                There’s an Oxfam report, which is readily available, and if 
you prefer watching documentaries, there’s a wonderful one that has just been 
produced by the organization Community Solution called “The Power of 
Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.”

                I kept thinking of two works of literature as I listened to 
you speak, The Grapes of Wrath and Their Eyes Were Watching God. As you 
described the catastrophes over the horizon but also the hopeful signs, it 
occurred to me that both books revolve around natural climate disasters and a 
climate shift that caused suffering, but then they move from there to a 
cultural shift and to the recognition of the need for a shift in people’s own 
hearts. I think you articulated that need. Do you have any specific ideas on 
how to bring that about and to learn to celebrate ourselves again and 
celebrate our work? I think that’s lacking in large part, and if we learn how 
to do that again, we’ll feel proud to either return or move forward to the 
kind of de-industrialization that will sustain us.

                One cultural element that could help enormously is sharing. 
That’s something we seem to have forgotten how to do, and we’ve been 
encouraged not to do so by the way our cities have developed and by economic 
trends in this country. Clearly, as there are fewer commodities to go around, 
either we will fight over what’s left or we will share what’s left. Those are 
the two paths before us, so developing a culture of sharing is 
extraordinarily important in finding a peaceful way through the coming energy 
transition. Sharing has to be pioneered in all of the areas that will be 
important to us, not only food but also transportation. The driving-alone 
syndrome will inevitably go by the wayside, literally and figuratively, but 
what will replace it?

                A number of interesting new models are being proposed such as 
community cars and the smart jitney, which is like a shared taxicab and very 
common in the less industrialized world. We don’t have them here because most 
cities have ordinances that prohibit taxicabs from picking up multiple 
passengers in multiple places and dropping them off as they go along. But of 
course it’s a much more energy-efficient way of operating, and you end up 
sharing the resource of the taxicab. These are only two little examples, but 
virtually all of the social invention we’re going to be having to undertake 
over the next few decades involves some form of sharing. Again, the more we 
get used to this now and think about it and pioneer and imagine ways of doing 
it, the better off we will be.

                You’ve come out with a very important new book, The Oil 
DepletionProtocol. Would you please describe the Protocol and talk about the 
ways in which it impacts the subject of your address today.

    I’m not the author of the Protocol, just of the book by that title. The 
protocol itself was suggested by Colin Campbell, the petroleum geologist, and 
it’s essentially very simple: It calls on adopting nations that are oil 
importers to reduce their imports by the global oil-depletion rate, which 
happens to be about 2.5 percent per year, and oil-producing nations would 
reduce their production by their national depletion rates. This would 
stabilize oil prices at a high level. We need stable prices, and we need high 
prices. If we have volatile prices, that undermines the process of economic 
adaptation. The Protocol would also reduce the likelihood of competition and 
conflict for the world’s remaining oil supplies. If the nations of the world 
fight over the world’s remaining oil, which we’re really doing right now, the 
end result will be that no one is able to adapt successfully. Finally, the 
Protocol will leave oil in the ground. If you think about it, the least 
intelligent thing we could do with this amazing one-time-only gift of nature 
is take it out of the ground as quickly as possibly and just burn it once and 
for all.

                The Oil Depletion Protocol is something that is just 
beginning to be promoted, and I’m working closely with the Post Carbon 
Institute on it. The Protocol can be adopted not only by nations but by 
businesses, states, regions, municipalities, and even by individuals. All 
that’s necessary is to calculate how much oil you’re using now and make a 
plan to reduce that amount by 2.5 to 3 percent a year. That’s easy to do in 
this country; we’re already consuming twice as much oil per capita as the 
Europeans and Japanese. Making this reduction confers an immediate benefit 
because whether it’s a nation, a city, or a business that does so means 
adapting to the post-peak world now while there are many options available 
rather than waiting until the last moment when the opportunities will be far 
fewer and not as favorable. We see this in the U.S. auto industry right now: 
Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler chose to put off the energy transition as 
long as possible, and now they are on the verge of bankruptcy while 
automakers like Toyota and Honda, which foresaw the likelihood of higher fuel 
prices, are engaged in the transition. They are profiting as a result. That’s 
just one example, but transfer that to individual cities, to nations across 
the world, and you get the picture. Sweden has voluntarily decided to end its 
oil addiction by 2020, and I think we’ll see other nations lining up in the 
years ahead as well.

                You mentioned an annual 2.5 percent reduction in our energy 
obesity, but on an individual basis, if you were to wave a wand and suggest 
we all start tomorrow, what percentage would you suggest?

                We must proceed by increments. I think we have to look at 
something like a 90 percent reduction in U.S. energy use as our goal, but I’m 
talking about the end result over certainly many years and possibly decades 
of adaptation. We need to understand that the rate at which we in this 
country are using energy now is absolutely off the charts, completely 
unprecedented in all of human history. Even with a 90 percent reduction we 
would still be looking at a historically high level of energy consumption. I 
think we can support that amount by using renewable energy sources.

                I personally know people who have no car, who use no external 
source of heat for their homes—of course, they do live in California—who grow 
most of their own food, and so on. Their energy consumption is in fact right 
now only 10 percent of the U.S. average. It certainly can be done, but for 
society as a whole we have to stretch out the process of reduction: 2.5 to 3 
percent a year achieves 25 percent over the course of ten years, 50 percent 
over fifty years, and so on.

                You talked about many of the inefficiencies of the 
petroleum-based agriculture system that we’re used to in this country, but 
you didn’t really go into the vast inefficiencies of how much of that grain 
is going for animals, which we then eat. You did mention Cuba and their 
experience of a plant-based diet and the benefits that ensued. How do you 
view eating lower on the food chain as it relates to your overall thesis?

                As a thirty-five-year vegetarian I’m a little biased. Yes, 
meat production is obviously extremely energy intensive and more so in this 
country than in many other places. In Australia, for example, the amount of 
water devoted to meat production is much smaller than it is here. Over the 
past thirty-five years I have found that from a health standpoint many people 
don’t do well on a completely vegan or vegetarian diet, and I think we have 
to be realistic and take account of that. I also think, however, tht we would 
be much healthier if we ate much less meat; that would help our collective 
survival prospects enormously as we go through this transition.
    Concluding Remarks

           In our transition to a post-fossil-fuel food production regime I 
think one of the key elements has to be the relearning of seed saving, and I 
say this because the current system for producing and distributing seeds is 
very vulnerable due to problems associated with the genetic engineering of 
food crops and also to the problem of dependence on our current 
transportation system. If that system breaks down, where does next year’s 
crop come from? So seed saving is a skill I would advise everyone to learn 
about and start practicing for at least part of your food supply.

           There are differing approaches in the discussion having to do with 
the peak-oil movement. A number of former petroleum geologists and engineers 
and energy traders involved in it have a rather narrow view of what peak oil 
is about and what the problem is and how we can solve it. They tend to 
gravitate to solutions like tar sands and oil shale and nuclear power. But a 
big part of the response to the problem of peak oil that has emerged over the 
past few years has been a citizen-based movement that I must say is one of 
the most encouraging political movements I’ve seen in my lifetime.           
Everywhere I go, I see groups that have formed within the past two years, 
often within just the past few months—citizen groups working to formulate 
local policies, working with their city-council members, their county boards 
of supervisors, mayors, etc. They are knocking on doors, being persistent, 
and actually getting a hearing, in many cases even making changes in public 
policy. Now, these aren’t sufficient changes yet, but it’s certainly a start. 
The great thing about it is that these are people who in many cases have 
previously not been politically involved, or they’re people who were 
politically involved years ago but then became discouraged by the complete 
dysfunctionality of the national political scene in Washington and gave up on 
political action. But now they’re involved at the local level, and they’re 
finding that it is possible to make a difference. I think this is enormously 
encouraging. There are several organizations that are trying to help 
coordinate all of this, but in fact it’s very much a spontaneous effort.

           I know that probably all of you have been toiling in this vineyard 
for some time, and speaking to a gathering of this sort is sometimes referred 
to as preaching to the choir. I don’t regard it that way at all; I regard it 
as talkingto a room full of preachers because I know that all of you have 
many connections throughout your own communities.

    With that religious metaphor still lingering in the air I will conclude 
with words from Genesis, words that have caused endless mischief in the world 
up to now but that may actually be appropriate in this context. They are, “Go 
forth, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth.”

    Richard Heinberg is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, musician, 
and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches a 
program on “Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community.”

                Widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil 
educators, he is the author of seven books including most recently The 
Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Society (2003, 2005), 
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post Carbon World (2004), and The Oil 
Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse 
(2006).

           His monthly MuseLetter was nominated in 1994 for an Alternative 
Press Award and has been included in Utne Magazine’s annual list of Best 
Alternative Newsletters. His essays and articles have appeared in many 
journals and on web sites. He is a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and a 
member of  the Association for the Study of Peak Oil.