Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Growing Food After Peak Oil
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Archives2007/HeinbergFiftyMillion.html
By Richard Heinberg
Section C. Peak Oil and Energy

Editor's Note: This is the abbreviated text of a lecture by Richard
Heinberg delivered to the E. F. Schumacher Society in Stockbridge,
Massachusetts on October 28, 2006

There was a time not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not
accepted, part of life. Until the 19th 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 America, such a state of affairs 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 in America 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 finding time
in the day’s hectic schedule to go to the grocery store or to cook. 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 American family spent 20 percent of its income on food
in 1950; today the figure is 10 percent.

This is an extraordinary situation; but because it is the only one that
most Americans alive today have ever experienced, we tend to assume that it
will continue indefinitely. However there are 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. This is a subject I have
written about extensively elsewhere, so I shall not repeat myself in any
detail. Suffice it to say that the era of cheap oil and natural gas is
coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak in
2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline.
These events will have enormous implications for America’s
petroleum-dependent food system.

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 to fuel farm machinery and 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;
this makes it the single largest consumer of petroleum products as compared
to other industries. By comparison, the U.S. military, in all of its
operations, uses only about half that amount. About 350 gallons (1,500
liters) of oil equivalents are required to feed each American 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. And 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 of land and other resources needed for agricultural production.
Already 14 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 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; so, throughout the past century, most farming
families—including hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions that would
have preferred to maintain their rural, self-sufficient way of life—were
economically forced to move to cities and find jobs. Today so few people
farm that vital knowledge of how to farm is disappearing. The average age
of American farmers is over 55 and approaching 60. The proportion of
principal farm operators younger than 35 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, which produces the substantial bulk of the nation’s
fruits, nuts, and vegetables, receives virtually no rainfall during summer
months and relies overwhelmingly on irrigation. But the snowpack on the
Sierras, which provides much of that irrigation water, is declining, 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 looming
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)—in short,
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 American agriculture has become highly centralized due to
cheap transport and economies of scale (almost the entire national spinach
crop, for example, 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.

















averting famine, this strategy may permit us to solve a host of other,
seemingly unrelated social and environmental problems.

Intensifying Food Production

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 (gardening) 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 over-hunting 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 (gardening) eventually led to
agriculture (field cropping). The latter produced more food per unit of
land, which enabled more population growth, which meant still more demand
for food. We are 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.

But 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 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, and that was 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 up 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 just
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. And,
in the process, we have made farming uneconomical and unattractive to all
but a few.

That’s the broad, global overview. In America, 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 U.S. farm size grew from
100 acres in 1930 to almost 500 acres by 1990), and production for export.

The Saturation Period (1970-present): In recent decades, the application of
still greater amounts of energy have produced smaller relative increases in
crop yields; meanwhile an ever-growing amount of energy is being expended
to maintain the functioning of the overall system. For example, about ten
percent of the energy in agriculture is used just to offset the negative
effects of soil erosion, while increasing amounts of pesticides must be
sprayed each year as pests develop resistances. 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. That 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 short, 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—the Greeks, Babylonians, and
Romans—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 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 time-worn tale of catastrophic
civilizational collapse.

The 21st Century: De-Industrialization

How might we avoid such a fate?

Surely the dilemmas we have outlined above are understood by the managers
of the current industrial food system. They must have some solutions in
mind.

Indeed they do, and, predictably perhaps, those solutions involve a further
intensification of the food production process. Since 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, for example, we could 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, there are some flaws with this plan. Our collective
experience with genetically modifying crops so far 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 forms
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 the re-mixing of
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 ones, and even if we manage to avert a genetic
apocalypse, the means of producing and distributing 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 system have resisted it. 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 occurs
without intelligent management, driven simply by oil and gas depletion.

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. However, 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. Yet they might find all of the available land already owned
by banks or the government. Without experience of 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. Yet 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 and that in fact 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 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.

















waiting in the wings, 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-ops, 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
(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. At the same time, wages for farmers were
raised to be at parity with those for engineers and doctors. Many people
moved from the cities to the country; in some cases there were incentives,
in others the move was forced.

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
methods.

I don’t want to give the impression that Cubans sailed through the
Special Period unscathed. Cuba was a grim place during these years, and to
this day food is far from plentiful there by American 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. Since Cuba has a very different government and climate, we might
question whether its experience can be extrapolated to the U.S.

Let us, then, consider an indigenous historical example. During both World
Wars, Americans planted Victory Gardens. During both periods, gardening
became a sort of spontaneous popular movement, which (at least during World
War II) the USDA initially tried to suppress, believing that it would
compromise the industrialization of agriculture. It wasn’t until Eleanor
Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden in the White House lawn that agriculture
secretary Claude Wickard relented; his agency then began to promote Victory
Gardens and to take credit for them. At the height of the movement, Victory
Gardens were producing roughly 40 percent of America’s vegetables, an
extraordinary achievement in so short a time.

In addition to these historical precedents, we have new techniques
developed with the coming agricultural crisis in mind; two of the most
significant are Permaculture and Biointensive farming (there are
others—such as efforts by Wes Jackson of The Land Institute to breed
perennial grain crops—but limitations of time and space require me to
pick and choose).

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 concentrates 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,
Biointensive is a product of research begun in the 1970s. Jeavons defines
Biointensive (now trademarked as “Grow Biointensive”) farming 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.

Like Homgren and Mollison, Jeavons has worked for the past three decades in
anticipation of the need for the de-industrialization of food production
due to accumulating environmental damage and fossil fuel depletion.
Currently Biointensive farming is being taught extensively in Africa and
South America as a sustainable alternative to the 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 have been shown to be capable of dramatically improving
yields-per-acre, their developers clearly understand that even these
methods will eventually fail us unless we also limit demand for food by
gradually and humanely limiting the size of the human population.

In short, it is possible in principle for industrial nations like the U.S.
to make the transition to smaller-scale, non-petroleum food production,
given certain conditions. There are both precedents and models.

However, all of them imply more farmers. Here’s 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 21st 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 be in the
countryside growing food.

They won’t be doing so the way farmers do it today, and perhaps not the
way farmers did it in 1900.

Indeed, we need perhaps to redefine the term farmer. We have come to think
of a farmer as someone with 500 acres and a big tractor and other expensive
machinery. But this is not what farmers looked like 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 perhaps start thinking of a farmer
as someone with 3 to 50 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 U.S. 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 America
in 1900, nearly 40 percent of the population farmed; the current proportion
is close to one percent.

Do the math for yourself. Extrapolated to this country’s future
requirements, this implies the need for a minimum of 40 to 50 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 North American natural gas is already in
decline, we are looking at a transition that must occur over the next 20 to
30 years, and that must begin approximately now.

Fortunately there are some hopeful existing trends to point to. The
stereotypical American 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 America’s increasing diversity. Already the fastest
growth in farm operators in America is among female full-time farmers, as
well as Hispanic, Asian, and Native American farm operators.

Another positive trend worth noting: 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. 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 CSAs
are established or springing up throughout the region. This is somewhat the
case also on the Pacific coast, much less so in the Midwest and South.

What will it take to make these tentative trends the predominant ones?
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, here in
the northeast.

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

Since few if any farms are financially successful the first year or even
the second or third, loans and grants will also 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 this situation now, food rationing may be
required at some point in the next two or three decades. That 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. 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. Over the past decades these same towns have seen their best
and brightest young people flee first to distant colleges and then to the
cities. 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. Farming communities must be
interesting, attractive places if we expect people to inhabit them and for
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 the acceptance of the
anonymity and loss of autonomy implied by mass society. In essence, this
tradeoff has its origins in the beginnings of urbanization and agriculture.

Could we actually regain much of what we have lost? Yes, perhaps 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, hierarchy, and patriarchy.

Biointensive farming and Permaculture are primarily horticultural rather
than agricultural systems. These new, intelligent forms of horticulture
could, then, offer an 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 non-farm
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, report 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. Rather than a new peasantry
that spends all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a new
population of producers who maintain interests in the arts and sciences, in
history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology—in short, the whole
range of pursuits that make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile.

Moreover, the re-ruralization program I am describing could 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 America 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’
ability to influence public affairs tends to shrink. Sociological research
now shows that people who have the ability to influence policy in their
communities show a much higher sense of satisfaction with life in general.
In short, the re-ruralization of America 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. Moreover, the efforts
of this alliance would have to be coordinated at the national, state, and
local level. This is clearly a tall order. However, we are not talking
about merely 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 that of 8,000 BC. 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 biology, geology, hydrology, and other
relevant subjects in recent decades, and we should be applying that
knowledge—as Holmgren, Mollison, Jeavons, and others have done—to the
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.
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.

Perhaps these great changes won’t take place until the need is obvious
and irresistibly pressing. Maybe gasoline needs to get to $10 a gallon.
Perhaps unemployment will have to rise to ten or twenty or forty percent,
with families begging for food in the streets, before embattled policy
makers begin to reconsider their commitment to industrial agriculture.

But 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.