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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] An Interview with Albert Bates
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An Interview with Albert Bates
Jan 14th, 2009 | By Aaron Newton | Category: Featured Articles | ShareThis
http://henandharvest.com/?p=186

The following is an interview with Albert Bates conducted as part of the
process of writing A Nation of Farmers, by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton
which is available for pre-order now and will be published in March of 2009
by New Society Publishers. An edited version of this interview appears in
the book.

Albert Bates’s latest book is The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and
Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. Bates is described as:

albert-bates2an influential figure in the intentional community and
ecovillage movements. A lawyer, author and teacher, he has been director of
the Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and of the Ecovillage
Training Center at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee since 1994.

Bates has been a resident of The Farm since 1972. A former attorney, he
argued environmental and civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court
and drafted a number of legislative Acts during a 26-year legal career. The
holder of a number of design patents, Bates invented the concentrating
photovoltaic arrays and solar-powered automobile displayed at the 1982
World’s Fair. He served on the steering committee of Plenty International
for 18 years, focussing on relief and development work with indigenous
peoples, human rights and the environment. An emergency medical technician
(EMT), he was a founding member of The Farm Ambulance Service. He was also
a licensed Amateur Radio operator. More on Albert Bates.

Albert Bates

Spring 2008

A Nation of Farmers: I wanted to start by asking about something I’ve
heard you say in other interviews.A lot of other people, even some of the
cheery folks, tend to talk about peak oil specifically in really gloomy,
sad terms.You tend to talk about it as a potentially positive development
for humankind, and I wondered if you could talk about why.

Albert Bates: There are a few reasons behind that I think everybody at some
point has to go through the process of having the realization.That may come
as kind of a rude awakening, or it may come as “Aha, I told you so!”,
but at some point everybody goes through it. It tends to deepen as time
goes on, and people have their own periods of weeping and gnashing the
teeth, but then you have to cope, you have to get up and do something about
it. I think the more important thing is to have an attitude that something
can still be done. You can’t exclude the possibility that the future is
still malleable, that there is still an opportunity for positive change if
we exert our capacity or our abilities to do that.

I think it’s important to paint a positive vision for the future to
galvanize the kinds of changes that people are capable of, rather than to
focus on the various dystopias, which is all too common in peak oil
literature. We’re going to have to talk about energy and energy descent,
and that’s ultimately about energy ascent — which is to say
re-energizing. Re-energizing communities and culture, re-energizing the way
we go through our lives so that we’re much more of our human selves, so
that the separation that we’ve lost with nature is repaired. And that’s
the key to realistically embracing the possibilities of our situation
rather than being overwhelmed by the kinds of challenges that our situation
presents us with.

That’s part of it. And then the other piece of it, this whole idea of
neurological evolution and the way that the human brain works and hormones
and things like that. One of the kinds of things that we’re investigating
in recent years has been the feedback mechanisms, the chemical stimulators
within the brain. What we’re learning, slowly, over a long period of time
now, is that people who have a pessimistic outlook tend to close off parts
of their brain that would normally function to provide alternatives, lots
of ideas. And people who have optimistic attitudes tend to produce the
kinds of body chemicals that stimulate the creative centers in the brain
and produce the kinds of ideas that might actually provide solutions for
some of the problems that are confronting us. So what we tend to do by
being pessimistic is create a self-fulfilling prophecy that we cannot get
out because we’re stuck. If we actually have an optimistic outlook, even
though it’s unrealistic, it has a better chance in the long term of
succeeding than even a very cautious attitude.

ANOF: It’s reinforced even by biology and chemistry! That’s very
interesting. Well, you certainly have a positive vision for the future and
you’re working towards it. Your most recent book, The Post-Petroleum
Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, talks about
preparing for a transition to a new way of being, to a new way of living.
Could you talk in broad terms about what that transition itself might look
like? I think some people have the expectation that we’re going to flip a
switch and things are going to be post-carbon.

AB: Yeah, it’s not actually going to go that easily. I think that’s
kind of wishful thinking, and I think the key theme that I’m harping on
these days when I go out and talk or lecture or give permaculture courses
or speak to groups of students is that what we need more of is resilience.
That’s essentially the quality of defense in depth that allows a
community to provide for most of its essential needs: food, energy, water,
raw materials, from multiple sources, most of them local. So that in the
event of large-scale system failures, collapse is averted because there’s
smaller-scale, local community resilience, and that has the wherewithal to
fend for itself.

Getting to that, that idea of resilience, actually means traveling back on
a development path that we had previously gone the opposite direction on.
In a sense it’s kind of a reversal, but at the same time, it’s
something that we are familiar with, that we know how to do, because
we’ve been there before. We actually have a lot of things that we’ve
developed in the last century of high-tech, fossil-fueled, civilized
progress, and we can apply many of those same kinds of things to this new
paradigm of living locally and having multiple resilient systems.

To give you an example, the bicycle. The bicycle has advanced hugely in the
last 20 years and even more in the last 50 years. If you look at that kind
of progress and you say, ok, apply that now to getting to the post office
to pick up the mail, or the postman delivering the mail, or the cop on the
beat instead of going around in a cruiser being on a bicycle. That kind of
thing is actually more doable now than it would have been back when
everyone had a single gear clunker that weighed a quarter of their own body
weight. At the same time, I don’t want to completely throw out those
heavy-duty steel frame models. Arguably they won the Vietnamese their
independence. They were the workhorses that carried artillery shells up the
mountains to Dien Bien Phu and ran supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail
through all the B-52 craters.

ANOF: Are you at all concerned about the loss of knowledge concerning
low-tech technologies that could come into play? I’m thinking here
everything from pottery making to just even basic food production and
farming skills, because we haven’t been doing that.

AB: No, I’m not in the least, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve had the
benefit of having had a forty-year experience with that which many other
people don’t have. And so I have a certain level of confidence and ease
that many people who have not had that forty-year experience may not.Let me
break that down for you with some history.

The Farm started here in Tennessee in 1971. It came out of an exodus, a
hippy exodus from the cities — San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, New
York’s East Village, and so forth, and arrived here at this cattle farm
in the middle of the forest where land was 70 dollars an acre. And for
hippys, that was less than the cost of a kilo at that time, to get an acre
of land, you know? We didn’t understand at that point, myself included,
why it was so cheap, and I’m including myself even though I didn’t
actually get here until 1972 when I shelved my law career in favor of
retiring young and came out to the country.

The reason that the land was 70 dollars an acre was that it had no soil. It
was essentially a clear-cut in an oak forest, made a century earlier, and
it had actually been clear-cut several times by the 1950s and turned into a
cattle ranch which pounded the ground in an area with 50 inches of rain in
winter and dry dusty summers, to the point where there wasn’t any soil
left, just chalky clay and gravel. Our first objective, our necessity for
the first couple of years here, was simply to make soil.

We got horses from the Amish. I was somebody who grew up in Connecticut and
my high school sport was equestrian arts like dressage and stadium jumping
and that sort of thing. And so I was enlisted by the horse crew to work
behind draft horses in the field, and to teach others how to work with
horses and care for them properly.

There was a certain amount of carryover there, I mean a horse has certain
kinds of needs that I knew how to fill, but I had to learn other skills
that you don’t get when you work a yearling on a lunge line. I had to
learn that gee and haw turn them right and left. I had to learn how to work
with old-fashioned harness and double-tree hitches. I had to learn how to
make canvas collars because we were vegetarians and actually pretty serious
hard-core vegans, and we didn’t believe in using leather at all. So we
replaced everything we had that was leather with something that was not
leather, mostly riveted canvas and nylon.We had to re-make all of the
harness and tack.

So I learned how to do that. My friend Eli Gifford went off to Maryland to
learn to be a ferrier so he could come back and make horseshoes. And we
learned how to make crops with draft horses, and in three years time we
took a bunch of art majors and English majors and by 1974 we were nearly
food self-sufficient. We grew pretty much everything we needed to feed 800
to 1000 people, the exceptions being things like rice and fruit, which we
also would have gotten around to eventually. Fruit takes a while, but we
had probably 20 acres planted in fruit trees and bushes.

We had to go out and buy toilet paper , matches, light bulbs, salt and
things like that. But by 1976 we had a hundred-man farming crew here at the
farm. We had a cash crop of sorghum that we made into molasses for our
sweetener. We had a canning factory that could turn out a thousand gallons
of ketchup in a night. We had a walk-in solar dryer for herbs and sliced
vegetables.

I gradually moved off the horse crew and onto the flour mill crew, and
worked with a five-man team re-learning the skills of making wheat flour
and buckwheat flour and cornmeal and grits and groats and horse feed and
peanut butter and coffee from soybeans and things like that. We went out
and salvaged old milling equipment, old flour mill equipment from places
that had been abandoned for years, and took all that small-scale,
intermediate scale kind of stuff and brought them back to The Farm and
built elevated buildings that functioned like giant machines. It was
village-scale stuff that nobody used anymore. And we put it back to work.

Like I say, we had about 300 acres under till in Tennessee. We had some
people come to join The Farm who had lived in Florida. They had some land
in southern Florida, and so we used their place to stay and we rented land
near there to grow food in the winter. We had some folks who joined The
Farm from Michigan and they had a nice apple orchard, so we sent a few
hundred people up there and farmed that, too, and had the apples to bring
down to Tennessee. We dried some of that fruit and made fruit leather at
another satellite farm near Denver. By the early 1980s, a network of more
than 20 such places had formed and were coordinated from our base in
Tennessee, using ham radio.

Gradually, over the course of a decade or so, we re-learned all those
skills. They’re not so far away. People in other parts of the world still
have them. Our Amish neighbors never lost them. And so it’s not so
difficult to do as you might think.

ANOF: It seems to me that when we’re talking about food production, today
we’re facing two simultaneous problems. The first being that fossil fuel
energy used to produce food is becoming less available and so it’s more
economically expensive. But also using that fossil fuel energy to grow food
is more ecologically expensive. Is food the intersection of these issues?
Could it be the catalyst for a greater social change? By that I mean, peak
oil and climate change the flip sides of the same coin. And so I’m
wondering, because so much petroleum is necessary to continue industrial
agriculture, and because burning that petroleum and the other fossil fuels
used in agriculture are warming the planet causing our climate to change,
because both of those are coming to bear on the same issue, that is, how we
eat, could food be the issue that really puts peak oil and climate change
on the map?

AB: I think that’s entirely possible. It’s hard to say exactly what’s
going to put it over the top. There are 37 countries right now that are in
serious food shortfall, and that’s why you’re getting riots in Haiti,
Egypt and Mexico, in some places banging pots in the street and in others
people actually dying in riots. They’re protesting in a lot of different
places — they’re protesting in France, they’re protesting in many
parts of the world, Africa and so forth. It’s true, that’s definitely
coming to the fore. I’m not certain everyone makes the connection yet,
however, between the shortage of food and the energy and climate crises.

We’ve got essentially four converging factors on the food supply. The
first is the high cost of petroleum products, and that includes the
fertilizers and chemicals, the fuel for the tractors and the combines, and
the storage costs, the transportation, the drying of the grain and so on
and forth. All of that is bearing on the costs of the food and making it
much more expensive. We’re watching in the US the average market basket
increase in price about 30 percent a year, just the same as the rise in the
price of crude oil.

Now we’re seeing the second shoe fall, which is the competition over land
created by alternatives to fossil fuels, specifically biofuels.You see a
lot of places that are starting to switch over their corn production or
their soybean production or some other things to biofuels, and that’s
putting more price pressure on food. A lot of that corn and soy production
was not for food anyway, but that is another story.

The third thing is you have the whole world moving towards the American or
European food standard. I have to say the US food standard, because even
the Germans eat only a third of the meat in an average day that US citizens
do. And so we are losing the caloric efficiency of eating lower on the food
chain. Every time you move up the food chain a notch and eat something that
ate something else, you’re losing about ten times the caloric efficiency.
The typical chicken might cost you 30 calories for every 10 calories that
you’re actually able to achieve from the protein value of the food that
the chicken ate. I’m making this more complicated than it needs to be,
but you get the picture. Essentially what’s happening is we’re moving
into a meat-eating culture worldwide, and because that requires a huge
amount of grain, a huge amount of land and so forth, it’s putting
pressure on food prices.

Also, we’re running out of food. We’ve got oceans that are running out
of fish now. They’re starting to catch tuna in the Gulf of Mexico that
are really just fry because they cannot meet world demand by what is left
in the Atlantic. If you catch one of those Blue Fin Tuna that are as big as
the ones that we had 10 years ago, you’d get 275,000 dollars for one
fish! So what they’re doing, to satisfy the new Chinese craving for sushi
is they’re going and catching the fry, and that means of course that
there won’t be any of those big tuna anymore. That’s a world population
issue, and a dietary fashion issue, that’s coming to bear on the food
supply.

And then the final issue is the climate change issue, which is essentially
saying that you’re not going to be able to grow food in places that
you’re accustomed to growing food, because of the change in climate.
We’ve had two revisions of the USDA planting chart here Tennessee while
I’ve lived here, because they keep having to move the isotherms northward
to reflect the change of seasons because of global warming.

ANOF: Not to mention then chaos caused by the late freezes and the early
frosts, and the heavy rains in some places.

AB: Yeah, not to mention all the pests that can survive that didn’t used
to be able to survive and are now invasive. That is also another function
of the fossil fuel era, which is moving those sorts of things all over the
world and finding them new niches in which they have no predators or in
which their favored food supply lacks resistance.

ANOF: You talked about The Farm and the evolution of food production at
your community. Could you talk about cooking as an important building block
of the community? I’m thinking here of the technologies and the skills
that it takes, but also the sharing and the communal aspect of eating and
cooking together.

AB: When I first came here, I arrived on a cold November day. I had just
walked the Appalachian Trail from north to south, and I had been on the
Trail for 103 days and had been making my own meals, cooking for myself
every day. I came in here and they had turned an old line shack that had
been a cattle feed storage building into the community kitchen. There
wasn’t enough room inside to seat anybody, but they had enough room in
there for a few stoves, a bread oven, prep tables, dish washing sinks and
so on.

People who lived on The Farm in those days lived mostly in busses and tents
and things. We hadn’t had time or money to build buildings yet. So we
would take turns; each tent would take a rotation in staffing the kitchen.
We would create these huge meals for 300, 400, 500 people in long lines —
tables outside and people sitting on the ground — and we would cook. In
those early days we didn’t have the advantage of giant pressure cookers,
so there would be a bean watch that would go overnight for the next day’s
soybeans. It takes eight or ten hours cooking soybeans to denature the
trypsin inhibitor in soybeans to make them edible, unless you are a
ruminant with multiple stomachs and can chew cud. In a pressure cooker you
can do that in 45 minutes to an hour and a half. Without that you have to
watch the pot for eight, ten hours. So we were taking turns, on rotation,
doing that sort of thing. We had a chore wheel. Pancake breakfasts would go
on for hours, if we tried to feed 500 people a pancake breakfast.

So we learned how to do these kinds of things, but here’s the interesting
thing about all that. If you look back in American history, you can see
that there’s been a lot of communal experiments over the years, a lot of
weird strange cults and stuff that came over from various different
countries and settled in North America, and a lot of those didn’t
survive. Most of them didn’t survive, and several of them had fairly
serious death tolls the first few years.

We survived, we made it. And part of the reason we made it was we were able
to feed everybody from soybeans. Soy was our miracle plant. It was the
wonder bean of China, and for 2,000 years people in Asia had been
developing a marvelous cuisine. The Indonesians had developed tempeh, the
Javanese had developed ontjom, the Malasians yuba, the Japanese natto and
sufu, and the Chinese had tofu, soy milk, and yogurt and things like that.
We just kept pushing that envelope and taking that into the hippy realms of
California cuisine — soy burgers and soy burritos and soy cheesecake and
soysage and soy pizzas and soy coffee and things like that. We were the
Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck of soy. And because soybeans in those days
cost about three dollars a bushel, which is 60 pounds — today it’s
probably up to about seven dollars a bushel — what that means is that you
can feed one person their protein needs for a year on three to seven
dollars if you can make it tasty enough to repeat almost daily.

So we could actually make some very elegant world fusion dishes, and to do
that we built ourselves a soy dairy, eventually, where we could make milk
and tofu and ice cream; frogurt, whipped cream, mayonnaise and things like
that. And then we also eventually developed canning and freezing and
processing plants to help produce things that would last for longer periods
of time. Pickled eggplant was one of my personal favorites. We got into
texturized vegetable protein and soy isomers and various forms of frozen
deserts, eventually buying an ice cream factory at salvage prices and
selling Ice Bean to an 8-state region.

ANOF: It sounds like the eating was really an important part socially, a
cohesion, a wonderful thing to look forward to.

AB: There’s actually been a study done by a guy at the University of
British Columbia. A professor there did this lovely study where he looked
at what is it that communities that have lasted the longest, intentional
communities that lasted the longest, what are the factors that they have in
common. And one of those that he signaled as being pretty important, that
you can pretty much rank the longevity of any community based on this, is
common shared meals. The more often people come together, the better their
odds. So if they come together daily, three times a day, their odds are
excellent. If they come together a couple times a week, their odds are
still good. If they come together once a month, they’re still better than
not coming together at all. There’s a direct correlation there between
people eating together and getting along in a community.

ANOF: Certain sociologists say the same about individual families don’t
they?

AB: Probably so. You know, the other thing about it is that there is a joy
in cooking, there’s a joy in providing for others by the fruits of your
labor. And you see that personal satisfaction of watching other people eat
what you’ve just cooked and complimenting the chef and so on and so
forth. All of that is a self-maintaining, self-gratifying kind of effort,
but it’s also very important from the standpoint of kids growing up in
that and propagating that meme of the happy family out to larger and larger
groups of extended family and community and so forth. We had lots of kids
living in close confinement here — in the early days we didn’t have
much in the way of housing, so people were living thirty, forty people to a
standard house, what you’d call a house in the US today. And so a lot of
kids being raised there in those communal settings, going to meals three
times a day with everybody else, all the other kids, all the other
grownups, and seeing this kind of interaction over the food. It has an
effect of making the community more stable from the kids up. As the kids
grow into that, they grow up more stable in their social relationships.

ANOF: It’s funny — it’s much maligned by a lot of modern Americans,
the idea of growing their own food and, God forbid, cooking it, anything
other than a prepackaged microwaved meal — but there really is a joy that
many people are missing out on.

AB: That’s right. You can go back — I don’t know how old you are, but
for me, I’m in my sixties now and I go back to the early days of
television and I remember Mrs. Goldberg, you know, and the old 12-inch
black and white TV and the Honeymooners and stuff like that? There were
always people standing around the stove, right? There were always people
who were making a pot of spaghetti sauce or something. That’s what they
did. You go to an Amish community and you see the same thing; you go to a
Hutterite community and you see the same thing, which is that there are
people who are the cooks. They’re the ones who really take pleasure in
making sure that everybody’s well-fed all the time.

ANOF: You mentioned successes and some failures in the intentional
community movement. I see them as having been wonderful incubators for
ideas during the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. What do you
think of as their role in the 21st century?

AB: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head; they’re incubators. There
was never any sense, I think, in any of the intentional communities that
somehow that was the mainstream. People went to intentional communities or
joined experimental spiritual communities or bohemian tribes specifically
to live outside the mainstream. What they’re were doing was living on the
edge, experimenting, trying to be true to their personal values and to live
in a way that didn’t offend their personal values and life goals or make
it impossible to raise sane children. If they were lucky, they’d find a
bunch of people who had similar values and could live together, practicing
what they believed, and that’s the nature of the intentional community.

Now once you’ve gotten to that stage, you’ve freed up a certain amount
of creative energy, and you can begin to explore interpersonal dynamics,
gestalt therapy, the opportunities to work together in various forms. And
as you do that, you begin to actually advance new ideas and new memes which
quite often then spread out into the larger mainstream. So the mainstream
may not notice, or may not credit the intentional communities with starting
some of these things, but actually those kinds of things come into general
use after a time because they’ve been proven out in small experiments out
of the limelight.

It’s kind of a Jeffersonian way of looking at the larger society —
every separate entity is its own sovereign and creates its own ways of
doing things. And as long as they’re peaceful towards each other, they
can experiment to their hearts’ content. That’s how the more liberal
thinkers among the US founders– Jefferson, Franklin — saw the States,
as opposed to the federal government, in the early days. I’m showing my
Southern roots here, because I have a view of states here that’s
different than people in the North. [laughs]

ANOF: Well, I’m in North Carolina here, so I’m familiar with that.
[laughs]

AB: That’s how the Framers thought, if you go back to the Constitutional
Convention, or read the Federalist Papers, particularly the southerners.
They felt very strongly about having the States as crucibles of
experimentation on their own terms, and not be welded into mere divisions
of a single homogenous central government, and all look exactly the same.

ANOF: Right. And for our book, A Nation of Farmers, we’re talking
specifically about Jeffersonian vision of democracy because I feel like he
had this idea of fairly self-sufficient individual farms, of a people who
were marginally sovereign as families or groups of families. They still
interacted with others of course, and traded amongst their communities, but
that certain level of self-sufficiency insulated them, gave them a certain
amount of freedom because they weren’t beholden to others for their basic
needs.

AB: That’s right. Here’s another piece of that, which is that one of
the tensions that you always find in intentional communities, indeed
anywhere that people are living together, is this continuum between privacy
and public space, or personal space and public space. People want to be
able to be left alone, but they also crave the company of people and the
opportunity for conviviality. So you have to have a balance in your life,
and you have to have a balance in your space, and you have to have the
development of forms, patterns that allow for people to be in whatever
place they want to be in that given moment and be able to move freely.

If you’re successful in creating those kinds of forms where people have
the option of being public or being private, where people have shared purse
or common enterprise but they also have the ability to provide for their
immediate needs or their families’ immediate needs, then you get to a
certain point where you can actually obtain enough happiness, enough
contentment, that actually new creative energy comes forth that might be
more synergistic, more multiplicative than what you had when everybody was
just sort of contending for what they individually needed.

ANOF: [Aaron] I’m trained as a landscape architect, so it really bothers
me to see what post WWII land development has done to the previous design
strategy of a series of private to semi-private to more public spaces as
you move farther from the home. What we have now mostly is a really private
space, the home with a deck in the back, and then these transportation
quarters that move you at high speeds to really public nasty spaces, and
those are really your only two options.

AB: Here at the training center, one of the courses we teach is Ecovillage
Design and what you’re discussing is exactly the kind of thing we’re
talking about — pattern language, Leopold Kohr’s sense of management
scale, and the Jane Jacobs idea of having shared spaces but a continuum of
privacy and public space, and transportation corridors and viewscapes that
are pedestrian-scale, government that is personally connected and locally
accountable, and that sort of thing.

ANOF: You mentioned the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm, and you
helped found that almost fifteen years ago?

AB: 1994, so actually that’s about right, almost 15 years now. I’ll
take you back a little there, because I had a number of years after being
the horse farmer that I described earlier, and a flour miller, where I
would have to describe myself as more of a ronin. You know, that’s the
samurai who gets kicked out because the lord can’t afford him anymore and
so he kind of becomes a freelance samurai? I retired from farming and flour
milling, and also a short career as a brickmason, and was working with The
Farm’s alternative energy crew, and in the process made a number of
inventions, some of them patented, for solar powered hybrid electric cars,
bamboo windmills, tofu presses, flour sifters, mobile concentrating
photovoltaic collectors, that sort of thing. We displayed a lot of that at
our Appropriate Community Technology Pavilion at the 1982 World’s Fair,
which was an old Victorian house we helped keep from being leveled to make
room for the fairgrounds.

In 1977 I started an organization called the Natural Rights Center, which
was based on this concept that there are transgenerational torts — wrongs
by some persons against others — and that we actually have a
transgenerational threat matrix; our nuclear energy, transgenic,
climate-tampering technology, all those kinds of things, are creating
conditions for future peoples which they will be powerless to do anything
about. It’s being imposed upon them by the present generation, and
that’s actually criminal conduct, organized criminal activity, and that
there ought to be something that can be done about that if you take it to a
court of law.

So my push over the next twenty years — eighteen years, actually — was
to take that stuff and make it into civil rights battles, human rights
battles, internationally, and also to write legislation on various things
to improve the situation. I got into the Who’s Who for law, Who’s Who
for science,Who’s Who for engineering, and Who’s Who for emerging
leaders. And I decided at some point that I was much too much of a Type A
individual to be doing that kind of stuff; I was getting high blood
pressure, I needed to get out of it.

So I retired from that. Once I really understood climate change, I got out
of that whole thing of fighting the bad guy, and I purchased a small
business called Mushroompeople which was a way of improving the health of
the forests and the health of people by using mushrooms — forest
mushrooms, rather than the kind that are manufactured in large factories.
We brought that to The Farm and started a little mail-order business
selling kits to farmers for making a living from growing forest mushrooms.
I stayed with that for a few years and then some other things intervened.

The Farm was awarded the first Right Livelihood Award — we shared it with
an Egyptian architect, you may know, Hassan Fathi — and that brought me
to a conference in Italy where we were talking about the things having to
do with the future, and Helena Norberg-Hodge, another recipient of the
Award, said an interesting thing. She said, “Ecovillages are so important
to the world that people ought to be paid to live in them.”And I thought,
I don’t think we can actually sell that idea very easily, but I think
that you have the right idea, the right sentiment. We’re actually getting
more information about the way we need to live in the future by that way
than we are from all of the grants that are being paid to scientific or
academic organizations to study climate change or to deal with some of
these other major issues or resource limits. Just by people changing their
lifestyles it would change the world tremendously, but nobody knows how to
do it. And yet, ecovillagers are doing it.

So about that same time, because of that same conference, I got invited to
a meeting in Denmark to kind of coalesce the ecovillage movement.We set up
the first conference on ecovillages and sustainable communities in 1995 in
Scotland, and at that conference I was elected to the board of the Global
Ecovillage Network, although a year earlier I had already founded the
Ecovillage Network of the Americas. That launched me off onto a new career
out of the mushroom business and into twelve years of traveling ecovillage
to ecovillage all over the world, talking to different government
authorities, talking to the UN, doing things like that, and kind of being
“Johnny Ecovillage Seed” for this concept.And now I’ve retired again.

ANOF: [laughs] How many times have you retired?

AB: If you ever get me to a college where they do a commencement ceremony
and I’m the speaker, my advice: “Retire early, retire often!”.
[laughs] So I retired again, because I had taken that about as far as I
could take it. After a dozen years I was president of the Global Ecovillage
Network, president of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, and I got
tired. So I’m now a simple permaculture teacher, teaching here at The
Farm in this training center. Our effort is to try to empower people to
create change through personal lifestyle choices and through creating
communities, whether these are transition communities like the Transition
Towns movement or new villages like ecovillages or modified intentional
communities or whatever it is. We give people skills and tools to help them
do that.

ANOF: It looks like we’re going to have a shortage of arable land going
forward, as our human population grows and as we salinate, and
desertification and deforestation…

AB: We’ve got a shortage now, and it appears that that shortage is
growing. The thing about that is that there’s this whole bugaboo about
people saying that since the last ice age we’ve been depleting our soil
and that we’re in this irreversible decline now; we’ve past peak soil
and we’re now on this downslope, and so we’re going to face this huge
famine from that. My personal experience is, I know how to make soil. I
teach people how to make soil. We’ve been making soil here at The Farm
for years and years and years; we know how to make soil. It’s not
difficult to make soil, and I say the same thing for arable land. We can
make arable land.

One of the things I do when I go out and talk is I go up there on the stage
and I put up the projector and I have this short Shockwave Flash movie of
Geoff Lawton making forest in the middle of the desert in Jordan. He is
growing mushrooms in the soil and the mycelium is locking up the salt in
the desert so that the soils have tilth and come alive. And we can do that:
we can take all of our deserts and turn them into farmland. Lately I have
been researching the paleoclimatology of the Sahara and I am beginning to
think it is even possible there. We can at least reverse the
desertification trend in the Sahel, and it is possible we can reforest in
Chad and elsewhere where there are aquifers.

ANOF: How about our suburbs?

AB: Well, suburbs are poorly designed. Being an architect, you probably
understand. They need some redesign — David Holmgren has some interesting
ideas about that. You can take out every third house or every fourth house
and begin to cluster up a bit and have connections between houses, and have
land that has farming uses or other kinds of common activity. But the
suburbs need redesign if for no other reason than they don’t have
essential infrastructure within walking distance. They need to have food
production, they need to have water, but they need to have shops, schools,
churches, theaters and clinics, a cemetery and things like that in every
suburb.

ANOF: How much does food production and cooking factor into the systems you
teach at the center?

AB: We do two long-term apprenticeships here at the center. One is in
natural building and the other is in food, principally growing, although
there’s a certain amount of work in the kitchen as well. There’s a bit
of overlap there — the people who come to do natural building also get to
learn about cooking and gardening. We do concentrate on those because we
feel that it’s pretty important that people change their lifestyles, and
a chunk of that is how they make food, how they prepare soil, how they
preserve water, how they go through droughts.

Climate change is real. I mentioned the USDA changing it’s charts;
we’ve got an isotherm migration here of about 35 miles per decade since
about 1971 when The Farm was started here. It’s been speeding up that
whole time, so now it’s estimated to be closer to 70 miles per decade.
That’s moving from southwest to northeast; that means that we’re
warming here at a rate of somewhere between 30 and 70 miles per decade, and
the climate that was here when we got here in middle south-central
Tennessee in 1970 is now up in Lexington, Kentucky. And the climate that we
have now in middle south-central Tennessee in 2008 was in Nashoba County,
Mississippi back in 1971. That’s real.

Now, can you actually provide for food when you have a sustained drought
like they had in Georgia or Tennessee last year? You can, if you know what
you’re doing, if you know a few basic skills like mulch, like rainwater
storage and replenishing your aquifers and things like that. So we teach
all of that. We did not lose any of our crops in the drought of 2007. The
deep mulch retained moisture at the roots. I think of that when I travel
and see all of these gardens and fields laid bare for the sun to bleach out
all the life-giving bacteria and soil microbes. How 15th Century!

ANOF: Derek Jenson, the author, has this great quote — I’ll have to
paraphrase because I can’t remember exactly — but he says something
like, “The great thing about everything being so fucked up is that
there’s so much to do!”

AB: And the other Derek Jenson line that I often quote is, “We’re
fucked, and life is very, very good.”

ANOF: [laughs] Well, you seem to have a handle on so many of the changes
that are going on and you’ve been doing this for so long, I just
appreciate getting a chance to talk to you and interview you for this
project.

AB: Well, let me just close by saying something about the future for us. We
may soon find that the model that we’ve created for a business here for
the Ecovillage Training Center will not sustain past the period of no
airplanes flying or people having the ability to travel long distances to
come take a course here. And national currencies could become worthless
also. So we’re actually looking at a transition now, and some of our
effort is directed toward the surrounding communities — going out to
several counties around us and teaching these skills at the very simple
level of where people are at in the surrounding areas rather than telling
them that they have to learn permaculture or something. I have learned much
from my friend, Rob Hopkins, and the Transition Towns movement, and I think
that offers a strategy that is the next step after the experimental vessel
of ecovillages. It is really a synthesis of ecovillage and re-localization,
intentional community and sustainable development.

Then also the example of The Farm has transitioned out of its early days of
more self-reliance into much more bourgeois living in people’s middle age
or later years. And so we actually have to go back and say, “You know, we
learned a whole lot back in those early days of the 70’s; we sure could
be doing a lot more of that now again. “We’re having to re-learn or
think about reclaiming some of that earlier skill set. So we’re in a
transition here.We’re stable but not static. It’s much tougher now,
because our population has aged and our youth are still somewhat
disinterested, but we’re moving. We’re in the process of changing
ourselves. Events will force us to speed that up soon enough.

Best of all, we have tools we did not have in 1971. We have permaculture,
biochar, E.M. (effective microorganisms), compost tea, biodynamic preps,
aquatic garden systems, and activated water. We can terrace slopes with our
bulldozers and road graders that can run on pond algae and used cooking
oil. We have Japanese forest mushrooms, tempeh, and home-brewed beer.

I’m happy, because the children have, to a larger extent then they may
appreciate, already got it and they’re turning around and heading in the
right direction pretty quickly. My son, Will, is living in a passive solar
house and farming; he’s got several acres in CSA vegetable gardens now,
and he’s coming by all the time and asking for different bits of advice
and tools and things. One of my next-door neighbor’s kids, Biko, has
spent several years living in ecovillages in South Africa and India and has
returned with a whole new set of skills. That’s the kind of thing that
gives me real hope — that the next generation is hip, they’re on board,
they’ve got the vision, and they can see what’s possible. And having
done it all myself when I was young and full of crazy ideas, I don’t
worry that they can do it just as easily as I did. And everyone else can
too.

ANOF: Thank you for your wonderful vision of the future.




  • [Livingontheland] An Interview with Albert Bates, Tradingpost, 02/11/2009

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