Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

     Illusions about self sufficiency

We hear a lot about self sufficiency and green living but there's an element 
of self deception or illusion in it. I've refered to only working *toward* 
self sufficiency, esp community type. But we don't get there 100% without 
reverting to some version of the Stone Age. What the Ed Begleys of the 
country don't fully realize, no matter how fervently they recycle and buy 
energy efficient appliances, is how dependent we still are on thousands of 
remote materials of all kinds and machinery manufactured with fossil fuels 
and transported - by fossil fuels - across the country or across the planet. 
I'm all for doing what we can. But there's this elephant in the energy 
efficient living room. And here's the kicker: this means no amount of solar 
or recycling can maintain some standard of living without the fossil fuels 
and other resources we've been using up.

I see one of the books on Mother Jones site, THE SELF SUFFICIENT-ISH BIBLE.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/order/order.aspx?promocode=MMEEMA61&utm_content=MEN+Merch+6.3.10-Books&utm_campaign=Merchandise&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email#Item4534
A few of the points they mention:

   Energy-saving tips for every room in the house.
Good. But nobody asks how much embodied energy the finished house itself 
contains. How much fossil fuel energy to make and fire the brick or tiles? 
How much energy to make the steel in it? To transport the lumber and 
manufacture the drywall, the electrical components, the glass, the flooring, 
roof and paint - not to mention utilities? They show how much energy is saved 
by all their tinkering around the edges, but no mention of the vast amount of 
energy that built the house itself. Without the energy to build it, where's 
the house to save energy in?

   Cutting waste by recycling and re-using
Good. But let's remember that everything recycled had to be manufactured 
using energy in the first place. Aluminum cans are energy hogs. Without that 
energy what is there to recycle?

    Wholesome recipes for in-season foods
I'm all for it. Yet stoves, microwaves, refrigerators and freezers all use 
energy daily, and represent a huge amount of embodied energy in their 
manufacture. Without that energy how do you cook or preserve what's in season 
or out? There's campfires and food drying of course.

And another: TOWARD A ZERO ENERGY HOME

   Nope. A cave is zero energy, no building at all.

Another nice book from them: WHEN TECHNOLOGY FAILS

   Renewable energy system for home or business.
Sounds like a wise investment. That would be wind or solar. Can't put 
windmills on every house, can we. But throw in enough solar for all our 
electrical needs and embodied energy sky rockets. It takes so much energy to 
manufacture the panels and batteries that it takes years for a solar system 
just to pay back the energy used to make it. How energy efficient is that? 
Some claim enough solar to keep up our usual power consumption adds one third 
to the cost of a new house. Powering the whole country with solar would cost 
trillions. At least wind farms, where you can locate them, are more low tech. 
As a replacement for fossil fuel power plants however, there's a problem. Our 
society, our economy, demands constant, reliable power, and wind doesn't 
always blow enough for every wind farm. The trick is to rebuild the 
nationwide grid with enough redundancy to send whatever wind power there is 
everywhere it's needed all the time. And they estimate that kind of grid 
would cost as much as our entire national GDP. Doubtful. The books list of 
emergency survival tips are probably pretty good though. But not for The Long 
Emergency, as Kunstler termed it.

So we can work *toward* self sufficiency, hopefully community style, but our 
standard of living in the future will be severely limited by how much 
renewable energy we can make. We'll need to plan for a lot less electricity 
and a lot less manufactured goods (and tools), and a lot less food from 
somewhere else. As for the food future, it's can't be just organic but grown 
and moved without machinery or gas guzzlers. Plenty of evidence for all this 
is online for those inclined to research. The conclusions however are mine. 
YMMV.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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