Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Two lessons in practical ecology
by John Michael Greer
Published Dec 15 2010 by The Archdruid Report
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/12/two-lessons-in-practical-ecology.html

These days, the news coming out of America’s political and financial centers 
evokes the same sort of horrified fascination that draws onlookers to the 
scene of any other catastrophe. Investors spooked by the Fed’s willingness to 
pay for deficit spending by printing money are backing away from US debt, and 
the interest the US government has to pay on its bonds has accordingly gone 
up, gaining a full percentage point in the last month and putting pressure on 
other interest rates across the board.

In the teeth of this stinging vote of no confidence from the bond market, the 
Obama administration and its Republican allies in Congress – chew on that 
concept for a moment – are pushing through another round of spending 
increases and tax cuts that the government doesn’t have the money to pay for. 
The ratings agency Moody’s has warned that if the current spending bill is 
passed, it will have to consider downgrading the once-sacrosanct AAA rating 
on US government debt. Exactly how the endgame is going to be played is still 
anybody’s guess – runaway stagflation, a hyperinflationary currency collapse, 
and a flat-out default by the US government on its gargantuan public debt are 
all possible – but there’s no way that it’s going to end well.

All this makes the topic of this week’s post particularly timely. Across the 
industrial world, people have come to assume that they ought to be able to 
buy ripe strawberries in December and fresh oysters in May, and more 
generally food in vast quantity and variety on demand, irrespective of 
season. That assumption relies on using wildly extravagant amounts of energy 
to ship and process foodstuffs, and that by itself renders the eating habits 
of the recent past an arrangement without a future, but these same habits 
also depend on a baroque global financial system founded on the US dollar. As 
that comes unraveled, an old necessity most of our grandmothers grew up with 
– home processing and storage of seasonal foods – will become necessary once 
again, at least for those who don’t find scurvy and other dietary deficiency 
diseases to their taste.

Food storage is a subject that calls up strong and often contradictory 
emotions, and sometimes inspires actions that don’t necessarily make much 
sense. Rumors are flying just now in some corners of the peak oil community, 
for example, that the sales freeze-dried food has spiked so sharply in recent 
months that suppliers are unable to keep up with the demand. This may well be 
true, but if so, it shows a certain lack of common sense; unless you plan on 
living out of a backpack during a financial crash – and this is arguably not 
a good idea – there are many better and cheaper ways to make sure you have 
some food put by to cope with breaks in the supply chain.

Nor is food storage really about stashing food in a cellar in order to ride 
out a crisis. A century ago, nearly everybody in America processed food at 
home for storage if they could possibly do so, for reasons much more down to 
earth than expectations of catastrophe. They did it primarily because the 
foods available year round in a temperate climate typically don’t provide a 
balanced diet, much less an inviting one. Absent the energy and financial 
systems that make it look reasonable to fly fresh food from around the world 
to stock supermarkets in the United States throughout the year, good sources 
of vitamin C are mostly to be had in the summer and fall, meat tends to show 
up in a lump at slaughtering time in October and November, and so on; if you 
want these things the rest of the year, and you don’t have a functioning 
industrial economy to take care of that matter for you, you learn how to 
prepare foods for storage in season, and keep them safely stored until wanted 
later on.

The ways that this can be done, interestingly enough, make a very good lesson 
in practical ecology. To keep food in edible condition, you have to engage in 
what ecologists call competitive exclusion – that is, you have to prevent 
other living things from eating it before you do. Your main competitors are 
bacteria and other microorganisms, and you exclude them by changing the 
habitat provided by the food until it no longer provides the competition with 
the resources it needs to survive.

You can do that by changing just about every ecological variable you can 
think of. You can make food too cold for bacteria to survive; that’s 
freezing. You can make food too hot, and keep it enclosed in a container that 
won’t let the bacteria back in when the food cools down; that’s canning. You 
can make food too dry; that’s drying. You can change the chemical balance of 
food to make it indigestible to bacteria, but not to you; that’s salting, 
brining, smoking, corning, and pickling, among other things. You can get 
sneaky and keep food alive, so that its own immune system will prevent 
bacteria from getting a foothold; that’s root cellaring, and a variety of 
other tricks commonly used with cold-hardy vegetables. Alternatively, you can 
get even sneakier and beat the bacteria to the punch by deliberately 
infecting food with a microorganism of your choice, which will crowd out 
other microbes and change the food in ways that will leave it in edible 
condition for you; that’s fermentation.

Which of these is the best option? Wrong question. Depending on where you 
are, what foodstuffs and other resources you have to hand, and how long you 
expect it to take for various parts of the current order of things to come 
unraveled, almost any mix of options might be a good choice. It will almost 
certainly have to be a mix, since no one preservation method works best for 
everything, and in many cases there’s one or another method that’s the best 
or only option.

It’s also wise to have a mix, because methods of preserving food differ among 
themselves in another way: some are much more functional in a time of energy 
shortages than others. If your food storage plans revolve around having a 
working freezer, you had better hope that the electricity remains on in the 
area where you live, or you need to make sure you have a backup that will 
function over the long term – and no, a diesel generator in the basement and 
a tank of fuel doesn’t count, not after the first few weeks of fuel shortage. 
That doesn’t mean that blanching and freezing some of your homegrown garden 
produce is a bad idea; it means you need to have something in place to power 
the freezer well before the brownouts start to happen, or you need to be 
prepared to shift to another preservation method in a hurry, or both.

This points to a second good lesson in practical ecology that can be learned 
from food storage, though this one’s a lesson in practical human ecology. 
Technologies – all technologies, everywhere – vary in their dependence on 
larger systems. When comparing two technologies that do the same thing, the 
impact of their relative dependence on different systems needs to be included 
in the comparison; if technology A and B both provide a given service, and 
technology A is cheaper, easier, and more effective than technology B under 
ordinary conditions, technology B can still be the wiser choice if technology 
A is wholly dependent on an unstable system while technology B lacks that 
vulnerability.

This much should be obvious, though all too often it isn’t. It’s 
embarrassing, in point of fact, to see how often a brittle, complex and 
vulnerable technology dependent on highly questionable systems is touted as 
“more efficient” than some simpler, more reliable and more independent 
equivalent, simply because the former works somewhat better on those 
occasions when it can be made to work at all. Just as you don’t actually know 
how to use a tool until you can instantly name three ways to misuse it and 
three things it can’t do at all, it’s a waste of time and resources to buy 
into any technology unless you have a pretty good idea in advance of its 
vulnerabilities and the ways it tends to fail.

This sort of thinking can and should be applied throughout the green wizardry 
we’ve been discussing in the last five months or so of posts, but food 
storage is a very good place to start. Let’s say you’ve decided to blanch and 
freeze some of the vegetables from your backyard garden. That can be a good 
choice, at least if you can expect your electricity supply to remain stable 
for the next year or two; still, you owe it to yourself and your freezer bags 
of Romano beans to take a moment to work out the downside. What are the main 
sources of electricity in your service area, and how will they be affected by 
likely changes in fossil fuel prices over the next couple of years? How does 
electricity get to you from the grid, and is that connection vulnerable? When 
does your service area tend to suffer blackouts, and how long do they tend to 
last? Are there ways you can keep a freezer powered for the duration of a 
longer than average blackout? Does one of those ways seem like a sensible 
investment, or would it be smarter to shift to a less vulnerable method of 
storage?

More complexities slip in when you remember that there’s often more than one 
way to power the same process. You can dry food, for example, in an electric 
dehydrator, but in any climate that isn’t too humid, you can also dry food in 
a solar dehydrator. This is basically a black box with small holes in the top 
and bottom, covered with fine mesh to keep out insects, and trays of 
screen-door screening stretched on wooden frames inside, with the food spaced 
on the trays to allow air circulation. The sun heats the box, air flows in 
through the bottom and carries moisture away through the top, and the food 
dries with no other source of power. When you’ve got adequate and reliable 
electricity, an electric dehydrator is more convenient and reliable; when you 
have reason to think that electricity will be expensive, intermittent, or not 
available at all, the solar dehydrator is usually the better plan.

In many cases like this last, though, the best option of all is to have and 
use both – the more convenient and reliable technology while you’re still on 
the learning curve and the larger system that supports it is still there; the 
more resilient and independent system in a small way all along, so that you 
learn its quirks and can shift over to it full time once the more complex 
technology becomes nonfunctional. In the same way, it can make a good deal of 
sense to blanch and freeze garden produce while you’re still learning your 
way around using home-dried foods, or to can your pickles in a hot water bath 
while you’re still getting the knack of older pickling methods that don’t 
require airtight containers.

In a time of faltering energy supplies – not to mention the spectacular 
self-destruction of national finances – this sort of thinking can be applied 
very broadly indeed. The strategy of a staged disconnection from failing 
technologies, made on the basis of local conditions and personal, family, and 
community needs, offers a pragmatic alternative to the forced choice between 
total dependence on a crumbling industrial system, on the one hand, or the 
usually unreachable ideal of complete personal or community independence on 
the other. The backyard-garden methods discussed in earlier posts are founded 
on that strategy, and most of the energy conservation and homescale renewable 
energy production methods that will be central to the first few months’ worth 
of posts next year rely on it as well.

There’s a reason for this ubiquity: the strategy of staged disconnection is 
the constructive alternative to catabolic collapse. A society in catabolic 
collapse, running short of necessary resources, cannibalizes its own 
productive assets to replace resource flows, and ends up consuming itself. 
The strategy of staged disconnection is not catabolic but metabolic; it taps 
into existing resource flows before shortages become severe, and uses them to 
bridge the gap between existing systems that are likely to fail and enduring 
systems that have not yet been built. At the same time, if it’s done right, 
it doesn’t draw heavily enough on existing systems to cause them to fail 
before they have to.

That’s what could have happened if the industrial world had pursued the 
promising initiatives of the 1970s, instead of taking a thirty-year vacation 
from reality that cost us the chance of a smooth transition to a sustainable 
future. On the collective scale, that’s water under the bridge at this point, 
but it can still be done on the smaller scale of individuals, families, and 
communities.
Resources

Food preservation and storage are among the few subsets of green wizardry 
where old information can land you in a world of hurt. If you intend to take 
up canning, in particular, you need up-to-date information; for example, the 
relative proportions of sugar and acid in today’s tomato varieties, as 
compared to those fifty years ago, are so different that recipes that were 
safe then can land you with botulism poisoning, i.e., quite possibly dead, if 
you use them today. Your county extension service can point you toward 
accurate information on safe canning, and so can the current edition of the 
Ball Blue Book.

Not all methods of food preservation are as volatile as canning. Though it’s 
always wise to check for updated information, some of the classics are still 
well worth reading. My library includes Mike and Nancy Bubel’s Root 
Cellaring, Grace Firth’s Stillroom Cookery, Phyllis Hobson’s Making and Using 
Dried Foods, Carol Hupping’s Stocking Up III, and Stanley Schuler and 
Elizabeth Meriwether Schuler’s Preserving the Fruits of the Earth.