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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Two lessons in practical ecology
  • Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 20:16:07 -0700


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.





  • [Livingontheland] Two lessons in practical ecology, Tradingpost, 12/16/2010

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