Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

[from 2006 - BEFORE the oil spike of 2008 and "recession"]

Community survival during the coming energy decline
by Jan Steinman and Diana Leafe Christian
Apr 30 2006 by Communities Magazine
http://www.ecoreality.org/wiki/Community_survival_during_the_coming_energy_decline
[internal links in the website]

Imagine community life in a world with increasingly scarce and expensive 
fossil fuel—oil, coal, and natural gas.

“Well, we’ve got off-grid power from solar panels and wind power,” a 
community might say, “and we’ve got wood stoves, too. No matter how high the 
price of gas goes, we’ll be fine.”

Perhaps, but does the community buy any food items they don’t grow 
themselves? While its members can certainly bicycle, car-pool, or use 
biodiesel to get to the local food co-op, are any of these food items grown, 
processed, or packaged in other regions? If so, they’ll pay for the 
ever-increasing cost of transporting these items into their area. The same is 
true if the community uses local suppliers for seeds, soil amendments, 
fencing, hand tools, or other gardening supplies that originate elsewhere, or 
building supplies from other regions—from lumber to cement blocks to 
electrical supplies and PVC pipe.

But this is only considering the rising price of gasoline. It's harder to 
grasp, but equally true, that the cost of all manufactured goods themselves 
will steadily increase in price -- because manufactured goods are tied to the 
price of oil. Why? First there's the electricity used in factories to 
manufacture things: the electric power in most regions of the world is 
generated in power plants fueled by non-renewable fossil fuel. Second, 
there's the use of metal in manufactured items, which must be mined, smelted, 
and formed into parts -- all of which requires electrical power. The same is 
true of rubber, machine oil, glass, and other materials used in manufactured 
goods -- not to mention the silicon used in items from solar panels to 
computer chips. Third, there's the plastic used in manufactured items 
themselves, and the plastic used in the packaging and shipping of such items 
-- since plastic itself is made from oil.

What happens when a community's wind turbine or inverter needs a new part? 
Most likely its members are used to picking up a mouse or a phone, finding 
the part hundreds or thousands of miles away, performing an electronic 
transaction that depends on the fossil-fuel-powered infrastructures of 
electricity, telecommunications, and banking, and then a large brown truck -- 
powered by fossil fuel -- brings the part in a week or so. But with the 
coming energy decline it, won't be so easy.

And even if the community did happen to have an "Off-Grid Power Parts 'R Us" 
franchise nearby, does that store actually mine the copper, aluminum, iron, 
tin, cobalt, antimony, beryllium, niobium, and various other metals that they 
smelt, forge, and extrude into wind turbine or inverter parts -- and have 
equally basic methods for obtaining any rubber, plastic, glass, or silicon 
required for these parts? And if they do happen to have such parts on hand, 
their seeming availability just masks the dependence on fossil fuel driven 
infrastructure that goes to the very core of our civilization.

Well, you get the picture. But there's more. Many rural communities are 
already growing at least some of their own food, but outside of the tiny 
percentage of food that's organically grown, the entire food industry (and 
thus, the world's burgeoning population) is totally dependent on fossil fuel. 
That's because most non-organic fertilizer is either made from the byproducts 
of refining oil, or from natural gas. As a civilization, we are literally 
eating fossil fuel, from the natural gas that produces virtually all 
commercial fertilizer; to the diesel farm machinery that prepares the land, 
weeds the crops, and harvests and distributes the yield; to the 
energy-intensive processing, packaging, and distribution networks that get 
the food to us. And this doesn't even include the fuel used in home 
preparation and cooking.

All told, about 10 calories of fossil fuel goes into each single calorie of 
food we eat (not counting fuel used for cooking). And make that ratio at 
least 100:1 for heavily processed foods.

So agribiz-grown food (even though we communitarians don't eat it), heating 
oil for home furnaces (even though we choose renewable heating sources), 
manufactured goods (even though we eschew most of them), and transportation 
fuel (even though we car-pool or bicycle), all affect the greater economy. 
And most ecovillages and intentional communities are embedded to some degree 
in the greater economy -- whether we intend it or not -- and the greater 
economy is completely driven by fossil fuel. And it's not just the economy -- 
it's almost everything we take for granted as a given in our lives: modern 
medicine (antibiotics, anesthetics, insulin, glasses, hearing aids); holistic 
medicine (nutritional supplements, Chinese herbs); communications (telephone 
lines, electronic switching equipment, satellite dishes, satellites 
themselves, computers, networks, modems, servers); law and order (police 
cars, police communication systems, police officers' salaries), the ability 
to govern -- these a but a few examples of non-obvious things we take for 
granted that are totally dependent on fossil fuel.

This means, of course, that as the supplies of fossil fuel become more 
scarce, and the price of oil and natural gas goes up, everything will become 
more expensive. As the economy worsens many businesses will severely downsize 
or even shut down because they can no longer afford parts, repairs, or needed 
services. Thousands of people, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of 
thousands, may lose their jobs. Thus while living in an ecovillage or other 
kind of intentional community or a sustainably organized neighborhood may 
make us less reliant on the typical energy sources and commercial products of 
mainstream life, it is not automatic protection from the coming energy 
decline. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the gasoline shortages of the 
1970s were just the warm-up act for what is coming -- the permanent, 
irrevocable decline of fossil fuel.

And it will impact those of us living in intentional communities -- whether 
or not we grow our own food or are off the grid.
What is "Peak Oil"?

"But I heard that there is at least as much more oil available as we've used 
already -- we've only used about half," you might say. "Things can't be so 
dire."

You're right -- we aren't "running out of oil" just yet. But it is not so 
simple as that. People think of petroleum like they think of their car's gas 
tank, with an "E" on the left, an "F" on the right, and a pointer that is 
currently somewhere near the middle. But the way fossil energy really works 
is that it follows a classic bell-shaped curve: a small amount of available 
energy starts out being fairly cheap, then we figure out how to make use of 
the most easily available, cheapest sources, and quickly use them up. Then at 
the mid-point, all the cheap energy is gone, and the "second half" takes 
increasingly more effort to produce, even as the total amount produced 
declines year after year.

We are very near -- if not already past -- that crucial mid-point for 
petroleum. We are at Peak Oil.

The concept of peak resource depletion means that energy will continue to get 
increasingly expensive, at a fairly rapid rate. Post-peak oil shortage 
estimates, at current consumption levels, range from four percent to eight 
percent annually -- this means that the available fossil fuel will be reduced 
by half every 10 to 20 years. Thus the cost of oil will continue increasing 
at about the same a rate that is much greater than the rate of decline, since 
there are so many more of us living now than there were on the front-side of 
the bell-curve. When demand out-paces supply for something so essential, 
chaotic swings in prices will make simple price prediction impossible. These 
huge swings will bankrupt many people -- and make a very few, very rich.

Plus, demand is rising. Not only are people in the Western world demanding 
more oil, but China and India are developing voracious appetites for energy 
-- they want the lifestyle that cheap energy has given so-called developed 
nations for the past 50 or so years. Modern civilization's existence is 
predicated upon ever-increasing economic growth -- and such growth simply 
cannot continue indefinitely in a system with finite fossil fuel and timber 
resources, like Planet Earth.

"But there's a 200-year supply of coal, at today's consumption levels!" 
There's that bugbear: at today's consumption level. We need to look at the 
rate of total energy recovered over the amount of energy used up to make 
reasonable predictions. For example, it originally took 1 barrel of oil to 
create the equivalent of 100 barrels of oil worth of energy, but currently it 
takes about 20 barrels of oil to create the same amount of energy -- and the 
ratio is steadily getting worse. When petroleum and natural gas go into 
decline, there will be pressure to make up for their missing energy, and 
there's talk of coal gasification and liquefaction to replace the gas and 
oil, so coal will be consumed much faster than it is today. So even if using 
coal gets us over the crisis of Peak Oil and Peak Gas, a child born today 
will still have to endure "Peak Coal" in her lifetime (not to mention the 
ghastly environmental impacts of burning coal on a large scale). Humanity 
will eventually have to learn to live within the planet's energy budget: the 
energy falling on the Earth's surface from the sun.

Likewise, none of the renewable sources available can continue our energy 
gluttony at today's consumption level. You can't just pave the entire desert 
Southwest with solar cells, or turn several Midwest states and provinces into 
biofuel farms, or clutter every inch of our coastlines with huge wind 
turbines -- the energy input to do so is too great. Remember, we're measuring 
the ratio of the total energy recovered to the total energy we're using up -- 
you have to get more out of it than you put into it. For example, Cornell 
University has studied current ethanol production, and determined that each 
unit of ethanol energy requires 117 percent of fossil fuel energy to produce. 
So using ethanol fuel doesn't really help anything!

This is not to say that we should not try to use any and all renewable energy 
sources in a responsible way; it's simply that nothing can maintain our 
current energy gluttony, and the future is one of increasingly expensive and 
precious energy -- no matter the source.

"But at least we've got our wood heat," a community might say. "At least 
that's renewable!" Yes, but for how long, and at what cost? Throughout 
history, civilizations have gotten into deep trouble by "timber mining" at 
unsustainable levels. The Greeks, for example, once lived on fertile forested 
mountains and islands. After centuries of logging their forests for homes, 
ship building, and firewood, they used up their timber resources, and the 
forests did not grow back and Greece became the relatively arid landscape it 
is today. It is only since the availability of fossil fuel in the mid-1850s 
that the population on every inhabited continent has been able to increase 
without disastrous timber harvests.

If the price of the natural gas that heats many of the homes in North America 
goes up by a factor of 10, how many trees are going to be left standing when 
people start burning every tree in sight just to stay warm? (And in such a 
case, who will be able to breathe the air?) Keep in mind that there are about 
10 times the number of people on the planet now as there were when humanity 
last depended entirely on wood for energy!

Although things look bleak for current generations, Peak Oil offers humanity 
an opportunity to learn and prepare for the inevitable Peak Coal that will 
impact generations to come. It's too late to hope for a pleasant decline from 
Peak Oil, but if we pay attention, humanity may choose to plan for a long and 
orderly Peak Coal.
Is Intentional Community the Answer?

Julian Darley, author of High Noon for Natural Gas and founder of the Post 
Carbon Institute, believes civilization is necessarily headed down the path 
of "re-localization"; that is, reversing the energy-fed globalization trend 
that has wracked the Earth for the past century or so. Those who already 
enjoy a measure of self-sufficiency, such as ecovillages and other kinds of 
sustainable intentional communities as well as sustainably organized 
neighborhoods, will already have the skills and experience needed for 
re-localization.

"This is a time of tremendous challenge," says Richard Heinberg, author of 
The Party's Over and Powerdown, "but also a time of great opportunity." In 
Powerdown, Heinberg notes that small, self-sustaining communities may become 
cultural lifeboats in times to come. "Our society is going to change 
profoundly -- those of us who understand this are in a position to steward 
that change. We are going to become popular, needed people in our 
communities." When asked at a Peak Oil conference in 2005 about what can be 
done, one of the things Heinberg replied was, "Start an ecovillage!"

These changes are not going to happen overnight. James Howard Kunstler, 
author of The Long Emergency, calls the coming energy decline "the long 
emergency" because it is occurring almost too gradually for most of us to 
register. The energy decline is often compared to the metaphor about boiling 
frog: if you want to cook frogs and you put them in boiling water, they will 
immediately hop out, but if you put frogs in room-temperature water and only 
gradually turn up the heat, the frogs will stay in the water -- not noticing 
it's gradually getting warmer -- and slowly cook to death.

We could say this is happening to our civilization at large. Most of us have 
a vague feeling that things in general are getting worse, but from 
minute-to-minute, day-to-day, and even year-to-year, the worsening is not 
enough to get us to change our energy-consuming ways.

The Trends Research Institute, a network of interdisciplinary experts who 
forecast developing trends, echoes Darley's prediction for "re-localization." 
One of the hottest trends they see is a "rapidly growing desire of more 
people to be self-empowered, non-reliant, and 'off the grid'" -- in the 
broadest possible sense, as in "off the grid" of mainstream society. Such as, 
for example, ecovillages, sustainable intentional communities, and organized 
neighborhoods.

"It's time to return to the community," says Pat Murphy, executive director 
of Community Service, Inc., ";to clean up the mess and get back on the right 
path." Murphy ended his organization's second annual conference on Peak Oil 
and Community Solution by noting that the survivors of this crisis will be 
those who seek out a "low-energy, caring community way of living."

Humanity faces its biggest challenge since at least World Wars I and II, or 
perhaps even since the great plagues of the Middle Ages, or perhaps ever. No 
matter how prepared an intentional community or organized neighborhood may 
be, it will be adversely impacted in some way.
Is Intentional Community Enough?

Experts suggest several possible numerous scenarios for the coming energy 
decline. These range from a "magical elixir" scenario -- a totally unexpected 
technological fix, to a "power-down soft landing" scenario of everyone 
cooperating to reduce energy use by perhaps 90 percent or more, to a "Mad 
Max" scenario of anarchy and insurrection. Some even whisper the possibility 
of human extinction, since by most measures, we have overshot our resource 
base, which ecologists believe is often a cause of extinction. But the point 
is, any of these scenarios will present significant challenges for 
intentional communities.

In the "soft landing" scenario, there will still be massive structural 
changes in society, with winners and losers. In this and other scenarios, 
being in debt may be the undoing of many.

Let's say a community is deeply in debt, for example, and is still paying off 
its property purchase or one or more construction loans. Let's say the 
community loses its financial resource base -- if many members lose their 
jobs, for example, or if a weak economy reduces the market for the goods and 
services the community produces -- the group could default on its loan 
payments, and may have its property seized by the bank or other creditors. 
Common advice among Peak Oil experts is to get out of debt! (Although a vocal 
minority say you should take on as much fixed-interest debt as possible, in 
the hope that escalating energy prices will inflate the debt away.)

A property-value crash may worsen the debt situation for intentional 
communities. During the last oil crisis, the market value of prime farmland 
fell by 30 percent or more. If a community's property value falls below their 
equity in the property, they won't be able to save themselves from defaulting 
on loans by selling off their land, which is typically the last resort of 
farmers in debt. (Again, a vocal minority claims that as energy prices 
escalate, fertile farmland will also increase in value.)

All the shortages and systems failures that can affect mainstream culture can 
affect intentional communities and organized neighborhoods as well. But just 
"living in community" will not confer any kind of immunity from this gradual 
but drastic change. A community in a mountain forest setting may have plenty 
of water and firewood, for example, but little flat, arable land for growing 
food. A community on the prairie may have plenty of water and fertile, arable 
land, but little firewood. A community in the Great Plains may have plenty of 
sunshine for passive solar heating and off-grid power from solar-panels, but 
not enough water for growing food or firewood. A rural community may have 
enough space to grow food but little help from the outside; an urban 
community or organized neighborhood may have little place to grow vegetables, 
but proximity to food distribution networks and local government assistance. 
But any community may not have enough foresight, labor, tools, or funds to 
create alternatives to whatever their members use now for heating, lighting, 
cooking, refrigeration, water collection, water pumping, and disposal 
utilization of gray water and human waste.

Then there's the tenuous matter of community security -- a subject many find 
"politically incorrect" to even consider. Many communities that embrace 
nonviolence may find it difficult to nonviolently defend their community in 
the face of anarchy or insurrection in the society around them. If the local 
government fails; if a local law and order system falls apart, there can be 
various kinds of dangerous consequences. Desperate, hungry people can loot 
and steal and take what they want from others. Vigilante groups can form to 
either deal with the lawlessness, and/or take what they want themselves. 
State or national government can declare martial law, rescind constitutional 
liberties, send in troops, and restore order and/or take what they want from 
others. Having supportive neighbors and good networking in the greater 
community may help. But in the worst-case, "Mad Max" scenario, it may not 
help much.

Embracing weaponry for self-defense may not be useful, either, as the 
presence of weapons and ammunition may simply make one a more attractive 
target of people who want to get their hands on the community's weapons.

Another, much more basic and subtle challenge to preparing for the coming 
energy decline is even being able to start or "join an ecovillage" in the 
first place! It's really hard to start a new community in today's political, 
cultural, and financial environment. Land prices are exorbitant and getting 
more so every day. Zoning restrictions, designed to protect homeowners' 
property values, can severely limit a group's ability to create the community 
they want with the numbers of people they need. Building codes, designed to 
protect a county from lawsuits from approving unsafe buildings, and county 
and state health codes, designed to keep people safe from biological and 
other health hazards, can stop a community's sustainability plans faster than 
you can say, "That's illegal!" And the all-too-human tendency to bring 
habitual reactive and destructive behaviors to community settings -- making 
it hard to get along well and resolve inevitable conflicts -- can make 
cooperating with friends or neighbors, especially in frightening and 
desperate times, even more challenging than it normally is.

It is also difficult to radically change one's energy-consuming lifestyle. It 
may be easy to think, "I'd like to join an ecovillage some day" or "I'll stop 
depending so much on fossil fuels and live a more sustainable lifestyle 
soon," yet it's easy to become inexorably distracted from that goal by the 
demands of jobs, family, and other responsibilities. Tearing oneself away 
from the status quo may be the most difficult thing we can ever do. Once we 
make the break, resisting the allure of today's cheap-energy lifestyle can be 
a constant effort.

Yet we must. The experts agree: the future will have more in common with the 
18th century than it does with the 20th. Societal upheavals will favor those 
who have prepared over those who come to realization late, without building 
community and sustainability skills.

In just a century and a half humanity has spent down about half of its "bank 
account" of formerly cheap energy that has taken millions of years to 
accumulate. This may be our species' greatest crisis ever, and there will be 
a very few winners, and possibly billions of losers over the rest of our 
lives and longer. The winners will be either those with the power to hoard 
much of the remaining fossil energy, or those with the foresight, knowledge, 
resources, and will to live within the Earth's sustainable energy budget.

We certainly have no answers, solutions, or "magic bullets" for this dilemma. 
We both believe it's better to live cooperatively and sustainably with 
others, but we don't know what else is needed to truly be prepared for the 
inevitable energy decline. Is it better to be widely connected with one's 
neighbors and bioregion, or isolated and inaccessible? Is it better to grow 
all of one's own food and generate all of one's own energy, or to create a 
tight web of trade and barter relationships with one's friends and neighbors, 
supplying some of what they need and vice-versa? Our contributors to this 
issue offer various perspectives, and we hope you find them 
thought-provoking. We are sure of one thing though: people who understand 
what is happening, and act with others of like mind to build sustainable 
agriculture, culture, and energy systems -- in right relationship with the 
Earth's finite energy resources -- will have at least a chance to live 
fulfilling lives in these challenging times.

Jan Steinman has been a ski instructor, electrical design engineer, software 
engineer, and fine-art photographer, among many other pursuits. He drives 
with biofuels, strives to be an alternative lifestyle pioneer, and is a 
founding member of EcoReality.

Diana Leafe Christian is editor of Communities magazine and author of 
Creating Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional 
Communities, and was a speaker at Community Service, Inc.'s "Peak Oil and 
Community Solutions" conference in 2005. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in 
North Carolina.
Resources for Learning More About Peak Oil

The End of Suburbia. This 78-minute video (on VHS or DVD), describes, with 
humor and fact, the energy crisis and how it happened, with testimony by 
leading petroleum engineers and Peak Oil researchers, including Julian 
Darley, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, and others. 
www.EndOfSuburbia.com.

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, Meagan Quinn and The 
Community Solution. Inspiring, hopeful 60-minute documentary of Cuba's crisis 
and recovery when they ran out of oil 12 years ago, from permaculture design 
and solar energy, to city gardening on rooftops and balconies, to organic 
farming with oxen. (Info on how to get it goes here.)

The Party's Over and Powerdown, Richard Heinberg. Two of the most popular 
books that present this information in a readable way to lay people. New 
Society Publishers, 2003 and 2004, respectively.

High Noon for Natural Gas, Julian Darley. A hard-hitting look at an energy 
source that rapidly went from nuisance to crutch, and the implications of our 
increased dependence on a resource that will soon be in rapid decline. 
Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004.

Relocalize Now!: Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil, 
Julian Darley. Timely advice for re-creating local communities that can begin 
to build "parallel public infrastructures" for survival during the coming 
energy decline. New Society Publishers, 2006.

The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler's view of what life in 
the near future will be like, post Peak Oil. Grove Press, 2006.

The Oil Age is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil: 
2005-2050, Matt Savinar. With a question and answer format, one of the 
easiest resources to understand what's happening and why; also one of the 
least optimistic (some would say "most realistic") perspectives of what's 
going to happen. Available mail-order or paid download from the author's 
website: www.LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net.

    * http://www.CommunitySolution.org. Website of Community Service, Inc., 
sponsors of the annual conference: "Peak Oil And Community Solutions." 
"Dedicated to the development, growth, and enhancement of small local 
communities... that are sustainable, diverse, and culturally sophisticated."
    * http://www.EnergyBulletin.net. "A clearinghouse for current information 
regarding the peak in global energy supply."
    * http://www.PostCarbon.org. Julian Darley's website. "Our mission is to 
assist societies in their efforts to re-localize communities and adapt to an 
energy-constrained world."
    * http://www.MuseLetter.com. Richard Heinberg's website. "A monthly 
exploration of cultural renewal."
    * http://www.Dieoff.com. A massive collection of articles, assembled by 
Jay Hanson, regarding the relationship between resource depletion and 
population, including full text of many seminal scientific papers and 
published works.
    * http://www.TheLeadershipSchool.com. "Committed to training the next 
generation in the sustainable skills of the 21st century."
    * http://www.TrendsResearch.com. "Discover the future, see tomorrow's 
trends today," Trends Research Institute

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