permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

Harmon, I see one problem in our discussion right now. I've been talking 
narrowly about the US program for subsidised corn ethanol production. And you 
have 
been talking about the whole world of plant-based vehicle fuels. Two 
different subjects.

Okay, let's try your subject. I would agree that so long as you have time 
apart from your other labors to grow cattails on your vacant land, harvest 
them, 
distill them into fuel and run your truck, your tractor and your generator on 
them, it makes a lot of sense... it really does. It would enable you to live 
off the grid, albeit with some labor and some land being involved.

I'm not sure this approach scales up to the human race though. Let's look at 
the world our kids will be living in. Whether the population is our current 
nearly seven billion or our expected nine billion, most will become affluent 
enough to require a personal vehicle in order to navigate our car-based 
modern 
life style. So let's say there will be a billion autos. And each will be 
driven 
12,000 miles a year. That's twelve trillion MPY.

Now let's suppose mileage is pretty good, fifty mpg on whatever their fuel of 
choice is. Their annual fuel requirement will then be 240 billion gallons.

Where will it come from? Here's a pretty good source site for biofuel info:

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html

Let's further suppose that we depart pretty largely from other biofuels and 
concentrate on the most efficient one-- palm oil. I see where annual 
production 
of palm oil fuel can be 635 gallons per acre.

Crunching the numbers, we can get the acreage requirement to run the world's 
auto fleet on palm oil. Hmmm...  I'm getting 377,952,750 acres. Call it 378 
million.

This compares fairly well with the total area of the US planted in crops-- 
349 million acres.

http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6
.htm

But that's just for scale... let's compare it with a tropical area. Brazil, 
for instance, has 445 million acres of grassland devoted just to cattle.

http://www.as-coa.org/article.php?id=738

So if they cut their beef production in half, by this source, they could 
plant 395 million acres, total. Plus, there are underutilized lands in 
Africa, 
elsewhere in South America and in Indonesia, where massive deforestation is 
now 
underway. Let's put all of these lands into oil palm.

The Brazilian acreage can go toward auto fuel. The Indonesian acreage can go 
into the truck and tractor fleet-- including mechanical and industrial fuel 
consumption. And all of Africa can go into other fuel uses, like fertilizer 
(we'll need to put back into the land the equivalent of what we take from it) 
and 
other miscellaneous fuel uses. And with the tropics so employed, we can feed 
the world population on the production coming from the temperate zone food 
producers.

It looks to me like the world of tomorrow can only be achieved by belt 
tightening on a scale hard to imagine today. We'll lose every acre of the 
original 
planet, of course, as wilderness will be an unaffordable luxury. And we'll 
have 
to do quite a lot of belt tightening in the food department as well. But with 
a lot of beans and rice replacing our meat diet, maybe it can be done.

Assuming sufficient water. And assuming the mechanisms at work in the 
transition are working smoothly and efficiently.

But they never have. More probable is worldwide resource wars-- convulsions 
that radically reduce the total world population and the level of 
civilization 
required to provide global resource distribution to everyone. So the horizon, 
for many people, will once again become local.

After the wars there would be a different scale to life. And there, a farmer 
with some basic permacultural knowledge could mash up his corn or his 
cattails 
to make his own fuel. And even feed his chickens, whose litter enriches the 
land, on the spent mash. Plus, everyone's manure could help out a little by 
powering his biogas electrical generator.

So I guess I'm with you. It could be done. The transition sounds unpleasant, 
but I guess that's where we're headed.