07.05.09
Posted in Activism, Commentary, Current Events, Environment, Sustainability at 4:04 pm by Christina
If you visited any of the links in Part One: The Problem of Peak Oil – or perhaps even if you didn’t – you likely noticed that being aware of peak oil is scary; doomers and survivalists abound. James Howard Kunstler writes his commentary under the heading “Clusterfuck Nation”. If I wasn’t horrified enough by the dramatic realities of peak oil, it didn’t take long to notice that the petroleum crisis isn’t happening in a vacuum. Woven together with peak oil are crises of climate change, financial collapse, water and land degradation, food declines, overpopulation: together, Richard Heinberg’s “peak everything”.
Acceptance takes time. Surely there must be some way out? Solar and wind will save the world? Unfortunately, alternative energies are oil-dependent. Solar and wind technologies are capable of producing electricity; they are not capable of generating enough power to reproduce themselves. In other words, you can’t use a solar panel or wind turbine to make a new solar panel or wind turbine. We’d need to dedicate all our remaining hydrocarbon resources to the manufacture of alternative energy installations. Furthermore, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is dramatically lower for alternative energies than for petroleum. In 1930 petroleum had an EROEI of 100:1, meaning it took one barrel of oil to mine one hundred new barrels; by 1970 it was 30:1 and in 2000 it had declined to 11:1. (The first petroleum gushed out; what’s around now is harder to bring out and harder to process into usable fuels.) (Energy Bulletin: The Net Hubbert Curve by David Murphy) Energy alternatives, green or not – solar, nuclear, geothermal, etc. – top out at about 10:1 EROEI. That means we would have to create up to 1000% value in alternative energy sources in order to match the 1930s petroleum level that drove the height of the industrial complex; right now non-hydrocarbon energies total only 13% (Figure 2, International Energy Outlook 2009 by the US Dept. of Energy). The arithmetic is a little offputting, isn’t it? And it doesn’t even begin to tackle the enormous challenge of transportation in this age of globalization; the challenges to alternative energy there are, as my middle child says, “gi-normous”.
All I know is, things must be really bad if the energy companies are actually advertising to get people to purchase less of their product – i.e., to consume less energy: Chevron’s Will You Join Us? campaign My reading has made it clear that absent an eleventh hour, miraculous scientific or technological discovery (notice the oxymoron), peak oil is unresolvable.
Thank goodness for the peak oil optimists. These folks acknowledge that peak oil and parallel crises are going to mean “the end of the world as we know it” (lightheartedly called Camp TEOTWAWKI), but refuse to countenance a true apocalypse. They devote themselves to the hard work of modeling low-energy, self-sufficient, cooperative living, promoting real peak oil solutions and strategies, and helping increasingly aware people like me and perhaps you move past peak oil denial and grief into functional adaptive work.
Sharon Astyk is foremost among peak oil optimists. A college friend pointed me to Sharon’s blog, Causabon’s Book (an obscure George Eliot reference from this former English Lit. graduate student), where I was able to glimpse past the dark curtain of peak everything into the world that can exist on the other side. Depletion and Abundance, Sharon’s first book, is about petroleum depletion and the full life that can be had under peak oil conditions. It can’t be full of Lunchables, international travel, or on-demand cosmetic surgery (I’m pretty bummed about one of those); but it isn’t empty. In fact, Astyk’s vision of post-peak life is filled with many of those things most people value: productive work, close communities, health and well-being. The simple answer is that we need to redefine what those things are.
Sharon’s vision resonates with me; I think it’s because we both have children at home. If you peruse peak oil literature, you will find the presence of children a rare thing; and their presence correlates strongly to an optimistic, hard-working vision of post-peak. The doomers don’t have children and they don’t seem to care about the seventh generation or even the first generation out from peak. That’s not for me! Sharon took her family to a farm in the poorest county in upstate New York. (Coincidentally, I’ve an aunt who did the same thing in the same county after she retired from teaching.) Through her farm Sharon is able to directly model one possible post-peak lifestyle. It’s not the only possibility, though, and she tackles others via her online course “Adapting in Place”. One’s post-peak vision might include relocation to a farm, as Sharon’s did; but then again, it might not.
The common thread among all the lifestyles Sharon discusses is the low-energy reality of the post-peak world. The reduction in or loss of cross-country and international shipping, giant tractors and combines, and agricultural chemicals means the answer includes local, organic, hands-on food production. No gasoline for automobiles means the answer includes feet, bikes, and possibly electric-powered public transportation (if we get both transit networks and non-fossil electricity production on the agenda soon enough, like yesterday). The absence of Ecuadoran beef or bananas may seem like a loss, but what about the abundance of good health that takes its place because of well-grown seasonal food and regular exercise?
The blogging community has been a tremendous boon for peak oil aware folks. The internet is one thing they’re all willing to keep electrified, or at least to bike into the library to access! I made a peak oil post to my homeschoolers’ groups and got a 1% response; when a group is that small, it’s hard to network with each other for support. It’s so necessary to have support when most of the world looks at you with a blank expression. Besides moral support, the peak oil community is so generous with practical and informational support as well. Sharon Astyk offers not only the Adapting in Place class, but also a class on food storage and preservation and two different ones on garden design.
The second blog I read regularly is One Green Generation, written by Melinda in Seattle. I don’t remember how I got to Melinda’s blog, and she is peak oil aware – but peak oil is not her point. Her point is sustainable living. Melinda writes posts that help troubleshoot difficult adaptations, hosts challenges that encourage positive changes, and generally provides a forum for people tackling the same difficult adjustments. As an urbanite, her perspective is different from Sharon’s while reinforcing the same shared values and purpose.
The last peak oil blog I read regularly is Peak Oil Blues by Kathy McMahon. This “Peak Shrink” is a clinical and teaching psychologist and chicken farmer who offers, essentially, free therapy to the peak community via her blog “couch”. Whatever I’m feeling about peak oil, chances are someone has written her a letter about it and she’s responded with solid advice about how to embrace the feeling and convert it into productive action. Peak oil is an emotional rollercoaster; a lot of days I can be productive, and then one day I’m on the couch burying my face in mass-market paperbacks and industrial strength junk food. The Peak Shrink helps get me back on track.
It’s amazing to me, the generosity of others. So much time and energy goes into the process of these writings – not just Sharon’s full-fledged books, but every blog post these people write. Although my first glimpse of peak oil was like a bucket of ice water in the face, now that I’ve caught my breath it’s nice to know there are plenty of people offering towels. Although the doomers and survivalists can be compellingly hypnotic with their apocalyptic visions, the calm, practical words of people like Sharon, Melinda and Kathy confirm for me that we can convert the apocalyptic visions into hallucinations if we turn ourselves to the work.
To be continued in Part Three: Finding the Answers.
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07.02.09
Posted in Food, Growing Challenge: Seed to Seed, Sustainability at 9:24 pm by Christina
It’s been two months since we officially entered the Seed to Seed challenge at One Green Generation. Gardening is a lot of fun, and a lot of work! The whole family is involved, although Jamie’s interests are primarily of the destructive, clipper-wielding variety. The rest of us are putting our sweat into the project. Katie and Emma have done planting, weeding and harvesting. Jeff has done those, plus infrastructure labor and design on the beds, the irrigation, and plant supports. I’ve done everything mentioned, plus starting seeds, working the greenhouse, and the R&D. (Actually, if you include the time at the farm the others have done seed starting too; I was thinking of the work here at home.)
Most things are growing well in the ground – so well that we’re harvesting and eating here at home. The farmers’ market bounty is limited to foods we aren’t growing: berries, peaches/nectarines, cherries, onions, garlic, mushrooms and potatoes are the main market items these days. If we’re growing it, we’re waiting to eat it until it’s ready in our garden! The above dinner was a casserole of roasted potatoes and summer squash, sauteed chard and kale with onions and garlic, and fresh yellow plums. Boy are we proud of our efforts!
The only totally failed crop at this point is the carrots; the ground is way too dense for them, heavy on the clay. Germination was incredibly poor and growth was bad too. Those got pulled to make room for other plants; the to-do list holds the task of scavenging some wood to build a raised bed for carrots with properly constituted soil for that crop. We eat a lot of carrots, so we want to get that crop going!
The previous three pictures are crops that we can’t take much credit for; they are part of the perennial plantings of our rented property. The first is grapes, the second red plums, the third yellow plums. The yellow plums are ripe now and we are preparing for plum jam (I think). A woman posted onto freecycle today looking for a plum harvest she could use for plum jam thank you/favors for her baby shower; she’ll be here Monday (and what a great idea!)
These three pictures are of the corn and pumpkin patch. We put the pumpkins in all at once, and divided the corn into two plantings. The first picture is on the tall side of the patch – the corn is close to five feet there. The second picture shows the second planting; the corn sprouted just fine there, and we’re hopeful it will be able to grow up through those maniac pumpkin plants! The third picture is a close up of the pumpkins; each plant has too many blossoms to count! (They’re a small eating variety, no giant jack o’lanterns.) I hope we – and everyone we know! – can store the bounty successfully through the winter!
Above are the strawberries. These were transplant divisions from an active patch at the farm that was being relocated. We didn’t let these bear this year, pinching back the flowers and the runners to encourage a strong mother plant. Next year they can go crazy like pumpkins!
Along the fence beyond the strawberries I put in some potato vines, which are supposedly vigorous and also supposedly shade tolerant; to me they look exactly as they did when I planted them, oh, eight weeks ago? Probably just not enough sunshine; it’s too bad. It’s an ugly chain fence with wood or plastic slats dimming the view into the neighbor’s yard. I thought a shade and drought tolerant vine would be more aesthetic, and also provide color and attraction to beneficial bugs. Try, try again! The shade wildflower mix in front is fully sprouted though – not much blossom yet but we’ll give it time.
These two are the non-pumpkin curcurbits (a plant family for rotational gardening, which approach helps prevent the build-up of soil diseases). The first is the black-mulched bed of melons, two varieties, which started strong in the greenhouse and were transplanted into the ground June 19th. I don’t see much growth there in the last two weeks. Melons like a hot microclimate, hence the black mulch. I wanted to plant these in beds near the house, training them up trellises and giving the fruit sling supports, but our co-tenant planted other stuff where I had intended them to go. (The reflected heat from the house would improve the microclimate.) The black mulch helps keep the soil warmer, but doesn’t do much for the air around the plants; I’ve got it on the task list to get a hoop-house over at least some of the melons to see if that improves their growth. The second bed is the crazy summer squashes, with some giant sunflowers thrown in for good measure. Thank goodness for hungry friends!
These three are the Solanaceae beds, hosting plants from the nightshade family: mostly tomatoes, with some eggplants and peppers to try. Potatoes and tobacco are in the same family. First picture is the early plants of slicer and cherry tomatoes; a plant of cherries is just starting to turn ripe, and all the plants have plenty of fruits and flowers presaging an excellent harvest. I hope I can keep us in baguettes and fresh mozzarella so we can enjoy summer bruschetta to our hearts’ mouths’ content! The second bed is eggplant and sweet pepper interspersed with homegrown French marigolds; there are a few sauce tomatoes at the end. The eggplants and peppers are not thriving; like with the melons, I think this is a heat issue. The third pic is the sauce tomatoes that I started from seed I harvested last year, from slightly overripe tomatoes I gleaned at a local farm (in exchange for picking market-quality produce), which tomatoes I sauced and canned. My first batch of starts never came up under the initial heat/moisture conservation system; my thought is I cooked them, judging from the steam. The second round of starts thrived in the mini-greenhouse and went into the ground June 19th. They’re doing well and I’m looking forward to pulling out my food mill again. There are several varieties of basil planted with the sauce tomatoes, too.
Last two! First is a cole family bed – chard, kale and broccoli at this point. (We had to get some herbs in the ground before leaving on vacation and put a block of those at the end of the first chard planting so they’d get irrigated while we were gone.) More chard than kale, as we’re not totally into eating kale yet; I’m increasing the mixture in the meals I cook, though, so it shouldn’t take long to acclimate to it. The broccoli is growing but no florets yet; not sure what will happen there. This bed is where Jamie can indulge his clipper fetish; I assist with leaf selection, but he gets to cut all the greens! The second picture is the bush beans, with the poorly located summer savory buried in the middle. (Too bad, because I love savory and use it in almost everything; but it’s very spindly. I’ll try and relocate a couple of plants and see how they do.) The beans were planted successively, first the left and then the right so the shadows would fall into the path rather than onto the smaller plants. It’s a three-bean mix, yellow, purple and green. There’s another half of this bed to prepare for a third and fourth succession, for beans through the fall!
I’m planning to harvest seeds from the sauce tomatoes and the pumpkins at least. The sauce tomatoes are time-staggered from the slicers, so the pollination shouldn’t be affected; the pumpkins are separated from the row of mixed summer squash by a tall row of tomatoes. I’m hopeful that planning will do the job and my seed-to-seed challenge will be successfully met with a strong year-two showing! I read today that only around 10% of home growers start their own seeds, which really surprised me given the price difference; the U.S. really does face a cost-versus-time imbalance! I’m proud of myself; almost everything in the garden was done from seed. Even the plants we brought home from the farm, we helped start the seeds back in January. Only the strawberries weren’t from seed, and they usually aren’t for anyone 
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Posted in Activism, Commentary, Current Events, Environment, Sustainability at 4:04 pm by Christina
A year ago, I learned about peak oil. Peak oil is the point in time when maximum production (extraction) of petroleum occurs. There is a peak because petroleum is, practically speaking, a finite and non-renewable resource. (Petroleum is technically renewable; it just takes millions of years and precise geologic conditions to create it.) Energy Bulletin has a good peak oil primer. The term “peak oil” has a specific scientific meaning; as a concept, “peak oil” refers more generally to the imminent decline in the availability of fossil fuel energies.
Peak oil is not something universally acknowledged. As with climate change, though, the majority of scientists admit the geologic reality of the decline of fossil fuels and argue only about the shape of the graph.
The challenge of peak oil comes in the form of our consumption of and dependence upon fossil fuels. In the rich world, demand for and consumption of fossil fuels has increased annually to catch up with supplies over the last 150 years. Liquid hydrocarbons (petroleum, aka crude oil) as well as the various natural gases have been so abundant and are so chemically useful that commerce and industry have derived hundreds of thousands of products from them:
- plastics in every room of every home, office and factory
- synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester for clothes, carpeting
- pharmaceuticals and other medical applications
- fertilizers and pesticides for food production
- asphalt and other construction products
- manufacturing components
and so forth.
These end-use products are highly visible to us, but of course hydrocarbons are overwhelming consumed as combustible fuels, either in fuel tanks of cars, tractors and airplanes, or when powering the conversion of other resources into consumable products: cotton into the clothes I’m wearing, or silicon into the computer chips powering my laptop.
Citizens of rich countries have learned to consume fossil fuel as if it were alcohol and they college students on spring break. We live many miles from friends and family and our jobs, and count it as nothing because we can hop in the car or book a flight. Our consumption is not only metaphorical; our agricultural system uses ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy, making our consumption literal as well. I have read estimates that our individual hydrocarbon consumption is equivalent to harnessing the labor energy of one hundred or more human slaves. Fossil fuels are not necessary for human survival; hundreds of thousands of years of human existence proves that. But we are as practically and psychologically dependent on them as any addict is to their drug.
Peak oil would present a challenge at our current consumption and dependence levels. But those levels are not peaking; they are rising. India and China, with one-third of the global population, have the steepest consumption curves as their economies strive for U.S. levels; no country has a falling consumption curve. With peak production upon us, supplies will decrease against rising consumption.
How we handle that gap will determine our future.
To be continued in Part Two: Looking for the Way Out.
Resources on peak oil:
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04.26.09
Posted in Food, Growing Challenge: Seed to Seed, Household, Sustainability at 7:01 pm by Christina
Our family has increased our sustainability goals enormously over the last year; that shift motivated our move to a location more convenient to activities (for biking and walking), with a smaller house and a larger yard. The last was very important to us, as we wanted to get ourselves involved in the production of our own food. We started last summer volunteering at a local organic farm, Terra Bella, after speaking with them at the farmers’ market. (It’s called wwoofing, for “world wide opportunities in organic farming”.) They get our labor once a week on average, and we get the benefit of their expertise; we also got to take home lots of starts from their high-yield greenhouse.
I decided to participate in The Growing Challenge: From Seed to Seed, which is sponsored by Melinda of One Green Generation in Seattle. Our garden is of significant size, 40×50 (plus lots of fruit trees around the perimeter as well). We share it with a co-tenant, an elderly Lebanese woman, the mother of our landlord, who will be gone for three months this summer to Lebanon; so while she has about 100 linear feet of fava beans active right now, the rest of the garden is under our care and planning and the favas will revert to us after she harvests them.
Because we are novice gardeners and because the plot is so very large, we (I really – Jeff is more labor than R&D) are implementing a combination of cover-cropping (basically leaving some of the space resting) and also sequential planting since our growing season here is long and strong (i.e., instead of planting 40 linear feet of beans, we’ll plant 10 feet at four different times). We are following organic principles as well as a system of companion planting and crop rotation based on Great Garden Companions by Sally Jean Cunningham.
We machine-tilled most of the garden, and brought in two cubic yards of compost from the municipal transfer station, made from our curbside green waste bins (which accept kitchen waste as well as yard waste). We made 11 mounded wide beds, amended them with compost, and set up a drip irrigation system (with the help of Sean from Terra Bella) wherein each bed has its own valve(s) for excellent watering control. (Very important with our current drought!) Everything got mulched over with straw. We got some input from Sean about our planting layout and forged ahead!
Our current planting status:
- 14 different summer squash plants, of I think 7 varieties, planted and mulched with companion plantings of marjoram, sweet alyssum, and some N-plant I have to get the farm to tell me again (third or fourth time!)
- 19 tomato plants of 7 different varieties for fresh eating, also 3 tomatillo plants, mulched and interplanted with marigolds (and eventually basil varieties)
- 6ft by 3ft planted with three varieties of carrots (will be sowed sequentially across the summer and fall)
- 10ft of bush beans (mixed varieties) with marigolds
- maybe 12ft x 2ft interplanted with broccoli, chard and kale, as well as sweet alyssum and marigold
- 25ft (with three fruit trees in the row) set with strawberry plants; these won’t be allowed to bear this year to promote good core growth
I started numerous things in newspaper pots (using the Pot Maker) that I created while watching Jane Austen movies, Jane Eyre, etc. Not all of these starts were successful; the beans were too wet (and I later read better started in the ground, which wasn’t ready at the time!), and others were I’m sure too hot, judging by the fact that I could observe steam when I lifted the plastic bag I was trying to conserve moisture with. I also used “potting soil” which was likely too dense; for the second set I tracked down a “seed starter” mix. Jamie and I biked to the hardware store last week for a clear shower curtain which we used to construct a more easily ventilated greenhouse (using the worktable and two soil-filled buckets). Under that setup, the 5-day marigolds are up after only 3 days. Successful starts under the original system include small sugar pumpkins (which are still coming up a week later, so very variable) and Autumn Beauty sunflowers. New starts in the curtain greenhouse:
- 8 pots lovage
- 12 pots chive
- 8 pots basil blend
- 12 pots French marigold (which is the variety with scientifically demonstrated nematodicidal effect)
- 16 pots red bunching onions (scallions)
- 22 pots flat leaf parsley
- 14 pots of striped roma tomatoes, for canning (which heirloom seeds I collected myself last year from gleaned tomatoes I was allowed to harvest after picking market-ready tomatoes for the producer)
Other than the tomatoes, these starts are for interplanting with main crops in the garden. Oh, and Emma has been doing some stealth (but approved) planting of nasturtium seeds and the like; we’ll have to wait for sprouts to see what she accomplished!
This project is huge for our family, in terms of the learning curve and especially the physical labor commitment. The size of the garden is large for a starter, but we have good advisors and are hoping to donate oversupply to our local food bank and/or shelter. Katie loves the gardening and the farming; Emma will do some, but prefers to choose wildly rather than meld seamlessly into the task list. Jamie is of course mercurial about it, sometimes being helpful, other times being quite a handful (or footful, since we have to keep him off the plants!). Jamie is getting part of the garden for himself, which corralling will hopefully be successful; Emma is trying to be patient with Mom trying to adapt to her requests.
Participating in the Growing Challenge will likely mean weekly updates far more brief than this introduction, consisting mostly of fact lists for the week. I still want to get a post written up about the very first sentence – our explosion of sustainability goals in the last year – but that will be another time. For now, I wanted to get linked into the Challenge to share with others working on similar projects. All the best!!!
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