[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Master Conservers

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (April 09 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


For those of us who have been watching the energy scene for the last few
decades, there's a certain wry amusement to be gained from the daily
fare on the peak oil newsblogs. Once the conservation and appropriate
tech movements of the 1970s collapsed beneath the weight of the falling
oil prices of the 1980s, it became highly unfashionable to question the
theory that the market economy could extract infinite resources from a
finite planet.

During the quarter century of extravagant waste that followed,
conventional wisdom across the industrial world's political and cultural
spectrum insisted that turning sows' ears into silk purses was not
merely possible, but a great investment opportunity that would drive a
bigger and shinier global economy than the one we already had. A very
short time ago, it bears remembering, the suggestion that crude oil
might cost more than $60 a barrel within this decade was roundly
dismissed as preposterous alarmism, while the grim prospects of economic
decline and global famine raised by concerned voices in the Seventies
were so far off the radar screens that nobody even bothered to denounce
them.

A glance down the leading stories on Energy Bulletin {1} or The Oil Drum
{2} makes a tolerably good indicator of how far we've come from that
comfortable consensus. Today a widely used measure of crude oil prices
broke $111, after recovering from a sharp selloff a few weeks back that
took it down all the way to the upper $90s. Meanwhile the energy sources
and technological breakthroughs that were supposed to come on line once
oil hit $30, or $40, or $50 a barrel are still nowhere to be seen.

The wider picture is no more encouraging. Crippling electricity
shortages outside the industrial world are starting to play hob with a
global economy that depends on Third World factories to produce First
World amenities. Likewise, the blowback from US energy policies that
poured a fifth of the American corn harvest into ethanol is sending
grain prices soaring worldwide, raising the unwelcome prospect that
millions of the poor around the planet may not be able to buy enough
food to survive the coming months. Barring some improbable deus ex
machina that comes along in time to bail us out of the mess we've made
for ourselves, it's fair to say, the limits to growth are back.

Up to this point the political leaders of the world's industrial nations
have had very little to offer in response to all this. Most seem to
think that the advice allegedly given to Victorian brides on their
wedding nights - "Close your eyes and think of England" - counts as a
proactive energy policy. Eventually they will have to think of a better
response, if only because political survival does have its appeal. Food
riots in Haiti and Egypt are one thing, but when the price of food and
gasoline starts putting serious pressure on the American and European
middle classes, expect politicians to trip over one another in the rush
to respond to the crisis.

Many of the resulting policies and programs will be counterproductive,
and even more of them will be useless. In most of the nations of the
industrial world, politics has long since devolved into a spoils system
whereby different factions of the political class buy the loyalty of
pressure groups among the electorate by a combination of ideological
handwaving and unearned largesse. As long as that remains in place - and
it has proven enormously durable, surviving wars, revolutions, and
massive economic changes - a very large fraction of the responses
proposed to this or any other crisis will be aimed at pushing
ideological agendas or rewarding voting blocs rather than actually doing
anything about the crisis.

Still, it's by no means impossible that some constructive changes might
come out of the approaching mess. We have, after all, a resource at hand
that, while rarely recognized, has a great deal to offer: we have been
here before, during the energy crises and resource shortages of the
Seventies. Some of the projects launched in those days turned out to be
expensive flops, but others have more to offer. I'd like to talk a bit
about one of these.

I have no idea how common this is outside the West Coast, but out here
state and county agricultural extension services launched Master
Gardener programs some years ago. Staffed by volunteers, many of them
retirees with a lifetime of gardening experience, and run on a
shoestring budget, these programs train and certify people to field
gardening questions that would otherwise clutter up the ag extension
phone lines. In the small Oregon town where I live, you can find a
Master Gardener's booth at the local farmers market every Tuesday,
staffed by a brace of volunteers who will happily help you figure out
what's chewing on your cabbages or what soil amendments your blueberries
need.

Soaring garbage disposal costs a while back led to the birth of a second
project on the same lines, the Master Composter program. Less visible
than the Master Gardeners, the Master Composters have mostly
concentrated on teaching people how to set up backyard compost bins and
take their yard waste and kitchen scraps out of the waste stream. When I
lived in Seattle in the years right around the turn of the millennium,
the city government helped the Master Composters out to the extent of
giving away free compost bins to anybody who attended their classes; the
reduction in garbage disposal costs was substantial enough that this
made economic sense.

The late Seventies and early Eighties, though, saw the birth and
abandonment of another project of the same sort: the Master Conserver
program. I was one of some hundreds of people, ranging from teenagers to
retirees, who attended weekly classes in the auditorium of the old
downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. We studied everything
from basic thermodynamics to the fine details of storm window
installation. Those who completed the curriculum took an exam, then put
in at least a minimum number of hours of volunteer work helping schools,
churches, nonprofits, and elderly and poor homeowners retrofit for
energy conservation, to receive their Master Conserver certificate. I
still have mine, tucked away in a drawer, much the way old soldiers I've
known kept medals from the wars of their youth.

Could such a program be put back to work by local governments in the
face of the approaching energy crisis? You bet. A quarter century of
further experience with the Master Gardener and Master Composter
programs on county and state levels would make it child's play to
organize; the information isn't hard to find, and the dismal level of
energy efficiency common in recently built houses and the like could
make a Master Conserver program a very useful asset as energy prices
climb and the human cost rises accordingly.

For that matter, I can't be the only Master Conserver from those days
who still has all the class handouts from the program in a battered
three-ring binder, or who keeps part of a bookshelf weighed down with
classic conservation books - The Integral Urban House, The Book of the
New Alchemists, Rainbook, and the like. I don't quite remember anybody
in the last days of the program saying "Keep your Whole Earth catalogs,
boys, the price of oil will rise again!" Still, the sentiment was there.

More generally, of course, the experiences of any of the 20th century's
more difficult periods can be put to work constructively as we move
deeper into the 21st century's first major crisis. The victory gardens
and ingenious substitutions that kept the home front functioning during
the Second World War are another potential source of ideas and
inspiration well worth a sustained look. Still, the experiences of the
Seventies offer a particularly rich resource in this regard. Close
enough to the present to be part of living memory for many people, and
faced with the same basic challenge of too little energy, too few
resources, and too much economic instability for an overheated and
overextended industrial world, it parallels our present predicament too
closely to be neglected.

One crucial lesson from that decade may be particularly worth keeping in
mind. In the depths of the Seventies energy crisis, the conventional
wisdom had it that energy would just keep on getting more costly as a
lasting Age of Scarcity dawned over the industrial world. That didn't
happen, of course. I've suggested elsewhere, based on the way other
civilizations have fallen in the past, that the end of the industrial
age will trace out a stairstep decline, with periods of crisis and
breakdown punctuated by periods of partial recovery.

This has its drawbacks, but it also offers the hope of breathing spaces
in which the lessons of each time of crisis can be assessed and put to
use in dealing with the next. By the time we start on the downward arc
following the one we're approaching just now, with any luck, the Master
Conservers of that time will have the accumulated knowledge of a second
round of crises to draw on, and may be able to make the transition to
lower energy use a little less rough than the one that looms before us
today.

Links:

{1} http://www.energybulletin.net/

{2} http://www.theoildrum.com/
_____

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA),
John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/master-conservers.html#links

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